Much of its economic miracle was debt, smoke, and mirrors — (I think understanding China is critical to understanding how the future of the global economy might play out. In an earlier post, I discuss this at length.) Reading Frank Dikotter’s book, China After Mao, I learned that China’s debt issues are even more complicated and messed up than America’s. Over…

The greatest current threat to long term world peace and prosperity — China is complicated. It’s a huge country and a big part of the global economy that’s contributed greatly to global growth over the past two decades. At the same time, China, along with America, is also the greatest threat to the peaceful continuation of the current global status quo. Like…

Is there something structurally wrong with the business? — Podcasts have always been a fascinating a business to me. Part of that fascination stems from the fact that a podcast is just a prerecorded snippet of audio of (in most cases) someone or a group of people talking — so I always wondered what is it that made podcasting…

It takes from creatives and artists without compensating them in any way — One worrying thing about this current AI revolution (can we call it that yet?) is the way it’s more or less ripping off the collective previous efforts of creatives while at the same time reducing the incentive to be creative going forward. In a prior post, I wrote: Still, the…

It will significantly change how we work and get paid — I’ve held off on writing about AI because I wanted to wait for the hype to die down and see what stuck and what didn’t. It does look like AI is here to stay though. And it will significantly change the way many of us think about and make things. …

Which is why it works — Being antifragile is a concept introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. The general idea is that certain things are inherently robust to and even benefit from volatility and that’s a good thing. An example that Taleb gives is the restaurants in a…

They go hand in hand — Capitalism is inherently unequal. It’s a great system for economic growth, but an innate problem with capitalism is that the spoils of that growth are distributed very unequally. And thanks to compounding, over several generations these discrepancies become massive. I do think (though I am open to changing my mind)…

Decision making under uncertainty — Most of us glaze over when we hear the term statistics. It’s thought of as this tedious subject that’s used to twist and manipulate numbers around until they tell the desired story. Yes, statistics can be misused. But that’s doing the subject a disservice. Rather statistics is decision making quantified. …

More than 150 years of banking tradition goes poof — Back in 2008 when I was doing my MBA, my classmates and I traveled to New York for my school’s annual Week on Wall Street trip. One of the highlights of the trip was a cocktail happy hour with Credit Suisse and their investment bankers. As an aspiring business person…