📈 first Derivative [118]

"I won’t be surprised if future historians consider our times as the early phases of the next global war"

(Han Youngsoo)

“The time is short, the opportunity is great; therefore, crowd the hours with the best that is in you." —John G. Hibbens, Princeton Commencement Address, 1913

“L’opportunité c’est fucking énorme” —Ronan O’Gara, delivered in “Cork French”

I came across the Hibbens quote today and it moved me, especially the entire passage (linked above). It reminded me also of O’Gara’s hilariously rousing speech, which always makes me feel ready to run through a Duolingo brick wall.

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Apologies for the unplanned hiatus, and welcome to all the new subscribers. I’ve neglected fD over the past few months as I launched my business (I’ll write about this in future issues). I’ve done some interviews and writing elsewhere in the last few months—mainly an entertainment column for

Emily Sundberg

’s

Feed Me

—and you can read them all here:

• My media diet and some other random thoughts

• The alcohol wellness startup I’m working on

• “New American cinema” and my favorite movies of the decade so far

• The future economic structure of Hollywood

• Prediction markets and politics

Let me know if you get paywalled, I’ll send you a PDF.

I’ll keep this issue short, just a catch-up to get the channel flowing again. I have a lot of stuff I want to write about and my intention is to keep publishing fD at a regular clip. If I go two weeks without, I’ll pause paid subscriptions so that those of you who are, aren’t paying for nothing. For existing paid subscribers, I’ve extended all of your subs by 6 months, at no cost to you, to make up for my break.¹

For everyone new, fD is basically the intersection of what I’m finding interesting in the world and what I think will matter beyond the present. I hope you all stick around for 2025 🙏🏼

Highlights in this issue:

• Me scoring my predictions for 2024

• Mapping out global conflict

Good reading,

—TK

If you were forwarded this email, subscribe here.

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☑️ Quick scoring of the predictions I made at the end of 2023 for 2024:

• “A fatal crash involving a major airline in the US”. I quickly regretted this one as so many you texted me every time something happened. I never really had anxiety over flying but I have to say it’s ticked up. It didn’t help that a Japanese A350 blew up on January 2 and then Boeing decided to blow its doors off a few days later. I ended the year happy to be wrong about this prediction, but sadly only by 29 days, as we did end up getting a fatal crash on January 25. And then today we had another crash in Toronto, although so far there’s thankfully no confirmed deaths. In December 2023, I wrote: “I hope I’m not right but I wouldn’t be surprised if that 14-year streak [of airline safety] ends next year. I wrote in June about the spike in close calls this year. I don’t see an easy solution to the shortage and overworking of air traffic controllers.”

• “De facto armistice between Ukraine and Russia along the lines of control.” I’ll score this one as mostly wrong, although there hasn’t really been much change in the line of control.

• “Approval for the long-awaited Bitcoin spot ETF in January”. Happened on January 10, 2024.

• “Trump reelected in 2024”. At the time, PredictIt had him about equal with Biden. I’ll score this one right, although who could’ve predicted the assassination attempt on Trump and Biden’s disastrous debate that forced him to drop out. At the time I wrote: “A key lesson I learned in 2016 was to be aware of how my dislike for a possible result affects my thinking about how likely that result is. I could be overcompensating now but I think people are underestimating the likelihood of a Trump reelection. He’s currently leading Biden in seven key swing states. I think the deciding factor will be the economy and people’s perceptions of their living costs.”

• GLP-1 > GPT. Hard to say on this one, which was more of a multi-year thing anyway. I will say I’m more impressed by AI now than I expected to be when I wrote this: “In the short term, I think the proliferation of Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonist drugs is a far more meaningful development than ChatGPT and other large language models. Barring the discovery of more serious side effects, the use and cultural profile of Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonist drugs will only continue to grow in 2024.” That being said, I’m also still very bullish on the impact of GLP-1 drugs.

I know it’s already mid-February, but if there’s interest, I’ll do another round for 2025. One prediction I’m considering is regime change in Iran. Polymarket has Khamenei out by end of 2025 at 41%. That feels high to me, although I know that’s also factoring in the fact he’s just 85.

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🌍🌡 After firing an experimental ballistic missile at Ukraine in November, Putin said “the regional conflict in Ukraine has taken on elements of a global nature”. (FT)

I’m not saying we’re headed imminently or inevitably to World War 3, but if we are, I won’t be surprised if future historians consider our times as the early phases of it. I’m emphasizing less the full-blown “War” aspect of it, and more the “World” part. The conflicts happening around the world are more globally connected than the piecemeal impressions you’d get from the headlines. Here are some of the links:

🇰🇵🇷🇺🇺🇦 North Korea, The Hermit Kingdom, has thousands of combat troops fighting alongside Russians in Ukraine. As Ukrainian president Zelenskyy said, “it’s effectively the participation of a second state in the war against Ukraine on the side of Russia.”

North Korea has already been supplying Russia with ammunition and missiles and now it gets much needed combat experience, in addition to antiaircraft missiles, oil and other economic resources, and military tech and support for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. In response to the security threat, South Korea was considering supplying lethal aid to Ukraine although now, post coup attempt, what’ll happen is unclear.

🇨🇳🇰🇵 Closer North Korean relations with Russia also lessens China’s influence, its traditional main security and economic partner.

🇺🇦🇲🇱🇷🇺 Ukraine provided help to rebels in Mali to defeat Russian Wagner Group contractors.

🇷🇺🇨🇳🇾🇪 Russia and China provided targeting data and arms to the Houthis in Yemen for their attacks on Western ships.

🇫🇮🇹🇼🇸🇪 Russian and Chinese ships are going around cutting critical undersea cables in Taiwan, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The last two are NATO’s latest members.

🇹🇷🇺🇦🇮🇷 Turkey is building drones for Ukraine and Iran is building them for Russia.

🇸🇾🇮🇷🇷🇺 Because of Russia’s focus on Ukraine and Iran’s with Israel, the allied Syrian Assad regime fell in a matter of days after a long and protracted civil war. Iran and Russia have both pulled significant resources out of the country.

🇹🇷🇸🇾 Instead, Turkey, through its allied militias turned governing coalition, now holds sway in Syria.

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🎧🇺🇸✝️ I really enjoyed these two podcasts, both featuring Ross Douthat. In one, Douthat interviews Steve Bannon and I think their conversation is the best thing I’ve heard yet on the intra-MAGA divide between the populists and the broligarchs. Here’s the transcript but I recommend listening to it here.

In the other, Tyler Cowen interviews Douthat about his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I respect Cowen but I’m not a big fan of the Rationalists in general, and Cowen betrays some of their desperation to be (or become) machines, or as I call it, robot fetish. But I do think he is a very good interviewer and is asking here the strongest versions of the right opposing agnostic/atheist/materialist questions here, and Douthat has very thoughtful answers.

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You’ve made it all the way to the end! Thanks for reading fD. You can support my work by upgrading to premium or share the newsletter with a friend. —TK

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Here’s a link to my News Journal where I'm collecting the headlines that catch my interest each day so that when we look back at that at the end of the year, we'll see when things happened, what kind of patterns emerged, without the problem of hindsight bias.

1. If you don’t see that, please ping me.