Investor Jeremy Giffon Says Attention Power Shifts From Billionaires to Internet Posters

投资人 Jeremy Giffon：注意力话语权正从亿万富翁转向网络发帖者 社交媒体算法在推动市场叙事和机构政策方面，已使网络内容创作者的影响力超越了传统亿万富翁与企业资本。 Jeremy Giffon 与 Patrick O'Shaughnessy 探讨了市场叙事、算法驱动的“统一信息流”（主要是 X）以及如《十亿美元 PDF》（The Billion-Dollar PDF）等病毒式投资论点文件如何驱动资本配置与估值变化。他们分析了权威从传统亿万富翁向线上“发帖阶层”的文化移交，同时批判了特殊目的载体（SPV）封建化机制、公开市场低效以及 AI 对白领的替代效应。讨论最后对比了东海岸债务驱动型金融与西海岸股权乐观主义，并剖析了硅谷隐性的准宗教知识传统。 对于早期风投基金而言，在实际现金回报需要约10年才能兑现的周期中，叙事（Narrative）是其向LP推销的核心产品；有时候仅通过重塑时间线和叙事包装，就能让一家陷入瓶颈的成熟初创公司瞬间变成热门标的。 (2:34) “十亿美元 PDF”（Billion-Dollar PDF）充当了关键叙事锚点，能在市场混乱中迅速统一共识，像磁铁一样指引数百亿美元风险资本的配置方向。 (7:01) 社交平台算法已转向“单一信息流”（Unifeed）机制并呈现极端的幂律分布；政治与市场的实际话语权正迁移至高发声的“发帖者阶层”（Poster class），传统亿万富翁与机构反而开始依附于其引领的公众注意力和叙事。 (8:13) 科技投资正从边际成本趋近于零的纯软件转向重资本支出的算力基础设施；由于AI提示词无法零成本复制输出，更低的毛利率迫使行业走向类似沃尔玛的超大规模竞争，未来回报将主要集中于数万亿美元量级的巨头中。 (47:15)

Investor Jeremy Giffon argues that modern capital allocation, corporate success, and political influence are increasingly dictated by algorithmic narrative formation and scarce attention rather than traditional financial metrics or institutional authority. Narrative Primacy and the Billion-Dollar PDF (7:01) Giffon observes that because venture capital returns take roughly a decade to materialize in cash, narrative serves as the primary interim product sold to limited partners. This dynamic creates distortions: a seven-year-old startup growing revenue 200% year-over-year to $8 million ARR struggles to raise funds because of historical duration stigma, whereas an identical business rebranded with a two-year operational history would command an oversubscribed round. When market uncertainty peaks, capital clusters around what Giffon calls the "Billion-Dollar PDF"—a single, authoritative thesis document that crystallizes an emerging paradigm and sets baseline assumptions across the market, directing billions of dollars as funds chase the latest thesis in unison. The Unifeed and the Poster Class (8:13) According to Giffon, the rise of the algorithmic "Unifeed" on platforms like X has replaced fragmented information bubbles with a shared global consensus driven by a central pool of roughly 500 daily posts. Modern institutions—from venture firms to public equity desks and the White House—are forced to become "timeline native," monitoring real-time sentiment and deploying messages to influence elite debate. In this environment, Giffon argues society has reached "Peak Guy," where the cultural authority of billionaires has eroded as their ranks expanded roughly a hundredfold over two decades. Consequently, cultural power is shifting toward a disciplined "poster class" that commands public attention, making mindshare a far scarcer and more influential asset than raw liquid capital. Compute Scale and the Post-SaaS Economy (47:15) Private market fundamentals are shifting away from traditional software-as-a-service models toward capital-intensive infrastructure. Giffon notes that early SaaS businesses thrived on "selling a copy of a string" at near-zero marginal cost, generating high gross margins. In contrast, AI and modern token-based architectures require compute to rerun for every output, eliminating zero marginal costs and eroding margins. Drawing an analogy to a "Walmart effect" in technology, Giffon forecasts that returns in the compute era will accrue disproportionately to massive, multi-trillion-dollar scale providers capable of operating profitably on razor-thin margins. High-CapEx AI infrastructure effectively acts as a "capital sponge" absorbing excess capital that outstripped the limited supply of top-tier traditional software founders. SPV Feudalism and Manager Psychology (57:15) Giffon characterizes the current private investment ecosystem as a modern feudal structure centered on special purpose vehicles (SPVs). Prominent founders of frontier companies act as lords distributing coveted equity allocations—such as SpaceX shares—akin to landed estates. Intermediaries package these allocations into SPVs, charging downstream investors substantial terms, including upfront fees as high as 10%, ongoing management fees without fixed fund expirations, and carried interest with zero personal GP capital commitment. Furthermore, Giffon highlights how fund scale distorts manager performance: allocators overseeing sums an order of magnitude larger than their personal net worth frequently suffer from psychological paralysis, whereas unconstrained individual investors outperform by deploying capital into simple, high-conviction ideas without committee friction. Giffon maintains that despite the commercial veneer of modern technology hubs, Silicon Valley is fundamentally driven by unpriced philosophical frameworks—including effective altruism, utilitarianism, and fringe internet accelerationism. Whether these implicit belief systems and high-CapEx infrastructure commitments will yield durable enterprise value or succumb to capital misallocation remains an open question for allocators.

Jeremy Giffon 认为，当前资本市场与科技生态已转向由注意力主导，叙事、算法分发与特定关键文本（如所谓“十亿美元 PDF”）成为调动数百亿美元资本的核心力量。在此背景下，风险投资的权力结构正从传统财务资本转向拥有注意力的内容创作者与掌握超级项目分配权的科技巨头。 叙事滤镜与十亿美元PDF的资本重塑 (7:01) 在长期未上市的私募股权与风投市场中，实际现金回报通常需要约 10 年才能兑现，因此基金向有限合伙人（LP）兜售的过渡产品本质上纯粹是叙事。Giffon 指出，一家成立 7 年、年收入达 800 万美元且同比增长 200% 的创业公司，往往因“耗时太久”而被传统投资人冷落；但若是重塑叙事、假定其成立仅 2 年，同样的基本面却能迅速引发超额认购。这种机制迫使陷入困境的中期成熟企业在严苛的内部搭桥轮、战略收购或立即削减成本之间做出生死抉择。 面对宏观与技术层面的高度不确定性，市场极度渴望锚定共识，这便催生了“十亿美元 PDF”（The Billion-Dollar PDF）现象。Giffon 形容机构资本就像“踢足球的十岁小孩”，全场球员只会盲目跟在被踢出的球（即最新爆火的叙事文件）身后奔跑。一份在恰当时机出现、逻辑自洽且高度自信的范式论述，能够单枪匹马设定整个周期的估值倍数与资本流动走向，直接驱动数百亿美元的投融资决策。 统合信息流与发帖阶层对传统权威的颠覆 (8:13) 以 X（前 Twitter）为代表的“统合信息流”（Unifeed）改变了全球共识的生成方式。该平台向数亿日活跃用户提供相同的约 500 条热门内容，使得白宫、对冲基金与风投机构必须成为对时间线动态高度敏感并能反向塑造型塑舆论的“时间线原生”（timeline-native）实体。由于 AI 推荐算法突破了关注者基数的硬性限制，优质甚至偏激的内容能瞬间击穿圈层触达海量受众，但也导致内容传播呈现极端的幂律分布。 Giffon 提出社会已到达崇拜超级商业领袖的“巅峰个人”（Peak Guy）饱和点。过去二十年间亿万富翁数量大幅增加，其权威性与硬权力反遭稀释，极易因一条糟糕的发帖而被迫退场。相反，具备艺术化语言感染力与喜剧特质的顶级“发帖阶层”（poster class）正在崛起，甚至让富豪群体争相拉拢。在注意力成为终极稀缺资产的时代，大众对书籍、长篇播客等严肃源文本的完整消费急剧萎缩，转而依靠病毒式切片和模因进行心智互动。 算力重构商业模型与私募股权文化演变 (43:18) 科技产业正经历底层结构的剧烈迁移。传统软件即服务（SaaS）的黄金时代基于近乎为零的边际成本（本质是“贩卖代码字符串的复制品”），从而享有极高的毛利率；然而，当前的生成式 AI 模型依赖按次运行的昂贵算力，边际成本不再为零。Giffon 强调，科技业正呈现类似沃尔玛的超大规模、薄利模式，低毛利与低规模并存的企业将面临被淘汰的风险，超额回报将高度集中于万亿美元级的底层算力基础设施提供商。 与此同时，金融巨头内部展现出“债权优先”与“股权优先”的基因差异。黑石、KKR 等传统巨擘诞生于 1980 年代注重下行保护、偏好财务工程与杠杆收购（LBO）的债权文化；而新一代平台型机构则从早期风险投资中诞生，根植于追求不对称上行潜力的乐观股权文化。东西海岸在薪酬机制上也出现倒挂：华尔街逐渐转向由受限股票单位（RSU）主导的长期企业价值激励，而硅谷则在大量 AI 军备竞赛与机构整合中，通过频繁的要约收购和巨额现金变成更为流动的雇佣军生态。 特殊目的载体封建化与个人投资者的心理悖论 (57:15) 在顶级非上市科技企业与前沿 AI 实验室周边，一种类似封建采邑制度的资本结构正在成型。处于核心顶层的科技领袖（如 Elon Musk 等）犹如君王，掌握着 SpaceX、Waymo 等稀缺资产的投资额度；被赐予额度的中间层经理人充当“领地贵族”，将其打包进特殊目的载体（SPV），向主权财富基金或家族办公室等外部投资者转售份额，并收取高达 10% 的预付费或无限期的管理费。这套体系并非基于基本面承销，而是纯粹依靠内幕准入关系的寻租。 在二级市场与资产管理维度，Giffon 驳斥了散户无法战胜专业基金经理的教条。由于职业经理人背负着严格的管理约束、规模压力与声誉风险，当所管资金体量远远超出自身净资产时，往往会产生恐惧与心理瘫痪；相比之下，不被制度限制绑架、仅以小额自有资金进行极简下注（如长期持有核心资产或在 200 周均线买入）的个人投资者，反而能更轻松地取得超越指数的绝佳回报。 Giffon 揭示了资本市场正在发生的认知与范式位移：从依靠纯财务工程与传统 SaaS 软件的高毛利神话，转向依靠大规模硬件算力基础设施与极端注意力经济。但该观点未深入探讨当注意力过度透支或巨额 AI 基础设施投资回报不及预期时，整个生态将面临何种系统性出清风险。

## Background 本期节目来自播客频道 Colossus 旗下的《Invest Like the Best》，由 Patrick O'Shaughnessy 主持并于 2026 年 7 月 7 日在 RSS 与网络全平台发布。单集聚焦于知名返场嘉宾 Jeremy Giffon，记录了他在过去 18 个月与数百位创始人及资本配置者密集对话后的深度思考，探讨创始人与投资人的生存法则、全球时间线崛起对权力的重塑以及硅谷隐秘的智识历史。 ## TL;DR 对话深入剖析了当下一级市场在高度不确定性下的运作逻辑与范式转移：在叙事与算法统治的当下，一份极具说服力的“十亿美元 PDF”就能撬动巨量资金，全球精英与政客正在沦为向顶级“发帖者（Posters）”低头的附庸。同时，随着 AI 推动软件商业从零边际成本代码走向重 CapEx 算力消耗，传统的 SaaS 高毛利神话破灭并显现“沃尔玛效应”，而未上市核心资产更异化为靠 SPV 配额抽租的封建制度。此外，Jeremy 还解构了个人投资的非对称优势、招聘中的争议性筛选杠杆，以及硅谷深层杂糅的准宗教与新反动哲学底色。 ## Atmosphere & style 整场对谈智识密度极高、节奏飞快且充满反共识的锐利洞见。Jeremy 展现出一种兼具冷峻解构力与黑色幽默的思想漫游者风格，以极度坦诚甚至辛辣的语调剥开创投圈与现代名利场的虚伪外衣。Patrick 则作为极佳的智识共谋者，通过精准的追问与共鸣层层推进，让整场播客既像是一场华尔街与硅谷权力生态的“内部吹哨”，又宛如深夜在雪茄吧里进行的严肃文化与哲学推演。 ## Bulletin - `07:01` 在商业模式极度不确定的周期中，“十亿美元 PDF”成为凝聚全行业共识与撬动天量资本的核心支点；创业者此时首要任务是誓死捍卫股权结构的选择权（Optionality），警惕以认股权证为代表、剥夺上行潜力的内部过桥轮。 - `25:00` 全球统一信息流（Unifeed）与推荐算法正在重塑权力格局，发帖者阶层（Poster Class）成为新一代“世俗祭司”；亿万富翁光环因人数通胀与权力萎缩见顶，正普遍向顶级发帖者俯首称臣，以此对冲财富贬值并锁定稀缺注意力。 - `50:00` AI 算力转型宣告了传统软件零边际成本与默认高毛利的终结；软件产业正迈入低毛利、微薄净利但依靠十万亿美元级超大规模驱动的“沃尔玛效应”，迫使大量过剩风投资本涌入重 CapEx 的实体与算力赛道。 - `01:00:40` 私募市场正演化出“SPV 封建主义”，少数控制顶级算力与硬科技的创始人如封建领主般分配稀缺配额，促使中间人凭借人脉特权层层拼装载体，向机构与长尾出资人抽取永久管理费与高额地租。 ## Key takeaways - `02:34` 风投资本存在根深蒂固的“年龄与叙事偏见”，导致成立多年后出现爆发拐点的老公司极难完成向上融资，常被迫接受暗含严苛条款与剥夺上行认股权证的内部过桥轮。 - `05:00` 在技术动荡期，保留股权架构的“选择权（Optionality）”与敏捷度远胜于盲目巨额融资，避免期权潜水与资本僵化封死商业模式转身空间。 - `07:01` 由 X（Twitter）构筑的全球统一信息流通过大模型推荐算法塑造全球舆论，一份极具自信的“十亿美元 PDF”即可在迷茫市场中主导数十亿美元流动性资本的追逐方向。 - `10:00` 机构能否生存取决于其是否具备“时间线原生（Timeline-Native）”特质，既要实时敏锐监控网络动态，又要能以自身决策反身性地塑造时间线共识与资产定价。 - `19:15` 现代政治治理逻辑发生质变，决策核心从面向大众的传统民意调查全面转向时间线舆论共识，政客群体实质上蜕变为算法驱动的内容创作者。 - `21:40` “Peak Guy”时代的终结：随着富豪数量大幅膨胀、实际干预现实权力萎缩以及内容供给过饱和，大众对亿万富翁群体的“神圣祭司”式崇拜已触碰天花板。 - `32:13` 在法币持续贬值的世界中，发帖自媒体是超级富豪清醒的资产对冲手段，旨在用边际效用递减的金钱置换无法被轻易稀释的绝对稀缺资产——心智注意力与影响力。 - `30:00` 信息消费本质上多为披着生产力外衣的娱乐；最聪明的信息摄取策略是保持断网与认知自由，让社交圈的朋友先肉身承受算法“辐射”，再通过线下交流吸收过滤后的精华。 - `35:00` 绝大多数现代白领岗位本质上是为了消化过剩资本与排解虚无而凭空发明的，AI 推动的职能自动化并非灾难，而是将人类从表演性忙碌中解放出来的契机。 - `41:00` 金融底层范式正在从东岸传统以债务工程、存量榨取和防范下行为基因的杠杆收购（LBO），转变为西岸以早期种子投资、幂律法则和非对称上行为基因的技术乐观股权创投。 - `50:00` 算力与 CapEx 成为吸纳宏观过剩资本的自发海绵，AI 推理的实时成本彻底打破 SaaS 零边际成本神话，软件行业正在上演残酷的低毛利、微薄净利率“沃尔玛效应”。 - `53:26` 职业基金经理因受制于回撤控制、合规约束与 LP 季度交代等沉重制度枷锁而极难跑赢大盘；相反，散户凭借生活常识与毫无心理负担的长期持有更易获得超额回报。 - `55:34` 新兴基金经理面临“资金心理重力”考验：个人资产远低于操盘规模的“仰视型”经理容易因恐慌动作变形，而身价远超基金规模的“俯视型”经理更能从容执行高赔率非共识下注。 - `01:00:40` SPV 封建主义正在私市扩散，头部创始人如同国王册封土地般分发稀缺直投配额，中间人利用这种人脉特权拼装无存续期限制的 SPV，层层抽取高额无风险租金。 - `01:04:50` 投资应走向两极：要么深耕破产重组等无人愿碰的极端复杂脏活以赚取溢价，要么走向如“单页纸核心逻辑加真金白银身家配比”的雷恩沃特式极致简单，避开“显得聪明”的平庸陷阱。 - `01:10:00` 硅谷繁荣的背后深植着新佛教功利主义、有效利他主义与加速主义等隐秘哲学，与坦然承认贪婪的传统华尔街不同，硅谷将商业包装为终极慈善，陷入了一种极度自以为义的道德优越感。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `00:00` 赞助商与节目开场 Patrick O'Shaughnessy 开场介绍了本期节目的赞助商伙伴：致力于帮助企业削减开支、加速增长的现代财务管理平台 Ramp；由 Rogo 打造的华尔街个人金融智能体 Felix，能将简单提示词一键转化为符合机构标准的交付物、投行模型和演示文档；以及为 AI 和企业级软件公司提供企业就绪型基础设施（SSO、SCIM、审计日志等）的 WorkOS。 随后 Patrick 宣布了本期嘉宾 Jeremy Giffon 的回归。Jeremy 曾在之前的访谈中给听众留下了极深印象。在过去 18 个月里，Jeremy 在一级市场最前沿的角落与数百位创业者以及他们背后的资本进行了密集对话。Patrick 指出，很少有投资人能达到如此高密度的“实战训练量（high rep count）”。两人将以此为起点，探讨在不确定时期创业者与资本的生存法则、叙事的力量、“十亿美元 PDF”现象，以及时代焦点向社交时间线的全面倾斜。 --- ### `02:34` 叙事过滤、被困老公司与残酷的内部过桥轮 从长周期私募市场的本质来看，基金最根本的“大过滤器（great filter）”实际上是其**叙事能力**。因为投资的核心产品——即最终实现的现金回报——往往需要十年甚至更久才能交付。在漫长的过渡期内，不论是季度更新报告、LP 年度大会还是私下的一对一沟通，基金对外兜售的本质上全都是“叙事（narrative）”。 在过去 18 个月的数百场交流中，Jeremy 频繁观察到一类极具代表性的棘手案例：业务已创办了六七年，原本不温不火，近期可能借助 AI 浪潮或某种业务契机开始强劲拐点向上（例如年增长率高达 200%）。然而，这类公司在融资市场上却寸步难行。风投资本的固定叙事偏见会认为：“你成立了 7 年，年收入才做到 800 万美元，哪怕去年翻了两倍又如何？”但 Jeremy 指出，如果直接换个公司名字、重新编排叙事，把计时器的起点人为定在两年前，同一批资产和增速在市场上会瞬间被抢破头。资本对“叙事与年龄”的刻板印象，成了困死优秀业务的枷锁。 随之衍生出的另一个普遍困境是：公司业务开始步入正轨，却无法以显著的估值上涨（up round）融到下一轮。创始人被逼入三个狭窄的选择： 1. 接受苛刻的内部过桥轮（bridge round）； 2. 谋求被战略收购（M&A）或人才收购（acquihire）； 3. 彻底裁员砍预算，收缩到盈利线保命。 面对这种窘境，Jeremy 建议创始人必须在股权结构表（cap table）上极具创造力：如果有富余现金，应考虑回购早期投资人份额，甚至设法将所有优先股转为普通股（convert everyone to common）。Jeremy 震惊于业内对“内部过桥轮（insider bridge rounds）的敌意与剥削性”讨论严重不足。传统上，若投资人要求 3 倍清算优先权（liquidation preference）或反稀释棘轮（ratchets）等下行保护，大家会痛骂其具有掠夺性；但如果投资人索取“上行层面的剥夺权”——例如要求未来两年以当前估值继续跟投的认股权证（warrants），由于包裹着“乐观支持”的糖衣，大家反而乐于接受。两者本质上同样具有极强的剥夺性。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 拐点老公司的三大困境路径 accDescr: 展示成立6至7年的老公司在出现拐点但估值未获认可时面临的三种艰难选择。 A["成立6-7年的业务<br/>近期出现增长拐点"] --> B{"叙事不匹配<br/>无法完成高估值Up Round"} B --> C["内部过桥轮 (Bridge Round)<br/>暗含严苛条款/认股权证"] B --> D["战略出售 / 人才收购<br/>(M&A / Acquihire)"] B --> E["削减开支至自我造血<br/>(Cut to Profitability)"] ``` --- ### `05:00` 不确定时代的终极资产：股权结构上的自由度（Optionality） 当前正处于自互联网转型以来最具不确定性、最具波动性的技术与商业拐点。没有人敢断言“软件是否已死”，传统商业模式正面临重估。如果按座席收费（per-seat pricing）的 SaaS 模式崩塌，企业可能被迫转向按实际用量收费（usage-based）；或者原本纯软件的业务必须被迫接入服务，甚至需要通过并购其他公司或长期保持小规模盈利来生存。 在这种动荡局势下，Jeremy 给创始人的核心建议是：**必须不惜代价保护自身股权架构的“选择权（Optionality）”与敏捷性**。 - 通常情况下，“坚定承诺（commitment）”是优于“保留选择权”的策略；但当未来完全无法预测时，必须确保公司拥有掉头转身的灵活性。 - 盲目按照传统风投剧本不断巨额融资，会导致期权潜水（underwater options）、核心骨干流失、招聘瘫痪，最终把公司锁死在“要么千亿美金、要么归零”的狭窄独木桥上。 - 创始团队应倾向于减少单笔融资额度、寻找投资授权更宽泛（wider mandate）的资本伙伴，绝不能让僵化的股权结构限制了公司在关键时刻调整商业模式的自由。投资机构自身的资本架构亦是同理。 --- ### `07:01` “十亿美元 PDF”现象与全球统一信息流（Unifeed） 在投资机构尚未拿出长达十年的实际回报凭证之前，它们是如何撬动天量资本的？Jeremy 与 Patrick 提出了一个半开玩笑却极度真实的观察——**“十亿美元 PDF（The Billion-Dollar PDF）”**。 在不确定性弥漫的周期里，市场中的所有人都在迷茫观望。此时，只要有人能在最恰当的时机，以一种极具穿透力的方式，将一个宏大的核心论点浓缩成一份文档或宣言（PDF），这份材料就会迅速成为定义整个时代的基石观点。这个论点甚至不需要百分之百正确，只要它具备无可动摇的自信与清晰度，它就能确立一套让全行业暂时安歇的全新叙事。这就像是一群 10 岁小孩在场上踢足球，足球被踢到哪里，所有人就一窝蜂涌向哪里；数十亿美元的流动性资本，往往就追逐着一份横空出世的“十亿美元 PDF”在球场上疲于奔命。 而这种叙事爆炸的底层技术温床，正是以 X（Twitter）为代表的“统一信息流（The Unifeed）”： - **算法的同质分发**：尽管 X 拥有数亿日活跃用户，但系统每天向所有人推送的，本质上是精选出的同一批大约 500 条推文。 - **极端悬殊的产出与围观比**：不发推的人根本无法理解“发推者（poster）”与“潜水者（lurker）”之间数量级的巨大鸿沟。哪怕一位从未公开表态的政商大亨，私下可能整天都在刷推特，并在特定推文爆火后第一时间发短信讨论。 - **跨越周期的林迪效应（Lindy Effect）**：虽然 X 在纯用户规模上比不上其他泛娱乐社交巨头，但历经近 20 年演变，它依然稳坐全球事实源头（source of truth）的核心生态位，扮演着现代“全球统一报纸”的角色，牢牢统治着当代精英阶层的注意力与议程设置。 ### `10:00` 时间线原生与发帖的终极“精英文治” 在当今的信息生态中，X 平台（原 Twitter）上的最新推文或长文已经取代传统媒体，成了全球权力阶层晨间必读的“每日报纸”。无论是资本市场、政坛、新闻界还是创业圈，世界顶层精英都在通过这个统一的信息流获取信息。这些内容直接塑造公众舆论、为金融资产定价、指引资本流向，甚至直接催生国家政策。Jeremy Giffon 指出，当下各类机构面临着一次重大的“大过滤器（Great Filter）”检验：一家机构能否生存，完全取决于它是否具备“时间线原生（Timeline-Native）”的特质。这种特质包含双重属性——不仅要对时间线高度“反应（Reactive）”，时刻监控网络动态；更要具备“反身性（Reflexive）”，其做出的实际决策反过来塑造时间线，并进一步根据网络反馈进行二次反应。从白宫到风险投资机构，再到二级市场公开股票，无一不在这一逻辑中运转。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 时间线原生的反身性反馈循环 accDescr: 展示发帖者、算法推荐、机构决策与现实世界资产之间相互影响的反身性闭环机制。 subgraph TimelineLoop["时间线生态闭环"] A["发帖者（Posters）<br/>产出极具娱乐性与叙事性的内容"] --> B["分发算法 / LLM 过滤器<br/>依据互动率向数亿人推送"] B --> C["全球时间线（The Timeline）<br/>形成即时舆论共识与故事脉络"] end subgraph InstitutionalAction["现实世界映射与反身性"] C --> D["权力机构与资本决策<br/>白宫立案 / VC 投资 / 二级市场交易"] D --> E["现实世界变动<br/>股价剧烈波动 / 政策出台"] E --> A end ``` Jeremy 谈到，自己最常收到读者反馈的言论是“发帖是最后的伟大精英文治（Posting is the last great meritocracy）”。许多人给他写信表示，这句话点醒了他们，并在学会发帖后彻底改变了自己的人生轨迹。在过去的社交媒体时代，发帖更像是一场苦熬粉数的“买彩票”游戏，拥有庞大粉丝基数的账号哪怕发一句极其平庸的废话也能收获大量互动；但在现今的 AI 和算法推荐机制下，哪怕是一个刚注册的全新账号，只要能写出一篇极高质量的内容，算法就会精准捕捉并直接将其展示在 5 亿人面前。然而，决定内容能否引爆的核心已不再是一本经过深思熟虑、能被讨论一整年的严肃书籍，而是必须“听上去聪明、读起来爽快，且极具娱乐性”。公众在不确定性中疯狂寻找最具说服力的故事，每当市场上有人炮制出一篇关于 AI 的“色情同人文（pornographic fanfic）”，公开市场便会为之剧烈震荡。 - **时间线原生的机构特征**：对网络舆论高度敏感并实时监控，同时以自身的行动引发网络连锁反应，白宫与华尔街均已彻底卷入这种反身性机制中。 - **发帖的新算法逻辑**：打破了过去依赖原始粉丝积累的壁垒，纯粹以内容在推荐算法中的吸引力为王，赋予新账号瞬间触达全球顶层受众的机会。 - **共识驱动要素**：当今决定大众行动与市场共识的内容，必须是兼具娱乐性、新奇感且“某种程度上貌似正确”的故事。 --- ### `14:00` 幂律分布与突破圈层的算法机制 Patrick 观察到，这种传播生态的剧变深刻影响了内容产业的分布规律。以往制作播客节目时，节目的播放量方差相对较小，表现最好的一期虽然超出平均水平，但不会与表现较差的期数拉开难以逾越的天文数字级差距。但如今内容分发彻底走向了极端的幂律分布：一旦某一期内容“突破了信息茧房与封锁（breach the containment）”，其影响力便会呈核爆式裂变，仿佛瞬间劫持了全世界的大脑，在短时间内强行将所有人的目光拽向这一个焦点。这种极端突破所带来的总体冲击力，甚至远远超越了其余所有常规内容的综合总和。 Jeremy 解释道，这一切内容表现的剧变本质上只是“技术变革的下游产物”。过去播客呈现典型的正态分布，仅仅是因为其底层传输协议是机械化按时间排序的 RSS 订阅流；而如今分发通道变成了推荐算法和短视频切片（Clips），甚至大量受众开始迁移到 YouTube 上收看长音频内容。在算法主导的平台上，即便用户订阅了某个频道，系统也绝不会按时间先后顺序老老实实呈现全部内容。Jeremy 认为，播客行业目前落后于 YouTube 和游戏主播生态的一大原因，在于播客创作者对“喂养算法”仍然处于极其天真的状态。在 Twitter 核心小圈子甚至公开的算法代码中，点赞、回复、视频时长等各项权重参数早已被系统化研究；创作者必须认清一个现实——如今制作内容，首先面对的第一读者并非人类，而是一个负责审查、筛选并决定是否展示给人类的 LLM（大语言模型）算法系统。 - **分发技术的范式转移**：从去中心化、按时序推送的传统 RSS 协议，转向基于 LLM 和推荐算法驱动的平台，直接将流量结构推向极端幂律化。 - **创作认知的脱节**：许多传统长音频制作人仍未意识到内容生产的“第一道过滤器”早已变为大模型算法，尚未建立起针对算法互动率的优化意识。 --- ### `17:00` 书籍之死、信息滋养与“脑腐”争议 针对算法统治内容分发是否会导致深度思考能力丧失的“反乌托邦”担忧，Jeremy 给出了与大众悲观情绪截然不同的独特视角。当前文化界充斥着对“书籍消亡”和“人们不再读书”的如丧考妣般的哀叹，但作为一名半生都在大量阅读严肃书籍的人，Jeremy 并不认为书籍的衰落是一场文化危机。他承认在当下的信息环境下，单纯依靠专注力从头到尾读完一本书确实变得更加艰难，但这并不意味着受众的求知欲正在枯竭；相反，他通过收听深度长访谈、浏览精炼高密度文章所汲取的心智养分，比以往任何时候都更加充沛。 在 Jeremy 看来，书籍并非神圣不可侵犯的图腾，它在本质上只是人类过去所能发明出的最佳信息交付技术，而如今我们拥有了更加生动、高效、引人入胜的全新交付手段。他做了一个鲜明的对比：人们常常将沉迷网络与看色情片等同视之，但色情片之所以公认有害，是因为它阻碍了真实的性生活，而现实体验显然远胜于虚拟图像；但网络内容与书籍的关系并非如此。虽然人们在语言层面上创造了诸如“网瘾晚期（terminally online）”或“脑腐（brain rot）”等具有死亡与虚无意味的负面词汇，潜意识里隐隐感到不安，但这并不代表新媒介本身原罪深重。新时代的信息工具对自律性提出了极其严苛的要求：对于自律且具备强大内在驱动力的人来说，新媒体赋予的赋能效率超越以往任何时代；但对于缺乏自制力的人而言，其毁灭性也将远甚于以往。 - **书籍的技术工具论**：书籍只是一种信息承载媒介，并非思考的唯一圣殿；新媒介能够提供同样密集甚至更高维度的思想滋养。 - **新信息生态的非宽容性**：算法时代不再宽容平庸，极具自律心的人能将其作为智识加速器，而自制力匮乏者则极易陷入无意义的信息消磨与注意力涣散中。 --- ### `19:15` 首个时间线白宫：从民调统治到内容创作者政治 随着时间线对权力的全方位渗透，政治生态也迎来了根本性洗牌。Jeremy 指出，当前这一届白宫堪称历史上第一个彻底“时间线原生”且完全以此驱动决策的政府，无论公众评价其好坏，它都代表了某种现代政府的新形态。以往的历届传统政府几乎完全依赖于对主流媒体和普通大众进行民意调查（Polling）来制定策略；然而现今的决策核心直接转移到了时间线上，其对推特等平台动态的敏感度与依赖度已经全面压倒了民调数据。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 传统政治民调模式与现代时间线政治模式对比 accDescr: 对比过去基于全样本大众民调的治理路径，与当下基于时间线少数精英发帖者的内容化政治治理路径。 subgraph Traditional["传统政治治理架构"] direction TB T1["抽样调查民调"] --> T2["大众 / 传统媒体偏好"] --> T3["政策治理输出"] end subgraph Modern["现代时间线政治架构"] direction TB M1["少数核心发帖者"] --> M2["算法推波助澜的关注度"] --> M3["内容创作者型政治家"] end ``` 这种重心的偏移，实质上让政治退回到了某种偏向“共和制（精英主导）”的代议模式——政客们所真正在乎的，不再是几千万普通大众在民调中的统计均值，而是时间线上活跃的数十万拥有巨大话语权的精英阶层。正如前参议员 Ben Sasse 曾尖锐批评的那样，如今华盛顿的大多数参议员和众议员，其根本野心不过是成为 TikTok 或 YouTube 上的超级网红。虽然从传统治理角度来看，政客不再专注于实质政策是一场巨大的悲剧，但在客观现实中，治理逻辑已被彻底重塑：传统的“民调指导治理”变成了“时间线指导治理”。那些在当今政治角斗场中如鱼得水的人，本质上全都转型成了顶级的内容创作者；而真正可怕且吊诡的地方在于——尽管阅读时间线的人群尚且能大致反映全美大众的横截面，但真正在幕后定义争议议题、引领时间线思想风向的“核心发帖者（Posters）”，却是一个规模极其微小的神秘精英小圈子。 - **治理驱动力的转移**：政治运作的核心罗盘从过去面向大众的“民调数据”全面转向了对“时间线舆论共识”的即时迎合。 - **政客身份的内容创作者化**：在时间线政治生态中脱颖而出的政治人物，其技能模型被高度特化为擅长煽动流量、制造爆款叙事的内容创作者。 - **权力的高度集中**：尽管信息流面向全球大众，但决定国家政策叙事走向的掌控权，实际上高度集中在极少数精通算法与叙事的发帖阶层手中。 ### `20:00` 顶级发帖者的特质：喜剧演员、诗人和受折磨作家的混血儿 在过去的美国早期政治设想中，拥有投票权的是拥有土地的白人男性；而到了今天，真正能在政策与文化层面翻云覆雨的，或许已经变成了那些精于网络发帖的“发帖者阶层”（Poster Class）。这群人既不局限于特定的人口统计学特征，也不受传统权力结构的约束。谈及这些伟大的发帖者究竟具备何种特质时，杰里米·吉芬（Jeremy Giffon）坦言，发帖从本质上讲与文学创作非常相似：你必须带有一点“被折磨的灵魂”（a little bit tortured），个人生活通常也一团糟，宛如喜剧脱口秀演员的生存状态。 优秀的推文（Posting）绝不仅仅是信息的输出，而是作家、喜剧演员与诗人的奇妙融合。它既需要脱口秀那种能够瞬间击中受众神经、引起情绪共鸣的即兴抛梗能力（riff），又必须在极短的字数内以精妙绝伦的词句进行包装。在吉芬看来，能在时间线（Timeline）上脱颖而出的发帖高手，创造的正是一种兼具幽默、诗意与高密度洞察的现代微型文学。 ### `21:40` 从神祇、科学家到亿万富翁：现代社会对“新祭司”的追寻 吉芬提出了一个颇具哲思的概念——“人类顶峰／男性崇拜顶峰”（Peak Guy）。为了厘清这一现象的源头，他梳理了人类精神信仰的变迁轨迹。在泛神论时代，神无处不在，万物有灵且皆受神明驱使；到了文艺复兴时期，神退居到云层之上，化身为一个具象的存在，人类依然能够仰头与他对话；然而，当人类的望远镜穿透云层、冲向太空后，人们发现上方空无一物，神只能被迫退到宇宙更深处的抽象概念之中，最终演变为现代无神论社会。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 现代社会祭司阶层的权力演变史 accDescr: 展现从传统神职人员到科学家、亿万富翁，再到顶级发帖者的权力与崇拜转移逻辑。 subgraph ReligiousEra ["传统信仰时代"] A["泛神论/传统神职人员<br/>（提供神性意义与道德解释）"] end subgraph SecularEra ["世俗化探索"] B["科学家/物理学家阶层<br/>（试图通过理性与硬科学提供终极意义）"] end subgraph CapitalEra ["资本崇拜时代"] C["亿万富翁阶层<br/>（商业成功被视为智慧与勤勉的道德至高点）"] end subgraph AttentionEra ["注意力时代"] D["顶级发帖者阶层<br/>（掌控时间线认知与文化品味的真正权威）"] end A -->|"二战后物理学停滞<br/>科学祛魅"| B B -->|"向资本屈服<br/>科学沦为附庸"| C C -->|"人数通胀、公信力饱和<br/>注意力被瓜分"| D ``` 但人类社会的结构决定了祭司阶层（Priestly Class）的位置永远不可或缺。在失去传统神明后，社会开始疯狂寻找替代品： - **科学家作为祭司的破灭**：人类曾将物理学等硬科学捧上神坛，寄希望于它为人类存在赋予终极意义，但二战以来基础物理学陷入长期停滞，科学无法填补人性的精神空虚。 - **亿万富翁接管神职**：现代社会将“商业成功”确立为核心道德标杆，人们潜意识里认为成功人士必然兼具聪明与勤勉，进而将亿万富翁奉为世俗的“虔诚化身”。 - **越界的权威**：大众开始病态地渴求富豪对物理、神学、医学健康以及一切毫不相干领域的指导，追逐每一期播客，研究他们的日常作息与生活习惯。 ### `23:45` 亿万富翁通胀与“Peak Guy”时代的终结 吉芬指出，这种对亿万富翁的盲目崇拜目前已经触碰到了天花板，即所谓的“Peak Guy”。这种幻灭源于三股力量的夹击： 1. **数量大通胀导致稀缺性荡然无存**：在过去20年里，全球亿万富翁的数量增长了上百倍甚至更多。当格兰特·卡尔东（Grant Cardone）和埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）同样被冠以“亿万富翁”的头衔时，这一标签便彻底失去了区分度。 2. **实际权力的急剧萎缩**：比起当年的强盗大亨（Robber Baron）或非洲军阀，当今富豪的权力极其有限。安德鲁·卡内基（Andrew Carnegie）可以公然动用武力镇压罢工工人，而今天的亿万富翁如果发了一条不合时宜的推文，甚至会被迫引咎辞职；政治献金阶层（Donor Class）的影响力也远未达到大众想象的支配地位。 3. **内容供给的过度饱和**：播客和访谈铺天盖地，富豪们的人生鸡汤已经无法提供边际增量。“现在听播客里的边际亿万富翁讲话，你很难再学到任何有趣的新东西了，而这在六年前是完全不同的。” ### `25:00` 权力下移：亿万富翁正对“发帖者”俯首称臣 当旧的神祇倒下，谁是下一任祭司？吉芬认为答案毫无疑问是顶级发帖者。判定社会阶层统治地位的最好法则，就是看**“谁臣服于谁”**（who is subservient to whom）： - 科学界曾向富豪低头，正如杰弗里·爱泼斯坦（Jeffrey Epstein）事件所揭示的，顶尖学者们争相依附于富豪的金钱与光环； - 如今，在顶级名流的社交场域中，富豪们却反过来对发帖者表现出高度的顺从与恭维。 吉芬分享了一个极具代表性的亲历场景：在一场高规格的亿万富翁投资人聚会上，满屋子的超级富豪竟然在激烈争夺谁能坐在经济学家兼顶级博主泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）的身旁，因为他才是全场最有思想、最有趣的人。“每个房间都有真正的老大（Every room has a boss），”吉芬感叹道。在注意力成为绝对稀缺品的当下，积累十亿美元资产的难度，甚至可能远远低于在公众心智与时间线上占据核心生态位。 ### `26:40` 作为意识形态的“净资产”与时间维度的终极稀缺 为了解构当下对财富的虚假崇拜，吉芬提出了回溯历史的框架。在《傲慢与偏见》等经典文学中，人们谈论达西先生（Mr. Darcy）的财富时，使用的是“每年从庄稼地产中获得一万英镑收益”的现金流概念，根本不存在所谓的“庄园资产净值两万镑”或者“用庄园抵押了多少保证金贷款”，因为土地是不可变卖的根本存在，无法折算为账面数字。 而现代的“净资产”（Net Worth）和“亿万富翁”概念，在吉芬看来纯粹是一种概念化的排行榜积分（leaderboard points）： - **不可变现的虚名**：由于许多富豪的财富沉淀在未上市股权中且无法随意抛售，这一头衔更像是一种“政治与文化标签”，甚至可以说“亿万富翁是一种心理状态（state of mind）”。 - **词义的贬值**：就像“百万富翁”在今天仅仅指代拥有房产的中产阶层一样，“亿万富翁”正走向平庸。如果真正按照流动性和通胀调整后的购买力来重新划定门槛，全球能够达标的统治级富豪人数极少。 - **时间与注意力的硬通货**：法币在持续贬值，金钱的购买力和能换取的现实权力在缩水，但人类一天的绝对时间是恒定不变的。谁能抢夺屏幕上的停留时长与心智空间，谁就掌握了新时代的终极资产。 ### `28:45` 模因偶像与拟态消费：没人完整消费的现代文化 在探讨当代最引人入胜的发帖者时，吉芬区分了两类人：一类是极其罕见、产出精良到让人必须开启“推文强提醒”（Tweet notifications）的创作者；另一类则是纯粹靠海量高频发布（prolificness）博取眼球的流量收割者。尽管吉芬极其厌恶以量取胜的机制，主张推特应当以“粉丝数除以发帖量”（Followers per post）作为评判影响力的指标，但算法的现实依然残酷地倾向于高产。 由此，吉芬总结出了一组关于现代拟态文化的深刻悖论： - 最重要的媒体品牌不会被真正观看； - 最重要的作家几乎没人通读他们的著作； - 最重要的哲学家从未被大众理解； - 表现最好的股票往往毫无基本面支撑。 在全面“法币化”（fiat）的世界里，一切都在符号化。哲学家和严肃作家的书籍不过是充当某种“文化偶像”，只有极少数品味制定者（tastemakers）会真正阅读，其他人仅仅是跟随权威的盖戳认证，进行一场模因式的狂欢庆祝（mimetic celebration）。这种现象同样蔓延到了播客与新媒体行业： - 切片短视频（Clips）的传播力和数据往往数倍于整集播客； - 哪怕没有人完整听完一期播客，只要高光切片被全网疯传，这个媒体资产的商业与文化价值就丝毫未受损耗； - 吉芬提到某拥有数百万订阅者的知名媒体机构，其内部人员透露，多达 95% 的所谓“读者”仅仅是在 Instagram 等平台上快速滑过精心制作的名言高光图卡，但他们依然被算作忠实读者。所有的文化内容，都在被极端加工与切片化，以求用最少的人类时间夺取最多的注意力。 ### `30:00` 自由与相关性的权衡：信息消费的“辐射”本质与娱乐伪装 在这段对话的开篇，两人探讨了一个令人深思的现象：当下的内容创作者与发帖者群体，已经彻底沦为了统一信息流（the monolithic timeline）的附庸，所有人都在机械地喂养这个庞然大物。Jeremy 曾在此前完全断网、淡出社交媒体长达六个月之久。当被问及这种彻底消失的体验是否值得推崇时，Jeremy 阐述了这背后关于“自由（Freedom）”与“保持相关性（Relevancy）”的核心权衡。他指出，人们从社交媒体的戒断中唯一应该看清的真相是：千万不要自欺欺人，以为自己在消费媒介时是在寻找娱乐之外的任何东西。屏幕上的所有内容，从选题、制作到剪辑，唯一的“待完成任务（Job to be Done）”就是提供娱乐。 Jeremy 用消费主义做了一个绝妙的类比：就像劳力士（Rolex）或耐克（Nike）想方设法让消费者相信，他们的产品是一种“资产”或“投资”而非消费负债，从而诱使人们掏出更多金钱一样；播客、推文和深度长文也在给受众灌输一种心理安慰，让人误以为自己读到的东西是极其实用、极具生产力的，绝非在“整天看电视消磨时间”。然而无论是每天刷一小时还是八小时，本质上都只是你想要接受多少娱乐而已。如果你不是一个彻底与世隔绝的隐士，即便彻底离开时间线，真正重大的事情你也绝不会错过。最聪明的媒介消费方式反而是“自己绝不亲自去读”，而是去吃身旁朋友在午餐和晚餐上过滤后的信息——“让他们先去暴露在信息的核辐射之下，然后再跑回来告诉你有什么有趣的东西”。两人的共同好友 Jesse 便奉行这种极简哲学，彻底拒绝生活中出现任何算法，包括本质上就是一种算法的新闻；当被问及不看新闻如何知晓天下事时，Jesse 的回答极度纯粹：“别人自然会告诉你。” ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 媒介消费的辐射与过滤模型 accDescr: 展示原始信息流如何通过个人肉身承受辐射与通过社交圈过滤摄取的两种路径对比 subgraph TimelineRadiation["单一信息流的算法辐射"] A["算法时间线<br/>(Monolithic Timeline)"] -->|"全天候算法投喂<br/>伪装成'生产力'的娱乐"| B["普通受众 / 沉迷者<br/>(长时间承受信息辐射)"] end subgraph FilteredConsumption["高阶/启蒙式信息过滤"] A -.->|"肉身抗辐射"| C["社交圈深度阅读者 / 朋友"] C -->|"线下聚餐 / 面对面交流<br/>口口相传沉淀出的精华"| D["断网者 / 极简主义者<br/>(零算法干扰，保持绝对认知自由)"] end ``` --- ### `32:13` 消失的休闲阶级与发帖终局：注意力作为终极稀缺资产 随后，话题转向了“自由与影响力”之间的对立。Jeremy 敏锐地指出，商业历史中似乎曾经存在过一类如今已经“彻底灭绝”的传奇人物原型——比如西奥多·罗斯福（Theodore Roosevelt）或安德鲁·卡内基（Andrew Carnegie）。卡内基曾是有史以来最富有的人之一，但他却能将生命中海量的时间投入到远离商业的闲暇时光中。如今的人们普遍被一种观念所裹挟：必须每天拼命工作 22 个小时才能创造改变世界的成就。然而这真的必然成立吗？现代表现最反常的例子当属甲骨文（Oracle）创始人拉里·埃里森（Larry Ellison），他从一开始创办 Oracle 就公开宣称，自己的初衷是为了能随时随地消失两周去扬帆出海，即便到了今天，他依然能够自由自在地随性进出公司决策。这引发了一个尖锐的问题：在现代商业社会中，这种“每天必须在线、硬性拼搏”的状态，究竟有多少纯粹属于“表演性质的勤奋（performative hard work）”？ 不仅如此，卡内基一生都对跻身文人墨客的社交圈抱有某种自觉与执念，他很清楚光有金钱远远不够，他渴望成为受人尊敬的作家、学者并被社会接纳——从这个角度看，太阳底下并无新鲜事。Jeremy 进而抛出了一个坚定的论断：“金钱积累的终局就是发帖（The end state is just posting）。”无数的亿万富翁和知名机器人在赚取了巨额财富之后，无一例外地涌向 Twitter 发帖、开播客或者做 YouTube 频道。表面上看，这或许是富豪在坐拥财富后对名声的贪恋；但在更深层的金融逻辑上，这其实是一种清醒的资产对冲： * **资本的边际效用递减**：当一个人积累了天文数字的财富后，金钱本身的边际价值急剧缩水，甚至随着通胀和增发迅速贬值； * **稀缺资产的锚定转移**：他们真正意识到，在这个时代唯一稀缺、无法轻易被稀释的硬通货，是“注意力（Attention）与影响力（Influence）”； * **对冲贬值机制**：转向发帖和自媒体，本质上是用正在迅速贬值的金钱，去换取并对冲到真正稀缺的影响力资产上； * **反向对照组**：耐人寻味的是，两人共同最推崇、最感兴趣的七八位顶尖人物，却全部抵制住了发帖的诱惑，这让人怀疑沉迷发帖或许本身就是一个吞噬心智的“精巧陷阱”。 --- ### `35:00` 白领岗位的“虚构性”与 AI 时代的无尽消费欲望 针对“表演性勤奋”这一洞见，Patrick 将话题引向当前全社会最核心的焦虑：AI 对白领工作的颠覆与替代。以往的历次技术革命虽也取代旧工种，但节奏相对缓慢；而 AI 具备通用智能且迭代极其迅猛，引发了前所未有的失业恐慌。面对这种焦虑，Jeremy 表达了截然不同的激进视角。他提到一位朋友家里有上大学的孩子，还有一个十岁的小孩；这位朋友对正在读大学的孩子的前途忧心忡忡，但对十岁的小孩却毫不担心。Jeremy 完全赞同这种判断，并直言：“凡是能够被自动化的东西，就理应被自动化。”对于他个人而言，想到自己可能正处于人生中最后几年还需要坐在电脑屏幕前敲敲打打的时光，这非但不可怖，反而是一种“巨大的解脱”。 Jeremy 尖锐地指出，所谓的“岗位见顶”或“我们即将耗尽工作机会”完全是个伪命题，因为现代几乎所有白领工作本质上都是“凭空捏造出来的虚构岗位（totally fake and made up）”。这些白领工作根本不直接关涉食物、庇护所、医疗等生存必需品；哪怕有一点关联，也是极其间接和衍生性的。 以资本配置者（Allocator）自身为例，资本天然具有通胀属性，一旦你拥有了钱，就绝不能把它闲置在一旁，否则它就会在通胀中蒸发——这正是金钱最大的“罪恶”之一。因此，当富人有了钱又不想缩水时，必须把资金交给配置者，配置者再把钱分散配置到各种号称具有生产力的资产中，期盼未来能收回更多资金。这项工作确实好玩、有用，但它绝不是维持人类生存的“实体性现实”。 人类的需求与欲望是永无止境的，整套现代经济系统的核心引擎，恰恰就是人类对消费“无法遏制、难以满足的渴望”。只要人类还在不断发明出全新的消费欲望，社会就会源源不断地创造出无限多全新的虚拟岗位。短期和中期内技术颠覆确实会导致摩擦、失业与阵痛，但在长期维度上，担忧人类会没有工作可做是毫无根据的。因为现代人类早已解决了最基础的生存问题，绝大多数工作不过是我们在吃饱穿暖后，为了打发时间、避免虚无而自己发明出来的游戏。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 现代白领工作的虚构机制与资本循环 accDescr: 展现从生存必需品解决到资本通胀压力，再到虚构岗位诞生的内在经济逻辑 subgraph BasicNeeds["物质与生存底层"] A["基础生存需求已解决<br/>(食物、庇护所、医疗无需全员劳作)"] end subgraph CapitalEngine["资本通胀与虚构岗位循环"] B["资本天然通胀贬值<br/>(财富不可静止放置)"] --> C["资金配置者与金融中介<br/>(衍生出的庞大白领体系)"] C --> D["投资与生产新产品/新体验"] D --> E["人类无止境的消费欲望<br/>(不断被发明的新需求)"] E --> B end A -.->|"释放出海量冗余劳动力"| C ``` --- ### `38:53` 远程办公拆穿的工时谎言与善待自身天赋的道德责任 关于现代白领工作的“表演性”，Jeremy 提出了一个非常生动而直观的现实佐证——居家办公（Work From Home, WFH）。如果工人在工厂流水线上做工，即便把流水线搬到自家庭院，依然得在工位上钉满 10 个小时，这种在家办公并不会带来质的幸福感飞跃。白领阶层之所以对居家办公如此执着，核心原因在于：在每天长达 8 小时的坐班中，绝大多数人真正需要投入产出的核心工作其实只有两到三个小时，剩下的五六个小时全都在办公室里假装忙碌、摸鱼发呆、或者被迫枯坐在无意义的会议里“随时待命”。星期五的远程办公，本质上就是社会在半推半就中对“四天工作制”进行的一次软启动（soft launch）。既然整个社会在支付全额薪水、允许人们每周摸鱼或只干四天的情况下依然保持着充沛的生产力，这本身就证明：维系当今世界运转，人类实际需要的必要劳动时间已经大大减少了。 如果大多数人不必再整天坐在屏幕前机械地把数据比特从一个窗口搬运到另一个窗口，人类又该如何寻找真正的天职（Vocation）？Patrick 提起 Jeremy 曾经发给他的一条难以忘怀的短信：“我们每个人都有一种道德责任，去好好善待与照料自己的天赋（steward our gifts）。” 谈及这一理念，Jeremy 阐述道，即便纯粹从审美角度来看，“浪费（Waste）”也是一件极其丑陋的事情；而在一切浪费中，最令人痛心的莫过于浪费掉你与生俱来的天赋、才华与特质——那些你拥有独特优势、能够为他人做出不可替代贡献的能力。在人生中，最大的挑战莫过于两步：首先是精准识别出自己到底擅长什么，这知易行难；其次是探索如何践行它们。在他看来，善待天赋通常存在两种截然不同的模式： - **分离模式（The Pure Mode）**：保持天赋的纯粹与不被污染，不强求将其与谋生的职业硬性捆绑。例如一个人从事一份平凡的日常工作来支付生活账单，从而在业余时间毫无功利心、不受商业妥协地专注于自己的艺术创作或手艺（Craft）； - **整合模式（The Ambitious Mode）**：一种更具野心的方式，即设法将自己的天生优势、核心才华与商业主业深度融合，直接将自身独特的天赋转化为能够产生巨大现实影响力的事业杠杆。 ### `40:00` 天赋与商业的融合：将工作打造成才华的容器 在人生的职业探索中，如何将商业现实与个人天赋相融合始终是一个核心命题。这往往会陷入“是否应该追随激情”的老生常谈，但更底层的逻辑在于：一个人耗费绝大部分清醒时间所从事的事业，必须能够真正激发并调用其独有的天资与才干。如果一份工作无法做到这一点，那么它显然不值得投入绝大部分精力。衡量这种契合度存在一个非常敏锐且真实的代理指标——即一个人在工作中是否感受到了巨大的乐趣；当工作充满乐趣时，通常意味着个人天赋与商业价值已经达成了高度共识与共振。 --- ### `41:00` 金融范式的代际演变：从杠杆收购（LBO）到股权创投 回顾现代金融史，当下的主导范式大多脱胎于 20 世纪 80 年代由 KKR 等机构开创的杠杆收购（LBO）热潮。任何组织、企业乃至国家，其“奠基时刻”（Founding Act）都会深远地塑造其底层文化基因。大型私募股权巨头（如 Blackstone、Apollo、KKR）发端于债务逻辑与金融工程，其本质在某种程度上具有“榨取性”（extractive）——即核心目标是通过财务杠杆使资产快速提高账面盈利能力，而资产本身的业务质量有时甚至退居次席。尽管这些巨头如今的业务已经多元化，且 LBO 仅占其管理资产的一小部分，但这种基于下行风险控制、债务驱动与定量计算的基因依然深植于其骨髓之中。 这种历史结构引出一个极具启发性的思考：如果未来二三十年内，全球最庞大的金融机构是诞生于“种子轮早期投资”（Seed Investing）的土壤，金融世界将会呈现出怎样的面貌？股权融资与古老且充满道德争议的债务融资截然不同，它是一项更为年轻、本质上极度乐观的制度创新。股权投资由幂律法则（Power Law）主导，收益上行空间彻底打开，更依赖定性洞察而非死板的下行定量测算。当管理万亿美元规模的主体从一群保守防范下行风险的债务工程师，转变为一群信奉非对称上行收益的超级乐观主义者时，整个全球资本配置的底层哲学将被彻底重写。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 债务驱动与股权驱动金融模式对比 accDescr: 对比传统东岸以LBO和债务为核心的模式，与新兴西岸以股权和种子投资为核心的模式特征。 subgraph East["传统东岸模式 (以 LBO / 债务为基石)"] direction TB E1["奠基行为: 杠杆收购与金融工程"] --> E2["核心属性: 债务优先、防范下行、定量算计"] E2 --> E3["哲学特征: 存量榨取、收益有上限、相对悲观保守"] end subgraph West["未来西岸范式 (以 Seed / 股权为基石)"] direction TB W1["奠基行为: 极早期种子轮风险投资"] --> W2["核心属性: 股权驱动、追求幂律、定性洞察"] W2 --> W3["哲学特征: 增量创造、上行无封顶、极度技术乐观"] end ``` --- ### `43:00` 东西海岸金融文化的倒错：薪酬结构与资本形态的逆转 在传统认知中，美国东西海岸的金融文化存在着鲜明的刻板印象：东岸（华尔街/私募股权）务实、严苛、偏重下行防护甚至被视作具有榨取性；而西岸（硅谷/风险投资）则天真、对金融工程欠缺深究，却充满对未来的纯真幻想。然而现实证明，西岸正在无可争议地“吃掉”东岸。风险投资作为一项非凡的“文明级技术”（civilizational technology），允许全社会将数以百万计的美元交给年轻人去尝试充满投机性的先锋实验，即便失败也无需承担惩罚性后果。这种微小的资产类别最终孵化出了全球规模最大、最具变革性的商业帝国，而传统私募股权所构筑的巨无霸大多只是依赖并购整合与财务重组。 耐人寻味的是，东西海岸从业者的“薪酬与激励结构”正在发生戏剧性的历史倒错： - **曾经的格局**：华尔街提供极为丰厚的年度流动性现金奖金，从业者享受短期财富但缺乏持久的机构股权沉淀；而硅谷从业者则在纸面上富有，持有大量流动性极差、遥不可期的期权或股权，期盼多年后不可知的上市兑现。 - **当下的逆转**：随着黑石、KKR 等华尔街私募巨头相继挂牌上市，东岸的薪酬体系逐步转向限制性股票单元（RSUs）。机构精英们开始从百年老店的企业价值与整体股价出发思考问题，其利益绑定变得更为长期且机构化。相反，硅谷由于企业推迟上市，催生出了高度成熟的非上市公司二级市场（Secondary Market），定期的要约收购（Tender Offers）构建起近乎实时的流动性变现管道。在 AI 人才争夺战与 GP 份额交易的推动下，硅谷反倒沦为了追求高频现金变现、频繁跳槽的“雇佣兵市场”（mercenary market）。 --- ### `45:30` 市场的极端与缺乏细微差别：算法驱动叙事与资产定价 身处一个极度动荡且充满不确定性的市场周期中，资产定价往往暴露出极度缺乏“细微差别”（nuance）的缺陷。以 SaaS 为例，市场倾向于将其全盘贴上恐慌性标签。但 SaaS 本质上只是一种收费模型——即“企业按人头、按月或按年付费，以获得帮助员工使用电脑的软件工具”。随着 AI 的演进，这种纯粹按人头付费的软件形态确实面临巨大危机；然而很多正被无情抛售的企业，其底层商业价值与客户粘性根本不是由这一计费外壳所决定的。市场在恐慌中粗暴地一刀切，将优质资产连同脆弱模型一并低估。 类似的反常现象同样出现在公开市场的“七巨头”（Magnificent Seven）上。在当前宏观环境下，公募基金经理单纯重仓 Mag 7 是一种合理甚至出色的资本配置策略，因为“有时候最明显的共识恰恰是正确的”。反对者通常声称这些万亿美元市值的巨头早已“定价完美”（priced to perfection），但真实数据令人大跌眼镜：这批全球体量最大的核心资产，其 52 周内的价格振幅（52-week variance）居然接近 100%。如此剧烈的波动证明市场定价机制漏洞百出。 这种失效的核心根源在于： 1. **被动资金流动（Passive Flows）**：指数基金和 ETF 的机械配置主导了边际流动性，抹平了资产内在质量的差异。 2. **算法驱动的叙事定价**：决定证券边际交易价格的情绪，往往发酵于群聊讨论以及由 Twitter（X）、YouTube 推荐算法放大的网络帖子（Posts）。驱动这些推荐算法的底层技术正是 AI 本身。在某种真实意义上，**AI 算法正通过掌控叙事筛选权来为整个金融市场定价**。许多基金经理在结构上面临无法空仓等待的制度枷锁，明知估值失真也只能硬着头皮将资本部署出去，将暴雷的风险留给明天。 --- ### `48:30` 资本堰塞湖与重资产转向：当风投资本撞上有限的创始人供给 风险投资领域近年来出现了一个标志性转向：从纯粹追求轻资产的“纯比特”（pure bits）软件，全面转向重 CapEx、重算力 Token 消耗以及涉足实体世界资产（Real World Assets/Atoms）的全新商业品类。许多曾经 100% 押注纯软件的基金，其投资组合的市值中已有超过 60% 属于非纯软件资产。 这种宏观转型的深层动因并非仅仅是技术演进，而是风投资产类别结构性失衡的必然结果： - **资本供给过剩**：自 2016-2017 年起，由于此前长达二十年的卓越回报率，全球各路长线资本（LPs）如潮水般涌入风投市场。 - **优质资产供给刚性受限**：伟大企业的诞生本质上是极少数顶级创始人驱动的下行结果，而全球顶尖创始人的供给在任何时代都是绝对有限的。 - **资金容量与轻资产的冲突**：在 AI 与云基础设施高度成熟的背景下，创办一家 B2B 软件企业的初始资金门槛越来越低。巨额的风投资本根本无法被资本消耗极低的企业所吸收。为了把规模膨胀的基金体量合理地配置出去，风险投资机构别无选择，只能将资本导向需要庞大 CapEx、算力集群与物理实体的全新赛道。 ### `50:00` 资本过剩、AI 算力转型与软件行业的“沃尔玛效应” 资本的流动如同水流，永远在寻找阻力最小且效率最高的路径，最痛恨的就是被阻断。在过去的负利率与流动性泛滥时期，资本狂热地涌向风险投资（VC），因为从历史回报率来看风投收益极高。但传统轻资产软件公司的吸金能力存在硬上限，公司实际能够消化的资金，与它们在市场上融到的巨额资本严重脱节。大量过剩的资金最终没有转化为实际的生产性投资，而是不可避免地流向了商业地产所有者（如办公楼租金）以及高管团队极度膨胀的薪酬包。杰里米·吉芬（Jeremy Giffon）坦言，正是这种资本错配与资金严重过剩的荒诞现象，促使他创立了自己的基金——商业形态与资产本质上就是吸收资本的“海绵”，当宏观环境充斥着过剩资本而无处可去时，系统会像“机械降神”（Deus ex machina）一样自发催生出能够吸纳这些资金的容器。硬件与人工智能（AI）这类具有极高资本支出（CapEx）属性的赛道，正是资本为了排解过剩压力而“自下而上”反向催生出来的终极资产海绵。 从经济模型的底层逻辑来看，传统软件即服务（SaaS）在当前市场上遭到残酷抛售有着深层的必然性。过去的 SaaS 模式本质上是在“售卖一段字符串的代码拷贝”，边际分发成本无限接近于零。在近乎零边际成本的假设下，软件前期虽有固定研发投入，但后续毛利率极高，理论上最终会带来极高的净利润率——尽管这种净利润率在现实中往往沦为空谈，直到私募股权（PE）机构入场强制降本增效才得以挤出。然而，当前 AI 时代的底层逻辑已彻底转变：行业不再是“卖代码拷贝”，而是在“卖算力（Compute）”。用户无法只写一次 Prompt 就零成本地复制分发产出结果，每一次调用与推理都必须消耗真实的算力与电力，边际成本绝不再是零。 这一根本性转变宣告了高毛利率作为软件行业默认常态的时代正式终结。未来的软件商业形态将转变为低毛利、微薄净利以及极度依赖庞大规模（Scale）的商业逻辑。资本必然加速向具有绝对规模优势的头部算力基础设施与服务提供商集中。十年前人们无法想象市值达 3 万亿至 4 万亿美元的企业，但未来涌现出 10 万亿美元市值的超级巨头已毫无悬念。软件行业正在上演残酷的“沃尔玛效应”（Walmart effect）：未来的格局是微薄的毛利、如刀片般狭窄的净利率与不可思议的超大规模效应，而那些传统的垂直 SaaS 厂商，正如沃尔玛开进小镇时那些毫无还手之力的夫妻便利店（Mom-and-pop shop）一样，面临着生存根基的瓦解。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: SaaS与AI算力经济模型变迁 accDescr: 对比传统SaaS以零边际成本代码拷贝为核心的高毛利模式与AI时代以高算力成本和微利超大规模为特征的沃尔玛效应模式。 subgraph SUB1["传统 SaaS 范式（代码拷贝时代）"] A["交付物：字符串拷贝（代码）"] --> B["边际成本趋近于零"] B --> C["高毛利率 / 理论高净利"] C --> D["过度募资流入办公地产与高薪酬"] end subgraph SUB2["AI 算力范式（沃尔玛效应时代）"] E["交付物：实时算力（Compute）"] --> F["每次交互产生真实算力成本"] F --> G["极低毛利与微薄净利"] G --> H["绝对规模驱动（10万亿美元巨头）"] H --> I["挤压传统垂直 SaaS 夫妻店"] end ``` - **资本海绵理论**：商业模式与重资产项目的涌现并非孤立的技术演进，而是宏观过剩资本由于无处可去而自发构建的泄洪口。 - **SaaS 的底层幻象**：售卖字符串拷贝使得软件具备了虚高的高毛利光环，但大部分公司的真实净利率只能靠 PE 收购后的财务重组逼出。 - **算力经济学**：AI 的每一次 Prompt 输出都伴随着硬件折旧与电网消耗，零边际成本的神话破灭，软件彻底滑向以规模取胜的重工业模式。 --- ### `53:26` 战胜市场并没有那么难：职业投资人的诅咒与散户优势 自指数基金之父约翰·博格（Jack Bogle）开创被动投资时代以来，金融界便确立了一条深入骨髓的信条：战胜市场（Alpha）是一件近乎不可能的事，因此普通投资者根本不应尝试，彻底退出主动博弈才是理性的。沃伦·巴菲特（Warren Buffett）也多次公开建言，其遗产除伯克希尔的资产外，应全数投入标普 500 指数。大众普遍将此解读为“巴菲特承认无法战胜市场”，但吉芬认为这完全曲解了巴菲特的初衷。巴菲特的真实意图在于：对于不具备专业能力与耐心的普通大众，指数投资是唯一的理性解；但在这一断言背后，隐含的语境是对所有真正具备主动投资能力之人的豁免。 市场上形成了一种极具杀伤力的“组合拳论调”：一方面是投资教父告诫公众不要白费力气，另一方面是冰冷的实证数据——绝大多数拿取高额报酬的华尔街专业基金经理，在扣除管理费与业绩提成后，长期回报均落后于大盘。然而，吉芬指出这恰恰构成了一种独特的金融悖论：**对于职业基金经理来说，战胜市场极其困难；但对于纯粹的业余个人投资者来说，超越平均水平其实并没有想象中那么难。** 这一论断呼应了彼得·林奇（Peter Lynch）在几十年前提出的超前洞察。职业基金经理肩负着沉重的制度枷锁：他们受到严格的投资风控指令约束、背负着维持资产管理规模（AUM）的商业诉求、需要每季度向出资人汇报并时刻讨好客户、承受着同业排名的职业声誉风险。相反，个人投资者几乎没有这些心理和体制包袱。现实中大量普通人因为热爱特斯拉汽车而买入特斯拉股票，因为日常使用苹果电脑而配置苹果股票，甚至在早期凭直觉买入比特币，他们仅仅凭借朴素的生活常识便斩获了远超对冲基金的惊人回报。对冲基金的合规与风控机制绝不允许以这种方式运营，正是体制与代理人成本，剥夺了专业人士的胜率。 - **巴菲特建议的真意**：推荐标普 500 是针对不愿承担主动研究风险的公众的最优解，而非判定战胜市场在逻辑上绝无可能。 - **职业投资人的体制束缚**：对冲基金面临流动性管理、风控平仓线、LP 心理按摩等多重非投资维度的干扰。 - **业余选手的非对称优势**：个人投资者不必为回撤写季度解释信，可以以极长周期持有基于生活直觉买入的标的（如特斯拉、苹果、比特币）。 --- ### `55:34` LP 的出资哲学与新兴基金经理的“心理重力” 作为有限合伙人（LP）进行资金配置时，必须摒弃温情脉脉的叙事，采取一种近乎冷酷的现实主义商业视角：**基金首先是一门商业生意，其销售的产品是回报率，LP 必须极度清醒地认识到自己在对方眼中属于哪一类客户。** 现实中常有个人或小型家族办公室拿着 50 万或 100 万美元的支票，纠结是否该挤进规模 50 亿美元的大型成长型基金（Growth Fund）。吉芬直言，这类超大规模基金的业务架构是专门为了服务主权财富基金、大型大学捐赠基金而设计的，小额支票在其中不仅无法获得定制化关注，其资金属性也与对方的产品定位彻底错位。如果手握 5000 万美元寻求避风港，投进 50 亿基金毫无问题；但如果是小体量资金，这种选择极其平庸。 小额出资人真正的阿尔法藏在“新兴基金经理”（Emerging Managers）领域。在这一区间，管理人的个人利益与基金的超额回报高度捆绑，要么因为只有创造暴利才能融到下一期基金，要么因为业绩提成是其唯一的财富跃迁通道。然而，在评估新兴经理时，绝大多数 LP 都犯了严重的认知偏差：他们过度偏执于投资逻辑、研究框架和过往虚名，却极度低估了对管理人“个人财务真实底色”的穿透审查。 吉芬强调了“你如何做一件事，就会如何做所有事”这一核心信条，并提出了**“向上看”与“向下看”（Looking up vs. Looking down）的资金心理重力理论**。面对一支规模同为 5000 万美元的新基金： 1. **仰视资金的管理者**：如果个人银行账户里只有 50 万美元存款，掌管 5000 万美元意味着操盘资金规模比其个人财富高出两到三个数量级。这种巨大的数字差会产生一种近乎窒息的心理威慑力（Monumentalness），导致其在下注时神经紧绷、动作变形，因害怕犯错而被恐慌所瘫痪。 2. **俯视资金的管理者**：如果个人净资产已有 5 亿美元，面对这支 5000 万美元的基金时心态极为放松（Held with a looser grip）。由于这笔钱在其个人财富中只占边缘份额，管理者不会被资金规模所绑架，反而能更果断、从容地执行非共识的高赔率下注。 这种心理维度的重力不仅适用于初生基金，同样贯穿至百亿级别的金融战场。一个身价 1 亿美元的基金掌舵人去操盘 100 亿美元的超大基金，同样会面临巨大的心理重压。个人投资者之所以有时更容易斩获超额收益，正是因为用自己流动净资产中无足轻重的小钱去买入一只看好的股票时，既不需要向外界自证合理性，也不必担心一次挫败就断送自身职业生涯。 | 评估维度 | 仰视型经理（Looking Up） | 俯视型经理（Looking Down） | |:--- |:--- |:--- | | **资产与基金对比** | 个人资产极小，基金规模比身价高出数个数量级 | 个人资产远超或平视当前管理的基金规模 | | **心理状态** | 对大额数字心生敬畏，动作僵硬变形，过度保守 | 握拍松弛（Loose Grip），决策不受规模恐慌干扰 | | **代理人压力** | 极度恐惧业绩回撤断送生计，过度迎合外部评价 | 敢于承受非共识风险，专注投资本身的底层商业逻辑 | | **典型画像** | 50 万美元身价管理 5000 万美元首期基金 | 5 亿美元身价掌舵 5000 万美元特种机遇基金 | --- ### `01:00:40` SPV 封建主义：AI 时代的新贵族与配额特权 在硅谷与私市股权投资的隐秘角落，一种由特殊目的载体（SPV）与超级独角兽驱动的全新体系正在成型。吉芬将其生动地定义为**“从第一性原理自发重构的封建主义制度”（SPV Feudalism）**。 在当下的前沿技术生态——尤其是超级 AI 实验室与顶级硬科技企业中，埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）、马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）、达里奥·阿莫代伊（Dario Amodei）、萨姆·奥尔特曼（Sam Altman）等少数几位掌握算力与模型命脉的创始人，已经俨然演变为拥有至高权力的“封建领主”（The Lords）。这些科技领主手中掌控着当今世界最稀缺、最受资本追捧的硬通货——SpaceX、Waymo 或顶级 AI 实验室的稀缺投资份额（Allocations）。 在这一权力架构下，分配“配额”的权力等同于中世纪国王册封土地。科技领主们将原本封闭的珍贵投资配额恩赐给特定的人脉圈层、中介或中间人，便直接在金融界凭空造就了一批“新贵族阶层”（Landed Gentry）。这些获得分销特权的中间人，通过拼装各路 SPV 将昂贵的入场券转售给下游如饥似渴的长尾资本，不仅能借此收取极其夸张的管理费与附带权益（Carried Interest），更将一种原本纯粹依靠科技突破创造价值的机制，变异为依赖人身附庸与特权分发建立的寄生性金融链条。这种配额本身已经脱离了传统资本市场的价值发现逻辑，沦为一种人为制造稀缺性、层层抽取封建地租的“纯合成金融衍生品”。 - **科技封建领主**：掌控生成式 AI 与重工业硬科技生态核心股权的少数创始人，拥有决定资本生死的主权式配额分配权。 - **配额即封地**：获取 SpaceX 或核心 AI 实验室的直投份额，等同于获得了跨越代际财富阶层的特许采邑。 - **合成地租体系**：通过复杂的层叠 SPV 结构，金融中间人依靠从领主手中分得的配额向散户及中小型出资人兜售暴利产品，形成层层盘剥的封建进贡链。 ### `01:00:40` SPV 封建主义与令人咋舌的配额寻租 在私募股权和风投市场中，一种围绕“配额”（Allocation）展开的怪诞资本游戏正在普遍上演。这种模式被形容为一种“纯粹基于人际关系构建的纯合成资产”（purely relational, wholly synthetic thing），其规模和机制在过去从未达到过今天的程度。这宛如中世纪的封建采邑制：创始人或公司知道某位中间人手里根本没有实际资金，但依然授予他额度。这就如同“国王在领地里划拨了 500 英亩土地给你”，或者“埃隆·马斯克给了你 1 亿美元 SpaceX 的认购配额”。中间人随后便能带着这份“地契”走向主权财富基金或大型家族基金会，向他们索取巨额的准入费用（access fee）。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: SPV 封建配额寻租机制 accDescr: 展示创始人授予中间人额度，中间人设立SPV向主权基金或LP兜售并长期抽取费用的流程 subgraph Allocation["核心资源（封地）"] Founder["头部创始人 / 明星企业<br/>（如 SpaceX / Elon Musk）"] Middleman["关系中间人（领主）<br/>（获得数千万至上亿美元配额）"] Founder -->|"授予配额（象征性地契）"| Middleman end subgraph Syndication["资本分发（封建寻租）"] SPV["设立特殊目的载体 (SPV)"] LP["主权财富基金 / 慈善基金会 / 散户LP"] Middleman -->|"打包配额设立"| SPV LP -->|"全额出资 + 支付过桥通道费"| SPV end subgraph RentExtraction["掠夺性收费结构"] Fee1["零 GP 出资（No GP Commit）"] Fee2["10% 一次性预付管理费"] Fee3["无存续期限制：永久收取 2% 年费"] Fee4["高额附带权益（Carry）分成"] end SPV -.-> RentExtraction ``` 传统的中介经纪（brokering）通常只是一次性交易，而现代的特殊目的载体（SPV）配额机制却能永久存续。谈及见过的最离谱收费结构，中间人甚至可以做到“零 GP 出资”（no GP commit），直接收取 10% 的一次性预付费，外加高比例的 Carry（附带权益），在承担零个人风险的前提下坐收改变一生命运的财富。更甚者，部分早期 SpaceX 的 SPV 项目甚至没有设置存续期限（term limit），从十余年前开始每年无休止地收取 2% 的管理费。尽管 LP 站在今天看可能庆幸当年搭上了 SpaceX 暴涨的顺风车，但这已经完全偏离了真正的投资或单纯的经纪业务，演变成一种靠内部准入特权建立的寻租系统，甚至在市场泡沫期滋生出大量虚假宣传与违规操作。 - **封建采邑比喻**：配额如同国王封赏的地契，中间人凭借个人关系获取后向机构资金倒手换取现金。 - **极端掠夺性收费**：零 GP 本金投入、高达 10% 的前端预付费用、附加 Carry 且无到期期限。 - **业务本质的异化**：它既不是基本面投资，也不是标准经纪交易，而是一场依赖绝对内幕圈子特权的套利游戏。 --- ### `01:02:10` 个人生产力：为什么怪异对话远胜于 AI Chatbot 面对信息过载与各类技术工具，如何界定与实践真正的个人“生产力”？如果认清消费内容本质上只是娱乐而非真正的学习，那么追求盲目的信息吞吐就毫无意义。就个人体验而言，迄今为止最具生成性（generative）和启发性的活动唯有高质量的深度对话，而这直接取决于关系网络。阅读书籍的频次之所以下降，是因为身边围绕着一群阅书无数的聪明朋友。 更独特的一点在于对“怪异甚至令人不悦的人”（distasteful and weird people）拥有极高的包容度。许多人索要媒体摄入清单时总会感到失望，因为他们无法理解与非主流边缘人群建立深交的价值。高价值对话的核心在于“不可预测性”：如果与某人结识已久，却依然猜不透对方下一句会说什么，这种极高方差（high variance）的交流才最具智慧冲击。 与此相对，YouTube 凭借海量隐秘而小众的冷门资源，依然堪称“当代的亚历山大图书馆”，但它更多是知识沉淀而非生产性力量。而放眼 2026 年初，风头正盛的 AI Chatbot 极易让人产生一种虚假的充实感——在人机对话框前酣畅淋漓地交互两小时，自我感觉产出极高，但事后复盘真实行动与结果，往往会发现其实质生成性远没有想象中那么大。 - **对话为王**：最高效的思考产出来源于与真人碰撞，而非单向阅读或信息消费。 - **怪人偏好与高方差**：偏爱那些相处已久却依然无法预判其言论的朋友，视认知怪异为宝贵的信息源。 - **AI 交互的错觉**：长时间沉迷 Chatbot 会制造高产出的虚妄幻觉，实际转化的有效行动极为有限。 --- ### `01:04:50` 投资的极简与复杂：在两极之间寻找超额收益 在投资思想的构建中，人们往往陷入“为了复杂而复杂”的心理陷阱，许多投资人本质上是在玩一场“显得自己格外聪明”（feel clever / look smart）的游戏，而非纯粹的“赚钱游戏”。但投资界最残酷的真相在于：最精妙聪明的想法往往并不赚钱。投资策略往往应该走向两个极端之一：要么选择做复杂到没有任何人愿意去碰的事情，要么走向极致的纯粹与简单。 复杂的典型代表是专注于破产重组（bankruptcies）的投资者。这种业务肮脏、繁重、高度复杂且伴随着巨大的个人与诉讼风险，其高额回报是对承受这种“令人不适的复杂性”的合理补偿。而走向极简的代表，则是“只在跌破 200 周移动平均线时买入超级龙头股”，或者直接坚定做多埃隆·马斯克（Long Elon Musk）以及做多比特币（Long Bitcoin）。极简投资的真正天赋不在于分析模型有多花哨，而在于如何把这些看似朴素甚至浅显的逻辑，包装成能让机构 LP 觉得“足够专业且差异化”的话术。 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 投资认知的两极分化策略 accDescr: 展示追求聪明的陷阱，以及走向极度复杂与极致简单的两种有效投资路径 subgraph Trap["无效中庸地带"] Clever["追求精巧复杂<br/>（'显得聪明'的游戏）<br/>回报率平庸且内耗"] end subgraph ValidExtremes["有效两极策略"] Complex["极度复杂（脏活累活）<br/>• 破产清算 / 法律重组<br/>• 高风险、高门槛、无人愿做<br/>• 赚取复杂性与艰辛溢价"] Simple["极致简单（宏大共识）<br/>• 做多 Elon Musk / Bitcoin<br/>• 200周均线买入大公司<br/>• 核心考验包装与坚定持有"] end Trap -.->|"应该摆脱"| ValidExtremes ``` 传奇投资者理查德·雷恩沃特（Richard Rainwater）在项目筛选上的方法堪称穿透迷雾的典范：投资经理进入他的办公室，只能拿一张黄色信笺纸（yellow legal pad），在一页纸内写清投资核心逻辑，并明确写下准备为此投入自己净资产（net worth）的百分之多少。雷恩沃特只凭借这单页陈述与个人身家投入比例，当场拍板是否投资。这种机制让习惯用 400 页 PPT 掩盖平庸想法、且自身只愿投 3% 身家的人无所遁形，用最简单粗暴的皮肤在局（skin in the game）穿透了所有包装伪饰。 - **聪明的陷阱**：投资者常为心理优越感而自缚于复杂模型，忽视了资本获利的本质。 - **破产投资的代价**：通过深耕无人愿碰的破产重组脏活（grimy work）来赚取复杂性的溢价。 - **雷恩沃特测试**：一页纸核心论点 + 个人真金白银身家占比，瞬间击碎冗长推介的虚假繁荣。 --- ### `01:07:15` 招聘作为杠杆：用争议性 JD 筛选离群人才 在这个离群顶尖人才（outlier talent）回报呈指数级放大的时代，超凡的招聘能力成为了不可或缺的底层杠杆。招聘包含两个阶段：首先吸引极具差异化的候选人池，其次从中高效甄选。绝大多数公司的职位描述（Job Description, JD）彻底沦为无人阅读、形式主义的公文敷衍；但一份合格的 JD 本质上应该是一份公开发布在社交媒体上的硬核销售文案（sales pitch），必须具备作为独立优质帖子的自传播力。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 争议性招聘文案的自选择漏斗 accDescr: 展示通过故意设置模糊争议语句自动筛选离群人才的过程 JD["JD 核心主张：<br/>'顶尖前十大学中的意识形态少数派'"] JD --> Response1["自我怀疑者：<br/>纠结学校到底算不算前十<br/>👉 自动放弃不申请"] JD --> Response2["极度自信者：<br/>学校一般但理直气壮声称就是前十<br/>👉 展现强烈进取心与自信"] JD --> Response3["挑衅挑战者：<br/>直接回怼'这是狗屁标准，你很蠢，但你必须招我'<br/>👉 展现打破规则的非凡气魄"] Response1 --> Out["淘汰：缺乏胆识"] Response2 --> CandidatePool["入选：渴望的高方差人才池"] Response3 --> CandidatePool ``` 文案中最强大的杠杆在于“主动资格淘汰”（disqualifying who you don't want），通过高度对立和具有挑衅性的表述引发强烈共鸣。例如在招聘要求中加入一条极具争议且完全开放式解读的条件：“你必须是全美前十顶尖大学中的意识形态少数派（ideological minority at a top 10 school）”。这种模糊语句本身就是一场精妙的面试测试： 1. **测试自信与胆识**：对于哪些学校属于 Top 10，有人因为不确定自己的大学是否达标而退缩自限（正好过滤掉缺乏自信者）；而有人明明身处三流大学，却能理直气壮地宣称自己就是 Top 10，这种特立独行令人眼前一亮。 2. **测试思维的离群度**：“意识形态少数派”并不局限于狭隘的政治派系，它逼迫申请者去反思并阐述自己在大学主流环境中是如何做到特立独行、承担边缘立场的。 3. **激发逆向反叛者**：甚至有人直接公开回击“这完全是狗屁标准，我根本没上过前十大学，你也是个蠢货，但你绝对应该招我”。这种敢于直面权威的特质正是顶尖团队梦寐以求的离群性格。 通过将面试的前置筛选机制直接植入招聘文案本身，不仅能大幅削减冗长的面试甄别成本，更能在源头上精准吸聚那些真正具有高容错率与强悍个性的顶尖异类。 --- ### `01:11:00` 巨变背后的隐秘智识与特质错价 驱动当今这轮空前科技变革浪潮的，往往并非浅层的技术演进，而是其背后领军人物与核心机构所信奉的深层文化信念与隐秘智识传统。主流叙事往往忽略了这股力量的源头。面对这种推动人类历史最大技术转折的底层驱动力，真正敏锐的切入点在于审视市场对“人、事物与地点的品质和属性”（qualities and attributes）所产生的长期错误定价（mispricing）。当某些关键特质在主流文化中被系统性低估或误读时，正是孕育巨大范式转移与不对称认知优势的土壤所在。 ### `01:10:00` 硅谷隐秘的哲学传统与准宗教底色 人们通常很容易给身高、智商（IQ）或光鲜的简历明码标价，并对其进行极其高效的市场定价；然而，对于驱动硅谷演进的核心力量——那些潜藏在水面之下的哲学家、思想流派和模因思想（mimetic ideas），外界却长期存在着严重的低估。硅谷的技术爆发绝非凭空产生，其底层沉淀着一套非常真实的哲学架构，某种混合了“新佛教功利主义”（neo-Buddhist utilitarianism）的奇异思想谱系深刻塑造了当下的技术走向。 这类思想在硅谷地下暗流涌动，即便公众未曾察觉其名，也早已深度渗透到了科技领袖的言行举止与决策中： - **思想领袖与现实事件的绑定**：哲学家威廉·麦卡斯基尔（Will MacAskill）与有效利他主义（Effective Altruism）深入介入了山姆·班克曼-弗里德（SBF）与 FTX 的崛起； - **潜伏的激进思想家**：尼克·兰德（Nick Land）的加速主义，以及柯蒂斯·雅文（Curtis Yarvin，即 Mencius Moldbug）的新反动主义。多年来，许多硅谷巨头口中吐露出的世界观，实际上几乎一字不差地复刻了雅文的思想，只是从不公开提及他的名字； - **边缘知性社群的渗透**：诸如“杠杆研究”（Leverage Research）等带有神秘色彩的理性主义思想团体和知识分子群体，深刻充当了创业者与资本家的精神指引。 世俗化的人群往往会严重低估“宗教信仰”作为人类行动灯塔的巨大能量。科技精英创造的模型与产品充满了极度功利主义的倾向，其内核杂糅了犹太教的道德审判、佛教的心性修行与超脱，以及演变为有效利他主义的极端功利主义逻辑。这种文化与哲学震中塑造了硅谷“为什么制造这些技术”以及“产品内嵌何种世界观”的底层逻辑，甚至让算法与 AI 模型天然带有了这套哲学的遗传基因。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 硅谷隐秘思想体系流向 accDescr: 展示从底层哲学思想如何渗透到科技巨头并最终具象化为技术产品的路径 subgraph Philosophies["底层隐秘哲学与模因"] A["新佛教与犹太教道德"] B["极端功利主义 / EA"] C["加速主义与新反动思想<br/>(Nick Land / Curtis Yarvin)"] end subgraph Culture["地下社群与知识阶层"] D["理性主义圈子 / Leverage Research"] E["科技精英的准宗教信仰体系"] end subgraph Outcome["产品与现实投影"] F["科技领袖的公开叙事与决策"] G["自带功利主义世界观的模型与技术系统"] end A --> D B --> D C --> E D --> E E --> F F --> G ``` --- ### `01:12:15` 华尔街的享乐主义 vs 硅谷的“自以为义” 将硅谷的精神底色与 20 世纪 80 年代的华尔街进行对比，可以清晰揭示出科技行业独特的道德心理学。80 年代的传统华尔街是虚荣、享乐主义甚至接近异教徒式的崇拜——信奉“强壮与美貌至高无上”，且对自身的贪婪与虚无主义坦然承认，大家心知肚明一切只为赚钱。而在传统金融文化中，赚取暴利之后存在一种道德焦虑，迫使人们必须将金钱“净化”并转化为被社会认可的有价值之物：赞助艺术、资助建筑、投入传统慈善事业，或者深耕改善自己生活的社区与文化圈。 硅谷的行事逻辑却走向了完全相反的极端——它处于一种“极度自以为义”（totally self-righteous）的状态： - **消解贪婪的原罪**：硅谷从不承认自己的行为是由赤裸裸的原罪、野心或贪婪驱动的。其叙事始终建立在一种名义上的利他主义假说之上：“我们正在打造全世界都在使用的产品，这是一场纯粹的正和博弈。” - **商业即最高慈善**：硅谷从不需要通过举办新书派对、赞助高雅艺术或附庸风雅来洗白或论证自身财富的合法性。在科技领袖的逻辑里，“创办并做大一家科技公司本身就是终极的慈善”，这导致他们完全丧失了对自身商业行为阴暗面（shadow side）的内省与警惕，演变为一种近乎病态的道德优越感。 - **技术狂热的内在疯狂**：外界误以为科技圈只是无趣的码农代码世界，但实际上，“所有的疯狂、性、药物与摇滚乐都在这里存在，只不过是以它独有的极客与偏执谱系（nerdy autistic way）呈现出来”。 当传统宗教衰落后，这种填补精神空虚的准宗教信仰与亚文化，正是驱动硅谷改变世界、同时又引发巨大社会争议的最深层引擎。全期节目在对这种文化暗流的意犹未尽中收尾，主持人与嘉宾感慨这一庞大议题即便再聊三个小时也难以穷尽。 ## Notable quotes > `10:00` Posting is the last great meritocracy. — Jeremy Giffon > `25:00` Every room has a boss. — Jeremy Giffon > `32:13` The end state is just posting. — Jeremy Giffon > `35:00` 凡是能够被自动化的东西，就理应被自动化。 — Jeremy Giffon > `38:53` 我们每个人都有一种道德责任，去好好善待与照料自己的天赋（steward our gifts）。 — Jeremy Giffon > `53:26` 对于职业基金经理来说，战胜市场极其困难；但对于纯粹的业余个人投资者来说，超越平均水平其实并没有想象中那么难。 — Jeremy Giffon > `01:00:40` 纯粹基于人际关系构建的纯合成资产（purely relational, wholly synthetic thing）。 — Jeremy Giffon > `01:04:50` 最精妙聪明的想法往往并不赚钱。投资策略往往应该走向两个极端之一：要么选择做复杂到没有任何人愿意去碰的事情，要么走向极致的纯粹与简单。 — Jeremy Giffon > `01:12:15` 创办并做大一家科技公司本身就是终极的慈善。 — Jeremy Giffon ## Mentioned Jeremy Giffon, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Ramp, Rogo, WorkOS, X (Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, Ben Sasse, Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, Larry Ellison, Oracle, Tyler Cowen, Grant Cardone, Elon Musk, Jeffrey Epstein, Jesse, KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, Jack Bogle, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, SpaceX, Waymo, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Richard Rainwater, Will MacAskill, Effective Altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), FTX, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), Leverage Research ## Video description My guest today is Jeremy Giffon.  Jeremy has been on the show before as one of our most popular guests, and this conversation is every bit as enjoyable as the first. Over the last 18 months, Jeremy has had hundreds of conversations with founders and with the capital behind their companies. I don't know many investors with such a high rep count in the most interesting corners of private markets, so I asked him what he has learned. We talk about what those lessons mean for founders and investors, why everyone has become subservient to the poster class, the hidden intellectual history behind Silicon Valley and much more. Please enjoy my conversation with my friend, Jeremy Giffon. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.  ----- Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. 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Timestamps: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:02:02) Jeremy Giffon (00:02:34) Lessons from 18 Months of Founder Conversations (00:07:01) The Billion-Dollar PDF (00:08:13) The Unifeed & Rise of the Timeline (00:17:02) Power Law & Breakout Content (00:18:48) AI Algorithms Driving Content (00:20:38) Timeline-Native White House (00:21:09) Traits of Great Posters (00:25:27) Peak Guy & the Billionaire Priest Class (00:32:13) Billionaires Now Defer to Posters (00:34:52) Freedom vs. Relevance (00:38:53) AI & White-Collar Job Displacement (00:40:53) Stewarding Your Gifts as Moral Duty (00:43:18) Next Wave of Finance: Equity-First Firms (00:53:26) East Coast vs. West Coast Finance (00:55:34) Beating the Market Is Not That Hard (01:00:40) SPV Feudalism & Allocation (01:02:10) Egregious SPV Fee Structures (01:04:50) Simplicity vs. Complexity in Investing (01:07:15) Hiring: Attracting Differentiated Talent (01:11:00) Silicon Valley's Hidden Intellectual Traditions [Source](https://traffic.megaphone.fm/CLS7913917793.mp3)

[10:00] Jeremy Giffon: Posting is the last great meritocracy. [25:00] Jeremy Giffon: Every room has a boss. [32:13] Jeremy Giffon: The end state is just posting. [35:00] Jeremy Giffon: 凡是能够被自动化的东西，就理应被自动化。 [38:53] Jeremy Giffon: 我们每个人都有一种道德责任，去好好善待与照料自己的天赋（steward our gifts）。 [53:26] Jeremy Giffon: 对于职业基金经理来说，战胜市场极其困难；但对于纯粹的业余个人投资者来说，超越平均水平其实并没有想象中那么难。 [60:40] Jeremy Giffon: 纯粹基于人际关系构建的纯合成资产（purely relational, wholly synthetic thing）。 [64:50] Jeremy Giffon: 最精妙聪明的想法往往并不赚钱。投资策略往往应该走向两个极端之一：要么选择做复杂到没有任何人愿意去碰的事情，要么走向极致的纯粹与简单。 [72:15] Jeremy Giffon: 创办并做大一家科技公司本身就是终极的慈善。

[4:00] Jeremy Giffon: If you're extractive to the downside, everyone sort of boos you. But if you're extractive to the upside... because one is like an optimistic extractive, everyone loves that one. [7:01] Jeremy Giffon: The billion-dollar PDF thing is this idea that you can form billions of dollars of capital one way or another around simply setting a new idea... Capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. [8:13] Jeremy Giffon: Posting is the last great meritocracy... You can literally be like a new account and just write a good post, and then the algorithm selects you and it'll display you in front of 500 million people. [38:00] Jeremy Giffon: The notion to me that I might be in the last years of my life where I ever have to sit down in front of a computer and do things with it is tremendously liberating.

[0:00] Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better, saving businesses 5% annually on average so you can stay focused on growth. Ramp customers grew revenue 3.2 times faster than the average American business. Visa, Vercel, Cursor, Stripe, Notion, 11Lab, Shopify, and 70,000 other businesses all run on Ramp. Mine does too, and so should yours. Learn more at ramp.com slash invest. Felix by Rogo is a personal finance agent that turns a single prompt into finished client-ready work using your firm's own templates, context, and standards. Send Felix an email like, take these comments and turn them for me, or update my tracker with the context of these emails, or run the ability to pay math on this buyer, and Felix sends back finished PowerPoint decks, Excel models, and sourced research. Felix works the way your team already does, delivering work quickly and accurately around the clock. Learn more at rogo.ai slash Felix. The best AI and software companies from OpenAI to Cursor to Perplexity use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit WorkOS.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Hello and welcome everyone I Patrick O and this is Invest Like the Best This show is an open exploration of markets ideas stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum, All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUM.VC. My guest today is Jeremy Giffen. Jeremy has been on the show before as one of our most popular guests, and this conversation is every bit as enjoyable as the first. Over the last 18 months, Jeremy has had hundreds of conversations with founders and the capital behind those companies. I don't know many investors with such a high rep count in the most interesting corners of private markets, so I asked him about everything that he has learned. We talk about what those lessons mean for founders and investors, why everyone has become subservient to the poster class the hidden intellectual history behind Silicon Valley and much more Please enjoy my conversation with my friend Jeremy Giffen So we going to have the chance to talk about as we do on a daily basis you and I 57 different ideas. But I'm always interested to begin with you a couple questions about investing. I sit near you, we share an office, so I get to hear a lot of these stories every day. I think it would be really fun for you to turn your observations from all those God knows how many hundreds of conversations with founders of these companies and with the capital that has backed them in the past to sort of share what you've learned from that frontier over the last 18 months, framed as advice for founders and advice for capital. I just don't know very many investors that are looking at situations like you are with such a high rep count. So what have you learned in the first 18 months of doing this. You really realize in, let's say, long-term private markets that the great filter for funds is their storytelling ability fundamentally because their product, which is realized cash returns, take a decade. The thing that you're selling in the interim, whether it through a quarterly update or your event or just your one conversations with your LPs is really just narrative A particular situation that very interesting that we seen a lot of is companies where twofold One is that the business is kind of old but it has started to do well recently That's an interesting scenario because it's one of these instances where merely because the company, the story, again, the narrative of the company is that it's seven years old. Let's say the company has really started to inflect. Maybe it's because of AI or maybe it's because of something else, but they're six or seven years into their life. It's very difficult for those companies to get funding because the story is, well, okay, fine, you grew 200% last year. In absolute terms, you're only at 8 million of revenue and you're seven years in. Whereas I think literally if you just change the name and told a different story and just sort of arbitrarily started the clock two years ago, that company would actually be like really hot. That's an interesting situation. The fix, I think, is just to be more flexible on narrative and story. A derivative of that problem is just the amount of businesses where they're in a spot where it's kind of working, things are starting to go well, but they're faced with three choices, which is basically they're not going to raise a significant upround. Really, they're staring down a bridge round, strategic like M&A, acquihire, or cutting to profitability. And those are just really hard situations. If you're in that situation, I think that's where you really want to get creative with [5:00] cap table. If you have some cash, buy back your investors, convert everyone to common, really start to spend more time on the cap table because otherwise I've been shocked at sort of how hostile insider bridge rounds really are. I think this is like an under-discussed part of venture. How so? Just they have 3X liquidation preferences or warrants or ratchets or other things. If you're extractive to the downside, everyone sort of boos you. But if you're extractive to the upside, where you say, I want the right to invest at the same price in two years from now, They're both like similarly extractive, but because one is like an optimistic extractive, everyone loves that one. So what advice would you give to founders in thinking about their cap table from the start? We're obviously in a highly volatile, highly uncertain period right now. No one knows if it's the death of software. I think it's certainly the most unprecedented and uncertain time since the transition to the Internet. that what you want in that time is a lot of optionality and the ability to be nimble and the ability to really be able to do what is right for the business and not be constrained by the cap table. Maybe your business needs to become a services business. Maybe you need to acquire other companies. Maybe you need to run profitably for a while. Maybe you need to change your whole business model If per seat pricing goes away you need to pivot to usage In volatile times it always useful to have optionality I guess the general piece of advice is unless you're certain that you want to just try this one thing and it's going to be huge or zero, you should think about optionality, which usually means raising less, raising from investors with a wider mandate, not getting stuck in all these weird problems where you need to continue to raise more money, and if you don't, it's bad for employees, It's bad for recruiting. People's options get underwater. They start to leave. All those things sort of reduce optionality. It's funny because in general, I think commitment is a much better strategy than optionality. But I think in highly volatile times where it's hard to tell the future, you basically just want to control for being able to be super nimble, turn on a dime, do what you want, not be constrained by our capital set up in such a way that we can really only do this one thing, which is also true for investors. Going back to the investors and the construction of an effective narrative for building an investing firm before you've delivered the 10-year investment returns or whatever. You have this great idea called the billion-dollar PDF. Can you describe what you mean by that and what the interesting components of a billion-dollar PDF tend to be? This is sort of an idea that you and I came up with in a joking way that turned out to be true I think the more we thought about it which is every once in a while someone basically crystallizes a notion right at the right time in the right way that becomes the foundational viewpoint or opinion uncertain era And I think it just this idea of everyone a little bit uncertain. They don't know what's going on. And someone just needs to set the story and set the narrative. And it doesn't even have to be right. But there's just a sort of confidence of this is what's going on. This is happening. When those come together, they sort of just set a new narrative that everyone can kind of rest on for a period really until the next PDF comes along. And the billion dollar PDF thing is this idea that you can form billions of dollars of capital one way or another around simply setting a new idea. And then maybe you can think of capital as 10-year-olds playing soccer. They all sort of just follow the ball around. The capital just follows the billion dollar PDF around the field. It's probably a good excuse to talk about this joint notion of posting a billion dollar PDF is the ultimate form of that or something. And the furnace that is the timeline of predominantly X, that's where I get my timeline. There's other places as well. But it seems like these notions have taken over people's desires and attention Everyone wants to ultimately have a spot on that timeline It a strange phenomenon There like five or six subcomponents of the timeline that I want to ask you about But maybe to start just how you thinking about this strange modern phenomenon I think it downstream of technological change I think the technological change is really the unifeed. What people don't appreciate about X is that everyone gets served the same 500 tweets per day. There's hundreds of millions of daily active users. And the thing that people who don't post don't realize is just the poster to lurker ratio on these things is enormous. It's really hard to feel the impact unless you're actually getting onto the feed and seeing all the people that you didn't know were reading X all day, commenting on your thing. I'm always surprised. Like when I post a good tweet, whoever texts me about it, it could be someone I know about. I had no idea that they read Twitter all day, but everyone reads Twitter all day. So the uni feed I think is sort of the technological catalyst for this phenomenon. It is X by the way. It's interesting how X, it's sort of the Lindy social network. It probably is never going to reach the scale of the others, but it just fills this vital role. And it's interesting to me how it's, however long in, I'm probably almost 20 years now, and it's still more important than ever. Sort of the same source of truth almost for the whole world. And what that means is that everyone is reading the same thing. It's the global newspaper. In the same way that people would talk about the latest article in the journal 30 years ago, [10:00] Now it's the latest tweet or the latest essay on X. What that creates is that all the most important people in the world, at least when it comes to capital markets and politics and journalism, entrepreneurship, they're reading their daily paper every morning. These things really form opinion and they price securities and they dictate where capital flows and they certainly write policy. There's this idea that another great filter perhaps is that your institution will only survive if it's timeline native. And what that means is that it is both reactive to and reflexive to the timeline. Reactive meaning that it's constantly monitoring the timeline and reflexive in that its actions then affect the timeline, which it then sort of reads and reacts to. And you can think of the White House is obviously like this. Venture capital is like this. Public equities are like this. There's this idea of what is the story. And what's interesting, one of the things I get emails about the most is a comment I I made somewhere about how like posting is the last great meritocracy. I get emails about that because people are like, that really clicked in my head and I start posting and posting changes your life if you're good at it. That's still true today, maybe more true than ever. And it is sort of a meritocracy in a weird way Now there the algorithms and AI and all this stuff In some ways it a lot more meritocratic than it used to be Like everything it been a lottery In the old times you had to grind away and build this huge following And then by virtue of having a big following, you could post a really inane tweet and it would be very popular. But that doesn't happen anymore now. You can literally be like a new account and just write a good post. And then the algorithm selects you and it'll display you in front of 500 million people. You have the global newspaper that everyone reads, that everyone finds highly influential. There's also this meta thing where it's like the newspaper. If you could see all the influential people reacting to the articles in the newspaper and then by virtue of reacting to it, making the thing more important. And anyone can post to it. Gets dictated from the timeline how much venture rounds are done on the timeline, how much businesses are built on the timeline. increasingly everything will just become timeline native. TPBN is a great example of this. When we're recording this, every other day someone writes some sort of pornographic fanfic about AI and it moves the public markets dramatically. When there's uncertainty, people are just looking for what is the story? What is the most compelling story? And the way that it works on the timeline is it not this well book that comes out that everyone talks about for a year It what is the thing that sounds smart feels good It has to be entertaining Maybe that another change A good post has to be very entertaining because people are on the timeline to be entertained They can lie to themselves and say they're on it for other reasons, but it's just to be entertained. That's obviously what the algorithms are selecting for. There's this idea that the most entertaining, novel, somewhat interesting, somewhat correct thing is going to set the actions and the consensus for everyone on a day-to-day basis. And this translates into their actions. Vanta automates security and compliance for over 16,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, keeping them audit-ready around the clock. 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Firms are moving off legacy technology and onto Ridgeline because of how far ahead Ridgeline's AI features are compared to anything else in investment management software, which is why I believe that firms that come out ahead in the AI era will be the ones running on Ridgeline's unified platform. If you're serious about your firm's AI strategy, Ridgeline should be part of that conversation. You can request a demo at ridgeline.ai. Is this all just fuel in the fire for the notion of power law in general? One of the things I've noticed in our show is it used to be that the variance was quite low. The very best one did a bit better, but not a crazy amount better than the worst one in terms of performance. And that has completely changed. And now there seems to be this threshold we were just talking about this morning, that if you breach the containment, if you breach this threshold, it literally feels like you have taken over the world's brain and just shoved everyone's eyes at your threshold. [15:00] for a short period of time. The impact of those handful of things are so much bigger than all the rest of them combined. So what you're playing for is really to be just one of these breakout things. Is that the right way to think about the timeline? That actually is all that matters, is that you get one of those. So you should be living at the edge of the distribution as much as possible in what you're posting about, writing about. Everything is just downstream of technological change. So the reason podcasts followed a normal distribution was because the technology delivering it was an RSS feed. And now it's an algorithm and it's clips. And I mean, even the method, I'm sure some obscene amount of your viewers are watching or listening on YouTube, which is new. Even if you subscribe to a podcast on YouTube, they're not going to show you every single episode in chronological order. So I think this stuff is all just new, just downstream of technology. I don't think something has changed in the content or in the listeners. It's just how it's delivered. In that sense, maybe one world where the podcast world sort of legs behind the YouTube world is that the podcast world is still highly naive to serving content to the algorithm You know if you get deep into the Twitter group chats especially now that they posted the algorithm there are all these very specific things that you can do around replies and likes and length and all these numbers that the algorithm is selecting for streamers and people on youtube and stuff certainly understand that i think maybe the reason it feels a little bit random is because podcasts still like really aren't into the meat of understanding that we are recording this video for a llm to review and decide what it wants to show people and then people will decide if they like it or not. That first filter we don't really think about, but that is the case. Does that stress you out? Does that feel deeply dystopian? I hear a lot of lamentation over the death of books. People don't read anymore. And it's so interesting to me because I've read a lot of books. I like books. I've spent a good portion of my life reading books. I don't see the big crisis that everyone laments about with books. I mean, the attention span thing maybe is true. Like it's certainly way harder for me to read a book just on a pure focus. But I feel like the sum total of the interviews that I listen to and the things that I read and all this stuff are great. I don't think I don't have an appetite for books just because they're harder to read. I think I'm like feeling nourished from the other sources. If you think about porn it like more obviously bad because people don have sex and they watch porn and it fairly straightforward that sex is better than porn That seems like an obvious thing People will hold that up right next to books And to me the book thing feels a little bit like a swan song for a technology that there will still be a place for. It was the best way we had of delivering information. And now there's new ways and they're more compelling and more interesting. You have to cog out that, of course, I'm very sensitive to language and the terms that we use terminally online, brain rot. We recognize these are terms of death and rotting and destruction and very negative nihilistic terms. You do have to balance that with, we didn't pick neutral or positive terms for these activities. And I don't think anyone ever would self-conceive of reading a lot of books as being this very negative thing. The counter argument would be that we have this deep sense that it is bad. Maybe like everything, it's just less forgiving. If you're highly disciplined and motivated, the way that you can use new media is better than ever. But if you're not, then it's just going to be worse than ever. It's just going to be really tough. You mentioned the White House. Certainly, this is the first White House that feels completely timeline native and reactive. Yes, I think it's the first modern administration for better for worse. What else does modern mean in that context other than timeline native? It just highly reactive and reflexive to the timeline I think it hyper aware maybe in the same way that past administrations would be addicted to polling I think it looks more at the timeline than polling Polling is all about understanding the wants and desires of the media and the average person. But the timeline shifts back to a more Republican model, which is that you're caring about a few hundred thousand people who are influential. Ben Sasse, the former senator, has this great notion that Washington is now mostly people who want to be TikTok and YouTube stars is like mostly what congressmen and senators want to be. He condemns it, which is true from some very simple sense, which is you would hope that congressmen and senators primarily interested in governance, but they're not. On the other hand, I think maybe a shift of this that I'm only just putting together now is polling drives governance. Whereas if you're only pulling the timeline, you can sort of think about it as this is why the people who do well in politics now are just optimized for content. They're basically content creators because the polling is the timeline. And that's interesting, again, because who is on the timeline? The readers is probably more of an accurate sample of the media and people in the country. But the posters who are dictating what the timeline thinks of something is a really, really small group. If the original... [20:00] vision for who voted was white male landowners. Maybe the version of people who matter for policy now are the good posters. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, but it's certainly a very different group that I don't think correlates super tightly to any particular demographic trait necessarily. You're friends with many or most of the great posters. What makes a great poster? It's not that dissimilar to writing, being a little bit tortured, having a bit of a messed up personal life, just in general. Like comics or something? Yeah. And maybe posting is a little bit like a writer mixed with a comedian or something like that. Certainly has the comedic element of you need to sort of have a riff that resonates. And it's sort of this instant hit. It's phrased in an interesting way. There's sort of like a blend of like comedy, poetry and writing. You've used this funny phrase before that we're at peak guy. What does that mean? I think we are at peak guy. It's hard to say where to start this. there's a pagan understanding of God as being like in and around you everywhere. Everything is animated. Everything is controlled and dictated by the gods. And then in the Renaissance, you could say that God lives above the clouds, but there's like a guy up there that you can talk to And then when we discover what past the clouds we go OK well there no guy up there And then we discover space And so basically you have to just keep going well okay maybe he beyond space Maybe we don know that it a guy anymore that you could address and talk to, but it's this conceptual thing. God just sort of like moves farther and farther away and becomes more and more conceptual. But the idea is that ever since we've sort of become an atheist society, we've been looking for things to sort of look up to and worship. I think basically it's sort of trite now to say that like everyone has to worship or whatever. I think maybe like the more precise thing would be that there's always a role for a priest in society. And we've been looking for new priests. I think we tried scientists as priests. The scientific project has fallen apart a little bit. This is widely discussed. The idea that we look to physics as hopefully going to provide us meaning. It hasn't. Physics has largely stalled since the war. We've moved beyond science as a source of meaning, there's this billionaire class that we sort of look to as the new sources of meaning. On its surface, it doesn't make a lot of sense that we would spend so much time caring about what billionaires think about whatever physics or theology or health or topics unrelated to occurring a billion dollars The reason we do I think is this is our new priestly class which is we said OK the values that are important in our society are being successful at business And to be successful at business you generally have to be smart and hardworking These are the people that have ascended to the highest realm of piety in our value system And so we're going to listen to them. We're willing to, like, take scientific and medical advice from people who are either in the billionaire class or are adjacent to the billionaire class, which is the poster class, which is the new class, I think. the Pete Guy thing is this idea that there's basically been a lot of billionaire worship. Part of it is that they've gotten way less scarce. Billionaires have probably grown 100x in the last 20 years, probably more. We sort of look to them to provide us these answers, and it has not been satisfying. And so this notion that I want to catch every podcast with this billionaire, and I'm going to study his routines and habits and care about what he thinks about these things, has sort of come to its full saturation. Money, I think we've just seen is not as powerful as maybe it once was, or we think it is insofar as certainly our political landscape, we have not seen the donor class be nearly as successful as they maybe used to be, or we thought they were. If you're a billionaire you sort of quite limited on the things that you can do vis like an African warlord or a robber baron There these sort of like three forces of inflation driving down what it means to be a billionaire at all And then the evolution of power structures in society are also limiting. Andrew Carnegie could take up arms against his workers. But now if you post the wrong thing as a billionaire, you have to resign. There's a sense that this whole class has just become less important. And then I also think just the media and podcasts, it's just saturated. You get it. You understand this thing. But we don't want to take life advice. We don't want to hear about what's happening from the billionaire class anymore. And so that whole set just feels very saturated. It feels unlikely that there's a marginal billionaire that I'm going to learn something very interesting from on a podcast. And I don't think that was the case like six years ago. And so the logical question is, what is the next class as we sort of flail around looking for our next set of priests? I think it's the poster. I think you can see this because I think the billionaire class is a little bit deferential to the poster. one very clear way is the science class sort of inherited the priesthood after the actual priest. And then you can always look which class is subservient to the next to see who's next. The science class becomes subservient to the billionaire class. This is certainly the Epstein lesson, which is all the scientists are clamoring around the sort of money and glamour. Now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class. You can't see the science class [25:00] sort of see who society collectively chooses to be like, all right, this is the guy I want to listen to for two hours and base my life on. Subservient to the poster class evidenced how? Why do you say they're subservient to the posters? I was at this thing a while ago, and it was a bunch of billionaire investors, and they were all fighting over who could sit next to Tyler Cowen because he's the most interesting person there. Every room has a boss. Every room as a boss. Yeah, exactly. And I think there's very much something to that. It's sort of that simple. There's sort of this line of subservience. There's also this interesting point about it's just scarcity. Like always the billionaire inflation thing is the seat of their demise. That if there's so many billionaires, if Grant Cardone is a billionaire and so is Elon Musk or something, it just makes it so stupid. So we either need a new class at the top and it's not Deca or sent a billionaire. Who cares? We need to reclassify the top 100 or something, robber barons. It just seems like there's too many of them, so no one care anymore. It seems much easier to get a billion dollars than it does to gain the real estate in people's minds or on the timeline that the top couple of posters can do If I could just have it by decree it would be who is a liquid inflation adjusted billionaire I think that number probably hasn changed a whole lot I always find it so useful to take this retrospective historic frame Net worth is like this new idea If you read like Pride and Prejudice, they're talking about how wealthy all the men are. Mr. Darcy is discussed as getting 10,000 pounds a year from his estate. That's his wealth. It's his cash flow. There's not like a scene in Pride and Prejudice where they're like, does he have a lot of margin loan against his estate or whatever. And there's also not this idea of, well, OK, his estate's worth, whatever, $200,000, because he would never sell his estate. It's not viewed as his essence. So it's just like wholly conceptual points on a leaderboard, truly, because you can't spend it. I really think it's kind of crass to say, but I think billionaire is like a state of mind. Between like private markets and net worth as a concept and then inflation, Billionaire is now something you can just be dubbed. I think you'll come to see billionaire as sort of this political label that's only tangentially related. You see this on the timeline a lot, which is people get referred to as billionaire who are not rich at all, but they have these traits and associations. And so I think this term, it's sort of a millionaire. No one says that anymore. Yeah. And it used to carry the same weight as billionaire but now millionaires both irrelevant When you say someone a millionaire you sort of just saying they like a upper middle class well person with a house It doesn't matter if they have $5 million or $800,000. It's this looser class thing. As currency gets devalued, both in terms of the literal sense and also in the sort of what you can do with it sense, time is fixed. The new scarcity is just like a tension you can draw on the screen. If you think about the most interesting posters today, I'm not asking you to endorse them one way or the other, but just the people that you think are the most interesting, who comes to mind? The distinction to draw is the people that I want to get tweet notifications for because I actually think each one of their posts is really good. And that's like a vanishingly small number. And then there are good posters who are just people who have really made something of themselves because of their prolificness. The other sort of problem with posting is like it still does reward prolificness, which I am still sternly against. I always think Twitter should be dictated by followers divided by posts, followers per post. But that's not how it works. It just rewards prolificness. I think there's this idea that the most important media property won't be watched. The most important author isn't read. The most important philosopher is not understood The most important stock has no fundamentals in a world of fiat currency everything sort of becomes this weird fiat thing Certainly it true about philosophers authors. Does anyone really read the books these authors write? I don't think so. I think a small amount of tastemakers read the books and then other people look at books as sort of idols. And if they're blessed by the right people, then there's sort of this like mimetic celebration of the thing. And even podcasts. Clips do a lot better than the podcast episode. I pride myself. I can tell if a podcast or a blog essay or a book or something is good or not without having read it just by triangulating it. I know which one of your episodes do well without listening to them because I can sort of feel from the reception. To some extent, that is the thing. You can imagine a world where there's a few clips from a podcast, but no one ever listens to the podcast. I don't actually think that would diminish the value of the property. It's like everything is being processed and packaged for catching attention, but taking the least amount of that person's time. I heard this interesting story about a publication that has X millions of followers or whatever readers, however they describe it. And the person behind it told me like something like 95% of the readers are people that scroll through like the quote highlights on Instagram or something and whatever, there's still a reader. To me, it's all quite [30:00] depressing that the world of posters and content has reoriented around this monolithic timeline, and they're all just feeding it what it wants. But that's the game you sort of have to play. And I'm curious, I know you went six months or something completely off of it, like you just disappeared. What was that like? And is that a path that you would encourage people to give a try? This is my way of asking the freedom versus relevancy question. I think my takeaway from that would simply be that one should not fool themselves that they are looking for anything other than entertainment in all the media that they consume. It is produced to be entertaining. It's selected to be entertaining. It's edited to be entertaining. The job to be done of what is on the screen is to entertain you. I think that is the big lesson. I'm not going to tell people how much entertainment they should have in their life, but that is what it is fundamentally. Similarly, Rolex or Nike can convince you that their thing is an investment or an asset versus a liability. Then you'll spend way more money on it. Podcasts and posts and essays can convince you that what you're reading is useful for you and productive and anything other than watching TV all day Whether I want to spend an hour a day on the timeline or eight hours a day on the timeline it just about like how much do I want to be entertained You don really miss anything If you not like a complete hermit you hear about what's important. Probably the most like enlightened way to consume this media is to not read it yourself. Get the filtered takes from people around you at dinners and lunches and stuff. And you just let them, first of all, expose themselves to the radiation and then come back and tell you what's interesting or not on there. Our friend Jesse thinks about it this way. He refuses any algorithm in his life, including news, which is just an algorithm. It's like, how do you know what's going on? He said, well, people tell you. Yeah, that would be my takeaway. The freedom versus impact question. Do you believe that tradeoff's real? Yeah, I think it's real. One of the questions I'm interested in is classes of guys, archetypes, genres, whatever. There seems to have been this type of person that's largely gone extinct. Unfortunately, I think this is probably all just explained away by technology, which is sort of a boring but maybe accurate explanation. The Theodore Roosevelt's or the Andrew Carnegie's of the world who are able to spend a lot of their time in leisure, a lot of time away from their business Carnegie for example is arguably still the richest person or very close to the richest person that ever lived That probably a technological thing But I fascinated by this idea of is that necessarily true Does the idea that you have to be working 22 hours a day to get these sort of world-changing outcomes, is that necessarily true? I think Larry Ellison is like the contemporary figure who sort of bucks this trend and he claims to have started Oracle very much with the intention of being able to disappear for two weeks to say and still by all accounts sort of like drops in and drops out. And can you still be a player and not be jacked in 24-7? I don't know the answer. It's unfathomable that the president of the United States could be off the grid for a month, probably impossible because of technology. But is that true in business? Is a lot of hard work performative? Maybe. In the case of Carnegie, it's interesting because he was self-conscious his whole life about joining this sort of society, maybe at the posters of his day. He knew that for him, money wasn't going to be enough and he wanted to be accepted into society and be well-read and be a man of letters and do writing and stuff. And in that sense, there's nothing new under the sun. I firmly believe this to be true, that the end state is just posting. The amount of billionaires and founders who turn to Twitter after they accrue their wealth or start a podcast or start a business Yeah start a YouTube channel It sort of is the end state And I think one way that you could look at that is just that once you accrue wealth you want to accrue fame The other way of looking at it would be that wealth is less valuable and you actually realize that the scarce asset is attention and influence. And so you're almost hedging against the sort of rapidly devaluing nature of your money and trying to switch to what is actually scarce. I find it very interesting that call it the seven or eight people that you and I know that we're most interested in are not posters. There's sort of some interesting opposite. They've resisted the temptation. That makes me wonder if it's almost like a trap. But it's such an interesting concept that hard work is performative is the phrase you used. It actually makes me wonder that hard work being performative thing, how you're thinking about this AI and job displacement question, which you and I've talked a bunch about. I'm super personally interested in. It seems to be the issue around which people are rallying for the anti-AI fears is that it's going to destroy jobs in a way that prior technology changes didn't because it's so ubiquitous, it's intelligence, and it's moving so fast that even if you compare it to prior tech changes, which all displaced jobs or changed jobs or whatever, it happened more slowly. And that's why this one's so scary. It gets at questions about what is worth it. [35:00] really in the modern sense, especially white collar work. I'm curious how you're thinking about like AI and job displacement. The short to medium term prognosis is hard to speculate on and could very well be bad. A friend of mine, he has kids in college and he has a 10 year old and he's very worried about the kids in college, but not the 10 year old. And I think that is directionally correct. Maybe from the 10 year old's perspective, look, I think it's great. I think first of all, anything that can be automated should be automated. I think it's really hard to argue against that when you really, really think about it. The notion to me that I might be in the last years of my life where I ever have to sit down in front of a computer and do things with it is tremendously liberating. On the jobs thing, I don't really understand this idea of we're at peak jobs or we're going to run out of jobs. To me, it's very obvious that every white collar job is totally fake and made up in the sense that These are not contingent for shelter and food and medicine and other necessities. I'm not talking about those. But most jobs do not touch those. Or if they do they touch it in a very very derivative way What is your job as an allocator Well because capital is inherently inflationary you can just leave it alone This is one of the great maybe evils of money is that once you get it, you can't just leave it alone because then it goes away. So you have to do something with it. And this creates this entire whole thing. My job is when you have money and you don't want it to go away, you have to give it to someone. You give it to a bunch of people. I take it and I put it into things that are productive. And then hopefully you don't lose your money, you get more money. Is this useful? Is this good? Yeah, sure. It's not real and it's like fun and useful, but not in a direct way. To me, there's like unlimited amounts of jobs that you can create in those sorts of scenarios. We're going to have unlimited wants and desires. And our economy is solely driven by our unquenchable desire to consume things. So we're going to come up with new things to consume. And now, again, in the short term and medium term, that might be volatile and there might be a lot of job loss and that's not good. then there could be a lot of despair. In the long run, we're just gonna invent new things to do. We've already solved all of our problems. The worry about, oh, we're not gonna have more jobs. It just doesn't really resonate. We just make up stuff for us to do, and that's sort of the whole point of it. And that good It better than being idle Maybe more people should be idle There all sorts of ways that this shows through the cracks The work from home thing I think is like a strong indication of most people don have 40 hours of work to be done. They maybe have 40 hours of meetings to sit in or they have 40 hours that they have to be on standby. Work from home, I think, wouldn't be that important. Let's imagine a version where you work on a factory line and you can set up the microcosm of the factory in your backyard. But you still got to be on the line 10 hours a day. Yeah, I guess work from home. Maybe you can have lunch at home. You don't have a commute anymore. But it's not like this huge improvement. The reason people are so attached to work from home is because they actually have like two or three hours of work to do per day. And there's a lot of your time at the office where you're just sort of like. I'm like that. Yeah. And so work from home Fridays is a soft launch of the four day work week. And I think this is all fine. The fact that we can continue paying people to work from home and work four days a week is just a sign that we need less labor time out of people than we used to. And we're still able to be just as productive. If in some sense, some of these jobs maybe are made up and actually people will be happier not ushering bits from one place to another on a screen or something. I curious how you think about searching for one vocation You texted me one time something that stuck in my head which is that we all have some sort of moral duty to steward our gifts If you agree that that's true, curious for you to expound on that. But that then reframes success and failure in a cool way that maybe cuts through this priestly class thing of like looking to others to tell us what to do versus looking internally. Can you expand on that? I think there's something even just aesthetically bad about waste. One of the worst things that you can waste is your gifts, your skills, attributes, things that you're uniquely good at, things that you can do for others that you might be able to do that others can't. For me, one of the great challenges has been trying to understand how to best, first of all, figure out what they are, which is easier said than done, and then figure out how you can use them. There's kind of two modes, I guess. One is that you use them in a very pure and unadulterated way, and you don't try to integrate your work with how you use your gifts. And this would be the person who has a day job in order to support their craft or something. And then the other, perhaps more ambitious version is... [40:00] is trying to integrate commerce and their work with their gifts. This gets into the like, should you pursue your passion thing? And it's really difficult. But you said something to me, which is the thing that you are spending most of your time on really ought to spark and utilize your sort of genius and gift. And if you're not doing that, it's obviously not the thing that you should be spending most of your time on. There's proxies for this. people who are having a lot of fun at their job or like it's a very strong indicator that you've combined the two well. What do you think the future of finance looks like? The 80s and the last era was built by those people from KKR and leveraged buyouts, whereas those firms are obviously really important and really big, but they were started a long time ago. And in many cases, they're still run by people that were the founder or close to the founder getting up there in age. What do you think the next wave of finance look like? The founder is incredibly important. The founding act is incredibly important in any business or country or organization, really. I do think that it's notable that the current paradigm in which we live, the largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leveraged buyout which first of all is a debt idea It financial engineering It extractive insofar as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. And I'm not trying to disparage leveraged buyouts. I don't think they're as evil as people say, but the core idea behind it is using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money in a way that the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to the poor trade. And those are what the founders and the founding acts of these large firms today are. Now that the Apollos and Blackstones and KKRs of the world, I think in a lot of cases, the leveraged buyout is a very small part of what they do today. But I do think it's still in the core culture. One thing that we've pondered about before is what does the next 20 or 30 years look like when the largest financial firms in the world, their founding action was seed investing. It's equity driven. It's power law. It's hugely optimistic. It's largely qualitative. What would a Blackstone and Apollo look like if that was the core seed at the start of the inception of the firm? It's notable in the same way that equity financing is a far newer idea than debt financing And equity financing is obviously a far more optimistic idea It uncapped to the upside And so there all these sort of philosophical ideas around equity versus debt. And debt is far more ancient. And debt obviously has a very controversial past about whether it's morally good at all. And there's this idea of like, what if the crux of finance is with these kind of wildly optimistic people versus people who might be more conservative, of more concerned about the downside, more concerned about maybe one way of looking at it as a shift from the quantitative to qualitative. What other differences are interesting to you between East Coast and West Coast finance? The people doing it, the optimism versus not pessimism, but realism or dollar orientation. You straddle these two in an interesting way. I don't think one's better than the other. There's truth to the caricature, which is East Coast is extractive, pessimistic, downside oriented. West Coast is naive, unsophisticated. That is true to some obvious extent. And I think they're merging now. It's no coincidence that the West Coast is definitely eating the East Coast. Venture capital has created the biggest businesses in the world and private equity has not And where private equity has it largely been through acquisition and financial engineering And so it sort of inarguable that venture capital is this sort of much better force for the world It a tiny little asset class that has produced all the most important things in the world. It's also this civilizational technology, which is you're willing to give young people millions of dollars to try a very speculative idea with basically no retribution or downside if it doesn't work. So it's clearly this amazing force. I think there's been a very interesting like flip in compensation between East and West. And so when I was growing up, my understanding was that Wall Street is where you would get paid huge amounts of cash on a yearly basis. You would have no enduring equity value, but you would get paid a lot of liquid cash. And the West Coast was this idea where you would be rich on paper, you would have equity that would maybe be this enormous payoff in some distant future. And I would argue that those have started to flip now, whereas like Wall Street, because all these businesses have gone public, you know, on Wall Street, you're comped on RSUs and you're thinking like a firm and you're less worried about the carry in any one fund and you're more worried about the stock price and performance of the firm as a whole. And interestingly, in Silicon Valley, it's almost moved towards a annual cash basis. But given how these markets, you know, companies staying private creates these sort of mature secondary markets that sort of de facto yearly tender is becoming almost a parallel [45:00] liquid marketplace, you're actually paid huge amounts of cash in Silicon Valley. And I think we've seen that with the AI stuff and even, you know, venture capital firms getting acquired and GPs leaving their firms and all that sort of stuff where it actually is becoming more liquid, more mercenary. I'm always interested in these structural shifts and how that starts to change things where the Valley is a place where you're liquid and you're getting cash out yearly and you're jumping from firm to firm. And Wall Street is a place where you have a bunch of RSUs and you're sort of thinking more about the long term and the enterprise value of the firm. If you addled this up, where are you looking for opportunity? You have such an interesting mandate because you could do a venture style growth equity deal. You could do a special situations private equity style deal. You've historically across your career invested in dozens of software companies. You've, I think so far wisely avoided companies that could get railroaded by cloud code. But nonetheless, I think you're still curious about where there might be value in software. Just as a pure investor, how are you approaching this very strange high-vol, high-uncertainty landscape? We very fortunate to have such a wide mandate in sort of what we can do and look at Maybe the only consensus view is the niche sort of apocalyptic vision at some of the core zealots at the labs But outside of that I think it really sort of a jump ball Markets lack a lot of nuance. SaaS is a business model of this idea that you pay usually per person, per month or per year for access to a tool that helps you use your computer. I think in that sense, SaaS is in a lot of trouble. but I don't think for a lot of these businesses that are being really sold off today out of fear that that is actually what is important to the business at all. It is actually interesting to me. I wrote a post recently about the idea that a public manager being long, the MAG7 is, without taking a specific view on the trade, probably like good capital allocation because sometimes you just got to do the really obvious thing and just follow consensus because consensus is usually right. One of the pushbacks that I got to that as well these things, you know, they're the biggest companies in the world, they're priced to perfection. I think it's underrated the fact that the 52 week variance on these things is like nearly 100% for the biggest companies in the world. And so they're not priced well at all. And the market lacks extreme nuance. I think it goes back to what we were talking about, which is probably someone smarter than me could draw out a much clearer picture but there something to do with passive flows and the marginal price of security And what informing the marginal price of securities is the posts in the group chats that the random people are writing that the algorithms chosen. In this way, the algorithm, the AI, frankly, my understanding is that's what's driving most of the algorithms now on Twitter and YouTube is pricing the market in some very real sense because it's choosing the narrative that it wants to show to people. And then those people are pricing off that. It's another lesson, which is markets are not efficient. There's no nuance. That would be the big thing that we're seeing today. I think there's a lot of delusion in either direction. The most honest thing for a lot of managers to do would be to sit it out, but they're structurally unable or unwilling to do that. And so you just sort of hope for the best and put capital out the door. And it's sort of a problem for tomorrow. A lot of things are still getting priced irrationally in the private markets in ways that are totally unrelated to the quality of the business, but are more of a function of just the incentive structures of the funds. You mentioned the SaaS is just a model and there's good and there's bad. What do you think about this trend of super CapEx heavy, token heavy, real world asset? There's this new genre of company that seems to have emerged as really dominant. I was looking the other day I was curious in our portfolio what percent was not pure bits And it like 60 something percent is not just software based on the market value of our investments I was surprised by that Like it a really high percentage whereas VCs have mostly historically been all software for the last 10 or 15 years What do you make of this trend, this class of business, lower gross margins, things like this? One way that you can look at this is we were really in the late innings in, let's call it 2016, 2017 on of, okay, returns in venture capital have been very high. And now we've seen whatever, 20 years of venture returns being very good. And so logically, capital is going to flow into the asset class. The problem is that the venture market is largely constrained in that the amount of great businesses that are started is relatively fixed. Probably, I believe, downstream of how many great founders there are. I think there's just a finite amount. More and more capital flows into venture, there's basically a finite amount of companies. So you have to put more money into the same amount of companies. This was becoming a real problem before AI and COVID, which was that there's only so much money that you can cram into a B2B software business. And especially when annoyingly the companies are getting cheaper and cheaper to start. Functionally, what you saw and what you still see to some extent, [50:00] But what you really saw was that all this capital was just flowing to landowners and to compensation packages, basically. Capital hates getting blocked. It's like water. It wants to find the most efficient path. And it was getting blocked because it wanted to flow into venture because there was backward looking higher returns. It was just constrained. You only cram so much money into these companies. And it was a lot of what inspired me to start my fund was seeing this problem, which was just that the amount of money these companies are raising is unrelated to the amount of money they need. almost as if deus ex machina, all of a sudden there was two great categories that could just soak up this capital. And I really do believe in some sense that the businesses and assets are sponges for capital and that the excess in an era of back then we had negative interest rates and stuff. The capital has to go somewhere. And if it has nowhere to go, it will create somewhere for it to go. And I think that there's a very fortuitous arising of these high capex businesses of AI, the ultimate high CapEx project, obviously all the hardware stuff. And so I think in some sense, like you could say that the capital markets were desperately looking for a place to go to put the capital and there was no place. And so these companies almost got created downstream of capital which I think is a little bit different of the narrative than most people would look at So that sort of the philosophical view The economic view part of the reason SaaS is getting punished so much today in the market is because it was this idea of you're selling a copy of a string fundamentally. That's what a software product is. And the marginal copy of a string is very close to zero. And so with zero marginal cost, the thing that you're selling should be highly profitable. The vision of that was that you will have high upfront costs and then you will have very high gross margins and hopefully one day very high net margins, although the net margins seem to never sort of materialize until private equity gets their hands on things and sort of forces the net margin out. That era is largely just a downstream coincidence of this like selling strings. And now I think we're in an era where we're selling compute. And selling compute, you can't write the prompt once and then sell copies of the output. You have to do the compute every single time. And so the marginal cost obviously is not zero. And I think this is like a fundamental huge change to the software business. And I think it means that this era of high gross margins being the norm is just gonna go away. And what's gonna make up for it, I think, is lower gross margins, much thinner net margins, and much more scale. And I think that's sort of what you're seeing, which is that the capital is flowing to the top end provider of the scale It would have been unthinkable that we talk about companies in three to four trillion dollar market caps 10 years ago Big part of that is inflation I believe. Another part of that is just the scale dynamic, which I think it's uncontroversial to say we're going to have 10 trillion dollar companies and so on and so forth. Because margins are going to drop, all the returns are going to accrue to scale because obviously low margin, low scale is not a very good business. It's crudely a bit of a Walmart effect in software, which is that The future looks like low gross margins, razor thin net margins, huge scale. And this is probably a problem if the SaaS provider is the mom and pop shop like Walmart's coming to town. You have this funny view that the whole myth of how difficult it is to beat the market, however you want to define the market, is wrong. I'm curious to expound on that. That seems to have become post-Jack Bogle. one of the deeply held truths of the market is that it's extraordinarily difficult to beat the market. So you shouldn't even try. You should just opt out of the battle. I think you have a very different view on this. Buffett and Munger were my kind of main teachers on investing. Buffett says that he wants his estate outside of Berkshire to be put in the S&P. That's his advice to the general public People take that to say that Buffett saying you can beat the market I don think that what he saying I think he saying for the average person you shouldn try and beat the market Implicit in that statement is leaving out any sort of active investor Maybe the anecdotal side would be Buffett saying you should put all your money into the S&P. That's the most rational thing you should do. On the other side is the sort of empirical argument, which is, look, most professionals don't even beat the market after fees. this is this one-two punch of the godfather of investing says, don't try. Seemingly the smartest people with the best incentives in the world can't do it. And then the other thing is, I just think that for a professional money manager, and this is sort of the paradox with the Buffett thing, is that for a professional money manager, it is really hard to beat the market because you have all these other factors that the average person doesn't have. And this is the Peter Lynch argument. I increasingly think Peter Lynch was kind of a genius about this, which is that like, yeah, when you're a professional manager, by and large, you have all these mandates, you're running a business, you have customers that you need to keep happy. It's more difficult for the professional money manager to beat the market than like the average amateur. How many people do you know who like bought Bitcoin and did really well or bought a Tesla and then they bought the Tesla stock or they bought an Apple computer and they bought the Apple stock? You can't run a hedge fund that way, but they've outperformed just doing that. And so I think there's a little bit of this like weird thing [55:00] in isolation, none of the advice is wrong. It's not as difficult as people think to, I think, outperform or do better than the average. And there's this notion that gets caught up in all sorts of other things that I think sort of sullies that view. I wanted to ask the LP's perspective, what you would do if you were an LP, what you'd be looking for. I get asked a lot by LPs where they should put their money, what managers are good, or should they invest in this fund? You have to take a somewhat cynical view of these things as, and maybe it's not actually cynical, just maybe the more realist view of these are businesses first and their product is returns, but they're a business. You have to recognize what sort of customer you are. The question of where should I put my 500 grand check? You probably shouldn't put it into marginal $5 billion growth fund, but I actually get asked that a lot. Should I put some $1 or $2 million into this fund? It's probably going to be a good fund, but could you find something much better to do with that million dollars? Probably. It sounds obvious, but in reality, it's not. And I think what people don't understand is that basically if you're a principal, let's say if you're a principal that can't write like sovereign or institution size checks you a totally different customer and the businesses are not designed to serve you as a customer The growth fund is probably a great place if you have to park million somewhere It probably a very, very good place, but it's not a good place to park like a 500 grand check. If your business is set up to service sovereigns and large endowments and stuff, your product is just so different from what you're going to serve for someone smaller. And this gets into the like, well, okay, if you have a small check, what do you do? And I think this is where the emerging manager stuff is really underrated and looking for places where the manager is actually most tightly aligned to returns, either because returns are critical to future funds or that's actually how they're going to make all their money. Are there features of the emerging managers situation that you find interesting or attractive one way or the other? It's probably similar to how I look at everything, but I think, especially for an emerging manager, when you're truly just sort of underwriting the person, people still fail. They probably overweight the investing thesis and track record and stuff and underweight facts about the person. I think you and I are both big believers in the idea of how you do one thing is how you do everything. And so the personal financial situation of a manager is an incredibly underrated thing to ask about If you have a couple hundred million dollars in the bank account and you raising a million fund that very different than someone who has a million dollars in the bank who's raising $100 million to go do a thing that they're trying to make the most money from. There's like two very different places to start from underwriting. One notion I have about this is whether someone is looking up or looking down at something and the idea is take the same two $50 million funds. One is from someone who has 500 grand in the bank and one is from someone who has 500 million dollars in the bank. Those are just like obviously going to be treated very, very differently. For the latter, for the 500 million dollar person, the 50 million dollar fund might very well do better because it's held with a looser grip. It's less on the line. You're going to be less paralyzed by the sheer like quantities of dollars. That is generally not super recognized. and you see it all the time. Like in new ventures, if you're helming something that is two or three zeros more than you have, there's just a sort of monumentalness to it that is a bit intimidating. You can scale this all the way up. You know, someone who's worth 100 million with a $10 billion fund. It's just a big, scary thing. And I don't care who you are, when you're taking bets that are an order of magnitude larger than any amount of money you ever had there just a psychological factor there versus when you taking bets that are maybe sort of negligible to you Part of the reason I think it easier for people to outperform individuals is it easy to take a flyer on a stock with a marginal fraction of your net worth that you don't feel you need to explain and you're not going to be judged on later than it is to do with maybe a dollar amount that's more money than you have. going to affect your track record and you're going to have to explain it and all these other factors that are not related to like, do you think this is a good investment or not? You and me are always interested in this sort of what I'll call the underbelly of finance. And you have this funny idea around the sort of feudal like system that is emerging in the world of SPVs and the big private companies. Can you share that idea? There is this funny notion that it's sort of specific to the labs, but it's a broader thing as well, I suppose. We're sort of recreating the feudal system from first principles where there are the lords, Elon, Zuckerberg, Dario, Sam. They can sort of make landed gentry by giving out allocations because these allocations are sort of these best example of generational wealth. You get this allocation in SpaceX or in Waymo or whatever. You get to charge huge fees on it. And it's sort of this like wholly synthetic product, which is someone gives you a sort of [60:00] They know you don't have the money, so they know you're going to go fill it. And then you get to go out and basically say, I've been given a deed. The king has given me 500 acres in this country, and Elon has given me $100 million to allocate in SpaceX, and you get to go out and charge fees and make a bunch of money from it. Do you have allocation? And I guess I'm interested in it because it's sort of this purely relational, wholly synthetic thing that I'm not sure has ever existed before, certainly not at the scale and magnitude. you can go due to your relationship, basically get this like landed estate and then take it to a sovereign or a foundation and they will pay you for that access, like a pure paid for access. But maybe where it's different is that's just brokering. But the difference is obviously that brokering is sort of like a one time transaction. But these allocations sort of, you know, they live on forever. What's the most egregious fee setup you've seen in one of these? no GP commit 10% one-time upfront fee with some carry structure generally where you're just demanding basically that you get paid life-changing amounts of money with zero risk. And then you also get a huge amount of upside. The other thing is I've seen a few that don't have a term limit. I know there was famously a lot of SpaceX ones I think people were doing that 10 years ago I know there certainly some that just collect the fee forever To Capital credit you very happy to be paying that 2 on the SpaceX thing that you did 15 years ago So it's sort of a win-win. It's not to say these are all bad. It's just sort of funny because it's not investing. It's not strictly brokering. It's this very different thing that is like a holy insider access game. And then, of course, there's all the fraud and bad behavior that I think comes with all the bubble and stuff. how do you think about your own productivity, for lack of a better word? We talked before about how content is really just entertainment, not learning. We shouldn't kid ourselves about that. Therefore, it is largely unproductive, which is fine. It's entertainment. How do you think about, to the extent you care, about yourself personally being a lot more productive with all this insane tool. I certainly care about productivity. For me, by far, the most generative thing is conversations, which I guess are downstream of relationships. Part of the reason my book reading has gone down is I'm friends with a lot of people that read a lot of books. If I could only keep one thing, it would be conversations with people that I find interesting. But I also think I'm uniquely tolerant of distasteful and weird people I get asked a fair amount what your media diet and conversations are my answer It always feels like the answer falls flat with people And I think it because they not friends with like weirdos A lot of my friends I think are sort of people would largely find strange at best, just tasteful at worst. If I can't predict what the person's going to say after knowing them for a while, I like them a lot. And that's a very high variance thing. Old books are good. I think YouTube remains underrated. There's a lot of really obscure things on YouTube that I really enjoy listening to. YouTube sort of remains the library of Alexandria of our time, maybe of ever. But yeah, YouTube doesn't feel generative. I think the only thing that's generative is conversations. So far in early 2026, I would say chatbots can lull you into feeling generative. But if I actually look at like the actions that I've taken, you can feel really productive after like a good two hour session on a chatbot. but I actually don't think they're that generous. If you think about great investing ideas, what is the right balance between simplicity and complexity, both in the ones that you've done yourself, but also studied? I really do think people value complexity for the sake of complexity a lot. I think a lot of investors are in the like feel clever look smart game more than the money game Personally I think this has been a big area of self for me which is the clever thing is not always the thing that makes money, obviously. You either have to say, I am looking for investment ideas that are so complex that no one is going to do them, or it should actually be quite simple. I'm a bigger and bigger believer in the simplicity, which is you probably want to be long Elon Musk. That level of idea, I actually think the gift is being able to sell that idea and maybe even dress up. I think a lot of the investing media actually serves for the people who are really good to dress up those ideas in a way that makes them feel differentiated and smart enough to what is actually sort of long Elon or long Bitcoin. I think of a guy that I know who exclusively does bankruptcies and he makes a lot of money. That's very complex and very difficult, but it's a tremendous amount of work. It's grimy. It's difficult. There's a lot of risk and personal stuff. And that to me is like an example of getting paid for complexity. Whereas a good example of simplicity is you should just buy big companies when they're at their 200 week moving average. I love that idea because it's just so simple. [65:00] But it's right. One story that I absolutely love cutting through the mess and getting to like complete clarity on how to evaluate an investment is from Richard Rainwater, which is there's these stories about him that you would basically come into his office with a yellow legal pad and you would write out your thesis on one page and then you would tell him what percentage of your net worth you're going to put in the deal. And based on your one page thesis and the percentage of the net worth that was going to put in, he would say yes or no. And I think that's genius. People don't do that because that's really hard. It makes things way hard. First of all, it's hard to write a compelling thesis in a page. It's much easier to do it in a 400-page slide deck. And second of all, no one wants to say, well, I'm only putting 3% of my net worth in this. To me, that's one of the most simple, clear examples of really cutting to, is this a good investment or not that I've ever heard? One of the, I think, natural points of leverage now is the ability to hire extraordinarily well, which means two things, attract an amazing differentiated talent pool and then select from that group effectively. That's something that you thought a ton about in building your business. And it seems like a skill that if you got good at it would be unbelievably valuable in this era specifically where the returns to like outlier talent seem to be going up and up and up What did you learn about the two stages of that process I'm especially interested in attracting a unique pool of talent in the first place. Maybe the most practical thing is that I think is very low hanging fruit is just a job description. I think job descriptions are one of these things where they are written for nobody to be read by nobody. And there's sort of this like token document. It's more about does the job description exists is more the question versus like what's written in the job description. I tried to write one that followed a very simple rule, which was a obviously I was going to post it on Twitter and LinkedIn. Anything you post has to be a good standalone post. It can't be something that you wouldn't share if you didn't know me. I think what's so important in any sales pitch, which is what a job description should be is disqualifying who you don't want. And the nice thing about a divisive statement is that when it resonates, it deeply resonates with the person. And so I just tried to think of, okay, like what are all the traits that I would want someone to have and try and make them again to go back to the like how you do one thing is how you do everything that would make them the type of person that I was interested Obviously the skills and the experience was going to be table stakes I tried to write out traits and ideas that would really be inspiring and for the right person to be like whoa this person really gets me, understands me, and would make people mad. One of the things that I posted the funniest was or got the most reaction was you're an ideological minority at a top 10 school. and what I love about that is that it's entirely open for interpretation. I would get people who would be many different things, who'd be angry that I only want a top 10 school. The nice thing about top 10 school is it's a fully ambiguous statement. What I love about it is, A, there's some schools that I think uncontroversially are top 10 and so I get those people. You can also just sort of assert that your school is a top 10 and I had a few people from schools that I would not say are anywhere close just sort of assert that and I thought that was great. I had people select out because they were sort of like, oh, I don't know if my school is, I'm not gonna apply, that's great because I don't want those people. And then ideological minority was really interesting. I had a certain idea in mind, but people gave me all kinds of answers about ideological because I didn't necessarily political. There was all kinds of answers around how that person stood out at their school And so those statements are great because they like highly ambiguous There a bit of an inherent test of confidence I would even get a few posts that were like I think this is bullshit. You should hire me. I didn't go to a top 10 school. You're an idiot. And I love that person too. The more you can do statements like that, where they like, get this sort of reaction is great. Imagine what you would have to do in an interview to like get at all of those various traits. Statements like that, I think, are underutilized in these job descriptions. It's a cool idea of baking the interview into the job post itself. It seems to me like an underrated area of inquiry today that I know you're interested in is the cultural and intellectual traditions behind major movements. I think that that has certainly been true in this wave of technology. And it's not something I see talked about, written about very much. and I'd love you to just riff on your interpretation of the key sets of beliefs behind the people and the institutions that are ushering in the biggest wave of technology change that we've probably ever seen. I'm interested in mispricings in qualities and attributes about things and people and places. I don't know if this has always been true, but it's true today. I think there's some qualities and attributes that are [70:00] widely recognized and priced efficiently, let's say, height, IQ, resume. And then there's other traits and characteristics that we have just decided collectively not to price. For Silicon Valley, people sort of underrate the philosophers and thinkers and mimetic ideas that underpin the whole thing. I think there is a real philosophy that some sort of like neo-Buddhist utilitarianism that underlies the technological developments in Silicon Valley. It's interesting because you see it like Will McCassle gets involved with SPF and FTX. There's these sort of thinkers like Nick Land. There's sort of ideas percolate underneath the surface in the Valley and are influential in everyone, but are not necessarily named. I mean, now they have been. You could say the same thing about Curtis Yarvin. I thought it was remarkable for years how you could sort of hear Curtis's ideas coming out of the mouth of the big tech leaders without being named. There's things like leverage research and all these intellectual characters that I think people's religious beliefs are generally underrated by secular people in terms of how important that is as a guiding light. In the valley in the development of these technologies these sorts of cultural and philosophical ideas are underrated Like it or not the models are highly utilitarian They have this weird mix of religious ideas from Judaism, from Buddhism, this sort of like utilitarian bent that turns into effective altruism. And people sort of think this is just culture or whatever, but these things matter. And it just feels to me that this whole cultural epicenter has been highly underrated in general and informing why these things get built and what the worldviews inherent in them are and what the inherent worldviews are in the people who build them. It almost feels to me that Wall Street in the 80s was sort of this vain, almost pagan, the strong and the beautiful are what's most important. There's a hedonistic aspect to it. There's an openness that it's a little bit nihilist because it's all just about getting money. There's not the same notion. I think at the crux of that is that technology views itself as totally self-righteous, which is that the thing that they are building, it's not nakedly sin-driven or driven out of a greed or ambition. It's driven out of this nominally altruistic idea of, no, we're building this thing, this product that the whole world uses it positive sum which is true on the surface But I do think that it almost pathological to the point where there no recognition all the other factors It almost sort of shadow And there none of this notion of like well if you work in finance you sort of need to translate the gains from finance into something worthy, into art, into architecture, into philanthropy, into just culture in general, or into the place that you live. None of that exists because I think tech views itself as the ultimate philanthropy is the business that you're building. I don't think Silicon Valley today has the same sort of reflexive need to justify or document or even launder what they're doing through going to book parties and arts and all this stuff. And I think it's like this interesting difference. And I wish that more people would try and document this stuff because it's all there, all the crazy, all the sex, drugs and rock and roll is there in its own nerdy autistic way. Again, I think culture is just like vastly underrated and religious beliefs, whether literally religious or pseudo-religious, but filling that void. As always, when we talk, I wish we had three more hours. Thanks for doing this to me again. Thanks for your time. Thanks for having me. If you enjoyed this episode, visit Colossus.com. You find every episode of this podcast complete with hand edited transcripts You can also subscribe to Colossus our quarterly print digital and private audio publication featuring in profiles of the founders investors and companies that we admire most Learn more at colossus slash subscribe Thank you. Thank you. [75:00] TagelineApps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm.