Monthly Rewind: July 2023
Discussing the future of music, investing & quantum technology!
🎙️ Podcast Episodes & Deep Dives 🎙️
If you are interested in AI, investing, cryptocurrency, finance, Wall Street, the Open Source movement, or just cool new ways of reshaping industries, this is the episode for you!
Jim’s interest in finding ways to develop the art and science of quantitative investing was what led him to first dive down the AI rabbit hole 🐰🕳️
Something similar can be said for Numerai founder and head honcho Richard Craib.
Numerai is an open-source hedge fund where data scientists worldwide collaborate to predict equity returns using artificial intelligence.
The basic premise is that data scientists download clean, obfuscated data, model the abstract data, and submit it to a competition to predict the stock market. Numerai then has its own meta-model, which manages money in the hedge fund, created by combining the best models submitted by the data scientists.
One really cool thing about Numerai’s model is that, as the dataset they download is clean and obfuscated, the data scientists who submit the models don’t actually need to have an understanding of finance to do well. What was once a finance problem is effectively transformed into a data science one.
Open source. Quant investing. AI. The conversation heads down all these avenues and some unexpected ones, including how Numerai encourages users to put skin in the game via its own cryptocurrency and Richard’s humble plan to “monopolize intelligence, monopolize data, monopolize money, and decentralize the monopoly.”
Probably the funniest man in finance, Jack Raines has used his self-anointed role as LinkedIn provocateur-in-chief to produce some incredible viral posts (his latest is possibly our favorite: “Multiply this across my 30,000 hinge matches (ChatGPT has been handling the conversations), and I estimate that I contributed $90,000,000+ to Soho House's top line in Q2.” )
Aside from that, Jack has experienced a lot of Life in his 27 years, including earning $400,000 flipping SPACs, losing $150,000 in a day, amassing over 30,000 followers to his newsletter, Young Money, traveling to several continents while writing a travel blog and working in corporate finance.
His conversation was as fun and wide-ranging as we expected, ranging from the downfalls of grind culture to why Jack thinks crypto is bullshit 💩.
We also prepared a deep-dive summary of Jack’s most valuable insights - “What You Can Learn From Losing $150k in One Day.”
“We're going to change reality and reality is going to change us at an accelerating pace.”
O’Shaughnessy Fellow Dr. Zeng is at the forefront of the quantum revolution, having been named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 in the Science category for leading “the development of one of the world’s first quantum stacks.”
As well as walking us through some of the technological and societal implications of quantum technology, Dr. Zeng also made a powerful case for open-sourcing the quantum movement:
“quantum computing is a hard problem, really hard. And so we need as many smart people as we can get working on it, and we need to give them on-ramps into the technology that are not, do a five, six-year PhD. “
and:
“Let's try and make what we are benchmarking... At least be transparent about what we are benchmarking, and make that stuff available. And that way investors, and end users, and people who are seeing the space can see the progress we are making, even though quantum computers aren't solving all the problems that we wish they could solve yet. “
If you’re even slightly interested in quantum computing and, in particular, how revolutions in quantum technologies may change the world we’re living in, then you’ll love this one.
As the Founder of Trapital, a company focused on music, media, and entertainment; Dan Runcie spends his life thinking about past and future trends in the music industry.
As you’d expect, much of our conversation is spent on AI and how it will impact the music industry, including whether AI will lead to the death of DJs (spoiler - no) and how improving streaming algorithms will affect how we consume content.
We also go beyond AI, talking about things like the rise of the billionaire artist, whether anyone will be able to disrupt the streamers, and whether we will see the end of the superstar.
We particularly enjoyed Dan’s thoughts on how the hip-hop industry has historically been the first to embrace new technologies:
I feel historically we've seen hip hop artists and hip hop fans lean into new technology and new formats. We saw this even before streaming. We saw this with ringtones. Hip hop artists were definitely the leaders there, and that whole culture was much more in tuned with it earlier than others. Others followed, but it was early there. And I think we saw the same with streaming over the past decade. Those early years, especially that 2014 to 2018, 19 hyper-growth period where everyone was, at least in the US and Europe, getting more and more streaming subscriptions. A lot of the early listening was hip hop and the streaming services leaned into that. And I think with AI, the songs that we're talking about that went viral, it's Drake in The Weeknd, so this is what we see, and these are the fans that also tend to be online more.
They're talking about what's happening in music, what's happening in culture. So I feel like with AI and any future development, we'll likely see that there.
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📰 News 📰
Wisdom-Keeping
Following his June Infinite Loops appearance, we collaborated with friend-of-the-show Brian Roemmele to hold a “Wisdom-Keeping” competition in July.
We wrote more about the competition and shared some of our favorite snippets of wisdom here:
Our Final Fellowship
We also announced this year's twelfth and final O’Shaughnessy Fellowship, which we have awarded to Dr. Sandro Luna, a health tech founder based in the USA.
As the founder and CEO of Maiv Health Inc., Dr. Sandro will use his $100,000 fellowship grant to continue developing an application that enables anyone to measure clinically important data such as heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation using only their smartphone or mobile device. No sensors or other hardware will be required.
You can find out more about Dr. Luna here.
🚀 What’s Next? 🚀
Buckle in for a bumper August. We’ve already had Luca Dellanna and Jack Butcher on the show, and coming up, we have the second appearance of 😵💫 hypnotist 😵💫 Todd Goodwin, the debut appearance of renowned executive coach Dr. Julie Gurner, and more.
Here on our Substack, we’ll continue to deliver you the usual selection of deep dives and other ideas that make you go, “Hmm…that’s interesting!”
Onwards! 🚀