Urban Trade Breakdowns

Munehisa Honma was the greatest trader in history. The OG. A bad motherfucker and a good person. He went deep and invented the game as we know it. This is going to tax your Instagram attention spans but I couldn’t think of another way to tell the story and I’m lazy and didn’t feel like editing. Way back in the day, rice was money in Japan. They needed it and survived on it and lacking a better unit of currency to tax and oppress your people, the Japanese Shogun (the main man) authorized a rice futures market. Munehisa Honma was born in 1717 in Sakata. They grow rice there. He was adopted into a farming family with a small plot of land and as is their tradition, when he became a man he was given responsibility for the family’s money. When you are born into the the lowest class in a feudal country where there ain’t really shit else to do and all you know is rice, if you don’t want grow rice, another option was to trade it. This is what Honma decided he wanted to do and he thought that if...

On June 28th, 1997, just seven months after shocking the boxing world by defeating Mike Tyson by TKO in the 11th round, Evander Holyfield was back in Las Vegas to defend his title in one of most anticipated rematches in boxing history. Holyfield was a hugely experienced fighter and a meticulous trainer and in preparation for the fight, his team analyzed virtually every element of Tyson’s style and developed a grueling training program and a brilliant fight plan. He was never more prepared, but the smart-money oddsmakers in Vegas saw things different, predicting a Tyson win at 4:1 odds. But sometimes, shit just gets crazy, and when it does, you can throw away the fucking odds, because some shit is just too un-real to predict. Until it happens. With 40 seconds remaining in the third round, while brawling through through an ugly clinch against the ropes, Tyson shoves his head across Holyfield’s face and bites an inch-long chunk of cartilage from the top of Holyfield’s right ear. T...

Before 1776, you didn’t need to know math and shit to understand economics. Because back then, if a country was 1/3 of the world’s population (like India in year 1 AD), it was roughly 1/3 of the global economy. And if a country had 1/4 of the world’s population (like China at the time), it was roughly 1/4 of the global economy. Because before tractors and electricity and shit were invented during the industrial revolution, which was in full swing by 1776, a motherfucker could only hunt or gather or grow so much shit on any given plot of land. If a country ran out of land, it ran out of food, and its people starved, which kept both population and economic growth in check. And that explains all that old world raping and pillaging and conquering of land, because up to that point, economic growth meant pretty much one thing, more land. But after the industrial revolution, a motherfucker could grow or produce a shit-ton more on any given plot of land, which meant if you could out-think and...

The world is a crazy-ass place. Every day, all day, we get slammed with zillions of bits of information and our little monkey brains, which evolved to keep us alive just long enough to fuck and create the next generation of fuckers, just can’t keep up. So to make sense of the shit, we tell ourselves stories, cheat-sheet versions of reality to make the shit simple so we can pass the test and live another day. And when enough people buy into the story, the story starts to influence reality and it starts a feedback loop that continues until reality intervenes. But the stories are never real. Reality is fucking infinite-K HD and we can’t even see past the color red. We don’t have the hardware or software to process the shit. But what we can know for sure is when we are wrong. Wrong pops the bubble, it curb-stomps our stories. People tell stories until reality proves us wrong. That’s the law of the jungle, and if you want to survive in the jungle, a mans got to have a code. George Soros ...