Category: Uncategorized
My Conversation with the excellent Gaurav Kapadia
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing, which makes this conversation a rare window into how he thinks. He now runs XN, a firm built around concentrated bets on a small number of companies with long holding periods. However, his education in judgment began much earlier, in a two-family house in Flushing that his parents converted into a four-family house. It was there where a young Gaurav served as de facto landlord, collecting rent and negotiating late payments at age 10. That grounding now expresses itself across an unusual range of domains: Tyler invited him on the show not just as an investor, but as someone with a rare ability to judge quality in cities, talent, art, and more with equal fluency.
Tyler and Gaurav discuss how Queens has thrived without new infrastructure, what he’d change as “dictator” of Flushing, whether Robert Moses should rise or fall in status, who’s the most underrated NYC mayor, what’s needed to attract better mayoral candidates, the weirdest place in NYC, why he initially turned down opportunities in investment banking for consulting, bonding with Rishi Sunak over railroads, XN’s investment philosophy, maintaining founder energy in investment firms and how he hires to prevent complacency, AI’s impact on investing, the differences between New York and London finance, the most common fundraising mistake art museums make, why he collects only American artists within 20 years of his own age, what makes Kara Walker and Rashid Johnson and Salman Toor special, whether buying art makes you a better investor, his new magazine Totei celebrating craft and craftsmanship, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Now, I don’t intend this as commentary on any particular individual, but what is it that could be done to attract a higher quality of candidate for being mayor of New York? It’s a super important job. It’s one of the world’s greatest cities, arguably the greatest. Why isn’t there more talent running after it?
KAPADIA: It is something that I’ve thought about a great deal. I think there’s a bunch of little things that accumulate, but the main thing that happens in New York City is, people automatically assume they can’t win because it’s such a big and great city. Actually, the last few presidential elections and also the current mayoral election have taught people that anyone could win. I think that, in and of itself, is going to draw more candidates as we go forward.
What happened as an example, this time, people just assumed that one candidate had the race locked up, so a lot of good candidates, even that I know, decided not even to run. It turns out that that ended up not being the case at all. Now that people put that into their mental model, the new Bayesian analysis of that would be, “Oh, more people should run.”
The second thing: New York has a bunch of very peculiar dynamics. It’s an off-year election, and the primaries are at very awkward times. I believe there’s a history of why the primary shifted to basically the third week of June, in which there’s a very low turnout. The third week of June in New York City, when the private schools are out and an off-year election. You’re able to win the Democratic nomination and therefore the mayoral election with tens of thousands of votes in a city this big. That is absolutely insane.
A couple of things that I would probably do would be to make the primary more normal, change the election timing to make it on-cycle, even number of years. You’d have to figure out how to do that. Potentially have an open primary as well.
COWEN: If we apply the Gaurav Kapadia judgment algorithm to mayoral candidates, what’s the non-obvious quality you’re looking for?
KAPADIA: Optimism.
COWEN: Optimism.
KAPADIA: Optimism.
COWEN: Is it scarce?
KAPADIA: Extraordinarily scarce. I think there’s much more doomerism everywhere than optimism. At the end of the day, people are attracted to optimism. If you think about the machinery of the city and the state, having a clear plan — of course, you need all the basics. You need to be able to govern. It’s a very complicated city. There’re many constituents.
But I think beyond that, you have to have the ability to inspire. For some reason, almost all of the candidates, over the last couple of cycles, have really not had that — with the exception of probably one — the ability to inspire. I think that is the most underrated quality that one will need.
COWEN: I have my own answer to this question, but I’m curious to see what you say. What is, for you, the weirdest part of New York City that you know of that doesn’t really feel like it belongs to New York City at all?
Definitely recommended.
Claims about Russian women (and men)
A trained observer of psychology, Alina had made careful note of the strategies that seemed to work for these gazelle-like young women. For example: “A man values a woman a lot more if she is constantly dragging presents out of him,” she said, “and he values her a lot more than the woman who says, ‘No, no, no, I don’t need anything.’ ” Alina cradled her teacup, half awestruck. “They get everything this way,” she said. “I think that these things should be explained to girls in childhood. It’s very important. And it doesn’t matter if the girl is smart or not, because you can have a girl who goes to university and gets a Ph.D. and is tremendously accomplished but then loses to these pretty young things who will take away her husband before she can count to three.”
Here is more from Julia Ioffe in The New Yorker, interesting throughout.
Wednesday assorted links
2. Historian sentences to ponder.
3. New paper on why female labor force participation is sometimes low.
4. On my chat with Dan Wang. And an Indian converses with Tyler Cowen at the Bangalore EV meet up.
5. The labor market is not yet very much rewarding claimed skills in AI?
6. Capping Swiss population at ten million polls reasonably well there (Bloomberg).
Australia should not ban under-16s from internet sites
YouTube in particular, and sometimes X, are among the very best ways to learn about the world. To the extent that the law is effectively enforced, targeting YouTube will have a terrible effect on youth science, and the ability of young scientists and founders to get their projects off the ground will take a huge and possibly fatal hit. If you are only allowed to learn from the internet at age 16, you are probably not ready for marvelous achievements at age 18 or perhaps not even at 20. The country may become more mediocre.
The more serious concern is that this represents a major expansion of government control over tech services and also speech. Over time the government has to decide which are the approved tech companies and services and which are not. That becomes a politicized decision, as any chosen lines will be arbitrary, especially as online services evolve in their functionality. For instance, if excess video usage is what is problematic, it is possible for videos to be embedded more seamlessly into some future version of WhatsApp, an exempt service. Or Australian youth, even under the new law, will be able to access video on a laptop, simply by viewing it and not signing into their accounts…
I predict that either this law stops being effectively enforced, or the controls on companies and users have to become much, much tighter and more oppressive. In a large poll of Australian 9 to 16-year-olds, only 6 percent of them thought the new ban was going to work.
That is true for yet another reason. With gaming and messaging exempt from the ban, we can expect old-style “social media” to move into those areas. It already was the case that Fortnite and other gaming services served as social media networks, and that trend will be accelerated. Discord, for instance, is exempt from the ban, a glaring hole, and in a fast-changing market there probably will be some significant loopholes most of the time. For the ban to continue to work, it will have to spread. It is hard to think of an area of internet services that could not, in principle, serve social media–like functions, or produce the harms being attributed to online life. Regulation of artificial intelligence services is perhaps the next logical albeit misguided move here.
Who is in charge of the family anyway? If I have decided that my 15-year-old should be free to follow Magnus Carlsen on X and YouTube, should we have the boot of the state tell me this is forbidden? This is a big move in the direction of what Socrates advocated in The Republic, namely that the state takes priority over the family in deciding which stories can be told to the youth.
Over time, I expect this ban, again assuming it is kept and enforced, to become one of the biggest free speech restrictions on the internet. It is the incentive of government agencies to boost their budgets, spread their mandates, and enforce their dictates. What starts with a nation’s youth rarely ends there.
You might think that Australia’s regulatory guardians can be trusted to uphold free speech ideals, but has that been the case to date? Under Australian law, it is permissible to restrict free speech for reasons of public order, national security, and protection from harm. That includes limits on “hate speech,” prompting Elon Musk to exaggerate and call the country fascist. Nonetheless the country does not have anything comparable to America’s First Amendment free speech protections.
So why should we empower Australian regulators and restrict free speech further?
It is very defensible to worry that your kid is on his or her phone too much. Furthermore, school bans or limits on smartphone usage are likely to bring some measurable but small gains.
But if you think a massive expansion of state authority over online content is the answer, you ought to know that the associated gains from that decision will at best be modest. You will not be saving civilization or our youth; rather you will be joining the ever-growing parade against free speech.
Recommended, and in this recent piece Ben Yeoh surveys the research-based literature on social media and teen harm.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Lakers’ LeBron James shocked to learn he has played against 35 percent of all players in NBA history.
2. Affordability is about output, not prices.
3. “In this cohort study including 22.7 million vaccinated individuals and 5.9 million unvaccinated individuals, vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and no increased risk of all-cause mortality over a median follow-up of 45 months.” In reality, that debate has been over for some time now, but you can take this as a final confirmation.
5. Is there a market for this cinematic ape bathrobe? (NYT)
6. Latin American immigration to Spain (NYT).
Quantifying human-AI synergy
From Christoph Riedl and Ben Weidmann:
We introduce a novel Bayesian Item Response Theory framework to quantify human–AI synergy, separating individual and collaborative ability while controlling for task difficulty in interactive settings. Unlike standard static benchmarks, our approach models human–AI performance as a joint process, capturing both user-specific factors and moment-to-moment fluctuations. We validate the framework by applying it to human–AI benchmark data (n=667) and find significant synergy. We demonstrate that collaboration ability is distinct from individual problem-solving ability. Users better able to infer and adapt to others’ perspectives achieve superior collaborative performance with AI–but not when working alone. Moreover, moment-to-moment fluctuations in perspective taking influence AI response quality, highlighting the role of dynamic user factors in collaboration. By introducing a principled framework to analyze data from human-AI collaboration, interactive benchmarks can better complement current single-task benchmarks and crowd-assessment methods. This work informs the design and training of language models that transcend static prompt benchmarks to achieve adaptive, socially aware collaboration with diverse and dynamic human partners.
Here is a useful tweet storm on the work. I do not love how the abstract is written, I would stress these sentences: “We demonstrate that collaboration ability is distinct from individual problem-solving ability. Users better able to infer and adapt to others’ perspectives achieve superior collaborative performance with AI–but not when working alone. Moreover, moment-to-moment fluctuations in perspective taking influence AI response quality, highlighting the role of dynamic user factors in collaboration.”
Does studying economics and business make students more conservative?
College education is a key determinant of political attitudes in the United States and other countries. This paper highlights an important source of variation among college graduates: studying different academic fields has sizable effects on their political attitudes. Using surveys of about 300,000 students across 500 U.S. colleges, we find several results. First, relative to natural sciences, studying social sciences and humanities makes students more left-leaning, whereas studying economics and business makes them more right-leaning. Second, the rightward effects of economics and business are driven by positions on economic issues, whereas the leftward effects of humanities and social sciences are driven by cultural ones. Third, these effects extend to behavior: humanities and social sciences increase activism, while economics and business increase the emphasis on financial success. Fourth, the effects operate through academic content and teaching rather than socialization or earnings expectations. Finally, the implications are substantial. If all students majored in economics or business, the college–noncollege ideological gap would shrink by about one-third. A uniform-major scenario, in which everyone studies the same field, would reduce ideological variance and the gender gap. Together, the results show that academic fields shape students’ attitudes and that field specialization contributes to political fragmentation.
That is a recent paper from Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman. Here is a thread on the paper.
Monday assorted links
1. New Yorker best films of 2025. The full panoply (not always available to actual viewers in advance) is in fact quite good, once the full list is out.
2. Individual home NIMBY in Fairfax.
3. Jerry Muller Substack and intellectual biography.
4. Mick West sides with a guy with 286 Twitter followers over classified intelligence, based on multiple sensor readings. Russian drone incursions are not seriously doubted…except by him (no doubt some are mistaken observations ofc).
6. Scott Alexander on the vibecession.
7. The New School will cut or pause 25 different programs.
8. On new, for-profit cities (FT).
9. Are global aesthetics flattening India’s fashion imagination?
Political Organization in Pre-Colonial Africa
We provide an overview of the explanations for the relative lack of state formation historically in Africa. In doing so we systematically document for the first time the extent to which Africa was politically decentralized, calculating that in 1880 there were probably 45,000 independent polities which were rarely organized on ethnic lines. At most 2% of these could be classified as states. [emphasis added by TC] We advance a new argument for this extreme political decentralization positing that African societies were deliberately organized to stop centralization emerging. In this they were successful. We point out some key aspects of African societies that helped them to manage this equilibrium. We also emphasize how the organization of the economy was subservient to these political goals.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Soeren J. Henn and James A. Robinson.
What has gone wrong with tourism to Las Vegas?
Agitators in the city have attempted to document the deterioration by posting ominous images of barren casinos, conjuring the perception of a place hollowed out by economic armageddon. The reality is more nuanced, but it is true that practically every conceivable indicator tracking tourism to Las Vegas is flashing warning signs. Hotel occupancy has cratered. Rooms were only 66.7 percent full in July, down by 16.8 percent from the previous year. The number of travelers passing through Harry Reid International Airport also declined by 4.5 percent in 2025 during an ongoing ebb of foreign tourists, for familiar reasons. Canadians, historically one of the city’s most reliable sources of degenerates, have effectively vanished. Ticket sales for Air Canada jets flying to Las Vegas have slipped by 33 percent, while the Edmonton-based low-cost carrier Flair has reported a 62 percent drop-off.
Here is the full story, which shows it is by no means an exclusively Canadian phenomenon. Overall, I am happy to see a shift away from gambling, drinking, and “shows for wealthy old people”?
Colors of growth
This looks pretty tremendous:
We develop a novel approach to measuring long-run economic growth by exploiting systematic variation in the use of color in European paintings. Drawing inspiration from the literature on nighttime lights as a proxy for income, we extract hue, saturation, and brightness from millions of pixels to construct annual indices for Great Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany between 1600 and 1820. These indices track broad trends in existing GDP reconstructions while revealing higher frequency fluctuations – such as those associated with wars, political instability, and climatic shocks – that traditional series smooth over. Our findings demonstrate that light, decomposed into color and brightness components, provides a credible and independent source of information on early modern economic activity.
That is new research by Lars Boerner, Tim Reinicke, Samad Sarferaz, and Battista Severgnini. Via Ethan Mollick.
Sunday assorted links
1. The fight over Romansh (New Yorker).
3. Kelsey Piper responds on Mississippi. She is probably correct.
4. Future VP?
5. Is the political allocation of gay representatives skewed?
6. If Arnold Kling taught conservative thought.
7. Noah is right.
Planning sentences to ponder
Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed.
Here is the full abstract:
We study how the federal Urban Planning Assistance Program, which subsidized growing communities in the 1960s to hire urban planners to draft land-use plans, affected housing supply. Using newly digitized records merged with panel data across municipalities on housing and zoning outcomes, we exploit eligibility thresholds and capacity to approve funds across state agencies to identify effects. Planning assistance caused municipalities to build 20% fewer housing units per decade over the 50 years that followed. Regulatory innovation steered construction in assisted areas away from apartments and toward larger single-family homes. Textual evidence related to zoning and development politics further shows that, since the 1980s, assisted communities have disincentivized housing supply by passing on development costs to developers. These findings suggest that federal intervention in planning helped institutionalize practices that complicate community growth, with subsequent consequences for national housing affordability.
Hail Martin Anderson! The above paper is by Tom Cui and Beau Bressler, via Brad, and also Yonah Freemark.
A Ukrainian mathematician requests mathematical assistance
…an expert in general relativity or a mathematical physicist familiar with PPN methods, weak-field gravitational tests, and variational principles…
For the two technical appendices (ψ-preconditioning and χ-flattening), I would need:
• a quantum algorithms researcher (QSP/QSVT/QLSA/QAE) to assess the correctness of the operator transformations and the potential complexity gains;
• a quantum control or pulse-level compilation engineer (pulse-level, virtual-Z) to evaluate whether the phase-drift compensation algorithm can be implemented realistically on actual hardware.
Please email me if you think you might be of assistance.