Ian Vanagas

Thiel blamed the "gerontocrats" for Bitcoin's failure to reach $100,000 pinning blame on Warren Buffett, whom he called a “sociopathic grandpa,” as well as Dimon, the 66-year-old chief executive officer of JPMorgan who called bitcoin a "fraud" on multiple occasions, and BlackRock's Larry Fink, 69, who recently ran the Fed's direct corporate bond... See more

When she was laid off from her role at a fintech startup in the pandemic panic of early 2020, Paris doubled down on driving traffic to her DePop store to make money. She saw TikTok as an untapped fount of opportunity, and made creating videos for it her full-time job. She posted dozens of times a day, drawing viewers in with her... See more

The perceived mediocrity of her content, and its subsequent success despite that, was dubbed the "Victoria Paris Effect" by the Embedded Substack. She's had advantages others don't: her college education, pandemic timing, and the fact that "so  many  massive creators are thin and white," she says. "That is never something that's not always working... See more

Money makes games hyper realistic. More real than real. 

"I watch the data all day long… I see every uptick or downtick. I put a video out, I watch how it trends. And then I'll make another video and see if that trends similarly." Then, she privates the videos that don't do well. She estimates she's made more than 20,000 TikToks, only a third of which are still public.

Today all the gold in the world is worth $12 trillion, while global equities are worth $115 trillion. In 1980, the ratio was one-to-one, with all the gold in the world and global equities having the same value of $2.5 trillion.

We are in the age of hyper-competition. Being a big spender is a seductive way to make you feel like you belong.