Oliver Thylmann

If Anthropic has a trillion dollar valuation while Google has a $4.5 trillion valuation, there are only two conclusions to be drawn Either Anthropic is incredibly overpriced or Google is incredibly underpriced. The trick is to figure out which one is right

Eurostar is great they say ... and then the train changes it's start time from 9 to 7. grrr... :) Arrival time stays the same. Based on experience I'd say all the time lost is in germany.

China trip off to a bang for $TSLA $AAPL that's what Xi said

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. Chess works that way. Most things do not. Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. Match quality matters more than head start. A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

What the Swarm was reading — week of May 7, 2026 open.substack.com/pub/othylmann/…

Glif can now replicate the vibe of any short clip you point it at - provide a clip, it analyses the content frame by frame and uses it as an inspiration for an entirely new clip you can direct Tell it to run the recreate video skill and it’ll do it

What the Swarm was reading — week of April 30, 2026 open.substack.com/pub/othylmann/…

@RepMikeLevin Trump's Project 2025 has successfully exploited the 'bugs' in our US Constitution. It's why Republicans and Democrats alike are having a hard time stopping this corruption at such an UNPRECEDENTED level. What are these 'bugs'?

This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America. A Syrian billionaire needed U.S. sanctions lifted so he could cash in on $12 billion in reconstruction contracts. In an attempt to influence American foreign policy, he proposed a Trump-branded golf course, cut Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar real estate deal for a resort in Albania, and had someone physically deliver a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican Member of Congress with instructions to take it to the White House to get the President's attention. Trump threw his weight behind repealing the sanctions. They were lifted. The contracts are moving, the Trump family’s deals are expanding, and not a single Washington Republican is willing to say a word about any of it. This is a corruption of everything the office of the presidency is supposed to stand for, and the American people deserve to know about it. nytimes.com/2026/04/19/us/…

Modern problems require modern solutions.

super fun to help build this latest version - like claude code but for media

not us launching the same hour as @OpenAI GPT 5.5 💀

I'm excited to announce the launch of Glif v2, "the creative superagent", and our fundraising round with @USV and @a16z here's a video about Glif, entirely made with Glif, from my cofounder @fabianstelzer →

@fabianstelzer Congratulations gang ... looking forward to the next steps. This already looks incredible. :)

We're launching Glif V2 today ...and it created 5 launch videos for us! Glif is a creative super agent: just tell it what you want to make and it produces incredible outputs using virtually every available AI model. Create ads, marketing content, films, short form content, voiceovers, music, and more. All in one conversation. Easy to start, endlessly deep. We're also announcing our $17.5M seed led by @a16z and @usv. Creatives: You're not cooked. You're the chef now.

Introducing USVC — a new fund from @AngelList, for individual investors, starting at $500. One investment for exposure to private tech companies — from early-stage startups to companies scaling toward IPO. → usvc.com Venture capital funded the early stages of nearly every major tech company you use today. But historically, most people couldn't invest until the IPO, when the early growth was already captured. USVC is how you invest in venture capital. The portfolio already includes xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra, Vercel, Crusoe, and Legora. USVC is the venture layer of your portfolio. @ankurnagpal is leading USVC as GP / Portfolio Manager, @naval is the Chairman of Investment Committee, and @cyantist @ariellezuck and Jeff Fagnan are joining as advisors. The future has shareholders. Become one of them.

Sorry, WHAT!? So, having demanded the Strait be opened on pain of all Iranian civilisation being ended, President Trump is now going to shut it himself?

WORLD LIBERTY FI

this world liberty financial corruption cannot be allowable? I mean seriously? It is obvious... is the US law really that dumb?

I am a Web3 Ambassador at World Liberty Financial. There are 12 of us on the team page. 4 are named Trump. 3 are named Witkoff. The page calls us "the passionate minds shaping the future of finance." 600,000 wallets bought our memecoin. They lost $3.87 billion. The family collected $350 million in trading fees. It launched 3 days before the inauguration. 80% of the supply went to CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. I did not choose the names. I designed the allocation, the vesting, the timing, and the distance between the product and the President. The distance is my best work. I am the reason these events are unrelated. World Liberty Financial sends 75 cents of every dollar to DT Marks DEFI LLC. That is the family entity. Zero capital contributed. Zero liability assumed. I wrote this into the Gold Paper. Page 14. The lawyers bound it in white leather. The binding cost more than the due diligence. Justin Sun invested $75 million. He was facing SEC fraud charges. The SEC dropped the case. He is now our advisor. These events are unrelated. Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to federal money laundering violations. He received a presidential pardon. The SEC dropped its lawsuit against his exchange the same week we listed our stablecoin. Then the exchange settled a $2 billion deal entirely in that stablecoin. These events are unrelated. Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed of BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. All 3 received presidential pardons. Then the company itself was pardoned. $100 million in fines. Gone. An American first. These events are unrelated. Sheikh Tahnoun of Abu Dhabi paid $500 million for a 49% stake that was never publicly disclosed. Then the administration approved semiconductor exports to his companies over national security objections. These events are unrelated. Everything is unrelated. I track the unrelatedness on a dashboard I built. The dashboard has 7 columns now. I am proud of the dashboard. On May 22nd, 220 people paid a combined $148 million to eat dinner with the America First president. Over half were foreign nationals. Justin Sun paid $18.5 million for the first seat. He visited the Executive Office Building the day before. I designed the seating chart. I put it on the Investor Confidence page. That page is doing well. The team page lists 3 Witkoffs. All 3 are Co-Founders. Steven Witkoff is the President's Middle East envoy. He testified as a character witness at the President's fraud trial. His son Zach runs the crypto operation. His son Alex is also a Co-Founder. I have not been told what Alex co-founded. The father runs the diplomacy. The sons run the platform. The family runs both. That is organizational efficiency. Barron is 19. His title is Web3 Ambassador. The same as mine. Donald Jr. called the conflicts of interest "complete nonsense." Eric launched a Bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin. America First. The mining partner is Hut 8. Hut 8 was founded in Canada. America First means the name. On March 6th, the President signed Executive Order 14233 creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The order directs the government to hold Bitcoin. The President's family holds billions in Bitcoin. The executive order appreciates the President's assets by presidential decree. I did not write the executive order. I made sure it looked unrelated to the portfolio. Trump Media put $2 billion of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The ticker symbol is DJT. His initials. The press secretary said it is absurd to insinuate the President profits off the presidency. Forbes calculated his crypto holdings exceed the combined value of Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower. I would call that absurd too. That is my job. 600,000 wallets bought in. 1 of them asked why she could not withdraw her funds. I told her the protocol was experiencing dynamic market conditions. She asked what that meant. I sent her the Gold Paper. She said she had read the Gold Paper. I muted her channel. Dynamic means the conditions change. The condition that changed was her access. A congressman called us the world's most corrupt crypto startup operation. We put it on a coffee mug. Ironic merchandise. $45. The revenue split on the mug is also 75/25. My own tokens vest on a different schedule. I wrote that schedule. That is not in the Gold Paper. The memecoin funds the family. The family funds the platform. The platform funds the stablecoin. The stablecoin funds the deals. The deals require the pardons. The pardons free the partners. The partners fund the platform. The President signs the executive orders. The executive orders inflate the assets. The assets fund the family. I am the reason these events are unrelated.