Devin Baker

The antidote isn’t motivation. Motivation comes and goes. The antidote is surrender .

You lower the stakes.

You let yourself look foolish.

You accept the embarrassment of being a beginner, the awkwardness of doing something badly, the exposure of putting your real effort on the line.

Because once you remove the need to look good, the need to start... See more

In fact, capital markets themselves are no longer systems for raising new capital, but have become vast mechanisms for refinancing these huge debts. This makes the balance sheet capacity of the financial sector, or ‘liquidity’, far more important than interest rates as a cycle determinant and it means that the business cycle increasingly hums along... See more

Most Bitcoin advocates conflate monetary expansion with hard asset appreciation, assuming it automatically flows into scarce stores of value. This ignores a critical mechanism: cheap money doesn’t necessarily mean money flows to hard money without understanding the shape of the yield curve. When rates fall, duration-sensitive assets, especially... See more

When people make unconventional decisions, it often feels like they are measured to another standard than those who follow the default script. If you do the normal thing and it fails you, then it isn’t your fault; it’s the system. But if you do an unconventional thing, even small, normal setbacks are read as proof of your foolishness. When a normal... See more

My opinion is that should the US dollar fail, or lose in a global conflict, there is a possible competitor to the dollar, but that this isn’t enough to supplant the dollar as the global reserve currency. At least not within the next decade, which is what matters to most reading this. The BRICS system doesn’t have the unique economic requirement,... See more

Legacy Industrials , or Incumbents, have vertically integrated supply chains designed around older technologies and processes. Deep Tech companies have unproven technologies that, if they work, could be a very powerful building block for many businesses. Vertical Integrators integrate a number of cutting-edge-but-proven technologies; what they need... See more

When you remove enough of this over time, you slowly scrub the soul from it. We’re better than ever at building things and yet it feels as if we’re losing the unexplainable wonder from them because we’re so obsessed with optimizing the soul out of everything.

With growing demands coming from pending debt roll-overs as the ‘maturity wall’ of debt termed out during the COVID emergency comes nearer, to say nothing of the 30% of US Treasury debt that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent must refinance, the Fed will be forced to raise US liquidity levels.

With the rise of the amount of money that these tech giants are making, and the international nature that they are now able to operate at, the one risk that i’ve only seen myself talk about is the rise of corporate sovereignty.

This hasn’t really been a major issue really since the East India trading company. However with how big and how much power... See more