Moritz spends a lot of time talking about the imprint parents leave on their children, and how it shapes them for the rest of their lives. Ravi Gupta (@GuptaRK22) tells a story about Michael interviewing him for Instacart, spending an hour and a half asking about his parents and where his motivation comes from. "The only thing that endures is the intrinsic motivation, and I think understanding the source of that is critical. Why does it matter if you succeed? What is the thing that keeps you going?"

In 1960, 60% of young Americans one year into their first marriage owned their home. By 2023, that had fallen to 42%. Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) has a theory for why homeownership feels out of reach, and how we can fix it: "The single family home in the suburbs replaced the single family farm. Think about not only building the freeways and the highways, but subsidies through the tax code so that municipal bonds are tax-free, which means towns can build the infrastructure that attracts developers and homeowners, who then raise the value of the property, so you can repay the bonds out of the higher property values the infrastructure has created. Tis kind of wealth-creating machine. Right now we seem to be reaching the limits of that wealth-creating machine, because it's just too expensive for the average person to buy a house and land close enough to where you work so the commute isn't killing you. Homeownership is one of the real big problems for why young people are unhappy with the economy. Between remote work and hybrid work and self-driving cars, if you only have to go into work once or twice a week, you can work farther out. If you expand the commuting radius from 40 miles to 75 miles, the amount of land that is developable for housing goes up with the square of the radius. It's geometric. Information technology appropriately deployed can open up for another two generations this wealth-creating machine."

Bonus footage that didn't make the episode. Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) on his dinners with Fidel Castro: "He could be better than average, and he could be the biggest jerk you ever met. A lot of powerful people who are really good at power are both below and above the norm of human reaction."

Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) on why Xi Jinping fears a US counter-blockade, and how China might try to still take Taiwan: "Xi Jinping is committed to trying to get Taiwan. The Chinese need a very high probability of success to commit themselves past a certain point, because failure would be catastrophic for whoever launched it. I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade. They could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty. They'll be looking for things that fly just under the radar, that don't actually cause us to really respond, but which alter the situation in their favor. One of the things that keeps Xi Jinping awake at night is his awareness that in any kind of conflict with the United States, China would face being cut off from so many of the raw materials and markets that economy needs. No oil is coming in or out. No manufactured goods are being sold. The soybean contracts they have with farmers in Brazil and Argentina, not getting delivered. We've all been surprised with the Iran war to see just how big the Chinese oil stockpiles have become. A lot of Chinese energy policy can be understood as trying to avoid the trap of dependence on the global economy. They're doing the solar, they're doing as much hydro as they can, and they're also digging as much coal as they possibly can, because what they're trying to do is make themselves less dependent on the outside world, so in a worst case scenario with the US, they can actually fight for the long term."

Other than my own Invested podcast 😉, this conversation between @wrmead and @patrick_oshag is the BEST thing you will listen to this week. I have had the honor of meeting Walter in Israel during the war, and he is one of the most clear thinking civilizational analysts alive.

Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) shares a fascinating dispatch on how fast the war in Ukraine is changing, and what it means for the US military: "The first time I went to Ukraine after the war, I went to this drone factory, and it really was remarkable because in real time they were starting to get results from the battlefield, and then they were adapting. But at that time it was very simplistic stuff. They were getting kids' toy trucks and re-engineering them into drones, ground drones that could put a landmine on a tank. I was back there a couple of months ago, and the advances are just unbelievable. The intensity is the same, but the scope of change is amazing. I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore because it's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones, you have this gray zone, where at most you'd have a couple of soldiers together. One of the hardest problems in warfare now is, how do you evacuate someone who's wounded? They're having to build a new kind of ground drone that can go retrieve a person, cover them with a metal shield, and wheel them out. Even to do this, you need a whole team of drones working with this thing because they're looking for other drones that would try to attack this. They tell me they had one soldier that it took 63 days to get evacuated after a wound. This is so unlike what war was even six years ago. If the tank and the rifle are becoming as obsolete as the cavalry charge and the sword, what kind of forces do you need? We're actually the most vulnerable to technological change, because we've got so many tanks. If the tank becomes useless, that's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody who's figured out the tank killer."

The capacity of @wrmead to synthesize SO many complex layers (and tensions) of issues interacting with each other w/r/t American global power, the tech frontier, domestic US policy, American culture and history, institutional dynamism, etc. is truly impressive.

Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker) on how Claude is Walter Cronkite for the stock market. "Everyone I know in the public equity investment business, whether retail or institutional, everything immediately, every piece of news gets fed into Claude—Claude, Claude code, sometimes a Claude agent. Claude is probabilistic. There's probably not that much variation in the way it's interpreting this news. People talk about the fragmentation of media and how it used to be like Walter Cronkite was the only voice of truth, and now we don't have that anymore. It's like Claude is Walter Cronkite for the stock market, and everybody just believes whatever it says."

Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) on Donald Trump: "He's discovered one of the secrets of power in the contemporary world, which is he's managed to turn fame into power, drama into power, and to do it in ways that leave him completely free to act. If you lie enough, the marginal cost of your 10,000th lie is nothing, while the marginal cost of your first, second, or third lie is very high. So all of the normal constraints on political figures, reputational and so on, he does not pay." "The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied the amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does. And he sees that as the key to his unique power. He is a major historic figure who has developed a new understanding of how power works in an era of mass communications and social media, and the rest of us are just trying to deal with it."

My conversation with Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead). Walter has spent decades studying how America came to dominate the world and whether it can keep doing it in an era of AI, robotics and what he calls personal politics. He's a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of Special Providence and God and Gold, two of the best books on American power. We discuss: - The five point plan for global dominance - How Trump turned fame into power - The four schools of American foreign policy - What worries Xi/China - Ukraine, Iran, and the erosion of deterrence Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:01 America, Trump and World Order 9:23 Why America Keeps Winning 20:40 China’s Structural Weakness 26:39 Technology and American Power 36:51 Four Foreign Policy Traditions 53:59 The Future of Warfare 1:00:52 Taiwan and Asian Power 1:08:39 Middle East and Deterrence 1:15:04 America’s Next 20 Years

Sarah Guo on why we need to rebuild American manufacturing to gain compute independence: "There is not a version of the world where we rebuild our industrial base without automation in the United States. If we don't import people, and our people are expensive, and we lack some of the skills but want to produce a lot more goods and have a more resilient supply chain, who's gonna produce this stuff? People in the United States do not want to work, and should not want to work, for $13 an hour doing a very inhuman job. I don't think it is inevitable that we are competitive, and I think we need to make that decision actively. One of the most important inputs is compute. If we don't have it, we're naturally not competitive, or we're at least not independent. I don't think that means it's all got to be created in the United States. But having more than one source is a position that everybody wants to be in."

"She is indefatigable, just always working," @mvernal said. "I get up at 4:45am, but I go to bed at like 9:30pm. Sarah’s up at 4:45am and goes to bed at midnight." Guo hasn't watched TV in 15 years."

Warren Buffett told Charlie Munger, late in Munger's life: "It's so interesting now. I would like to stick around for another 30 years if I couldn't participate. If I could just watch." Sarah Guo gets to participate, and that's why she works so hard. (From our first conversation with Sarah, Aug. 2024)

Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker): "Investing is the search for truth." If you find truth first, and you're right about it being a truth, that's how you generate alpha It has to be a truth that other people have not yet seen, you're searching for hidden truths.