517: Apple's Big Mistake, Ben Thompson Interview, Nvidia Beats 30,000 Stocks Since 1925, Solar Power Flaw, Neuralink, Midjourney, and Rudy

"Innovation invariably builds upon prior discoveries"

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

–Abraham Verghese

🎤🎙️⚙️Technology is one of the biggest drivers of Art.

People often think that they’re in opposition, but throughout history, new tools have opened up whole new art forms and expanded old ones.

Do you think that the novel or non-fiction world would exist without the printing press? Would as many people write without word processors and online research tools?

The still camera created photography, the film camera created cinema. 📷 🎥

Various innovations to record and playback sound became tools for musicians to vastly expand what was possible. Studio techniques, multi-track recording, and synthesized sounds made possible all kinds of music beyond what can be done live.

More recently, digital art was created by computers and software like Photoshop. But if we go back to the 12th-15th centuries, the spread of oil paints made many of the world’s masterpiece paintings possible. 🎨

Here’s a slightly less obvious one that came to mind: Sensitive microphones opened up the world for quiet singers. 🤫

Artists like Grimes, Billie Eilish, Nick Drake, and Leonard Cohen have a very quiet, sometimes whispered singing style that wouldn’t have worked back when you had to belt things out to be heard. Even the crooners and jazz singers of old like Sinatra and Billie Holiday had a singing style that wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without modern microphones.

🔌🚘 💾 🔊Even after all these years, the power of software to shape the world still impresses me, in ways both big and small.

I recently updated the mapping and infotainment software in my EV6. I got a few new features, which is nice, but I also noticed that the stereo seemed to sound noticeably better.

Was I imagining things?

I found that this was widely reported by owners of this model.

This software update made the stereo go from a “C” to a “B+”, which is a huge improvement. Usually, to get such a noticeable difference, you need to buy a new stereo!

I can’t help but wonder:

• If the hardware could do it, why did they ship the car without optimizing the software for better sound in the first place?

• Is there more left in there? Will I find out later that the car’s stereo is even better than B+?

What else in my life could use a good software optimization to help reach its true potential?

🛀💭🍛🍽️🧼🧽🫧 I wonder what would be the cumulative cost to global productivity if dishwashers didn't exist and every plate and fork had to be washed by hand every time. 🤔

🏦 💰 Liberty Capital 💳 💴

🗣️ ✍️🧠💭💡 Interview: Ben Thompson on how he writes and thinks

David Perell did a great job with this interview. It’s a glimpse not only into how Ben writes and his framework for generating new ideas and turning them into essays, but also into how he thinks about his business and online media in general.

Check it out:

• 🎧 How Ben Thompson Built a Writing Empire

The analogy he made between TSMC’s building blocks for chips and the mental building blocks from his frameworks was excellent. I feel similarly. I have these lenses through which I look at the world and these areas of interest that I keep coming back to, and not starting from zero every time allows me to go deeper.

🔥 Nvidia’s 25-year Track Record Beats 30,000 Stocks Since 1925 🥇🚀

Nvidia has the best CAGR for a stock with at least 20 years of data.

But note that this is only up to the end of 2023! This doesn’t even take into account 2024 — the stock is up about 150% YTD right now and peaked at 175% YTD a few weeks ago.

To add 2024, I looked on Koyfin and got a CAGR of 37.21% for Nvidia since going public in 1999 🤯

The authors of this study looked at almost 30,000 stocks since 1925:

This report describes compound return outcomes for the 29,078 publicly-listed common stocks contained in the CRSP database from December 1925 to December 2023. 

The majority (51.6%) of these stocks had negative cumulative returns.

Read that again: “The majority (51.6%) of these stocks had negative cumulative returns.” This is a hard game!

Altria takes the 🍰 for cumulative returns because it has been around forever:

Seventeen stocks delivered cumulative returns greater than five million percent (or $50,000 per dollar initially invested), with the highest cumulative return of 265 million percent (or $2.65 million per dollar initially invested) accruing to long-term investors in Altria Group. 

Annualized compound returns to these top performers relatively were modest, averaging 13.47% across the top seventeen stocks, thereby affirming the importance of "time in the market."

h/t Tae Kim

☀️👷‍♂️ Crucial but Overlooked Point on the Economics of Solar Power (a Flaw in Most Predictions) 💰🚧 🧰