A Learning a Day

“Prediction markets” are a fancy term for legalized gambling. Nine years ago, Americans bet less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, that number rose to at least $160 billion. Another way to internalize that statistic – $5 billion is roughly the amount Americans spend annually at coin-operated laundromats (source) and $160 billion is nearly what Americans spent last year on domestic airline tickets (source).

So, in a decade, the online sports gambling industry will have risen from the level of coin laundromats to rival the entire airline industry.

Derek Thompson shared a couple of stories with the premise that we haven’t seen the worst of this – with chilling effect.

1. Baseball

In November 2025, two pitchers for the Cleveland Guardians, Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz, were charged in a conspiracy for “rigging pitches.” Frankly, I had never heard of rigged pitches before, but the federal indictment describes a scheme so simple that it’s a miracle that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Three years ago, a few corrupt bettors approached the pitchers with a tantalizing deal: (1) We’ll bet that certain pitches will be balls; (2) you throw those pitches into the dirt; (3) we’ll win the bets and give you some money.

The plan worked. Why wouldn’t it? There are hundreds of pitches thrown in a baseball game, and nobody cares about one bad pitch. The bets were so deviously clever because they offered enormous rewards for bettors and only incidental inconvenience for players and viewers. Before their plan was snuffed out, the fraudsters won $450,000 from pitches that not even the most ardent Cleveland baseball fan would ever remember the next day. Nobody watching America’s pastime could have guessed that they were witnessing a six-figure fraud.

2. Bombs

On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and made an unusually large bet. This bet wasn’t placed on a baseball game. It wasn’t placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a specific day, despite extremely low odds of such a thing happening.

A few hours later, bombs landed in Iran. This one bet was part of a $553,000 payday for a user named “Magamyman.” And it was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly-timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars, placed in the hours before a war began.

It is almost impossible to believe that, whoever Magamyman is, he didn’t have inside information from members of the administration. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from war. But we now live in a world not only where online bettors stand to profit from war, but also where key decision makers in government have the tantalizing options to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by synchronizing military engagements with their gambling position.

3. Bombs, again

On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalist Emanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on Polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on March 10. Fabian’s article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel reported, bettors encouraged him to rewrite his story to produce the outcome that they’d bet on. Others threatened to make his life “miserable.”

A clever dystopian novelist might conceive of a future where poorly paid journalists for news wires are offered six-figure deals to report fictions that cash out bets from online prediction markets. But just how fanciful is that scenario when we have good reason to believe that journalists are already being pressured, bullied, and threatened to publish specific stories that align with multi-thousand dollar bets about the future?

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There’s a lot to digest in the post. This passage is an example.

Indeed, why not let people gamble on whether there will be a famine in Gaza? The market logic is cold and simple: More bets means more information, and more informational volume is more efficiency in the marketplace of all future happenings. But from another perspective—let’s call it, baseline morality?—the transformation of a famine into a windfall event for prescient bettors seems so grotesque as to require no elaboration. One imagines a young man sending his 1099 documents to a tax accountant the following spring: “right, so here are my dividends, these are the cap gains, and, oh yeah, here’s my $9,000 payout for totally nailing when all those kids would die.”

And this

Prediction markets can be useful for those who want to know the future, but their utility recruits participants into a relationship with the news cycle that is adversarial, and even misanthropic. A young man betting on a terrorist attack or a famine is not acting as a mere concerned citizen whose participation improves the efficiency of global prediction markets. He’s just a dude, on his phone, alone in a room, choosing to root for death.

If that doesn’t bother you, I don’t know how to make it bother you. Based on economic and market efficiency principles alone, this young man’s behavior is defensible. But there is morality outside of markets.

It is a powerful post. Thanks for sharing, Derek.

Having spent time with talent acquisition leaders and fielded more than a few reference check calls from hiring managers, one thing consistently stands out – the sheer amount of hubris embedded in how organizations think about hiring.

One talent acquisition team at one of the world’s largest employers insisted they only hired “the best of the best of the best.” Leaving aside how that sounds – it’s numerically impossible given how many people they hire and how many churn. There simply aren’t that many “best of the bests.”

I’ve heard of companies with policies excluding candidates from certain universities, certain companies, certain backgrounds. Everyone wants references – many references. And, in these references, hiring managers want to hire only people who’d be in the top 10% of the best people they’ve ever worked with.

It always makes me chuckle – top 10% based on what exactly? Across every role? Every context? Every kind of work? According to whom?

The reality is simpler and more honest than any of this. We hire people we think can do the job. We hire people we think can grow. And most importantly, we hire people we can work well with. When the organization is performing well, we get to have more access to people in the intersection of these three.

Everything else is mostly bullshit.

When you’re part of these kinds of hiring machines, you sometimes have to drink the Kool-Aid. That’s fine. The most useful thing you can do is stay conscious of how much of it you’re internalizing. The same holds true for candidates who have to play the game as well.

But that doesn’t mean these standard processes makes much sense.

If it smells like bullshit, trust your instincts.

We often have a conversation with our kids about the idea that excellence is never an accident.

When we see a kid consistently outperform everyone else on the field, you might often hear notes about how the kid is a “natural athlete.”

When you see someone present with flair and make it look effortless, you might hear comments about how they’re “natural presenters”.

However, when you see Steph Curry sink three pointer after three pointer however, you don’t walk away thinking that’s just natural talent. You know that, behind every one of those shots, were hours and hours of relentless practice.

That’s true in every sphere of life. Excellence doesn’t happen by accident. When you dig deeper into the “natural talent,” there’s always a story.

The one nuance – excellence in young kids is often driven by external pressure. The challenge is helping them build the internal motivation and grit to sustain it over the long run. That’s a harder thing to cultivate than the excellence itself.

But either way, the core truth remains the same – excellence doesn’t happen by accident.

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” | Epictetus

“He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.” | Epictetus

I was struck by how observations on human nature haven’t changed over the course of centuries. Epictetus’ stoic approach still resonates so powerfully today – maybe even more so in a world where it is so easy to be stirred by someone else’s possessions on social media.

My articulation of this idea is Happiness = Reality/Expectations. It is hard to change reality but significantly easier to change our expectations.

And the best way to do so is to practice gratitude for what we have. For it isn’t happy people who are thankful, it is thankful people who are happy.

I was in conversation with a friend who’s been around the block – and seen plenty of dysfunctional executive teams – about the most common types of dysfunctions. We landed on three.

(1) Solving for yourself or your people instead of the organization. The motivations are either selfish or tribal. These teams involve executives optimizing for their own position or protecting their team rather than doing what’s right for the whole.

(2) Inability to commit to a strategy with real trade-offs. Here, everything is important. Every initiative is a priority. The answer changes depending on which forum you’re in. A strategy without trade-offs, it turns out, isn’t a strategy.

(3) Inability to have hard conversations. Meetings end without clarity on decisions made and next steps taken. Forums for strategic conversations are used to discuss minutiae that doesn’t matter or to simply hear the sound of their own voice. Everyone leaves the room having said nothing of consequence.

The common thread: all three are forms of short-term comfort chosen over long-term health. And the cost is always paid by the organization.

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” | John Kenneth Galbraith (quoted in Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

Funny and wise.

John Kenneth Galbraith’s quotes have all gotten me asking the same question – how often do I do this?

The answer is more often than I’d like to admit.

The Exponential View team pulled together a thought provoking interactive resource on the Solar supercycle.

You can see the impact of learning curve projections as you tweak assumptions. The trend so far alone is fascinating however – as solar capacity increases, it is becoming exponentially cheaper.

It is a self-reinforcing cycle. The same forces that shaped the computing flywheel and made it ubiquitous are at work here.

Cost reduction creates demand. Demand drives deployment. Deployment drives more learning curves and cost reduction.

It is fascinating to think about the impact of lower costs. Suddenly, technologies that were out of reach given how energy expensive they were – from desalination to sustainable aviation fuel – become possible.

Positive exponential changes are fascinating to behold. And as far as the solar supercycle goes, we’re just getting started.

Derek Thompson shared a few fascinating charts.

Teenagers in the US aren’t reading.

They (along with adults) aren’t partying either.

But everyone is watching more YouTube (and TikTok).

The link between spending time on TikTok and most brain functions – from attention to memory to reasoning to inhibitory control are all negative. TikTok is melting our brain.

We’re seeing more young adults dislocated from both the economy and society.

Jonathan Haidt unearthed a fascinating insight among 12th graders – finding that conservatism and religion helped reduce the impact of this dislocation.

His hypothesis is that conservatism and religion might offer a binding moral matrix that protects young people from a rapidly changing world. While progressive moralities aim to grant people more freedom to “create their own identities”, this freedom is likely causing anxiety.

Societal dislocation and the legalization of gambling presents a toxic combination.

And this one continues to blow my mind – leading to the largest measles outbreak in the US in 20 years.

Don shared a quote from Michaelangelo when he was 87 years ago – “Ancora Imparo.”

It means “I am still learning” in Italian.

This is the from the person who painted the Sistine Chapel, sculpted David, and had produced more than most people could dream of in several lifetimes.

Inspiring – a lovely note to carry around.

Ancora Imparo.

Every Saturday morning, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton gathered his team for the same ritual.

First, they’d review the week’s sales in detail. Then, they’d discuss one question: what is a competitor doing that we should be paying attention to?

Employees would share observations from visits to Kmart, Walgreens, Sears. There was one strict rule: you could only talk about what competitors were doing right. Things that were smart and well executed.

Walton didn’t care what they were doing wrong. That couldn’t hurt him. What he cared about was not letting any competitor get more than a week’s advantage on something innovative.

It’s a beautiful way to institutionalize curiosity. And to steer a room full of people away from the instinct to talk about why they’re better – toward the harder, more useful question of what they can learn.