Welcome to In the Trenches. It’s great to have over 10,000 of you here! My goal with this newsletter is to be all signal and no noise. To that end, make sure you let me know each week how you liked the content.

Hello again!

I took a break from writing for ~6 months. I'm excited to start getting back into it and reconnecting with many of you - I can't promise that I'll be writing weekly (maybe monthly?), but I can promise that if I enter your inbox, I'll always try to share insights that push your thinking forward.

On a personal front, I've been heads down on a lot of exciting business activity (filled with lessons and insights) that I'm really looking forward to sharing once the dust settles and I'm publicly able to.

In the meanwhile, I've been reading a lot more about AI and been thinking about how it will affect the world we live in over the next 10 years. Here are the 15 second order effects I’m most curious about over the next 10 years:

• If FSD (full self driving) actualizes, what happens to car insurance companies?
• What impact do AI and AI agents have on white collar labor? Specifically which pockets get decimated and which get accelerated
• What impact do humanoids have on blue collar labor? Same question as above
• At what point does US national debt crush the domestic and global economy? What will be the “clever” government scheme to rebalance the economics and who will be most affected (eg do private sector assets get securitized)?
• What assets are most mispriced in an AI driven world?
• Technology has always been deflationary; is AI the ultimate deflationary technology?
• When do software companies transition to selling “outcomes” vs “software to generate outcomes”? The market size is 100x as large
• Will a rebalanced S&P 500 rip over the next 30 years? The 500 largest companies in the world should have larger scale, more profitability and potentially be more enduring?
• If the set of public companies continue to shrink at current pace, how will the public participate in returns? Do these returns come before the companies go public? Increasingly it seems obvious to generate returns you have to participate in and have access in private markets
• What does AI do for wealth inequality?
• How much more volatile and extreme will markets be as speed of information travels faster? Should we expect deeper lows, accelerated highs and shorter recovery periods in between?
• What does the world order look: I’m bullish on the US, Dubai and India. Bearish on China, Russia and Europe.
• How do we get mental health, anxiety and depression in the next generation under control? If the trends continue, we are in for an increasingly unstable and disruptive society
• What is the impact of AI driven healthcare / ozempic / weight loss drugs on: (1) food companies, (2) airlines, (3) healthcare system, (4) health products, (5) beauty industry?

If there are other second order effects you find particularly interesting or have a view on the above, I'd love to hear from you. I think we're living through potentially the most fascinating time in history.

Talk soon,

Romeen

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