Daniel Hatke

the worst day of your life won’t be the day you get your heart broken or lose millions. it’ll be the day you realise that you were lying to yourself this entire time. you made things harder for yourself for no reason. you squandered money and opportunities for nothing. you realise the self sabotaging behaviours you had and try to untangle it all. you look back at once in a lifetime opportunities that you fumbled and wish you could “run it back”. you remember sums of untold money that you wasted and it aches. it’s like an awakening or rebirth. less esoteric, more pragmatic. i’ve seen this happen to those around me making millions and those around me stuck in a cycle of loss. the key when you get here is to stop dwelling on what could have been and what you’ve missed out on. all you can do is look at where you are now and vow to never be the reason why you lose again. if you lose, let it be because of factors outside of yourself. never let it be you. this happened to me once. i woke up and felt as though years of my life were lived as a fraud and it broke me. i questioned every belief i had about myself for months. until i decided to stop dwelling and start winning. i haven’t looked back since. each time i find myself falling down that path of self imposed loss, i catch myself. i remind myself of the consequences and what i risk in the process. once you learn to overcome your self sabotaging loser behaviours and live in congruence with your beliefs you’ll learn that the worst day of your life was equally the best day of your life.

Feel like not enough people are aware of this part of the California high-speed rail story:

wisdom is the new intelligence. joe hudson (who coaches sam altman and research teams across openai, anthropic, deepmind, apple) has the best explanation why his logic is simple: every major technology shift in history changed which human skill mattered most 1. before the industrial revolution, physical strength was the edge. farming, building, hauling goods, fighting wars. the stronger you were, the more you could produce and the more you were worth 2. then machines took over the physical work. so the edge shifted to learned skills. you could learn a trade, work a factory line, operate equipment. the skill was knowing how to do the thing 3. then the information age hit and the edge moved again. raw intelligence. if you could process information, write code, analyze systems, solve complex problems, you had the advantage 4. now ai is outsourcing intelligence. you can get a free tool to write your emails, research your market, analyze your data, build your software so what's the edge now? wisdom. sounds abstract until you break it down: it's the quality of the decisions you make. > can you see patterns others miss? > can you decide well on where to direct the ai? > can you do the hard thing when everyone else avoids it? > can you spot which opportunity is real and which is hype before you waste 3 months on it? in other words, a form of taste and emotional intelligence hudson put it like this: "if I can get 70 people to run a company for me, they're all free and they're all AI agents, then the question is, what are the decisions I'm making to make that company successful? What advice am I taking? How am I listening advice? How do I create alignment between the five or six people?" ai handles the thinking, but only you can handle the deciding we're moving from knowledge workers to wisdom workers

All week people have emailed me telling me that Alpha School selects for the top 1%. While I can't speak to Alpha School's application process, I can say my kids test similarly to theirs on standardized tests like the PSAT when it comes to math ... and it's 100% because they use/d AI tutors and the tech stack we talk about in this episode (Prodigy/Synthesis Tutor/Math Academy/Physics Graph). I realize it's uncomfortable to ask why AI improves results over teachers. And it's worth exploring. Some of my thoughts ... The "problem" with grades 4-12 of Math, is that most teachers "teach the grade" and math is cumulative. So, if you didn't learn something from grade 6, you're in a lot of trouble by the time you get to grade 8. With very few exceptions, your grade 8 teacher is not going to teach you (or the entire class) grade 6 math and as a student in grade 8, you'll resist it if you know it's grade 6. One of the primary reasons that AI is better is that it simply teaches you what you need to know, regardless of your grade level. It says you don't know X, and you need to know X to do this problem, so let's learn X. And it never tells you that it's grade 6 and you should have learned this years ago, so you just learn X. Another problem is the way maths are taught now. In a lot of schools, including my kids, they never had to "memorize" multiplication tables. And if you don't know them, it's ok. That sounds all fine and dandy, until you realize it takes up a lot of working memory in grades 8-12 -- working memory you need for other things on the problem. We only have so many working memory slots. It sucks but most "improvements" to education over the past 20 years, have had negative impacts on objective learning. The biggest thing we can do in this moment is raise the bar on what we expect from kids, focus on what works based on evidence, and make AI tutors free to the bottom 75% of each math class today. If you're a parent, this is a must listen. (Even if you disagree with the conclusions).

“I’ll figure it out” has gotten me further than any plan I’ve ever made

Extremely good post

We will spend the next 5 years arguing about ways to subsidize demand (therefore driving prices up even further) instead of massively increasing supply. Same exact thing as the Housing debate. Can we get this one right upfront?

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

The persistence of wealth within these families is unrelated to how much wealth children actually inherit. When it comes to inherited fortunes specifically, the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” story is correct. The estimated effects of being in a larger family on wealth for children (generation 2), grandchildren (generation 3), great-grandchildren (generation 4), and great-great-grandchildren (generation 5). By the time we observe the great-grandchildren, the estimated effect of wealth shocks from family size is 0.