Joe Borstein

$10,000/hour x 2000 hours = $20m /year for THEIR OWN WORK. Does anyone think that some lawyers (the best of the best) aren’t worth that? To hold this belief, you’d have to believe that the most important lawyers are structurally less valuable than the best: bankers, singers, executives, athletes, investors …. I don’t believe that.

@writeclimbrun Thx!

@jborstein from the journal yesterday: wsj.com/real-estate/co…

Last year, for the first time ever, service-based businesses (e.g., gyms and salons) accounted for more than 50% of retail space in the US, eclipsing stores that sell actual things, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Maybe we need a recession: How Scientists Unlocked the Secret of a $400 Skin Cream: Playing Music to Kelp wsj.com/lifestyle/la-m…

@realEstateTrent 💯

The very worst salespeople use high pressure sales tactics. They sell you hard. They tell you to act now or else. And they wonder why they’re on their 8th sales job in 7 years.

@skylarromines @realEstateTrent Haha. I feel like you could pull that off.

@realEstateTrent Talk to me about insurance right now or else

the real benefit of ai is the forced confrontation with the question "what tf are humans for?"

I’m sure this is true for what you do. You always tell it like it is, and are clearly smart. It’s simply not true for what i do. It changes my day every day in ways that move needles for my clients and the companies i invest in (Legaltech). It’s also not true for anyone in tech — whose lives have been absolutely turned on their heads in ways good and bad in the past year. It’s deeply untrue for middle-layer white collar workers of all sorts who do what you describe above. Sort and summarize and present information. That’s millions of people. We have never seen a technology impact millions of people and their core jobs (especially good jobs) so quickly.

AI completely fails at what matters most in business: Original ideas, imagination, and creativity. Ask it to analyze your strategy and to identify ways you can better monetize your business, or to introduce a new angle that creates value - and it's completely lost. All you get are generic ideas you've already thought of, or suggestions that make little sense. Yes you can use AI to do research faster and put together a spreadsheet more quickly - but who cares. Those things save you a few bucks over hiring a low-cost virtual assistant, but not a game-changers. Yes it saves you time, and yes you should learn the tools, but there is nothing extraordinary here. There is no, "Wow, I never thought of that!" moment. Until that happens, the overhype is real.

I've had ChatGPT-5.4 Pro working away at a project I always wondered about: how lucky are you to be alive right now? Of all the ~117B humans who ever lived, only about 1.5% had a lifestyle roughly equivalently to a middle-class person in a middle-income country today, or better.

Indoor living area per person has roughly tripled in the US since 1950.

A wise man poetically described it as the “time bounded valuation of an enterprise” Who knows with MacroHard and human emulation not to mention terrestrial data centers, it’s hard to know what to wear in the morning let alone how to value an enterprise 3-5 years out even with strong current cash flows and an apparent “moat”.

Length of product roadmaps 2022: 1 year 2024: 6 months 2026: 1 week

It’s inevitable that contracts will be negotiated by agents within the next decade. Business will speed up so much that humans won’t be able to keep up with day-to-day contracts between companies. Lawyers will set the policies and audit— agents will be trusted to do the rest. This sounds irresponsible, until you realize what the error rate is for human contract managers—fairly high. I believe agents will be a safer way to negotiate rudimentary agreements within the decade, just like self-driving is now safer than human driving. This chart will exist for basic business contracts:

@scottastevenson Don’t you think it’s logical for it to be higher than historic with infinite, virtually free, minds entering the economy?

Shiller PE Ratio since QE

I have a (probably dumb) theory that almost all useful software that isn't an AI application was already created by 2021. AI agents are crawling all over a search space already picked clean by infinite VC dollars a decade ago.

A small thank you to everyone using Claude: We’re doubling usage outside our peak hours for the next two weeks.

Amazing book. Cant wait for movie!

@scottastevenson Love this. Betting on creation of the new.

99% of people don’t bet on things that have never happened before. But that’s where 99% of the alpha is: new phenomena that the market hasn’t figured out how to price. Everyone is fighting for scraps hoping for established patterns to keep repeating, but with each repetition alpha logarithmically decays. If you can think independently from first principles about what new things will happen that have never happened before, you can tap into abundant alpha. But if you need precedent, you are stuck fighting for the returns on the tail:

the irony may very well be that the more advanced tech gets, the more value concentrates in *very old human qualities*.

@realEstateTrent It was awesome. It was exciting in the way AI is exciting these days. Also, yes, you are old.

Anyone else remember encarta and how magical it was the first time you saw it - or am I just old?