Unqualified Advice

The Averaging Machine Hello dear show notes readers! Dan's wife and kids were off camping leaving him time to watch the whole of Glengarry Glen Ross in a single sitting . Why does nobody make movies like that anymore? Scale homogenizes. Once a film has to sell in China and Germany and everywhere at once, it gets sanded down to the middle. Dan claims that AI is the same kind of averaging machine gl...

Hello dear show notes readers! This I ask Dan if he's been building anything lately, and we spend the hour discussing the ins and outs of building new tools and products. Two guys, exploring niches. That's the whole episode. Dan is launching Kabu (kabu research dot substack dot com, link below) — a paid newsletter and model portfolio centered on small and mid-cap Japanese equities, anchored on the...

Hello dear show notes readers! This week Dan and I open on the image that everyone seems to have fixated on — Jensen Huang in his black leather jacket on the Anchorage tarmac, allegedly traveling with just a backpack — and from there we slide into the actual substance of what happened at the Trump–Xi summit. The deliverable was, in Dan's word, frameworks rather than specifics: no signed trade deal...

Three Weeks to Get Numb Hello dear show notes readers! This week Dan and I sit with a question that's been quietly bothering both of us: have we all just gotten numb? Dan says it only takes three weeks to get numb to anything. I had to agree. Once we saw two data points for the same trend, the rest of the conversation flowed. If the standard warning system has gone quiet, what canaries are still w...

Two Hundred Bucks and a Stock Tip Hello dear show notes readers! This week Dan and I sit with a question that has been bothering me for a while and got sharper this week thanks to a perfect natural experiment: a US Army NCO got charged for making four hundred thousand dollars on Polymarket betting on the Maduro raid he was part of. Around the same time, Senator Markwayne Mullin bought stock in Che...

Stealing Fire for the People Hello dear show notes readers! Dan's been thinking about Prometheus — not as a myth, but as a political archetype. The person who steals fire and hands it to the people is a very different animal than the one who steals it and keeps it for themselves. That framing runs underneath the whole hour. We start with Dan's top-down vs. bottoms-up read of American politics, wan...

Hello dear show notes readers! This week on Unqualified Advice, we started looking at the phrase "Sold down the river." The phrase's dark history goes back to the cotton gin, 1793, and the horrific expansion of slavery that followed. It was an unfortunate example of Jevons Paradox in action, which brought us our thread for the episode: when technology makes something more efficient, demand doesn't...

Hello dear show notes readers! This week on Unqualified Advice, Dan and I dove headfirst into the Hormuz Strait crisis — and what started as a conversation about oil prices turned into something much bigger. The strait went from 120 ships a day to about 5. The cascade from that single chokepoint touches everything from the gas in your car to the chips in your phone to whether your local hospital c...

Hello dear show notes readers! This week on Unqualified Advice, we did something we don't usually do — we took a victory lap. Sort of. Back in January 2025, on Episode 22 ("Showing off Our Big Shiny Crystal Balls"), I said on the record that we'd see a sizable scandal grow within private credit within the year. Fourteen months later, Boaz Weinstein and Saba Capital showed up with tender offers at...

Hello dear show notes readers! This week on Unqualified Advice, we opened with a deceptively simple question: how's the oil market? Turns out, the Strait of Hormuz isn't flowing oil, and that particular "simple" problem unravels into one of the most complex cascades of consequence we've talked about in months. We're talking supply chains, geopolitics, chip manufacturing, and yes — the helium probl...

Hello dear show notes readers! This week Dan and I tackle a question that's been bugging both of us since Christmas: what if hallucinations—those supposedly broken outputs that make AI unreliable—are actually just creativity in disguise? It's the kind of reframe that changes how you work with these systems entirely. I open with my custom scheduling system that beats a $4 billion ERP, and from ther...

Hello dear show notes readers! This week on Unqualified Advice, the energy was all over the place — and we kind of loved it. Dan opens with a Jeremy Piven mantra about getting the f*** after it, and it turns out that's basically the thesis for the whole hour. We start in the Fourth Turning framework — Dan's been refining his theory that the turn itself has happened, and now we're watching the ener...

Welcome to Flow City Hello dear show notes readers! This week on Unqualified Advice, Dan's been writing again. His latest Prometheus Dispatch essay on pseudo events — manufactured moments designed to create energy rather than report on it — kicks us off and leads to a conversation neither of us expected. We start with Kennedy-Nixon, swing through Greenland headlines, and land squarely on Californi...

Dan and Sean kick off 2026 with a look back at their 2025 predictions—what hit, what missed, and what's carrying over into the new year. From government shutdowns to Big Tech dominance to the DEI pendulum swing, they grade their calls before diving into what's ahead. The big theme for 2026? Geopolitics. With power shifting in Venezuela, potential regime change in Iran, and Trump making noise about...

What starts as a travel recap turns into a wide-ranging conversation about manufacturing, geopolitics, surveillance, and the quiet signals of national confidence. Sean is back stateside after several weeks in China and Japan, where he was auditing suppliers and rethinking what tariffs, supply chains, and "reshoring" actually look like on the ground. From panda diplomacy and traffic that "flows lik...

After an unintended "summer break" that didn't feel much like one, Dan and Sean are back at the mics. This episode ranges from the personal to the global: burnout, survivor's guilt, therapy culture, and the constant tug-of-war between staying informed and staying sane. On the business and economics front, they dive into tariffs, reshoring, and whether Intel should be nationalized. From semiconduct...

This week, Dan and Sean dive into the deep end of economic uncertainty—from the philosophical origins of "the economy" to the lived reality of layoffs, inflation, and shifting trade routes. Why do oil rigs in North Dakota matter to the price of cheese? Are we witnessing demand destruction or just another panic? And what does "creative destruction" really look like when the grenades are turning int...

Dan and Sean return to the mic with a message for the wanderers, the misfits, and the intellectually restless. This episode explores what it means to seek challenge instead of comfort, to embrace unfinished thoughts, and to carve out space for messy, real-time reflection. If you've ever felt like a mental nomad—curious but unrooted—this one's for you. Topics Covered: Why we sometimes feel allergic...

Hello show notes readers! This week, we're trying something new in our mission to bring you insights from the world of entrepenuership.  We're bringing in an outside expert to exlpore an area of entrepeneurship that some of you may have thought about - real estate! This week, we're joined by Lindsay Howard, broker and entrepreneur, for a deep dive into the real world of real estate — starting a fa...

🧵 Episode Summary In this episode, Dan and Sean delve into the complexities of tariffs, the decline of U.S. manufacturing, and the philosophical underpinnings of leadership. They challenge conventional narratives around NAFTA, explore the historical impact of events like the bombing of Dresden, and discuss the strategic philosophies of Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, and Donald Trump. The conversation also tou...

In this episode, Dan and Sean navigate through numbness, nuance, and the uncomfortable edges of modern life. From tariffs and fentanyl policy to the messy mechanics of entrepreneurship, they discuss the complicated reality of staying engaged in a world that often feels overwhelming. Also on deck: what it really means to be an entrepreneur, thoughts on Prometheus Rising , unfair competition on Amaz...

Hello show notes readers, What is writing? What is art? Did I create this or did a robot and how would you be able to tell the difference? This week we coin the term "adverbious", hoping to prove we aren't robots and also to give you a tool to figure out who the robots are. We can't define it but we know it when we see it, if you know what I mean?  Later, we delve into Dan's masterful schedule man...

Hello show notes readers! This week, Sean and Dan look into the rhythms of the oil and gas world — how things speed up, slow down, and sometimes just stop. They talk about layoffs making headlines , how organizations expand and contract like they're breathing, and what it feels like to be on the inside when that happens. Sean explains why fewer rigs don't always mean less oil, and why the people m...

Hello dear show notes reader, We're 25 episodes in! Woo hoo! ( Imagine Leslie Knope. Now read the italicized bit again. ) As the author of these show notes, I feel like 25 should be a significant number, but I also don't have any valid reason why. Nonetheless, I felt inspired to make these show notes really shine! What's good about this episode? While editing, I had two realizations: Dan is a bett...

Hello dear show notes readers! In this episode of Unqualified Advice we discuss our recent experiences writing code for building websites and apps with Cursor . In short, we're having a blast working with these new tools and have a few tips for those just getting started. We've recommended it before, but it's worth repeating Nat Eliason's Course Build Your Own Life Coach is a great course for begi...