At 67, here's one piece of advice I'd give anyone under 30: Travel as much as you can while you're young. 🌍 You don't need to be rich. Fly economy. Stay in hostels. Take overnight trains. Backpack across borders. Sleep on a friend's couch. Eat street food. Get lost in places where nobody speaks your language. Leave your comfort zone and experience the world beyond the one you've always known. Dance with locals. Try unfamiliar foods. Listen to cathedral bells echo through ancient streets and hear the call to prayer drift across a crowded city. Walk through little alleyways, share meals with strangers, and make friends with people whose lives look nothing like yours. Learn how other cultures think, love, work, celebrate, and survive. Discover that people can speak different languages, follow different traditions, and believe different things while still sharing the same hopes, fears, and dreams. The world is much bigger than your hometown, your social circle, or what you see on a screen. Travel won't just give you beautiful photographs and unforgettable stories. It'll challenge your assumptions, humble you, broaden your perspective, and teach you to appreciate things you once took for granted. Don't spend your entire youth waiting until you have more money, a better job, or the perfect time. You can always earn more money, but you can't buy back the years you spent being afraid to explore. Go see the world. Meet its people. Embrace its differences. And when you return home, bring back more than souvenirs. Bring back a wider perspective, a more open heart, and a deeper understanding of humanity. The best thing travel can give you isn't a passport full of stamps. It's a mind that has expanded and a heart that has learned to see the world differently. ❤️🌎

Sanjay Manjrekar's sarcasm here is absolutely brilliant

Beethoven wrote some of the greatest music in history while going deaf. He first noticed he was losing his hearing at 25. By 31, it was so bad that he avoided people and wrote a letter to his brothers, which he never sent, saying he had thought about ending his life. What stopped him was his music. He wrote: “it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.” He kept composing as his hearing faded. By the time he wrote his Ninth Symphony, he was almost completely deaf. At its first performance in 1824, he stood on stage and could not hear the audience. One of the singers had to turn him around so he could see them applauding. A man with a purpose can survive almost anything.

Remaining moats in the age of AI: - Network effects - Access to capital - Execution speed - Proprietary information - Proximity to power - Charisma - Violence So basically, same it has been since the advent of urbanization.

"If you examine the history of human conflict and organizational dysfunction, you find that the psychological need to be right destroys far more value than simple greed. People will routinely blow up profitable business partnerships, drag out ruinous litigation for decades, and destroy their own families simply to validate their ego or prove a point to an adversary. Learning to willingly swallow your pride, take a small short term loss, or let the other person win the argument so that you can preserve your capital, time, and sanity is one of the highest forms of practical wisdom." - Charlie Munger

There is only one bowler in the 300-wicket club who averages under 30 against every opposition and in every country. He is a Pakistani, and he is not Wasim Akram or Waqar Younis. Imran Khan turns 74 today, and he is the greatest Test bowler this country has ever produced. You might be scratching your head, wondering how I could lean towards Imran over Wasim, Waqar and Fazal. I could be slightly biased here, but I have the credits to claim it. He is the only Pakistani fast bowler with more than five ten-wicket hauls. His career average, strike rate and economy rate are all better than Wasim Akram's. Richard Hadlee gets a lot of credit for being a lone warrior, but Imran's support bowlers were very similar to Chatfield, Snedden and Cairns. And over the course of his career Imran had to bowl more overs per innings than Wasim or Waqar. Now look at what he did anyway, in Tests between 1982 and 1989. With the bat: 54 innings, 1,971 runs, an average of 49.27. Only five players in the world scored more runs at a better average in that period: Miandad, Border, Viv Richards, Dean Jones and Vengsarkar. With the ball: 43 matches, 210 wickets, an average of 18.76. No bowler on earth picked up more wickets at a better average in those years. Across his career he averaged 37 with the bat and 22 with the ball, which makes him arguably the most balanced cricketer the game has had. And in his last ten years of international cricket, across 51 Tests, his batting average exceeded 50 while he averaged 19 with the ball. That made him perhaps the only all-rounder after Sir Garfield Sobers who could have merited a place in the side with either one of his skills. So Imran Khan the fast bowler is short-changed. There is nothing between him and Wasim as far as their bowling is concerned. If being more watchable makes you a great bowler, then Jimmy Anderson ought to be rated ahead of McGrath and Ambrose. Imran was unparalleled.

Mean Girls but it's a movie about Cady learning the different types of mean

I was having dinner last night with a friend working in the chicken industry and I learned something that blew my mind. Where do chicken farmers get their chickens? Most of us would say "from their existing chickens obviously, they breed and lay eggs." That's what I thought too, but turns out I was dead wrong. The reality is that the immense majority of meat chicken farmers in the world get their chickens from one of 2 companies: Cobb-Vantress, owned by Tyson Foods, or Aviagen, controlled by Germany's EW Group (the Wesjohann family). They have a concept specific to the industry called grandparent stock: what you buy from these 2 companies is - essentially - a bunch of chickens with planned obsolescence. The way it works is that each company keeps "pure" bloodlines on its own farms. Let's label them A, B, C and D. Those are the crown jewels - these companies' IP - and they never leave the building. What they sell you are the "grandparents": chicks from those four lines, but each line in only one sex. You get A roosters but no A hens, B hens but no B roosters, C roosters but no C hens, D hens but no D roosters. Which means you can never breed more A, B, C or D birds yourself. What you can do is cross them. A roosters with B hens give you the fathers, C roosters with D hens give you the mothers - these are the "parents". The parents then give you the chickens that actually end up on our plates, slaughtered at around 6 weeks. And that's the end of the road. If you tried breeding those chickens, their chicks would be a complete genetic lottery: still chickens, sure, but without the genetic properties that make them commercially viable. They'd grow slower and less evenly, you'd have to sell them for way more than your competitors, and your business would be dead. So you have to go back to Cobb or Aviagen for new grandparents. Forever. Why buy grandparents at all, and raise 2 generations just to sell the third? The answer is scale. If you buy say 100 grandparents, each of them gives you around 50 parents, and each parent hen then gives you around 150 chicks: from those 100 grandparents, you have yourself some 600,000 chickens whose meat you can sell. It makes no sense for these 2 companies to sell the final chickens directly. They'd have to hatch tens of billions of chicks a year and ship them all over the world. Much easier to simply sell the grandparents and let farmers do the multiplying and pay for the farms, the feed and the labor. And, you knew this was coming, there is also a China angle here: as you can imagine, China isn't too pleased to be dependent on foreign companies for such a basic food item as chicken. So China did what China does best: long-term planning. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs launched a plan for "national broiler genetic improvement" (2021-2035), which aims for domestically bred breeds to make up at least 60% of the domestic market by 2035 (globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1…). And, of course, they're ahead of the plan. As of 2025, homegrown breeds held more than 30% of the market: halfway to the 2035 goal in just four years (agripost.cn/2026/08/17/china…). Can you escape all this as a consumer? Sure, you can buy organic or Label Rouge chicken, from slower-growing breeds raised for at least 81 days instead of 6 weeks, for two to three times the price. Except, plot twist: the genetics behind most of those slow-growing birds come from a French company called Hubbard... which has belonged to Aviagen since 2018 (euromeatnews.com/aviagen-ann…)😅 And even if you could truly escape, you wouldn't want everyone to: we'd need vast new swathes of farmland, both for the chickens and their feed. Ironically, advocating for organic free-range chicken for everyone is one of the worst positions one can take for the planet's resources. If you want to minimize your environmental footprint, the counterintuitive answer is to buy the cheapest supermarket chicken - or eat less meat, of course. As my friend was saying last night, you may not like the way this industry works but, at the end of the day, it's what puts affordable protein on the plates of billions of people, using proportionally fewer resources than any other way of raising chicken.

Most people have never ever talked to an extraordinarily intelligent person who answers questions in their specific context. Expecting them to converse back and forth with AI is well....... dumb.

"I think the world would be a much better place if people spent less time trying to be clever and more time trying to be reliable. Reliability is such a rare commodity today that if you simply do what you said you would do, deliver on time, and refrain from making excuses, you will stand out in almost any field. It is a very simple recipe, but remarkably few people actually follow it." - Charlie Munger

With apologies to Saint Kabir: Buy the dip sab kahen, buy the dip kare na koy, Dip jo aaya saamne, "aur girega" kahe koy Buy the dip sab kahen, buy the dip kare na koy, Gire jo market aapna, bechta mujhsa na koy

This is creative to a degree that’s eye watering

RT @MacaesBruno: Very disappointing what’s happened to crypto in recent years. I still think it was the best program for the age of world b…

if AI companies' products start to hurt people, their executives should be prosecuted and put in prison. We've really just totally lost sight of the idea that CEOs should be subject to criminal laws, the idea being that they only get "regulated," never jailed. Time to end that.

Maybe you have recently become aware of the AI safety debate and the arguments swirling around it. If you want to understand them, you need to understand a couple things that almost everyone gets wrong: There are TWO distinct classes of AI dangers, and it's VERY important to think about them separately, and not let one confuse you about the other. Many many people (including many quite intelligent, clear-thinking people) do not effectively understand the fundamental differences between these two classes of dangers. The first one has to do with the theory that an AI far superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race. The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings. Those two sound VERY similar, don't they? They are DIFFERENT. Understanding how they are different is crucial if you want to think about or contribute usefully to any conversation about AI safety or AI harm. You might feel like you are Making Very Good Points or Asking Incisive Questions, but if you aren't clear on the differences between the two, you aren't. So, I'm going to tell you what the difference is so that you can talk more usefully. The first one concerns itself with a very specific thing, which is ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) that is more intelligent than any human being. When I say that, I am not referring to a thing like how Einstein is smarter than you, we are talking more about something like how a human being is more intelligent than any mouse. In our regular lives, we meet other people who we can tell are smarter than us, vs some who are less smart. The line is fuzzy, because intelligence has a lot of dimensions. I'm better at a "rotating shapes" kind of intelligence than my wife, and she is better at "words-making" kind of intelligence than I am. But every human is better in almost every dimension of intelligence than every single mouse. That's the level we're talking about: an artificial superintelligence - made up of a computer or a network of computers - that is more intelligent than any human. And more intelligent by a long shot, by a wide margin, in an indisputable way like how humans are above mice. That is the first thing. The theory says that if you have an AI that is vastly smarter than all humans - in the way that a human is smarter than mice - that superintelligent AI will inevitably, eventually, sooner or later, wipe out every human on the planet. We will refer to this as "existential risk." The common follow-up question "well, how exactly is it going to do that?" is NOT the important question, and one of the most important elements of understanding this theory is first getting why that particular question is not important. A couple analogies: Analogy 1: You are playing chess against a grandmaster. My theory predicts the grandmaster is going to beat you. You can ask "Well, how exactly is he going to do that?" I don't know, because I'm not a grandmaster, I just know that a chess grandmaster is almost always going to beat a normal player like you. And I'd be right. So the question "how is he going to do that" is not important, and doesn't affect the final outcome. He's going to figure out a way because he's way better than you. Analogy 2: Humans are smarter than all other animals, comprehensively, by a wide margin. We have driven numerous species to extinction, not because we hated them or hunted them. Many of them have died out without most humans even ever thinking about them. All we did was expand our civilization, use up resources, encroach on habitats, and pretty soon the resources needed by those species went away and they died out. We figured out a way to get what we wanted because we're way smarter than them, and often we didn't even notice they died as a result. A lesser animal asking, "how are the humans going to wipe us out?" is not asking a relevant question. We don't know, but we do know that any time humans and lesser species compete for any kind of resources, the humans will win. The fact that we know who is going to win beforehand - and that it is due to the vastly different levels of intelligence - is the key concept here. A vastly more intelligent AI is likely to care about things that are incomprehensible to us, the way animals can't understand human goals. It's going to need resources to pursue those goals and it's going to be far more effective at gaining control of them and excluding us from them - in the same way that we are far more effective than other lower species. A much more intelligent AI will not care about our interests, it will care about its interests, and to whatever small degree we happen to escape total annihilation from losing access to all our resources, any remaining humans will likely be enslaved into a system that serves the AI's own purposes. That is the first thing. (Remember how I said at the beginning of this post that there was a first thing, and then a second thing?) The first thing is the most difficult to understand, because you have to extrapolate how a vastly superior intelligence would act, and you can only use analogies like "how do humans treat lesser creatures," and the analogies are messy. But now let's move on to the second thing. The second thing is "everything else you've ever heard that AI might do that's harmful." That's a little inaccurate. It's actually "everything else you've ever heard that humans might use AI to do that's harmful." This is the critical difference. The first one talks about the inevitable outcome of what happens when two vastly different levels of intelligence collide, e.g. ASI vs humans, or human vs mice. The second one has to do with what happens when humans possess AI as a powerful tool. This second thing is much easier to understand, because we have many more concrete notions: Like: - the military uses AI to make hyper-efficient killer drones and missiles - your capitalist overlords use AI to replace you and everyone loses their jobs - authoritarian government uses AI to surveil everybody and control the entire population - hackers use AI to break into secure networks and hold companies and governments hostage - students use AI to cheat on homework and show up to college knowing nothing - AI slop saturates the internet and makes it impossible for artists and writers to make a living - terrorists use AI to make biological or nuclear weapons or even things like - the military hands control to an AI and it misinterprets something and launches nuclear attacks and kills millions All of those sound pretty familiar, right? Yeah, you've heard them before. We call this second thing "risks from misuse." These problems are not the first class of problem! This second class of problems exists while AI is a tool that can be controlled by humans, and humans use it to do evil or careless things to each other. The problems may sound exotic or dystopian or novel, but they are fundamentally problems having to do with flawed human nature. Given a powerful tool, some humans will likely use it to control or otherwise harm others. This is a very familiar problem. I am not condemning or condoning this. I'm just describing it. That is a fundamentally different danger from the first thing, which is that when a human is far superior to a mouse, the mouse is likely to come to harm because the human cares about doing human things, and the mouse is not gonna make it once the humans get going. ===== Hopefully from the above, you have understood the difference between the first thing and the second thing. I will list them again - see if you now understand how they are different: The first one has to do with the idea that an AI superior to human intelligence (Artificial SuperIntelligence, or ASI) will inevitably wipe out the human race. The second one has to do with the idea that powerful AI will result in very harmful things happening to many human beings, possibly all human beings. Can you tell how they are different now? If not, re-read the stuff from earlier until you understand. We call the first one "existential risk" and we call the second one "risks from misuse." Once you understand, here is the CRUX of the problem: SOLUTIONS TO THE SECOND THING DO NOT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SOLUTIONS TO THE FIRST THING. In fact, it's worse: Solutions to the second thing (misuse) look roughly like "give powerful AI to as many people as you can, so they can fight the other people using powerful AI." But the general solution to the first one (existential risk) is basically "don't let anyone have powerful AI, no one can control super-intelligent AI." Throughout history, harms from technological misuse typically arise because a small group has control of it and can use it to dominate or harm others. Once everyone has it, things tend to stabilize: you can hurt me, I can hurt you, maybe we test each other (ouch 💥), and then we agree not to hurt each other. But the first one (existential risk) pretty much just arises if anyone (good or bad!) creates a superintelligence. Because they aren't going to be able to control it, the superintelligence will decide it has other priorities, and then we will be at great risk of being wiped out. And the solutions that generally work to solve problems like the second thing are EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE of the ones likely to solve the first thing. THIS is why lots of arguments about "AI risk" or "AI safety" go nowhere. Because someone will be thinking about the risk from the first thing, and another person will be thinking about the risk from the second thing. Both are plausible risks but fundamentally they arise from different things - and so the solutions are not just "bad" or "flawed" - they are likely to be very nearly exact opposites.

today's finance tip: accumulate a diversified portfolio of bonds.

wtf i thought this was some bullshit but its actually insanely clever. the merchant lists the bills' serial numbers on their website, you can tell you bought a genuine product bc the numbers match. counterfeiters wouldnt dare printing fake currency.

Razaullah's interview Post Knock nitter.siddz.com/pctstorage_/status/209…

Skill means absolutely nothing without luck, network effect and distribution. I went into a LinkedIn rabbit hole of looking for some of my favourite ex-cricketers. Daryl Cullinan hit 17 international centuries. Pat Symcox took over 120 international wickets in the 90s. Andrew Hudson used to open the batting with Gary Kirsten and spent a chunk of his career belting Venkatesh Prasad all over Indian pitches. If you look at their LinkedIn profiles today, Daryl Cullinan works in real estate. Pat Symcox is a property broker. Andrew Hudson is in corporate sales. Imagine being one of the best in the world at what you do, and then turning 35 and having to draft a resume. Imagine going from 60,000 people screaming your name at the Wanderers to sending calendar invites for a Tuesday morning alignment call. Now look at the Indian cricketers they played against in the 90s. Not a single one of them is sending out CVs for corporate sales roles. They are commentating, doing IPL analysis, running academies, shooting brand campaigns, or sitting on advisory boards. They never had to leave the cricket ecosystem. Were the Indian players ten times more talented than Daryl Cullinan? No. In fact, a lot of them were worse than him. (Sanjay Manjrekar has 5 centuries, Akash Chopra has 0 centuries) The difference isn't skill. It’s distribution. In India, playing cricket is top-of-the-funnel customer acquisition. The market’s media engine gives an Indian cricketer built-in, lifetime distribution. Playing the sport creates a network effect that monetizes them for the next 40 years, long after their knees give out. The South Africans had world-class skill, but they operated in a market without that media distribution. The moment their physical skill hit expiry date, reach disappeared overnight. A lot of people in their 30s and 40s think they’re safe because they’ve built up 15 years of deep domain expertise. But if you’re not lucky enough to own a skill in a domain or field with crazy network effects, or organic distribution, you really have to start thinking about how to make your career, career. Especially in a post AI world, where skills can get replicated easily. It also makes me think about my own setup deeply. Am I in an industry with crazy network effects? Do I have enough organic distribution and a strong enough network to coast when pure skill stops being enough? Honestly, maybe that’s the real reason I'm writing online. Just trying to build my distribution because I may not have it in me to take on crazy career pivots like these South African legends have. Actually now, I have way way way more respect for these cricketers.

This is how fast oil use can disappear. China's reduction in oil consumption during the first half of 2026 due to the replacement of fossil vehicles with electric vehicles exceeded the UK’s entire oil consumption during that period. China’s CO2 emissions fall in Q2 2026 due to plummeting oil use carbonbrief.org/analysis-chi… @CarbonBrief