Boy howdy has it been a busy spell here at currently-100-degree Camp Nadig, out here in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Let me get the “me” update out of the way.
Work Stuff:
Most recently, I’ve written about the bizarre quirks of the South Korean ETF market, and why they’re setting themselves up for their own “Memogeddon” if there not careful with all the Leveraged ETFs. I also wrote more about SpaceX, but most about why Growth/Value indexes make no real sense in frothy markets.
Every two weeks this year I’ve been doing the ETF Zoo podcast with Sumit Roy and a rotating cast of ETF pundits, and it gets more fun every week. You can catch up or tune in over there.
I’ve also just been making a TON of video, most recently at the Basis Northwest and ICI conferences. Videos from both are dropping every day or so now for the next few weeks. Our YouTube Channel is probably the best way to check them out.
Not Work Stuff:
Burying the lede a little, I spent just an endless amount of time writing a piece for Panoptica on a practice that’s been super valuable to me for decades: deliberate contemplation.
I wrote and deleted about 20,000 words on the way to this short piece, but I hope you’ll click over and read it. Here’s a nugget:
Directed attention towards ideas allows you to fully explore the things you think you know, vs. the things you believe to be true. And (just like meditation), the more you do it, and thus the better you get at it, the more confident you’ll likely become in how little you know …
… The point isn’t to know more — it’s to be determined and resolute in our action of contemplation of what we think we know. Rarely do I find I have such knowledge and insight that I have real opinions that I can claim come from my “autonomous mind.”
Obviously, my plea for folks to at least experiment with a no-phones, no-distractions, seated, quiet, dark period of just thinking is partially in reaction to AI. With AI doing more and more thinking for us, it feels to me that understanding what we think we know and believe becomes critical before entering into the AI:Human cognitive partnership. Otherwise were just cavemen at an arcade, pushing the buttons randomly because we like the pretty lights.
But as much as I’m at least not-unhappy with this little bit of writing, the most fun part of it was talking with my friend Matt Zeigler about the process of writing itself, and how AI fits in, or mostly doesn’t. It’s a short conversation but maybe there are some nuggets in here.
… And about the 4th …
One of the challenges of being largely in the business of saying things out loud and hoping people care, is that there’s always an devil-editor on my shoulder saying “Why does anyone need to read what YOU think about this? What makes YOUR words special?”
And on the topic of (waves hands) all this political stuff which absorbs SO much time and energy in all forms of media (but lives particularly heavily in financial media), I don’t actually think I have a lot new to offer. My weird neurospicy brain, my “hermit-who-still-loves-everyone” heart and my Christian/Buddhist mysticism-tinged spirit are all, at least in my own opinion, deeply tinted with the idea of “America.”
I wrote what I needed to say about my country last fall in a piece called “My Comic Book Country.” I reread it today, and I still pretty much feel the same way as I did when I clipped this from Mark Russell’s Superman:
We’re in a very strange time. Change is happening fast. Most of those changes — changes to what it means to be “America” — are moving things further away from the ideals I held in my heart when I marched in all those parades with veterans as a boy scout: welcoming the stranger, providing peace to the oppressed, keeping our minds and hearts opens to the differences and variation in all of God’s creation, eschewing power in favor of grace.
It’s fine if you have a different experience and different opinions, but in my small world, my reality tunnel of actual humans I can touch with my hands, there is want and fear where there was less want and little fear a short while ago. Causes and programs and ideas I spent a lot of my adult life supporting and arguing for are in trouble, diminished, or gone.
I could be saucy about it I suppose, but here’s the big positive: these losses have driven me back out into the community. It drove me back to the church — in my case, a church held outside or in basements to support the unhoused community, and get them a good meal on Sundays (where, sadly, the food line gets longer and longer by the week).
Bre Petis wrote in his 2009 “Done Manifesto” that “people without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.”
I’m deeply ashamed of how clean my hands have been last 20 years. I can make excuses … I gave money, I wrote things, I voted, I raised kind and giving children. But I didn’t really get my hands dirty.
That’s my pledge to America on her Birthday. I will keep getting my hands dirty for my fellow Americans, particularly those left behind in all this change. I can’t solve everything. But if each of us just looks around our neighborhood and lends a hand, we can keep the dream of the American experiment alive, regardless of who has the reins on a given day.
Peace.
What is striking about modern America would appear to be, seen from the other side of the Atlantic, the Income Distribution.
For my father’s generation (starting a career in the late 50s or early 1960s), a good job was with a large multinational company which gave security and the chance to travel. All your ideas and effort were for the benefit of the company. Lots of PhDs were employed in research, mostly plastics (in the 60s they were the future… as in the scene in The Graduate!). Fortunately they also did some pharmaceutical research - which was the real future. My father & all his friends retired on comfortable pensions (a guaranteed 2/3 of final salary), but none of them became a millionaire. But they helped a good company to continue until it was restructured in the 90s.
Now? The finest minds in scientific research or management want to become “founders”, essentially meaning that bright-but-dysfunctional students like Musk or Zuckerberg are given cash by venture capitalists to start disruptive technology firms. If it succeeds you have another Amazon or Facebook or Tesla which a significant chunk of is given to the “founder” as a reward for their “genius”.
But seriously, did Musk need more than half a trillion of paper wealth. Couldn’t he be happy on $500 billion as a reward for his “genius”? These men have been handed wealth that hasn’t made them happy, and the best idea they have to spend this wealth is to invest in going to the moon… a perfect metaphor for losing your mind.
There is a direct connection between the US business model of Venture Capital and “founders” and the political divide between the haves and have nots. I honestly think my father’s generation was happier. Both in Europe and America at the time being paid a good salary to work in a white collar job for IBM or GM or a similar multinational was enough. Yeah, and that generation actually put a man on the moon, they did it in a decade as an offshoot of the military budget.
Musk & Bezos with all their paper wealth and genius would probably be unable to wire a plug, but dream of moonshots…. The most depressing story I have read on Reuters recently was a lawyer specialising in contracts for private jets having to cancel her vacation. The “SpaceX” IPO had created so much wealth the sale of private jets had gone through the roof. That doesn’t sound like a good way of dividing up the cake in a prosperous country.
We can always count on you for unique thoughts. Thank you!
Here’s to “Hand’s Dirty” and contemplation. My best ideas always came on my jogs and walks. I read once that exercise of the body allows your brain to move into a state where you are able to gain perspective from looking beyond and forward in a different way than when you are in your normal functional state of going through your day. It works for me, but now my stiff knees don’t allow me to jog, but swimming laps also does the trick.