The Curious Mind

Yet another doomer hit piece predicting mayhem copying Citrini's AI piece style. Says he's not predicting, but the whole piece is a prediction!

Your body produces ~7,000 peptides that control nearly everything: hunger, sleep, healing, mood, immunity. We spent 100 years studying them. Now AI can design new ones in hours. The peptides that will matter most in 2035 haven't been invented yet. I wrote a deep primer on what's real, what's hype, and what it means for markets: afewthings.substack.com/p/the-peptide-…

Peptides are everywhere. Injected by SF tech founders. Debated in the Senate. Fueling a $328M grey market. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are in a multi-billion dollar arms race to turn them into pills, but the real story is much deeper. A primer on the peptide wars: open.substack.com/pub/afewthings…

@ChrisWillx with Cal Newport on the cost of AI slop was powerful and hard to miss it now that he's mentioned it!

@LukeGromen @PeterMcCormack Hugely powerful conversation and its worth squaring it with @pmarca chat with @lennysan. I think what the tech guys don't get it is that if there was no debt, then deflation would be probably ok. But not at the level of debt we have!

Thanks for having me on for an in-depth discussion on the interplay between AI-led deflation, pressure on employment, v. already-straining sovereign bond markets, @PeterMcCormack!

@InvestLikeBest John had a super point on the energy bottleneck, but also on the power of the seat! It tied well with what @tferriss just discussed with Jim Collins on return on luck.

John Arnold's story is about what it takes to be the best in the world at something, and the sacrifices it demands along the way. At the peak of his power, John's brother told him he had "changed", kicking off an introspection that ended with John walking away at the top. John grew up in Dallas in the late 1980s, when the baseball card market was booming. He noticed the same card was worth dramatically different amounts depending on where you were in the country. Hockey cards had almost no demand in Texas but strong demand in New York or Montreal. He was 14 years old. He talked his way onto a bulletin board of wholesale baseball card dealers and started flying around to card shows across the country every weekend. "It turns out there were a lot of similarities between doing that and the trading," he later said. "I was, in a way, doing market making in sports cards. I was taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities in sports cards." The same instinct that made him good at baseball cards would later make him one of the greatest natural gas traders who ever lived. "I just always had this sense of value, of what something was worth at the time." In 1995, at 21 years old, John joined Enron straight out of Vanderbilt, which he finished in three years. He was put on the natural gas trading desk and became consumed by it. By 22 he was running the Texas natural gas trading desk. In 2001, the year Enron collapsed, Arnold made the firm $750 million. When Enron went bankrupt, he could have followed the trading floor to UBS. Instead, he started Centaurus Energy in 2002. From the beginning, he was deliberate about building what he called "the best seat in the market." The fund economics – no intermediary between him and the returns – allowed him to hire the best people and reinvest in the business. He built proprietary trading systems, and paid for data sources nobody else had. For the next seventeen years, he worked at his screen from six in the morning to six at night, going out with people from the industry at night, and thinking about trading in the shower in the morning. What followed was arguably the greatest decade of performance in hedge fund history. Centaurus returned 160% in 2005. In 2006, the year Amaranth Advisors blew up on the wrong side of a massive natural gas bet and John was on the other side of it, the fund returned over 300%. By 2007, Arnold had become the youngest self-made billionaire in the United States. Over ten years, Centaurus compounded at roughly 130% annually. His returns were so good, and demand to invest so high, he eventually raised his fees from the industry standard 2 and 20 all the way to 3 and 35. He later described what it took to achieve this. "I just loved the battle, the puzzle, the game of it." He was completely locked in for 17 years. But he was also honest about what that kind of obsession costs. He wasn't a great friend during that period. Not a great partner. It wasn't a healthy lifestyle – mentally, physically, or in terms of relationships. At some point his brother pulled him aside and told him he had changed. He later called it the kindest thing anyone had ever done for him. In 2012, at 38, Arnold closed Centaurus. His closing letter said they had achieved outstanding returns – often in the triple digits – while staying true to their core focus. Then he walked away entirely. He has spent the years since building what may be the most rigorous philanthropic enterprise in America. The Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures) has invested across criminal justice reform, healthcare, infrastructure, education, and journalism. He applies the same systems thinking to philanthropy that he applied to natural gas markets. John ultimately decided there were other problems worth solving, and that the same obsessive focus that built Centaurus could be pointed somewhere else.

@tferriss This was a hugely powerful conversation, I tried to square @pmarca AI view with @LukeGromen deflation, with what would Jim do in this situation. Thanks for a great conversation Tim. afewthings.substack.com/p/schrodingers…

“Never confuse scale of impact with scale of enterprise.” — Jim Collins Listen to my interview with Jim Collins: tim.blog/2026/03/04/jim…

I tried to capture both @LukeGromen’s ideas and @pmarca’s simultaneously with a dash of Jim Collins thrown in! afewthings.substack.com/p/schrodingers…

@MacroVoices the Jeff Currie episode crystallised something I'd been thinking about. The capex supercycle isn't just a macro trade, it's the market finally escaping a broken scoring system. Wrote about the philosophical framework underneath: afewthings.substack.com/p/the-scoreboa…

@DKThomp your conversation with C. Thi Nguyen on how metrics make us miserable turns out to explain the current equity market rotation better than any macro framework I've seen. Wrote about it here: afewthings.substack.com/p/the-scoreboa…

The 15-year scoring system in equity markets is breaking. For a decade and a half, "great business" simply meant "looks like software." Recurring revenue, 80%+ gross margins, capital-light, globally scalable. AI was supposed to be the ultimate confirmation of this thesis. Instead, it's destroying it. afewthings.substack.com/p/the-scoreboa…

My HRV drops after staying up late with a friend, after a cocktail with someone I love, after the kind of conversation that reminds me why I'm alive. A life lived by HRV-maxing would be a profoundly boring life. There is no fitness-tracker metric for good friendships. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls this "value capture", when a simplified measure takes over a richer set of values. You stop doing what you value and start doing what you can score. This turns out to explain the biggest rotation in global markets right now. For 15 years, "great business" simply meant "looks like software." Asset-light, high-margin, scalable, digital. The scoring system became the game. Then AI arrived, not as confirmation of the thesis, but as its destroyer. If AI can automate software workflows, the moat around a SaaS company isn't its code. The world is now asking for things that are heavy, physical, slow to build, and impossible to automate. Copper. Grids. Shipyards. Energy. The old scoreboard doesn't measure any of them. That's the opportunity. Full essay in The Curious Mind: afewthings.substack.com/p/the-scoreboa…

A hospital's productivity software flagged its best cardiac nurse as non-compliant. She'd spent "too long" with one patient. Three shifts of building trust with that man is what got him to finally say "my chest feels different." They found a 94% blockage. He went home to his family in eight days. The dashboard recorded one efficiency violation. New essay on what we've been counting wrong , and what it's costing us. afewthings.substack.com/p/the-unseen

@LukeGromen flagged something that stopped me: for two consecutive months in late 2025, America's single largest export was gold. Not semiconductors. Not aircraft. Not IP. Gold. I built a section of a new essay around what that photograph is actually showing us, through the lens of Bastiat's broken window, the depletion of institutional trust, and what happens when everything we left off the ledger becomes undeniable. afewthings.substack.com/p/the-unseen

@michaelpollan line about friction, that real contact depends on embodiment, might be the most important sentence written about AI this year. I built part of a new essay around it. afewthings.substack.com/p/the-unseen

@morganhousel story about Kip, the ski bum who died at 32 with $25k in credit card debt, changed how I think about what a life costs. I wrote about it in the context of Bastiat, AI, and what we've been leaving off the ledger. afewthings.substack.com/p/the-unseen