Pautatoes

Singapore's Token2049 side event calendar is down about 40% from last year, 510 events versus 814, per @miragather. The same dataset says about 60% of attendees are in sales roles, and only around 8% are founders, execs or technical leads who can say yes to an integration. Meanwhile BlackRock, Goldman, J.P. Morgan and Citi mostly show up as speakers and in small private events, not as sponsors. So most of the room is selling to a small group of people, and the ones with a budget are paying to reach people who don't need to pay to be reached.

The only 3 things that move the needle for alts these days: Buyback Burn Revenue

A reminder that ordinary days are part of a very good life. Happy Sunday

Brent settled at $113 yesterday on Hormuz shipping attacks and fresh Houthi strikes on Saudi infrastructure. Same day, the 10Y Treasury fell 19 basis points, the biggest single session drop in over 2 years. Those two things shouldn’t happen at the same time if you’re running a consistent macro view. So the contradiction is: 1. When oil spikes on a supply shock, the usual fear is inflation which means the Fed has to keep rates high or hike. Gold fell close to 3% yesterday, which fits the story. Expensive oil, Fed stays aggressive, higher rates hurt gold. That logic holds. 2. The bond market looked at the same $113 oil and did the opposite. It bought bonds and sent yields down. That’s the move you make when you think growth is about to slow, not when you’re worried about inflation. Both can’t be right about what comes next. One of them is wrong and probably by a lot. Flash PMIs tonight are the next data point. If the economy reads as still strong, the bond market probably reverses fast. If it comes in soft, the bond market was right all along and the oil story becomes a lot scarier.

I was ready to be unimpressed with Instinct. It's an AI that lives in my iMessage. Figured it’d be another chatbot with a new coat of paint. Then it took my inbox from 6,000+ emails to 0 (don’t ask), reminded me of an event I’d RSVPed to, caught a trial I forgot to cancel, and talked me out of clicking a sketchy Zoom link. To be fair, what it can do for you is not a huge leap from other AI tools, but it works because of where it lives. God knows how many apps are already on my phone, and Messages is the one place that isn’t as congested as Telegram or Discord. Nothing extra to install either. Meanwhile every lab is pouring money into better models, and this simple assistant is growing fast. Reportedly raised $1B at a $10B valuation last month. About 4x from the month before. Distribution really is the moat.

If you don’t fail, you’re not even trying.

Okay, Elon is crazy. But he also put EVs on the map, got everyone talking about space travel in a diff way, and now he’s going for flying cars (or w/e the technical term is). Meanwhile, when did you last bet on yourself? On your own unhinged idea? I think we should take notes.

GM. Everything else is noise until I can retire my mom.

I haven’t lost anything because I haven’t sold anything. Perspective.

We've made information easier to access than ever. Somehow, we've also made it easier to stop thinking for ourselves. I know how easy it has become to outsource thinking especially with social media and AI. And there’s something almost addictive about it. Someone tells you what to believe, what to buy, what to sell, and suddenly you have an answer without doing the work of getting there. No research, no uncertainty, no uncomfortable figuring-it-out phase. Feels great, right? Wrong. Because you pay for it. The more you borrow someone else's judgment, the less you use your own. Then every new decision needs another opinion, another recommendation, another person to tell you what to do. You're basically waiting on your next dose of conviction. I see this a lot in markets. It's so easy now to follow what successful traders and influencers are buying. Apps like Fomo took away almost all the friction between seeing a trade and taking it. That's great for access. But easier execution doesn't make you a better investor. One widely circulated analysis of Fomo wallets found only about 6% were in profit over 90 days. The methodology does have limits, but it still raises an interesting question. Polymarket looks different but points the same way. Galaxy Research looked at about 2.9 million retail accounts and found roughly 69% finished below break-even. The median account was down only a few dollars. So fine, most people don't blow up. But they don't win that much either. To be fair, losing doesn't prove you weren't thinking for yourself. Good decisions lose money too. But that's exactly why you need your own framework. If you don't know why you got in, how would you know when to get out? If your whole thesis is that someone you admire bought it, what happens when they sell? And if you need someone to tell you what to think every time the market moves, have you actually learned anything? I'm not against learning from people smarter than me. Quite the opposite actually. But there’s a difference between learning how someone thinks and simply adopting their conclusions. One develops your judgment. The other substitutes for it. And I think that’s the bigger problem we’re facing, well beyond financial markets. We have more access to information, expertise, and opinions than ever before. Yet it’s increasingly tempting to skip the difficult part of forming our own. If you never develop a system for thinking independently, you risk becoming a permanent consumer of other people’s convictions. And someone will always be happy to sell you the next one.

Watching Balaji and Vitalik pick each other's brains is worth the ticket price alone.

Me at the @KASTxyz party like: they don’t know Bitcoin just dipped below $81,000

I helped someone out, and he gave me $100. What the fuck? Where are these types and how do I find them more often?