Kris Abdelmessih has this super-evocative metaphor in his Epsilon Theory Unplugged essay, "The Sound of Inevitability," about how certain market participants are like crocodiles - just there, waiting under the surface, until something happens where the caloric math tips their way and their eyes come up out of the water.
When we were recording our Notes on Notes episode about the essay and the process behind it, the metaphor clicked in my head (you can literally watch me light up over it) that these people are basically like dinosaurs who escaped extinction. The Ken Griffins of the world live in a certain way that they just won't die, not by a careless mistake at least, and they will follow their code in an opportunistic manner to death, "not today."
I think those dinosaurs are everywhere. Not just in derivatives pits. And the way you spot them tells you a lot about the way you can become one, which, make your own choices, but it's the whole game in much of life.
Kris' essay weaves around the story of the Situational Awareness LP (SALP) hedge fund liquidation from a place of abject frustration. You can feel it in his writing. He told me about how when he read about the fund, he always knew this was going to happen and that it was just a matter of time. And that feeling really (really) bugged him.
After the blowup (end of July), he started gathering all of the data and writing things out. He built a massive Claude document. It took him 12-15 hours to edit it down over days. It was cathartic. It was also how he processed his frustration and anger over the situation.
Kris is also a dinosaur who didn't go extinct, and it shows in how he works. He may not be out there acting the croc in markets, but he is embracing the tools and thriving in the modern world.
And I feel this because so much of my own creative process rhymes with his. Especially with the essays - we fight with Claude in similar ways. We look for structure and bullet points and beef with any and all attempts at prose. We know it's a tool. We know it's not our extinction event, so we don't leverage ourselves or our process in any way we can't outsurvive, and we're frustrated and baffled by anybody who strays.
When Kris explains Ken Griffin not worrying about how much a stock moves, but instead only concerning himself with the existential dread of whether exchanges would operate tomorrow, and relates it to the 25 year old genius investors - especially the ones who blow up - I think about who the dinosaurs are vs. who the dinosaur ancestors are.
I think about my essay on earning your s***. I think about the adaptive nature of systems and why the worst thing you can do is be a passive participant, munching on plants, evolved to a massive size, entirely positioned as a bet that this world you're living in will never change even the slightest. The worst thing that can happen to you is so small (and so tragic!). If you don’t constantly earn your right to be there, and adapt as much as you fight to keep being there, the world can change fast.
But if you’re not passive, if you feel ways to retain some amount of smallness in all aspects of what you do, staying under cover and compounding whatever you're compounding, you still have to pay attention to what’s going on at the larger scales. You poke your eyes up and look around, and you think about just how big some people are both acting and living. You don't root for their demise. But after a while on the block, you know how those stories end.
It's easy to think of dinosaurs as just fossils in museums or Jurassic Park retellings. The reality is, they still walk among us, in more ways than you probably realize. Just because they're not all big and terrifying and worthy of museum exhibits and blockbuster movies doesn't mean there aren't a million variations under your nose.
Kris is one of them. The essay and this talk are proof.
ps. I didn’t want to confuse this idea of coding and having a code, but - creativity has a code. It's built in learning how to communicate, in your bones, with some people you care about and trust. It's built in recognizing that some people write airport books, and others make blogs and zines and funny jokes on bathroom walls that work for a subculture of people only. There’s probably another post if not an essay in this idea.
