High conviction. Non consensus. Entrepreneur building a convex portfolio in the real world. On bad days, I pair drawdowns with good wine 🍷
Joined October 2021
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The Brothers Karamazov is my favourite novel. Patrick’s review made me want to explain why, and what I think his reading misses:
For me, the book’s deepest achievement is that, through Alyosha, it makes love seem possible in a world whose suffering we cannot explain. It does so through precisely the things Patrick’s review discounts: spiritual anguish in materially comfortable people, and goodness practised through ordinary, difficult encounters.
Patrick recognises that Dostoevsky offers a response to evil through people rather than a logical justification, but calls this a “tacit concession.” I think it’s the whole point. Centuries of philosophical argument have left the problem of evil unresolved, yet we still have to live in the world and respond to suffering. Alyosha shows how someone can continue to believe and love without knowing why God permits innocent children to die. His life doesn’t settle the question; it shows that faith and love needn’t depend on settling it.
Patrick questions whether Alyosha’s life can offer that response because he is “never tested.” But he is tested constantly, in ways most of us will recognise. Rakitin envies him, needles him, tries to drag him into cynicism, and Alyosha responds with grace. A boy throws a stone at him and bites his finger, and Alyosha later befriends him and helps bring the boys together around him. Snegiryov tramples money his family desperately needs, and Alyosha tries to understand why rather than taking offence. Father Zosima says it outright: love in dreams can crave the grand gesture; active love is “harsh and dreadful,” requiring labour and patience.
Watching Alyosha embody this throughout the book, I recognise moments when I’ve been capable of a little of that love, and many more when impatience, defensiveness or judgment got in the way. He helps me see how much strength it takes to preserve the gentleness I so easily lose. To me, this is one of the highest things a novel can accomplish: help us recognise a possibility in ourselves and inspire us to give it life.
Ikonnikov’s refusal to help build a gas chamber is undoubtedly an extraordinary act of courage. But why should goodness need to confront a gas chamber before it has something to teach us? Most readers will never face his predicament. All of us will encounter people whose resentment, pride or cruelty tempts us to give up on them. Alyosha’s response deserves the same recognition Patrick gives to Grossman’s examples of everyday kindness.
I also think calling the closing scene a “denial” of Ilyusha’s death misses what Alyosha asks of the boys. His belief that they will meet again doesn’t stop him from asking them to remember their friend, the kindness they found together, and to let that memory shape how they live. To me, the book comes home in that moment: let what has moved you change the person you become. His hope of resurrection accompanies that responsibility; it doesn’t replace it.
The broader claim that the book’s problems are “fake” seems harder still to defend. A father is murdered. A son is wrongly convicted. A child dies, amid poverty, illness and his family’s humiliation. Everyday cruelty and grief are no less real for occurring outside a historical catastrophe.
And even where suffering is partly self-inflicted, that doesn’t make it unworthy of attention. “Why don’t they just pull themselves together?” could dispose of a great deal of Fitzgerald, Proust or Tolstoy—and dismiss many of the people we know. The difficulty of pulling oneself together is exactly what needs understanding.
This is also why I find the book especially relevant to the promise of AI-driven abundance. Patrick seems to hold the Karamazovs’ comfortable circumstances against them: why, with so much going for them, can’t they pull themselves together? But isn’t that exactly a predicament worth understanding if we hope to give far more people material comfort, leisure and freedom?
Abundance can relieve enormous suffering. It cannot, on its own, tell us what to love, how to bear guilt, or what makes a life worth living.
Perhaps we differ most in what we ask of a novel. Reading Patrick’s review, I feel there is something of Ivan in the desire to put life on trial before the intellect. What Alyosha offers becomes harder to see from that perspective. His goodness draws us towards a way of living we might never arrive at through rationality alone. After reading the book, I still cannot explain how God can coexist with evil or with letting innocent children die, but I’m drawn to be more like the person who responds to it all with love. That’s why it’s my favourite novel.
I think this misses something quite central about Karamazov.
For me, the fact that much of the suffering is internal is a large part of the point. You’re left alone with yourself, your urges, your pride, your conscience. Having money and education doesn’t suddenly make that easy. You can understand your situation quite well and still be unable to get out of your own way.
Take the brothers. Yes, they are excessive. But honestly, I find all of them possible. A person can sincerely want to be good and still be driven by resentment or desire. They can love somebody and behave terribly towards them. Being conscious of the contradiction doesn’t necessarily help them stop.
I also think a lot of this is encoded in the social context. Having grown up in a Russian-speaking culture, I recognize something in these people: the pride, the shame, the way an argument suddenly becomes a confession, or tenderness turns into aggression. What the essay describes as unearned instability often feels familiar to me, even when it’s pushed to an extreme.
Facing famine or mass murder is obviously a different kind of challenge. But I’m not sure why that should become the standard against which the brothers’ struggles are judged. There is plenty to understand about human beings within a family, or within one person’s relationship with themselves.
And I don’t primarily read Dostoyevsky as setting out a philosophical problem and then giving us a solution to assess. I’m reading people, their relationships, and a society through them. Their ideas matter because of how they live with them, contradict them, or fail to live up to them.
I actually appreciate that we can read the same book and experience it so differently. But the question of “why don’t they just pull themselves together?” is, for me, exactly where the novel becomes interesting. Knowing what you should do, wanting to do it, and actually being able to do it are very different things.
Brothers Karamazov was Einstein’s favorite novel, a verdict he shared with Freud, Hillary Clinton, and Murakami. Dostoyevsky was Pope Francis’s favorite author. Indeed, he approvingly quoted Elder Zosima; perhaps an interesting case of art molding life. At the risk of betraying my relative shallowness and inferiority, I confess that I did not love it.
Written in the shadow of the death of Dostoyevsky’s son (also Alyosha), and, more broadly, after a life of repeated tragedy, Karamazov attempts most of all to address the problem of evil in Christianity. Ivan presents a trenchant argument, asking how the suffering of children may possibly be explained given the existence of a supposedly benevolent God (Dostoyevsky collected real court cases for Ivan), culminating in Ivan’s famous return of the ticket.
The book gives some sense for how dislocating the nineteenth century must have been. The ascendant authority of science, the spread of materialist philosophy, the doctrine of evolution, the aftermath of the French revolution and its supposedly enlightened empiricism: in Karamazov, we get the feeling that finding some kind of consilience wasn’t just an abstract philosophical challenge, but a source of intense spiritual torment. If inherited tradition is no longer an adequate basis for faith, why would we rationally cleave to an apparently irrational theology? All of this was in the air: it was only two years later that Nietzsche declared God to be dead.
Perhaps demonstrating the utility of the novel as a medium, Dostoyevsky does not even attempt to solve the problem, but merely to illustrate a response, showing how individuals (Alyosha, Elder Zosima) may in the face of the inherent injustice present in the world nonetheless pursue lives of benevolence and charity: theodicy-by-example. In so doing, Dostoyevsky tacitly concedes that none of the teetering justifications expounded over the centuries can actually survive critical pressure and be defended through pure logic.
Ultimately, though, I don’t find myself being fully compelled by Dostoyevsky’s characterization of the problem or his proposed solution. As another sprawling confrontation with and attempt to reconcile the problem of evil, Grossman’s Life and Fate is maybe a useful counterpoint. Unlike Karamazov, Life and Fate shows actual people confronting great wickedness. Ikonnikov, a small but important figure, is ordered to help in the construction of a gas chamber. He refuses, with full awareness of the consequences that will ensue. The Karamazovs, by contrast, live middle class lives unvisited by greater events. Ivan has money, education, and leisure; his torment is the invention of his own mind and thus a kind of self-indulgence. Even Alyosha, the novel’s most sympathetic character, is never tested. His crisis is spiritual: there is a slightly comic kerfuffle about Zosima’s noisome corpse, which challenges his faith, but no circumstance requires him to stake his life or even his comfort.
Thus, a fundamental issue with Karamazov is that the problems of the book are on some level fake: they’re the self-inflicted derangements of febrile and dysregulated men. How much can or should we learn from the insane?
To be charitable to Dostoyevsky, we might say that he understood the spiritual dislocation of the era that later gives rise to the larger evils of totalitarianism in the twentieth, even prefiguring them in the Grand Inquisitor. (Dostoyevsky explored this theme in greater detail a few years earlier in Demons.) Camus in 1959: “The real nineteenth century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.” In this interpretation, the problems in Karamazov set the stage for those in Life and Fate.
Maybe. At least as a work of art, I’m not sure that this anticipation is enough to make the book stand on its own. In Karamazov, one continually wonders why the brothers don’t just pull it together. Dostoyevsky seems to transpose his own inner depths and spiritual torment onto his characters, but most people are not tortured writers, and it does not feel that the unhingedness of the characters is ever fully earned.
In attempting to address evil, Grossman’s conclusion is ostensibly similar to Dostoyevsky’s: the only resolution lies in senseless kindness. For Dostoyevsky, this message is embodied in Alyosha, who represents a kind of fervent innocence. For me, however, it’s not clear that Alyosha ever fathoms the realities and extremities of evil, and hence he’s not fully persuasive: does he even reckon with the misdeeds of his brothers?
Grossman is willing to engage head on. Far beyond gruesome newspaper anecdotes or neurotic and volatile siblings, Ikonnikov directly experiences the Holodomor in Ukraine and then the murders of the Jews. He has no patience for the kind of revolutionary ideas that animated Ivan’s contemporaries: “whenever we see [the dawn of an eternal good], the blood of old people and children is always shed.”
Alyosha believes in the Church and is willing to set aside its failures to address suffering. The book closes on his declaration that all shall rise again. That is, Alyosha does not accept the tragedy of Ilyusha, an innocent boy’s death, but rather seeks to deny and escape it. “We shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened.”
Life and Fate flatly rejects providential resolution. The heavens may be empty, and there is no greater meaning in evil. We can simply choose (freedom the other great theme of Life and Fate) to pursue acts of charity, generosity, and comfort:
“Yes, as well as this terrible Good with a capital ‘G’, there is everyday human kindness. The kindness of an old woman carrying a piece of bread to a prisoner, the kindness of a soldier allowing a wounded enemy to drink from his water-flask, the kindness of youth towards age, the kindness of a peasant hiding an old Jew in his loft. The kindness of a prison guard who risks his own liberty to pass on letters written by a prisoner not to his ideological comrades, but to his wife and mother.”
These acts don’t ennoble the suffering but are instead justified on their own terms. Such altruism cannot become a catechism, as clearly lies in Alyosha’s destiny (and Karamazov was planned before Dostoyevsky's death as the first of two works); instead, our kindness must be senseless. And we should presume no salvation in adherence: Alyosha imagines a kind of sacred tutelage, but Ikonnikov is unceremoniously shot.
Karamazov doesn’t show true evil, and Dostoyevsky’s solution, such as it is, involves a kind of denial, or at least evasion through metaphysics. Grossman saw it directly, and instead argues, humanistically, that we should be kind just because.
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If Dostoyevsky came to his works by trying to understand and depict Russian society, they in turn became tapestries for others to understand national souls.
In the aftermath of WWI, Russia was the great power defined in opposition to the West. As Germany tried to rediscover its own soul in the wreckage of defeat, it looked east to Russia, and frequently to Dostoyevsky himself.
Carl Jung thought that the German people had a kind of Karamazovian quality. In particular, he believed that Christianity had disciplined them without fully transforming the impulses beneath their ostensibly civilized conduct: the “Germanic barbarian” was divided into upper and lower halves. Religion had domesticated the former while leaving the latter untamed. Waning faith consequently threatened to release forces that its authority had long restrained: “As the Christian view of the world loses its authority, the more menacingly will the ‘blond beast’ be heard prowling about in its underground prison, ready at any moment to burst out with devastating consequences. When this happens in the individual it brings about a psychological revolution, but it can also take a social form.”
Dostoyevsky was reputedly invoked on a weekly basis at Max Weber’s Sunday gatherings. At the beginning of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann’s later-repudiated 1918 nationalist polemic, he quotes approvingly Dostoyevsky’s characterization of Germany as the “protesting Western empire”, never quite adopting or feeling at home with the inheritance of Rome. In the same year, Spengler wrote Decline of the West, and explicitly perceived in Russia a youthful vigor, primitiveness, and irrationality that contrasted with the senile high culture of the German and Western worlds. In Magic Mountain, Mann later used Clavdia Chauchat to personify the seductive dangers of Eastern (i.e. Russian) illogic.
Hermann Hesse declared that, for all their differences, Fyodor, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha are actually all of one type; the Russian man. In them, he perceived that “the ideal of the Karamazov, primeval, Asiatic, and occult, is already beginning to consume the European soul”, which was leading to the downfall of Europe. In Hesse’s conception, the Russian man rejects inherited ethics and morals, and even beneficent Alyosha represents an “amoral impartiality.” Man is, Hesse says, halfway between animals and higher consciousness; the former restrained through the process of civilization and domestication. The Karamazovs represent the fraying of the ties.
Hesse proceeds, ominously, to notice that the Germans in particular are more vulnerable than any European people to the temptations of “all those evils which one may regard in different ways, but which collectively signify the Karamazov.” While he was prescient in anticipating some of what would follow, he was in the end too sanguine in his hope that the spiritual dislocation could remain limited to that. “It is possible that the whole Downfall of Europe will play itself out only inwardly, only in the souls of a generation, only in changing the meaning of worn-out symbols, in the dis-valuation of spiritual values.” Alas!
In general, it is interesting to trace the mutual obsession between Russia and Germany: how preoccupied each was with the respective supposedly corrupting influences; how urgent the question of the national soul was felt to be. Many of the analyses seem a bit contradictory—Hesse actually inverts Dostoyevsky, for whom “everything is permitted” nihilism is a Western import for which Russian Orthodoxy is the cure—but there’s a striking intensity in the attempts to apprehend.
Most of all, I’m struck by how anachronistic it all feels today: a country’s writers investigating the national soul and the nation’s fate through the lens of foreign literature.
Which novels or works of art do we use to understand our contemporary issues? Should we be using such works? Do they inform or do they mislead? Today, the US worries a lot about China, but this mostly manifests at the level of trade balances, AI policy, and military prowess. We don’t seem to worry much about the spiritual force of Chinese ideals, and for all of the policy fractiousness, China continues to import and absorb American culture with enthusiasm that is mostly undimmed. There is a genre of jeremiad and cultural analysis in the US that rhymes a little with early twentieth century German criticism, but it today tends to be much more clinical, hinging around PISA scores, smartphones, lower fertility, and not around higher aspirations and ideals as such. So, to what extent should there be analyses of the national soul? And to what extent should they connect with major novels and works of art?
Shroom season is on!
FYI. I’ll come out of my posting bunker soon:) have been working on something exciting in the background!
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A breakout above 82.8K will be the long signal (in this time frame) for bitcoin:native Rectangle reversal or double bottom will complete above the year-long (52 week EMA) average. It needs a weekly breakout candle. This is an investor perspective (short-term traders time your entry with daily candles).
$HTZ can take large slice of this pie!
My hyper-bull case is that 30% of global rides will be driven by AVs in 10 years.
This will require ~120M+ cars doing ~25 rides a day ~360 days a year.
It will cost ~$5T to build these cars at ~$40,000 each.
12M cars are built a year on average, but there will be a slow and steady ramp; perhaps 250k in 2027, 500k in 2028, 1m, 3m, etc (build your own model).
Predict Tesla will be #1 in this space with 40% market share -- which would mean building ~50M cars in a decade.
Zero to 40% market share and 5M cars a year on average is an insane ramp up -- but Tesla is the company best positioned to do this.
Uber will be in second place with 35% market share, with two dozen partners putting absurdly cheap Chinese, Japanese, and purpose-built robotaxis into their fleet -- as no car maker wants to go head-to-head with Tesla building cars AND building a network.
Waymo will buy a car maker in the next 12 months, creating a hybrid of Tesla and Uber: full-stack cars built in its factory, deployed on its network, and also added to Grab, Lyft, Uber, and other networks to increase utilization.
The big story?
Someone will need to fund FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS WORTH OF CARS
120M+ cars @ $40,000 each on average; some will be 15-20k two-seaters, some will be premium SUVS at $80,000.
$7-10T+ in annual revenue is at stake for AVs alone.
At a 20-40%+ gross margin, $1-2T+ in EBIDA/cash flow, we will be talking about ~20-30T in market cap.
Waymo and Uber are worth ~$120B and $150B; Tesla is worth $1.4T at the moment.
There's 18-28T in market cap about to be created.
Please run this through your own LLMs and models... move the variables around however you like. $5 average ride, $10 average ride, $50k average vehicle cost, etc.
10% of total rides... 50% of total rides...
... however you slice it, this will be the largest market in the world for AI over the next decade.
After that, human robotics will be the TAM/biggest market cap opportunity in the world... but we can do that model next.
Sugar is looking very sweet lately! We are holding every level we should post textbook horizontal breakout!
Macro and technical tailwinds on our side (Poor harvest, higher oil price = cane is used for ethanol, poorer than expected inventories + historically crowded short trade)
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$HTZ is running out of shares to short. It went from 3M to 500,000 12 minutes ago. It could run hard very soon.
MY TAKE ON $BABA EARNINGS:
Strategically, Alibaba is growing exactly where I need it to grow.
AI Cloud revenue +45%.
Cloud EBITA +133%.
Margins expanded to almost 12%.
Quick commerce +45% with improving unit economics.
AliExpress reached operating profit.
This is real AI demand turning into revenue and operating leverage not just another AI story.
Of course, near-term headwinds remain. Capex reached RMB68B, FCF was -RMB45B, core commerce monetization remains weak and AI applications are still producing significant losses.
But the important nuance: E-commerce + Cloud combined EBITA actually grew. The consolidated profit decline came primarily from aggressive investment into AI applications and other technology businesses not deterioration across the entire company.
My takeaway is simple: the strategic thesis got stronger, while the near-term financial picture remains messy.
I still need to see CMR recover, AI application losses peak and FCF normalize. But Alibaba is building exactly the AI + Cloud infrastructure platform I own it for.
Not a clean quarter but strategically, a very strong one.
Long $BABA.
ALIBABA $BABA Q1’27 EARNINGS HIGHLIGHTS
🔹 Revenue: ¥269B (Est. ¥269.3B) 🟡; +9% YoY
🔹 Adj ADS: ¥8.52 (Est. ¥11.26) 🔴; -42% YoY
🔹 AI revenue tripled for the 12th straight qtr
🔹 CapEx: ¥67.7B (Est. ¥29.22B) 🔴; +75% YoY
🔹 Free Cash Flow: -¥44.7B (Est. -¥12.80B) 🔴
Segment Revenue:
🔹 AI Cloud and Compute Services: ¥48.4B
🔹 China E-commerce Business: ¥110.9B
🔹 AI Labs and Applications: ¥3.3B
Segment Adjusted EBITA:
🔹 AI Cloud and Compute Services: ¥5.6B; +133% YoY
🔹 Alibaba E-commerce Group: ¥39.7B; -1% YoY
Other Q1 Metrics:
🔹 Adj. EBITDA: ¥39.1B (Est. ¥37.5B) 🟢; -14% YoY
🔹 Net Income: ¥10.4B (Est. ¥26.98B) 🔴; -75% YoY
🔹 Income From Operations: ¥15.2B; -57% YoY
🔹 Adj. EBITDA Margin: 15%; LY 18%
🔹 88VIP Members: approximately 64 million
Key Updates:
🔹 AI-related product revenue delivered triple-digit growth for the twelfth consecutive quarter
Comments:
🔸 “Alibaba Cloud’s external revenue growth accelerated to 45%, with AI-related product revenue delivering triple-digit growth for the twelfth consecutive quarter.”
