How to be a Millionaire

Hello and welcome to this episode of Anon and I. The internet is home to many interesting, anonymous writers and posters. In this series we hear what they have to say. Joining us this week is a gentleman of leisure, a man of means, a modern aristocrat who post as P.P. Poo Poo and who can be found on Twitter as Deep Dish Enjoyer. Deep Dish Enjoyer, please say I love to listen to this. Hey everyone. Could you stop by telling us why you joined Twitter and why you chose to be anonymous? Yeah, sure. So my first four ends online posting wasn't really on Twitter. It was on a site called "Predict It" over the pandemic. I was getting a little bored and you know heard about prediction markets so I checked it out and the entire site was quite small at the time. Prediction markets were not nearly as big as they are now. So it was kind of like a small community. People, I mean people, people traded on political markets but the real thing was kind of all in the comment section. So this is actually where the name comes from too. I kind of decided, okay, I'm starting to trade this market but I feel like I have a fair amount of information on a fair amount of confidence on and the market is quite mispriced and the market in question was the New York Mirrolet primary market. So there was this candidate, Catherine Garcia. She was endorsed by Union. She had a lot of experience and she was trading for like one or two cents and I'm like, okay, this is massively mispriced. I'm going to name myself something incredibly stupid and then you know, be this sharp taking advantage of people in the market. So that's where the name came from. I think, yeah, that's just very interesting. That's kind of similar to my philosophy. Like the reason I've got an anime profile picture and I've always liked, I've always stuck with that even now quite a big account because it's kind of like a asymmetrical warfare if you're posting with something other really stupid pseudonym because if you lose, it doesn't really matter because they've only made an anime profile picture look stupid. But if you outsmart them and you make them look like a dick, they've been made to look an idiot by someone called Pepe Pupu or somebody who's got a cartoon character as a profile picture. So it's even worse for them. Yeah, exactly. So there's been so many arguments online just ended by like, why are you, why are you even talking to this person his name is Pepe Pupu? So what was the outcome of that Mirrolet action? So I did quite well there. I mean, Catherine Garcia ended up being one of the top, so it was a ranked choice primary and she ended up being well the top two. So her top price was over 50 cents. So that was a good trading outcome for me. But the real outcome was, I was actually just really present in the comment section. Yeah. And so I kind of started shit posting there and it's a very niche form of shit posting. You sort of have these long arcs of, memes don't just last a day or two. They're like, oh, you know, self-referential over and over again, like you reference a certain user or certain outcome for months at a time. And so I would post on these, on these comment sections and eventually a lot of those users move to Twitter and I kind of followed. So that was my first story into Twitter. And I actually had an account there that was mostly political prediction market focused. But you know, it got a little bit bigger. You know, it was already starting to do some of the bits that I'm doing now. But yeah, I think the way that kind of evolved was, you know, it's still a sort of side hustle for me. I was still working at the time too. I wasn't retired yet. Yeah, you still involved in prediction markets. How have you moved on from that? I think prediction markets have really, really changed. I mean, when I first joined, you knew everyone. So it was a small community. It felt, you know, there was money on the line, but it was sort it didn't feel quite some dirty. It was a fun pool of money as opposed to the millions and billions of dollars that are kind of transacted now. Yeah. So it feels a little bit different. I've actually posted recently about prediction markets and I'm quite negative on them because they feel quite predatory. They're much more gambling sites. And I think, you know, if you look at something like a Calche, like most of the volume is on sports betting. It's on, and now they're doing parlays and things like this. I mean, it's, you know, it's not something I really want to encourage. It's one thing when you, you know, have 50 bucks on the line. And it's, you know, maybe a thousand people at most betting on something they really care about versus, you know, just hundreds of dollars every day on some kind of, you know, degenerate sports outcome. It's really interesting to me as an English speaker from the UK to watch the explosion in sports betting and betting more generally in the United States because Britain's always had a lot of gambling. But like, it's kind of been socially embedded. It's something people are quite used to in a way. So there was a joke in like, even in like the Victorian period that the English people don't really have any religion and that, except for the Derby and whether on their deathbeds would ask for the results of horse races, rather than anything else. So, so like, it's kind of really embedded in British culture. But the way it's kind of exploded into the United States is pretty fascinating. The way, I mean, obviously, it's due to the legislative, the legal changes in the framework, which have made it possible. And the changes in technology. But like, how would you feel about that more generally? Like, the explosion in betting like? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what happened. I mean, from where I sit, it seems like one of the results of COVID, basically, of the pandemic in general. I mean, the, you know, if I'm thinking about the 2010s, you know, betting wasn't so big, retail trading wasn't so big. And people tended to have pretty, you know, if not pure to an ideal, like pretty conservative use of, you know, how much gambling should exist in society. COVID happened and then suddenly, you know, first of all, there were stimulus checks. So people got an influx of money. There was nothing to really spend it on because you were stuck in your apartment. So like, you know, maybe you buy, you know, some sourdough starter kick, they're kid or something, but you know, you're really not, you're not going to the pub and spending a bunch of money anymore. So yeah, people started gambling on equity options and things like that, because that's what was legal. That was what was available. And it became normalized because the, you know, there were these online communities like Wall Street bats and, you know, people starting posting on Twitter about things like this. So I think, I think gambling became normalized in that way. And it never sort of unnormalized when the pandemic ended. And then you have these, you know, pushes, and it's probably is true that the regulatory clamp down on betting was, was maybe suspiciously high in the United States. Like, you know, you couldn't access a site like Betfair that you could in the UK or something like this. But, but there does seem to be, I mean, you know, there's a pretty stark contrast in mind view from that, from legalizing something to normalizing, you know, giant billboards of saying, oh, you know, this parley on on Calche on sports bats is a form of investing like you're doing something prudent by doing this. Like, I mean, that seems a a little bit misleading. Well, as a professional in that area, how, how would you distinguish trading gambling and prediction markets? Would you think they were in a spectrum? I do think they're on a spectrum. I mean, broadly for retail, I don't think they're all that different. I think for retail, they're all a form of gambling. Yeah. When people ask me for trading advice, I always point them to the book, a random walk down Wall Street, and I tell them to not trade. Like, it's not a very, I mean, even if they could somehow avoid losing a lot of money, it's generally not a very fruitful use of their time. There's so many better ways to use their time, even either to develop themselves as people or to earn money in a real job or what have you. So, you know, I think it's all form of gambling. Now, gambling is okay when done in moderation. I think it's perfectly fine to set aside 10 bucks a paycheck and if it makes you happy to gamble, and that's totally fine. I don't think that's going to ruin anyone's life. What's different is that these days, people tend to be sucked in. They convince themselves that they're actually very sharp, but it's just bad luck that's causing them to lose every single time. And that becomes a pretty, pretty bad spiral. Yeah. And it's interesting how strong the alert seems to be of becoming a trade. I do think it's not in the wake of the crypto explosion, which again, I think is a total total form of gambling and that's what take your money down the horse races for how sound it is. But I was very keen to have you on and things were talking about trading because not just because you're an amusing post, but you wrote two very interesting pieces for substakes. The first one was entitled The 24 Hour Life, where you explain the how and why of why you were able to retire as a 31-year-old. In which you've already referred to today, in professional terms, what were you doing that got you to the point where you were retired in your early 30s? Yeah, sure. So I was a quantitative trader to take a step back, I guess, like the other side, if you're trading options or accolades or whatever, as a retail person, there are people providing liquidity on the other side. Those firms are mostly electronic market making firms. So they may be interacting with your order directly. So people sort of know that if you're on Robinhood, Citadel will pay for your order flow and provide quotes to that. So that's one form of interaction. Then there's other firms that will maybe not interact with your order when it goes to your brokerage, but may be posting on the exchange, showing tight quotes on the exchange. And then there's other firms that are less in the liquidity provision space and more on the risk provision space. So the kind of differential I'm making there is, if you're trying to buy something or sell something, someone may be the person that you're transacting against in that very moment, but they might not want to hold on to that risk. But eventually, somebody has to be the other side of that risk and their firms that make their bread and butter and that. So yeah, I think I've always been interested in markets and trading in its sort of academic sense. I kind of vaguely knew that I was interested from even the late years of high school. Originally, my parents were software engineers and engineers. I was always a STEM kid in that sense. It was good at math. The things that really interested in me math were things like physics, things like econ. I really liked the idea that you can model complicated systems with mathematics. And so that was always academically interesting to me. And then, Lane High School, I learned, hey, there's this entire career path of people doing this in the context of markets. And I graduated high school in 2011. So the landscape kind of looked a little bit different. This was still the wake of the financial crisis. Finance was it so popular. So it was sort of an opportune time to be interested. Like, there were still competitive seeds for sure, but it was still a lot more accessible, I think. These weren't so hyper competitive. You hear about seeds now out of college, people making $600,000, $700,000. That's crazy. My first job out of college was a normal five-figure salary. But it was something I was very interested in. I happened to be very lucky with the people I interacted with at work and the people I was directly working with. So my first job was at a large investment bank on their trading floor. And generally, that kind of environment is a lot less quantitative as a lot. It's not filled with the sort of people that you think of when you think of like, you know, Cisco Honda or Jane Street or Citadel or whatever. But my specific team was filled with really young bright guys. I mean, the oldest person was the managing director and he was 30. And I was primarily working with a guy who was probably, he must have been like 24 or something. Really smart guy, you know, was an athlete, an Ivy League, but a math major. So kind of had that blend of hard work and quantitative ability and, you know, charm. So I worked with them and then he ended up leaving to go to one of these electronic market makers. And I soon followed, like, you know, maybe a year later, I kind of follows him when, you know, he gave me a call and he's like, hey, you should work here. Everett, he wears jeans. People are really smart. You know, the, you know, it's a very, very different environment from, you know, the Stoic bank. I was, you know, I was wearing business casual in the bank every day. So I were, you know, and that was kind of my career sense where I've been working out these electronic market making firms. And at the time, you know, it seemed like a good job, but it wasn't the explosive industry. It's been in the last couple of years, you know, the job really changed when COVID hit. There was a lot of volume. There was, you know, more money being poured into the markets. And at the same time, the people who would be normally taking risk, you know, these big investment banks had to take less risk because they're giant mark downs and many assets banks are typically pretty conservative post financial crisis because of all the regulations. So they had to kind of step aside and the people taking risk were suddenly these electronic market making firms. So the opportunity was just way larger to make money. My income grew a lot faster than I expected. I mean, I kind of had some vague dreams about what my income might be someday. But, you know, it's very fortunate in that way. And it feels kind of gross because, you know, and I remember talking about this in 2020, like a lot of people were really excited on the desk about, you know, how profit will trading was. And I kind of had to remind people, like, this is awful. People are dying. Like, you know, this is, you know, not, uh, you know, like you can be personally happy for how your life is going, but you still have to put it all into context and consider what's happening with society. So it felt a little bit gross. I mean, we weren't at fault. I don't think I don't think we did anything unethical. Like, you know, you were just there. But it, it, it, it, it was pretty stark about how, how, how high variance fortunes could be, you know, like, for a lot of people, COVID was one of the worst times ever. Like they would lose their jobs. You know, I visited Alaska during COVID, for example. And tourism was collapsing. You know, people weren't traveling entire towns were filled with unemployed people because, you know, normally they would be maintaining tourism. And that was gone. So yeah, I mean, like, you know, and I think the ultimate answer to your question is like whenever you see somebody that ostensibly looks like a success story, what you're looking at is a manifestation of very good luck. I mean, yeah, maybe that person put in a lot of effort. Maybe they made their own luck in a certain way. Maybe they were competent and smart. But I think, like, I think it'd be who's people to remember that. And then there's kind of two, two, uh, consequ, uh, two consequences of that fact, I think. One is, you know, if I, if I said exactly how I set myself up to, to get a job in trading or whatever, it's not clear to me that somebody, you know, following that advice to the T will get the exact same results I did just because of how luck turns out. And the other consequence, I think, is it's for for person that's lucky. It's sometimes hard to evaluate exactly how they got there. So yeah, yeah, you know, I think, you know, I, you know, in college, I was pretty linearly focused on getting a job in trading. Like, you know, I think I was focused on that intensely. Um, I was even letting my grades slip in classes if I thought I could use the time to prepare for interviews. And I think back at that now, and I think that advice would be terrible today. I bet people are putting a lot less emphasis on interviews and in trading just because, you know, there's AI tools that people can use on the phone. And I assume like, you know, interviews are, are weighted a lot less now. They were, you know, this would be great advice for people in my exact position. But people today, I don't think would be quite in the same book. So this was around, so this was in the early 2020s. Well, I suppose we're just, we're just coming out of the early 2020s really. So around 20 around the COVID era, you're a quantitative trader at a market maker. Yeah. What exactly was just for the poor people listening, or people who don't work in finance. What was your, what was your role? What would you be doing on a, like a month on a, when you turned up a work? Yeah, sure. So that the, the, the exact rule has changed over the course of my career. I think, you know, maybe 20, call it 2017 to 2022. I was something that you would call a high touch trader. So a lot of my role was actually picking up phones and trading manually, like, or going on Bloomberg chats and trading manually. People would, would call me to make large markets on a large amount of risk. And I would do that on some options order and, you know, in a wide variety of names. And a lot of my day to day was, what's spent doing that? Like outside of market hours, I might be doing some sort of research. I might be, you know, doing some stats work or, you know, some data work. But my day to day was primarily spent, you know, physically making prices for people, physically transacting in the markets. I actually moved roles, you know, the, the firma is working for, was doing really well. It was known for taking a lot of risk. And then, in 2022, a firm reached out, that was also known to markets, but it was more of a liquidity provider than a risk taker. It was, it was trading a lot in markets, but not taking a lot of risk. And they were like, hey, we'd like you to come over and help us build out, you know, kind of our risk-taking business as well. So I did that, but that changed my role dramatically. There was, you know, a lot more electronic focused, a lot more systems-building focused. You know, I wanted to do something that was much more systematic, something with a lot less key person risk. I was basically trying to build myself out of a job, more of us. But, yeah, I think, you know, in general trading sort of has, or quantitative trading, at least kind of has multiple axes. Like, one axis might be programming, the other axis might be research and stats work. The last axes might be, you know, manual trading and kind of manually keeping up on markets. And I think everybody is, you know, somewhere on this three-dimensional, three-dimensional graph. And the exact, you know, depending on the exact role, like the split between those three might be different. And your income, would that be based on your performance, based on how much money made the company? How would that be calculated? Yeah, it depends on the firm, again. Many firms, I think most market makers have something that looks like a discretionary bonus, plus possibly a percentage cut of firm performance. Literal profits splits are kind of unusual at market makers because market makers tend to view their employees as a cohesive team. Like, you're supposed to be helping each other. You're supposed to be working in a group, like you're all kind of working towards one goal. And maybe that involves, you know, doing something that's not directly related to your business to help grow out about their business, like whether that be research work or, you know, business development work, or what have you. At hedge funds, you might see a profits split. Like, you might see, like, oh, you're going to literally make, you know, 15% of what you made this year, especially at multi-manager funds. But there, you know, the teams are siloed. You know, it is kind of very much what you kill environment there. I personally like the fact that I was working on a team, like it, you know, it just made work a lot better and a lot more fun to go to every day. But, you know, there are people that are attracted to the idea of like, you know, I want to be able to be fully responsible for my destiny. I want this person I cut. So that doesn't exist in it. And feel free to decolor into answer this if you, if it's a two personal question. But how much were you making at the peak per hour? Sure. I'll say it in big terms because, you know, there are people all that know my identity. So, you know, I was, I was making a comfortable seven figures, you know, it wasn't like, it wasn't, you know, like right out the cusp or something. It was, it was a comfortable seven figures. I think that's honestly that's probably more usual these days, like last couple of years, as training has gone even more and more, you know, the amount of volume and the amount of activity has ramped up. I definitely remember feeling very lucky when I hit my note. Yeah. It was, you know, I even, even 10 years ago, numbers were a lot lower across the board. I mean, you could really see this, I think, with junior salaries out of college. Because yeah, like out of, I remember when I first started looking at trading when I was in high school, there were, you know, you could, you could see junior salaries online. People would post about it to kind of give a sense. And I think, you know, if you worked at a bank, the starting salary was something like maybe 60k a year or something like that or even 50k, I can't quite remember. Maybe if you worked at like the best place, you worked at a Jane Street. Maybe it was 100k. I can't quite remember what their salary was at the time. But starting salaries now are many multiples of that, you know, at any firm. Yeah. You know, and what's driven that? I think it's just hyper competition. I mean, like at the end of the day, if you're a firm that's making billions of dollars a year to pay your genius, you know, several hundred came more per year is not a huge issue. Like you can physically afford that. Yeah. So it just becomes solely driven by demand for that talent. And demand for that talent has been exploding because those people can be going to, you know, fang. They could be doing AI for that matter, which also pays the ludicrous sum of money. All the quantitative training firms are competing with one another. So, you know, it's sort of a, you know, just a spiral where there really is no end insights because, you know, the firms are making so much money. That firms are incentivized to be the first to kind of raise their salary for a particular year. Right? Like if you just say, oh, I'm just going to start paying people, you know, another hundred K like if that attracts enough people, you should do it rationally. But before we move on from like that part of your life, what's the biggest misconception you've encountered from people outside that world about about the at that part of finance? Man, there's so many. I think it depends on like what sort of people we're talking about. I think a lot of people that are interested in working there often think that quantitative trading is a lot more esoteric than it really is. You know, people imagine, you know, some guy that looks like Jim Simon's, you know, going working out a blackboard with some complicated equation, you know, some very complicated stochastic calculus or what have you. But really in my world, you know, the most complicated mathematics was basically like the first course of a university was, you know, regressions and stats 101. The math isn't very hard. The hard part is like you have to be exceptionally careful and exceptionally kind of clever about like what you're doing because it's a competitive environment and like the data you're working with is noisy and you know, anytime you figure something out, the market changes maybe by the fact that you're starting to act on on your observation. Like, you know, they're sort of higher order things that are complicated and require being, you know, mathematically savvy and clever, but there's not a lot of knowledge, so to speak, that's required in quantitative finance, which I think is great. Like for me, I found that super satisfying. Like the amount of finance knowledge is not that high. Like most people that are hired don't have any finance background whatsoever. Like you just learn it on the job. And even though amount of math knowledge is not so high, so you kind of get to just jump straight into the meta game. You kind of get to jump straight into thinking about interesting problems as opposed to, you know, it's not like grinding out a problem sign in college or something like that. So that's a big one for sure. And then like again, like we kind of touched on this before, but you know, I think a general thing that people have a misconception about is that like it is a realistic goal to profitably make money trading. And I think the answer is for most people, it's not like you're competing against mass armies of these really smart kids from MIT and Harvard and Princeton or whatever. And they're backed by billions of dollars of capital and they're backed by institutional knowledge that's been generated over the course of 25 years and they're backed by these giant computer systems and like, you know, programs that either automatically trade for them or help them trade or what have you. They're just armed with so much more resources. And the thing is, you know, finance is a competitive market. I think, no, Augustine LeBron, sorry, actually what is his last name? There's a guy on Twitter that used to work for James Sham, I'm going to try to pull up his name because he is a, yeah, Augustine LeBron. Because you think that was a joke name? You know, I thought it was like, there's no way that's his actual last name. And then I looked up, yes, it is a kind of recalled it. I think the analogy he gave is, you know, training is kind of like playing a sport. Like, let's say you're playing football and there's no divisions. Like, you're playing with Ronaldo and Messi. Yeah, I mean, I think he used American football as the analogy, but you know, I'm being charitable here. And the thing is, like, you know, if you're playing against them, you're like, you know, you wouldn't win. Yeah. Like, I think it's obvious when you say that for sports, but suddenly for trading, people are like, no, I'm built different. I think that's why I put again. And it's just like, yeah, I don't think that's what's going to happen. There's the problem is it's because there's variance. People can dilute themselves into thinking that for a while, but it's not very realistic. You mentioned the myth of game. What do you mean by that? I mean, I guess in, you know, when you're playing a kind of whether it be a car game or a board game or a video game, you know, the first part of learning to play that game is literally learning the mechanics, literally learning controls. And for certain games that might take a long time, just learning the rules is hard enough. But then, like, once you learn the rules, like, you get to think about strategy, you get to think about, you know, what the implications of those rules are, and kind of get to think about these higher order concepts. I am personally fond of games where the rules are exceedingly simple. And finances sort of, I mean, they're specific as a tarot things that are kind of complicated. But really, it's not so hard. I mean, people in trading, again, usually come with no finance background whatsoever. And many of them are trading within months time. You know, far less than, say, a university course or something like that. And that's kind of what I mean. Like, you know, you kind of start thinking about the hard problems pretty quickly. You know, that's not necessarily limited to, you know, very senior people or, you know, very experienced people. Obviously, like, you know, when you're young and unexperienced, you're going to be mentored by these experienced people who have thought about these problems deeper than you. But you still get to experience it pretty, pretty quickly, I think. And that's a lot of fun. Like, honestly, I think that's one of the biggest selling points of quantitative trade. So as mentioned, that piece to 24 hour life is about essentially your retirement. And can you tell me about the point where you realized you were able to retire and you that you would never have to work again? Yeah, I mean, I think I called the plug not for retirement reasons. I mean, I wrote about it in the piece, but my father was sick with with pancreatic cancer. And I wanted to spend time with him like his treatment stopped working. I knew that there wasn't much time left for him. And I knew for sure I was at a point where like, you know, I could, I could take a hiatus from work. There's no question about that. I don't think that's so unusual for people. So I, you know, I let my work know. I kind of, you know, thank them for the time. Said it was nothing personal. I wanted to spend time with my father. So I did that. And what is true in a lot of these trading roles is that they come with a non-compete. So when you don't work, you're forced, you're basically forced out of the market for, you know, a set amount of time. In my case, it was, you know, 18 months to not work in the market. And the idea is like, you know, you have a lot of IP, you have a lot of things that can hurt the business of, you know, if you were to work for a competitor, they kind of want to put a, you know, a speed bump on that. And you get, you know, you get paid some, some amount of money for this period that you have to sit out. You get paid a, a, a salary for this period. So, you know, my temporary retirement was kind of forced for 18 months anyway. And so I took the time to do a lot of things that I couldn't do when I was very busy. You know, I traveled for extended periods of time. I spent like a month in Japan. I spent two weeks in Germany and the Netherlands. There were a lot of hobbies that I wanted to do, but would just take too much time out of my day, such that when I was working, it wasn't very feasible. So like learning Japanese at the time was so much easier because it's a, it's a very difficult task for a 30-year-old native English speaker who's learning Japanese for the first time. Like that, you know, takes multiple hours a day. So I was doing that. And one realized, you know, a lot of people were worried, oh, you know, aren't you going to be bored and itching to go back to work after these 18 months. And the answer was definitive, no. I had found myself quite occupied in the hours of my life, just not with structured work. And the other thing is again, like, you know, once again, luck strikes. And like, I think financially I was maybe on the cusp of what I would consider to be what I want, like, you know, how much money I would feel comfortable retiring with. And I kind of, you know, in the piece, I kind of go over the map of what that is. You know, people can read it if they're listening to this podcast. The punchline I think is that it's generally super safe to think of, you know, the pile of money you have right now, take 3% of it, and that's the equivalent of how much real income you can sustain for pretty much forever. So, you know, if you have $3 million or something, then you can imagine yourself as being able to sustain a real income and real meaning adjusted for inflation and all these sort of things of $90,000 a year forever. So, yeah, I mean, I was, when I had retired, I was on the cusp of what I considered for the lifestyle that I want to be able to afford myself, like, basically, like, you know, what I actually felt comfortable just putting down the pencil and being like, okay, like, I'm ready. I was on the cusp of that. But over, you know, the last 18 months, like, you know, I did some personal portfolio trading, which again, I would not recommend to people. I don't even, it's, it's, it's, I'm not even confident that I have edge. I've been doing this professionally for a decade. I'm not even confident that I have edge over the course of a year, maybe in vary as a tariff market conditions, like very crazy jumping conditions like we had. With tariffs. With the tariffs exactly. I think the more of an efficient market is, the crazier market is that more plausible it is to find pockets of edge. But, you know, whether or not, you know, it's because of skill or lock. I'm actually leaning more towards lock here. You know, I did quite well. And that pushed me well over what I thought was, you know, no more than enough some of money for me to say, look, I have other things I want to prioritize. Like, you know, at a certain point, money is just a number. Yeah. It's very hard. You know, I think I'll, what drives a lot of Taipei people that are able to make a lot of money is the kind of notion that they can win at making money or something like this. But it's just such a fruitless exercise. Like, there's always going to be a green. Yeah. They're completely good. Not at all. I mean, and like, I don't know, like, you can, you can take the richest person in the world as an example. I think Elon Musk has been asked multiple times whether he's happy and he basically always says no. I don't want to put words in his mouth. Like, I don't remember the exact formulation he uses. And it's not like, you know, he's not shouting to the world, look, I'm depressed or something. But, you know, he just says there's like a lot of things happening in his mind and he never feel satisfied. I like, I don't think I'm mischaracterizing this. Like, there are clips that can kind of look at. I think Elon's a very interesting example of like him, of my, of money, because he's the richest man in the world and what has he spent it on getting better at Twitter? Yeah. That's what people want. That's ultimately that is, that's people's raised on DETRO. That's my raise on DETRO. Like, I've made my money. I've made my money and now I run on a Twitter account called TPUPU. That's what it's a great leveler in a way. Like, no matter how good you, how rich you are, you don't get a bit of social media network. You're still, you're still posting in the same place as the part time binmin and stay at home. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's funny. People, people I've talked to have commented about this. I think it was like a specialty during the pandemic where people's entire social spheres moved online and you'd have these hodgepages of bizarre combinations of people. You would have literally, you know, especially if you look at say shit, posting Twitter, shit, posting Twitter is like 50% you know, Ivy League educated, hyper intellectual people doing a bit of like, you know, oh, I'm going to ironically post something very stupid. And the other 50% is like actually schizophrenic. Yeah, completely mentally insane people. And in real society, they would never come across each other, but over the pandemic, yeah, you'd have like these group chats and discords of just the most opposite looking people you could imagine interacting and, you know, having a good time. A lot of people are still friends now. It's a great level. It's like universal conscription. Everyone's just forced into the same, forced into the same battlefield. Right. And you're not convinced by Elon's claims that he want, he's doing this all so he can go to Mars. I don't think Elon is claiming his Twitter acquisition is that the getting the getting more money. Oh, I. Well, I mean, I think it's true that he wants to get more money to be able to control more capital. I don't like at a certain point, like you actually are not able to consume the money you have. And I'm not sure where that is, but it's probably in the low billions. Like maybe you can, like the most expensive things, like think of that you can buy or like these mega yachts. Even politics is comparatively cheap. Like if you want to install a local politician, it actually is like shockingly, like you'd be surprised about how little money it takes to buy politician. Yeah. So it's, you know, at a certain point, it's like, okay, if you're already a billionaire and you're looking to make more money, it's because you're kind of viewing this as you're raised on debt. It's like it's a game to you to be able to, you know, control large groups of people or corporations or what have you and sort of direct how capital flows and how society is met and and look, that's to an extent. I think that's why I mean, I don't think he's being misleading about that. I actually think it's being quite clear about that. Whether it's to go to Mars is a little bit, I mean, I think Mars is one of his goals, but I don't think it's his only goal. And I certainly don't think Mars is the most imminent one. Like I don't even think, like it's not even clear to me that in the short term, Elon thinks Mars is the most existential question. Like yeah, go like, copulating the rest of the universe will eventually be existential for humans, but you know, that's not on the time scale of dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, whereas like, you know, in his mind, you know, the evil woke mind virus or whatever is an existential question on the order of dozens of years, right? So, you know, and that's why he's buying things like Twitter and that's why he, more importantly than buying Twitter, it's why he's buying mind share and paying all these influencers and, you know, kind of controlling, you know, what sort of ideas get more exposure. Mind share wasn't what I was aware of. Is that to explain that briefly? Well, sure, I mean, it's just like, you know, like when you look at what sort of ideas were being discussed on Twitter before the acquisition and even what sort of ideas are being discussed now, they look nothing alike. And why is it that the ideas that are being discussed now are so popular, I think, in large part, is because of the blue check mark program of the ad revenue sharing. So there's these hot fun topics that get a lot of clicks and got in and these clicks aren't even necessarily positive, right? A lot of originally, I think a lot of these posts would get a lot of negative attention, but it doesn't really matter because they get views and views, you know, again, would get ad revenue share and that ad revenue share would go to the influencers. And once influencers realize that, you know, there's a lot of kind of, you know, capture of those influencers because some of those influencers wanted to make money. Right? Like, you know, I've taken an example of like Tiffany Falling. She used to be a crypto influencer. She would talk about crypto. She would talk about SPF. She would talk about whatever. Suddenly, she's getting paid by Elon and she gets a lot of views and, you know, it's all culture war stuff because that's kind of what pays. I don't even, I find it extremely unlikely that culture war stuff was fundamentally important to her before then. Maybe she was vaguely centrist or right wing before. Like, that's possible, but it wasn't like she was working for, you know, whatever right wing media thinks about this stuff all the time. But since it pays, like, of course, it became, you know, a large part of her identity. And then once you have that, it's just sort of a chain reaction. It's like, okay, that starts to become what's on your for you. People start talking about it. Regardless of whether your pro or against it, it certainly, it becomes a topic. It becomes the preeminent preeminent topic of conversation in the town square. And this wasn't the preeminent topic of discussion in the town square like a couple years ago. It's very odd for it to have suddenly shifted. And it's, I think it's really hard to say that it organically shifted with no pressure from heel on. Like, I think that's a little bit too far fetched for me. You wrote about one week lead to it. You started a Bluescai account. And yet just, why is it you think that Bluescai hasn't been able to succeed in a way a lot of people hope to do it? Well, it's always network effects. Like, that's the most important thing of a social media site. There's nothing terribly wrong with Bluescai from a technical perspective. The one thing that's missing that's actually quite important, I think, is the lack of group chats. Group chats are extremely important cultural note in Twitter. All of the big accounts are in group chats with one another. They're workshopping thoughts and ideas with one another before it goes on the timelines and us posts. The topics of the day are basically decided in these group chats. And people make more meaningful connections in group chats than on posts. It's really hard to make a friendship based off of public posts. It's just like a venue for that. So, group chats are important. Bluescai doesn't have it. So that's the, okay, that is a meaningful technical loss. But outside of that, I do genuinely just think it's like, well, Bluescai happened to be taken over by very unrepresented left wing part of the population. And the politics would be forgivable, but they're also just so painfully unfunny. The wham bam of that, in combination, is quite bad. Because if there were funny, I think nobody would care. If there was a banter, I think people would go out of perverted curiosity. But it's not bad. It's people who are. The humor almost is in the character of these people. You'll see screenshots of Bluescai. I can't think of concrete examples because I just didn't spend that much time there. But it's always some sort of, are you really going to call this abelism or something? It's just some totally unrelated thing. There's the whole door dash discourse and somehow it became an abelist thing on Bluescai. It's like, come on. So I think that's. Yeah, I think it's just like the audience that's cultivated there is quite uncohesive to individual people leaving Twitter and settling there. So it's kind of stuck, I think, in its rut for a little bit. I think it's really interesting that you mentioned group chats. Because I think that's one another really under-discussed cultural phenomenon that nothing is really written about in the mainstream. There's nothing like. It's not something that's really discussed, but it has a huge. As you say, has a huge impact on what people end up thinking about. I won't push back some. There was that article about the group chat that's. The signal audience? Yeah, that was a huge article. And that was a perfect example. I mean, that is. That's cabalias against. So yeah, it is exactly chats like that. Yeah, I think. So what I kind of meant is there'll be individual group chats that occasionally don't get leaked. The signal one that the. The Trump cabinet we use. And so on and so forth. When they get leaked, the individual group chats become a story. But group chats, their role in the more general sense, the role of group chats at large in how they affect this course and what role they have in the cultural mainstream. I think is really under-examined. And I'm kind of a bad person to talk about this because I do get added to a lot of group chats. And I have been members of many, many quite large group chats in my part of Twitter by almost always leave them. In fact, I think I've left because. And the reason I leave them is because I find myself being. What I post is affected by what the group chat I mean. So I find it hard to call people a fucking idiot. If I'm in a group chat with them. I'll see if people post some shit. I'll be like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" Like, that's. But if I'm in a group chat with them, I'm like, "I kind of. I feel bad. I feel like I'll affect the tone of the group chat." Or, "I'll even. I found myself moderating what I was posting or like, or like, second guessing what I was posting because of how will the people I'm in a group chat will respond to that. These are people I don't. I've never even met." And so I ended up leaving most of the group chats I was in and that. For that reason. But could you just expand on like. Like, why do you think that group chats do shade the discourse? Like, and do affect what gets post-what gets people who aren't in the group chat's talk? Yeah, so. I think these very big group chats are not the group chats I'm usually talking about. Like, the very big ones are, I think, are a consequence of the group chat sort of. What do you mean by big? What sort of numbers are you talking about? I don't have a. Again, this is one of those aesthetic things. It's more. I don't think it's a pure numbers thing. It's a more. Does everyone know each other and is everyone active? Because usually too big is when the two statements are. Because I mean, like, 10 to 3. I would say like. 30 would be a big group chat in my head. That's what I'm talking about when I said. Yeah, I mean, it depends. I think 30 could be big or 30 could be. I know, okay. 10 is a small group chat. I mean, not especially small, but I think 10 is. You certainly know everybody and someone's. Someone being missing would be missed. But yeah, like, I think. Again, it's just one of those. There aren't many that I'm in that I think really have shaped the discourse. And even when they have. You know, it's often momentary. It's like, it's this. You know, again, Kabbal, it's constantly shaping the discourse that's like, you know, at the top of. That's totally captured mind share forever. But, you know, usually what will happen is. There'll be kind of a topic of the week or topic of the month that this group chat is. Very well-versed in. Has a lot of members that are directly involved in like, when that happens, like, you know, the. The discourse will be somewhat shaped by kind of what this group chat thinks and kind of what this group chat feels. You know, a lot of ways this works is just because like, specific posts will be called out in the group chat and like, then suddenly a lot of people will, you know, quote, tweet it or interact with it. And that will naturally drive engagement. Because like the algorithm will see, oh wow, this post is getting a lot of attraction and it'll start, you know, serving it to people, you know, people who are just browsing there for you feeds or whatever will start seeing a post like this. And then, it'll attract attention, like, quick attention will get more attention. And so, you know, in the very least, the discourse will be shaped that way. I don't know, like for me, I'm thinking of a particular group chat that was just well ahead of the discourse. Like, I remember reading about AI and LLM's in this group chat, you know, in early to mid 2022. And I feel like it only became popular in like 2023. And so between the fact that it was early, there were some accounts that were really topical and kind of were leading, I guess, the sort of discourse around this area. I just remember being like, oh wow, like, there's a lot of cultural and mimetic power being generated in this particular group chat. I don't know. You know, in a certain sense, I just think in general, human communities, like throught, like the natural state of being is being in, you know, a small community where you can actually, meaningfully interact with people. I think that's why Discord is so popular. Like, I think, you know, like, I've posted about this before, but like, in certain sense, there's no, there are no new ideas being formed on the Twitter chat timeline. Like, those are pre-prepared, pre-packaged, pre-thought-about ideas. They might be like, people might be holding court with them. There might be battle, like, between two conflicting ideas, but there's not like a new idea being formed real time in Twitter posts. I've never seen it. And I feel like Twitter doesn't really allow for that. Like, there's just a living number of characters. It's all short, like, short form content doesn't really allow for that. Whereas, Chad is, you know, much more interactive. There's a back and forth. There's much more collaboration. There is a lot more guaranteed attention to, right? Like, if you post something, it's not clear who will see that post. If you post something in a group chat, the people that you want to see that post will interact with it. A lot of the very technical parts of Twitter as well behave this way too. So, for example, on Fin Twitter, you know, there'll be people that post technical things about trading or quantitative finance. I've made a couple threads with, like, interview questions and things like this, but like, there's very little of that on the timeline. In group chats, people talk about very complicated things, very, like, technically savvy things. That would border on IP even. And it's because, well, there's fewer people, like, they trust them, those people are competence. Like, there's just, it's just a very different experience, I think, than the Twitter timeline. Yeah. I think that's something I've quite well. But just for any low-weez listening, the group chat illuminaties are real. So, you're just not part of it. That's right. I want to go back to what we've discussed at the start about the 24-hour life. Because in the article, and I will put a link to it in the show notes, you describe your situation as the 24-hour life, which I presume, and I'm sure you let me know if I was right or not, or the reference to Paul Scalis' idea of the 4-hour life. That's right. I'm interested to know, how did what you chose to prioritize change once you're in a situation where you had potentially five decades of freedom ahead of you, rather than 18 months of gardening leave? Yeah. I mean, I guess the main thing is you sort of don't have to prioritize anything anymore, like, from a hobby perspective at least. Like, you know, the smaller things, you don't have to budget anymore. Time is no longer a very constrained resource for you. When you have four hours there, freeing the day, and those are even a quality four hours. Those are four hours where you're tired, and your brain is wiped. You have to be quite discerning about how you occupy that time. Whereas this, I mean, I'm having a multiple-hour discussion with you right now. This would be unthinkable when I was working, because like, why would I waste my small free time talking to some, you know, kind of kind of the UK? Yeah, it's just like, why would I do that? The main thing that I think is still top of mind and high priority for me, I think, is like, well, I do want to settle down. I want to sort of family all these sorts of things. And, you know, if anything, I think it makes that goal easier from the perspective of like, well, again, one is dating as much easier. Like, from one of my limited-sisterned geographies, I could go to a different geography if I wanted to. And I just have a lot more energy and time for it. Like, when I was working, you know, I'd go on dates, but I'm a, I'd call myself introverted from the perspective of like, you know, I'm not especially shy, but talking to strangers takes some sort of energy for me. And so if I'm tired already, you know, I'm less keen to do it, but in my energy reserves are much, much higher. So that's easier to do. And then the ideas of like, well, you know, how much time will I have to allocate to something like a family? Well, you know, when you're retired, you have all the time in the world. So like, it can become like, when you say something like, oh, you know, starting a family is a priority for me. Like, the people listening to that, like, actually, no, that's sort of true. Because like, you know, a person that's working might say that, and then, you know, take the job promotion that requires them to never see their family again. It's like, well, I mean, I guess you had to part in physically making your family, but like far from that, it's like, not quite there. So that, I guess it's changed. But the, but yeah, like in terms of day to day, how do I spend time? The freedom I have is just, it's just huge. Like, from a mental perspective, I just, I'm no longer worried about, you know, do I have, is this too cute? Do I have the time to really be for like, like, do I have the time? Do I have the free time to be able to waste it like this? And the answer is yes. Like, I, you know, I can, I can have the conversation with you. I can go on a meaningless long walk just because I want to clear my, my head to kind of see the sights of, the sights of the town. Just yesterday, like, I had to pick up a blank personal check and like, you can order these online. Like, you can get them delivered for you. But I decided to just walk to, you know, the bank branch. I didn't take the tea. I didn't take a car. I just walked and it's, you know, maybe a half hour or 40 minute walk. And this is like, you know, Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this too. Like, Kurt Vonnegut wrote a, like, a short piece on, you know, why he buys postage stamps at the post office instead of doing it online. Like, you know, it's kind of weird. Like, you know, I always imagine him as living in a, like, a time far in the past. But I think, you know, he died early this, you know, in the 2000s. So he, he was familiar with the online life. And even though it's available to him and his wife kept on asking him, he's like, no, I, I like walking and seeing the sights. I like seeing crying babies. I like seeing cute dogs. I like, you know, spending the time. And I feel fortunate that I have the time to spend doing that. Even though it's like, it, it seems so meaningless. Like, people are really interested these days of like, well, how did you hyper optimize X, Y and Z? I'm looking to read a sum stack to know how I can squeeze out three days of existence in one day of life, just like that meme of the influencer saying that he's repackaged his life into three days or whatever. And it's just like, that's not the point. Like, that's missing the, the force for the trees totally. And the point is that I don't need to package three days of life in one day of life. I can just go on living my life because I, I haven't enough of it. So you actually opened the, the 24 hour life article with describing how, describing how you choose to generally choose to avoid saying to on dates that you are retired and you say you're on like, you're not allowed to work because you've just left somewhere. So how have you found people have respond to your financial situation and your personal choice when they do find out? I think it depends on, well, first of all, like, I think the, so I'm off my non-copy now. And what is true now is, no, this again, this is maybe 1% of my time, but it's spent doing more like ad hoc consulting, S quirk. And so that's my new white lie. And somehow that, that feels a lot more natural to people like, like, people don't really like an oil. So that's, that's, I mean, it's a less interesting answer to what I think is a very interesting question. I think, well, most people's reaction is honestly like, wow, this is fucking cool. I wish I could do that. I think most people are a little surprised. Like, it's, they can't really wrap. It's just a very unintuitive thing. Like, and I talked about it in the article too. Like, people with a lot of money often can't wrap their minds around it. Family members certainly can't wrap their minds around it. Like, I don't know. Most people were raised with the heuristic that, of course, you need to work to live. Like, it's just kind of obvious. Like, well, duh. Like, well, how else are you going to live? Like, you're not going to be a leech on society, therefore you have to work. So it's confusing for people, but it's also not terribly hard to explain. Because again, like, I mean, I think the article to explain, like, it's sort of, the math is just a consequence of basic arithmetic, basically. You know, the other thing I think that's hard for some people to wrap their heads around is like, what disparity there is between possible incomes in the United States. That's, that's, that's, that's an important part, I think of the, the recipe and like, you know, most people are just not even thinking about that in the state of possible scenarios. Like, I, I, I can speak, speak for my dad, like, my dad thought that I made it when I made more than 400,000. Because for him, that was like how much a surgeon gets or something. Like, you know, that's a doctor. That's someone that spent many years in school, then spent another four or five years at residency. And it's like, okay, like, and this is like now, uh, upper class person in society. And like, okay, once you've hit that, like, that's, that's crushing it. And I mean, honestly, objectively, he's correct. Like, just by his dad's, like, that's an incredible salary. That's like very good. But, you know, anyone should be proud of achieving that. But that's kind of the frame of reference he had. Like, you didn't have the frame of reference of like, oh, there's this really weird niche job market where, yeah, like salaries can can can blow up to astronomical amounts just because, you know, it makes sense for the firm to pay that. So, so people don't, yeah, I think, I think that's a really common frame of reference to have. I'll say another thing is like even before that, like, people's frame of reference tends to be attached to what they've seen in other ways as well. Like on dates, I'll, I'll, a very common question is like, well, is your apartment a wonder two bedroom apartment? And like, I can't quite answer like no, like it's just a, it's a bad way to answer like a question like that. What do you mean? Like, oh, I have, I have a bigger place. Like, it's just like, yeah, and I live, I live alone, but I can afford a bigger place. And it's, it's a very privileged spot to be in. But like, again, like even your question, like, like, like, like, it's in dawn on you, like, like, oh, that's, you know, it's like, of course, that's a reasonable question to ask, like a wonder 10 bedroom apartment is like 90, 99% of people are going to be in that state. But I don't know. I don't think it's say in some ways, it's actually not as big of a deal that I think some, some people might think like at the end of day, I think most women that are looking to date are looking at character, looking at compatibility for starting a family, like, you know, there's some prequisites that I think are important. Like, you know, if you're literally a jobless bum with no money, like that becomes an issue. But, yeah, you know, if I think bar that it's, it's a lot less important than people think. And for any woman that is very important, it's probably a giant red flag anyway. Just just just my last question, though, is like, and I think I'll know the answer to this already. And is there a book? What book would you recommend to listen to? Oh gosh, I mean, it depends on the context. I mean, again, when I asked that, like, what's the book you, like that most? What had a big impression on you? Well, see, this isn't the book I would necessarily answer for that. But like, the book that I've mentioned earlier in the podcast, the most listeners are probably caring about because they're like, oh, this guy's in finance, certain wants whatever was again, the random walked out Wall Street because it's easy to read. And it might save somebody. It might, you know, if I've given it to a friend and it saved like they used to trade, they was to his money, they read it, they stopped trading, they stopped losing money, it's like mission accomplished. Yeah. And hopefully that saves somebody else money and at least gives them a better appreciation for kind of how markets are structured. I don't know that that's the book that had the biggest lasting impact on me though. Like, I don't know, like, for me, mostly that's classic literature, I think. I mean, I just read this recently and I've talked about this book a lot and I feel like it's almost, people are going to think I'm doing it for pretentious reasons. Like, it's just kind of a shabel, I think, for people who read, but like, I just read "Stoner" by John Williams. And as a 31 year old who hasn't like, you know, figured out life entirely, right? Like, I'm a Mary and like, I still have like, there's still a lot of life paths my life can take. I think it was, it was pretty pointed. Like, I think it was just like, I don't know, it made me think about a lot of things in life for sure. So somebody likes fiction, I recommend checking that out. No, it's a good book, so I've also read it and it did have an impression on me, but not, I mean, it wasn't a book I loved. I think I found the main character too frustrating and too willing to like, I found him too passive. Well, that's exactly the point, isn't it? Like, he has no, like, it's interesting because the character is very much not-agentic. And I mean, like, he realizes this at the end, right? What did you expect? And that was like, him kind of coming to grips with that at the very end. Although on paper, I think, you know, "Stoner" looks a lot, his life looks like a lot of people's lives. You know, he's successful in some sense, like he has, you know, finally gets the full professorship, he marries a beautiful woman, he has a daughter, you know, if you don't read the book and just squint at his life, he's able to attract a young woman, like, he's still attractive as he's older, has a young woman that's attracted, like, and a lot of people would be like, "Oh, yeah, that seems great, but yeah, his life is missing a lot." And I think- And I just couldn't get on, I couldn't, maybe it's just a, maybe it's a me from maybe my mind's too shallow, but I couldn't grasp why you would walk away from the love of your life and why you would let your child, your only child go to a wreck and ruin just so you could stay as an English professor. I don't understand, I couldn't quite grasp what it was about that role that he was willing to sacrifice because ultimately that's why he ends the affair, isn't it? Because they wouldn't be able to stay as- And like, I couldn't, he didn't seem to be getting as much from being an English professor as he was from everything, from the thing from the people in his life that he'd be cared about. I think that's a very good point. So I couldn't quite, maybe it's just an observation of humanity and maybe that's just someone he knew and maybe- But I couldn't quite, I didn't feel that was well drawn out enough. I didn't understand why I couldn't, what mattered so much to Stoner about the position that he was willing to sacrifice. Oh, I know, I don't think it mattered much to him. I think it was just the easy choice. I think, you know, an object in motion or object at rest, stay at rest. Like, I think it was the easy choice. It was the don't pull the switch on the trolley problem choice. And it's what you knew all his life. And so he stayed with that. I do agree he's very not a judge-dick in that way. But I think most people probably aren't. I think most people pick easy choices like that all the time. So you're supposed to feel somewhat relative. You're supposed to feel like he's somewhat relatable. I mean, if you had actual visceral disgust, I think that's probably- I wouldn't say it was disgust. It was just a degree of contempt, I think. Which probably probably a poorer reflection of me than it is on Stoner. I think he's supposed to feel negative about his decision making for sure. But to me, that seemed like the point of the book. But again, a lot of it's not just some of the more interesting things are like how he chose his wife. You know, like, I like, oh, wow, like he got the pretty girl. And that was a terrible decision. He never- he never- it's funny. It's like arguably the one-agentic choice he made, but she didn't. She was the unagentic agent in that interrupt. I don't know. I find the book interesting. But it is an interesting book. I will say that. It's certainly one that calls you to think. Yeah. Anyway, deep dish and doya, pee pee poo poo. Thank you for coming to the podcast. Yeah, thank you. [Music]