Joe Markman

Helping investors profit from the $2T AI infrastructure boom → Get The 3% letter 👇

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

In the 1830s, a group of doctors published warnings that railroad travel at speeds over 30 mph would cause passengers' bones to shatter and their lungs to collapse from the air pressure.

Schools near proposed rail lines petitioned to stop construction because the noise would make children unable to learn.

Farmers argued that sparks from locomotives would set their fields on fire and that cows exposed to trains would stop producing milk.

So yeah. "AI will destroy everything" is basically the "trains will shatter your bones" of our generation.

The people who bought railroad stocks in the 1840s built generational wealth. Same panic, different century. Stay invested.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

AI will offload human memory and creativity, risking a kind of "forgetfulness" in skills like unaided reasoning or cultural improvisation; much like literacy diminished oral epics.
This did lead to the loss of oral traditions worldwide.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 1995:

"The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper. No CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher. And the network won't change the way government works."

He was a respected astronomer. Newsweek ran it as a feature piece. Basically everyone nodded along.

The newspaper industry lost 80% of its ad revenue over the next 20 years. Newsweek itself stopped printing in 2012.

Same panic, different decade. Stay invested.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

AI, at the most basic level, is just: electricity → floating‑point numbers → intelligence.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

@MediaKing @VanshKharidia Ahhh good idea. Did you develop an SOP for its character of how it deals with customers? Grok seems to be kind of a dick out of the box... lol

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

1876. Western Union gets an internal memo about Alexander Graham Bell's new invention.

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

They were the most powerful communications company on the planet. They passed.

Bell's patent became the most valuable patent in American history. Western Union spent the next century in decline.

Same panic, different decade. Stay invested.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

@MediaKing @VanshKharidia how???? i use it for video editing and it only ate 70% of the weekly limit....

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

Plato had concerns about allowing the general public to learn how to write. As learning how to write DOES erode specific memory faculties. He feared societal "forgetfulness," yet it enabled unprecedented progress in education and innovation.

The biggest question I have is, what is today's version of this with AI? What skill will we lose and subsequently gain?

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

@MayaOfTime Super cool. Thank you for sharing!

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

1193 AD. Bihar, India. Bakhtiyar Khilji's army reached the gates of Nalanda.

Inside was the largest knowledge repository in the ancient world. Three library buildings. Manuscripts on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, philosophy.

It burned for three months.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

1903. The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advised Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Company:

"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad."

Ford's lawyer ignored the advice and invested $5,000. His stake eventually became worth $12.5 million.

The Michigan Savings Bank doesn't exist anymore.

Same panic, different century. Stay invested.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

In 2017, Costco dropped 13% because Wall Street decided Amazon would kill it.

Revenue at the time: ~$126 billion.

Revenue today: $254 billion.

The stock is up over 300% since that panic.

Meanwhile, Kodak actually had a digital camera prototype in 1975. Their own engineer built it. Executives looked at it and said "that's cute" and shelved it. They went bankrupt in 2012.

The difference between Costco and Kodak was never about the threat. Both faced a real one. Costco invested in e-commerce, built out delivery, leaned into the membership model harder. Kodak pretended film would last forever.

Markets misprice transformation all the time. The question is whether the company itself also misprices it.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

The monks could see the instability around them. They kept teaching the same curriculum to a shrinking class. Never distributed the knowledge beyond their walls. Never decentralized.

When the single point of failure was hit, everything was lost.

This is why open source matters.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

Nalanda had been declining for decades before the attack. Funding dried up. Fewer students enrolled. The institution got rigid, dependent on royal patronage that was fading.

By the time Khilji arrived, Nalanda was already fragile. The fire just made the collapse visible.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

What "beat and raise" actually tells you:

→ Executives know their numbers cold
→ Demand is outpacing internal projections
→ The business has pricing power it hasn't fully used yet

In a volatile market, these are the companies you stay with.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

In 2017, Amazon bought Whole Foods. Costco stock tanked 16.5%.
The market's verdict: internet finally arrived for warehouse clubs.

Costco's earnings grew 14% that year.

The stock regained its pre-announcement price 167 days later.
Anyone who bought the July low is up 521% since.

The market argued with the business. The market was wrong.

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

A positive vision of the future here. I got goosebumps watching this.

I am so excited for humanities future.

...and it's sometimes even hard for myself to remember that, due to all the negative news everywhere all the time.

Stuff like this lifts my spirits back their right path.

Worth a ~3 minute watch.

[karim_yourself @karim_yourself]

This is our submission to the #FutureVisionXPRIZE, a global competition from the XPRIZE Foundation, Google and Range for optimistic science fiction about a future worth building toward.

Massive shoutout to Steven Quach for helping me bring this together in less than a week!

[karim_yourself @karim_yourself]

This is our submission to the #FutureVisionXPRIZE, a global competition from the XPRIZE Foundation, Google and Range for optimistic science fiction about a future worth building toward.

Massive shoutout to Steven Quach for helping me bring this together in less than a week!

[Joe Markman @joe_markman]

Low-information investors call this a bubble. Bubbles require excess supply. AI compute is still supply constrained.

Cast your mind back to January 2023. Headlines screamed Google was obsolete because of ChatGPT. Alphabet sank to $1.15 trillion. Investors who bought that narrative got crushed.

Same panic, different model launch.