Deploying zero-liquidity vehicles into frontier innovation markets.
Palo Alto, CA
Joined September 2015
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There is a somewhat strange tension in Republican messaging:
On the one hand, luxury trad wife, pro-natalist ideals sit at its core — have more kids, return to family values.
At the same time, its leaders insist that the United States cannot afford childcare, healthcare, paid leave, or other forms of material support for those same families.
We are broke. You must live with austerity.
The data, meanwhile, is not especially controversial: the primary constraint on whether young couples start families is financial.
So the combined message is something like: you should have more children, but also the system will not meaningfully de-risk that decision for you.
Which is honestly a pretty un-American pitch.
This is the wealthiest country in history — a place where the cultural identity is that everything is supposed to be bigger, better, more ambitious.
And yet the governing posture being offered is scarcity.
There’s an obvious political opportunity here, which is to just reject that premise entirely and say:
You are an American. You live in the richest country on earth. You should be treated like it.
You should have freer healthcare than the French.
You should have better paid leave than the Swedes.
You should have more affordable childcare than the Germans.
You should have better-funded schools than the Singaporeans.
You should be able to raise a family on a more livable wage than anywhere in the world.
Not as some aspirational program — as the baseline.
A pro-family agenda is not telling people to have kids.
It is making it economically viable to do so — and aligning the standard of living with the actual wealth of the country.
And I don’t mean the next Democratic candidate should say this once in a debate.
I think this should be the foundation of the entire platform — in the midterms, and more importantly, in the next presidential election.
Because right now, the public perception is something like this:
Democrats are neoliberal managers who capitulate to corporations, obsess over process, and confuse caution for virtue.
Republicans are willing to break rules, make Democrats look like pussies, tell them to go fuck themselves (which, to be clear, polls), and “get things done” — even when what they’re actually getting done is austerity for everyone below the oligarch class.
The only path forward is to reverse that polarity.
Democrats need to make the case that Republican austerity is not strength.
It is weakness.
It is asking the richest country in the world to behave like it’s broke.
Which is honestly more pussy than being a rule-following neoliberal.
The actually bold position is simple:
The richest country in the world should deliver the highest standard of family life in the world — and then govern accordingly.
A second way to make this argument is just Cold War logic.
The Cold War of the 21st century is not primarily about weapons. It is about how effectively you can turn your population into highly productive, technologically capable humans.
Patriotic entrepreneurs.
Russia is not especially competitive here. Even worse than struggling in Ukraine, it produces almost no consumer technology of value.
I have never used a single piece of Russian software, with the partial exception of Escape from Tarkov, which is, in a way, a very on-brand product: a simulation of human suffering.
China, meanwhile, is doing something different.
DJI.
A large number of electric vehicle companies.
TikTok.
Huawei.
Shein.
These are not accidents. They are downstream of a system that has decided, explicitly, to invest in producing capable people and competitive industries.
The U.S. position is that it cannot afford to invest at that level.
Which is a slightly odd stance to take in a competition that is, in large part, about the only thing the United States actually cares about — remaining the dominant economy and exporter of innovation globally.
If the objective is to “win” this sort of Cold War, the strategy is not austerity.
It is to produce the most capable, productive generation of people in the world, at scale.
By investing in:
education
healthcare
childcare
economic stability
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One way to think about the AI boom is that the world has discovered a new commodity called tokens.
You put electricity into a GPU and out come tokens. You put tokens into software and out comes work. Tokens summarize documents, answer questions, write code, route customer support, and generally act as small units of machine cognition.
A lot of the economics of AI right now rests on a simple assumption: the world will need vastly more tokens every year. That assumption sits underneath the whole stack — the data-center buildout, the chip-scarcity story, and the race to train ever larger models.
Maybe that’s right.
But there’s another possibility: token satiation.
This sort of dynamic has shown up before in technology markets.
During the cloud migration era, compute demand looked almost infinite because every company was discovering new things to move into elastic infrastructure. Every new product required servers, every feature required compute, and for a while it seemed like the curve might just keep going up forever.
Then the migration matured.
Compute stopped being a frontier and became infrastructure. Mature companies didn’t keep discovering infinite new workloads to run in the cloud. They just ran the business there.
Not because cloud failed — because it worked.
AI may follow the same arc.
🧵
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You can think about token demand with a simple equation:
Total token demand = (tokens required per task) × (number of AI tasks).
Start with the first number.
The number of tokens required per task is likely to fall, maybe a lot. Models are already getting better at doing the same work with fewer tokens through better architectures, routing, distillation, and specialized inference. Some adaptive reasoning work already shows meaningful reductions in token usage while preserving similar performance. And that is before the more aggressive version of the story, where models increasingly self-tune and learn how to allocate reasoning more efficiently on their own.
In other words, the amount of intelligence produced per token keeps going up.
Then there is the second number.
Right now the number of AI tasks is exploding because companies are in the obvious phase of the cycle — the AI-ify everything phase. Support tickets, search, coding, documentation, analytics, planning, compliance, all of it.
But that number probably does not grow forever. Eventually a mature company runs out of obvious things to AI-ify. At that point the number of AI-mediated tasks stops being driven by discovery and starts being driven by routine usage.
It plateaus.
And it may not stop there.
A lot of what we call “tasks” inside modern software systems are really artifacts of how humans organize work. Much of software complexity exists because humans are bad at coordinating large systems, so we invented microservices. One team owns payments, another identity, another search, another notifications, and all of those services talk to each other through APIs, queues, orchestration layers, monitoring stacks, and glue code.
Microservices are often described as a technical architecture, but in practice they are often an organizational architecture — a way of slicing systems so groups of humans can work on them without stepping on each other.
But the org chart isn’t a law of physics.
If AI becomes good enough to understand and refactor systems end to end, it may not just perform the existing tasks more cheaply. It may start reorganizing the system that created those tasks in the first place — collapsing services, removing orchestration layers, eliminating duplicated logic, and deleting large amounts of glue code that exist mostly to coordinate teams around other software.
The mature AI company may therefore not look like today’s company with AI sprinkled everywhere.
It may look like a company with fewer systems, fewer moving parts, and fewer tasks to perform at all.
And that leads to the slightly strange possibility here:
AI can keep getting better. The supply of intelligence can keep going up. But demand for raw tokens can still saturate, because the economy eventually runs out of new AI tasks to create and then begins removing many of the tasks it previously needed.
So the long-run path may not be:
more AI → more tokens forever
It may be:
better AI → fewer tokens per task → fewer tasks → less token demand overall
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If that’s even roughly right, then a lot of the economics of AI may turn out to be migration economics rather than steady-state economics.
The early phase rewards whoever can produce scarce tokens.
The mature phase may reward whoever knows what to do once tokens are no longer scarce — or no longer the interesting bottleneck at all.
That also makes some recent market narratives look a little backwards. The market spent much of the last year worrying that AI would wipe out SaaS companies. But if intelligence itself becomes cheap, abundant, self-tuning, and increasingly commoditized, the durable economics may belong less to whoever manufactures the tokens and more to the companies that organize the workflows those tokens are actually serving.
In other words, the technology that created the AI arms race may also be the technology that eventually makes the race itself unnecessary.
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I keep hearing the Iran/Venezuela conflicts are about protecting the petrodollar or crippling China.
Sounds sick to project 4D-chess-level intellect onto our illustrious leaders…
But it doesn’t really add up.
The petrodollar theory is simple: oil is priced in USD, exporters recycle those dollars into U.S. assets like Treasuries, and the U.S. defends that system geopolitically.
And yes — the suspicion isn’t crazy.
Iraq actually switched its oil sales to euros in 2000. Three years later the U.S. invaded over “WMDs,” and Iraqi oil sales reverted to dollars.
Draw your own conclusions.
But that logic breaks down pretty quickly when you look at the countries people point to.
Venezuela has massive reserves but produces <1% of global supply. Most of its oil is ultra-heavy crude from the Orinoco Belt, which requires specialized upgrading and huge capital investment to extract and refine. After decades of industry collapse, analysts estimate it would take tens of billions of dollars and many years just to meaningfully increase production.
So in the short-term scheme of things Venezuela doesn’t really fucking matter to global oil markets.
If Venezuelan oil were the real objective, the U.S. would be investing in pipelines and refineries — not fighting wars halfway across the Middle East.
Iran matters more (~1.5–2M bpd exports), and most of that oil ultimately ends up in China.
And this is where the theory really starts to fall apart.
Over the past decade China and Russia have built alternative financial infrastructure specifically to reduce exposure to U.S. leverage:
• CIPS (China’s SWIFT alternative)
• yuan-denominated settlement
• bilateral currency swaps replacing dollar trade
• shadow tanker fleets moving sanctioned oil
• intermediary traders and non-Western insurance networks
Millions of barrels already move through this parallel energy market.
If you think China is going to willingly route critical energy trade through SWIFT, you misunderstand China completely.
From Beijing’s perspective SWIFT means the U.S. can monitor, sanction, and ultimately control the financial rails.
China’s strategy is reducing exposure to that leverage, not increasing it.
Even with Iranian exports disappearing, China isn’t suddenly routing its oil trade through the dollar system — it will simply buy from other suppliers.
Petrodollar believers argue that this would force China to purchase from Saudi Arabia or other Gulf producers who price oil in USD.
But the currency used for settlement is far more flexible than people assume, and China has spent the last decade building alternatives precisely so it doesn’t have to depend on the dollar system.
More importantly, the dollar’s dominance was never really built on oil pricing in the first place.
It comes from global finance: U.S. Treasury markets, dollar liquidity, trade finance, derivatives markets, and the sheer scale of American capital markets.
Oil being priced in dollars is a symptom of that system — not its foundation.
The other theory I hear is that this war is about weakening China’s energy supply ahead of a possible U.S.–China confrontation around 2027.
But that explanation struggles too.
If Washington were preparing for a near-term China conflict, you’d expect maximum focus in the Indo-Pacific.
Instead we’re seeing missile defense systems and naval assets redirected from Asia toward the Middle East — while the Iran war is already consuming years of military bandwidth and resources.
Which is the opposite of what you’d do if China were the real priority.
So both explanations — petrodollar defense and China energy containment — give Washington far too much strategic coherence.
My view: this war isn’t really about the petrodollar or China — it’s about Netanyahu’s long-term strategy to fragment the Middle East into weaker rivals.
I break that argument down in a separate thread linked below.
Washington has no master plan, yet analysts keep hunting for one.
For nearly 20 years, Netanyahu has pushed every U.S. president toward confrontation with Iran.
Bush resisted.
Obama resisted.
Trump is the first president “persuadable” enough — or stupid enough — to go along with it. Probably both.
The real question isn't China or oil.
It's Netanyahu's long-term strategy.
Netanyahu's plan has always been what analysts warned about for decades: the Balkanization of the Middle East — slow fragmentation into smaller, divided power centers instead of coherent rivals.
Chronic instability like that ultimately strengthens Israel's position.
Israel's Western standing has tanked over the past two years, especially with younger people. The "Israel vs Gaza" frame keeps eroding support in Europe and North America.
A wider regional crisis flips it: Iranian escalation, proxy wars, multi-front attacks, Gulf threats → narrative shifts to "Israel as the only stable power in a collapsing region."
Israel then sells itself as the indispensable security anchor Western powers rely on to manage the chaos.
This aligns perfectly with Netanyahu's incentives.
The irony? Analysts long warned a major Iran war would yield exactly this: fragmentation, not decisive victory.
So if this was Netanyahu's objective, what the hell was Trump's plan?
Part of it is political psychology.
Trump sees himself as the guy who gets things done where others hesitated.
Past presidents avoiding Iran? Not caution — weakness. They were too much of a pussy to pull the trigger.
If everyone refused, doing it becomes the win itself.
You can hear it already: Trump "solves" Iran, succeeds where all failed.
But why did previous presidents stay away? Because it's fucking stupid.
Serious models show war with Iran brings regional fragmentation, endless proxies, decades of instability — disaster for nearly everyone.
Prior presidents saw it as political suicide. Trump sees the same warnings and thinks “opportunity.”
Israelis get a more volatile region. Iranians face devastation.
The Middle East gets endless chaos.
Yet one actor benefits from permanent instability: Netanyahu.
In a fragmented region where rivals bleed each other, Israel positions as the indispensable military/security power — locking in his domestic grip too.
This is classic geopolitics: leaders under pressure use external conflict to rally around security/survival.
Putin did it with Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine.
TBH, Putin is probably jealous of Bibi right now. He wishes Ukrainians were brown people who worshipped Allah — it'd be way easier for Western support on his "anti-terror" framing.
Same model: instability abroad → power at home.
But high-risk: in today's world it likely backfires and collapses both regimes.
People want reliable healthcare, better sleep, work-life balance, small indulgences, mental wellness apps, fast delivery, financial security, and peaceful chilling — not endless war and nationalism.
For context, I've written on:
• Balkanization as likely Iran war outcome
• Spiking energy prices baked in
• China's structural pressures (oil shock or not)
• How prolonged conflict could destabilize Israel too
Links below.
Bottom line: this will not be a short crisis.
It’s the start of another half-century of Middle Eastern fragmentation — with Israel as the only "stable" power in permanent chaos.
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Washington has no master plan, yet analysts keep hunting for one.
For nearly 20 years, Netanyahu has pushed every U.S. president toward confrontation with Iran.
Bush resisted.
Obama resisted.
Trump is the first president “persuadable” enough — or stupid enough — to go along with it. Probably both.
The real question isn't China or oil.
It's Netanyahu's long-term strategy.
Netanyahu's plan has always been what analysts warned about for decades: the Balkanization of the Middle East — slow fragmentation into smaller, divided power centers instead of coherent rivals.
Chronic instability like that ultimately strengthens Israel's position.
Israel's Western standing has tanked over the past two years, especially with younger people. The "Israel vs Gaza" frame keeps eroding support in Europe and North America.
A wider regional crisis flips it: Iranian escalation, proxy wars, multi-front attacks, Gulf threats → narrative shifts to "Israel as the only stable power in a collapsing region."
Israel then sells itself as the indispensable security anchor Western powers rely on to manage the chaos.
This aligns perfectly with Netanyahu's incentives.
The irony? Analysts long warned a major Iran war would yield exactly this: fragmentation, not decisive victory.
So if this was Netanyahu's objective, what the hell was Trump's plan?
Part of it is political psychology.
Trump sees himself as the guy who gets things done where others hesitated.
Past presidents avoiding Iran? Not caution — weakness. They were too much of a pussy to pull the trigger.
If everyone refused, doing it becomes the win itself.
You can hear it already: Trump "solves" Iran, succeeds where all failed.
But why did previous presidents stay away? Because it's fucking stupid.
Serious models show war with Iran brings regional fragmentation, endless proxies, decades of instability — disaster for nearly everyone.
Prior presidents saw it as political suicide. Trump sees the same warnings and thinks “opportunity.”
Israelis get a more volatile region. Iranians face devastation.
The Middle East gets endless chaos.
Yet one actor benefits from permanent instability: Netanyahu.
In a fragmented region where rivals bleed each other, Israel positions as the indispensable military/security power — locking in his domestic grip too.
This is classic geopolitics: leaders under pressure use external conflict to rally around security/survival.
Putin did it with Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine.
TBH, Putin is probably jealous of Bibi right now. He wishes Ukrainians were brown people who worshipped Allah — it'd be way easier for Western support on his "anti-terror" framing.
Same model: instability abroad → power at home.
But high-risk: in today's world it likely backfires and collapses both regimes.
People want reliable healthcare, better sleep, work-life balance, small indulgences, mental wellness apps, fast delivery, financial security, and peaceful chilling — not endless war and nationalism.
For context, I've written on:
• Balkanization as likely Iran war outcome
• Spiking energy prices baked in
• China's structural pressures (oil shock or not)
• How prolonged conflict could destabilize Israel too
Links below.
Bottom line: this will not be a short crisis.
It’s the start of another half-century of Middle Eastern fragmentation — with Israel as the only "stable" power in permanent chaos.
The attack on Iran is more likely to catalyze regime change in Israel than in Iran.
I’ve written separately about why regime change in Iran via airstrikes alone is unrealistic (link below). Institutionalized security states rarely collapse from bombing campaigns absent elite fracture, proxy war, or sustained occupation — and Iran is exactly that: an institutionalized system anchored by a consolidated security apparatus.
History suggests this is a high-risk bet.
Iran possesses one of the largest ballistic missile arsenals in the Middle East — widely estimated in the thousands — alongside extensive drone production and distributed launch capacity. Hezbollah alone is assessed to control 100,000+ rockets and missiles in Lebanon.
If the Islamic Republic believes it is facing an existential threat — especially one publicly framed in terms of regime destabilization — it has no incentive to respond symbolically. Regimes fighting for survival escalate for endurance and deterrence.
This conflict is unlikely to be brief. It is more likely to stretch into months — possibly years.
Israel’s layered missile defense system — Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow — is highly capable but not inexhaustible. Interceptor inventories are finite. Replenishment is slow.
But the most important variable isn’t hardware.
It’s the public.
Even with high interception rates, constant sirens, shelter runs, school closures, economic disruption, and chronic uncertainty erode confidence. Tourism slows. Investment hesitates. Families absorb stress.
Democratic governments are judged not only on survival — but on stability.
Duration changes politics.
We can learn from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
What was supposed to be a short operation became a multi-year war of attrition.
Because Russia controls media and suppresses independent polling, public sentiment is difficult to measure. Official approval remains high — but in a constrained information environment.
What we can observe are structural signals.
The Wagner mutiny exposed elite fractures. Senior generals were dismissed. Command structures reshuffled. Rare criticism surfaced from within political and regional circles.
Putin expanded the National Guard, centralized authority further, insulated coercive institutions, and increased reliance on secure alternate facilities outside the historic Kremlin complex.
Leaders who feel secure do not expand internal guard forces and harden their personal perimeter during wartime.
This is the behavior of a leadership managing internal risk.
The pattern is consistent with a regime concerned about vulnerability — not one confident in long-term political stability.
In Russia’s case, attritional warfare has not toppled the regime overnight — but it has eroded its institutional cohesion.
Now consider Israel.
Before October 7, Israel saw one of the largest protest movements in its history over Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul — 400,000–500,000 weekly demonstrators at peak. Reservists threatened non-participation. Former security officials publicly dissented.
Then came Gaza.
Public confidence declined. Political capital weakened.
Israel entered any confrontation with Iran already polarized and fatigued.
If a “limited strike” turns into months of missile fire, repeated missile alerts, damaged infrastructure, and daily psychological strain, political pressure at home will intensify — not disappear.
Authoritarian regimes consolidate under threat.
Democracies replace leaders under strain.
Wars meant to destabilize others often destabilize the state that starts them.
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Most wars don’t begin with a plan for total victory.
They escalate step by step as each side tries to force the other to back down.
If current strategic dynamics hold, the Iran war could follow a familiar escalation path.
An escalation model:
🧵
One paradox of this war:
The attack on Iran is more likely to catalyze regime change in Israel than in Iran.
I explain why in another post ↓
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Regime change by airstrike is largely a fantasy — not because regimes are invulnerable, but because they are institutional.
Iran is not a one-man dictatorship that collapses with decapitation. It is an institutionalized system anchored by the IRGC’s military command, intelligence services, economic empire, and patronage networks. Authoritarian durability hinges on whether the coercive elite fractures — not whether a single leader survives. Decapitation is not dismantlement.
Historically, when outside powers have reshaped regimes in the Middle East, they have done so through one of three mechanisms:
1. Elite Replacement (Coup Model).
The 1953 Iran example: backing a domestic elite faction willing to seize power while preserving the coercive machinery of the state. Leadership changes; institutions remain.
2. Proxy War (Indirect Model).
Afghanistan: arming opposition forces to produce internal collapse. This often empowers the most disciplined militant faction rather than the most democratic one — and carries long-term blowback risk.
3. Invasion and Occupation (Dismantlement Model).
Iraq: removing the regime and dismantling its coercive institutions through sustained ground presence. This is the only model that reliably breaks a security state — and it requires years of commitment.
Airpower alone fits none of these categories.
Bombing campaigns degrade infrastructure and military capacity but rarely displace authority in cohesive security states. North Vietnam endured extensive bombing without regime collapse. Saddam remained in power through years of sanctions and air operations until a ground invasion removed him. Economic pain alone does not guarantee elite fracture.
The Arab Spring underscores the decisive variable. Egypt’s regime fell because the military stepped back. Syria’s survived because the security core held together. Iran’s 2009 Green Movement showed that even mass protest does not dislodge a regime when the coercive elite remains cohesive.
Libya offers another warning: removing a regime without post-conflict stabilization can produce fragmentation rather than democratic transition. Iraq further demonstrates the vacuum problem: even after years of occupation dismantled the regime, withdrawal exposed fragile institutions, sectarian consolidation, expanded Iranian influence, and the rise of ISIS. Removing a regime does not guarantee a stable successor order.
It is also worth distinguishing between stated and actual objectives. If the goal is deterrence or degrading military capability, that is a different strategic project. Israel historically prioritizes degrading threats rather than reconstructing neighboring states. Trump-era foreign policy likewise showed little appetite for multi-year occupations. But if the rhetoric implies regime change, history suggests that regime replacement requires elite substitution, proxy conflict with uncertain outcomes, or long-term occupation — none of which appear to be underway.
The counterargument is that precision strikes and economic strain can catalyze internal fractures. That is possible — but fractures occur when insiders conclude the regime can no longer protect their power. In Iran, the IRGC is not merely an arm of the regime; it is the regime’s central power broker politically and economically. External pressure absent a credible internal alternative is more likely to consolidate hardliners than splinter them.
Degrading a regime and replacing a regime are fundamentally different projects. One is coercive pressure. The other is state transformation.
Absent a credible internal alternative elite prepared to seize control, or a willingness to dismantle the coercive apparatus through sustained ground presence, the more probable outcome is regime hardening, regional escalation, and civilians bearing the cost — not democratic transition.
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The attack on Iran is more likely to catalyze regime change in Israel than in Iran.
I’ve written separately about why regime change in Iran via airstrikes alone is unrealistic (link below). Institutionalized security states rarely collapse from bombing campaigns absent elite fracture, proxy war, or sustained occupation — and Iran is exactly that: an institutionalized system anchored by a consolidated security apparatus.
History suggests this is a high-risk bet.
Iran possesses one of the largest ballistic missile arsenals in the Middle East — widely estimated in the thousands — alongside extensive drone production and distributed launch capacity. Hezbollah alone is assessed to control 100,000+ rockets and missiles in Lebanon.
If the Islamic Republic believes it is facing an existential threat — especially one publicly framed in terms of regime destabilization — it has no incentive to respond symbolically. Regimes fighting for survival escalate for endurance and deterrence.
This conflict is unlikely to be brief. It is more likely to stretch into months — possibly years.
Israel’s layered missile defense system — Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow — is highly capable but not inexhaustible. Interceptor inventories are finite. Replenishment is slow.
But the most important variable isn’t hardware.
It’s the public.
Even with high interception rates, constant sirens, shelter runs, school closures, economic disruption, and chronic uncertainty erode confidence. Tourism slows. Investment hesitates. Families absorb stress.
Democratic governments are judged not only on survival — but on stability.
Duration changes politics.
We can learn from Russia’s war in Ukraine.
What was supposed to be a short operation became a multi-year war of attrition.
Because Russia controls media and suppresses independent polling, public sentiment is difficult to measure. Official approval remains high — but in a constrained information environment.
What we can observe are structural signals.
The Wagner mutiny exposed elite fractures. Senior generals were dismissed. Command structures reshuffled. Rare criticism surfaced from within political and regional circles.
Putin expanded the National Guard, centralized authority further, insulated coercive institutions, and increased reliance on secure alternate facilities outside the historic Kremlin complex.
Leaders who feel secure do not expand internal guard forces and harden their personal perimeter during wartime.
This is the behavior of a leadership managing internal risk.
The pattern is consistent with a regime concerned about vulnerability — not one confident in long-term political stability.
In Russia’s case, attritional warfare has not toppled the regime overnight — but it has eroded its institutional cohesion.
Now consider Israel.
Before October 7, Israel saw one of the largest protest movements in its history over Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul — 400,000–500,000 weekly demonstrators at peak. Reservists threatened non-participation. Former security officials publicly dissented.
Then came Gaza.
Public confidence declined. Political capital weakened.
Israel entered any confrontation with Iran already polarized and fatigued.
If a “limited strike” turns into months of missile fire, repeated missile alerts, damaged infrastructure, and daily psychological strain, political pressure at home will intensify — not disappear.
Authoritarian regimes consolidate under threat.
Democracies replace leaders under strain.
Wars meant to destabilize others often destabilize the state that starts them.
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