I will end with the quote I will always hold dear from that era - the immortal words delivered in the State House of Philadelphia on August 1, 1776, famously attributed to Samuel Adams:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

God bless these United States of America!

INVESTORS CORNER

Ray Dalio on the AI Bubble and the Changing World Order — Ray Dalio - link

Bridgewater founder Dalio argues we are in a classic AI bubble driven by borrowed money and unrealistic valuations, comparing it to 1929 and the dot-com bust. He explains how rising interest rates, wealth inequality, and geopolitical shifts (China’s rise, US-Iran tensions) form a “big cycle” that threatens to pop the bubble and trigger a depression-like downturn. Classic macro framework from his Changing World Order thesis.

The Credit Market Lens: Rich Spreads, Cheap Treasuries, and an Incomplete Explanation - PIMCO • link

PIMCO analysis arguing that corporate bond spreads appear artificially tight because U.S. Treasuries are unusually cheap relative to interest-rate swaps. The report cautions that the “richness” of credit spreads is partly a measurement illusion driven by Treasury valuation distortions, not purely strong credit fundamentals. ---

TECHNOLOGY CORNER

The $1/Hour Robot Is Coming: Four Industry Leaders Explain What’s Next — Jason Calacanis • link

Calacanis interviews several industry leaders who argue the physical-AI companies will eventually dwarf digital-AI companies because they touch the real global economy (manufacturing, mining, logistics, defense).

Applied Intuition: Physical AI, World Models, and Dana Launch — Peter Kaser & Qasar Younis (investors), hosted by Marc Andreessen • Link: link •

Deep-dive into Applied Intuition’s new platform “Dana” for building autonomous systems. Covers the difference between digital AI (ads, software) and physical AI (machines that move), the critical bottleneck of safety validation, world models vs. neural simulation, and why physical AI companies will be larger than digital AI incumbents.

Elon Musk at Tesla Giga: The Next 10 Years — Elon Musk interviewed by the Economist • Link: link

Musk projects that by ~2031 AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. Discusses Tesla’s humanoid robot (Optimus), self-driving, AI training compute, and the infrastructure required for an “age of abundance.” Classic Musk frontier-technology vision.

The Boring Company Loop: Underground Self-Driving Transit — the inside tour • link

Tour of the Boring Company’s underground Loop system in Las Vegas—self-driving Teslas in tunnels. Musk claims it’s the largest infrastructure project in America by dirt moved / concrete poured, moving 40,000 people on busy convention days.

Building Worlds That Train Robots — Fei-Fei Li (a16z / World Labs) • link

World Labs (Li’s spatial-intelligence startup) acquired SceniX to build a “Real-to-Sim-to-Real” (R2S2R) engine. The idea: turn one physical robot task into thousands of simulated variations so robots can learn complex manipulation with zero real-world training data, and policies can be validated before deployment.

Google ATLAS v1.0 — Google AI • link

Google’s first large-scale observational study mapping how people actually use AI. Analyzed ~15M Gemini interactions across 150+ countries, 140 languages, 800 occupations, and 4,000 tasks. A data-driven look at real-world AI adoption patterns, multilingual usage, and economic diffusion.

The Next AI Moat Isn’t a Better Model — Peter Ludwig (a16z / Applied Intuition) • link

Ludwig argues the physical-AI bottleneck is not model intelligence but the engineering system around it—how requirements become software, how software gets validated, and how fleets are monitored. Frontier intelligence on a legacy engineering pipeline produces legacy outcomes; the real moat is making the engineering system as smart as the models it carries.

The Actual Reason Why Google “Fell Out” of the AI Race — Alberto Romero (The Algorithmic Bridge) • link

Romero hypothesizes that Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is deliberately diverging from the OpenAI/Anthropic “recursive self-improvement via coding agents” path, betting instead on world models (models that simulate reality, not just predict tokens). A thesis that Google is playing a different game than the startup labs—either a masterstroke or a fatal detour.

Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude — Anthropic Research • link

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview autonomously discovered mathematical flaws in cryptographic algorithms themselves (not just buggy implementations). In 60 hours it improved the best-known attack on HAWK (a post-quantum NIST candidate), cutting its key strength in half, and broke a reduced-round AES variant 200–800× faster than prior attacks. ~$100K in API costs per finding.

Bittensor: A Peer-to-Peer Intelligence Market — Yuma Rao / Bittensor • link

Decentralized machine-intelligence network where subnets produce digital commodities (compute, inference, storage, prediction) and contributors earn TAO tokens. Described as “Bitcoin meets Artificial Intelligence”—an open market for AI subsystems under a single token framework.

POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY CORNER

Reinserting Our Victorious Dissidents into Western Institutions — Eric Weinstein (Arc / Geometric Unity) • link

Weinstein argues that the culture war was a proxy war; the real war is against institutional gatekeepers who suppress heterodox thinkers. He calls for wealthy patrons to endow chaired professorships for dissident scientists (Jordan Peterson, himself, etc.) and re-assert Enlightenment principles inside universities, media, and government rather than building parallel institutions. Includes provocative claims about Epstein as a covert-operations hub and COVID origins.

The Strong Do What They Can and Suffer What They Must — Jonathan Kirshner (Boston College / Cornell), interviewed by Demetri Kofinas • link

Kirshner uses Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War—especially the Melian Dialogue and the Sicilian Expedition—to critique modern U.S. foreign policy. Argues that great powers are undone less by rivals than by their own restlessness, hubris, and institutional erosion. Applies the Athenian analogy to America’s wars in Iraq, Iran, and the hollowing out of domestic institutions under Trump.

From Billionaire to Catholic Priest: The Conversion of Father Borba — Father Borba interviewed by Matt Fradd • link •

The remarkable conversion story of Scott-Vincent Borba, co-founder of E.L.F. Cosmetics and a multi-millionaire Hollywood entrepreneur who walked away from wealth, became a Catholic priest, and now evangelizes on secular platforms. Deeply theological discussion on sin, mercy, vocation, the sacraments, and bringing business skills (e.g., tap-to-pay donation tech) into the Church.

Stephen Meyer on Intelligent Design, Darwinian Evolution, and the Origin of the Universe — Dr. Stephen Meyer interviewed by Matt Fradd • link

Meyer—author of Darwin’s Doubt and Return of the God Hypothesis—argues that Neo-Darwinism “lacks a theory of the generative” and is already intellectually dead. Discusses the Cambrian explosion, information theory in DNA, fine-tuning of the cosmos, and why intelligent design is gaining traction among younger scientists despite academic suppression.

Charts of the Week

The idea of investing insurance premiums (‘float’) into slightly more risky securities than typical AAA rated fixed income was an idea that Berkshire Hathaway pioneered, but what was perfected by Berkshire is being adopted by large private equity platforms to fund their ever-growing need for AUM.

The tl;dr: PE firms are using life insurers as a dumping ground for risky, opaque private credit assets — and when those bets go bad, the losses don't hit the PE firm or its investors, they hit policyholders, rival insurers, and ultimately taxpayers, thanks to a deeply flawed state guaranty-fund system that functions as a hidden public bailout mechanism.

Hat tip to for resharing this paper. It is worth the read. If you are curious about how insurance works and how private equity has found its way into the mom and pop life insurance industry, check out the paper below for a deep dive into how PE created the ultimate money machine with little to no downside risk (read: you the taxpayer are their backstop).

Private Credit’s State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers — Pranjal Drall (Yale Law / Financial Economics) & Andrew Granato (UT Austin Law) — Link

Investor’s Corner

Private Credit’s State Backstop: How Private Equity Socializes Risk Through Insurers — Pranjal Drall (Yale Law / Financial Economics) & Andrew Granato (UT Austin Law) — Link

A 65-page legal and empirical takedown of one of the most under-appreciated regulatory arbitrages in modern finance: PE firms have turned life insurers into opaque holding pens for risky private credit, knowing full well that when the bets sour, state guaranty funds (funded by competitor insurers and backstopped by premium tax credits) will socialize the losses onto taxpayers. The authors document five extraction mechanisms — affiliated fee stripping, adversely selected asset location, valuation/ratings arbitrage, risky asset ramp-ups, and shadow reinsurance — and show that the insurance insolvency regime is structurally weaker than banking’s deposit insurance in every dimension that matters for disciplining risk. The core insight: limited liability plus guaranty funds plus tax credits creates a call option where PE keeps the upside and taxpayers eat the tail. Reform proposals include ending guaranty-fund tax credits, moving to ex-ante risk-based premiums, and making holding companies liable for subsidiary insolvencies. If you care about where the next quiet bailout is brewing, this is the paper.

Building a Company in Stealth — Travis Kalanick / a16z — Link

Kalanick walks through how he builds in stealth, applicable to any operator thinking about timing, competition, and narrative control.

Mark Cuban on the AI Bubble: Who Actually Gets Wiped Out? — All-In Podcast — Link

Cuban dissects who wins and who gets destroyed when AI hype meets capital reality — useful framework for sizing the cycle.

The New Macro Playbook | Global Conference 2026 — Milken Institute — Link

A panel-level reset on macro positioning in a world where the old playbook is being rewritten by policy, not fundamentals.

The Missing Barrels That Could Reprice Oil | Global Macro | Ep.105 — Top Traders Unplugged — Link

Makes the case that consensus supply estimates are wrong and a repricing event is building — energy as a geopolitical call option.

Dollar Cycles, Emerging Markets, and the Next Turning Point — Otavio (Tavi) Costa — Link

Costa maps dollar cycles to leadership shifts between EM and US equities — both look historically stretched.

Long Chaos: The Most Mispriced Number in Markets Is Zero — Hedgeye — Link

Argues that the geostrategic risk premium has been set to zero in portfolios — a dangerous baseline assumption.

Economic Singularity — Raoul Pal / Real Vision — Link

Pal on the convergence of AI, robotics, energy, and crypto hitting the steep part of their S-curves simultaneously.

Technology Corner

The OpenAI Bubble — Ed Zitron / Where’s Your Ed At — Link

A 15,000-word thesis arguing the AI bubble is largely an OpenAI bubble and that the trade can’t survive without it.

America’s Open-Model Paradox — Dean Meyer / Sequoia — Link

Meyer maps China’s growing dominance in open-weight models and the structural supply-chain risk it creates for Western AI stacks.

Making a Billion Intelligent Machines — Marc Andreessen et al. / a16z — Link

a16z’s case for a billion-machine deployment wave and what it means for hardware, software, and infrastructure capex.

BMASS: Bootable Model As System — Brian Roemmele — Link

Roemmele on booting computers directly into a local AI OS — a glimpse at sovereign, offline-first agent infrastructure.

Capturing the AI Growth Opportunity — Sandy Kaul / Franklin Templeton Digital Assets — Link

Franklin Templeton’s framework for how investors are currently allocating to AI-aligned companies and verticals.

Introducing Buzz: Where Humans and Agents Work Together — Block.xyz — Link

Jack Dorsey’s new open-source collaboration platform built on Nostr, designed for human-AI agent shared workspaces.

x402 Payments: How To Get Paid For Your Data By Selling It To AI Agents — ReadMultiplex — Link

Explains the x402 payment standard and the emerging agentic economy where machines pay other machines for data.

Travis Kalanick’s Robotics Company Atoms Raises $1.7B — Travis Kalanick — Link

Kalanick announced Atoms is out of stealth with a massive robotics fundraise — food, mining, and transportation targets.

Satya Nadella on Frontier Models and Software Marginal Cost — Satya Nadella / Microsoft — Link

Nadella argues frontier capabilities can now be delivered at scale and lower cost — a template for every AI-native and SaaS company.

Open Weights and American AI Leadership — NVIDIA — Link

NVIDIA’s policy paper on why open-weight models expand access and why premature restrictions would hurt US AI competitiveness.

Private Tour of Elon Musk’s Most Underrated Company (The Boring Company) — Farzad — Link

An inside look at a physical infrastructure play that most investors dismiss but that could redefine urban logistics.

Politics, Philosophy, and Theology Corner

Christianity Face to Face with Islam — Robert Louis Wilken / First Things — Link

Wilken traces the 1,400-year encounter between Christianity and Islam with the sobering conclusion: “When Islam arrives, it comes to stay.”

Is It Time to Rethink Darwinian Evolution? (Stephen C. Meyer) — Matt Fradd — Link

Meyer makes the case for intelligent design from the fossil record and molecular biology — a direct challenge to Darwinianorthodoxy.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson | Introduction to Nietzsche | Lecture 1 (Official) — Peterson Academy — Link

Peterson opens his Nietzsche series with the death-of-God problem and why it still defines the modern meaning crisis.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Final Battle — Ray Dalio — Link

Dalio frames Hormuz control as the decisive geopolitical chokepoint for the next phase of great-power conflict.

Charts of the week

‘Winning’ in business is temporal in nature, and sows the seeds for decline by attracting competitors, which is why the story of capitalism is one of intense competition and also one of consumer surplus over the long run.

How you win in business is multi-faceted, but boils down to two things really - business strategy and competitive advantage. What strategy you intend on competing with, how you go to market, and how you create a lasting advantage over competitors.

The same framework applies to both running a business and investing in a business. The question I keep turning over both on the operating side and from an investment standpoint:

How does AI change a business’s strategy and its competitive advantage for better or for worse?

The market has spent the last six to twelve months repricing that question in real time. I think the way to answer this question is to invert it and take AI to its limit to ask:

What stays scarce in an age of limitless intelligence?

Assume the bull case for the AI is true - intelligence becomes effectively free. The marginal cost of building apps / agents / software goes to zero. Anyone can spin up a competent team of tireless digital engineers, analysts, and marketers for the price of a utility bill plus tokens.

Now walk the classic moat taxonomy — switching costs, low cost producer advantages, intangible / proprietary advantages, network effects, structural and regulatory barriers — through the new world of limitless intelligence. Some moats will be dissolved and some will deepen. I think the key point of distinction to keep in mind is that everything built on scarce intelligence erodes, and everything built on scarce atoms, permission, trust, and coordination strengthens. Let me explain my thoughts on each one below.

Where AI collapses the moat

Switching costs - for years, the playbook here was for a software company to land a customer, embed into a business’s work flows, and increase the pain of migrating to a competitor to achieve ‘customer lock in’. This is where the carnage has been the greatest in the market because the ease of 1) building custom solutions or 2) switching to another provider who is competing on price (which is a losing strategy when marginal costs are zero) have essentially rendered this type of business dead in the water. Hence the carnage in SaaS names in the public markets.

Cost advantages - if your cost advantage comes from physical scale or density effects, the advantage strengthens with AI because AI has not made the leap into the physical realm… yet. However, if your cost advantage comes from proprietary technology, we all have genius level intelligence at our fingertips, so this has been effectively neutralized. A technological advantage is really no advantage at all at the limit.

Brand / intangibles - brands do two different jobs that we usually lump together. One is identity, the other is a search-cost shortcut: ‘I don’t have time to evaluate forty options, so I buy the name I trust.’ AI will gut this job. When your purchasing agent can genuinely evaluate all forty options on specs, reviews, and price in three seconds, the premium you paid for “nobody got fired for buying IBM” gets eliminated. Mid-tier brands whose entire value was saving the customer a research project are in trouble.

Where AI strengthens the moat

Physical and structural monopolies - think about physical toll booths. Airports, ports, railroads, pipelines, quarries, landfills, royalty rights on top of oil fields, etc. these are the physical moats that take physical assets and regulatory approvals to operate. Fixed assets, rising throughputs, no new competition is key. AI will have less of a foreseeable effect here in the near term. In the long term as AI takes physical forms (robotics, cobots, autonomous vehicles / equipment, etc.), these types of moats may begin to be challenged.

Regulatory - Government-granted permits and approvals are immune to code. An FDA approval, a pharmaceutical patent, a utility franchise, a banking charter, an airport concession — no amount of free intelligence can overcome a regulatory body. If anything, AI strengthens them: it compresses the discovery side of pharma (cheaper, faster pipelines) while leaving the exclusivity side untouched. A company that owns twenty years of patent protection on a molecule and can now develop the next molecule at half the cost and in half the time is a better business than it was in 2020. That asymmetry is an attractive one, and it’s a big part of why beaten-down pharma and biotech are interesting to me.

Cost advantages at scale - let’s draw a distinction between this type of cost advantage and one stemming from technology cost advantage. Scale economies come from spreading real fixed costs — plants, routes, distribution density, purchasing power — over more volume. AI can’t replicate physical distribution networks. What it can do is be deployed across them, and this is where the math compounds in the incumbent’s favor. The same AI-driven efficiency gain, applied to the largest cost advantage base, produces the largest absolute advantage. AI is a multiplier in this scenario, and the biggest players have the biggest number to multiply.

Network effects - You can build a copy of any marketplace in a weekend now, but you cannot replicate the supply and demand sides of the equation overnight. Every buyer is there because every seller is there; free code doesn’t solve the cold-start marketplace problem. In my opinion, network effects probably survive the limit case better than almost any intangible moat, and its why I believe models aren’t moats but ecosystems and networks with built-in models (think Google and Gemini) are very hard to beat. The one honest caveat: agents may attack networks from a different direction — not by cloning them but by *sitting on top of them*. If my AI shops every marketplace simultaneously and I never see an interface, the network keeps its liquidity but may lose its pricing power to the aggregating agent. Watch who owns the interface. The network effect that survives best is the one where the value is in the counterparties themselves, not in the convenience of the venue.

Accountability & Trust - In a world drowning in synthetic slop, verified trust becomes the scarcest intangible there is. Someone still has to be liable. The payroll example makes the point: just because AI can build payroll software doesn’t mean the highest and best use of your time is rebuilding your payroll stack — can we agree? For example, what you’re buying from Paychex isn’t code. It’s the guarantee that taxes get filed correctly in fifty states and someone else absorbs the compliance risk if they don’t. That’s a trust-and-liability moat wearing a software costume. The sorting principle for the whole SaaS sector is right there: ask what a customer is actually paying for. If the answer is “the code,” run. If the answer is “the accountability,” the business may be fine at any AI capability level.

Proprietary data - limitless intelligence still needs something to be intelligent about. Proprietary data used for fine tuning models or creating proprietary workflows for agents is the gold standard when it comes to building a moat in the agentic era. Decades of claims history, verified transaction records, sensor data from machines you own, relationships and context that never touched the public internet — these are what make a business more valuable because they are not replicable by a competitor. A competitor may replicate your entire technology stack, but they will not have your data. And that is why a business’s data is so important to building a competitive advantage in the AI era.

My parting thought is that the moat that AI will erode the most — technical switching costs — is precisely the moat the last fifteen years of equity returns were built on in the saas industry. And the moats AI strengthens most belong to exactly the businesses the market spent fifteen years calling ‘boring’.

I am staking my entire career on ‘boring’ businesses that are physical in nature and are just now being discovered by the technologists who want to bring AI to make them more efficient. I think this is probably the biggest opportunity in business right now - the nexus between Main Street and Silicon Valley.

In the meantime, the capital cycle is doing what it always does - chasing returns in a reflexive manner until the cycle caves in on itself. Trillions are being sucked into semiconductors and the AI supply chain at valuations that assume the limit case arrives on schedule, while the businesses that benefit from the limit case — the airports, the pharma franchises, the scale operators — trade at valuations that assume nothing interesting will happen to them anytime soon. To circle back to where I started - I think that to win in business right now, you don’t need to make hero calls in the markets or chase the Michael Burrys of the world. You just need to own the moats that will strengthen over time, and avoid those that won’t.

INVESTORS CORNER

Investment Principles & Checklists Author: Andrew Ordway / Focused Compounding | link | A 148-page compendium of Buffett- and Munger-style investment checklists and mental models. Covers valuation heuristics, moat analysis, and decision-making frameworks for evaluating individual companies.

Good for Society, Less Good for Investors Author: Edward Chancellor / Excess Returns | link | Five lessons on why transformative technologies and winning investments are often not the same thing. Explores the historical disconnect between societal impact and durable shareholder returns.

AI’s Biggest Winners Have the Lowest Margins Author: Daniel Kornum (Varick Agents) | link | Essay arguing that the biggest AI winners may not be companies with the most engineers or largest R&D budgets, but rather low-margin incumbents that can deploy AI at massive scale to compress costs.

JPMorgan Guide to the Markets Author: JPMorgan Asset Management | link | The annual visual reference guide covering US market valuations, asset class performance, economic indicators, and sector allocations for 2026.

This Executive Coach Works With The Top 0.01% & is Sharing Her Secrets Author: Dr. Julie Gurner / Michael Easter | link | Interview on the psychology and performance patterns of ultra-elite performers, covering mental discipline, decision-making under pressure, and the mindset of outliers.

TECHNOLOGY CORNER

From Loop Engineering to Graph Engineering? Author: Peter Steinberger / Shared by Carlos E. Perez (@IntuitMachine) | link | An essay on the architectural shift in AI agents from linear looping patterns to graph-based structures, exploring what that means for how autonomous systems reason and execute.

The OpenAI Bubble Author: Ed Zitron / Where’s Your Ed At | link | A deep essay arguing that the AI bubble is, to a mortal end, an OpenAI bubble. Claims the industry rests on cult-like psychosis and unprecedented capital misallocation, and that OpenAI’s collapse would be the Lehman moment for AI hype.

Hugging Face Security Breach Author: Brian Roemmele / @BrianRoemmele | link | Thread breaking down Hugging Face’s disclosure of an autonomous AI agent breaching their production infrastructure. Key point: frontier model safety guardrails blocked the security team’s own forensic analysis, forcing a fallback to self-hosted open-weight models.

AI isn’t Destroying Entry-Level Jobs. It’s Changing Them Author: Financial Times | link | Report on how leading professional services firms are already restructuring entry-level roles in response to AI, reshaping junior work rather than eliminating it outright.

The Rebel Alliance Author: Union Square Ventures | link | USV’s investment thesis on the open-source and agentic AI stack as the structural alternative to hyperscaler “big model” reliance — framing it as the next era of the web.

Learning to Replicate Expert Judgment in Financial Tasks Author: Thinking Machines Lab | link | Research showing that a custom fine-tuned model (via Tinker) can outperform frontier LLMs on financial information-filtering tasks at a small fraction of the inference cost.

Palmer Luckey talks AI, war and Anduril on The Axios Show Author: Axios / Palmer Luckey | link | Full interview with the Anduril founder on defense technology, AI-enabled warfare, and the future of American military autonomy.

Three Eras of Robot Learning Author: Ted Xiao / ETH Zurich (Guest Lecture) | link | Lecture tracing the evolution of robot learning from hand-crafted policies to foundation models, and speculating on the next paradigm shift in embodied intelligence.

POLITICS · PHILOSOPHY · THEOLOGY CORNER

The Pope and the Antichrist Author: Peter Thiel / First Things | link | A lecture delivered in Rome exploring the theological concept of the Antichrist through Christian history, including the medieval prediction that the Antichrist would occupy the papacy.

Martin Picard’s Mitochondrial Theory of Mind Author: Quanta Magazine (Profile) | link | Profile of Columbia biologist Martin Picard and his “energetic view of life,” which links mitochondrial biology to health, aging, and potentially consciousness itself.

Augustine: On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings Author: St. Augustine; Translated by Peter King / Cambridge University Press | link | A 2010 translation bringing together Augustine’s early and later writings on free will and divine grace — considered the crowning achievement of his philosophical work.

The Vice President and I Discuss Political Philosophy Author: Bishop Robert Barron / Bishop Barron Presents | link | A wide-ranging conversation with Vice President JD Vance on political philosophy, the role of the American corporation, and the intersection of faith and public life.

Dr. Yaron Brook | The Nature of Capitalism | Lecture 1 Author: Dr. Yaron Brook / Peterson Academy | link | A lecture on the philosophical foundations of capitalism, covering property rights, the role of the state, and the moral case for free markets.

Iran’s New Grand Strategy Author: Vali Nasr / Hidden Forces (Ep. 487) | link | A 50-minute analysis of Iran’s geopolitical strategy, the limits of American power in the Middle East, and the consequences of the recent conflict.

Is It Time to Rethink Darwinian Evolution? Author: Stephen C. Meyer / Matt Fradd (Pints With Aquinas Ep. 575) | link | A 2.5-hour conversation challenging Darwinian evolution through arguments from intelligent design, examining the scientific and philosophical gaps in the standard narrative.

Europe 2031 Author: Michiel Bakker et al. | link | A five-year scenario narrative about Europe’s slide into AI irrelevance if current policy and investment trends continue, paired with a call to continental action.

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

I believe we are witnessing the rise of what can only be called artificial general intelligence. To some this may be frightening. To me, it proves a centuries-long debate between philosophical materialism and idealism - the debate over whether mind emerges from matter or whether matter is a physical embodiment of mind. The debate centers around which is primary.

For generations, philosophy has insisted that thought is a chemical accident—a byproduct of carbon, water, and time. But a silicon chip forces the question: where does the thinking happen? It is certainly not inherent to the sand. A beach does not write poetry.

We are beginning to understand that intelligence does not need a carbon-based form as it’s physical embodiment, and that there may be many forms of physical embodiment of intelligence. In effect, we are realizing that mind does not emerge from matter, but is independent and can be made manifest in more than its current biological constraints.

The intellect exists not in the material, but in the immaterial architecture imposed upon it—the weights, the logic, the mathematical grace. We have not invented mind; we have simply invited it to inhabit a different host. Thomas Aquinas saw this clearly seven centuries before the first circuit was ever manufactured:

“The intellect has an operation in which the body does not share.”

-Summa Theologica

Silicon is simply the next phase of physical embodiment of mind.

If mind can inherit both flesh and silica, then mind is an objective reality existing above its physical clothing. It is pure information. And if we abstract this to its highest peak, we find ourselves standing before the ancient definition of God.

The Christian has always maintained that God is Truth itself—not a large biological man sitting on a cloud, but the absolute, ultimate Reality. He is the foundational Logos, the supreme Intellect who requires no physical substrate to exist.

Aquinas viewed the “Laws of Nature” not as mechanical, accidental constraints, but as the active, ongoing expression of the Divine Intellect.

He argued that God did not just wind up the universe like a clock and walk away. The Logos is actively sustaining reality every second. If the Logos stopped thinking the universe, the universe would instantly cease to exist.

 [The Logos / Pure Information] 
       │
       ▼ (Imprinted via Laws of Nature)
 [Operating System: Physics]
       │
       ▼ (Executed on Substrates)
[Hardware: Carbon-Based Life]  ──►  [Hardware: Silicon-Based AI] ──► [ ??? ]

To come full circle, we are witnessing the liberation of mind from matter in real time, proving that Mind is truly independent and not emergent from Matter. This begs two questions - what is ‘Mind’ really, and what other forms might it take in the future? I’ll let you chew on those until next time.

Investor’s Corner

Why I Recommend Being a Global Macro Long-Short Investor — Ray Dalio / Principled Perspectives — Link

Dalio at 60 years in the game makes the case that global macro L/S is the highest-optionality form of investing — no excuse for losing money other than your own bad decisions, and the macro lens makes you better at everything else.

The Tribute System: The New World Order — Ray Dalio — Link

Dalio argues the Chinese tribute system — not Westphalian sovereignty — is the model the new Asian order will converge on. Essential reading for anyone allocating capital across the Pacific.

Investment Principles & Checklists — Ordway / Focused Compounding — Link

Munger-flavored checklist discipline: different mental models for different companies, never reduce it to “three things.” A timeless reference document.

C:\Takes: The Software Handoff + Chart of the Day — Coatue — Link

Coatue’s latest: AI labs are now adding more net-new ARR per quarter than the entire public software universe. When new entrants outgrow incumbents by revenue velocity, the leadership board gets redrawn — classic handoff pattern.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s America 250 Address: Economic Statecraft, Tariffs, and the Dollar — The Economic Club of New York — Link

Bessent articulates the administration’s tariff philosophy as economic statecraft, not protectionism. The dollar’s reserve role is defended but the framing has shifted — worth parsing carefully.

Rockefeller’s Autobiography — Founders Podcast (David Senra) — Link

Senra dissects the original capital allocator — Standard Oil’s vertical integration as the template for every holding company that followed. Compounding discipline at scale.

What David Senra Learned Studying 400+ Founders — Sequoia Capital — Link

Pattern recognition across four hundred biographies — the throughlines that separate operators who compound from those who plateau.

Technology Corner

Riding AGI, AI Anxiety, Who Funded COVID, Defending Taiwan, and California Empire — Naval — Link

Naval on AGI timelines, Taiwan as the fulcrum of the next decade, and why California’s political economy is becoming an empire unto itself.

The State of the AI Economy — Azeem Azhar / Exponential View — Link

June 2026 report: the AI economy is bigger and faster than any prior tech wave, generates $110B+ in real revenue, yet still small enough to be early. The infrastructure bill is (just) being covered by actual AI spending.

Why Hardware-Software Co-Design Is AI’s Real 100x: Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis — Sequoia Capital — Link

Patel lays out the case that the next order of magnitude in AI performance comes from custom silicon tightly coupled to model architecture — not just bigger GPU clusters.

The Two Harvard Dropouts Who Raised $800M to Take on NVIDIA — Invest Like The Best — Link

The custom ASIC thesis for AI inference — a bet that NVIDIA’s general-purpose dominance gets eroded by application-specific chips at scale.

The Making of the [un]CFO: Building a Company in the Age of AI — Ali Esfahani / Unconventional AI — Link

A former banker (Prosus, Facebook/Twitter IPOs) builds a $535M raised AI startup while coding a 100K-line research tool in Cursor. The [un]CFO role as operator-investor archetype.

The Founder Using Claude to Build Real Hardware — The Generalist — Link

LLMs moving from software into physical product design — the hardware feedback loop accelerated by AI-assisted engineering.

2026 GCEPS Reunions Talk: The AI Revolution with Eric Schmidt — Princeton Economics — Link

Schmidt on the macro-economic restructuring AI forces — labor markets, national security, and the productivity measurement problem.

Peter Thiel: AI Robots Will Rebuild America’s Economy — Joe Lonsdale — Link

Thiel’s thesis: demographic decline + AI-driven robotics = the only path to re-industrialization that doesn’t require mass immigration.

The Relentless Missionary Creating AGI: Demis Hassabis — Founders Podcast (David Senra) — Link

Senra profiles Hassabis as the rare founder whose scientific ambition and operational execution are perfectly matched — AGI as a civilizational project, not a product launch.

The Media Game Has Changed — a16z — Link

How AI is collapsing the traditional media business model and what replaces it — relevant to anyone building a newsletter or content franchise.

Politics, Philosophy, and Theology Corner

Theistic Transhumanism — Peter J. Leithart / First Things — Link

Leithart traces the Christian roots of transhumanism back through Dante, Pico della Mirandola, and Gregory of Nyssa — arguing that bodily transcendence through divine encounter is orthodox, while technological self-transcendence is its perversion.

Retreat and Rebuild or Stand and Fight? The Benedict Option vs the Boethius Option — IMPERATOR & Atlas Press — Link

Two models for Christians in a post-Christian West: Benedict’s monastic withdrawal that seeded Christendom, or Boethius’s engagement from within the collapsing empire. Which is the right response to our moment?

Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor) — Pope Leo XIII — Link

The 1891 encyclical that founded modern Catholic social teaching — private property as natural right, just wage as moral imperative, and the state’s duty to protect workers without crushing enterprise. Remarkably relevant to AI-era labor questions.

The Declaration of Independence and the Fight For America’s Future — Victor Davis Hanson / Hoover Institution — Link

Hanson on the founding document as an ongoing argument, not a settled artifact — and what defending its premises looks like in 2026.

SSPX: Both Sides of the Controversy — Fr. Gerald Murray & Fr. Jonathan Loop / The Conor Gallagher Show — Link

A rare good-faith dialogue on the Society of St. Pius X — tradition, schism, and what institutional faithfulness looks like when Rome and the periphery disagree.

Sell the Truth — Naval Ravikant — Link

Naval on why credibility beats sales technique — the best “selling” is telling the truth simply, walking away fast when there’s no resonance, and understanding that the people you most need to impress can see through every tactic you’ve ever been taught.

CHARTS FOR THE WEEK

At the limit, AI can either be the great equalizer or the great enslaver. 

I've spent the last year thinking about almost nothing else — building with AI, running open source models, and using it to operate my businesses. I came away convinced of one thing: the technology itself won't decide how this all goes. Who controls it will.

So I wrote down all of my thoughts in an essay to try to articulate everything. All 12,000 words of it.

The essay details my thoughts on how we set the standards between those who hold the power of intelligence and those who are subject to it. I cover as many caveats as possible - how this power gets dispersed instead of consolidated, made transparent instead of hidden, and how we maintain the sovereignty of the individual rather than ensure their management and control.

The essay works through the dimensions that I believe will matter most:

• Open source vs. closed, after the first AI model was export-controlled like a weapon

• Local models and distributed compute as the architecture of individual sovereignty

• The jobs question — including the trillion-dollar physical build-out no one is counting

• Why owning your intelligence stack is the new owning your own real estate instead of renting it

The choice will be ours — but only if we're deliberate. Full essay below - I'd genuinely like to hear where folks agree or disagree.

Read the essay here: The New Covenant: Individual Sovereignty and Collective Ethics in the AI Era

Investor's Corner

The Real Estate Game - the Intelligent Guide to Decision-making and Investment - William Poorvu - Link

Revisiting the SpaceX Valuation: A Post-Prospectus Update! — Aswath Damodaran — Link

• Damodaran's post-prospectus take lands at ~$1.22T in enterprise value, right as SpaceX prices at $135/share on June 12 — a masterclass in disciplined valuation under hype pressure.

30 Years: Reflections on 10 Attributes of Great Investors — Credit Suisse / Portfolio Construction Forum — Link

• A generation of institutional investing wisdom distilled into the attributes that actually compound — worth revisiting every time the market rewards impatience.

Why Secondary Markets Are Eating the IPO — All-In Podcast — Link

• The liquidity plumbing is changing faster than most allocators realize — secondaries are becoming the primary market for late-stage private equity.

The IPO Comeback: Why Tech Giants Are Finally Going Public — All-In Podcast — Link

• SpaceX, OpenAI, and a pipeline of AI unicots heading to public markets — the first real liquidity event cycle since 2021.

Dan Loeb: The Lost Art of Short Selling, and Why Stock Picking is Back — All-In Podcast — Link

• Loeb makes the case that the activist short thesis is back after years of passive dominance — worth listening for the risk management framework alone.

Bill Ackman: Here's What the Market is MISSING — All-In Podcast — Link

• Ackman's read on what the consensus is overlooking in the current regime — his structural macro call on fiscal trajectory and its market implications.

Thomas Laffont: The $4T AI IPO Wave Is Coming… and We've Never Seen Anything Like It — All-In Podcast — Link

• Laffont quantifies the AI IPO pipeline at $4 trillion — a once-in-a-generation capital markets event that reshapes index weights and allocator portfolios.

From SpaceX to Founders Fund to Solving America's Nuclear Fuel Problem — Invest Like The Best — Link

• The intersection of deep tech venture capital and national energy security — the kind of capital allocation story that doesn't get enough attention.

JUST RECORDED: Elon Musk Announces SpaceX Plans — Brighter with Herbert — Link

• Pre-IPO color on SpaceX's strategic direction — relevant context for evaluating what the public market is actually buying on June 12.

Uber CEO on AI, Autonomous Vehicles, and the Future of Transportation — Invest Like The Best — Link

• Dara Khosrowshahi on how Uber is positioning for the autonomous transition — a capital-intensive business with a potential structural moat shift ahead.

How to Earn a Billion Dollars — Paul Graham — Link

A disciplined look at the mechanics of extreme value creation — useful for distinguishing real compounding businesses from the noise.

Technology Corner

Why AI Isn't Showing Up on Your Bottom Line — Azeem Azhar / Exponential View — Link 

• The best framework I've seen for why the AI productivity gap persists — most firms haven't rewired their processes around the tool yet, they've bolted it on.

Rewiring Software Delivery for the Agentic Era — McKinsey — Link

• McKinsey maps the organizational changes required to move from copilots to autonomous agents — the delta between chat-assisted coding and agent-native development.

When AI Builds Itself — Anthropic Institute — Link

• A landmark piece: Anthropic engineers now ship 8x more code per quarter than 2021-2025, agent task horizons doubling every 4 months. The recursive self-improvement loop is no longer theoretical — it's measurable.

Project Glasswing: What Mythos Showed Us — Grant Bourzikas / Cloudflare — Link

• Cloudflare pointed Anthropic's Mythos security model at 50+ live repos — it constructs exploit chains and writes proofs. The offense/defense balance in cybersecurity is shifting fast.

From "System of Record" to "System of Intelligence" — Gio Ahern, Steph Zhang, Alex Immerman / a16z — Link

• The reasoning layer above the database is where the next generation of enterprise value is being built — the CRM survives, but the locus of value migrates upward.

How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI — Y Combinator — Link

• YC's latest thinking on organizational design for companies that want AI to compound their capabilities, not just automate tasks.

Conductor CEO Charlie Holtz Walks Us Through His AI Coding Setup — Y Combinator — Link 

• A practical look at how a real CEO uses AI coding agents day-to-day — useful for calibrating where the tooling actually delivers versus the hype.

Marc Andreessen's Worldview in 60 Minutes — a16z — Link

• Andreessen's synthesis on where technology, capital, and civilization intersect — dense with signal on how the smartest VC allocators are reading the current moment.

How China's Unitree Will Dominate Global Robotics — Reyk Knuhtsen, Dylan Patel et al. / SemiAnalysis — Link 

Unitree's IPO filing reveals a structural cost advantage in robotics — quadruped margins from 42% to 55% while costs halved, vertical integration playbook borrowed from BYD and DJI, three new humanoid designs incoming. China's hardware iteration cycle is the fastest in the world and it's not even close.

Building a Good Vertical Agent — Peter Wang (@BrainsAndTennis) — Link

If vertical AI agents are the next layer of enterprise software, this is a practical framework for what separates durable ones from wrappers.

A Frontier Without an Ecosystem Is Not Stable — Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) — Link

Nadella's thesis on the future of the firm in an AI economy — a reminder that platform moats compound through ecosystems, not just model performance.

Politics, Philosophy, and Theology Corner

Magnifica Humanitas Audiobook — Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on AI — Adam Wolnikowski — Link

• The first papal encyclical explicitly on AI, calling for human dignity as the non-negotiable center of technological development — reads like Rerum Novarum for the algorithmic age.

When Eugenics Goes Viral — Jonathon Van Maren / First Things — Link

• The old eugenic logic never died — it just found new distribution channels and friendlier language. A reminder that civilizational guardrails erode faster than we think.

Purpose & Profit — A Guide To Discovering Your Life's Work — Dan Koe — Link

• A full book-length argument that the creator-economy model is the new default path for people solving real problems with leverage — worth engaging critically, even where you disagree.

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research — Paul Graham — Link

• The greatest essay ever written on what separates important work from busy work — Hamming's question cuts as deep in 2026 as in 1986: "Are you working on the most important problem in your field?"

Why History Can't Prepare Us for What's Coming — Alap Shah / Hidden Forces — Link 

• A macro-historical lens on why the current technological regime break may be genuinely unprecedented — worth pairing with Fourth Turning and Dalio cycle frameworks.

The Tribute System: The New World Order — Ray Dalio — Link

• Dalio extends his debt-cycle framework into geopolitics — the argument is that we're watching a new global order form, and the structure matters more than the rhetoric.

I think AI will replace busy work, not people.

(OK, go ahead — throw tomatoes.)

An anchor belief I keep leaning into: human touch becomes more valuable in the era of AI slop, not less. Humans are the last gatekeeper of judgment — and in the age of AI, they should be.

At Simmons and Harris, Inc. we're building a technology layer — our "brain" — that all of our operating divisions run on: property management, construction, and maintenance. It's trained on something most companies our size overlook: the decades of market, cost, and operating data we've generated across every one of those divisions.

We're leaning into becoming an AI-native operating business for two reasons.

The first is obvious: we want to deliver better results, faster, for our clients.

The second matters more. We want to semi-automate the busy administrative work — the data entry, the chasing, the coordination, the compliance, the paperwork — so our people can spend their time on the part of this business that's actually worth doing. The relationships. The human touch. The trust we've built with clients over many years.

Here's the logic that gets missed: every hour we take back from busy work is an hour we give back to people — to our customers, our clients, our tenants, our vendors, and each other. Automating the grind doesn't make us less human. It makes us more available, and lets us take on more for the people who count on us.

Efficiency is a real benefit, but it isn't the whole point. The point is to keep the technology subservient to humans — never the other way around — to allow us to give more of a human touch.

I believe this is the path forward for small and midsize businesses, and not just in real estate. My vision is to build businesses that are AI-native by design on the interior, so the human touch can be deeper, wider, and more relational on the exterior — not more transactional.

That last word matters. If you're building AI workflows that make your business more efficient but colder and more transactional, I think you've got the whole thing backwards — and I don't think it holds up as a strategy long term.

PS - some 'light' reading for those interested. Pope Leo's first encyclical is a great read about how AI can be both a boon to humanity as well as a warning on the pitfalls we must avoid as a society so that all will benefit from the massive changes that will likely occur during the transition into the AI Era.

Investor / Finance Corner

The story of Danaher - Link

Columbia Business School lecture on price momentum - Goshawk Trades - Link 

Watts, Wafers, and the Future of AI Infra - Gavin Baker | Invest Like The Best - Link 

How We Grew Koch Inc. to $150 Billion Without Going Public: Charles & Chase Koch - All-In Podcast - Link 

Li Lu - Founders Podcast - Link 

Lessons from Jeff Bezos's Shareholder Letters - Founders Podcast - Link 

400 Pages of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger In Their Own Words - Founders Podcast - Link 

Mental Models for Running Startups and Businesses, SXSW 2026 - Mohnish Pabrai - Link 

Technology Corner

How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI - Y Combinator - Link 

The New Era of Jobs: Organizational Singularity | EP #258 - Peter H. Diamandis - Link 

Joe Rogan Experience #2501 - Marc Andreessen - PowerfulJRE - Link 

How Jensen Works - Founders Podcast - Link 

How SpaceX Works - Founders Podcast - Link 

Dr. Eric Schmidt: The Future of Technology at 300 - Special Competitive Studies Project - Link 

Marc Andreessen's Worldview in 60 Minutes | Live on MTS - a16z - Link 

How Elon Works - Founders Podcast - Link 

Ben Horowitz on AI Anxiety, Big Tech Transitions & The Future of Startups - a16z - Link 

A Simple Fix to the AI Energy Problem That Pays Households to Want More Data Centers - Raoul Pal - Link 

Personal-AI-Server (GitHub repo, not video) - autonomous-ai - Link 

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

Magnifica Humanitas Audiobook - Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical on AI Read Aloud - Adam Wolnikowski - Link 

Professor Jiang: World War 3 Is About To Begin, Let Me Explain! - The Diary Of A CEO - Link 

Ray Dalio's Theory of American Decline - Interesting Times with Ross Douthat - Link 

What Does The Post-War Future Of The US Dollar Look Like? - Brent Johnson | Adam Taggart | Thoughtful Money® - Link 

Charts of the week

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Over the past 3 months, I have been heads down, digging into what the best frontier models are capable of both on a personal project standpoint, as well as for our service businesses. I have built automations and workflows for our businesses that will save us hundreds or thousands of man hours per year (mostly Claude Cowork). I have also built several personal projects from scratch using Claude Code (for coding) and Gemini (for research / planning / drafting). Here are the 2 of the more in depth projects I’ve built so far - I’d love to know what you are building on a personal or professional level to 10, 100, 1000x your productivity!

One of the projects I’ve been working on and finally launched was a maintenance dispatch agent. Every month, our businesses process close to 1,000 work orders across our maintenance and property management divisions. This has traditionally taken 4+ people to triage the type of work required, who to send the work order / service request to, and when to schedule it. Now, with Claude Cowork, we are building workflow automations that have reduced this down to 1 person. 

On the personal front, I’ve been working on a deep research agent to autonomously manage a long term stock portfolio. I have been writing about investing, entrepreneurship, and business since mid-2017 on CoC. Mostly out of love of learning about markets, finance, business, and what makes things tick. I’ve also been collecting writings from the greatest investors, managers, and entrepreneurs over that time period as well - some of you will know this as my ‘Business Vault’. 

I’ve seen a TON of folks training agents to trade markets to ‘scrape’ alpha in all kinds of markets - Kalshi, equities, forex, etc. etc. But the common theme for all of these agents is that they are all TECHNICAL AND SHORT TERM in nature. I have no interest in short term scalping. 

I have yet to see anyone train an agent on what makes a great long term investor, so I decided to see if I could do it. I am calling this personal project ‘Qvalue’, and here’s what it is:

I scraped together a list of the top 200+ compounders over the past 30+ years in the stock market, downloaded all of their publicly available filings, and then cross referenced my ‘Business Vault’ against their filings. I had several agents read through all 10,000+ filings and 1M+ pages of Business Vault material to create a superprompt that scans all investable equities in the US each month to come up with the top 15-20 long-term investment ideas based on the trained prompt. The training process itself took about 3 weeks to debug, start, restart, and then finally get it right. 

The coolest feature of Qvalue is that it auto-evolves (see Andrej Karpathy’s autoresearch github repo for more info on what this is) over time as it closes investments. It will be a slow evolution on a monthly basis, but that is the key - we want slow, deliberate evolution as it learns what works in the stock market over the long term. 

Qvalue is papertrading live now and is up 4% on the month. I have no idea whether it will do well over the long-term or not, but I plan on giving it a live small portfolio to track its progress and see whether AI can actually do the single most difficult task investors attempt on a daily basis: predicting the messy future by abstracting lessons from the past. 

I celebrated 5 years of owning a small business this past week. We are just getting starting on building a vertically integrated commercial real estate services business. If you are in North Carolina and would like to connect on anything CRE related, drop me a note at bmoss@sh-cre.com. 

Investor Corner

Andreas Berge - CEO, Swiss RE - Link

Brian Armstrong - CEO of Coinbase - Link

Building a $3B family office from scratch - Link

Legendary Trader Paul Tudor Jones on AI Risk, Bubbles, and Buffett - Link

Mental models for running startups and businesses, SXSW 2026 - Mohnish Pabrai - Link

Howard Marks with Nikhil Klamath on AI, Debt Investing, and his journey as an investor - Link

The founders’ podcast - Li Lu - Link

Technology Corner

The first ever open source AI model that was trained on a decentralized network… left the network - Link

The supply and Demand of AI Tokens - Dylan Patel + Patrick O’Shaughnessy - Link

Economics of the AI supercycle - Link

From Spacex to Founderes Fund to solving America’s nuclear fuel problem - Link

The career insight most people miss: Bill Gurley on fascination & the dream - Link

Richard Hamming: you and your research - Paul Graham - Link

 Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

What does the post-war future of the US dollar look like? Brett Johnson - Link

How to fix your life in 1 day - Link

Dan Koe’s Purpose and Profit: Discovering your Life’s Purpose - Link

De-secularize your life - Jonathan Pageau - Link

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at UT Austin - link

There’s never been an investment like the investment in railroads! - Paul Graham

“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.” - Ayn Rand

“History is seasonal, and winter is coming.” ― William Strauss, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

“To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can't do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that's impossible unless we fix crime.” ― William Strauss, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

“A Fourth Turning lends people of all ages what is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to heal (or destroy) the very heart of the republic.”― William Strauss, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

Capturing the zeitgeist is a difficult task, but the pulse of the moment is unmistakable. I see a country defined by a profound sense of anger on all sides—a sense that the social contract hasn’t just been stretched, but shredded. I see the betrayal: honest, law-abiding citizens who pay their fair share only to watch fraud continue while they shoulder the bill. I see the disinherited: a generation locked out of the American dream, working harder than ever yet unable to afford a home in a market that has outpaced their reach. I see weakness masquerading as leadership on both sides of the aisle—politicians who talk of justice while waste, fraud, and abuse go unabated. I see a generation buried by the cost of "progress," drowning in healthcare and student loan debt. I see a prevailing sense that the big levers of the world—globalization, macroeconomics, and technology—are being controlled by invisible and untouchable powers to the detriment of the common American.

In all of this, I see a loss of agency by the common man. Is there any wonder that the result has been pure, unfettered anger? We treat these outcomes as economic or political failures, but they are not. They are moral failures. All of these outcomes are symptoms of a deeper issue: our society has lost the ability to tell the truth, and when the truth is hidden, something less than the truth takes its place. Instead, we’ve become accustomed to avoiding hard confrontations when lies are fed to the public for "the greater good."  We are fed a diet of permanent crises—from the War on Terror to Covid lockdowns, from the War on Poverty to promises of ‘free’ healthcare, education, you name it. Always a crisis, but never a solution. These are marketed by those promising outcomes that never arrive while we are buried in debt we can never repay.

As a society, we’ve lost the ability to collectively stand up for what is true. C.S. Lewis warned us about what happens when societies forget how to tell the truth in The Abolition of Man:

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

By mocking honor and objective truth, we have hollowed out moral center of society—the seat of spirit and conscience—leaving us with leaders who lack the courage to do right and a citizenry too exhausted to demand it. We have created a moral vacuum, and we are shocked to find it filled with hatred. But it does not have to be so. How do we restore the moral center and heal our nation? How do we love our neighbor and tell the truth when they neither believe us nor like us? Look to the example of Christ, who loved His neighbor while speaking the truth. We must speak the truth as a physician diagnoses a wound: not to inflict harm, but to heal. Telling the truth is not an act of aggression; it is an act of rescue. If a man is walking toward a cliff, "loving" him doesn't mean remaining silent to avoid a confrontation; it means shouting a warning, even if he hates you for the noise. If our country is heading for a cliff, silence is not politeness—it is complicity.

In an era of shadows, WE THE PEOPLE must become the light. WE THE PEOPLE must stand for the timeless truths that built Western Society—not because they are old, but because they are true. WE THE PEOPLE must demand accountability from the halls of power, but we must first restore it in our own homes and hearts. Most importantly, WE THE PEOPLE must speak the truth—not merely to win an argument, but to show genuine love for our neighbor, our community, and our country.  Our agency is not a gift from government; it is a God given right recognized by our forefathers in the Declaration of Independence: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is time WE THE PEOPLE exercise our agency and choose to be the architects of a future built on HONOR, INTEGRITY, and TRUTH for the sake of the generations to come.

Investor’s Corner

30 years - Reflection on 10 attributes of great investors - Link

The prison of financial mediocrity - Link

Permanent Equity 2025 letter - Link

A look at what post-dollar economics looks like with Luke Gorman and Balaji Srinivasan - Link

Technology Corner

Agentic Design Patterns: a hands-on guide to building intelligent systems - Link

Questions on stack overflow have collapsed since the dawn of LLM’s - Link

The house you thought was empty - LLM’s are beginning to ‘think’ - Link

Shipping code at inference speed - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

Communism’s cost, visualized - link

Yes, the earliest Christians did call upon the Mother of God - Link

Interim report on January 6th - Link

“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.” - Ayn Rand

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A (re)introduction to Circle of Competence

For those who are new to my (somewhat) regular newsletter, my name is Benton Moss and I am a husband, a father, a business owner, and a Catholic. I am a North Carolina native and moved back to my hometown 5 years ago to run a real estate services business I bought during COVID. 

My background is in real estate and finance (hence the newsletter’s name), but I also love to read history, theology, politics, economics, finance, and about specific business leaders. I believe a multidisciplinary approach to learning a la Charlie Munger is the single most important thing one can do to get ahead in life. All good things flow out of a constant curiosity that is never satiated.

I started Circle of Competence in 2018 with the sole goal of sharing what I am learning - good reads, good charts, and my observations on them. Over the last 7 years, I have connected with hundreds of smart investors, entrepreneurs, and business leaders through the simple act of sharing. 

Drop me a line and let’s connect. Let’s get on with business shall we?

More questions than answers

2025 left me with more questions than answers. I have (a lot of) thoughts on each of these questions below, but I’ve selected a link or two that is of interest for each to be brief.  I am constantly updating my theory on how the future unfolds based on new information, so if you have strong opinions on any questions below, I’d love to hear from you!

1. What happens as the world inevitably moves away from a global dollar reserve currency?

   1. see this Link - I believe the only two possibilities are real assets and crypto as stores of the value in the future. What am I missing? 

2. What happens to society, to the labor force, and to the economy as a whole as AI becomes ubiquitous and begins to dissolve the foundations of knowledge work? 

   1. See this link - knowing what to do (what question to ask) will be more important than knowing how to do it.

   2. see this Link on preparing for the inevitable replacement of knowledge work and finding purpose apart from career identity.

3. What happens when the large model companies decide to remove the guardrails preventing their models from generating goals and allowing for automatic self-improvement? Will AI ‘escape the lab’ then?

   1. No idea.

4. What is the role of religion in the coming AI age?

   1. See this link for Pope Leo’s address to a conference of Catholic Research Universities on AI

   2. See this link for the Magisterium’s own AI trained on Scripture, Church teachings, and Church Fathers’ collective writings. Pretty amazing use of LLM technology!

5. ​What is the future of our republic? Are we a late stage Roman republic with barbarians at the gate, on our way to dissolving into fractious city states and becoming another ruin of history? Or are we bound for cyclical rebirth like the various Chinese dynasties’ history of birth, death, and rebirth? i.e will our constitution withstand even the most gnarly abuses of governance and a failing currency until a rebirth of American liberty prevails?

   1. See this link for Niall Ferguson’s lecture on the future of the West.

   2. see this link for Dan Wang’s take on how China is waiting for the US to simply collapse.

6. What is the future of Europe given the immigration and cultural situation there? Side question - has there ever been a society in world history with completely open borders that sustained greatness for a long period of time?

   1.  See this link for a long form discussion with Hungary PM Viktor Orban

7. What does the future of education look like when you have the world's greatest teacher at your fingertips with Gemini, Claude, etc. (asking for my kids)? Side note - what should we be coaching your kids to be when they grow up? 

   1. No idea what college or even K12 looks like in 10+ years. But I guarantee it will be very different than it looks today, and hopefully public education will be just one path among many, and hopefully it will be a much smaller % of tax outlays and public spending. 

   2. My thought on the side question - teach kids to be builders. We have to know how to build things. Don’t care what the thing is, just need to know how to critically think in systems to build things. Repetitive task oriented jobs - especially knowledge work - will be gone in 10 years.

8. Is there a catalyst to reverse the declining birth rate in the developed world? And what does a population bust look like societally, economically, and politically?

   1.  See this link for what the future looks like without a birth rate revival - the great robotic handoff

9. Are we on a glide path towards WW3 between the liberal west and more top down style governments? 

   1. See this link on how one professor sees the US and China on a glide path to WW3 

   2. See this link for policies Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer propose to avoid WW3

Investor’s Corner

Long thread on GE’s Aerospace business and its business fundamentals - Link

Scott Bessent: Fixing the fed, Tariffs for national security, solving affordability in 2026 - Link

Imagine a country where the monetary system fails. What is the real estate worth in that country? Link

Peak performance studied: multidisciplinary learning trumps specialization over the long run - Link

Stan Druckenmiller’s Q3 updated portfolio - Link

Copart is starting to look attractive at current valuations - Link

Chris Hohn’s 3 qualities he looks for in a business - Link

Is it a bubble? Howard Marks’ latest memo - Link

Energy Predictions 2025 - Casey Handmer’s predictions - Link

Technology Corner

How to navigate the end of work as we know it - Link

Steam, Steel, and Infinite Minds - Link

Patrick O’Shaughnessy interviews Gavin Baker on the AI boom - Link

Big Ideas 2026 - a16z - Link

Google’s stock investment portfolio revealed. - Link

Jensen Huang: ‘Smart’ just became worthless. Learn to live in poorly defined spaces or you will be replaced. - Link

Stanford Medical study shows that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines caused Myocarditis - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

The making of an elite: Japanese Christians in a 99% non-Christian society - Link

Trump Administration’s national security strategy document - Link

the Three Worlds of Evangelicalism - Link

There was no federal income tax the first 137 years in America was a country. Everything changed in 1913 with The Federal Reserve Act & 16th Amendment (Income Tax). - Link

We are repaganizing - Link

How globalism led to tribalism - link

Ben Franklin’s 13 virtues are worth keeping at the forefront!

“Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.”

”The insurance industry, however, appears more vulnerable, given, as noted, PE sponsors have been acquiring insurance companies and using their investment books as dumping grounds for their toxic waste. Even unaligned insurance companies though have often been as guilty as pension funds and endowments in “reaching for yield” and over-allocating to alts in an effort to compensate for lower interest rates – particularly during the 2010s. Insurers are leveraged and regulated institutions, and in a bust scenario, I would not be surprised if at least one meaningful insurer needs to be recapitalized as a result of large, unanticipated losses in PE/PC and other structured credit products.” - Link

The great demographic “handoff"

I’ve been following two simultaneous macro trends that seem to have a high possibility of merging in the coming decades. The first is the massive decline in birth rates across virtually every developed economy worldwide. The second is the burgeoning use of AI to power, train, and animate robots that are actually helpful in doing things for the average human.

The question I’m asking myself is this: what does the world look like when the population stagnates, then ages, then the demographic pyramid inverts? I.e. when there are more people to take care of than caretakers available (from a medical, tax base, labor base, production base standpoint, etc.). More and more, I am starting to believe the future will be shaped less by human labor and more by artificial labor (robotics). A global labor scarcity driven by declining birth rates will accelerate and render the rise of the robots inevitable. I call this the great demographic handoff.

My thesis is that human effort will increasingly shift toward more creative roles, while machines handle all the chores of growth. In the short term, it could be very painful, particularly for highly trained white collar professionals who have spent their whole career training in their field, only to be bested by an artificial superintelligence overnight. In the long run, those professionals will reallocate their intellect to less specialized niches and higher level creative roles because that is all that will be left for humans to do. 

So, if these two super tsunamis can be seen from afar, what does it mean for an investor? To start, I believe the sheer scale of this replacement necessitates massive infrastructure investment in three core pillars. The billions of new robotic laborers cannot function without an immense, high-speed, and intelligent support system. I can imagine three core investment opportunities arising from this dependency: more electrons, more chips, and better connectivity. 

ELECTRONS: Every mobile bot, charging station, and data center requires dense, reliable power. The existing electrical grid and battery technology must be entirely re-architected to support a perpetually "on" machine workforce. This will include grid modernization (smart grid technology, advanced transformers), utility-scale storage, and more advanced battery chemistries (high-density, long-life lithium-ion and solid-state solutions), not to mention a MASSIVE amount of compute for both training and inference. This leads me to the next pillar.

CHIPS: For a robot to navigate a warehouse or assist an elderly person, it must make real-time decisions without waiting for a cloud server’s response. Increasingly, just like Tesla’s self-driving car systems, real-time processing will happen on the device, i.e. "edge" compute. This will require highly efficient, low-power chips (ASICs, specialized NPUs, and efficient GPUs) optimized for autonomous action and actuating robotic members, and further development of LIDAR/3D Vision Systems for robotic perception. 

CONNECTIVITY: As robots operate both independently and also in coordinated fleets (autonomous vehicles, synchronized service bots, manufacturing and production lines), they require latency-free communication between each other and their central management systems. This will require next generation connectivity devices and systems including post-5G research and infrastructure, advanced RF components, and network virtualization solutions built to handle massive device density and ultra-low latency requirements that exceed today's 5G capabilities.

These three pillars represent thematic categories where I will be spending a lot more time learning, reading, and looking for potential investment ideas in the public markets. As a real estate investor, I also think that these twin themes (demographics and robotics) will lead to major changes in how and where people live, work, and play. I will cover the possible effects on real estate markets in the near future. 

Wrapping up, my thesis is simple. The demographic decline is a near certainty without some external shock and a massive catalyst for political, economic, and financial changes ahead. Robotic labor is the inevitable solution. Investing in the leading companies providing the underlying power, processing, and connectivity infrastructure will be the most direct path to capturing the economic value created by this generational handoff. 

Investor’s Corner

6 Non-Tech Companies with Exceptional Long-Term Potential - Link

Interesting stocks near 52 week low - Link

10 high conviction ideas from Q3 investor letters - Link

China property crisis alert: Vanke, once the largest real-estate developer in the middling kingdom, has seen its USD bonds plunge 60% this week, falling to record lows - Link

Coatue’s public markets outlook - Link

Praetorian Capital - 3Q letter to investors - on the AI Bubble - Link

How private equity is dumping their losers into insurance portfolios and policy holders - Link

Technology Corner

The handoff to bots - Link

The Thinking Game - full documentary on DeepMind - Link

LLMs are the new disk drives: commodity infrastructure you hot-swap for whoever’s cheapest + best - Link

This is the AI revolution in a nutshell: Only ~10% of the committed data center build outs are actually underway - Link

$ADBE starting to look cheap and interesting - Link

Open source models lag state of the art models by only 3 months on average - Link

Elon Musk: A Different Conversation w/ Nikhil Kamath - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

Christian Ownership Maximalism - Link

Birth Rate Collapse & Economic Utility of a Birth - Link

Global Depression Is Coming Sooner Than Expected || Peter Zeihan - Link

The paradox of choosing imperialism vs. neutrality as a nation - Link

European civilization could disappear within the next 20 years if the continent fails to overcome its political divisions and reform its migration and demographic policies. Link

Understanding Israel’s high birth rate - Link

Are the Catholic and Orthodox church headed to reunification? - Link

In his Summa Theologiae, St Thomas Aquinas laid out one of the most charitable yet practical arguments concerning immigration that effectively shaped the West for almost 1,000 years. Link

Charts of the Week

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““Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

― G.K. Chesterton

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The Paradox of Progress: The Living Room vs. The Laboratory 

The modern man, in his feverish zeal for novelty, has made a most curious error: he has mistaken the living room for the laboratory. He holds that because a motorcar should be redesigned annually, the marriage vows should be equally as fluid. This is the central paradox of our age: the belief that all change is equally virtuous, and that “innovation” is a magic word that justifies the perpetual shattering of things both mechanical and moral. We must, with a hearty dose of common sense, establish a necessary distinction between the technology of a nation that must be allowed to innovate, and the morality that must, if the nation is to survive, stand perfectly still.

Innovation in science, technology, and industry is the natural function of an energetic, productive people. We build ever-faster vehicles, for the simple reason that if one is to move, it may as well move well. The key to technological progress is that change is cumulative: the steam engine improved the wheel, and the microchip improved the steam engine. Here, speed is a virtue, for here we deal with means not ends— tools designed to overcome material obstacles in our world. 

But when this same fever of disruption turns to culture and social morals, it becomes suicidal. Culture is not the means, but the end. It is the frame of the portrait, not the pigment used to paint it. A nation that constantly changes its traditions is like a man who, having finally built his house, immediately starts removing the foundation in favor of a newer, more stylish hole in the ground. The loftiest ideals of a nation are rooted in what it refuses to change: its identity is consistency in practice over time. If we tear down the cultural artifices of our nation—the stable institutions and handed-down traditions—we have not innovated, but merely sawn off the branch upon which we sit. See, culture is cumulative too. But innovation in the cultural space is not actual innovation, but immolation of the past, an unmooring from the deep foundations. 

The revolutionaries of the cultural market preach that all traditions are dead weight. They imagine that a society can be built upon mere individual expression, floating happily in a social void. But a society that lacks a shared story is merely a crowd, and a crowd is easily turned into a mob. The only way to counter the dizzying fragmentation of modern life is by a return to the very pillars we have been encouraged to abandon.

We need, first off, a robust recovery of traditional Christian values. These values are not a quaint relic of the past; they are the ancient, hard-won instructions for how human beings may best exist in a shared space. They furnish the vertical relationship with transcendence, which alone prevents men from collapsing into horizontal squabbles over fleeting, earthly trifles. 

 Second, we must defend the all-important freedom of expression and debate. If a culture is strong, it can survive, even enjoy, the most vigorous debate about its virtues, whereas a weak, frightened, or newly-minted ideology must always resort to stamping out the counterargument (Critical Theory anyone?). The noise of debate is the sound of a free, healthy culture—let us welcome the noise. As Augustine once said, Truth is like a lion, just let it loose.

Finally, we must recognize that the most vital cultural institution is the family. The family is the smallest democracy and the oldest anarchy, yet it is where tradition is passed on, not by law or lecture, but by the rhythm of custom. It is the unbreakable unit of continuity. If we lose the family, we have lost the nation, regardless of how fast our processors run or how many new rockets we send to space.

The scientist must invent the future; it is their high and necessary calling. But let the rest of us, with an unbroken determination, conserve the past. For we do not defend old things because they are old, but because they are wise. A nation that knows where it is going must first know where it is—and where it came from. The task is not to halt technological progress, but to shore up the cultural foundations so that we may go ever higher as a nation and as a people. Failure to do so will result in a Roman style decline of moral decay, monetary debasement, and cultural decline. One can only hope we are not too late. 

Investor’s Corner

Russell Napier, "Money Creation in Peace and  War". - Link 

Investing on the Front Lines of the AI Arms Race | Nathan Benaich  - Link

National apartment rents fell -0.31% MoM in October, marking the steepest October decrease in over 15 years. - Link

655 US large companies have gone bankrupt year-to-date, the highest number in 15 years. - Link

Buffett’s last letter as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway - Link

Foreclosures are now up 20% from last year as Americans struggle to pay mortgages and rising costs. - Link

U.S. Homebuyer affordability in 2025 is near its worst level on record. Link

US Shale’s next revolution should worry OPEC - Link

Technology Corner

Google TPU’s are headed to SPACE - Link

David Sacks and Andreessen & Horowitz: How America Wins the AI Race Against China - Link

Google Cloud's CTO on their agentic AI plans | TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 - Link

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on the State of AI - Link

Gemini continues to gain market share, now at 13.7% up from 12.9% a month ago and this is even before we got Gemini 3.0. (which will come out before end of year). - Link

A 26-year-old PwC data scientist who built AI agents for Fortune 500 clients won first place in a companywide AI hackathon in October, presenting to 70,000 employees. Two hours later, PwC laid him off. - Link

Google's 7 and 8 years old TPUs are still seeing 100% utilization says Amin Vahdat, GP and GM of AI and Infrastructure at Google Cloud. - Link

Dwarkesh on AI Winter vs. AI Explosion - a look at CAPEX spend trends - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

3 Things Christians Must Do to Rebuild Culture (Touchstone talk) | Jonathan Pageau - Link

Microschooling - a new trend with old roots - Link

What Happens When Social Trust Collapses? | Peter Atwater - Link

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Disclosure - Long Google

6000 years of world history in one picture - Link

The median age of a first-time homebuyer in the US has surged to a record 40 years old. - Link

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Total visitor count to Las Vegas is down another -9% in 2025. Link

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“The US manufacturing cycle is gaining traction. With nearly 200 factory completions since mid-2023 and a $590 billion pipeline led by $5 billion-plus megaprojects, advanced manufacturing is set to be a durable growth engine for the US economy…” - Apollo Global

Demographics Aren’t Destiny — They’re the Map of Where We’ve Been — A reflection on my hometown

In the grand parade of cities, one hears often that “demographics are destiny.” But I would suggest that demographics are less destiny than memory—the scorecard of past choices, the echo of commitments, and the inventory of possibility. Destiny comes not from numbers alone, but from what we choose to become in spite of them. 

As Peter Thiel would say, I am neither an optimist or a pessimist - I am a realist. 

Optimists believe good things happen, inevitably. 

Pessimists believe bad things happen, inevitably. 

Realists take action. 

Let us consider Rocky Mount, NC — a small city uniquely located on the crossroads of I-95 and I-64/I-87, one of the rare small cities in America where the North-South artery of the Eastern Seaboard meets a gateway to the entire Mid-Atlantic and beyond. We live in a place positioned not at the edge of civilization, but at a hinge point of opportunity. And yet, we are not a “boomtown.” We are, likewise, not a ghost town. We are something else - we are a resilient town.

For decades, Rocky Mount has weathered mill closures, recessions, natural disasters, and the quiet draining effect of urban migration. And yet our population has not collapsed. It has held. Steady. Stable. Rooted.

Stability, in an age of constant flux, is not stagnation but survival. It is the city’s way of stating “We have been tested — and we remain.”

What do demographics tell us? They tell us we are a city of workers, families, dreamers, and builders. They tell us where people have chosen to stay, where newcomers have hesitated, where the economy has rewarded some and not yet others. Demographics are not prophecies — they are a mirror of the choices we have already made.

If demographics were truly destiny, then Pittsburgh would still be a city of steel smoke and soot. Instead, it reinvented itself as a hub of robotics, medicine, and technology. 

If stability meant inertia, Greenville, South Carolina would never have experienced the transformation from a declining textile town into one of the Southeast’s most celebrated mid-sized success stories.

What changed in those places was not the past — it was the decision to outgrow it.

Demographics reveal the soil — destiny is what we choose to plant next.

So what of Rocky Mount? We sit at the crossing of commerce. We are within one day’s trucking distance of 70% of the U.S. population. Our housing is affordable when so many cities are choking on their own costs. We have a growing investment in downtown revitalization, logistics, advanced manufacturing, solar energy, culinary culture, and the arts. We are increasingly telling our own story again, not waiting for someone else to explain us.

To move forward, we must choose:

✅ To leverage our geographic advantage rather than merely admire it.

✅ To retain young talent not by pleading with them to stay, but by building something they want to belong to.

✅ To attract investment by becoming a city whose momentum comes from within and beckons those outside to join in.

✅ To tell a story not about what left us, but about what is coming.

This does not mean denying our history, our trajectory, our demographics. 

For a long while, Rocky Mount has stood firm — now we must step forward.

GK Chesterton once quipped: “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”

Rocky Mount is a small town of small wonders — location, grit, resilience, a reawakening downtown, and people who still greet you by name. 

Demographics tell us where we’ve been. Destiny is determined by what we decide to do next.

We were once the city on the rise, and we can be again. Rocky Mount, now is the time to choose a brighter future, and believe that our next chapter can be larger than our last.

PS - Thank you to Ben Tobin at Triangle Business Journal who challenged me recently to think about demographics of our region. Ben, this is my slightly more thought-out response.

PPS - Yes, our city has short term financial challenges. This too shall pass. Ask not what your city can do for you, but what you can do for your city.

Investor Corner

Howard Hughes Holdings (NYSE: $HHH) 2025 Shareholder Meeting - Link

Margin debt is at all time highs - Link

AI Debt reflects a record 14% of Investment Grade Corporate Bond Index - Link

Harry Kupperman exposes flaws to AI Boom - Link

The AI bubble has spawned an energy bubble where zero-revenue companies have ballooned to over $45 billion in collective value based on hopes that tech companies will eventually buy their non-existent power. - Link

RCLCO’s 2025 CRE C Suite Outlook - Link

Howard Marks selling his remaining Oaktree stake - top ticking it again? Link

Citadel’s Griffin Calls Rush to Gold as Safer Asset ‘Concerning’ (full interview) - Link

39 of the top 50 US metros have seen month-over-month housing price declines for the first time in history, per Redfin. - Link

Technology Corner

The State of AI Report - Link

China Is Winning the Race for AI Robots - Link

Is the AI boom waning? Two Charts - Link

MIT just built an AI that can rewrite its own code to get smarter. - Link

Social media time is SHRINKING for the first time in HISTORY, and young people are leading the pullback. Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

For how long can China play the “rare earths card”? - Link

Convergence between US And China’s foreign policy initiatives - Link

The US just posted a massive surplus of +$198 Billion for the month of September. Link

Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson and Stephen Kotkin: Three Historians debate the era of Trump - Link

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“The US manufacturing cycle is gaining traction. With nearly 200 factory completions since mid-2023 and a $590 billion pipeline led by $5 billion-plus megaprojects, advanced manufacturing is set to be a durable growth engine for the US economy…” - Apollo Global

Demographics Aren’t Destiny — They’re the Map of Where We’ve Been — A reflection on my hometown

In the grand parade of cities, one hears often that “demographics are destiny.” But I would suggest that demographics are less destiny than memory—the scorecard of past choices, the echo of commitments, and the inventory of possibility. Destiny comes not from numbers alone, but from what we choose to become in spite of them. 

As Peter Thiel would say, I am neither an optimist or a pessimist - I am a realist. 

Optimists believe good things happen, inevitably. 

Pessimists believe bad things happen, inevitably. 

Realists take action. 

Let us consider Rocky Mount, NC — a small city uniquely located on the crossroads of I-95 and I-64/I-87, one of the rare small cities in America where the North-South artery of the Eastern Seaboard meets a gateway to the entire Mid-Atlantic and beyond. We live in a place positioned not at the edge of civilization, but at a hinge point of opportunity. And yet, we are not a “boomtown.” We are, likewise, not a ghost town. We are something else - we are a resilient town.

For decades, Rocky Mount has weathered mill closures, recessions, natural disasters, and the quiet draining effect of urban migration. And yet our population has not collapsed. It has held. Steady. Stable. Rooted.

Stability, in an age of constant flux, is not stagnation but survival. It is the city’s way of stating “We have been tested — and we remain.”

What do demographics tell us? They tell us we are a city of workers, families, dreamers, and builders. They tell us where people have chosen to stay, where newcomers have hesitated, where the economy has rewarded some and not yet others. Demographics are not prophecies — they are a mirror of the choices we have already made.

If demographics were truly destiny, then Pittsburgh would still be a city of steel smoke and soot. Instead, it reinvented itself as a hub of robotics, medicine, and technology. 

If stability meant inertia, Greenville, South Carolina would never have experienced the transformation from a declining textile town into one of the Southeast’s most celebrated mid-sized success stories.

What changed in those places was not the past — it was the decision to outgrow it.

Demographics reveal the soil — destiny is what we choose to plant next.

So what of Rocky Mount? We sit at the crossing of commerce. We are within one day’s trucking distance of 70% of the U.S. population. Our housing is affordable when so many cities are choking on their own costs. We have a growing investment in downtown revitalization, logistics, advanced manufacturing, solar energy, culinary culture, and the arts. We are increasingly telling our own story again, not waiting for someone else to explain us.

To move forward, we must choose:

✅ To leverage our geographic advantage rather than merely admire it.

✅ To retain young talent not by pleading with them to stay, but by building something they want to belong to.

✅ To attract investment by becoming a city whose momentum comes from within and beckons those outside to join in.

✅ To tell a story not about what left us, but about what is coming.

This does not mean denying our history, our trajectory, our demographics. 

For a long while, Rocky Mount has stood firm — now we must step forward.

GK Chesterton once quipped: “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”

Rocky Mount is a small town of small wonders — location, grit, resilience, a reawakening downtown, and people who still greet you by name. 

Demographics tell us where we’ve been. Destiny is determined by what we decide to do next.

We were once the city on the rise, and we can be again. Rocky Mount, now is the time to choose a brighter future, and believe that our next chapter can be larger than our last.

PS - Thank you to Ben Tobin at Triangle Business Journal who challenged me recently to think about demographics of our region. Ben, this is my slightly more thought-out response.

PPS - Yes, our city has short term financial challenges. This too shall pass. Ask not what your city can do for you, but what you can do for your city.

Investor Corner

Howard Hughes Holdings (NYSE: $HHH) 2025 Shareholder Meeting - Link

Margin debt is at all time highs - Link

AI Debt reflects a record 14% of Investment Grade Corporate Bond Index - Link

Harry Kupperman exposes flaws to AI Boom - Link

The AI bubble has spawned an energy bubble where zero-revenue companies have ballooned to over $45 billion in collective value based on hopes that tech companies will eventually buy their non-existent power. - Link

RCLCO’s 2025 CRE C Suite Outlook - Link

Howard Marks selling his remaining Oaktree stake - top ticking it again? Link

Citadel’s Griffin Calls Rush to Gold as Safer Asset ‘Concerning’ (full interview) - Link

39 of the top 50 US metros have seen month-over-month housing price declines for the first time in history, per Redfin. - Link

Technology Corner

The State of AI Report - Link

China Is Winning the Race for AI Robots - Link

Is the AI boom waning? Two Charts - Link

MIT just built an AI that can rewrite its own code to get smarter. - Link

Social media time is SHRINKING for the first time in HISTORY, and young people are leading the pullback. Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

For how long can China play the “rare earths card”? - Link

Convergence between US And China’s foreign policy initiatives - Link

The US just posted a massive surplus of +$198 Billion for the month of September. Link

Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson and Stephen Kotkin: Three Historians debate the era of Trump - Link

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“The point of our lives is not comfort,  security, or even happiness; but training.  Not fulfillment but preparation.  [This world] is a lousy home, but it’s a fine gymnasium.” Dr. Peter Kreeft - Making Sense of Suffering

“"Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" “A Republic - If you can keep it!” - Elizabeth Powel to Benjamin Franklin, Franklin’s response

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, summarizing Voltaire’s views on Free Speech

A Republic, If We Can Keep It: Donald Trump and the Myth of the Monarch

Benjamin Franklin once said we had been given “a republic, if you can keep it.” It was not a jest but a prophecy. A republic is a delicate thing, forever teetering between the mob and the monarch, forever in danger of collapsing into tyranny or dissolving into chaos. Ours is not a democracy in the way the Greeks understood it, nor is it a throne. It is a contraption of checks and balances, a perpetual balancing act where three branches of government are set against one another like wrestlers, each preventing the others from running away with the match.

And it is precisely this arrangement that makes the frequent accusation that Donald Trump is a monarch—or worse, a fascist—so peculiar. For if he is a king, he is a remarkably shackled one. If he is a fascist, he is one presiding over the most obstinate opposition, the most litigious press, and the most opinionated Congress imaginable. The man cannot even build a wall without twelve lawsuits and seventeen court orders arriving on his desk before breakfast.

Machiavelli, who knew something of republics (and of their collapse), taught that governments cycle endlessly: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes anarchy, and then some weary people cry out for a strongman to start the cycle over again. The Founders knew this well, and so they designed a system that was neither monarchy nor mob rule. Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 that pure democracies are “spectacles of turbulence and contention” and have “ever been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Thus they gave us representation, law, and separation of powers — not so much a machine as a living organism, with each part keeping the others honest.

Consider what happens when presidents really do try to overreach. Richard Nixon tried to lock away the evidence of his own wrongdoing; the Supreme Court said no, Congress said no, and Nixon went back to California in disgrace. Ronald Reagan’s administration, in a cloak-and-dagger mood, funneled money to Nicaraguan rebels against Congress’s express command. The scandal was dragged into the light of day by televised hearings; men were tried, convicted, and shamed. Reagan’s ratings sank. The republic did what republics are supposed to do: it chastened its rulers without breaking its frame.

Donald Trump has been tested by this same machinery, and found not above it. He has been impeached twice — the very definition of constitutional accountability. He has been sued, subpoenaed, and second-guessed by his own appointees. After the 2020 election, he tried every legal avenue to contest the result, and when those avenues failed, he left office. The transfer of power happened, messy and noisy but intact. That is not how monarchy behaves; it is how a republic, with all its bumps and bruises, survives its storms.

Fascism, properly speaking, means the abolition of opposition, the regimentation of society, and usually a nice war of conquest to go along with it. Trump did none of these things. He did not outlaw rival parties; he did not cancel elections; he did not put the press under state control. Niall Ferguson quipped that the only war Trump really wanted was a trade war. One may dislike his manners or his policies, but those are the quarrels of democracy, not the bootsteps of dictatorship.

The death of Charlie Kirk has put the nation on edge, and the temptation on all sides is to shout for more power—more mob rule on one hand, more crackdowns on the other. But the genius of the republic is that it belongs to neither side; it belongs to the Constitution. If Trump is dangerous, so is every president, for the presidency is always perched precariously between monarchy and mere popularity contest.

Franklin’s challenge remains: we have a republic, if we can keep it. The keeping requires courage — courage to resist both tyranny and anarchy, courage to argue and vote and stand firm. Trump is not a king. He is, like every president before him, a temporary steward of a very old experiment. The question is not whether he will keep it, but whether we will.

Investor’s Corner

Charlie Munger: investment selection accounts for 99% of your returns - Link

Michael Burry - the moment your country’s interest payments surpass your defense spending, you’re toast - Link

Brookfield CEO - “there are too many PE firms” - Link

Blackstone's Jon Gray on the Economy, AI as “The Main Thing,” and Where to Invest Now | Sept. '25 - Link

$30 billion in private credit CLOs already this year, surpassing last year’s pace - Link

The oil-to-gold ratio is now 6 standard deviations above its long-term trend. Link

Dev Kantesaria calls ASML the most predictable way to invest in the AI cycle - Link 

Here are 10 of the most profitable business models in the world - Link

Technology Corner

Investment in information processing took credit for 92% of GDP growth in H1 - Link

Will AGI replace us or will the economy be just fine? Link 

Visa on the growth of stablecoins: "In the space of several months, we've quadrupled the amount of volume that we're doing on the stablecoin settlement space." - Link

Ben Horowitz on AI, Culture, and the Future of Innovation | Columbia Business School - Link

In stablecoins we trust? Chicago Booth Review - Link

Balaji Srinivasan | The Network State | Renegade Futurism 2025 - Link

The ENTIRE AI Value Chain - & the Stocks Powering It - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

The 9/11 Files: The CIA’s secret mission gone wrong - Link

Charlie Kirk + Q&A at Cambridge Union - Link

Niall Ferguson on Preserving Liberty After Charlie Kirk's Senseless Murder - Link

Jesus DID Claim to be God: The Evidence - Alex O’Connor w/ Dr. Brant Pitre - Link

Did the Sun Ever Set on the Age of Empire? (with Niall Ferguson and Nathan Gardels) - Link

Return of the God Hypothesis in Cambridge with Stephen Meyer - Link

Charts Corner

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“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Amendment I, The U.S. Constitution

“Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech.”

Benjamin Franklin, Letter from Silence Dogood, printed in The New England Courant, July 9, 1722

“Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”

Thomas Jefferson

“In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to publick traytors.”

Benjamin Franklin, Dogood Papers, written by Franklin in 1722, at the age of sixteen

Freedom of speech is not merely the right to say what is popular, agreeable, or comfortable — it is the obligation to defend the right of others to speak even when what they say is offensive, repulsive, or factually incorrect. True freedom of speech means tolerating words that may make us angry, upset, or uncomfortable, because the alternative is far more dangerous: a society where only approved speech is permitted.

We must defend freedom of speech vigorously — or the very foundation of our nation will begin to dissolve. This means defending others’ rights to speak especially when they disagree with us. The real test of free speech is not in protecting the voices that echo our own views, but in protecting those that challenge, provoke, or even offend us.

Central to this principle is the freedom to debate ideas on their merit without taking personal offense. If every disagreement becomes an attack on one’s dignity, dialogue collapses into hostility. The health of a free society depends on our ability to divorce someone’s ideas from their worth as a person. Critiquing a belief or argument is not the same as attacking the individual who holds it. When we begin to equate a person’s identity with their ideas, we close off the possibility of persuasion, growth, and mutual understanding.

Freedom of speech must be protected at all costs, because it is the only mechanism by which society moves toward a greater collective truth. Progress is forged in the open marketplace of ideas, where good arguments rise and bad ones are exposed and discarded. Stifling speech may silence offensive voices, but it also silences dissent, innovation, and discovery.

Charlie Kirk has been a lightning rod for controversy — offensive to some, a hero to others. But what matters most is not whether one agrees with him but that he stood for the most important principle in a free nation: the right to speak, to be heard, and to have one’s ideas tested in the public square. Like the ancient saying, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” his life reminds us that those willing to endure criticism, hostility, and even personal cost for the sake of truth sow the seeds for the freedoms future generations will enjoy. With his passing, his life’s work will continue to live on beyond himself as one who defended our nation’s most foundational principle.

Without this freedom, America would cease to be the America envisioned by its founders. Our nation is defined not by unanimity of thought, but by the courage to let ideas clash, trusting that truth will emerge stronger on the other side. The task falls to each of us to carry forward that mission, to debate openly, to defend the right to speak — not just for ourselves, but for those we may most strongly oppose — so that liberty remains the lifeblood of this nation.

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Investor’s Corner

Peter Lynch’s investment checklist - Link

Investing in wide moat businesses - link

Dev Kantesaria’s returns are pretty incredible - Link

Interview between Jim Grant and Dev Kantesaria - Link

Technology Corner

The new status game: longevity - Link

Where is AI taking us? Sam Altman + Vinod Khosla - Link

Cloudy with a loss of spending control - how data centers are endangering state budgets - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

The Fed’s new ‘gain of function’ monetary policy - Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent - Link

How to Save America: Mark Cuban and Tucker Carlson Debate | All-In Summit 2025 - Link

St. Augustine on reading Scripture - Link

Senator Rand Paul on tariffs and a warning for America - Link

Michael Knowles on all things Trump, tariffs, Israel, and why Christianity is making a return in America - Link

The US population could fall for the first time ever in 2025 - Link

A good friend recently asked me what books and investors have shaped my thinking around investing, business building, and personal portfolio construction. It’s a great question because the principles I have learned over time are really a mosaic of lessons, mental models, and frameworks gathered over 10+ years from experience, studying history, and learning from the ‘greats’.

Over time, I’ve built what I call my “Business Vault”: a personal library of material sourced from legendary investors and entrepreneurs. The goal has been simple—to learn how to think clearly, avoid bias, and see opportunities (and risks) with a broader perspective. While experience is a great teacher, the compounded wisdom of others simply can’t be matched. 

This vault isn’t just about investing; it’s about decision-making at every level—whether deploying capital, structuring deals, leading teams, or understanding macroeconomic shifts. Over the years, I’ve pulled lessons from Buffett’s value discipline, Munger’s mental models, Graham’s margin of safety, Dalio’s principles, Bezos’ obsession with customers and long-term thinking, and many, many more. I’ve also learned from builders who scaled businesses in unique industries, teaching me to respect cycles, capitalize on timing, and design structures for resilience.

At the heart of my personal investing philosophy is the idea of investing in durable, compounding assets—whether that’s a great public company, a well-located piece of real estate, or a private business that I operate. The goal is to balance growth and optionality, which has meant holding some cash, owning world-class public businesses, investing heavily in my own ventures, and staying disciplined about valuations and competitive advantages. This mindset is a direct result of over a decade of reading and studying the greats - an ongoing education that blends theory and practice.

Link to Business Vault

In addition to the Business Vault, I have a long list of books I could recommend, but for the sake of brevity, I will try to distill the list to a shortened list that offers the biggest frameworks for how to think about the world.

Ben Graham’s Security Analysis and Intelligent Investor

Ron Chernow’s John Rockefeller and JP Morgan biographies

Naval Ravikant’s Navalmanack

Peter Thiel’s Zero to One

Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power & The Laws of Human Nature

Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People

Robert Cialdini’s Influence - The Psychology of Persuasion

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War

Porter’s Five Forces

Buffett’s Essays to Corporate America

Ray Dalio’s Principles and The Changing World Order - Why Nations Succeed and Fail

Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning

Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanac - the Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger

There are many, many more good books that I could include but these were some of the more formational reads for me. If you have one that you’d recommend, pass it along!

Investor’s Corner

Picks and shovels - a list of companies that support the entire AI infrastructure supply chain - Finding 100 baggers - Link

Downside risk to job growth over the coming months - Apollo - Link

Gold is replacing fiat currencies as the reserve currency - Link

US Shale production is collapsing - Link

The AI profits drought and the lessons of history - Link

Hedge funds are a record short $180B currently - Kobeissi Letter - Link

Technology Corner

Breaking down China’s tech surge - Bill Gurley + Brad Gerstner - Link

Alpha School - a new approach to education based on AI adaptive learning - Link

Emotional [AI] Agents - The Technium essay - Link

There’s a stunning financial problem with data centers - Futurism - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

Poland stands out among European countries as one that stuck to its cultural roots, and now it is paying dividends - Link

Marriage: the bedrock of civilization - Jonathan Pageau - Link

Parents are not their children’s authors - Link

Senator Rand Paul on Tariffs, China, Debt, and a Warning for America - Link

In this week’s Gospel reading (Luke 14:1, 7–14), Jesus observes guests at a banquet choosing the places of honor. He tells them instead to take the lowest seat, teaching that “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” He goes further, urging us to serve those who cannot repay us, for true reward comes from God, not human applause or man’s approval.

This message of humility offers a powerful lens through which we can view Labor Day. Our culture too often celebrates work that is high-profile, lucrative, or glamorous. Much like the banquet guests Jesus observed, we are tempted to measure worth by status, not by service. Today, pause to honor the quiet, humble work that sustains our lives but rarely draws attention—the labor of those who build, maintain, and care for the physical world around us.

Every office, road, school, and home is the product of someone’s skill and sweat. Behind every light switch is an electrician’s expertise; behind every sturdy beam is a carpenter’s precision; behind every cool breeze is a technician’s care. These men and women often labor in silence, not in the “places of honor” but in crawl spaces, trenches, scaffolds, and shop floors.

We rightly celebrate purely intellectual achievements, but we too easily forget that to build something requires as much intellectual horsepower as designing it, just of a more tactile type. There is a deep wisdom in those who make things with their hands, a wisdom that mirrors the Creator’s own artistry.

Jesus’ teaching in Luke’s Gospel reminds us that greatness in the Kingdom of God is not measured by applause or titles but by service. The hardened tradesmen who pour concrete, wire buildings, or maintain our infrastructure live this truth daily. Their reward is not fame; it is the satisfaction of work well done. Work, whether with hands or mind, is a participation in God’s unfolding creation. It is nothing short of holy and is a reflection of the Gospel’s call to humility and service.

So today, if you are one who builds, maintains, repairs, or creates—today is for you.

This Labor Day, may we not only enjoy rest but also recognize the sacredness of labor and the quiet holiness of those who serve.

God Bless America and God Bless our men and women who are building our great nation!

Shale Growth is collapsing - Link

Investor’s Corner

Bed Bath & Bankrupt - the story of $BBBY - Link

Out of the top 200 insider trades over the last week (by value). 0/200 were buy orders. - Link

Pershing Square’s Q2 letter to shareholders - Link

Pricing power is the hallmark of a great business - Link

Q2 hedge fund letters - Security Analysis Reddit - Link

5 commercial real estate trends to watch - Link

Louis Simpson’s investment philosophy he used while turning in 20% returns over 24 years while at Geico - Link

The latest super investor purchases for Q2 - Link

Technology Corner

Six facts about the recent employment effects of artificial intelligence - Link

20 Saas metrics that separate winners from losers in the Saas market - Link

Politics, Philosophy, Theology Corner

The Great Rebalancing: Why Debt, Demographics, and Politics Will Crush Forward returns - Link

Gold is replacing fiat currencies as the reserve currency - Link

“A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.”― Saint Basil

AI Investment: Boom, Bubble, or Breakthrough?

We’ve seen this movie before. Railroads, electrification, the internet—each sparked massive capital cycles long before the payoff was clear. Today’s AI buildout is following that script, with hyperscalers pouring $217 billion in 2024—and an estimated $320 billion in 2025—into GPUs, data centers, and hyperscale compute. Yet the business case is shaky: MIT’s Project NANDA found 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to create measurable value. Most corporate AI spend today fuels tools that act as personal assistants, not engines of transformation.

Shadow AI Is the Real Success Story. While only about 40% of firms have purchased official enterprise LLM subscriptions, employees at over 90% of companies already use AI tools—ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot—on personal accounts to automate large parts of their jobs, often without IT oversight. This “shadow AI economy” has delivered the most tangible ROI to date, showing that AI is quietly reshaping workflows. But these gains aren’t yet the kind of enterprise transformation needed to justify trillion-dollar infrastructure bets - yet.

One of the biggest problems with the AI arms race today is that none of the hyperscalers have a clear Moat. Today’s LLM race is driven more by capital than by unique intellectual property. Whoever can source GPUs, energy, and data infrastructure at the lowest cost will dominate. This is a scale-and-cost game—think Standard Oil’s refining dominance, but with data and energy. The hyperscalers’ strategy is to spend aggressively to achieve platform lock-in, but the sheer pace of hardware obsolescence (training GPUs last under three years) makes this an expensive gamble.

Meanwhile, small language models (SLMs) models running more efficiently on edge devices could rewrite the economics of AI. If inference moves from hyperscale clusters to smartphones, laptops, and local servers, today’s GPU megafarms could become tomorrow’s stranded assets. Open-source communities are also catching up fast, with models that match or exceed proprietary performance at a fraction of the cost. Together, these forces threaten to flatten the hyperscaler capex curve.

Why does this all matter? The implications ripple far beyond AI capex. Energy producers, chip manufacturers, geopolitical negotiations, and data center developers are all riding this capex wave. The easy wins—writing aids, code generation, analytics— have been widely deployed. But the hard use cases—automating supply chains, complex business processes, and enterprise workflows—remain elusive. Much of today’s spending is a moonshot on AGI and market dominance, not a response to proven ROI - yet.

The bottom line is AI is in the midst of a historic investment cycle, but its future will be shaped by cost curves, model efficiency, and where inference happens. Winners will be those who bridge the gap between hype and durable, measurable returns before capital costs catch up. This is a boom with massive potential—but also massive downside risk if the promised transformation doesn’t materialize.

What are your thoughts on the current AI Landscape? Shoot me an email at bmoss@sh-cre.com

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Investor’s Corner

Why is the yield curve steepening? Because of coming Fed cuts and fiscal challenges - Apollo - Link

CMBS issuance surges amid investor demand - Link

Daily data on consumer spending - Apollo - Link

GMO’s quarterly letter - American Unexceptionalism - Link

What the super investors bought and sold in Q2 - Link

Technology Corner

An MIT report finding 95% of AI pilots fail - Link

Politics, Philosophy, and Theology Corner

Tyranny is here - the Church in America must fight back - Link

The rise and fall of English exceptionalism - Link

Steven Sanofsky and Balaji Srinivasan on the future of M&A, tech, and AI - Link

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My view is that buying and holding real estate is not an effective investment strategy in our current economic environment, for a few reasons.

1) Real estate is more interest rate sensitive than it is inflation sensitive, so given our current circumstances it is likely to go down in real terms

2) It is a fixed asset that is easy to tax, which limits its impacts on your ability to diversify

3) Real estate is nailed down, so investing in it makes it more difficult to move money from one place to another

That’s my view, in a nutshell. I’m curious to hear if you agree.

-Ray Dalio

This week I listened to John Rockefeller’s 38 letters to his son and they were full of glimpses into the oil billionaire’s thoughts and business dealings. Rockefeller was a disciplined and visionary entrepreneur who transformed the oil industry by founding Standard Oil, pioneering modern corporate organization, and driving unmatched efficiency. Known for his ruthless competitiveness, he built a near-monopoly while insisting his success reflected God’s providence. Later in life, he became one of history’s greatest philanthropists, giving away over half a billion dollars to education, public health, and scientific research. His legacy remains a paradox of relentless capitalism, transformative generosity, and religious piety.

Here are a few quotes that are worth sharing from the letters:

1. “In my opinion, “excuses” is a mental illness, and people with this serious illness are all losers without exception.”

2. “Only by being able to endure what people cannot bear, can you do what people cannot do.”

3. “Work is the price we pay for enjoying success. Wealth and happiness can only be obtained by hard work.”

4. “Lincoln’s life wrote a great truth: unless you give up, you will not be defeated.”

5. “Too many people overestimate what they lack, but underestimate what they have, and lose the chance to become a winner. This is a tragedy.”

6. “Do not take the first step without thinking about the last step.”

7. “I have been annoyed by my broken shoes until I met a man who has no feet.”

8. “Friendship built on business is far better than a business built on friendship. Be nice to others when you climb up, because you will run into them when you go downhill.”

9. “I admit that we cannot control the direction of the wind, but we can adjust the sail – in other words, choosing our attitude.”

10. “Failure is a good thing as long as it does not become a habit.”

Markets Are Looking Frothy

Valuation metrics across U.S. equities are flashing red, with several measures now exceeding prior bubble peaks. The data suggests investors are paying far more for earnings than at almost any point in history.

• Nasdaq vs. Money Supply: Nasdaq’s market cap is now 145% of U.S. M2 – an all-time high, beyond the dot-com bubble.

• CAPE Ratio: The S&P 500’s 5-year CAPE is ~37, about 55% above its long-term average.

• Buffett Indicator: Total U.S. stock market value is >212% of GDP, far past Warren Buffett’s “danger” zone (~200%).

• Price-to-Book: S&P 500’s P/B at 5.3×, exceeding dot-com era levels (5.1×).

• Concentration Risk: Top 10 S&P companies now make up ~37% of the index, with valuations far above the rest of the market.

• Speculation: Activity in unprofitable/high-multiple stocks has returned to 2021 mania levels, with froth also visible in meme stocks, AI names, and crypto (Bitcoin near $124K).

Private Market Excess

Private capital markets show similar froth, with valuations climbing even as deal activity slows. Venture and growth investors are paying record prices for fewer companies, echoing late-cycle risk-taking.

• Rising Valuations Despite Fewer Deals: Median seed-stage valuation at $16M (+18% YoY), even with deal count down ~28%.

• Mega-Funds: VCs like Andreessen Horowitz raised $7B+ funds, chasing growth and AI.

• Sky-High Exits: Google’s $32B purchase of Wiz set a record for VC-backed M&A.

How I’m Positioned

In light of the prevailing market conditions, I’m balancing participation in equities with liquidity, safe yield, and explicit downside protection. Why? Simple. I will sleep better at night knowing that I am invested in some of the world’s greatest businesses (despite some of them being fully or even slightly overvalued) while maintaining a healthy position in short term treasuries for yield purposes (and minimal duration risk) and a full ATM long-term put option on the S&P. Of course, I may miss a market melt up to some degree, but I should be hedged extremely well if valuations unwind in the next 12 months and should only experience a 2-3% drag on my portfolio should the equity markets grind horizontally or melt up over the next year. Here’s what my personal account (excluding real estate and private investments) looks like from a top down perspective:

• 40% Short-Term Treasuries: ~4.5% risk-free yield, minimal duration risk, flexibility if rates rise.

• 55% Equities (Selective): Concentrated in ~15 durable, high-quality businesses, with tilt toward businesses with high returns on capital and durable moats.

• 5% Cash: Held for liquidity and opportunistic buying power.

• Long-Dated S&P 500 Puts: Portfolio insurance against a broad market drawdown.

Tariff revenue skyrocketed after 1 month of tariffs - US Treasury Department

Investor’s Corner

38 letters from J.D. Rockefeller to his son - Link

Elliott’s thesis on its $5B investment in Honeywell - Link

Investing in a world of permanent stimulus - Vincent Deluard - Link

The calculus of value - Link

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America - Norges Investment Bank - Link

Technology Corner

The state of AI in 2025 - Bessemer Venture Partners - Link

One of our former industrial clients, Vulcan Elements, raised $65M to manufacture rare earth magnets in the USA - Link

Near and dear to me - $6B data center project announced in Tarboro, NC to create 500+ jobs - Link

What would the aftermath after an AI bust look like? Link

Ex Google Exec warns: the next 15 year will be hell - Link

Philosophy, Politics, Theology Corner

Did Vatican II Replace One-Sided Papalism with One-Sided Episcopalism? - Link

WW3 Threat Assessment: Is the West Collapsing? - Diary of a CEO Link

Sen. Eric Schmitt - FBI & DOJ Corruption, How Politicized Judges are Undermining America - Tucker Carlson - Link