Podbit · Excess Returns
Every productivity revolution — coal, railroads, assembly lines, the internet — follows the same arc: an initial boom as the tool deploys, then a plateau once it's fully implemented. China urbanized its farms and tripled output, then growth stopped. AI will likely follow the same script.
Gaetan Dugas, an Air Canada flight attendant, became infamous as HIV Patient Zero — but the label started as a clerical misread. Researchers wrote 'Patient O' for 'Out of California,' and everyone read it as the number zero. The man who got the blame probably wasn't even the first person infected.
Detroit convinced the government that Japan was dumping cars below cost. Japan responded by building factories in the American South. Detroit still collapsed. The same playbook is being run today against Chinese AI companies — and historical precedent suggests it won't work either.
The internet wiped out entire job categories — typing pools, travel agents, bank tellers — but it did it slowly enough that people had time to retrain, redirect careers, and retire naturally. That gradualness is the single reason we remember the 1990s as a boom, not a crisis.
When trade opened with China in the early 2000s, furniture manufacturing towns like Hickory, NC lost tens of thousands of jobs in months. Workers couldn't move because no one would buy their houses. Entire communities collapsed, bringing addiction, poverty, and political grievance in their wake. That's the template for what rapid AI disruption could look like.
Long before randomized control trials entered medicine, direct response advertisers were AB-testing headlines and creative executions by interleaving newspapers off different printing presses. The result: they discovered butterfly effects in psychology that behavioral economists only codified decades later.
Russia is so vast it could fit America and Australia inside it with 2 million square miles to spare. Siberia is just copy-paste terrain — God got bored and auto-filled the gap.
A 9-year-old Peter the Great hid in a cupboard for days while the Streltsy massacred his family on the Kremlin's Red Stairs. He survived by leaving the door slightly ajar so it looked already searched. He was not fine.
Peter the Great's go-to party piece was to serve guests an enormous pastry pie at state banquets, from which an oiled, naked dwarf would slither out when the crust was cut. Comedy that is, genuinely, 300 years old and still works.
Peter the Great set up an official organisation called the All Drunken, All Jesting Synod of Fools and Jesters. Members dressed in mock religious robes, rode through streets on pigs, and threw day-long bacchanalian rages — all designed to ridicule the Orthodox Church's grip on Russia.
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