“AI Makes Analysts Lazy” - Hedge Fund Manager Alix Pasquet on the Importance of Analog Training

In this episode, hedge fund manager Alix returns to Odds on Open to tackle what he calls the most important problem facing young investors today: the complete loss of analog training skills that created the greatest investors of previous generations. Alix runs a hedge fund that deliberately avoids AI tools for analysts, believing they're "extremely dangerous" because they optimize analysts in ways that sub-optimize fund performance. He breaks down why creativity comes from constraints, not abundance—why getting to consensus faster with AI actually makes you worse at generating alpha. The core issues: Gen X is the last generation trained with analog tools, the "junior-senior problem" where hedge funds realize they don't need junior analysts anymore, the attention span crisis, and why Silicon Valley executives don't let their kids use the products they built. Alix introduces the "10K and a pencil" approach, inspectional reading techniques to extract 80% of a book's value, frameworks from Charlie Munger and Peter Kaufman, Art of War principles applied to predator-prey business dynamics, and why reading trains every critical investment skill—pattern recognition, visualization, reading between the lines, leaps of judgment.