Sometimes there's a man....
Thoughts on AI, betting and Spencer Pratt as Claude Codes
I spend my summer days in outdoors cafes now reading and giving increasingly sparse directions to an intelligence far greater than my own. The Claude Code Terminals are up and so are its creations, a series of dashboards and Web UI’s confirming that The System Is Working: people are still clicking buttons on their phones and in expectation will send me money. Occasionally a sharp will have his code send a trade to one of the many exchanges and clear a price point on an order book; I will experience that notification with a sigh, a probabilistic loss, the clearest price of the business we have chosen.
I sip cortado and look beyond the portable monitors at the creative class sketching, writing, applying, kibitzing and occasionally instagramming themselves. I work on projects I enjoy, in the sun, drinking world historically good coffee and reading as much as I want. I can’t help but wonder, for me and these bohemian people, is this not as good as work gets?
Under the cafe’s large sun-protective umbrella, I read this week that the Pope has written an Encyclical Letter about AI, Mitt Romney has tweeted that AI is our most urgent national priority, Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution is endorsing the very non-socialist Alex Bores because he thinks tech barons should not have sole custody of our collective future. Strange alliances are forming.
I thought about these generally good, serious politicians and then the people who oppose them, like Marc Andreeson, who is advising people on social media to be less reflective and “retardmax”. Peter Thiel, fresh off lecturing in Rome that the Pope is the antichrist, has moved to Argentina possibly because Javier Milei is about to provide the legal mechanism for an AI limited liability corporation, an entity where no human is at fault for any damage caused.
I also read a series of insightful personal reflections on “the end of work”: a tech worker at Meta about the nuts and bolts of automating his own job as he waits for the inveitable layoff notice, a sex worker on whether sex work would still exist in a Marxian utopic future, this AI engineer on “survivor’s guilt” after AI layoffs. I also talked to a friend who wants AI progress to move as fast as possible because his finance job feels like a repetitive combat sport and he just can’t take it any more.
I learned a friend was pregnant and another friend had a tank in Ukraine named after her. I thought of the famous passage from Mrs. Dalloway - “Life, London, this Moment of June” - and the juxtaposition of Mrs. Dalloway’s enjoyment of a summer day in London with an airplane flying overhead, and the WWI veteran’s horror at the same airplane.
It was the anniversary of my mother’s death. She had enjoyed that passage and before she died, she said she appreciated the book in a way she hadn’t in her youth. In an uneasy religious gesture she kept rosary beads by her bedside next to the oxycontin and that book. I imagined explaining to her that if I don’t fill the orders of the phone-gamblers, it might well be another less charitable gambler who fills them. Worse yet, those profits might go to a peculiar libertarian billionaire financier unusually committed to the causes of indefinite occupation of Palestinians and unlimited CCP social media in the U.S. And won’t my donations be better than his? I doubt she’d be convinced.
I thought about these things because I had too much time, because Claude could code anything I wanted. But mostly I thought about Spencer Pratt, a reality TV court jester elevated by conservative media to be the next king of LA. Mr. Pratt is really the man of the moment, who fits right in there in the summer of 2026 at the center of Western Civilization and social media.
It was social media which led online conservatives to light >$50 million on fire betting on him, and now leads them to question how the man who trailed by over 15 points in head-to-head-polling in a city that is less than 20% Republican could possibly lose an election. And finally I thought about how I am charmed by Spencer Pratt, his refusal to embrace election denial, and the simplicity of “the city is on fire and there are drug addicts everywhere” as a campaign message.
The Bet of the Year
For much of May, Spencer Pratt had a ~25% chance of becoming mayor of Los Angeles according to Kalshi.
This pricing was insane. Los Angeles is 55% Democratic and 15% Republican city by voter registration. Polls taken in May (shown in the NYTimes screenshot below) consistently showed the combined Democratic vote far outstripping Pratt and the very real possibility - which transpired - of the leftist vote (Raman + Huang) combining to lock him out of the runoff. NYTimes Polling
Polymarket enables you to see which wallets hold which position and losers generally hold Pratt and winners hold not Pratt.
Much like the Jake Paul Anthony Joshua fight, professional gamblers of all stripes were attracted to this retail betting frenzy: mention market streamers, sports gamblers, poker players and traditional political junkies all got in on the “NO Pratt” position. I got worried enough about how obvious and crowded the bet was, so I kept calling one friend in LA to ask him what he was literally seeing: were people he knew talking up Pratt? The answer was no. Were his wife’s leftist friends uniting behind Raman? The answer was yes. I called a soft-spoken professional poker player friend and his advice was “maybe you should go bigger?”
There’s a social media unreality that Spencer Pratt is an eminently respectable and moderate figure facing off against a series of Marxists (Bass formerly, Raman perhaps presently). But Spencer Pratt is really best known for starring in videos like the one linked below, entitled “Spencer Pratt’s Top Meltdown Moments from ‘The Hills’ | MTV Ranked”. He fits in at Mar-A-Lago far better than Bloomberg, Romney, Charlie Baker or other Republicans who won in blue areas do.
In the aftermath of the entirely foreseeable defeat, conservatives on social media were perplexed. California experiences a “red mirage” as early votes are counted because voting methods are polarized now. Crudely speaking, in the aftermath of Covid, left-wing beliefs are correlated with voting by mail. And so the Steyer and Raman vote rose disproportionately in the days after the election, diluting the support of Republicans and the Democratic establishment (Beccera/Bass).
Although the government reported batches consistently, media outlets sometimes typed the info in candidate by candidate, and so people watching returns on a media page might see what they thought of as a “batch” going entirely without votes for Spencer Pratt (and no votes for another candidate in another fake “batch” but no one mentions that on social media). Trump’s hand-picked United States Attorney helpfully and courageously explains what was happening here.
Of course, the worst info hazards of our time - Musk, catturd - claimed FRAUD! and an increasingly credulous Republican base believed them. A few people in my life believed them too, or at least thought it was probable. The kernel of truth here is that California conducts elections insanely slowly and the method is broadly speaking insane and deeply decadent, but that describes much of California’s public policy, which was the basis of Spencer Pratt’s appeal. The fact remains that the current outcome is basically the pre-election modal outcome that every betting person with a pulse was in on.
What makes a man take his money and light it on fire? Perhaps it’s living in a state where highways seasonally look like the road to Mordor, but the state refuses to do controlled burns at nearly the scale required. Whether it’s money, wildfire or weed, the idea of burning trees is very Californian.
Spencer Pratt has thus far not joined in on the circus of election denial. So often the people who swing history in a good direction are not the “good people” but “okay people in an insane movement who refuse to cross a line”. Think Kruschevev after Stalin, Deng after Mao, Juan Carlos after Franco, Vasily Arkhipov on a Soviet sub during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There are many Spencer Pratt’s out there, not particularly thoughtful people who nonetheless have lines they will not cross. Most of them will choose right-wing populism over walking embodiments of sclerotic liberalism. Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr infamously told CNN Trump was an existential threat to democracy but he was still voting for him.
AI is exponentially increasing in power and importance. Whoever controls it in the next half-decade may end up controlling things, if humanity remains in control at all. It’s beyond ironic that the tech-right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings given their goals of building a digital God to rule them all, but people of at least passable faith are rising up to say no. We may yet see Romney, Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Bernie locking arms at the barricades. In a week defined by misinformation and lazy bad-faith accusations, it’s notable that reality-TV star Spencer Pratt still - at least as of writing - lives by a code.
Who is this soft spoken professional poker player? Asking for a friend
Love the opening of this article haha