Aaron Watson 🎥

@sam_gzstrength I’ve followed you for over a year. These are inspiring and attainable. 2025 via was 1k club. Hit it last week of the year.

Barbell Strength Standards to set your sights for the New Year The Base 115 Press 185 Bench 225 Squat 315 Deadlift Not Weak. 3-6 months training or less The Standards 1.0 135 Press 225 Bench 315 Squat 405 Deadlift Stronger than Average, But Not Weak. 6-12+ months training The Standards 2.0 200 Press 300 Bench 405 Squat 500 Deadlift Strong. 2+ years of training

There's been an almost 20% reduction in the population under 18 between 1990 and 2024.

I’ve got bad news. The AI cycle is over—for now. I’ve been an unapologetic AI maximalist since the first time I tricked GPT-4 into writing a working Python back-test for a volatility strategy back in early 2023. I’m still convinced it will take the wider economy years—maybe decades—to fully digest the productivity shock we’ve already uncorked. But the curve we’ve been riding just flattened into a long plateau. The problem isn’t that the models stopped improving. It’s that the improvements we need are measured in orders of magnitude, not percentage points. Every step up the scaling laws now demands a city’s worth of electricity and a sovereign wealth fund’s worth of GPUs. You can still squeeze clever tricks out of mixture-of-experts or chain tiny specialists into something that looks like agency; that keeps the demo videos cinematic. It just doesn’t get us to super-intelligence. For that we need either an architectural miracle (unforecastable by definition) or a civil-engineering miracle (a decade-long sprint to build nuclear plants and 2-nanometer fabs). The first is luck. The second is politics. Both are scarce. Meanwhile the models we have remain, at their core, next-token roulette wheels. Chain enough spins together and tiny error probabilities compound into existential glitches. In domains where you can automatically verify an answer—unit tests pass, the protein binds—those glitches are an acceptable tax. You iterate until it works. In domains where judgment is qualitative, the tax becomes fatal. My portfolio example still stings: I asked Claude Opus to locate the optimal weight for a new asset in an already-levered book. Opus quietly renormalized all weights to 1.0, vaporizing the leverage assumption. A layperson would see clean numbers and move on. Scale that failure mode to law, medicine, or national security and you understand why “human-in-the-loop” isn’t a slogan it’s a ceiling. What comes next is not the next spectacular demo but the quiet absorption of today’s tools into the 80 percent of the economy that still runs on Excel and email. Code will ship with more AI-authored lines, but senior devs will still sign the diffs. Customer-support bots will escalate the five percent of tickets that matter; the other ninety-five percent will vanish so smoothly customers won’t notice. Radiologists will still stare at scans, except now a model will have pre-read every slide and flagged the one in a thousand the tired resident would have missed. And yes, you’ll still need a PhD to notice that the portfolio weights got renormalized but you’ll build the new clustering module in five minutes instead of an afternoon. The productivity gains are real; they’re just not cinematic. For founders this means stop chasing the next 0.3 percent on MMLU. Find a vertical where verification is cheap and margins fat, then build the scaffolding that lets domain experts ride the model instead of babysit it. For investors, treat “AI” the way we treated “mobile” circa 2011: infrastructure bets can still clear the hurdle rate if you triple the time discount, but the application layer is a graveyard of demos wearing revenue costumes. For policymakers, forget the AGI manifestos and write zoning rules that let utilities run high-voltage lines to data centers. To my fellow zealots: we are not going back to the pre-2022 world. The ceiling just got higher, but the ladder is longer than we thought. That isn’t failure; it’s physics. The next breakthrough will arrive; maybe from a grad student with a sparse attention kernel, maybe from a national lab running a ten-gigawatt reactor. Until then the boring work of integration is the only game in town. So breathe. Ship the eval harness. Close the ticket. And remember: exponential curves always look flat when you zoom in too close.

@nateliason Love this. Can’t wait until they offer to just drive the baby around until it falls asleep.

Waymo is a godsend for working parents. Need to hand off the baby between meetings? Put them in a Waymo and send them to your partner across town. Impossible before now. Really grateful we have this technology 🙏

Reading about Javier Milei — paragraphs like this should be internalized by every public policymaker in the west

My toddler ripped off his poop-filled diaper and ran around the house cackling with one nugget still stuck between his butt cheeks. So, no. I did not have a relaxing Memorial Day weekend. Thank you for asking.

@luke_metro thanks Luke!

@AaronWatson59 osvnews.com/vatican-securi…

There's always a UAV angle

@zachpogrob 🏴

Bleeding to make things simple. Aura is coming. App-store launch in 2-3 weeks. A 100x improvement from the first beta version 2 months ago. Reply with a 🏴 for a beta invite (last round before launch).

@EricJorgenson @Geo_papic

What guest will you listen to on ANY Podcast, regardless of who the interviewer is?

@AJA_Cortes Wow. That was cool

PROMPT FOR CALCULATING METABOLISM: Please calculate my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), using the Mifflin-St Jeor formula or Harris-Benedict if more appropriate. I am [age] years old, [sex], [height in cm or inches], [weight in kg or lbs], and my activity level is [sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, very active, or super active]. Please show all formulas used, explain the reasoning behind the chosen formula, and break down my TDEE into suggested calorie ranges for maintenance, fat loss, and muscle gain.

Singapore created the world's most efficient healthcare system from scratch in one generation. They spend $4,000 per person on healthcare. We spend $15,000. Their secret? The exact opposite of what American "experts" recommend: 🧵

Global fertility is very low, and 2024 data shows that it has kept edging lower.

@ryxdurk I do this for clients all the time

Anyone know a guy/software/ai that can make solid 3-5 min animated explainer vids? I already wrote the script, just need a voice and animation on the screen

@_willcompton He’s a 6’4” guy playing against a bunch of 6 footers.

Just watching DK Metcalf here - it’s funny to me that people don’t think NFL players could play in the NBA

NEW VIDEO PODCAST INTERVIEW on U.S.-China and the Question of Whether China is likely to Invade Taiwan. The interview is with Aaron Watson, who hosts a show on global issues called "Going Deep with Aaron Watson". (It's received 21,000 views over the few days since its release on YouTube; there's also a version on Spotify which has a short intro.) youtu.be/8XKHvnmuPEU

never met a man who hates costco. it transcends race, class, and creed. i’d trust a costco hospital with my life. i’d send my kids to costco daycare. i’d be laid to rest in a kirkland signature casket

@LynAldenContact @JackFarley96 Jack is great

I've got my fluctuating list of top-5 or top-10 of financial/macro interviewers, and there are many great ones out there. But the unchanging #1 of that list for several years now has been @JackFarley96. How do I rank this? By the % of their interviews I actually listen to. 🧵

@JerimiahLee Congrats

Hit my lifting goal today! Officially in the two plate club 💪🏻

Was a great time being on @AaronWatson59’s podcast discussing India’s evolving dynamic in geopolitics. Take a listen in the next tweet’s link & lmk what y’all think!