Bubbles
Tings Newsletter #32
If you’re new here: I’m Michael Karnjanaprakorn. I founded Skillshare, Otis and Turing Capital. These days I’m running CHOOP. Every month, I write a newsletter about life, work, and random tings. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe along with 5k+ others here.
Someone on a podcast said, ‘I want to disappear off the web at 40,’ and that stuck with me. There’s something oddly appealing about it. I’m not ready to vanish completely, but after 18 months off X, the appeal of having no social presence keeps growing, especially since being tied to online popularity is the last thing I want as I get older.
I like how Andrew Wilkinson builds rituals around connecting with people. He hosts monthly entrepreneur forums, pickleball games, lunch clubs, “interesting people” gatherings, Camp Dad, and one-on-one father-son trips. These rituals create a social structure where he just needs to follow his calendar to stay deeply connected. Stealing this idea.
Speaking of lifestyle design, I’ve been thinking about a simple framework that maps to my own path. I’m in Stage 2 right now, but the arc looks like this: Stage 1 is escape → Stage 2 is purpose → Stage 3 is legacy. Stage 1 is all about creating freedom and getting out of whatever box you feel stuck in. Stage 2 is slower, more inward work: figuring out what you actually enjoy without chasing external validation. Here’s an example of Stage 1, and here’s one of Stage 2. Stage 3… I haven’t figured out yet 😆
My favorite author Morgan Housel just released a new book called The Art of Spending Money. It’s all about how to use money in ways that actually improve your life: reducing stress, buying back time, increasing freedom, and aligning spending with what you genuinely value. He was recently on Derek Thompson’s podcast, and one quote really stuck with me: “Happiness equals independence plus purpose and fun.”
It’s hard to not think that we are living in an AI bubble right now. I read Ed Zitron’s breakdown of OpenAI’s finances and the numbers don’t add up. OpenAI is burning around ~$4B a month. At this pace, it might be one of the most capital-intensive startups ever. You have to start asking yourself if this is sustainable.
Building on this, Kyla Scanlon argues that AI investment, memecoins, tariffs, healthcare, and debt-roulette apps have turned the US economy into a casino. “The AI boom has become one of the largest speculative waves in market history. AI companies represent roughly 75% of recent S&P 500 earnings growth, 80% of profits, and 90% of capital expenditure.” This is shaping up to be one of the biggest technology bets of all time. I’m optimistic it will be a net positive for society long-term, but pessimistic about the short term.
Yishan’s AI investment thesis is that “every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.” Almost every AI app will be crushed not by incumbents copying them, but by the speed of foundational model breakthroughs that make them obsolete before they can scale.
A simple 25/25/25/25 split across stocks, bonds, commodities, and cash has quietly outperformed most carefully engineered portfolios. I realized my own portfolio has quietly drifted into that split between stocks, bonds, cash, and alternatives.
I’ve been enjoying the Dialectic podcast by Jackson Dahl, especially the episode with MSCHF. My favorite line from that conversation was, “the only point of being a human is being able to eat, sleep, f*ck, and flex on your neighbor,” which made me laugh because it’s kind of true. I picked up the Made by MSCHF book recently and loved hearing the stories behind the Big Red Boot, Jesus Shoes, and Severed Spots.
George Mack has a great list of tactics for being creative without taking drugs. My favorite: avoid content made after 2016. “Something happened in 2016. The internet became less weird, less creative. Whatever the cause, pre-2016 content has a distinct flavor of strangeness that has vanished.”
Lately I’ve been drawn to the idea of craftsmanship: slowing down and making something truly great. It’s a very different mindset from the “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley culture. Todd Masonis talked about this on a podcast, sharing how he went from building a startup with Sean Parker (Justin Timberlaked played him in The Social Network) to a chocolate company built to last 100 years.
Bending Spoons has been making headlines lately for acquiring AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, and Meetup, basically some of my favorite internet brands. The Invest Like the Best podcast has a great conversation on how they built this strategy over the past decade, and this breakdown walks through the numbers behind it. They started with only $40,000 and scaled to billion-dollar deals like Vimeo at $1.38 billion and AOL at $1.5 billion. One of the best examples of compounding I’ve seen.
AI coding tools have made building software so cheap and fast that a new trend is emerging: “disposable apps.” It’s now quicker to build something with AI than to search for it. These are tiny, single-purpose apps people spin up in minutes, use briefly, and throw away. One example: Vercel’s chief product officer built a custom Europe trip-planning app with day-by-day agendas simply because it was easier to generate it than find an existing tool.
Essay clubs are a brilliant idea. Book clubs often feel like too much work, but discussing thought-provoking essays? That’s lighter and way more fun.
A final goodbye from the legend, the GOAT, Warren Buffett, in his last annual letter. He leaves us with this line: “Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.”
A few things I’ve enjoyed recently: The Diplomat, Pluribis, and Crooks. And Crooks was one of those books I couldn’t put down.
Does anyone have a good hair loss protocol? Asking for a friend. (Me.)
For all the dads out there with daughters. A reminder that she sees everything — how you treat your partner, how you show love, how you carry yourself. She’s learning what to expect, and what to accept.
Dark but creative: someone cloned Gmail and built a fictional Epstein inbox using the public email dump.
Just updated my Vibes playlist on Spotify. Enjoy!
(I don’t have anything to sell you, so please enjoy this intentionally empty space.)
A really great list, thank you!
This was great. Will def be listening/reading a number of these. Was wondering when you’d be posting!