465: Google Gemini, Market Karma, Munger & Senra, Lithium, Apple + Vietnam & India, SUVs, Architecture, Sweden, Huberman, and AI Critic

If we don't change, we don't grow.

If we don't grow, we are not really living.

—Gail Sheehy

🧠🦞 Here’s something I wrote a while ago:

The human mind is like a lobster trap. 

Ideas get in, but they’re very very hard to get out. 

There’s no easy mechanism to make people 'unbelieve' things.

🙋🏻‍♀️❓🤖 For the first time, and without any prompting from me, my wife told me she asked a question to ChatGPT (instead of using Google to search for an answer) 🤔

🗓️👦🏻🧒🏼🚫🚌👩🏻‍🏫 We’re now entering the 4th week — FOUR WEEKS — of the teachers’ strike at my kids’ school. Ugh.

I had planned to record some podcasts and do calls with the Extra-Deluxe subs this month, but unfortunately, that has been put on hold for now.

🤖📞🤬 For years now, every time I’m stuck on the phone, waiting for an operator or customer service person to get to me, I think that if I were designing the system, I’d have a “sentiment check” AI model listening in. When it detects that someone is getting particularly angry, I’d bump them up in the queue a little.

Of course, you’d have to keep this a secret, otherwise, if it became widely known, everyone would be grunting and swearing while on hold and that signal would lose all utility.

👁️👁️ There have been plenty of biomedical advances lately, but there’s an area where I’d like to see more progress: eye health and vision enhancements.

Lasik is great (I had it done years ago), but what about presbyopia/age-related farsightedness or removing protein aggregate from eyes (aka floaters) or even figuring out how to correct astigmatism?

Or how about finding ways to make people without any obvious vision problems see even better? Why not? It’s such an important sensory input, it feels like we could do more.

🔫 ⏱️ I don’t know what this sport is called, but I recently stumbled on it and it looks fun.

It seems to be a speed drill that is less about shooting accuracy — as far as I can tell the targets are pretty close — than about the mechanics of getting through a certain number of shots with a certain number of weapons from a certain number of positions as smoothly and quickly as possible.

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🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

Over the past 3 years, the S&P500 has gone up at a 7.59% CAGR 📈 + Market Karma Mechanism ⚖️

That’s pretty average historically. Fairly close to the center of the distribution…

What’s interesting is how ‘average’ rarely feels average as you live through it!

Almost every time I hear someone talk about how period XYZ was “easy money”, and it’s a time that I’ve lived through as an investor, I try to remember how it *actually* felt a the time, I re-read my notes from that era, and without the benefit of hindsight it usually didn’t feel easy at all.

Even when it was really pretty easy, like 2017 when volatility was extremely low and things just ratcheted higher all year, people still found reasons to complain constantly — in 2017 it was about volatility being too low, something that I’m sure everyone was missing in 2022...

Exceptions to this are periods when things truly feel easy and everyone thinks they’re geniuses. The Market Karma Mechanism (MKM) is usually about to inflict huge pain to balance things out, like 2000 vs 2002, 2007 vs 2009, or 2021 vs 2022.

Google Gemini is out! 😀 (except the best version… 😞)