The Travis.vc Newsletter

Banana-land markets: The bull case few want to make

Travis Jamison — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 02:31:51 +0000

Yesterday the very nice and very hard to spell Nick Maggiulli posted the question:

And honestly? It does seem like we’re in banana-land.

Nothing makes sense.

Up-only.

Same story in almost every metric you look at.

The trusty Buffett Indicator?

Shiller CAPE?

All show U.S. stocks have overheated.

So, given all of this, how could an investor actually be bullish on U.S. stocks?

I’m not claiming to have that specific belief here.

But, even if one believes we’re headed back to the stone age, It’s still useful to be able to make an argument both ways, so I took a stab.

As our sorely missed wise grumpy grandpappy said:

So here is my attempt at explaining just how a reasonable person could be optimistic on U.S. equities in this time of extremes.

#1 - The big companies moving the market are better than any we've ever seen before

This is not even a question.

This is a fact.

The amount of cash generated by these big tech companies would have been unfathomable even 20 years ago.

#2 - The market is forward-looking to fed rate cuts

The market is never looking at this moment in time, it’s always looking into the future as best it can.

The market sees the political pressure on the Fed, sees the deteriorating jobs numbers, and assumes that meaningful rate cuts are on the way.

Lower rates are just about the #1 lever around to boost asset prices.

#3 - Currency devaluation

Bitcoiners love to make this claim.

The narrative goes something like -
“the price of Bitcoin hasn’t gone up, the value of the dollar went down”.

Some would claim the same thing here, or at least that investors are terrified of fiat and are grasping at anything to preserve wealth.

I’m sure there are some interesting charts around this.
(send them to me if you know of any)

#4 - Passive investor inflows are all that matter

In today’s climate of passive investors, BogleHeads, and SPY-or-die investors, the valuations simply don’t matter much anymore.

Fund flows are the new name of the game.

And very significant funds will flow into the market every single day as millions of retail investors dollar-cost-average into an S&P500 index vehicle.

#5 - High profit margins

The S&P 500 is achieving the highest profit margins in decades.

Investors naturally pay up more for better companies.

#6 - AI

AI blah blah blah.

Enough has been said on this already.

Whether you buy it or not, the market clearly does.

#7 - Pro-business regulation will juice future profits

The current administration’s policies are seen as pro-business.

A low-regulation environment will lead to significantly more cash for these companies, as less is spent on fluff and more is returned to shareholders.

#8 - Finally… nothing matters anymore

The Fed Put.

Yolo.

Memes.

A complete loss of institutional trust.

Sneaky and infinite QE.

Nothing matters and not enough people care.

Our reality is now a big casino and the only winning move is to roll with it.

So there you have it, the eight possible reasons why the market may not be as extreme as it looks on the surface.

Is that what I actually believe?

Well, no.

I believe in up-only about as much as I believe in the Easter Bunny.

But what's a skeptic to do?

If you’re not inclined to believe in fairy tales, then Howard Marks’ recent letter laid out different “DEFCON” levels a pessimistic investor can reach.

They are:

This decision is even more tricky for our assets sitting in taxable accounts.

You may think we’re about to go full Chernobyl, but are you willing to wager 20% long-term capital gains on that bet?

Think hard.

The easiest move for most good DCA’ers is simply to change where your regular allocations go.

I usually split about half of my allocations to a basket of ETFs, and the other half to private market assets.

So what'd I do?

I simply shifted my DCA’ing into other less extreme asset classes, ones in more promising lands beyond my own.

It’s the lowest, level-6, DEFCON move.

I certainly do not know what comes next, but again to borrow from Howard Marks, I can see where the pendulum has swung.

Good luck out there 🫡

-Travis

Huge Disclaimer in Smaller Font

This content is being provided for information and discussion purposes only and should not be seen as a recommendation to do anything at all, especially not to buy or sell a security. Opinions expressed are that of the author, who is NOT a registered investment adviser, or a financial professional, or can barely even tie his shoes half the time. Do not try and copy the author or you’ll probably lose all of your money and have a rather bad day. There will also be affiliate links in here because he likes easy money.

Status at the expense of independence

Travis Jamison — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:39:00 +0000

I was just reading Morgan Housel’s fantastic list of very bad advice.

One stood out that I couldn’t quit thinking about.

I see this one far too often, and it’s usually from high-income earners.

It’s paradoxical.

Many are so thirsty for validation that they sacrifice genuine respect in exchange for a short-term eyebrow raise.

In my mind I have a clear example.

An acquaintance who has moved into a solid income bracket but has zero freedom to show for it.

He bought a brand-new Mercedes and a $20k Rolex, yet I know he has zero savings and is in debt.

His intentions are sadly clear.

He wants validation from me and those like me so damned bad, but misses the fact that the shiny toys aren’t what earn it.

It’s the opposite.

It’s a turn off.

Frequently, the richer you are, the less you usually care about those toys and trinkets.

The rich might have the toys, but it's because they are fun or because they enjoy beautiful craftsmanship. It's much less about impressing others.

Do you think Bezos looks at your watch?

I'm speaking in averages, as there are infinite counterexamples.

But, in my life, I found those at the top are far more impressed with the non-financial.

Living an interesting life
Quirky obsessions
New ideas
Art

Several years ago, earlier in my wealth journey, I was at a special intimate investor event. Everyone sitting at the table was quite financially successful.

As we went around sharing who we were, I had prepped my standard pitch. The point was to make myself look good. To look successful, and that I deserved to be sitting at that table.

As my turn came around, I was surprised. The only thing that anyone seemed even remotely interested in was that I lived in Asia for a decade.

Not my businesses. Not my assets, and certainly no silly sign of status.

No one cared. The people I had been seeking validation from only cared about the non-financial.

Now, imagine that you are someone spending all of your waking hours trying to accumulate outward signs of success? Sacrificing building up personal freedom (wealth) for the outward signs associated with wealth.

Besides the obvious shallowness of that all-too-common life, there are two other risks:

That you realize too late that there was nothing to gain from your efforts.
Or, that you don’t realize at all. Collecting signs of status is a game without end.

I believe that societal respect can on occasion come from financial success, but not as a result of the money, and certainly not from some shiny trinket.

It stems from the wisdom, the discipline, and the principles needed to accumulate such wealth when done the right way. Not from some lucky break, but from the disciplined pursuit of internal mastery.

But it also needn't come from wealth at all. I’d much rather have a conversation with a penniless monk than a finance bro.

So, when I see people trading their independence for a useless status symbol, I want to grab and shake and shout-

"I promise this isn't what you want!
Focus on freedom and living an interesting life!"

But alas I rarely do.

- Travis

🇺🇸 My wife became a U.S. Citizen! It was great.
“When you truly work for yourself, you won’t have hobbies, you won’t have weekends, and you won’t have vacations, but you won’t have work either.”
Quick 3min video from Naval on true entrepreneur “work life balance.”
The best non-partisan explanation I’ve read on the new tax law. (WSJ).
Non-paywall version is readable but doesn’t capture the scrolling graphics.
The strongest correlations with Google’s AI Overview mentions are all off-site factors. Branded web mentions, branded anchors. (Ahrefs)
What actually happens if a buyer defaults on a seller note? (screenshot)

Read anything good this week? Just hit reply.

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How I think about market crashes

Travis Jamison — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 22:53:31 +0000

_{Is that excitement?}

I see market drops differently than many.

I love it when the market tanks.

You think I'm crazy? I'm not.

As a long-term investor, my goal is simple.

I want to own as much of a productive business as possible.

The math is simple.

When prices drop, my cash buys more earnings.

Buy low, own more shares.

If XYZ Corp earns $10/share and costs $200/share, my $1,000 buys $50 in earnings
(i.e. 5 shares).

If the share price drops to $100? I can grab twice the earnings with that same cash.

Makes sense, right?

But wait, it still gets better.

Low prices compound my ownership even faster through another route - stock buybacks.

When companies buy back their stock at low prices, they retire more shares for each dollar spent.

More bang for their buck.

A bigger share of the pie for me over time.

Even if I have no more capital to invest, low prices still help due to more effective buybacks.

I want my companies to buyback and retire shares on the cheap, not at market highs.

I won't need this money for years. So why would I want high prices now?

The only time I want stocks to soar is when I’m ready to sell - at retirement.

If, like me, you’re decades away from retirement… quietly rejoice, because not all of us are this lucky.

- Travis

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⬆️ 📉 What rising rates are doing to asset prices (and why)

Travis Jamison — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 19:24:54 +0000

Hey what’s up

It’s been a month since I last wrote (been a busy guy), but I thought I’d drop in real quick to write about interesting things I’m seeing in the investing landscape.

To start, I want to explain a concept that is super important, and I’m going to say it in a few different ways.

So below is a snippet of a monthly letter from a real estate fund that I’m in.

I know it’s long, and I know it uses some complicated-sounding terms, but I really recommend just taking a moment to read the whole thing. Don’t worry about mastering the terminology, you’ll get the gist of it.

(seriously, read it, if you’re on a mobile, flip it sideways to see the font)

To summarize, essentially, a whole bunch of investors in real estate have lost all their money.

A lot hasn’t been “realized” yet, but it has already happened, and there are a bunch more RE deals that will have to face the music before too long as their interest rate caps expire.

Many will lose money, many will be forced to raise the rent on tenants a good bit just to survive (this is guaranteed), some will not be able to refi and have to do capital calls from investors, and many will just try and hold off long enough for lower rates to hopefully return.

Let’s simplify this concept a little bit.

This Tweet explains the exact same concept, just from a consumer point of view.

The same salary can now afford a significantly less expensive house vs just 1-year ago.

So either people will buy less expensive homes, or the prices of homes will have to come down (it’ll probably be both).

Now let’s look at this concept from a business owners point of view.

Just a little over a year ago I was in the final stages of selling one of my companies. I don’t generally sell businesses anymore (I collect them), but Mr. Market was being silly and offering me an almost 6x multiple on an ecommerce business, on top of all the inventory cost.

So of course I was taking that offer.

Unfortunately for my partner and I, the deal collapsed at the 11th hour. It was a combination of a lot of things: market uncertainty, aggregator blowups, rising rates, etc.

Now, what is that business worth today?

It’s only worth about 2/3 as much as it was at the beginning of last year.

This business lost 33% of its value in less than a year.

The crazy part though? The business basically still makes the exact same amount of profit, but its enterprise value dropped off a cliff.

Why? You guessed it… rates.

(I’m going to over-simplify here for the sake of the explanation)

The buyers (FBA aggregators) were generally buying businesses of this size with a combination of equity (cash) and debt. The cashflow of the business would pay the interest on the debt, and all the leftover would be profit.

Now with interest rates going up so much, the same amount of cashflow from the business can only support a much smaller amount of debt.

So what happens? It forces multiples down. And my business is worth a whole bunch less.

On top of that, with rates going up, the options for investors to get lower risk yield elsewhere goes up, which sucks liquidity out of those markets.

I can get a 5% yield on zero-risk US treasury bills right now. Why in the world would I take a higher risk and super-pain-in-the-butt 9% yield from buying a business?

(hint: I wouldn’t)

Now, one could argue that maybe my company was never actually worth a 6x. Perhaps it was only worth a 6x in a super low-rate environment where funny-money and mega-debt rules the world, but that’s a topic for another day.

Is there a lesson to any of this Travis?

Maybe a few:

1. Always wonder what your investments will look like in different interest rate environments. Remember rates change absolutely everything about valuations.

2. If you’re investing in RE deals, definitely find out about rate caps (and how long they last) in due diligence. h/t to Rob Barry in investing.io for that one, as I never thought to ask how long they were good for.

3. Be wary of debt. I absolutely hate it, but I realize that with some deals, it’s necessary. The more debt involved the less optionality that exists.

4. And finally, whenever possible, have assets where the value doesn’t matter. Look at my ecom biz I mentioned earlier. Yes the enterprise value fell, but it’s still generating the same amount of cash into my bank account each month. Sometimes Mr. Market will say the biz is worth more, and sometimes it’ll say it’s less, but that cashflow is the ticket to mental freedom.

And that’s all I care about.

Til next time,
-Travis

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💡 Branding advice from a master

Travis Jamison — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 21:39:47 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I was a little stressed. One of my businesses is a sort of holding company with a bunch of health brands in it. I'm not really associated with the different brands too much; I'm mostly just the owner who chimes in on formulas.

All was well until caffeinated-motivated-Travis decided to launch a new brand inside of it, a brand that makes the type of quality supplements that I think should exist in the world, but thus-far don't. A brand that I could put my Travis-stamp-of-approval on and call my own.

Everything was going well. The first few products were already being manufactured, I was super happy with our logo, Tony (the CEO) hadn't yelled at me yet for being my usual slow self, etc. Life was good.

I'd spent weeks of frustration searching for a brand name I liked, and had finally decided on Noble Labs. We searched for anyone else using the branding and it came up clear. The weight was lifted off my shoulders. Tap dancing ensued.

Then... we hit a snag. Our always lovely attorneys (mean it) got back to us with the official trademark search. The risk was high that we'd have problems and they couldn't give us the go-ahead.

Crushed 💀

I also knew that Tony might finally yell at me now as the manufacturers were getting cranky about having the labels.

Double crushed 💀💀

Panic ensued. I was throwing out every random name I could think of. It was ugly.

I asked the investing.io group for help. There were some solid responses (much better than I had done), but I couldn't quite find the right thing.

Then my buddy Bill D'Alessandro text me. He'd read the thread and came to help. Bill is uber-successful and has an oversized brain, so when he talks, I listen.

The Chat

And just for reference, here was his post in investing.io about using Midjourney for packaging:

Outside the box

I think you can probably see the 2nd level thinking going on in this branding exercise.

It's not just finding something that sounds neat.

> "You have to start with a customer archetype before the name."

What are some good terms to describe your ideal customer?

What real or fictional hero of yours would be the perfect embodiment of someone using your brand?

> Pick your hero archetype. Even better if it’s a character from literature, history, or fiction. If they launched a supplement brand, what would they call it?

> “What are some of Ernest Hemingway’s most famous quotes about courage”

> “Give me a list of characters from Norse mythology who are courageous” Tell me stories about those characters.

Try and find the essence of your character or archetype. Not descriptions of them, but the essence.

It's about finding a name that will evoke the desired emotion. A name that represents the qualities and principles that your company represents, but doing it in a sort of non-direct roundabout way.

> I used to do all this with google search, which was super time-consuming. ChatGPT’s summarization and ability to quote stuff makes it way faster.

And, of course, using ChatGPT and Midjourney to make the process easier.

(what newsletter in 2023 would be complete without mentioning ChatGPT at least once?)

The Result

I did indeed end up finding my new brand. The name came directly from Bill's good tips, so I most certainly owe him a steak dinner at our next meeting (steak dinners are the currency of business).

The name?

Well, I'm going to be super cruel and make you wait until I actually launch it. I'm ridiculously annoying, I know, just ask Tony (mostly kidding).

P.S. If you like Bill's insights here, he's also the man at optimizing "real" finance within a company. Take a look at this counterintuitive example.

The Bonus Round

The SEC is (rightfully) suing Genesis and Gemini for engaging in an unregistered offer and sale of securities to retail investors via the "Gemini Earn" product (Why did the SEC wait until investors lost money??). Alameda liquidators got themselves liquidated on AAVE. And then they got liquidated again 🤦. ChatGPT is piloting a pro version. Su Zhu and Kyle Davies (from the blown-up 3AC fund) are raising $25m for a new crypto claims marketplace for liquidating blown-up exchanges 🤡. Konstantine Kisin's viral speech on the only (logical) way to defeat climate change hits hard. The god-tier marketer Ryan Reynolds uses ChatGPT to write an ad in his voice (spoiler: it did a good job).

Talk to you next week,-Travis

Huge Disclaimer in Smaller Font

This content is being provided for information and discussion purposes only and should not be seen as a recommendation to do anything at all, especially not to buy or sell a security. Opinions expressed are that of the author, who is NOT a registered investment adviser, or a financial professional, or can barely even tie his shoes half the time. Do not try and copy the author, or you’ll probably lose all of your money and have a rather bad day. There may also be affiliate links in here because he likes money.

☀️ Light, Celsius death blow, a better analytics, & dopamine hits

Travis Jamison — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 13:30:20 +0000

Hey, Happy New Year!

If you're into this type of thing, then I hope your yearly reflection and planning went well. I'm still finishing up mine as we speak, but I think a little extra time is ok for something that is so insanely valuable to me. As Marc Andreessen said:

But... on that note, today's newsletter does not really have any big plan or even a central theme. It simply features a few random non-related topics that I hope you'll find interesting. Hope you enjoy.

I received a bunch of nice responses to last week’s email about my morning routine, a lot of you gave me some good tweaks I can use (thank you).

In the responses, a few people asked how they can get enough sunlight to kickstart their circadian rhythm if they live somewhere without much sun, such as when it’s rainy and gloomy outside, or if you’re just up too early for the sun to be up.

Huberman touched on this. In short, the truth is that nothing beats outdoor light, even on a cloudy day, it may just take longer (might need 20-30min in yucky weather).

But If that doesn't work, then a backup is using specialty light therapy lamps.

My personal setup is to use my two Elgato Key Lights (these are the go-to lights for home video recording). I attach them to my desk to pop over my monitor and then set the color temp to be around 4000k (roughly the same as the morning sun) at max brightness. These are not quite as good as the specialty lamps, but I don't need anything extra on my desk, so I'm ok getting close-ish.

I turn them on when I start working and keep them on for an hour or so. If nothing else, it really helps kill the gloomy day vibes of winter.

Something that won't help with gloomy vibes however...

Bad News Bears for Celsius Users

The judge presiding over the Celsius bankruptcy case just killed some of the last remaining hopes of those caught up in the debacle.

The judge just ruled that the customer deposits inside of Celsius at the collapse were the property of the estate, not the property of the depositors.

https://cases.stretto.com/public/x191/11749/PLEADINGS/1174901042380000000067.pdf

See, Celsius had a very specific Terms contract in place.

Feels wrong, doesn't it? How in the world is this even possible?

If I go and deposit my cash into my JPMorgan Chase bank account, and then Chase goes belly up, I'm still owed the cash. The cash is the property of Travis, not Chase.

Why is this different?

The reason comes down to the fact that Celsius was not a bank. If you remember, the always-pompous Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky was well known for saying, "Banks are not your friend". 😑

It seems that the way Celsius deposits were legally structured made them investments, not bank deposits, and investments can go to zero.

There is something else though. I hate to even say it, but unfortunately it's possible that even those who actually got their money out of Celsius before the collapse could be liable, and be ordered to return the funds.

There is some time limit on that. Twitter told me up to 90 days before the collapse, but that's just Twitter so no real clue.

A Very Tiny Upside

The only good thing to happen out of all of this is that New York's Attorney General is suing Alex Mashinsky for all kinds of sketchy shit, including making false statements about the financial health of the business. It is a civil suit, aimed at taking all his money, but would also restrict his future endeavors in the financial world.

Google Analytics is Terrible – Start using Clicky

(this is not a paid ad btw)

For years I've been a Google Analytics hater. It's a bloated product that just keeps getting worse, and GA-4 is a monstrosity.

And my biggest gripe... It's just so damn difficult to actually dig in and find any useful information! The info that I care about is usually buried three layers deep.

Clicky is much better at this. When you log in to Clicky, you instantly get a dashboard where you can quickly see all the data that matters to you (and it's customizable). So within 5 seconds I can see all my visitors, top pages, links that lead to those pages, etc.

Now it would be disingenuous of me to claim that Clicky is better at everything. It's definitely not. In fact, I treat Clicky and GA as almost separate products.

For me, I have both on all my sites. GA is definitely superior when doing deep-dives or syncing up ads. Clicky is superior when I just want to glance and get a feel for what's happening.

My recommendation: Try Clicky if you don’t already have it, and keep GA running in the background in case you ever need to dive deeper. I easily use Clicky 10x as much as GA.

An app to stop mindless distraction

I'm a dopamine junkie. Social media, financial news, email, etc.

When I'm aware of the hazards, I can remain strong. I build systems that prevent me from falling into the rabbit hole (like mornings spent in Airplane mode).

But, like most, I have more moments than I'd like to admit where I'm a sucker to dopamine hits.

It's not the intentional time spent on these activities that's the problem. The problem is when I unintentionally spend my time in these black holes.

When my caveman self has taken over and is opening Instagram after I just closed it. That's the problem.

I found some apps to help with this.

The tools are ScreenZen for my iPhone, and Pause for my desktop browsers (Chrome / Firefox).

These tools don't block the culprits, but instead, they try to shake me out of auto mode by making me wait a few seconds before opening.

Now, whenever I open one of the problem-apps it makes me wait for 5 seconds and then asks "are you sure?". If I'm intentionally doing it then I proceed, and if not then many times it shakes me out of my faulty autopilot.

Talk to you next week,-Travis

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👍 My formula to guarantee a good productive day

Travis Jamison — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 18:44:12 +0000

I want to share something that I believe has been really impactful in any success I’ve had thus far. This has allowed me to accomplish more, stress less, and feel more at ease in almost everything I do.

It allows me to think clearer, concentrate harder, and focus on the things that matter in my businesses and for my investments.

It’s my morning routine.

Now reading about morning routines on the web can be a bit polarizing.

On one hand, you have people who spend hours on their routine covering everything under the sun. Affirmations, manifestations, crystal fondling, “🍆 sunning”, etc. On the other hand, you have plenty of people who think morning routines are a waste of time, or at least that they are too busy and don’t have time for that.

So of course I’m going to share with you my morning routine, but I think it’s equally important to share with you my thesis around it.

What works for me might not work for you, but the principles behind it probably will.

The Rise of the Machine

I view the body as a bit of a machine.

What inputs can I give it to get the best outputs?

If I do X, I get Y.

If I don’t do X, I get Z. (and Z isn’t much fun)

My theory is that I can do certain things to my body and brain in order to maximize my outputs and to minimize as many of the pesky little negatives along the way.

Doing these certain things also provides me with another massive benefit; momentum. It gives me positive momentum going into my day, where I'm kicking ass from the start, and momentum is hard to stop.

Decreasing Resistance

Mark Manson’s now famous book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck has a couple of big points to it. One main one is that you cannot actually give a fuck about too many things. Giving a fuck about everything means that you essentially give a fuck about nothing, so you have to choose carefully.

But there are just soooo many things that you’re supposed to give a fuck about, right? How’s one supposed to choose?

Hang with me here for a moment on this thought: the hardest part of doing all the things you’re supposed to (exercise, meditation, etc) is not the actual doing of it, the hard part is actually mentally making time to do it.

Sitting and meditating for 10 minutes is super easy (you’re literally just sitting), but setting aside those 10 minutes for some reason frequently just seems too difficult. “Oh, I’ll get to that later… promise" 😬.

And the worst part of all of this is that throughout the day, you have this little nagging voice of guilt and resistance in the back of your head: “you know you should stop doing these emails and go workout dude”. Multiply that voice times 100 microtaunts a day and it’s actually a big drain on the psyche.

My Solution - Batching

The solution that works for me, and probably many others, is to just batch everything into the very first moments of the day. To do them all together, all at once, as soon as I get up.

If it’s not the very first moments, then the chances of it all getting done goes down exponentially.

Once I start doing ANYTHING else, then my routine gets 1000x harder to accomplish. And by anything I do indeed mean anything.

Even one glance at social media, or one look at my inbox, and the chances of me being successful goes down by multiples. Again, I’m not exaggerating. I don’t know why it is what it is, but that’s how it works. To make it easier on myself I generally stay in airplane mode, or at least DND mode, for most of my morning.

My morning routine is centered around how I can knock out all of those supposed-to’s in the shortest amount of time possible and in the most efficient way possible.

How can I give the machine (my body) the inputs it needs to have great outputs for the rest of the day, and how can I remove as many of those nagging regret feelings that would otherwise follow me around.

I’ve found it actually takes infinitely less willpower to knock everything out early and all at once than to try and drip it out throughout the day.

I know that if I can just complete my morning routine, then the whole rest of the day is just gravy. Even if I suck and fail at everything else I do for the rest of the day, if I just do my morning routine then I’ve succeeded at moving my life forward and being a productive human, and that just feels good.

And of course as we all know, it’s not the big “giant swings” that lead to improvements in life, it’s those little 1% improvements that compound over time.

The method

My process is broken down into three sections:

Activating the body - turning on all those processes that make it run properly
Stimulating the body - getting the blood flowing and boosting dopamine levels
Optimizing the mind - calming that chatty monkey mind, boosting my outlook, and focusing on the important tasks for the day

My personal routine

Activating the body:

Immediately after waking I chug 700ml of water w/ electrolytes. This rehydrates everything Iost throughout the night. (The water is always prepared the night before).
I stand in the sun for 5 min as I take my dog out. Morning sunlight in your eyes activates all kinds of hormones and signaling devices that wake you up, and even helps you sleep better at night. Don’t listen to me though, listen to this quick clip from Andrew Huberman. (seriously, listen)

Stimulating the body:

I do a ~ 10 minute HIIT (high-intensity interval training) workout. I make mine hard AF so that if it’s the only thing I do today then I’m happy with it, but everyone has their own fitness levels. Some good places to get started are the Seven App, 30 days of HIIT, or the Power10 series from Alo Yoga if you like nonstop strength-based yoga (it’s really good, here's 60% off annual membership). If you want to know exactly what I do, feel free to ask.
A 2-minute ice bath in my Ice Barrel (affiliate link w/ a discount). Let’s just say it like it is… a lot of ice bath people have those crazy eyes. But despite the oddness of the ice bath niche, there is definitely an abundance of scientifically proven benefits that come from cold exposure. The most pronounced one that people feel is the 2.5x increase in dopamine that lasts for hours after exposure. This boosts motivation and alertness. Most things that boost dopamine come with a drop afterwards, but cold exposure is one of the only free lunches. I’ll lean on Andrew Huberman once more to explain all the goodies.

Optimizing the mind:

I do 10 minutes of meditation. It helps me create awareness, calm my chatty little monkey mind, and boost my ability to focus on the task at hand. Using an app is the easiest way to get started. I have subscriptions to Headspace, Calm, and Waking up but just one (or none!) is fine.
A quick journal. I find this to be perfect right after meditation. My journaling usually only takes about 3-5 minutes. It helps me have more gratitude, focus on what’s important that day, and to “eat that frog”. Below are my prompts if you’re curious (and here's a Notion template version if you'd like to copy).

And that’s it. I like to almost challenge myself to see how quickly I can get it done, as the real time-sucks here are not the activities themselves, but the transition time between different tasks. If I don't rush it, then I blink and it's lunchtime.

Reality

You might be wondering what my success rate on this is? Is it realistic? Are you a robot Travis? (My wife sure thinks so)

I'll let you know how it works for me. The "activation" part (water/sun) happens almost without fail (it's easy). The morning workouts happen a good 28/30 days a month, and the mediation/journaling happens maybe 60% of the time.

If I'm running late (or I'm weak and open my phone early), then the meditation is the first thing I cut for whatever reason.

All of this failure is ok though, as I just want to be roughly moving in the right direction in life, not being perfect all the time. The more that I do these things the easier it becomes to do every day. It becomes a habit that happens naturally.

Personalization

As I mentioned at the beginning, I know that my routine isn't perfect for everyone. Kids will certainly complicate some things.

I think the general principles behind my routine could work for most people though. Activate, stimulate, optimize. Even if I shortened it to just 3 minutes of jumping jacks after rolling out of bed and a 3 min meditation, I would still get a lot of the results.

It's also worth noting that I change mine, it's not a forever-fixed routine. Sometimes I'll add in a bunch of stoicism and sometimes I'll ditch it completely. Play around with what works for you.

And my final tip: write it all down. Make it into a checklist and print it out on a little card. Take the decision-making out of it every day, and it all gets easier.

Have any thoughts or improvements? Let me know!

Thanks!-Travis

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1. The 10min workout is my usual, but sometimes I change. Sometimes I add in a mobility routine first, and sometimes if I have more time, I'll do a true full 30min workout. The 10min is the minimum that at least always happens.

♠️ Poker, risk, and avoiding financial blowups

Travis Jamison — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:37:50 +0000

Howdy. As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I recently made my annual poker pilgrimage to the local-ish casino to play the WSOP crowd.

It's a good time. Good energy, good friends, lots of money, and rooms packed full of (mostly) awkward (mostly) males from all walks of life who descend upon this tiny tribal town to try to outsmart other awkward males into giving them all their money.

What's not to love?

For those wondering, I did pretty well based on my small-timer metrics. I didn't play the tournaments (they take too long), I just played all the many cash games outside of the tournament with those who had already busted out. I cashed in for $1k and left with $4,700 the next day.

This is about the norm for me every time I go. Sometimes I win a little more, and sometimes I win a little less, but I can't actually remember the last time I went and played poker at a casino and lost money. It's been many years.

Now, the funny thing is that I'm not really a great poker player. I'm ok, yeah sure, but I'm nothing special.

The thing I believe I'm good at is knowing how to win. Not playing poker, but winning.

I think it's maybe an emotional intelligence thing, not necessarily a skill thing. In fact, when I was ~ 20, like so many other entrepreneurs, I played online as a source of income.

I was actually a much better technical player then. Like wayyyyy better. I instantly knew the probabilities of hitting my possible outs, I could run the math in my head of if I was getting good odds, etc.

I honestly can't remember a damn bit of that now, but yet I consistently win more than I did during my more-skilled youth.

Why?

I think it probably has a lot to do with my business and investing career. A surprising amount of these meta-skills translate into other walks of life, including poker.

There are a boatload of skills that relate. Patience, adaptability, bankroll management, choosing the right table (competitors), ego, etc.

Let's chat about a couple of these, and directly how they tie into making good business decisions in our crazy world right now.

How amateurs win at tennis

A couple of years ago, I was hunting for a mortgage and having a really hard time. Despite being in a good place financially and having great credit I just didn't check the right boxes for a traditional mortgage (banks love steady paychecks, even if they are actually more fragile). I was venting on Twitter about it and trying to get some advice.

My super-smart friend Jason Buck (CIO of Mutiny Fund) called me for a chat. He didn't have an immediate answer to my problem, but he'd been thinking about how to solve it for some time.

He was (halfway) proposing that we start a bank. A bank specifically for entrepreneurs. A bank that was run by people who understand how entrepreneurs' assets work, and then developing a method so we could provide loans against them (aka mortgages). I'm simplifying, but you get the gist.

I don't remember the specifics, but I think the plan was to maybe raise $10mil or so, buy the smallest bank known to man (just to get the hard-to-obtain banking license), and then to start working towards the new founder-friendly vision.

I listened for a bit, and gave my feedback.

"Jason, I love this idea. I think it would be amazing if it works.""But man, that just sounds really hard. There are just so many easier sure-fire ways to make money."

This is a business that SHOULD exist. If it works, building a new bank could be insanely lucrative (just look at Mercury). But talk about an uphill battle filled with torture and paperwork and government and decades.

Howard

Howard Marks is one of the OG value investors of our time. Inside one of his legendary memos called "What’s Your Game Plan?", he talks about winning as a tennis pro vs winning as a tennis amateur.

go me!

As an amateur, all you have to do to win is not make game-losing moves.

If you survive, you win.

Now let's go back to poker. Why is it that I can consistently crank out a modest profit?

Luck? Probably. High IQ? Definitely not.

IMO I think a lot is just because I frequently go for the easy-mode wins.

If I'm at a table and I feel everyone is better than me, I move tables or go home.

Last year, as it got late, I was at the table and noticed a couple of the guys knew the staff, a few others knew each other, and they all seemed to be there a lot. "Uh oh" I thought, "I'm the mark". I got up and went home, setting aside my ego.

I also don't try and play 5D chess. I play with plenty of focus on downside mitigation and bankroll management. Maybe I have a so-so hand, but I actually think I'm probably ahead of my opponent. If I'm being challenged really hard for large sums I might decide to just lay it down.

I might be right, but being wrong could be very costly and my hand is only so-so to start with. I'm focusing on the bigger picture.

I can win on the more sure-thing bets, which will come.

Of course, you can't just sit there and wait all night for pocket aces, you have to play offense. If all players pick up that you're just waiting around all night they'll fold when you show aggression. It's a balance of not getting carried away.

But in the end, it's a bit like amateur tennis in that I'm just waiting for the opponent to make the error, not focusing on outsmarting everyone at the table. I'm playing against amateurs, not pros. They will make errors.

The tie-in

Now, clearly, y'all know I've really been talking about business and investing this whole time. Let's just tie a few things together.

Table selection

Think of Amazon FBA in the early days. If you just threw any sort of neon spatula up on Amazon you'd be a millionaire. Now you have to do a bazillion more difficult things and compete against thousands of others with deep pockets doing the same.

Or think of Crypto in 2020 and 2021. If you did any sort of yield farming (and heavily diversified away your blowup risks) you probably made millions. Now all of the most profitable crypto people I know are just sitting on the sidelines, hoping that one day another bull run ponzi-szn will happen.

Yeah, you can still make some money, but the risk is high and the rewards are low, and since there is zero true fundamental value, there is no technical bottom to any of it. (An ETH at $200 works just as well as an ETH at $2,000).

Bankroll management

I relentlessly focus on not blowing up. You ARE going to lose money on bets, whether that be investments or marketing campaigns. The trick is ensuring that you don't overreach with anything.

I make "high-risk" investments all the time. I have an angel portfolio of about 60 companies. More than half of these will go to zero. That's ok though, it's expected, I'm diversified into all kinds of asset classes, cash-flowing small businesses, stocks, PE, real estate funds, cash, etc.

Ego

Although I don't really do what they do, I love listening to stories about traders like George Soros, Druckenmiller, and Paul Tudor Jones. Some of the best traders we've ever seen.

One thing that I love about them is how quick they are to kill their own ideas and change their minds (and positions).

I looked for the actual story but couldn't find it (email me if you remember it), but there is a story of Soros (or maybe Tudor Jones?) along the lines of at breakfast he was chatting with a friend about how he had very high conviction on a trade where he was long. His friend responded with how he was short and why.

That day ended up being the famed "Black Monday" in 1987, the market cratered and the friend feared the worst for Soros, but when he saw him he was in a great mood. Soros had changed his mind in minutes, done a complete 180, and ended up wildly profitable.

Winning vs not losing

In the end, there isn't a "right" path to go here.

If I wanted to be a billionaire, maybe I should have considered Jason's bank idea.

Poker pros will have much bigger swings. The good ones will win insane amounts, but the slightly less good ones (or unlucky ones) will disappear.

Some of the richest people in the crypto space were those who went all-in and leveraged themselves up early on. Their conviction paid off with ridiculous sums.

But there is a lot of survivorship bias to that too. How many people leveraged themselves on the wrong token, or in 2022, or used the wrong exchange?

How many of the r/WallStreetBets crowd made millions from the GameStop and AMC trade, and how many lost their homes (or at least their wives)?

I know what works for me, and I'm happy to be on that path. I maximize my investment portfolio for good sleep, and boy oh boy do I sleep well at night.

Until next week,

Thanks
-Travis

P.S. I probably jinxed my poker winnings for life after this newsletter.

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🤖 Diving into the crazy new ChatGPT

Travis Jamison — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 19:08:24 +0000

Welp, it's official. AI is cray-cray, and it seems we're starting to hit that exponential growth curve so who knows where we'll be next year.

This week OpenAI publicly opened up the beta/testing version of ChatGPT... AND IT IS INSANE. It's open to anyone, for free, so just sign up for an account and play with it here.

You probably already know, but just in case you don't, OpenAI is the artificial intelligence company that has made huge waves in the space with the release of things like GPT-3 in 2020 (which alllll the AI writers use) and DALL·E (the program that makes those crazy pictures based on what you tell it).

OpenAI has a lot of important people involved with it, including its CEO Sam Altman (the former president of Y Combinator). Its mission statement is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Originally founded as a non-profit, it changed itself to a "Capped-Profit" company in 2019 to attract investors, which seems to make sense to me. Investors can now make up to 100x their money, but no more.

The new ChatGPT is technically "GPT-3.5". It's the next iteration of GPT-3 that everyone has been using, but now it's optimized for dialogue and seems hella smarter.

So how smart is this thing? Let me show you a boatload of ChatGPT use cases that will blow your mind.

It can write poetry:

https://twitter.com/blennon_/status/1598030787709845506

It can do your copywriting

https://twitter.com/max_blessen/status/1598207494836588545

RIP recipe sites 💀

https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1598920887029628928

Replace your lawyer

(click to watch it create a contract in 30 seconds)

Find bugs in your code

It can write code for new programs… that works

Plan your PR campaign

It can help you hack a smart contract

https://twitter.com/gf_256/status/1598104835848798208

And all of this has been discovered just in the last three days since the release. Who knows what all we will find by next week?

It's probably a really good time to use this gif:

ChatGPT is not perfect though.

There is a seemingly massive amount of failed prompts, where the bot can produce wrong information, or possibly just made up information. Just scroll this search query to see tons of examples.

https://twitter.com/search?q=chatgpt%20fail

Also since there is not one single source of truth, there are a lot of questions that might get bad responses. The model's dataset also ended in September 2021, so it can't answer real-time queries.

It's also probably a good time to use this quote:

"With great power comes great responsibility" -Uncle Ben to Peter Parker

ChatGPT itself even warns of some of the potential bad shit that could happen.

Considering that ChatGPT is already a better writer than me, and just a few modification scripts could send it on a misinformation campaign... you can almost guarantee that this WILL happen. Add to that some of the deepfake videos and I shudder to think what could will happen.

We already found out that ChatGPT is purposely disconnected from the internet... but it doesn't have to be. A flip of a switch and this thing is everywhere.

What can we do with this?

Again, I want to emphasize how all of these capabilities have only been discovered within the last 3 days since release. And I might add that the API access is not even live yet, all of this has just been discovered using OpenAI's dashboard prompt interface.

To take this back to GPT-3, its release was cool and all, but the real amaze-balls stuff came from allowing entrepreneurs and geeks (and entrepreneur-geeks) API access so they could build products on top of it.

So the REALLY cool stuff with ChatGPT hasn't even shown itself yet. Stay tuned for the API release.

We can guess a little though. And the ramifications could be world changing.

Here's a fun little thought for you.

For years, Google has always claimed to not really be a monopoly. They always said they were vulnerable to disruption. I always believed them on this, but I don't think too many others did.

ChatGPT could be a massive direct competitor to Google.Instead of Googling something, sorting through affiliate spam, and digging through a few websites, you could just ask ChatGPT... and have follow-up responses based on that.

Of course, we know that Google has internal projects building the same thing as OpenAI, and they have billions more in funding to play with.

In 2021, Google announced a massive one trillion-parameter transformer system when GPT-3 was "only" using 175 billion. I am not up to date on the capabilities of Google yet (if you know please reply and share).

You can war-game out a few scenarios here just from this:

Google is forced to change how its search engine business works. SEO's generally hate featured snippets, answer boxes, etc. But with ChatGPT changing how people use the internet I could see Google having to offer an "ask the AI" feature for queries that don't need an opinion. Edit* 2 minutes after publishing I found a Chrome Extension to show ChatGPT answers beside Google search results.
Infinite Google-replacement competitors pop up. Below is an example screenshare of some hacker who got a version of ChatGPT working inside of Whatsapp. Need to Google something? Nah don't bother just text the AI.

(click the Tweet to see it in action)

Now multiply this over millions of script kiddies who can spin up an app over a weekend.

Makes you ponder things a bit doesn't it?

What's next?

Let's not forget that this is "just" GPT-3.5. Just a stepping stone.

It's almost a joke at this point, but GPT-4 is next and it's expected to basically walk on water and cure cancer all while making me a margarita.

Also, try and think exponentially here. Remember humans are not naturally very good at this.

I don't have any real clue on what these types of developments will bring to our future, but I'm pretty certain they will change things.

It's also a sort of well-known phenomenon that once one person or company discovers something then others will crack the code soon after.

All of these big giant tech co's around the world with infinite budgets and infinite computing power are sure to have similar things around the corner.

Have any thoughts, ideas, or requests? Please just hit reply and say hi.

Thanks-Travis

🫂 Frens R Gud

Travis Jamison — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 19:00:00 +0000

Warren Buffett is the investing GOAT. Yeah, there may be a few who made higher percentage returns for a bit, but none that have consistently crushed for seven decades straight and in such a transparent simplistic manner.

How did he become the 🐐? I see three reasons:

He’s a literal genius
He basically reads every report from every public company ever, especially in the early days.
His friends

The first two are well known, but the third one isn’t really talked about as much. What do friends have to do with it? Are you suggesting inside information Travis?

Nope

Friends can offer a fantastic way to learn. I consider myself pretty good at what I do, but I can honestly say that I would be nothing if it weren’t for the people I’ve met along the way.

Buffett frequently spent hours on the phone with friends each day, simply talking about what they saw and thought. He was constantly on a plane to New York or California to just meet and hang out with people. He openly admitted that he probably had more friends in those places than in Omaha (similar to me and Austin, TX 👋).

During those calls, they would discuss ideas, challenge each other's thoughts, and share things they had learned. No one person can gather all the insights that exist, not even Buffett. We learn from one another, and grow together as a group, and even as a species.

I can’t recommend enough investing in these relationships, both for professional improvement and, more importantly, for life fulfillment. And to be clear, it is an investment. Sometimes you have to put in the work of being a good friend before you can reap the rewards of having good friends.

I start with this preamble because my week just happened to be jam-packed with takeaways from a few people I'm lucky enough to know. I'm reaping the rewards of friendship.

Takeaways from my smart friends this week

Survival is all that matters in a bear market

Late last week, I had the pleasure of Sweaty Startup’s Nick Huber and his business partner Dan Hagberg coming through town.

They planned to go hiking with some of their buddies on Asheville's world-class trails, but when the weather changed, they hit me up, and we went out to a pub instead. I destroyed them at darts 😀

Of course, the conversations eventually shifted to our businesses and investments and all that jazz.

The story of their self-storage business is nuts. They’d been growing like crazy in 2021, buying 32 new properties for over $59 million and growing their staff from 4 to 34 employees. I'm an investor in one of their funds and can attest that they do this in intelligent ways. They don't overreach just for the sake of growth like a lot of startups.

But now the economy has shifted, and things have turned super quiet. For example, they only did ONE deal in the past few months (valued at $1.85m).

As we chatted about this, it became clear we looked at this situation the same way:

In a bear market, you don’t necessarily have to focus on making a big play or turning a big profit with your business.

All you have to do is SURVIVE

If you survive, the rest will usually take care of itself

There are two sides to the survival-first mentality.

In downturns, if you just make it to the other side, you win. If you come out intact, you can take advantage of the upswing, while those who didn’t make it are out of the game (maybe permanently).
If you’re frugal and savvy and stacked cash, then down-markets can be a great time to find amazing deals.

This applies to all markets, but let's dig into their storage unit biz as an example.

With interest rates rising, the math for doing a lot of deals no longer makes sense. I talked about this last week with my personal ecom example, but the gist is that as debt payments go up from higher interest, then the profitability of many deals goes down. The math changes.

A new deal that would have been profitable a year ago would now lose money today, or at the very least, not offer enough profit to make the risk/reward worth it.

Stack higher debt payments on top of a cooling storage unit market (fewer people are moving homes, thus less need for storage units), and it creates a double-whammy of slowing growth.

But, the odd thing is, that this is not really a bad thing.

Nick and Dan have been smart. They built in buffers for downturns, they fixed the rates on all of their debt when rates started going up, and they built a lean low-cost team.

So now... they can just wait. Wait for the markets to change, or maybe even better, for poorly run competitors to throw in the towel. They're excited about what is to come.

When money is cheap and plentiful, it's easy to keep things afloat. People are loose with cash and spend freely. Startups can raise infinite capital, refinance debt for pennies, and know that they can always buy time.

But things change. When poorly run competitors give up, it is a fantastic opportunity for skilled operators to buy assets on the cheap. Capital is more scarce, there will be fewer bids, and the prices of assets will be markedly cheaper.

This is how many value investors have outperformed their growth counterparts over time. They may underperform a little during market-mania, but they are still around when the house of cards collapses.

They survived, so they won.

What do the very best stock investors do?

Scammy headline, I know, but it's a legit question.

This week my big-brained friend Simon Stock (real name) came and hung out at my house for a couple of days. This is a guy that I've learned soooo much from over the years.

Simon is an entrepreneur turned investor who focuses most of his "energy" on buying public equities. I put "energy" in quotes on purpose.

Take a look at this tweet I shared:

Many people claim to do what Simon does, but few walk the walk.

One of the hardest parts of being a successful investor is playing the waiting game. NOT doing stuff just to be active. NOT giving into FOMO when prices are high. Not speculating, investing.

It's similar to being a good poker player. In general, good players don't play shit hands against other good players; they wait for good cards to come and then join the pot. It's a waiting game; the most challenging part is boredom.

So after my tweet, someone asked me, "so what does Simon actually do then?".

i.e., if he's not watching the stock prices all day, what does he do?

Over the years, he identified around 80ish companies that fit his criteria of being the right type of company.

This means that they have to:

earn a high internal rate of return on capital ( ROIC > 20%)
be run by capable management
and not be easily susceptible to disruption.i.e., he likes to say every day some genius kid wakes up and tries to disrupt Google, but no one wakes up and says, "I want to disrupt chocolate."

I'm probably simplifying a bit here, but after spending years with the guy, this is what he actually does:

He reads the annual reports of all the companies he's interested in when they come out, as well as the Fed reports.
He sets price alerts for those companies based on when they are statistically cheap (based on their earnings and growth rate).
That's it.

That's it. He just waits for them to get cheap based on his fundamental analysis of the business. NOT the news of the company, not the sentiment of the market. Just logical, thoughtful analysis and patience.

And in case you're wondering, he is one of those rare unicorns who actually beats the market by a sizable margin WHILE taking far less speculative risk IMO. Oh and he's also getting good cash-flow (dividends) along the way.

You hear of these people from time to time, and everyone says that they want to do this, but few do.

THIS is why he can easily go a month without checking the market prices and still sleep well at night. He knows in detail the underlying businesses of the stocks he owns, he has his price targets, and he just waits for those alerts.

No speculation needed. No watching CNBC needed.

Here is an old podcast if you'd like to learn more about his style.

Everything about buying businesses with SBA loans

If you’ve ever thought about buying a small- or medium-sized business, this great podcast episode is worth a watch.

My buddy Bill D’Alessandro is one of the single best business minds I know, and in that episode, he interviews a well-versed SBA lender who goes through all of the ins and outs, many of which I wasn't aware of.

Some topics they discuss:

How to structure your loans
How to protect your downside as a buyer
What lenders are looking for in a buyer
Seller notes: how they work (this part was great)
What to look for when acquiring a business
Current market & loan conditions
What default looks like if it happens

I found it fascinating to learn more about these deals, how to structure them intelligently, and how the overall SBA game works.

SBA loans are not a great option for everyone. Over-extending yourself with a business that can crash has its risks. Concentration risk is big here, as your other assets could be up for grabs (but not necessarily for everyone as I recently learned).

I enjoyed this episode more than I thought I would. I thought I'd poke through for 3 minutes and then move on, but it was super solid even for those not interested in SBA (just to understand structuring options).

The Bonus Round

SBF tries to explain himself via Twitter DM’s (while his lawyers shit themselves). The post-collapse FTX hack might have been at the request of the Bahamian government. FTX gets a theme song. A great thread on different types of SEO content algos. Amazon joins the other big tech firms adjusting to the new normal by cutting 10,000 corporate employees. Musk warns employees to “prepare for difficult times”, tells staff to start paying for their own lunch, and ends remote work except for “exceptional” employees (all of which seems normal, no?). Finally experience a nuclear explosion with VR.

Until next week,

– Travis

Huge Disclaimer in Smaller Font

🤡 Swimming naked, sticky inflation and a clown show.

Travis Jamison — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Happy Thanksgiving weekend to anyone who's celebrating. I hope you’re spending some quality time with your loved ones, or at least not fist fighting for TV's in Walmarts Friday morning.

I was lucky enough to bring together lots of my family from all over the world to my place for the weekend to binge on turkey and vino, and now after pressing send on this newsletter I'm off for a little annual WSOP tradition.

Here's what's been happening this week.

History Lessons: How “Transitory” Is Inflation?

Everybody and their uncle has been trying to guess what's going to happen next with inflation.

I've never seen so many crystal balls on Twitter.

Is inflation going down? Is it going to be transient or resilient? Is the Fed pivoting, slowing, stopping, jogging, or just guessing?

Well, this article looks at what *history* shows us

I hate to say it, but the article doesn't exactly paint a rosy picture.

To quote:

"Bad news: History tells us that once the inflation genie is out of the bottle, it can take far longer to return to normal levels than most people realize."

The key takeaways directly from the article:

The US Federal Reserve Bank’s expectations for the speed of reverting to 2% inflation levels remains dangerously optimistic.
An inflation jump to 4% is often temporary, but when inflation crosses 8%, it proceeds to higher levels over 70% of the time.
If inflation is cresting, inflation levels of 4 or 6% revert by half in about a year. If inflation is accelerating, 6% inflation reverts to 3% in a median of about seven years, threatening an extended period of high inflation.
Reverting to 3% inflation, which we view as the upper bound for benign sustained inflation, is easy from 4%, hard from 6%, and very hard from 8% or more. Above 8%, reverting to 3% usually takes 6 to 20 years, with a median of over 10 years.

These things are complicated. It's ALWAYS different than it was before.

Now we have some perverted combo of leftover Covid supply chain shenanigans, Russian/Ukraine war disruptions, trillions in helicopter money, and so on.

This IS different than before, but how much of it will rhyme with the past?

I don't have a clue, and no one else does either (including the Fed).

But, like all crystal-ball looking, it's always a bit exciting to try and guess the future. I can't hate on that.

Also, just a reminder on why this matters. The YOLO'ers out there miss the low rates so they can go back to Gamestop hunting, but there's a lot more to it than that.

High inflation:

Furthers the wealth gap - the poor spend more of their income just to survive (wages never really keep up).
Furthers the wealth gap - the rich can just tuck their money in treasuries paying sweet no-risk yields.
Stifles innovation. As we chatted about a couple of weeks ago, with high interest rates the hurdle (necessary returns) for productive assets (startups) must go up in order to attract capital. That's hard.
Stifles innovation. It kills deals of existing assets to those who can improve them. See last week's issue with Nick and Dan and their storage units, or the unattractive outlook on deploying debt to grow an existing company (debt payments become too high).
Destroys old people on fixed pensions.

And a lot more that I'm sure we'll talk about another time.

I have a primer quote for our next section:

“As a rule, Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.”

- John Stuart Mill

And boy oh boy, have we had some good examples of that lately:

🤡 Genesis 🤡

🤡 🤡 Masayoshi Son & SoftBank 🤡 🤡

Masayoshi Son owes $4.7bn to SoftBank following tech rout(Bloomberg Article)

Cumulative returns on SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Latin America portfolio plummeted from a gain of $56 billion a year ago to an overall loss of $1.5 billion in its most recent report.

The company’s core Vision Fund segment posted a $7.2 billion loss in the July-September quarter.

$56 billion to zero

🤡 🤡 🤡 Pomp 🤡 🤡 🤡

🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡 FTX 🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡

Just nothing surprises me here anymore. I'm numb. I barely even know how this dumpster fire is possible.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls...”-John Ray iiiFTX liquidator

Note that this dude was the liquidator of ENRON.

He goes on to say:“From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

Examples:

After SBF claimed that FTX's less-liquid tokens were worth $5.5 Billion, it turns out they're only worth $659,000.
SBF personally cashed out an undisclosed $300mil from a funding round.
SBF donated $300k to the House Committee members now investigating him, and some very questionable interactions with SEC chair Gary Gensler.
FTX employees used corporate funds to buy personal real estate (in their name), took loans without documentation, and now there isn't even a true record of who actually worked there.
And note that SBF is still scheduled to speak at The New York Times Dealbook summit.

I just can’t help but be impressed by the massive destruction of wealth these guys pulled off.

I also can't help but be impressed at the massive amount of sketchiness going on behind the scenes. Is there some deeper cynical plot?

Anywho, here's something amusing for those who followed crypto for the last few years. A little schadenfreude on the now infamous Tweet.

I may sound like I'm being lighthearted and maybe even enjoying a bit of this. Well, to be honest, that is because I am. It's funny how crazy it got.

But I know it's not amusing to those who got caught up in this mess. I have friends who have taken a beating with all this craziness, and that's very sad.

The sad parts are not that these things are imploding, as they should, but that people who did not know any better got taken in. Even somewhat sophisticated individuals got wrapped up in this, so normies can get a bit of a pass.

The upside is that, hopefully, this lesson of what happens during market exuberance will stick with at least a few people in the long run.

This is not a jab at speculation. Speculators who know they are speculating are fine.

It's a jab at "investing" when it just isn't so. It's a jab at "it's different this time" or "valuations don't matter" or the common get-rich-quick-with-no-downside mentality.

The above clown show is just an example, but I put meme-stonks, companies that could never be profitable, extreme stock-based compensation, growth over any chance of profitability, token emission "cashflow", $20mil seed rounds, and beanie babies all in the same basket.

Sanity always prevails in the end. I'm not against playing the game, but just know what game you're playing.

It's sometimes annoying how right Buffett always is, but here we are finishing with yet another Buffett quote:

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.”

The Bonus Round

Here's my new favorite alternative to Loom for video recording. Content At Scale announced that it can no longer be detected by AI writer detection apps. Metamask's default RPC will now collect your IP address and Eth address, here is alternative 1, and alternative 2 (DYOR) to prevent that. Privacy focused Proton.me (Mail/VPN/Drive) is 40% off for BF (not an affiliate link, it's just a good product)

Happy holidays and until next week,

– Travis

Huge Disclaimer in Smaller Font

💣 Here we go again... FTX

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Every damn time I think I'm finished writing about crypto, it just reels me back in.

This recent saga reads like a hybrid script of if a soap-opera and The Onion had a mutant baby. Eventually, you just stop being surprised by crypto and just accept that it’s a looney house.

I wrote up a short-ish simplified version of these latest shenanigans that led to FTX going from being a $32 Billion company to being worth $0 in less than a week.

If reading crypto rants is this your thing, you can read this crazy write-up here.

This was cool

After being a fan of the This Week In Startups podcast for so years, it was pretty neat to actually sponsor last week's episode via Smash Digital. It just feels good to hear our brand mentioned among the big boys that usually sponsor Jason’s pod.

Important clip for all founders AND investors to hear

Speaking of Jason, the last All-In Podcast had a segment that I think is really important for everyone involved in business, startups, or investing to hear.

The entire episode was great. But what’s super crucial is their conversation about the recent tech layoffs, why valuations are dropping so much, and how the math behind this all actually makes sense.

Just pay close attention to everything Chamath says from 15:30 onwards and get educated. It’s brainy stuff and they explain it better than almost anyone else can.

For those who don't watch it, I'll go over some easy cliffs-notes.

The risk-free return rate (govt bonds) is approaching 5%. I can earn that without taking any risk whatsoever.
So that means that other investment opportunities need to provide a return well in excess of this. If I can invest risk-free for 5%, or in your higher-risk deal for 8%, I'll take the 5% all day long.
To quote: “The dollar that is right in front of you is now meaningfully more important than a dollar that is far far away from you”.
The cost of capital is going up along with rates. It's more expensive for many companies to access capital and operate.

To give a real-world example, I own an e-commerce business that sells a lot of stuff on Amazon. Last year we were being offered loans in the 7.5% range, but today the rate is 12.99%. That means if we were to use (or need to use) the loans then we have to get a return far in excess of 12.99% just as the starting point for it to make sense.

When you start running the math everything changes. Strategies that were once profitable just a few months ago could now lose money.

Think of all of these buyouts over the last few years. A classic example is the Amazon aggregators. If they are buying Amazon co's using debt, as most are, then now the debt payments on the same amount of capital have gone up substantially.

With that, the aggregators can now only afford a much smaller amount of debt, which drags down the market multiples. So just having higher interest rates in the world made my actual e-commerce company worth less, even though its revenue and profit haven't budged.

This is an important concept for all those in business to grasp.

Meta is cutting costs and laying off 11,000 employees

Joining in on all the tech layoffs is Meta, laying off more than 11,000 employees (or 13% of their staff).

This goes to show that even Meta – where Zuck has complete voting control – has to face the realities of the market and rein in their spending.

All these stories point towards big tech, in general, coming to the realization they’ve overstaffed and overspent. What we see might be the changing landscape of hiring in tech going forward as companies focus on profitability over growth at all costs.

And who knows, maybe Meta is aware of something about the shifting economic tides. All that ad and ad spend data might give them exclusive insights into what'll happen in the world. Either way, something’s changing and this story is an important signal to take note of.

Note* Since Meta announced these layoffs, and a return to trying to actually make a profit, the stock has soared:

Bearly.ai: another cool text-based AI tool (free)

I feel like every week there is a new fun AI tool leveraging GPT-3. I thought this one was well done.

It's called Bearly.ai. It's essentially an always-there helper that you can use in your browser. Just use a keyboard shortcut and this box pops up.

GPT-3 is amazing, but the real value comes down to how it's applied. Content At Scale is a clear and unique example, where they built layers on top of GPT-3, and BearlyAI is as well.

It's the same algo, just used in an easy and efficient way.

Below is the "Executive Summary" function used on my article last week, which I thought was pretty well done. It's a long article and summarized it in 10 seconds.

Until next week,

– Travis

Huge Disclaimer in Smaller Font

🩸 Blood, profitability, options, and valuations

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 15:51:46 +0000

$SNAP… $META… $AMZN…

So it turns out, that in the end, markets actually do care about valuations and free cash flow.

Who would’ve guessed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Each of these companies got spanked this week in its own unique way, but it all kinda rhymed. It all came down to profitability, at reasonable prices.

A few things that caught my attention

1. Underwater OptionsAlmost all big tech companies have been paying their employees with options (essentially shares). The problem is that a lot of the options are underwater now that the stock prices have sunk so much.Essentially a lot of these employees ended up making far less than they had planned. Expect to see some different forms of compensation in the future, both as employees don’t want to get shafted, and as investors finally revolt (see next point).

2. Stock-Based Compensation (SBC)It’s been a free-for-all of poor financial stewardship for years now. $SNAP has been one of the worst, and investors are over it.

A huge chunk of this comes down to how the companies are paying for their expenses (employee compensation). It’s not all coming from revenue, that’s for sure. Massive amounts of it are coming from the issuance of new shares.

To put this in perspective, Snap issued over $1billion in new shares in 2021, mostly to pay the insiders. Every new share created dilutes the value to existing shareholders (cutting the same pie into smaller slices).

As a crazy example, in 2017 Snap lost $720M, but Even Spiegel awarded himself $636M in new stock.

3. BuybacksBuybacks get a bad rep, but the intelligent practice of buybacks can make a lot of sense. It can be a tax-efficient way to return profits to owners. By buying back shares, companies are essentially making the remaining slices of the pie bigger, entitling each remaining shareholder to a greater ownership share of the company.

The problem with buybacks comes when companies simply use them as a way to cover up the SBC mentioned above, OR they do buybacks at too elevated a price. The problem is when CEO’s use them as ways to try and game the markets.

Here is a fantastic thread explaining how META botched this up, and abused shareholder capital.

It’s worth reading, but the TL;DR is that Facebook used almost 78% of its profits to buyback stock over the last 6 years, but they did buybacks at a significantly higher share price than today (bad investment), AND the total amount of shares barely even went down due to all the SBC being issued.

SNAP tried the same buyback strategy (charade) but the results are even worse, and the share count still grew massively.

4. Profitability and ValuationsFor the last little bit of this tirade, we’ll turn to AMZN and META together. Both of these truly are amazing companies that swim in oceans of earnings. The problem right now, and one reason why the market punished them so hard this week, comes down to valuations and profitability.

For Amazon, it’s not that the company suddenly became a big cash suck, it’s simply that its growth slowed down. When something is growing like a weed you can pay a lot more for it. But, when that same thing slows down (as all things eventually do), valuations have to come back to earth.

Add to that all the king-sized capital expenditures the company has and the outlook can change.

Meta is similar. It shits cash, but with Zuck spending insane amounts attempting to build out his metaverse vision, there are a lot less profits available for shareholders. This is despite investors’ pleas to limit Meta’s capital expenditures to reasonable levels, as was demonstrated in this viral open letter to Zuckerberg by Brad Gerstner of Altimeter.… which Zuckerberg essentially just said “nah” to.

AMZN and META are two of the greatest companies of all time, but just because they are great doesn’t mean that they are great at any price.

Add to that general market nervousness, a slowing economy, and the risk-free rate of treasuries getting close to 5%, and investors have a lot more options to consider.

The Last Day for 9.62% iBonds

This one is only for Americans (and residents), but the Series I Savings Bonds (inflation-protected government bonds) are getting the interest rate reset next week. It’s currently 9.62%, but is expected to drop to the 6.x% after that.

If you want to lock in the rate, better move quickly. It’s mostly limited to $10k per person per year.

*Note* the TreasuryDirect website is crashing some under demand, so you may have to be patient.

What happened in China this week

One of my favorite things I read is this weekly Twitter thread on what all is happening in China.

(spoiler: there is always a lot happening in China)

I think it’s wild to see all the crazy shit that goes down, the juggling of the massive debt and economy, the strategy of long-term Chinese values, and a lot more that I never expect.

China is just super fascinating to me. It has such a huge impact on the rest of the world.

Sofia’s boots-on-the-ground (via HK) perspective is worth a read:

What happened in China this week.

One more thing:

I love my AirPods. I have two pairs, and basically live in them.

This quick little hack made them even better.

I made a 2-second change and now my audio sounds way better than before.

That’s all I’ve got.

Until next week's newsletter,– Travis

P.S. the original post is here.

🧘 FounderSummit, The AI Writer, Great Depression Learnings, and DAO Liability

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 16:07:27 +0000

Hey, I’m just catching up after a lovely few days at this year’s FounderSummit, put on by Tyler Tringas from the Calm Fund.

If you ever get a chance to go, I recommend it. It’s the lowest-ego conference I’ve ever been to (hard to accomplish in this space).

Most of the talks were pretty good, but a couple resonated with me in particular:

“How to actually cultivate calm” by Jonny Miller of Nervous System Mastery. It was the antithesis of the (IMO terrible) “hustle culture” idea, but instead of some woo-woo “find your true purpose” stuff it was rooted in practical and scientific understanding of how the body works for productivity and satisfaction, tips to control its various states, and some techniques for reaching the sweet spot between being too-hyped and sluggish.I’ll probably sign up for the course myself (no kickbacks here for sharing this). Ignoring the life-satisfaction aspects (which are most important), being able to balance the body’s states are key for performance.
A fantastic workshop put on by Ryan Tansom on how to run and view your company as a financial asset. “Intentional Growth” was the title (and the title of his pod). The meaning of this is around intentionally pulling the levers of a company to reach a stated goal, instead of how most of us do just bumbling around just trying to “make more”.Some good concepts here. Balancing revenue growth (which can kill profit), deciding if you’re optimizing for distributions or long-term enterprise value, tax optimization, interesting exit options (like ESOP’s which I’d never heard of), etc.Ryan does have a course, which I have not taken, but it seems to offer a lot of what the workshop was about (they appear to have a few free videos).

Lastly, before we get into the meat of the newsletter, sending some love to the Dynamite Circle crew in Bangkok. I’m FOMO’ing on not being able to make it this year.

Aight, let’s do this:

The “Mystery” AI Writer

A bit overwhelmed by all the positive responses I received to last week’s email, so thank you .

But if you look closely at the screenshot I think over half of y’all just wanted to know the name of the amaze-balls AI writer I mentioned (I don’t blame you). Clearly there is some interest.

The AI writer I mentioned is Content At Scale.

It’s not like the others though (like Jasper, WordHero, etc). Those are useful for short descriptions or rewriting something, but this tool creates full mostly ready-to-publish blog posts almost instantly.

Proof? Here is a post that I made, posted here without any editing or formatting. Just copied and pasted, including title, URL slug, and meta description.

It’s Bananas right? If you’re interested in this, I made a short video showing it in action, as well as talking about some outside-the-box ways to use it that I think are the best of all.

(Just to be clear: that’s an affiliate link, but I was I think the first paying customer, and you get extra article credits by using my link.)

Can you think of any more interesting ways to use this tool other than what I mentioned? If so, hit me up, I wanna play.

What was it really like to live through the Great Depression?

I’ve been super fascinated by the book The Great Depression: A Diary (Audible)

This book is a firsthand account of a young struggling lawyer in Youngstown, Ohio living through the Great Depression. He kept realtime journal entries for the entire decade writing down his daily struggles, thoughts and impressions of what he saw happening around him throughout this crisis.

What makes it so fascinating to me is that it’s not another typical history book looking back in time on this era as an outsider, forming the narrative afterwards.

It’s a day-by-day journal of what ordinary Americans were actually thinking during all this.

What were they thinking? How did they feel? What were they afraid of? What did they predict would happen next?

And then it’d flash forward to a diary entry six months or three years later and show how all of these predictions actually panned out.

It was enlightening to see how many things were similar to today.

Unease about the currency . The political party in power would kinda cook the books before elections to make progress seem like they did better than they actually did (like the US changing the calculation of inflation this year). Pundits spouting their theories about knowing what is next.

So much of what happened back then you see happening right now when you read the news.

I guess human psychology and politics never change.

Takeaway: keeping liquidity is vital

For me, a major takeaway from the book is that it’s important to keep a super-healthy cash balance.

Some people would claim that you should be fully invested all the time. That doesn’t work for me. I’ve always kept a higher cash balance than recommended by professionals.

Ya know who else does this? Señor Buffet is who.Berkshire Hathaway always keeps a very large cash balance.

Of course doing this allows me to move quickly and take advantage of opportunities when they arise.

But more importantly: it just keeps me sane. It keeps me from making bad decisions. It allows me to be more patient and logical with my moves as I’m never stuck in an awkward, over-exposed, position.

When the world’s going crazy around me I can sleep better at night and not panic.

(And there’s a LOT of value in that.)

4%+ short-term treasury yields make chilling in cash easier than ever too.

Some other takeaways that stuck with me:

In the end, the businesses with solid fundamentals at reasonable prices will do well even in dark times, but it can take a very long time to prove and be taxing on the psyche.
A lot of the “smart money” was in cash before the crash. They bought the dip in 1931. Unfortunately they all bought too soon and ended up almost as bad. (lesson: investing is hard.)
Margin, debt and lack of liquidity significantly ups the chances of financial death.
Diversification, in good assets, is key. In the book you hear story after story of rich successful people who go broke because everything they had was in 1-2 bank stocks paying high dividends.
Keeping money in high quality bonds is important (cash-ish). Poor quality bonds will just fail, all stocks can swing. Actual bonds in good companies and governments are much more stable. (Note* I don’t believe bond ETF’s are the same, actual bonds).
One benefit of the Great Depression (and downturns in general) is that people return to a more simple life. They start enjoying the simple pleasures in life again, instead of the status items we’re all so obsessed with.

The book was truly enlightening and I highly recommend reading at least a part of it. I think you’ll probably get the gist of it by just reading ⅓ or so.

Pick it up on Amazon (or get it on Audible)

You Might Be Personally Liable For Your DAO’s Decisions

A super interesting development in the crypto space.

The CFTC says that if you vote with your tokens in a DAO, you might be personally liable for the actions your DAO takes. (If you’re holding tokens and don’t vote, you’re off the hook.)

That’s a big development. And it actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Parker and Patrick McKenzie explain it far better than I could:

That’s all for this newsletter, until next week.

Take care,– Travis

💸 No, the Fed did not actually print 5x as much money in 2020

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 23:11:03 +0000

No, the Fed did not actually print 5x as much money in 2020

I see the chart above getting hooted at time and time again, but it’s actually very misleading.

The chart shows the M1 money supply (the amount of liquid USD held by the public, like cash and checking accounts). At first glance, it looks cray-cray.

Even sophisticated people see this graph and think “Holy f’ing shit Bro, in two years, the money supply has 5X-ed”.

But as my big-brained friend Simon Stock points out, that’s not exactly accurate. What really happened in this graph is that the bean-counters reclassified savings account deposits to be part of M1 money supply instead of only M2 – making them more liquid.

It’s all explained in this article:

Here’s a chart showing a more accurate representation of the overall money supply (notice M2, the green line):

As you can see, the more broader M2 money supply did go up, but not by that much. It’s closer to 25% instead of the 500% you’d think if you’d only glance at the first graph.

Oh and just to be clear I still think there was far too much funny-money happening, but just not exactly as the first chart would lead you to believe.

Google’s Helpful Content Update is probs punishing AI-generated content

AI writers like jasper.ai and copy.ai are pretty neat tools that have been taking the SEO world by storm. You can use them to write, rewrite or even generate whole webpages from scratch in seconds.

These tools are no joke. They can work quite well (when used as an assistant) Frequently, the AI content quality is even BETTER than my almost illiterate ass.(In fact, there’s one AI service so good that I don’t even want to let everyone know about it yet, but I will soon. Feel free to email me if you’d like the name early. Edit* I ended up publishing it. Here it is.)

A lot of SEOs are creating tons of content using these AI writers because they are easier to scale. Instead of writing two articles per day they write thirty.

But – this is not without risk. Certain algos can detect AI-generated content, and there is a legit risk of it getting slapped (remember Penguin and shared PBN networks?). There are some reports that this is already happening.

There’s a clear risk to using these tools. But, I know a lot of savvy SEOs (including this one on Twitter) are already working on ways to get around it. The ones who do, will thrive. (Like the service I don’t want to tell the world about yet)

Here’s one of the AI detection tools if you’d like to play with it:https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/

A Brief History of the Past 10,000 Years of Monetary Policy and Why Last Week Was a Big Deal

First off, let’s take a moment to gawk at the URL slug:https://www.epsilontheory.com/a-brief-history-of-the-past-10000-years-of-monetary-policy-and-why-last-week-was-a-big-deal/

Regardless of that horrific URL, the post is one of the simplest explanations I’ve ever read of how money, interest rates, and central banks work. It highlights the dangers of leverage and securitization and how it results in the colossal meltdown happening with UK pension funds right now (and how it could spread).

It’s a little long, very preachy, but definitely worth your time. If you’re lazy, just do the top half.

The title says it all:

That’s. Not. How. Inflation. Works, bro.

“If you’re going to build something from scratch, this might be as good a time as you’ve had in a decade.”

I came across this great interview with one of the all-time VC’s Bill Gurley.

As you know, everything is shit right now in the markets. Many assets are sketchy and may not make sense. Some smart people are saying there will be a “dead decade” ahead in terms of returns on the stock market.

But Gurley makes the point that in terms of BUILDING a startup, it’s one of the better times in recent memory.

Why?

If anything, the environment to launch a startup was crazy the past few years. Now, everything has changed.

It’s easier than ever to attract talent (startups shutting down, big tech laying off). High quality developers and marketers as well as office space are much cheaper than before, making your runway so much longer.

Also IMO it’s probably a really good time to invest in early stage startups. Your portfolio can take advantage of the downturn and cheaper labor, you can invest at a MUCH lower (more sensible) valuations, and exits aren’t for several years so the current macro landscape doesn’t matter.

6 months ago seed rounds could go @ $20m valuations, now they’re crashing back to more reasonable terms. Just make sure your companies have at least 2 years (or more) of runway.

Druckenmiller’s thoughts on the markets

Here’s another interesting interview with Stan Druckenmiller – probs the greatest macro trader of all time.

He talks about the dangerous game the Fed is playing with inflation, the stock market, upcoming recession, UK pension funds and a whole bunch more.

Really to be honest, I just love listening to anything Druckenmiller says. He has an incredibly broad understanding of how the world works (and where it breaks)/

Final thoughts:

That’s it for this week.Cheers,– TravisP.S. the original post is here.

flexoffers

The Travis.vc Newsletter

Banana-land markets: The bull case few want to make

#1 - The big companies moving the market are better than any we've ever seen before

#2 - The market is forward-looking to fed rate cuts

#3 - Currency devaluation

#4 - Passive investor inflows are all that matter

#5 - High profit margins

#6 - AI

#7 - Pro-business regulation will juice future profits

#8 - Finally… nothing matters anymore

Status at the expense of independence

Shares:

How I think about market crashes

Is that excitement?

⬆️ 📉 What rising rates are doing to asset prices (and why)

Let’s simplify this concept a little bit.

Now let’s look at this concept from a business owners point of view.

Is there a lesson to any of this Travis?

💡 Branding advice from a master

The Chat

Outside the box

The Result

The Bonus Round

☀️ Light, Celsius death blow, a better analytics, & dopamine hits

Bad News Bears for Celsius Users

A Very Tiny Upside

Google Analytics is Terrible – Start using Clicky

An app to stop mindless distraction

👍 My formula to guarantee a good productive day

The Rise of the Machine

Decreasing Resistance

My Solution - Batching

The method

My personal routine

Reality

Personalization

♠️ Poker, risk, and avoiding financial blowups

How amateurs win at tennis

Howard

The tie-in

Table selection

Bankroll management

Ego

Winning vs not losing

🤖 Diving into the crazy new ChatGPT

It can write poetry:

It can do your copywriting

RIP recipe sites 💀

Replace your lawyer

Find bugs in your code

It can write code for new programs… that works

Plan your PR campaign

It can help you hack a smart contract

What can we do with this?

What's next?

🫂 Frens R Gud

Takeaways from my smart friends this week

Survival is all that matters in a bear market

What do the very best stock investors do?

Everything about buying businesses with SBA loans

The Bonus Round

🤡 Swimming naked, sticky inflation and a clown show.

History Lessons: How “Transitory” Is Inflation?

I have a primer quote for our next section:

“As a rule, Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.”

🤡 Genesis 🤡

🤡 🤡 Masayoshi Son & SoftBank 🤡 🤡

🤡 🤡 🤡 Pomp 🤡 🤡 🤡

🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡 FTX 🤡 🤡 🤡 🤡

The Bonus Round

💣 Here we go again... FTX

This was cool

Important clip for all founders AND investors to hear

Meta is cutting costs and laying off 11,000 employees

Bearly.ai: another cool text-based AI tool (free)

🩸 Blood, profitability, options, and valuations

$SNAP… $META… $AMZN…

A few things that caught my attention

The Last Day for 9.62% iBonds

What happened in China this week

_{Is that excitement?}

The title says it all: