Old People, GLP-1s, AI, Climate Change, and Trump

the only 5 stories that matter

In 2025 (and soon 2026!) there are only really five big, important stories in the world. Everything else big that happens will be some kind of downstream/2nd order effect/sub-narrative or just random variance.

#1 Old people

America (and the west/developed world more broadly) is becoming the Great National Nursing Home (credit Random Walk). We’re not having an babies/America is getting really old. Basically the only engine of growth in our economy outside of data center construction is elder care. The center cannot hold and something has gotta give. So get long aging or get long fixing it.

#2 GLP-1s

Without AI this would be the most important new technology. We have invented a miracle drug with seemingly limitless use cases, increasing efficacy across them, and basically no serious side effects. We will all wind up on these drugs within a few decades. The first order impacts on weight, healthcare/insurance are obviously huge and spiky. The second order impacts are broad and will get really weird.

#3 AI… (duh)

Obvious to anyone reading this but it’s a new general purpose technology and is ushering in a new techno-economic revolution akin to information technology, railroads, electrification, etc. AI (and by extension robotics) is a huge deal with tremendous social upheaval. It’s largely felt through data center construction right now but eventually it’ll be in the true deployment phase and matter to society and the economy for more fundamental reasons. Most obvious of all 5. Moving on!

#4 Climate change

The fundamental substrate of life (the planet) is changing and at an accelerated rate. Both the entire physical infrastructure of the world is at risk and has to change AND long standing migration patterns, supply chains, and the majority of our species’ calories are at risk in one way or another.

#5 Trump

Hopefully transitory and maybe more of a trade. Lots of people will get their faces ripped off doing this in privates when it’s really a public markets bet, except to the extent that you see Trump as a part of a broader story about the decline of liberal order/rules based system and internationalism.

Trump is a proxy for vol because the government, which historically increased stability, is now a source of volatility.

So what?

Basically any bet you make (as a founder or investor) should have some exposure to one of those five. If you can hit multiple of them, you’re golden. Where specifically value accrues is separate and there are lots of important second order narratives but it all basically rolls up to these 5.

I feel pretty good about my exposure to most of these but I think I need to substantially increase my GLP-1 exposure. I’m not right now in love with any of the GLP-1 ETFs but don’t necessary just want to ape Novo… open to suggestions for how to put on a long term, set-it-and-forget-it trade (maybe prediction markets?).

I love granola but we have to Bork it

Discovery-proof phone calls are a great new business

It's increasingly reasonable to assume that every digital communication is discoverable/recorded/transcribed. This is legitimately extremely useful—except at the limit where it becomes disastrous and must be avoided at all costs.

Phone calls were the last vestige of privacy. Now that Granola has found a workaround to record live calls on iOS without notification, they're dead too. The only private communications left are face-to-face, in real life.

Note: if I see you wearing an always-on recording device IRL, I will not talk to you. Or I will smash it. Don't be a fucking snitch.

There are any number of non-nefarious reasons to want private phone calls. Lots of conversations sound terrible in discovery but are fine in practice, and velocity requires trust to say some risky stuff. You need some tolerance for nefariousness to maintain sufficient dynamism and creativity in the economy. If we can’t discuss marginal/risky things without fear of reprisals, we all suffer.

Lots of people will hate this once they cotton on to this new reality. The people who will hate it the most are the fancy people who have been deposed and have high propensity to spend (and of course their general counsels)

We can't expect this government to care about this problem, so the private sector has to solve what it created. TJ Parker and I have check ready for any highly technical founder who wants to go head-to-head with these surveillance apps and completely bork them via imperceptible audio perturbations or similar approaches.

My privacy agent will fight your surveillance agent via a series of inaudible beeps and clicks.

We’ve already started meeting some cool people working on versions of this but I am taking all comers at this point.

Let's kill this before it kills trust.

A personal update

I got married! It was an exceptionally special day/weekend 9 years in the making.

I’ve talked about this before but seeing stuff through and letting things compound over time is where all the important stuff happens in life.

On my wedding day someone advised me that “love is a verb” and it’s been rattling around since then. I couldn’t put it better.

I’m extremely grateful for all the love and support, our community of friends, and most of all for my incredible wife. Truly a once in a lifetime experience and I’m still kind of reeling.