So much happened. The blue tsunami in the US midterms, the AI revolution, and Jensen Huang.
Blue Tsunami… or Just a Mass MAGA Recall?
Nor sent me this, which showed clearly how the blue tsunami happened.
I feel very hopeful that enough people in the US felt angry enough about the current situation to take action. Turnout helped too: more people decided to actually do something about where things are heading. At the same time, I am becoming more convinced that this isn’t the blue shift many of us hoped for. It isn’t a shift towards the more democratic, rational, humane and kinder, bigger-government kind of world I wish to see. You know, the typical, more elitist view of the world.
What likely happened is that swing voters and independents abandoned the Trump ship. While this shift is positive, I am also quite cautious, because these are the same kind of voters who swung the US from Obama to Trump, to Biden, and back to Trump. Most of the blue and red bases did not move. The balance of power was swung by a bunch of voters who appear to be… suffering, and so more emotional and reactive. I don’t want to be judgmental. I think I would react the same way if I didn’t have a stable job, couldn’t pay my bills, and had a family depending on me. I am 100% certain I wouldn’t be able to stand so firmly on my so-called values if I didn’t even feel fed and safe. So the reality is, a bunch of Americans flip-flopped again. Last time, they flipped to giving Trump both the popular vote and the electoral college. This time, they flopped to running away from the Republicans, not running towards the Democrats. All in all, I need to remind myself that no, more Americans have not suddenly become Democrats.
AI Revolution
AI is revolutionary. That’s not an overstatement, at least for me.
I started using Claude to build my little school management system in March. It was great. I vibe-coded many modules with few hiccups. But there were issues. So when Fable 5 came out, I asked it to run a check on my site. It fixed a bunch of stuff and made it more efficient. Now that Fable 5.2 is out, I asked it to check again, and this time it caught significant issues and implemented fixes. I can now build app after app in just an hour or two. Vibe coding is real. What’s time-consuming is the design and planning. The actual coding and testing are so fast now.
Plus, I am starting to use it to automate a lot of my day-to-day work, from sorting out invoices to budgeting to forecasting. Hallucinations are few and far between. It’s super fast, and it is excellent at holding a lot of messy information.
Perhaps the most important thing is how cheap and fast it is to make something. This changed everything for me. I don’t have to worry about the time and cost of building something, throwing it away, restarting, and tweaking. This makes trying and experimenting much easier, so any idea I have can be built. This is revolutionary, because making an app prototype that runs is now easier and faster than writing a Word draft. Automating a process is faster than drawing a flowchart. Everything is so cheap and so abundant that I am much more wasteful when it comes to making things. I am also much bolder, because it costs less money and time to try things. The biggest thing I need to watch out for is how intoxicating it is. It is so cheap and easy to be “successful” at making things. And success is one sure path to overconfidence and complacency, which lead to hubris and nemesis…
Jensen Huang
Speaking of hubris and nemesis, nothing shows it more vividly than the fall of Jensen Huang.
What happened to him is all over the internet. It took 96 hours for him to go from king to cockroach. Just a few years ago, Nvidia was still just another graphics card company after almost 30 years of existence. Then, all of a sudden, the graphics card became the foundation of the LLM-based AI boom, Nvidia was the company behind the best processors for AI, and Jensen became a superstar almost overnight.
Fans adored him because he seemed so different from other CEOs. He was a Taiwanese American who built the most valuable company on earth. He was down to earth. He ate in night markets and drank soju in public. He talked to fans. He wore a leather jacket. He just seemed different. He seemed less like a billionaire CEO and more like you and me.
Those 96 hours showed that maybe he was more like us than we thought. And not at all ready to be a CEO in the big leagues.
At the start of 2021, Nvidia’s market cap was about $323B. In October 2026, at its peak, it was close to $5.8T. This was exponential growth, and neither he nor his company had adjusted to being the world’s most important company.
He believed what he was doing was the best for his business and company (and hence … him). But at that size and significance, he had to compete in arenas he was probably never prepared for. He had to deal with Trump, China, geopolitics, and he was caught in the middle of one of the biggest narratives in human history: the future of humanity in a world of AI. Plus, with this kind of growth, his company probably needed better everything, from supply chain to governance. He probably needed to evolve his 60-direct-reports structure. But he never had time or the room (and frankly, I doubt anyone would know how to handle this), because everything grew so fast and so big.
Huang once described his company as an F1 car, with him as the driver. “You should make the car adapt to you,” he said. The car is built around him. As for whoever comes after him: “And the next CEO, whatever their personality is, they can figure it out.” I would add that he was driving this car and trying to re-engineer the entire thing while racing at max speed. And he crashed, badly.
And I bet someone like him had to be very stubborn and opinionated. He had to go against the current. He made so many bets in his life to get Nvidia where it is today. He had to brush off the naysayers and ignore a lot of people to find his own path. I’ve met a lot of people like this. In fact, I think only people with his kind of mindset and self-belief can achieve this kind of generational accomplishment. If he had been even a bit less stubborn, less determined, less opinionated, he would never have made Nvidia what it is today. So I bet he thought: I can only be CEO the way I am, the only way I know. And he was.
The sad thing is, like all humans, he is flawed. Broken in some ways. Driven by his scars and demons. And people like him, driven, scared, broken, motivated, whatever you want to call it, have to believe they are different, that their actions will turn out differently. That is the dilemma. The only way to succeed is to bet on yourself. The more you win, the less you can tell when to stop listening to yourself. People like him don’t become hubristic because they want to. It’s statistics: betting on themselves worked more often than listening to others. Over and over, for 30 years. Hubris is believing, then experiencing, and then reinforcing the belief that the rules don’t apply to you. He believed he could rebuild the car at full speed without slowing down. He believed he could have affairs with a vendor and a subordinate (and God knows who else ….) and handle them like he had handled everything else. He ignored the rules because ignoring the rules simply worked for him.
I’m not defending what he did. I just wonder: if you made bets everyone told you not to make, over and over, for 30 years, and every time the world told you your bets were right, and then crowned you CEO of the most valuable company in the world, how could you not trust yourself? How could you trust any rules, limitations, guardrails, whatever? Is there any chance you could stay humble?
One last thing I have been thinking about: maybe tech executives really do need to read more humanities. With their overdeveloped engineering, business and logical brains, they simply miss the cheesy yet profound, simple yet ambiguous, trivial yet fundamental dynamics and morals of being human. Love, desire, obsession; confidence, arrogance, hubris. I think this is very possible, and very likely true.
Or maybe, at some point, no one can escape hubris. That’s why so many fables and myths tell the same story of hubris and nemesis. And I should remember that too.
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