Anecdote: “Misfortune is needed to plumb certain mysterious depths in the understanding of men; pressure is needed to explode the charge,” said Edmond Dantes, protagonist in The Count of Monte Cristo. “My captivity concentrated all my faculties on a single point. They had previously been dispersed, now they clashed in a narrow space; and, as you know, the clash of clouds produces electricity, electricity produces lig

Hope all goes well… “I pulled an Icarus, flew too close to the sun,” said SEAL on speakerphone, headed for a surf with my oldest son, the two of them out at Camp Pendleton. “Got cocky right at the end.” Three weeks into the second phase of SEAL training, there’s a twenty-minute underwater test. Instructors rip your mask off, your air out, and beat the crap out of you, all while you’re attempting to work your way thro

Hope all goes well… “When we are young, we don’t appreciate so many of the things,” said Vincent, the two of us winding our way high into the alps, his son up ahead, carrying our ropes. I had business in Switzerland and snuck back to Argentiere for the weekend to see my old friend. “Maybe we climb with our grandparents, and we think they go too slow, but so much we don’t know,” said Vincent, his life spent in service

Anecdote: When we started One River in early 2013, I had been a global macro investor for 24years. The number of transistors you could fit on a silicon chip had grown from 1.2mm to 4.32bln in that time (a 3,600x increase). You want to embed that kind of mega macro trend into your business. So, I figured we should build a quantitative capability, and felt if we didn’t, we probably wouldn’t have a firm in 10yrs. Aligni

Hope all goes well… “The FSD V14 release will be a dramatic gain with a 10X higher parameter count and many other improvements,” wrote Elon Musk on X. I started using Tesla’s full self-driving 5yrs ago. In the past 9mths the pace of performance improvements has gone vertical. A 10x parameter jump dramatically expands the model’s representational capacity – roughly akin to a 10x increase in mental resolution. It

Anecdote: “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” It is one of my favorite quotes from General James Mattis, our former Defense Secretary. My son Jackson and I were discussing the unusual meeting that Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of War, had called for his top 150 com

Hope all goes well… “Would I want my eldest son, who is 15 years old, eventually joining the types of formations that we are currently wielding,” asked Pete Hegseth, rhetorically, to 150 high-ranking commanders gathered in Quantico, Virginia. America’s new Secretary of War outlined his plan to lift standards across our armed forces. “Every parent deserves to know their son or daughter that joins our ranks is entering

Anecdote: When the story broke, I knew a few things for sure. The first was that this wouldn’t be the last. When the world’s most valuable company invests $100bln in its best customer to help it buy more AI chips, it’s not a one-and-done sort of transaction. The second thing I knew was that bearish traders would see this news as a definitive sign of the bull market top, kind of like they called the June 4, 2024, peak

Hope all goes well… “You mentioned Einstein and general relativity, and I agree. I think that’s like one of the most beautiful things humanity has ever figured out. Maybe I would even say number one,” said Sam Altman, speaking to British physicist David Deutsch, a founding father of quantum computing. “If in a few years GPT-8 figured out quantum gravity and could tell you its story – the problems it chose, the

Anecdote: I’ve spent my whole career taking risk. Which means I’ve thought about it from every angle imaginable. And I have a pretty good imagination. It also means I’ve suffered some soul-searching losses and enjoyed the windfalls that come to those who refuse to give up. One risk-management lesson I’ve learned above all others is that nothing good ever happens to dead people. So, the most important thing when takin