Top Lines
Four Hats of Trading, The Death of the Fantasy WR2, and AI Data Centers in Space
Top Lines is a short weekly post sharing the ideas, articles, and signals that stood out to me this week.
What I’m Reading
Books
In Progress:
I try to read 3 books at once: 1 fiction, 1 non-fiction, and 1 personal development.
Fiction: The Way of Kings — Brandon Sanderson (35%)
Non-fiction: Material World — Ed Conway (10%)
Personal development: Meditations — Marcus Aurelius (70%)
Articles & Posts
This section spans a range of topics.1 Key quotes are included below.
🏈 The Death of the Fantasy Football WR2
We haven’t had a target share this low at wide receiver since 2017.
🔋 Solar and battery storage combined drove 81% of new U.S. grid capacity in 2025.
🔋 What Is the Cheapest Source of Electricity?
LCOE answers a developer’s pricing problem, not a system reliability and cost problem.
If Elon’s right, he wins the AI race outright. SpaceX is the only entity that can launch at that scale. xAI would have unlimited power. Everyone else will be stuck fighting over grid interconnects and turbine orders.
🔭 SpaceX + xAI Merger, IPO, Data Centers and Moon Base
So if SpaceX succeeds with its Starship, it will have too much capacity to bring mass to space, and that emptiness will mean the entire program might not be viable. If SpaceX wants more, bigger rockets, it needs to manufacture demand… Musk thinks that’s AI datacenters.
🏛️💲 The Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump’s Tariffs. Now What?
💲 The So-Called “Debasement Trade”
My base case is that we will find ourselves in a structural environment where debasement keeps occurring, but absolute hurdle rates and costs of capital are no longer declining (i.e. no more lower-lows in interest rates), and thus valuations for equities, houses, and other assets will have less of a structural tailwind behind them.
💲 Morgan Housel: Wealth is What You Have Minus What You Want
Excellence is the capacity to endure pain
💲🧠 The 80/20 rule for your whole life
The 80% keeps you solvent, employed, and grounded. The 20% keeps you curious, engaged, and growing. Without the 80%, the experiments are dangerous. Without the 20%, the foundation becomes a cage.
You need both.
Our attention is a unique resource. Bodies degrade, wealth rises and falls, reputations come and go. But attention refreshes daily. The morning’s pitcher is always full. The morning’s cups are always empty. The begins again, and it’s a game you can win today no matter how many times you’ve lost. So this week I wrote myself a note and taped it to my desk, where I can’t miss it: Whose cup did you fill today?
🧠 Breaking a Problem Down into Parts
Atomize the analysis
🧠 Travel Is No Cure for the Mind
We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones.
🧠 The Seam Through the Center of Things
That’s where my head goes, when I encounter a great plate of risotto or a warm breeze on a winter evening. Overflowing gratitude, for this best-not-hoped-for gift from the universe.
We have convinced ourselves that simulation has exhausted the middle of everything— war, technology, politics, the economy— and that the only serious move left is the last one. Simulation has not exhausted the middle. It has exhausted our patience for it. The middle is still where the complications live, where the position is ambiguous and the thing no one modeled happens and you have to play the board as it is. The middle is two thousand years long and counting and we are somewhere in it and the eschaton is not ours alone to force.
Know your vocation. Play the game. Burn the clock.
🧠 Self Reflections of a Striver
Life really isn’t that serious. I am blessed to be able to play this game whenever I feel like it. The outside world moves so slowly, it feels like it is lagging years behind what is happening at the frontier online.
👨👩👧 More than 40% of your parenting time has elapsed by the time your kid enters kindergarten
💪 Sleep regularity appears to be a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration
Chart of the Week
This chart from Everything Everywhere All at Once maps closely to Adam Grant’s Four Modes of Thinking. Asking the key question in each quadrant is a useful way to pressure-test your thinking, whether you’re investing or simply evaluating a new idea.
What I’m Writing
🧠 Top Lines — publishing most Sundays
🏈 Recapping My First 100 Best Ball drafts of 2026 — publishing early March
What I’m Thinking About
🏈 The recent shift to more 2 TE sets increases the floor at tight end, and reduces the importance of secondary receivers. Practically, that means I want to focus on elite RBs and WRs more early, while avoiding middle round options in favor of TEs (and QBs).
🏈 There’s 15 fantasy relevant players projected as a top 64 pick, per the Consensus Big Board. This rookie class might be better than the current market indicates.
🏀 It looks like a Blue Bloods type of year for March Madness, with St. Louis checking in at #24 in KenPom as the highest-rated non-power conference team (excluding perennial power Gonzaga).
🏈Football
🏀Basketball
🔋Energy
🔭Science and Tech
🏛️Government and Policy
💲Personal Finance and Investing
💪Health and Fitness
🧠Thinking
👨👩👧 Family
❓Miscellaneous