David

Sydney is one of the worst cities to live in if you are a young person with real ambition and hunger to make a dent in the world, and one of the best if you’re simply looking to relax and disappear from the rest of the world. Nothing ever happens in the country.

Getting rich usually involves big bets, and asymmetric risk (exactly what trading + early crypto did for many people). On the other hand, staying rich requires almost the opposite: diversification, boredom, and sitting on your hands. Protection mode. Someone who 5–10x’s their net worth in a bull market, then keeps the same leverage and same size (if spot --> never sells) into the next cycle instead of derisking. Yep, you guessed it, they prob will round-trip it all. Losing 50% when you’re worth 100k is painful but survivable, but losing 50% when you’re worth 10M is life‑changing. So, you get rich once on a certain risk profile, but if you keep that degen risk profile, you can wipe yourself out once or twice, or even 5x times (depending on how many times you try). Making a lot of money in, e.g., one bull cycle, one asset class, one type of trading style can make people think they’re in God mode. They then take that confidence into areas where they don’t have an edge: perp trading (as an example, we saw this with the meme boys, who lost their money trying a game they had no skills in when meme liq was zero after Trump, Feb 2025). The behaviour that made you rich is often highly path‑dependent: a specific cycle (usually bull), focusing on a specific inefficiency, certain types of trades, etc. But by the end of 2025, for most people, that edge was gone. If you don’t adapt, your old playbook can become a liability where you lose it all. Many people only realize their edge is gone after a big drawdown (think 10/10 last year). Either you are good at making money, or you are good at protecting money. Very few are good at both and are the ones that survive cycle after cycle. Cockroach mode.

Although it may help, the real secret to surviving in poker long term isn't some secret meditation routine. It’s just not hating what it takes to improve. If you don't actually enjoy the process of getting better, others will eventually just outwork you. Longevity in this game is mostly just a side effect of curiosity.

I’ve never been big on backing other players—I’ve really only done it once. I’d much rather go long on the S&P 500 than sweat someone else’s variance while I’m already navigating my own. There is a massive amount of mental ease that comes with an investment you don't have to manage or think about daily.

claude cowork is making me think maybe we’ll look back and it’ll be obvious that humans were never meant to spend their lives working behind a screen. we’ll see it as inevitable that computers do everything for us on computers and the future of work is cooler than we can imagine