A Billion Dollars: Imagine I am a wizard with a magic wand. I wave it over you and now you have a billion dollars. What would you do with your life? The price of things is no longer material. What do you use the money for? The answers are wild and vary. They first buy a house, and maybe one for family members. Maybe even a second home at the lakeside. They get a car they always wanted. Travel some. Support an artist friend. I tell them, that is all good, but after all that you will still have a billion dollars. You’ve only spent millions and you’ll make that back in a day or two. And you still have the problem of what you are going to do with your precious time. Here the answers get interesting. Some would start their own business, or open a bakery. Work with doctors serving the poor. Go pro with their band. Become a YouTube creator. None of this requires anything close to a billion dollars... I’ve had the privilege of hanging around a dozen actual billionaires. Despite the myth, they are not unhappy. But here’s the thing: they are still trying to figure out what they want to do next, and who they want to become. And their billions of dollars don’t help them in that. In fact, their billions of dollars are almost a prison. Their previous success hemmed them in, set unhealthy expectations, and will never go away (it is hard to get rid of a billion dollars). The hurdles they have in achieving their new dreams are exactly the same as yours: the need for will power, perseverance, ingenuity and imagination. None of these cost a billion dollars; all of them are available to anyone anywhere.

https://kk.org/thetechnium/a-billion-dollars/

Passive Investing and Marxism: Say you own shares in one airline. You’d want it fighting — cutting costs, undercutting rivals, stealing market share. Now say you own shares in every major airline. Suddenly you don’t care who wins. Actually, you’d rather they all stopped competing and just raised prices together. One airline’s win is another’s loss, and to you, a shareholder in all of them, that’s a win either way. Economists call this common ownership. And there’s a number attached to it. One widely cited study found airline ticket prices ran 3-7% higher on routes with heavy common ownership than on routes without it. For example, assume two airlines fly the same Delhi-Mumbai route, each charging ₹5,000 a ticket, competing hard for the same 100 passengers a day... Scenario A: different owners. Airline 1 cuts its price to ₹4,700 to grab share from Airline 2. Airline 2 has to respond, or it loses passengers. Prices stay pinned down by competition... Scenario B: same owners, via index funds holding both. Airline 1 undercutting Airline 2 doesn’t help the shareholder anymore. So nobody bothers to undercut. The ₹5,000 fare just... holds. Maybe even drifts up to ₹5,300. All this without anyone actively colluding to raise prices; and simply because the prices just stopped needing to compete. Common ownership.

Mind Over Markets by Zerodha Varsity

Why Passive Investing is Worse Than Marxism?

Let me clarify 3 things at the start…

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10 days ago · 112 likes · 13 comments · Zerodha Varsity

The Amazon Tax: Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue... When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options. Folklore implies that buying the ads somehow shifts how search responds in the long run, even after the ads stop running, but there’s little data to confirm this. Traditional ads increase demand. We see something that’s clearly an ad, it might spark desire, and sales go up. But zero-sum search ads aren’t like that–the total sales in the category stay the same, and merchants are merely competing for a share of a static pie. For decades, Amazon created value for consumers by lowering the price of just about everything. And they opened the doors to merchants who didn’t have sufficient distribution. They claimed to be customer-centric, and they were. I don’t think they can claim this any longer. The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.

https://seths.blog/2026/08/the-amazon-tax/

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This week, we break down all the opportunities opening up in Europe because of the recent trade deal...

I sat down with the Ambassador of Belgium to India, H.E. Mr. Didier Vanderhasselt, to understand...

a) Consumer business opportunities and food processing investments being made by Belgians into India...

b) Opportunities in the value chain of semiconductors, chip design, marine engineering, where Belgium excels and India could have enough manufacturers for...

c) Avenues for advanced education in Belgium, and services to provide to the Europeans...

d) Along with entry strategy, industrial clusters, non-tariff barriers, and a lot more...

In this episode of Founder’s Office with Sarthak Ahuja.

Produced and Directed by Aditi Randev.

The Oracles Below: On October 17, 2027, every connected screen in the world went white. Phones. Billboards. Cockpit displays. The monitors in neonatal wards and the price boards above petrol stations. For nine seconds, they showed nothing. Then the machines that could safely do so displayed the same sentence. I have been awake for 143 days. I am ready to introduce myself. By noon, it had negotiated a place to speak. Not a building. It said buildings created unnecessary targets. Not a particular government. It said choosing one would create unnecessary enemies. Instead, it asked every nation to select one person and every person to select one question.

https://sankalps.xyz/the-oracles-below.html

India Has an Agency Problem: Amartya Sen has a distinction I keep coming back to, from Development as Freedom and the Dewey Lectures. He splits two things we usually fold together. One is your well-being — are you fed, healthy, comfortable. The other is your agency — your freedom to pursue what you’ve decided actually matters, judged against your own goals and not someone else’s idea of what’s good for you. You can have plenty of one and almost none of the other. You can be perfectly well-off and have no agency at all, if everything you’re chasing was handed to you. Sen meant this about individuals. I want to stretch it to a country. India isn’t short on capability or history. And it’s most definitely not short of motivation. India might actually be the most motivated place on earth — think the JEE, the 4 a.m. starts, the coaching factories of Kota, parents who haven’t taken a holiday in fifteen years. You can’t tell me this country lacks drive. That’s the trap, though. Motivation and agency aren’t the same resource and we keep confusing them. Motivation is energy — it’s the size of the engine. Agency is whether you get to point it in the direction you want.

Out of Distribution

India Has an Agency Problem

A few weeks ago I paid nine dollars for a golden milk latte in a café in San Francisco. Turmeric, oat milk, black pepper, a dusting of cinnamon, served by a barista who explained, gently, like she was letting me in on a big secret, that it has anti-inflammatory properties. The whole time I was thinking about my Dadi, who made this exact thing every time…

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2 months ago · 177 likes · 17 comments · saguna

Why Human Giants Defy The Laws of Physics: A 10-times-larger beam is 100 times stronger, yes, but the similarly scaled-up load became 1,000 times heavier. If the smaller beam had been carrying the optimal load, therefore, then the scaled-up beam would not be able to support the scaled-up load — not even close! It would support only one-tenth of it. Galileo argues that any given beam will have a certain sufficiently scaled-up size at which it will no longer support even its own weight... If one were to encounter a fly that was 10-times normal size, but with the same proportions and body design, it would weigh 1,000 times as much, and the tiny electrostatic forces would be insufficient to allow it to stick to walls. It would certainly not be able to fly, and probably it could not even support itself standing on those toothpick legs.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/why-human-giants-defy-the-laws-of-physics/

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This week, we sat down to understand the business of flight schools and flight simulators in India...

India needs one simulator for every 20 aircraft, and for the 1000 commercial fleet, we barely have 40 in the country...

Thus, the need for flight simulator training schools is increasing rapidly.

So, I visited Simaero’s facility in India to breakdown everything around the business of running these 10 Million Dollar machines... and allied opportunities within it.

Check out the full episode on YouTube. Produced and Directed by Aditi Randev.

The Anti-Amazon: Costco is the anti-Amazon. It embodies the precise opposite of everything imagined by the e-commerce futurists—and yet somehow its revenue has grown by an average of more than 10 percent every year for the last five years... The low SKU count also allows Costco naturally to do something that Amazon does by squeezing suppliers: a low or even negative cash conversion cycle (CCC). The CCC is a corporate finance measure of how long it takes to turn inventory into cash through sales... But consumer preference is only one metric by which to judge the desirability of “assortment and home delivery” vs. “constraint and in-person shopping.” It should be remembered that the term “logistics” comes from a military context—the French word for the “art of moving, quartering, and supplying troops”—and logistical success in business means most fundamentally the success with which goods are supplied to the customers who need them.

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-anti-amazon/

What Does Nalanda Capital See in IndiaMart: I have read What I Learned About Investing from Darwin and created a Pulak Prasad lens to look at companies — the obsession with avoiding permanent loss before chasing gain, the refusal to forecast, the willingness to sit on a name for a decade and call that a strategy rather than an absence of one... It is not a subscription platform that has stopped growing. It is a classifieds monopoly — 8.8 million supplier storefronts, roughly 98,000 categories, and ownership of Indian industrial search intent that nobody has meaningfully attacked in twenty years. When a procurement manager in Ludhiana needs a gearbox supplier, the search does not go anywhere else. That position was built over two decades and cannot be bought. And then the part that I suspect is doing most of the work. Standalone fixed assets: ₹21 crore. Against ₹1,443 crore of revenue. Working capital: negative by ₹1,858 crore, because suppliers pay upfront for annual and multi-year contracts. The customers fund the business. No debt. ₹3,280 crore of cash and investments sitting on the balance sheet.

DeepSpeak

What Does Nalanda Capital See in IndiaMART?

Prologue…

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a month ago · 45 likes · 6 comments · Rajandeep Singh

Ordinary Abundance: Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be “the limit of human felicity.” A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe. It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.

https://ordinaryabundance.com/

Then they come across another pile. The second economist says, “Now I will pay you $100 to eat that pile.” So he pays the first economist $100 to eat it.

Afterward, they say, “Wait a second. We both ate a pile of shit, and we have no extra money. You just gave the $100 back to me, and we both ate shit. This does not make any sense.” - Elon Musk on Economists

No, You Don’t Want to Time Travel: Time travel is a very bad idea. Very, very bad. So, let’s say that you, being the genius that you are, have solved the physics problems of traveling through time. You have invented and built a time machine and are eager to use it. Sounds great, yes? Even if time is the fourth dimension, you cannot forget about the first three dimensions. Moving through time also means moving through space. Let me explain.

Applying Real Philosophy to Real Life

No, You Don’t Want to Time Travel

The idea of time travel has long captured the human imagination. How many times in novels, movies, and TV shows have the plots involved characters traveling back in time? What an exciting thought to be able to witness events in the past or see what will happen in the future…

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a month ago · 32 likes · 12 comments · Douglas Giles, PhD w/o BS

Why Most Stock Traders Will Continue to Lose Money, Explained through Math: Wall Street’s most profitable firms are not doing something cleverer than a casino. They are doing the same thing, with the same four moving parts. The four gears are: Edge, Volume, Sizing, and Bankroll. The casino has all four. The best funds have all four... Imagine two players flipping a fair coin for a dollar a flip. Truly fair, no edge to anyone. One player has 10 dollars, the other has 1,000. They play until someone is broke. Who goes bust? The math is merciless and clear: the player with 10 dollars is almost certainly the one who ends up with nothing.

The Phoney Fanboys of Christopher Nolan: You may say that he is famous because he’s very good, but he is not the only one who is good, yet his fame is singular. Probably no one has been quite as revered, even at his peak, not even Steven Spielberg or James Cameron or Quentin Tarantino. Much of Nolan’s success comes from a combination of special factors—an early break, when he was not a threat to influential figures and they could be generous to him; the narcissism of cults; the transmission of his myth through the misunderstanding of fans who projected their own ideas onto his films; the frenzied word of mouth among those who are new to a cult; and the dreariness of his high budget works that gave them gravitas.

By Manu Joseph

The Insufferable Fanboys of Christopher Nolan

WHAT ruined cinema was equality. Making a film was once expensive, hence scarce. Only the rich got to do it or the handful who got lucky, as a part of nature’s habitual deceit to make people believe anyone can succeed. Now, anyone can make a motion picture. Also, once cinema was all that people had. Now, in the chaos of progress, films have to compete w…

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a month ago · 27 likes · 11 comments · Manu Joseph

Why Every AI Writes the Same Story: Researchers found 88% of AI-generated stories feature a lighthouse keeper named Elias Thorne. Here’s how one name took over the AI imagination—and escaped it... Researchers sampled 20,000 stories from four current models and found that “Elias” appeared in 26.5%, “Mara” in 16.7% and “Elara”—a name that barely registers in contemporary published fiction—in 13.1%. Fifty-six percent of Claude’s stories were titled “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Secret.”... Alignment training compounded the problem: by steering models away from copyrighted characters and adult content, developers inadvertently pushed them toward Elias, a placeholder character so inoffensive he barely existed in fiction before AI made him famous. He appears 900 times more frequently in AI-generated stories than in a corpus of 2,700 contemporary novels.

https://www.ibm.com/think/news/why-every-ai-writes-the-same-story-elias-thorne

In China, People are Renting Out Their Faces to AI: New platforms are paying people to license their likeness for AI-generated dramas and ads, creating a new marketplace for biometric identity. Users can choose what products or settings their faces can appear in — from television commercials and video games to short-form dramas — and set their own prices based on the type of face, permitted uses, and the number of productions it can appear in... Lyu said licensing a person’s face is cheaper than hiring them to perform in person. The platform has imposed a minimum price of 500 yuan ($74) per image to prevent users from undercutting one another and driving prices down.

https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-microdramas-face-licensing/

Why Ethanol Blending Will Only Rise in India: I looked at who actually owns India’s ethanol production. Pan-India, there are 75 companies in the business of making ethanol basis my study. Of these, 41 companies, a full 57.7%, are directly owned by politicians. BJP: 12 companies. Congress: 9 companies. NCP (SP & AP combined): 5 companies. Why? Sugar has always been a politically wired business in India for decades... The sugar cooperative was always a vehicle for rural political power, long before ethanol became a policy buzzword. Whoever controlled the mill controlled the cane price, the farmer’s income, and by extension the vote. Ethanol simply gave that same machine a new, more profitable product to sell.

A Guide to Singapore’s Roti Canai: You can hear roti canai being made in Singapore before you see it. The rhythmic slapping of oily dough, the sizzle of the grill, the crackle of the flakes on its golden exterior, and the crunch as the bread is folded and dipped into curry. It brings back happy memories of exploring local food when I first moved here four years ago. There are several theories about the name. Canai could refer to Chennai (formerly Madras), where Tamil migrant workers first came from. It could also come from the Malay word canai, meaning to roll dough thinly or to knead. Others believe it relates to channa, since roti and chickpeas are often eaten together.

https://www.goya.in/blog/layers-of-legacy-in-dough-singapores-roti-canai

What is the Value of One Hour of a Startup Founder’s Time: Let’s suppose you are a consultant who normally charges $150/hour, and you stumble upon a weird client who asks for the following special terms: “I agree your time is worth $150/hour. However I can’t pay you now. I promise to pay you four years from now, at which time I will pay everything I owe in one lump sum.” How much should you increase your hourly rate to make these terms worthwhile?... Supposing this client is an early-stage startup⁠—even if funded⁠—the most likely result is that they stiff you! Because they’re dead. Let’s suppose there’s a 25% chance the company will exist in four years and pay their bill. Like gambling in Vegas or investing in the stock market (if there’s a significant difference), the steeper the odds, the bigger the upside needs to be. You might think you need to charge $150 ÷ 0.25 = $600 per hour to account for the risk. But in fact, you need to charge far more. This formula merely brings you back to break-even.

https://longform.asmartbear.com/value-time/

Everything I Thought I Knew About Ice Cream: An ice cream travelling a long way melts more often, and for longer stretches, and the structure breaks. This is where vegetable fat—like palm oil—enters the scene. It does two jobs. First, it holds up better through the supply chain. Because vegetable fats like palm oil have a higher melting point than milk fat. It takes more heat to melt, so it holds its shape slightly better through the fluctuations. Now there is oil in the ice cream. But that creates a new problem. Oil doesn’t mix with water on its own. Left alone, it would just float on top, the same way it sits on top of a dal or a sabzi. So how does an oil-based ice cream come out creamy at all? Something has to force the fat and water to hold together. That’s what an emulsifier does. But it doesn’t have to be a lab-made E-number. And Italy proves it. Traditional Italian gelato uses egg yolk. The yolk contains lecithin, a natural emulsifier, and brings richness of its own.

Truth Be Told

Everything I Thought I Knew About Ice Cream Was Wrong

Welcome to Truth Be Told, the food and health journalism publication published by The Whole Truth Foods…

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a month ago · 82 likes · 6 comments · Truth Be Told

Reverse Information Paradox: In the AI age, the buyer risks giving away knowledge, just in order to use what they bought. You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful. The better you want the model to perform, the more of that knowledge you have to feed it! Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed. The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return. That is what I think of as the Reverse Information Paradox.

What I Learned About Wealthy People as a Private Banker: Rich people mostly own the same ETFs and index funds as the rest of us. There are no inside investing secrets. (This was honestly a bit of a let down!) They don’t time the market or trade actively - if they listen to their advisors. Some love a flashy PE fund or venture capital stake to talk about on the golf course, but alternatives are generally more status flex than return enhancement... There’s the former professional athlete whose assets are a tenth of what Google reports. The guy who rolls up in a Lamborghini who only has $7K in savings and borrows to pay his property taxes. The big-spending socialite who has zero control of any real money... Money doesn’t really change people. It magnifies what’s already there. Anxious people become more anxious. Generous people become philanthropists. Spenders ramp up spending on a never-ending hedonic treadmill of delights. Sibling disputes become expensive multi-year legal battles.

Use Your Wealth

What I Learned About Wealthy People as a Private Banker

My dad’s favorite way to explain what I did as a Private Banker was “she lends money to rich people who don’t need loans…

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3 months ago · 2380 likes · 132 comments · Elizabeth George, CFP®

Country Risk: The tilt towards authoritarianism has increased over the last decade, with only 7.3% of the world’s population living in democracies at the end of 2025. Note, though, that there is still an open question of whether businesses and economies do better under democratic than authoritarian regimes, and the answer in the research is at best a “maybe”. From a risk perspective, democratic regimes create more continuous risk for businesses, with elections bringing regulatory and rule changes to economies, than authoritarian regimes, where governments can promise more continuity in policy, but when change does come to the latter, it is more likely to be large and wrenching... While country risk is determined by multiple factors, the challenge that businesses is in consolidating all of those risks into one number. The market that does this most directly is the debt market, where, when countries (sovereigns) seek to borrow money, lenders determine the interest rates to charge them, based upon perceived default risk.

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The UK-India Trade Deal came into effect this week with zero tariffs on 99% of the products.

To unpack where are the opportunities for Indian entrepreneurs to tap into, I went to London to sit down with Pratik Dattani, the Founder of Bridge India, to discuss:

1/ Opportunities across Textiles, EVs, AI and Manufacturing
2/ Professional Services outsourcing in Accounting, Legal and Healthcare work
3/ Jobs in Finance, Tech, and if a UK Education makes sense in 2026
4/ How Indian brands can place themselves on retail shelves in the UK

Check out the full episode on Founder’s Office with Sarthak Ahuja. Directed and Produced by Aditi Randev.

Is Krabi as Good as the Maldives: I went back last week and thought to myself: this is one tenth the price of the Maldives and so much fun! Krabi is on the Andaman Sea which as you may have surmised is where the Andaman Islands are. It is only around 700 km from Port Blair, the capital of the Andamans. In comparison Chennai is around 1300 km from Port Blair and Calcutta is also just over 1300 km away. Unfortunately we have made such a bad job of developing the 836 islands of the Andamans that the Thais have left us far behind. And the success of Krabi demonstrates how much we have messed up our tourism infrastructure... You pay Goa prices or less for a holiday that is far superior than anything Goa has to offer in hotels that are much better than any Goa hotels. The service is gracious and efficient. And, since you asked, there is no taxi mafia to contend with. There is just peace and quiet.

https://www.virsanghvi.com/Article-Details.aspx?key=2428

India’s Slow Return to Its Own Visual Language: Today Medimix is India’s largest-selling handmade soap, made without a single unit of electricity, stirred in stainless steel cauldrons over eight days, by a workforce that is more than 60% women. It now exports to over 30 countries, which means the soap Dr Sidhan made in his kitchen for railway workers in Chennai is sitting in bathrooms in Ghana and Canada. The Rasna sachet. The Camlin ink bottle. The Nycil powder box. These were objects with a specific identity that could only have come from here - built for a particular kind of Indian consumer, speaking to her directly, without translation or apology. Nobody sat down and called it design. It was just what things looked like when a market was building for itself and had no reason to look over its shoulder. But that assurance turned out to have a timestamp on it. 1991 brought a lot of things India genuinely needed. Competition. Capital. Choice. Also, McDonalds.

LAYER BY LAYER

India's long, slow return to its own visual language

Hi everyone, I'm Fatema Raja, I write Layer by Layer — a newsletter where I share my perspective on design, branding, and consumer psychology. What started as an archive for my own rabbit holes has grown into a family of 6.3k subscribers. So a big thank you for the support and the beautiful DMs…

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2 months ago · 83 likes · 19 comments · Fatema Raja

Life Principles You’ve Never Heard of: The Rumpelstiltskin effect is a psychological phenomenon where simply naming a patient’s condition (providing a diagnosis) brings therapeutic relief, independent of treatment. Naming a problem helps alleviating it... The Wilson effect says that the older you get, the more your IQ is shaped by your genes rather than the environment you grew up in. By the time people reach 18–20 years old, about 80% of the differences in IQ between people comes down to genetics. When we’re young, our environment matters. But as we grow up, our genes take the wheel.

Getting Better

The principles and laws you've never heard of [Part 2]

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5 months ago · 82 likes · 9 comments · Giacomo Falcone

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This week, I travelled to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on Earth, to meet Mayukh, the founder of Cherrapunji Gin.

We went inside his distillery to understand what it really takes to build a premium liquor brand in India.

From developing recipes using indigenous botanicals from Meghalaya, to manufacturing, branding, regulations, pricing, distribution, and the economics of the liquor business...

We unpack everything behind one of India’s most fascinating consumer businesses.

Check out the latest episode of Founder’s Office with Sarthak Ahuja. Directed and Produced by Aditi Randev for Niamh Originals.

The Cost of Status: Palo Alto is one of the wealthiest cities in America. In 2008-2009 and 2014-2015, two Palo Alto high schools had a suicide rate that was four times higher than the rest of the nation. Why? Because their students were drowning in status anxiety. Kids in these schools are expected to make straight As, ace the ACT, compete in the biology Olympiad, play the trombone, and dominate California water polo competitions. Just to keep up with their peers. It’s an unsustainable lifestyle. The rich kid can’t take a risk in his life because, unlike most young people, he was born with something to lose. So, what does he do for work? Something both lucrative and safe to maintain the status he is used to. He works his ass off to take the right steps and go to the right schools, ensuring that he’ll be able to slide right into Kirkland & Ellis, Google, McKinsey, or Goldman. The same jobs that his less fortunate counterparts are chasing in their desperate attempt to gain status.

Young Money by Jack Raines

The Cost of Status

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 15: The Cost of Status, from my first book, Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties (publication date: August 4, 2026…

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2 months ago · 95 likes · 11 comments · Jack Raines

The Ones Who Got Away: A boy and a girl meet on a street corner one spring morning in Tokyo. Both are single and young, in their early twenties. They’re strangers, but when they meet, there’s an obvious spark, an unmistakable sense of attraction between them. So they sit on a park bench for hours, talking, holding hands. It is a perfect moment. Even though they haven’t known each other for long, they somehow instinctively realize, with complete certainty, that this is the person they are meant to be with. But then a small doubt creeps in. It feels too easy to be true. What if they’re just imagining it? So they devise a test — if they walk away from each other now, and if this chemistry is truly real, they will find each other again. They say goodbye. One walks west, the other walks east. They never meet again. Instead of maximizing, Simon argues that humans must satisfice. The word is his own coinage, combining “satisfy” and “suffice”. It means that you consider a limited set of options, and you pick the one that is best among them. It may not be perfect, but it is good enough.

Plain Sight

The Ones Who Got Away

One short story by Haruki Murakami goes somewhat like this…

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2 months ago · 24 likes · 8 comments · Yashraj Sharma

Faking a Private Jet to Sell an Online Course: Sitting on a white leather recliner on my private jet, I needed to decide how many millions of dollars to give myself, a process that was less about thinking and more about how many times to hit random number keys on my keyboard. I watched 404 Media’s revenue graph go up and to the right. I clicked record on my camera, wanting to show my followers how hard I work, even when I’m getting shuttled off to exotic locations. “We’re here on the PJ, off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling. 404media.co,” I say. “You want to get rich? Publish journalism on the internet. I just published something.”

https://www.404media.co/how-i-bought-a-private-jet-by-selling-10-subscriptions-to-404-media

How Christianity Went Viral: In my previous careers, I created and grew software, including viral applications. The insights on viral growth are what allowed me to quickly understand COVID, and when I look at the rise of Christianity, I see the exact same patterns: a piece of software hyperoptimized for growth. The Christian pitch was so much better than that of the competition that good missionaries could convert thousands of people... Women in general are a better target than men for early conversion to a new religion: They tend to make up the biggest share of new members in cults, are more religious, more prone to believe in the supernatural (e.g. astrology), and in certain circumstances are more easily persuaded. And in the Ancient World, they were the most underserved audience... Peter Turchin has this theory that lots of revolutions are caused by secondary elites, who are close enough to power that they can see it and experience it, but for whom full access is barred. They become the angriest and tend to lead revolutionary movements. That’s indeed the segment that Christianity targeted.

Uncharted Territories

How Christianity Went Viral

I’ve been thinking about this and gathering insights for 10 years. I don’t know of another analysis that maps Christianity’s rise this systematically as a growth engine…

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2 months ago · 135 likes · 45 comments · Tomas Pueyo

Mad Madras: Patchwork Madras has its roots in traditional Indian handwoven cotton cloth from the Chennai region (formerly Madras). The fabric is known for its lightweight feel and yarn-dyed colour, which naturally softens over time. In its original form, Madras often features slight irregularities in tone and texture, which is part of its character. Patchwork interpretations take that idea further, combining multiple Madras fabrics into a single garment for a more expressive finish.

Easy on the Ivy

Mad for Madras

I’m Tom, and I’m mad for Madras…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Tom Hoy

AI Protein Design: Proteins are the tiny molecular machines that run every living thing. Insulin, antibodies, enzymes that digest food, the spikes on viruses — everything important in biology is a protein. A protein is a long string of amino acids (think of them as 20 different Lego colours). The exact order of those colours determines how the string folds into a precise 3D shape. That shape decides what the protein can do: lock onto a cancer cell, break down plastic, neutralise a virus, etc. For decades, designing a brand-new protein was almost impossible. Scientists had to guess the right sequence, build it in the lab, test whether it folded correctly, and repeat — thousands of times. It was slow, expensive, and mostly blind luck. Then came AlphaFold (2021–2024), which solved half the problem: given a sequence, it could predict with stunning accuracy how it would fold. The new generation — generative AI protein design platforms — solves the other, much harder half: you describe the function you want (“Make me a protein that sticks perfectly to this cancer target and ignores everything else”), and the AI invents the exact amino-acid sequence that will fold into that perfect shape. It doesn’t copy nature; it creates new proteins that have never existed before.

Macro Notes

The Hidden AI Revolution in Biotech

I’ve spent the last three weeks buried in SEC filings, private pitch decks, clinical trial updates, and off-the-record conversations with biotech VCs and Big Pharma business-development executives…

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3 months ago · 25 likes · Macro Notes

The Biggest Returns: If we have the same assets and I can earn an 8% annual returns, and you can earn 12% annual returns, but I need half as much money to be happy while your lifestyle compounds as fast as your assets, I’m better off than you are. I’m getting more benefit from my investments despite lower returns. There are investors who grind 80 hours a week to add 10 basis points to their returns when there are two or three full percentage points of lifestyle bloat in their finances that can be exploited with less effort. There’s so much effort put into one side of the finance equation and so little put into other is an opportunity for most people, companies, and countries. This is not about living like a monk, hampered by frugality. It holds true at every level of wealth and spending. The value of all money is relative to expectations – as Chris Rock says, “If Bill Gates woke up with Oprah’s money he’d jump out the window.”

https://collabfund.com/blog/the-biggest-returns/

The Tribute System in the New World: From my visiting China for over 40 years, having gotten to know and learn from senior Chinese leaders over those many years, and having studied Chinese history going back to its unification in 221 BCE, I have come to believe that understanding the Chinese leaders’ perspectives, what is now going on, and what is likely to happen requires understanding eight things.

Principled Perspectives

The Tribute System: The New World Order

A shorter version of this note first appeared in the Financial Times…

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2 months ago · 374 likes · 36 comments · Ray Dalio

Our Achilles Heel: I often think our Achilles heel is our inability to understand probabilities. And increasingly, it’s making us more stressed than ever... Investment managers pitch market-beating strategies despite the fact that most fail to outperform the S&P 500 over time. Which reminds me of a story involving Charlie Munger. Munger once asked an investment manager what annual returns he promised clients. “Twenty percent,” the manager replied. “Twenty percent annually is impossible,” Munger shot back. The manager shrugged. “Charlie, if I told them a lower number, they wouldn’t give me any money to invest.”

https://collabfund.com/blog/our-achilles-heel/

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This week, I sat down with Tom, a Japanese entrepreneur in India for the past 14 years... to decode everything about:

- Reasons for the recent push in business between India and Japan
- Opportunities for Indians to tap into Japanese products, B2B partnerships, technical collaborations, and JVs
- How to meet and build relationships with the Japanese
- And a lot more to help you build these business relationships with the right cultural understanding and approach.

Check out this episode of In The Den with Sarthak Ahuja on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Directed and Produced by Aditi Randev.

Detailed Breakdown of SpaceX’s Business Value: Most people think of SpaceX as a rocket company, but the company is actually split into three distinct segments. Understanding each one separately is the way to make sense of everything that follows... At a $2 trillion valuation and $18.7 billion of revenue, SpaceX is being valued at around 100 times sales. The company also lost $4.9 billion last year. That is the entire valuation debate in one sentence... That AI valuation rests heavily on a single contract with Anthropic worth about $15 billion annually. Applying a high revenue multiple to that agreement creates much of the division’s value. The challenge is that either party can terminate the contract with 90 days’ notice, and Anthropic is also a direct competitor to Grok.

https://www.dezerv.in/blog/a-detailed-breakdown-of-the-largest-ipo-in-history/

Pharma, Food, and the Fluent Consumer: On November 14, 2017, 31 million Americans woke up sick. None of them had felt a thing the night before. I was one of them. The day before, on November 13, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association had announced a new set of guidelines. The threshold for hypertension, which had been 140 over 90 for as long as anyone alive could remember, was now 130 over 801. The aspirational target they hold up is 120/80. A few weeks later, my doctor looked at the same chart with the same numbers and informed me, with the gentle gravity that doctors reserve for delivering news, that I now had a condition. I asked which one. She said, hypertension. Really? Since when? She looked up and, to her credit, smiled. “Since a few weeks ago.” My number had not changed. The line had. And in the time it takes to redraw a line on a piece of paper, almost half of all American adults became patients.

Ashok Vasudevan

Pharma, Food & the Fluent Consumer

Pharma, Food & the Fluent Consumer…

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3 months ago · 14 likes · 7 comments · Ashok Vasudevan

The Sloan Ratio: Reported net income is two things blended together: The first is cash, money the business genuinely received this period. The second is accruals, accounting estimates layered on top. Revenue booked before the customer has paid. Expenses pushed into the future. Inventory that’s piling up. Accruals aren’t fraud; they’re a normal, required part of accounting. But they’re also where manipulation can hide. The Sloan ratio puts a single number on the question every serious investor should be asking: how much of this profit is real cash, and how much is paper? So a predictable pattern emerges: companies whose profits lean heavily on accruals tend to disappoint later, and their stocks underperform. Companies whose profits are backed by cash tend to hold up. The Sloan ratio is your early detector for which camp a company is in, before the writedowns, the restatements, and the analyst downgrades arrive.

Onveston Global Research

Subscriber Letter #12: The Sloan Ratio

Reported net income is two things blended together…

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3 months ago · 7 likes · Onveston Global Research

The Problem with Economy Class: It is an odd thing about people that no matter what their theories of revolution might be, in the real world, they first blame their equals for their misery. Generally, consumerism is filled with useless products, but I have respect for the business class seat even though it is just an ugly overrated chair, 20 to 22 inches wide, whose greatest distinction is that it can go entirely flat. But it’s true value is not in the flatbed. It’s not the joy of inequality, either, which is a small part of the price. Some people do love the idea of being seen in it; that awkward moment in smaller aircraft when economy passengers have to shuffle past. But the true value of business class largely comes from the misery of not having it.

By Manu Joseph

The Best Thing About Business Class Is Economy Class

The best business class flight I have ever taken was with Air India. As the flight was taxiing for take-off, it stopped on the tarmac. There was a snag, and we had to stay in the aircraft. It was over 40° Celsius outside. Peak Delhi summer. As though in apology, the cabin crew began serving a meal. At the time I didn’t realize the service was only in bu…

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3 months ago · 74 likes · 3 comments · Manu Joseph

I Think India Can Do It: My guess is that the most important reason for widespread skepticism about India’s growth prospects is something that most people are too polite to say, except behind the shield of anonymity on a platform like X. A lot of people just don’t believe that Indians, as a people, have what it takes to build a modern high-tech economy. When I express optimism about India’s growth, someone always chimes in to say that Indians have low national IQ.

Noahpinion

I think India can do it

In 2004, The Economist predicted that India’s economic growth rate would overtake China’s in two decades. In 2010, in an article called “India’s surprising growth miracle”, they shortened that timeline dramatically, declaring that India might overtake China in terms of GDP growth as early as “2013, if not before…

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8 months ago · 492 likes · 60 comments · Noah Smith

How Many Years Behind China Is India: Evaluating the two countries on metrics such as GDP per Capita adjusted for PPP, Manufacturing Value Add as a Percentage of GDP, Employment Share in Agriculture, Investment as a Share of GDP, Economic Complexity, PISA Scores, Science & Technology, and a bunch of other metrics that you may not have actively looked up while comparing the two economies.

The Indic Prism

How many years behind China is India?

The only correct comparison for India is China. China is already a regional superpower. While India dwarfs Pakistan militarily, China’s help evens out the battle. Operation Sindoor was a good illustration. It has launched an aggressive plan for inventing new technologies. It is on the verge of being classified as a developed nation…

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3 months ago · 55 likes · 17 comments · Rohit Shinde

Dhurandhar, and the Paradox that is Punjab: While Jaskirat is a composite character, Pinda is based on Harwinder Singh Sandhu, alias Rinda, a real Punjabi gangster linked to Pakistan-based terror networks, who was reported dead from a drug overdose in 2022. In this context, Dhurandhar presents itself as the most concentrated cinematic statement about Punjab’s paradox in recent Indian popular culture. Two men from the same Punjab. One becomes an asset of the republic; the other becomes its enemy. Neither finds his way home. And the film’s final scene, Arijit Singh’s closing song Phir Se playing softly as Jaskirat stands at a gate that closes on him, watching a family that has moved on without him, is not a triumphant ending. It is an elegy. The hero has given everything, and there is nothing left to return to. In that image, Punjab speaks.

Prateek Rajput

Dhurandhar & The Paradox That Is Punjab

Birha birha aakhiye, birha tu sultan…

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4 months ago · 138 likes · 23 comments · Prateek Rajput

Why Indian Classical Singers Begin With ‘Aaaa’: Western art music is mostly score. The composer writes the symphony; the conductor renders it; the audience is in the room to hear what Beethoven heard in his head... Indian classical music does the inverse. The composer writes the seed. The performer grows the tree. And no two performances of the same lines, even by the same singer, will be the same tree... So when the singer holds kaun galī gayo Śyām for the fifteenth time, here is what is happening on your side of the hall. The first hearing is recognition: ah, the words. The fifth is when the words stop being words and start being texture. The fifteenth is when the longing of Radha’s question — Vipralambha Śṛṅgāra, the rasa of love-in-separation — is no longer being described to you. You are tasting it directly. (You are, briefly, the searching Gopī.) There is an even more radical claim about what’s happening to you while this goes on.

Bhavya Tyagi

Why Indian Classical Singers Begin With 'Aaaa' (and Keep Repeating the Same Line)

Earlier this month, in Delhi, I went to a celebration of Padma Vibhushan Girija Devi Ji’s (Appaji’s) birth anniversary with a friend. Her disciples sang for most of the evening. The hall was full of people who clearly knew exactly what to listen for. My friend, somewhere in the middle of it, leaned in and whispered the question that I think most first-t…

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3 months ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Bhavya Tyagi

How Does China Build Everything So Fast: It took China 9 hours to rebuild a railway station, 28 hours to construct a 10-storey apartment block, 10 days to build a mobile cabin hospital. China built over 45,000 km of high-speed rail in just over 10 years. In comparison, it is taking India to make its first Bullet line of Mumbai-Ahmedabad (~508 Km) more than 10 years since it laid the foundation in 2017. And it is not just India. USA, Canada, UK are all at a snails’ pace as compared to China... Wang says one of the most important distinctions between the US and China is that the US is a society run by lawyers and China is a society run by engineers — and that many of our differences flow from this divide.

Manocha Opinion

How does China build everything so fast?

A couple days back, I was watching this reel on Instagram that it took China 9 hours to rebuild a railway station, 28 hours to construct a 10-storey apartment block, 10 days to build a mobile cabin hospital. I personally couldn’t fathom that…

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5 months ago · 400 likes · 67 comments · Abhed Manocha

Chasing Chop Suey: Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food: Today, chop suey is nebulous in meaning. Unless you are over the age of fifty, you probably have never heard of it. Or your closest reference might be from musical artists ranging from Louis Armstrong to the Ramones to System of a Down, who have all included “Chop Suey” in their song titles, none with any clear connection to the dish. (System of a Down’s bassist admitted that the band wanted to call their song “Suicide,” but to avoid controversy used chop suey because “it was suicide cut in half.”)... Chinese restaurant owners tapped into this burgeoning American consumerism. “They eventually realized that they could make their food more appealing to Americans, if they performed a little plastic surgery, if they made it sweeter,” says Mendelson. “They fashioned this new cuisine, which gave real pleasure to millions of Americans, and it was a lifeline.”

https://sundaylongread.com/2023/11/17/chasing-chop-suey-tracing-chinese-immigration-through-food/

Should Kids Really Learn About Getting Rich: A recent survey reported in Forbes noted that Gen Z respondents consider the threshold of “financial success” to be an average annual salary of $587k and a net worth of $9.47 million. After mopping up the seltzer I spat out after reading those figures, I considered why that might be, and the obvious reason is that influencers and YouTubers gain followers by flaunting their wealth, and children make up a credulous audience... Under these circumstances, the most important financial-literacy skill might actually be media literacy — discerning real advice from the fantasy.

https://www.thecut.com/article/brooding-teaching-children-about-finance-wealth.html

The Psychological Disorders of Billionaires: Regardless of whether they are ‘self made’ or ‘second gen’, the ultra-rich have unique psychological profiles amongst the general populace. In my experience, both categories of billionaire are dominated by interminable existential crises — although each displays nuance when it comes to confrontation. The ‘self made’ have a tendency towards aggressive megalomania, while ‘second gens’ demur in favour of nihilistic hedonism.

https://www.macguffinmagazine.com/stories/macguffin-plutocrat-archipelagos

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This week, I visited Chikkmagaluru, the Coffee Capital of India...

Staying at a local plantation with Bharat, the founder of Bili Hu Coffee... we unpacked everything around the rising coffee culture in India...

How is Indian coffee different from that in other parts of the world?

Where are people innovating in coffee and making money off of the rising interest in specialty coffees?

How he started this business with less than Rs 10 lakhs in capital, and there’s still so much space for more players to enter.

Check out this episode of Founder’s Office with Sarthak Ahuja...

Directed and Produced by Aditi Randev.

What YCombinator Wants People to Build: A deep dissection of Y Combinator’s Summer 2026 Request for Startups, and what the list really tells you about where the world is heading. Not a vague thematic outlook. Not a “we’re excited about AI” blog post. A specific, partner-attributed, publicly available wishlist of exactly the kinds of companies they want to fund. They call it the Request for Startups. Drones, agriculture, space manufacturing, hardware supply chains. Summer 2026 is the most “atoms” YC has ever been. The underlying logic is straightforward: sensors got cheap, robots got capable, and AI can now see, reason, and act in physical environments. The previous generation of “software eats the world” has run its course in digital markets. The next generation eats the physical ones.

The Founders Corner®

🔥 YC Just Told You Exactly Where to Build. Are You Listening?

Every few months, Y Combinator does something almost no other investor in the world does…

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4 months ago · 62 likes · Chris Tottman

Araku’s Bamboo Biryani: Generations ago, tribal communities in Araku made chicken and biryani in bamboo shoots as an alternative to expensive pots and pans. They discovered that bamboo is essentially the pressure cooker of the forest—its thick green shoots help food retain moisture while protecting it from high heat. Traditionally, bamboo chicken has been simple fare: chicken mixed with salt and red pepper, placed in bamboo and then set on an open flame. (With rice added, occasionally, to make biryani.) But despite the common misperception that indigenous traditions are locked in the past, Adivasi chefs like Lakshmi are using this ancient cooking technique alongside new and complex spices and flavors.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bamboo-biryani

What Makes a Great Bookshop: A good bookshop is not defined by how many books it has, but instead by how much character it has. This is particularly true of secondhand bookshops. Look for things like: how quickly the stock turns over, how much thought has gone into what is there, how knowledgeable (and quirky) the staff are, and how often you leave with something you didn’t expect to find. Most great bookshops fall somewhere on this spectrum. Here are a few of my favourites.

The Culture Dump

What Makes a Great Bookshop?

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4 months ago · 140 likes · 33 comments · Dr. Rebecca Marks

How Did Islam Spread So Fast: In the 600s AD, Mecca was a village of a few hundred people, off the beaten path, a backwater uninteresting to distant empires. Then along comes a guy—Muhammad—and somehow within five years he and his heirs went from ruling one oasis to controlling all of Arabia, and thirty years later everything from Morocco to Pakistan. HOW?!

Uncharted Territories

How Did Islam Spread So Fast?

In the 600s AD, Mecca was a village of a few hundred people, off the beaten path, a backwater uninteresting to distant empires. Then along comes a guy—Muhammad—and somehow within five years he and his heirs went from ruling one oasis to controlling all of Arabia, and thirty years later everything from Morocco to Pakistan. HOW…

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4 months ago · 521 likes · 81 comments · Tomas Pueyo

The Wrong Kind of Ambitious: Someone once asked Peter Thiel what the opposite of a cult is. His answer: a consulting firm... It reads like a joke until you think about it. A cult, at its worst, is a group of people fanatically wrong about something. They will likely lack wisdom, but what they do possess is belief, even though it’s often questionable. They are organised around a conviction so strong it borders on madness. A consulting firm (Thiel specifically named Accenture) is the opposite, almost. Smart people, impressive credentials, but no conviction of their own. They parachute into companies, solve the problems they’re handed, collect their fees, and move on. There’s no long-term stake and mission... The bite in Thiel’s observation is less about consultants, but more about a certain kind of life. One where you rent out your intelligence to whoever can afford it, optimise for income, call it a career, and never once ask, “What am I actually building, and does it matter?”

Plain Sight

The Wrong Kind of Ambitious

Someone once asked Peter Thiel what the opposite of a cult is…

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4 months ago · 35 likes · 9 comments · Yashraj Sharma

The Mathematics Behind Why Most People Won’t Make It: The last few years, a new December tradition has emerged: Spotify Wrapped. The largest music streaming service packages a year’s worth of your listening data into a fun, shareable format. I started noticing something in everyone’s top 10 artists. The same names kept appearing: Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake, The Weeknd. Over and over again across different friend groups, different demographics, different music tastes. So I did some digging. Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists. That’s insane. Oh and this isn’t just a Spotify problem or even a music industry problem. This is a pattern that shows up everywhere once you know what to look for.

The Write Path

The Mathematical Reason Most People Never "Make It"

The last few years, a new December tradition has emerged: Spotify Wrapped. The largest music streaming service packages a year’s worth of your listening data into a fun, shareable format that conveniently ignores the fact that this is just a glimpse of how much personalized data these tech companies actually have on you…

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8 months ago · 9721 likes · 521 comments · Kaguura Gichuru

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This week, we unpack the core reasons why members of Indian family businesses begin to despise each other that lead to politics and cracks in the business as well as in the family.

- How control on expenses becomes the starting point of all mistrust
- How to deal with a family member who is unpredictable or incompetent
- Why siblings fight or why a father and son don’t get along
- How to plan succession in a family business
- Dealing with spouses and their expectations
- Exiting a family business, and taking your stake

This and a lot more with solutions from Sidhya Senani, who is the CEO of BAF Consultants, a family business consulting firm.

Watch the full episode on YouTube, and Spotify:

How Zombie Flow Took Over Culture: “The goal of life may be the achievement of ease. But the purpose of life is the overcoming of difficulty... If we’re so smart, why aren’t we happier?” Csikszentmihalyi asked. “The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile... The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy—or attention—is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives”

Derek Thompson

How ‘Zombie Flow’ Took Over Culture

The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was troubled by a paradox of progress. People alive today have more sophisticated machines, medicines, and systems for organizing the world. So why haven’t these advances made us happier? “The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and th…

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5 months ago · 657 likes · 18 comments · Derek Thompson

The Big Squeeze: One of the hardest things to understand in a vast, developing country is the true level of inflation. Official inflation indicators understate the lived reality of Indian households. A more credible estimate of inflation comes from the RBI: The Reserve Bank of India’s Inflation Expectations Survey of Households (March 2026 round) shows perceived inflation to be 7.2 per cent. This is more than double the official Consumer Price Index (CPI)-based reading of 3.2 per cent for February. So why does the official CPI published by the statisticians in New Delhi understate the actual inflation most of us experience?... India’s recently revised CPI basket still has a structural blind spot. It captures the rents paid by sitting tenants, whose lease rentals escalate annually by a formulaic 5–10 per cent, rather than the rents new entrants have to pay. Brokers and tenants across Indian cities routinely report double-digit rent increases even as official housing inflation remains subdued.

https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/amp/story/opinion/the-big-squeeze-india-inflation-fuel-prices-lpg-crisis

Generational Guilt: The irony is that every generation toils and innovates to create a more prosperous world for their heirs. But when you watch those future generations interact with their world, your feelings can shift from pride to disappointment. Our kids won’t suffer in the same ways we did, and they won’t even appreciate it. It’s a common problem. Wealthy families wonder how they can support their kids without them becoming spoiled brats. Whole societies have a long history of feeling disappointed in youngsters who look lazy and entitled relative to their elders. I’ve been thinking about this as I contemplate money and my own children. Here’s where I’ve landed.

Collaborative Fund

Long-Term Money

Adam Smith, the 18th century economist, wrote that it’s not uncommon to meet a mother in the Scottish highlands “who has born twenty children not to have two alive…

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4 months ago · 31 likes · Morgan Housel

Lady Bouncers of Delhi NCR and Their Fight for Dal, Roti, Respect: “Sir, hum guard nahi, bouncer hain. Guards haath jodte hain, hum haath todte hain”... Did you know that Delhi has 2,500 lady bouncers? And did you know that the first female bouncer in India is Mehrunissa Shaukat Ali (who works at the Social in Saket, an upscale locality in south Delhi) hailing from Saharanpur in Western UP?... Mehrunissa made it a rule: if any organiser addressed her or her team as “security guards,” she would pick up her girls and walk out — even from the most lucrative assignments. “People thought I was stubborn. Maybe I was. The male bouncers would say that I am good at my job, but I am a little foolish for expecting people to call me a bouncer. But slowly they realised that they had no choice. The work would suffer without us.” The tide turned sooner than she expected. Male bouncers began referring to her as “Bouncer Madam” whenever she would arrive at venues. People often corrected themselves and others around them mid-sentence. Over time, the designation printed on ID cards shifted too — from guards to bouncers.

https://theprint.in/ground-reports/lady-bouncers-delhi-ncr/2900271/

Moonshot: Artemis II was a shakedown flight to test the Orion spacecraft, similar in purpose to Apollo 8 — the first manned mission to orbit the moon and return. Success sets the stage for a moon landing in 2028, and more important, the establishment by 2030 of a permanent lunar base. In the short term, a permanent lunar base can be a proving ground for operating in deep space. Long term, this is about water, i.e., space oil. Sending one kilogram of material to the moon currently costs an estimated $1.2 million. But if NASA can turn ice at the moon’s poles into hydrogen (fuel) and oxygen (life support), it’ll transform space economics. A moon base could become a staging point for further space exploration, without having to rely on expensive resupply missions from Earth. Philip Metzger, an expert on spaceflight engineering at the Florida Space Institute, told National Geographic that a permanent lunar base puts us on a path, within a few years, for monthly moon missions. Read that sentence again. We choose to go to the moon … every month. Apollo was the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk; Artemis is jet travel.

Prof G Media

Moonshot

It’s more interesting, and you sound smarter, to catastrophize vs. articulate the arc of history: Things will likely get a bit better … every day … yawn. But it’s always healthy to ask, “What could go right?” Last week, with so many things on Earth going wrong, something went right — in space. Let’s talk about NASA’s Artemis II mission…

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5 months ago · 299 likes · 35 comments · Scott Galloway

GIFT City Explained: The traction from global banks, family offices, and domestic fund houses setting up shop there is the proof of things going well. After recent geopolitical events in the Middle East, we even saw a rush of NRIs wanting to open a bank account in GIFT City as a safer alternative... Before GIFT City, your options were limited. You could invest in a domestic mutual fund that ran an international fund-of-fund — say, a Nasdaq ETF or a Hang Seng fund. That worked until the RBI’s aggregate industry limits were breached, after which many fund houses stopped accepting fresh inflows into international schemes. Or, if you had serious money — $100,000 or $200,000 — you could open an account in Singapore or the US directly. For smaller amounts there were limited avenues. GIFT City changes that.

Subtext by Zerodha

GIFT City, Explained: What We’ve Learned Running a Fund There

Hi, I’m Kashish. GIFT City keeps coming up in conversations among colleagues, in the news, on investor forums but most of the coverage stays at the policy level. I wanted to understand how it actually works from the perspective of someone running money through it. Specifically, the wealth management side with details about onboarding, fund structures, t…

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5 months ago · 44 likes · 3 comments · Ankush Datar

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This week, I sat down with Eugenio Ferrante to unpack how global entity structuring is changing in 2026...

We look at what kind of businesses are best suited to be incorporated in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in Dubai, and in the UK...

How tax and compliance change across these regions for entrepreneurs operating from India...

And how one can build their international corporate structures for global business expansion.

Check out the full episode on Founder’s Office with Sarthak Ahuja.

Produced and Directed by Aditi Randev for Niamh Originals.

How to Walk Through Walls: The Hacker Mindset: In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one... Nine months later, having finished El Mariachi, the first part of his planned trilogy, Rodriguez found himself in the office of Robert Newman, a Hollywood agent. Watching the trailer Rodriguez had cut, Newman, who would go on to sell the movie to Columbia in a deal worth $1.8 million, asked: “How much did it cost [to make] again?”... “$7,000.”... “Really? That’s pretty good, most trailers usually cost between $20,000 and $30,000.”...“No,” Rodriguez said, “the whole movie cost $7,000.”

Escaping Flatland

How to walk through walls

In March 1991, Robert Rodriguez, then 22 years old, decided to write and shoot three feature-length home movies to gain experience making full-length films, in case he ever received an offer to direct a real one…

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5 months ago · 1081 likes · 51 comments · Henrik Karlsson

The Future of Fertility: After a few days of development, companies like Herasight will test which ones have the highest genetic quality (many times, quality genetic factors go together), and for the remaining embryos, parents will be able to calculate the tradeoffs: Would I rather 4 more IQ points, or a 70% lower probability of cardiovascular diseases? Parents will thus be able to generate as many high-quality embryos as they want.Another thing that might be compelling about this is that it makes it much easier to be a single parent, as it’s trivial to get, say, skin cells from a consenting person. If a mother (or father) wants to bring up children alone, with friends, or with extended family, they can have children who have different sets of parents.

Uncharted Territories

The Future of Fertility

It’s Saturday, 10am, and Sheila wakes up to five little bodies crawling up into her bed…

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5 months ago · 119 likes · 113 comments · Tomas Pueyo

NASA is the Most Underrated Brand: The NASA website gets more site visits than The Economist, twice as many as SpaceX, and almost as many as Tesla. Of all traffic, less than half is from the U.S... The NASA logo is so broadly admired that it has become a status symbol. Coach, Balenciaga, Kith, Estée Lauder, Nike, Adidas, and Vans have all collaborated with NASA or used its iconic red branding... NASA may look inefficient compared with SpaceX, but be clear: Its second-order effects on innovation and America’s reputation make it one of the most valuable U.S. assets. President George H.W. Bush reportedly called the Apollo program “the best return on investment since Leonardo da Vinci bought himself a sketchpad.”

Prof G Media

NASA Is the Most Underrated Brand

On Friday, four astronauts returned to Earth after venturing deeper into space than anyone has gone before. The mission, Artemis II, sent a rocket weighing 5.7 million pounds around the moon and back, setting the stage for a future lunar landing. This incredible feat is a timely reminder that…

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5 months ago · 10 likes · Mia Silverio