Unqualified Advice

Dear Show Notes Readers, It's decorative gourd season, motherfuckers! Fall has finally arrived in Houston, and Sean has taken the opportunity to accumulate a frankly unreasonable number of pumpkins and decorative gourds. Dan has returned from Telluride, where the fall colors were spectacular and the first snow has already fallen. All is right with the world. Or is it? This week, we're attempting t...

Programming Note: Off next week for fall break. We'll miss you! What happens when AI makes building an idea almost free? This week we introduce two projects born directly out of last week's podcast: Sean's Vibe Index, an attempt to quantify market and social sentiment from volatility, credit, meme stocks, prediction markets and Reddit; and Catsup Bot, our deeply unqualified experiment in buying th...

Dear show notes readers, This week we accidentally spend most of an hour asking the same question in several completely different ways: Where are the humans? We start with personal AI agents and what happens when they begin doing more of our searching, shopping, comparing, emailing, and general internet busywork for us. Agents don't care about advertisements. Humans do. So if more of the utilitari...

Dear Show Notes Readers, This episode begins with Halloween costumes and ends with copper on the Moon. Somehow, it makes sense. Dan's kids have reached the age where putting on a costume doesn't mean pretending to be something. For a little while, you simply are that thing. A dinosaur. Elsa. Whatever you've decided to become. That gets us thinking about the costumes adults wear, the stories we tel...

Notes From a Man Who Did Not Shave Dear Show Notes Readers, If demographics are destiny, what happens when some of the participants in the economy aren't actually people? That's where we start this week. Population decline has traditionally meant fewer workers, less economic activity, less surplus, and—if history is any guide—a greater chance that people start fighting over a shrinking pie. But hi...

Hello dear show notes readers! Dan started with a question about AI agents: how do you stop a thing that keeps writing down its own rules from going rigid? He was picturing a government. I was picturing red tape, and the policy documents I'd spent the week wrestling with. In the end, you wind up with the rule is C , and nobody remembers that C only ever followed from A and B — so when A changes, t...

The Horse Hello dear show notes readers! On this week's episode I tell Dan about something that had been haunting me. The events in the Strait of Hormuz feel eerily similar to a story captured 2,800 years ago. I had just seen Nolan's version of The Odyssey and been left with the feeling that Hormuz feels a lot like a modern-day Troy. A trade civilization built on a handful of honor rules. A horse...

The 7:30 PM Tuesday Problem Hello dear show notes readers! This one starts with a website. I spent a good chunk of the weekend finishing the rebuild of Howard Home Realty — Lindsay Howard's brokerage — and it went live the morning we recorded. Twenty to twenty-five hours all in, about ninety-five percent of it alongside an AI tool. Dan, being Dan, immediately turned my little side project into a t...

Bag Six of Twenty Hello dear show notes readers! Dan opened this one by telling me he'd cracked back open a Land Rover Defender Lego set he bought two and a half years ago. It came with twenty bags full of bricks, he'd made it to bag six, and then life turned upside down and it sat there. He's up to nine now. I admitted that as a kid I couldn't stand letting friends play with my perfectly arranged...

The Mirror and the Force Hello dear show notes readers! Substack spent the week scanning everyone's prose for robot fingerprints with Pangram, the AI detector now built into the platform. We discuss the uncomfortable truth that a word-order detector can tell you how something was written but not if idea is any good. Dan's warning: the incentives now point toward machine versus machine, writers slo...

The New Midlife Menu Hello dear show notes readers! This week Dan walked in with a Substack essay and an idea that's been rattling around his head: the millennial midlife crisis is going to be a barbell . The boomer version of the midlife crisis had some memorable flavors: the sports car, the affair, the divorce. So what does ours taste like? We ran the menu: either quit drinking or take up alcoho...

Easy Come, Easier Go Hello dear show notes readers! Happy 250th, America! I spent the Fourth in Dallas watching Egypt and Australia go to penalty kicks in front of seventy-some thousand people. Nothing like getting full value for the ticket. In our increasingly small world, I randomly found a Egyptian coworker in the crowd to celebrate with. Then I went back to my friend's parents' place (shout ou...

Talking to God for a Couple of Days Hello dear show notes readers! I came into this one buzzing. I'd just stood in a roaring crowd at the World Cup fan fest in Houston watching Team USA put four past Paraguay, and I wanted to talk about what that kind of communal energy actually costs — who pays for the security (FEMA and Texas, it turns out, which means we already did), who rakes in the revenue (...

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...