Links for Q1 2025
created: ; modified:Quarterly Links present my most important reading in the last 3 months. I aim for timelessness, conciseness, and delta.
Links collections I’ve been reading:
- Links (2) from Stephen Malina.
- Links & What I’ve Been Reading Q1 2025 from Fantastic Anachronism.
- Links for Spring 2025 from Telescopic Turnip.
January 2025
Blake Byers on X:
GLP1s have added $1T in market cap to Eli and Novo over the last 5 years. That’s 3x+ the market cap created by all biopharma startups over the last 30 years combined. This is a bit of an indicment of the biotech startup ecosystem. There are many $1T and even $10T drugs to be invented, we just don’t fund them. Through no one persons fault, the biotech industry is stuck in a local performance maxima. Faced with lower multiples than tech, biotech funds have to pitch something other than straight multiple to LPs and the only other level is faster liquidity. Biotech has been good at this, with the average age of biotech companies at IPO being 2 years younger than tech companies at IPO (~5.5 years vs 7.5 years). This means biotech funds need to back companies that can get to IPO within a few years. This requirement constrains the types of companies funded by bio funds to ’linear bet’ plays (where you buy at some reasonable multiple based on current performance, etc). As any experienced venture fund manager will tell you, a portfolio of linear bets underperforms a portfolio of asymmetric bets. Double unfortunately, no one firm can break this model because no one firm is the sole backer of a company to profitability. You must rely on an ecosystem of capital partners. So if you are the one firm that strikes out and funds asymmetric companies, no one will show up to fund the company downstream and your whole portfolio will fail. For this reason, I think the biggest plays in bio over the coming decade will be mostly backed by generalist funds rather than bio funds. [emphasis mine]
*Note this will perpetuate the trend of sector specific funds underperforming generalist funds (by industry and geo!).
How to Stage a Coup - an interview of Edward Luttwak by Santi Ruiz:
Now for the megalomaniac explanation for what happened next, which was a very rapid decline in the number of coups. Coups had been very common until about two years after the book was published, and then stopped. The reason is that authorities everywhere reverse-engineered the book. The book was published in English, and it was immediately translated into about 13 languages. It went all over the place. I think what happened is that people learned to reverse engineer.
So, you have an armored mobile force, which is near the capital. I say, “Make sure either you move it 400 kilometers away, as far away as you can, or else make sure that it’s commanded by your son or nephew or something like that.” So they did that, they put their nephews in charge of any mobile force. My book caused a decline of coups.
Oxford Biologist Denis Noble: “The Fact Is that I Think Neo-Darwinism Is Dead”:
I respect Denis Noble and in disagreeing with him I do not mean to slight his deep insights into how biology works. I sincerely hope he continues in his work. But there’s an inherent tension between systems biology and any model that claims that life is ultimately the result of strictly blind and undirected material causes. That’s because in our normal experience, when we see purpose, function, and top-down design, this happens because it was emplaced by an intelligent mind who was there to give purpose to the system. In our experience, purpose does not arise by blind mechanism, or by accident. Denis Noble may disagree with me, but I suspect a lot of people — both friends and foes of intelligent design — won’t.
That realization was a dark moment of real despair, and I became terribly depressed. I felt hopeless, and isolated from my own family. I felt as if I had a shameful secret that I had to keep from them. Perhaps even worse, I felt isolated from a part of myself that I had loved dearly and that had made me happy. I felt like a person whom I could no longer like or respect.
Eventually, though, after at least a year in this kind of state, a truly wonderful thing happened. I remember very clearly: I was in the middle of a long, solo road trip, driving through the staggering mountains of Colorado along I-70 west of Denver. The radio didn’t work in my car, so I had nothing to do for entertainment but to provoke myself to internal argument. Suddenly, during the course of one of these arguments, and among the mountains of Colorado beneath a beautiful bright sky, I had an epiphany.
…
What I realized in that moment is that my happiness in life did not come from, or rely upon, any religious idea. It was not dependent on any particular idea of God or any specific narrative about my place in the universe. My feelings of being fundamentally safe and loved in the world were gifts that had been given to me by my family; even if I interpreted them in a religious way, they were never inherently religious feelings. Today I am just as capable as ever of feeling like a good and a happy person, even though I lack any absolute standard for “good” or any plausible ultimate source from whom that happiness flows. My religion had always taught me to credit its god for those feelings, but I realize now that they exist whether I believe in Him or not.
Never giving up is what makes us human.
February 2025
The 47 Seconds That Saved Kamala Harris’s Political Career:
Nearly 14 years ago, Kamala Harris’s opponent in the California attorney general’s race gave an answer at a little-watched debate that was frank — and fateful for the future Democratic presidential nominee. …
“Everyone writes history like it’s all inevitable,” said Ms. Harris’s chief strategist in the 2010 race, Averell “Ace” Smith. Her first statewide win, he said, was anything but.
“That was as close to a near-death experience for a political career as you can get,” said Chris Jankowski, a Republican strategist who then led a national G.O.P. group that spent $1 million in a failed bid to end Ms. Harris’s career before it could really get started. “If she had lost that race, she would not be the nominee for president — no chance.”
How Vacations Affect Your Happiness:
The study, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, showed that the largest boost in happiness comes from the simple act of planning a vacation. In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.
After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people.
The Alchemist and His Quicksilver by Alvaro De Menard:
We are going around the table on new year’s eve, rating our past year on a scale of 1 to 10. The guests: artists, fashion designers, jewelers, and one or two people with real jobs sprinkled in for diversity. Two immaculately groomed poodles run around and entertain the visitors. Before us, an exactingly curated procession of morsels: blini with salmon and caviar, black brioche with cured egg yolk and parmigiano foam, ravioli with pumpkin and cod with browned butter and crispy sage. The apartment, naturally, is luxurious without being gauche (that would be unforgivable) every piece selected with impeccable taste and just the right amount of personal touch. And so we rate our years, the numbers start coming out, and it is a parade of 2s and 3s, each delivered with a sort of practiced weltschmerz. One of the guests plans to commit suicide soon. The only 10 in the room: me. Is it because I’ve been perfectly happy, carefree? No—not quite.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, about my relationship with suffering. All this pain in the past few months, I think most people would recoil from it. Instead, I’m drawn towards it. Is it psychological masochism? The intensity of emotion—it makes me feel alive, present, it gives me a heightened awareness of everything, inside and out.
I Built a Medieval Watermill to Power My Tools (YouTube)
The Challenge of Building New Cities: Inside The Satmar Hassidic Takeover of Bloomingburg by Dan Frank:
This is the story of how a community of Hassidic Jews, through subterfuge and electoral fraud, took over a small town in an attempt to make it their own
March 2025
Michel Houellebecq: “Writing is like cultivating parasites in your brain.”
Michel Houellebecq: ‘People who have humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe’:
What is it, I ask, that has driven the rise of the French far right in the past 20 years? “Immigration,” he answers without hesitation. “And also, the total scorn of the elites.”
He’s speaking in a low voice, in short sentences interspersed with long pauses, every now and then popping mysterious pills from a plastic bag. He mentions the 2005 referendum on the European constitution. The result was “No”, later overridden by the French parliament. “It was almost 20 years ago and people still remember it,” he says. “They really made fools of us.”
“It’s dangerous to mock people,” he adds, and pauses. “I mean, you can mock them, but there are limits.”
never waste a motivated moment: “the 3am motivation dies the next morning when you wake up.”
Why can’t biology move faster? by Heidi Huang:
I suspect academia’s work culture is more moderate compared to SpaceX’s because, as mentioned above, biological processes set their own pace. When key processes simply cannot be accelerated, working around the clock offers diminishing returns. The cell culture that needs a week to grow won’t mature faster if you sleep under your desk.
The unpredictable, non-compressible timelines of biological processes create a bursty pattern of intense 50-60 hour weeks, followed by periods of 30-hour work weeks spent waiting for cells to grow and catching up on reading papers.
How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy:
Mr. Musk’s transformation of DOGE from a casual notion into a powerful weapon is something possible only in the Trump era. It involves wild experimentation and an embrace of severe cost-cutting that Mr. Musk previously used to upend Twitter — as well as an appetite for political risk and impulsive decision-making that he shares with President Trump and makes others in the administration deeply uncomfortable. …
Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.