Ezra Klein: “Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require? This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.” There is an optimism in that, a reminder of our own agency. And there are questions posed, ones we should spend much more time and energy trying to answer: How do we want to be shaped? Who do we want to become?”
Bryan Pellegrino: “I’ve realized that I don’t spend much time wondering what other people are thinking. One of the hardest questions for me to answer is something like, “What do other people think about you?” The truth is, I have no idea. That makes it tricky for me to know whether an opinion is genuinely contrarian or not. Something I believe very strongly that I don’t think is common is that the world is constantly improving and that technology can solve almost all of our problems. That might not be true in every dimension, in every instance. But from a high level, I think it’s right. I will always bet on progress and technology.”
Andy Kessler: “Capital, as always, sloshes around the globe searching for its highest return. Inflation usually means money is attracted to real assets rather than ideas. Energy? Real estate? Commodities? Fixed income will be attractive again. Corporate earnings, meanwhile, have started to decline as input costs—material, labor, regulatory overhead—spiral upward, red meat for bears. Of course, a new bull market could start anytime, but don’t even think about another big one driven by interest-rate declines until, well, interest rates go up enough. Instead, the next bull will be fueled by earnings growth from whatever drives productivity next. Forget last cycle’s winners, find new ones—next-generation machine intelligence, geothermal energy, gene therapy, insta-vaccines, nuclear fusion or, more likely, something completely out of left field that starts out expensive, is dismissed by skeptics and then gets relentlessly cheaper over decades, creating wealth for society.”
