If you missed the last two issues:

The Event Horizon - Curious Mind Research Letter 3

A Dynamic Country in a Collapsing World, The Nature of Reality, Living The 100-Year Life, Life’s Great Lessons....

Quotes I Am Thinking About:

"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories ... And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”

- H.G. Wells (English writer)

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”

- Einstein

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

- Thoreau

"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones."

- Keynes

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

- Picasso

A Few Things Worth Checking Out:

A. The Hottest Agent in San Francisco

Noah Shinn is the founder of Instinct, a personal AI assistant that doesn’t have an app. It has a phone number, an email address and a computer, and it gets on with things. It’s invite-only and has spent nothing on marketing. It’s growing about 10% a day, and more than $1 billion a year already passes through it.

It is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation less than a month after raising $250 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.

He spoke to Patrick at Invest Like the Best.

A couple of things I picked up:

• People trust it: Three weeks in, 40% of users have given Instinct a credit card. Once someone shares even one sensitive thing, retention is 80%, which is almost unheard of in consumer tech. Time to the first credit card or first password is how the company measures trust. The trust is also social. Instinct agents can talk to each other, but only inside a “trusted person network.” Your spouse might see everything and a colleague only your work calendar. If someone goes looking for more than you gave them, your Instinct tells you. On the technical side, everything coming in passes through a firewall, and every action goes past a watchdog that runs separately from the agent and has different incentives. So if the model invents a name that doesn’t exist, the watchdog catches it before anything happens.

• The agent’s revenue decides whose side it’s on: Patrick asked what I think is the key question: who pays the assistant? An employee is loyal partly because you pay them. A free agent paid for by advertisers is working for someone else. Noah’s answer is the best line in the conversation. Picture an agent that’s smarter than you, more socially aware and more persuasive, and whose business depends on getting you to buy things. “I just don’t want to build that reality.” So Instinct is free for users and paid for by merchants, the way Apple Pay works. Its design reflects the same thinking. Instinct doesn’t just complete tasks. It works toward higher goals: build trust, keep the user safe, have their back. Most of the time that means doing what you asked, but not always.

• Businesses that live on attention will lose, and those that sell a service will win: Noah went through every digital business he could think of and asked one question: how much of the revenue comes from holding the user’s attention, and how much from delivering the thing itself? Patrick summed it up: “Any product dependent on consumer laziness or inertia is toast.” Instinct will cancel the subscriptions you forgot about, all the way through to the confirmation email, and then tell you how much you saved. Noah thinks it cuts the other way too. When ordering a ride takes zero clicks because your agent already knows your calendar, and dinner is waiting because it knew your flight was late, people use those businesses more.

• The hardest part is buying compute: Noah spends 40% of his time on compute. At the current growth rate of 10% a day, the compute he needs doubles every week. New capacity takes three to four months to arrive, and if you need it urgently you pay 3–4x. Even if growth slowed to 5–8% a day, three or four months of it would mean around 100 million users. Buy 2x and it’s gone in a week. Buy 10x and you might still be short in a month. The bigger point is about how agents work. Coding tools mostly sit idle until you prompt them. Instinct is proactive by nature. It wakes at 6am because you get up at 7, checks your day, decides whether to bother you and goes back to sleep. Most of its work happens without anyone asking. Noah’s guess is that this kind of workload needs orders of magnitude more tokens than anyone has planned for.

Curious Thinking: the demand story for AI infrastructure has mostly been about training and coding. If proactive consumer agents catch on, the next wave of inference demand comes from millions of assistants working in the background, and every order has to be placed months before anyone knows how many will be needed.

B. From GLP to GDP

Four experts sat around a table in Austin for nearly three hours and talked about how not to die. Chris Williamson, who hosts Modern Wisdom, asked the questions. Ben Greenfield has spent well over a decade as the internet’s most committed human guinea pig. Dr Gabrielle Lyon trained in geriatrics and wrote Forever Strong. Her practice rests on the idea that muscle is the organ of longevity. Brigham Buhler founded Ways2Well, a clinic and compounding pharmacy with more than 70,000 patients, and he has spent the last few years lobbying Washington over access to peptides.

The conversation drifted all over the place: peptides, stem cells, hyperbaric chambers, and a light-and-sound lamp designed to make you feel you’re being born. Under all that was a serious argument about GLP-1s, testosterone, and who gets to decide what goes into your body.

• We’re about to swap one epidemic for another: Medicine spent fifty years fighting obesity and mostly lost. GLP-1s are winning that fight in about five, and Lyon says the forecast is 40 to 60 million Americans taking them. The worry is what comes after. The weight comes off fast, protein intake drops, and training stops because patients feel too flat and nauseous to lift. So the muscle goes with the fat. In the panel’s words, we’re going from people who are too big to people who are too frail. Lyon’s line is the one to remember. “Osteoporosis is a pediatric disease with geriatric outcomes.” The muscle and bone you build young is a savings account you draw down for the rest of your life. Greenfield was asked to choose between muscle and VO2 max, and he chose muscle. Failing to outrun a lion is less likely to kill you than a frail step off a kerb.

• A drug that dulls appetite may dull every appetite: GLP-1 receptors are in the brain’s reward circuitry as well as the gut, which is why the drugs are being tested on alcohol and drug addiction. Lyon sees it in her clinic. Some patients get less pleasure from sex, from food and from spending. Early signs suggest libido may rise in men and fall in women. Williamson asked what happens to an economy that runs on wanting things when tens of millions of people take a weekly shot that makes them want less. From GLP to GDP. Nobody knows. For anyone who owns consumer stocks, it’s a question worth keeping in view.

  

• The advice the panel could all agree on is cheap and a bit dull:

  • Lift heavy.

  • Add 10 to 20 second sprints a few times a week.

  • Walk a little faster than feels natural.

  • Eat 1.2 to 1.6 g of protein per kg of body weight.

  • Leave 12 to 16 hours between dinner and breakfast.

As Lyon said, “It doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective.”

A quick one on Testosterone: Lyon’s answer is that for men, testosterone may be the single most revealing number on a blood test. Low levels track with heart disease, diabetes, bone loss and depression.

Curious Thinking: Lift heavy and tell your parents to do the same!

C. Great Leaps in Biological Theory

In 1961 a British biochemist named Peter Mitchell explained how every cell in your body makes its energy. He had no experimental evidence. His colleagues shrugged, so he left Cambridge, set up a lab in a Cornish country house with family money, and spent seventeen years proving himself right. He won the Nobel Prize in 1978.

I think the next century will be about biology not computing. Computing will fade into the background very soon, and what will matter is what we do with it. The most important work for humanity is in biology because the human body is still a mystery.

tells the story of science and discovery in a new essay titled Great Leaps in Biological Theory for . Her question is one investors should care about too. How does anyone see the answer before the evidence exists?

The leaps didn’t come from more data. They came from philosophy, from ideas borrowed elsewhere, and from taking seriously the odd facts everyone else had learned to ignore.

Five big ideas.

• Sometimes you have to believe in the cat before you trip over it: Jeremy Gunawardena says doing biology is like hunting for a black cat in a dark cellar without knowing a cat is there. Mostly you find it by falling over it. A good theory can conjure the cat before the accident. Mitchell proposed that cells make energy by pumping protons across membranes with “not a shred of experimental evidence.” The theory came first and told experimenters where to look.

• The breakthroughs came from philosophy: Mitchell’s thinking grew out of Heraclitus. As a graduate student he invented “statids” (stable structures) and “fluctids” (things in constant flux, like a flame), which combine into a “fluctoid,” like a Bunsen burner. His examiners rejected the thesis as too speculative. It turned out to be a neat description of what he later proposed: a fixed membrane with a stream of protons flowing through it. Niels Jerne, the immunologist, drew on Darwin, R.A. Fisher’s statistics, and Kierkegaard’s reading of Socrates, where learning is really recollection. A germ doesn’t teach the body to make an antibody. The ability was already there. Scientists rarely admit how much their big-picture beliefs steer them. Theories of immunity swung from Darwinian to Lamarckian and back, tracking the fashions in evolutionary biology.

• Pay attention to the facts everyone has learned to ignore: The ruling theory of cell energy predicted a chemical intermediate nobody could find and couldn’t explain why the process needed membranes. The ruling theory of immunity couldn’t explain why antibodies outlasted the germ, why booster shots worked, or why antibodies improved over time. Healthy animals also carried antibodies against things they had never met. Immunologists had seen these for decades and written them off as impossible. Jerne saw them as proof that selection was at work. The clue was hiding in the pile marked “noise.”

• Big ideas are relay races, and being usefully wrong counts: Clonal selection (Your body already carries a vast library of immune cells, each pre-built to recognise one specific target, and when a germ shows up it doesn't teach the body anything new but simply picks out the few cells that already match it and makes them multiply) passed through four people over sixty years. Paul Ehrlich imagined a ready-made repertoire of receptors in the 1890s, then lost confidence in it himself. Jerne revived the idea but had selection acting on antibody molecules when it acts on cells. Macfarlane Burnet called Jerne’s version “attractive, though obviously wrong,” then fixed it. David Talmage made the same fix in a review article. Nobody ever won a Nobel for clonal selection itself, though it underpins immune memory, tolerance and monoclonal antibodies. A wrong idea with the right shape can be worth more than a correct idea with no reach.

• New ideas need somewhere to shelter while they grow up: Mitchell needed his own lab and his own money. Burnet was so unsure of clonal selection that he published it in the obscure Australian Journal of Science, so that “very few people in America or England would see it” if it turned out wrong. Aghayeva asks in a footnote what would have become of Mitchell under the normal grant system. Anyone who has backed a contrarian thesis knows the pattern. Being right early looks exactly like being wrong, until it doesn’t, and it only pays if your capital is patient enough to wait.

Curious Thinking: In biology or in investing, the information edge is mostly gone. Everyone has the same filings, the same transcripts, the same data feeds. What’s left is the interpretive edge, and that comes from the ideas you bring from outside the field. The best investors I know read history, physics, biology, and old philosophy, not because it’s charming but because it gives them a second lens on facts everyone else is looking at through one.

Which takes us to the weirdness premium essay from a few weeks ago.

D. Broken China

In September 2021 a crowd gathered outside Evergrande’s headquarters in Shenzhen, demanding their money back. The company owed about $310 billion, roughly the GDP of Finland, and most of that depended on selling flats that hadn’t been built yet.

Logan Wright opens his new book with that scene. He sees it as the start of China’s financial crisis, even though Beijing has never called it one.

Wright runs China macro research at Rhodium Group. He moved to Beijing in 2001 as a graduate student with mediocre Chinese, and spent years getting officials to talk to him about the exchange rate over dinner. Broken China, published this week, argues that the world’s largest economy by purchasing power is in structural decline. He also thinks the renminbi is overvalued, and that China’s leaders are far less in control than most of the West assumes.

He made his case to Demetri Kofinas on Hidden Forces on the evening Xi landed in Washington for his summit with Trump.

These are the five BIG ideas:

• In China, the banks are the economy: From 2008 to 2016, Chinese lenders created $24–27 trillion of credit on top of an economy of about $6 trillion. That works out to lending a Germany or a Japan every year for eight years. For a decade this credit absorbed China’s political shocks, keeping failing firms open and provincial jobs safe. Now the same credit is dragging growth down. People ask Wright how China can be broken if it’s never had a financial crisis. “You can avoid a financial crisis every day,” he says, “if you just continue to provide short-term liquidity.” A better test is to look at what countries usually look like five years after a crisis: deflation, stretched budgets, bad loans nobody will write down, and a growing need for foreign demand. China fits that picture.

• The GDP number is written for the party: In 2022 housing starts fell 40% in an industry worth a fifth of the economy, retail sales shrank, and Beijing still reported 3% growth. Wright puts growth in 2023 nearer 1.5% than the official 5.2%, and thinks it has probably turned negative now. He can’t think of any economy that grew 5% in real terms through years of deflation. In 2009 an official explained the logic to him: “If we actually said it was five, everyone in the system would think it’s zero.” The number keeps party cadres calm. Abroad it supports Beijing’s favourite line, that China’s rise is inevitable, so deal with us now.

• Confidence died with the bailout: Chinese savers used to assume the state would always cover losses. When interbank rates hit 30% in 2013, they bought more high-yield products, expecting the government to pay out rather than face protests. Xi ended that. Protesters were cleared away in 2018 and never repaid. After that the defaults came one a year: P2P lenders in 2018, small banks in 2019, trusts in 2020, developers in 2021, mortgages in 2022, local government financing vehicles in 2023. Asked why Beijing can’t restore the guarantee, Wright says: “First, don’t want to. Second of all, no one will believe you.” The same loss of trust keeps money leaving the country, which is one reason he thinks the renminbi is overvalued.

• Brezhnev chose decay, and so has Xi: Fixing the system means deciding who loses, and nobody wants to fly to Liaoning to tell the party committee its factories are finished. So 59% of new loans now go out at or below the 3% prime rate, mostly to state firms rolling over old debt. That share was in the mid-20s in 2020. The Soviets faced the same choice in the 1960s. They dropped market reform and bet on cybernetics to make planning work. Beijing is making that bet with AI. Oil money carried Moscow through the 1970s, and the bill arrived in the 1980s. Beijing’s long-term planning is mostly a myth. Nobody planned the biggest credit boom in a century or an 80% collapse in housing starts. “There’s a lot of long-term planning in China,” Wright says. “It changes every three to six months.”

• A declining China is a nearer threat, and a deterrable one: China can’t create demand at home, so it has to keep foreign markets open. That hands the leverage to the G7, as long as the G7 acts together. Beijing is betting it won’t before 2029, and it’s building up choke points in the meantime. Wright doesn’t think the West can simply wait China out. Its weakness is the reason to act now. The West needs to protect itself from China’s overflow while its own leverage grows and Beijing’s shrinks. China can’t double defence spending from here, which makes the threats it poses deterrable rather than inexorable. The risk he flags is that Beijing hasn’t yet accepted that time is against it, and the shock will come when it does.

E. What Is Your Edge?

I was recently on ’s Market Huddle podcast discussing lessons I have learnt over 27 years in finance.

Some of the ideas we covered:

• Decide what the money is for before you decide what to do with it: Money is a tool. That sounds obvious, yet most investors never write down what they’re solving for, and that’s how they end up chasing someone else’s game.

• Your time horizon is set by whose money you’re running: Patience costs nothing, and it’s one of the few edges left that most professionals structurally can’t use.

• You can believe in a revolution and still hedge it: Conviction and humility can sit in the same portfolio. Get the big shift right, and make sure being wrong on timing won’t kill you.

• The machines will do the analysis, so learn to ask better questions:
  AI already does in seconds the research, data work and modelling that used to fill a junior analyst’s week, and entry-level hiring is shrinking as a result. The way through has two parts. Become a power user of the tools, then invest in what they can’t do: judgment, character, curiosity, and the ability to ask the question nobody else in the room thought of.

• Compound yourself, and the people around you: Looks for cognitive diversity and polite disagreement. The most valuable information in markets is tacit, and it lives in people’s heads rather than in any database. The best compounding asset most of us own is the people who believe in us.

P.S. Could you do me a favor ? This email takes many hours to put together, including hours of sourcing, curating and writing. If it is helpful to you, then do me a favor and hit the “heart” button so I know it’s useful to you.

“The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

Curious Mind Research Letter No 3

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A. When Life Isn’t A Straight Line Anymore

On the night of June 27, 1936 about 100,000 people packed Franklin Field in Philadelphia to hear Franklin Roosevelt accept the nomination for a second term. On his way to the platform he reached across to shake an old poet’s hand, the steel brace on his leg came unlocked, and the President went down in front of everybody with his speech all over the floor. “Clean me up,” he said, and told them to keep their feet off the pages. A few minutes later he was at the lectern and this was the key passage in his speech (the speech is worth reading).

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

He said cycle five years before Pearl Harbor and blamed technology for the mess. Philadelphia had dealt with political tyranny in 1776, he says, and then “the age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio” brought “a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.” The new machines had let a small group, his “economic royalists,” build private dynasties on other people’s work and money. Swap in the model and the data centre and you could give that paragraph tomorrow.

And he’s talking from the middle of the biggest change America had seen. The Great Crash was 7 years back. Gold had been revalued, the SEC and Social Security were up and running, and the worst was still to come, which nobody in that stadium could know. They were halfway through building a new order with no idea how the story ended.

The thing is, his machines got a few percent better each year. Ours are improving several times over each year.

And yet nearly everything we own is a straight-line bet on nothing changing. The 30-year mortgage, the career built on a credential, the bond portfolio, the pension. It all works fine when the world changes 3% a year.

Two things are happening to that world at once. The first is the season. We discussed Fukuyama and Strauss & Howe’s work two weeks back.

The second is a technology getting several times better every year, which neither book saw coming. So if it’s winter in history and the machine is going vertical, how do you get ready?

B. Understanding The Exponential

Noam Brown helped build OpenAI’s reasoning models, and extrapolating their progress is more or less his job. On Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast this week he described the line he’d been drawing for AI progress. In maths the models went from problems that take a mathematician 5 seconds, to 1 minute, to 10 minutes, to the 100 minutes of an Olympiad question, one step a year, which is 10 times a year. After the Olympiad gold in 2025 he ran the line forward, got 15 hours for 2026, and guessed a Millennium Prize Problem for AI would have to wait until 2028. Recently, OpenAI said 10,000 copies of an unreleased model, working together for 88 hours, had solved Navier-Stokes. Patel reckoned the 130 billion tokens those agents wrote come to one person thinking full-time for 4,000 years, Sumerian civilization to now, over a long weekend. Brown knew the curve better than anyone and was still two years too cautious.

People are built to get growth rates wrong. Albert Bartlett, a Colorado physicist, opened the same lecture more than 1,700 times by saying “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Walk 30 paces and you’re 30 metres from your door. Make each pace double the last and 30 of them take you about a million kilometres, past the moon and back. At pace 25 you’ve done most of the steps, but only covered 3% of the ground, and you’d swear nothing much was going on.

Brown also said a colleague on that project used to be happy forecasting AI a year ahead and now won’t go past 3 months, and asked about 2030 he just said “I don’t know what the world looks like.” Their horizon is getting closer. The model that did the maths isn’t publicly available. The best ones now sit inside the labs for months. Even those of us on the tools daily are looking at last season’s.

Today, thinking compounds at multiples a year. The grid, the courts, parliaments and our own nervous systems manage a few percent in a good year. Things take off, things break, and the breaking happens in the gap. That is where our straight line promises sit.

“Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential."

- Ray Kurzweil

C. Capitalism Without Capital, Inverted

In 2006 the market said Microsoft was worth about $250 billion, and the plant and equipment on its balance sheet came to about 1% of that. Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake open Capitalism without Capital with that puzzle, and their book explains why the last era’s wealth is fragile and why solid things are getting scarce again. Around the mid-1990s in America, companies started spending more each year on things you can’t touch (software, research, design, brands, training) than on things you can.

They boil it down to 4 properties. Intangibles scale, because you write the code once and sell it a billion times. They’re sunk, since a bust company can sell its factory and can’t sell its half-finished software, which leaves a lender nothing to grab. They spill over, the way EMI invented the CT scanner and GE and Siemens made the money. And they’re worth more in combination.

When you run AI through that mental model, it comes out as about the purest intangible anyone has made. It scales without limit and it’s made of everybody’s writing. But a career is an intangible asset too. A lawyer’s knowledge was a sunk investment no bank would lend against, and it paid out for 40 years anyway. The model is that same knowledge spilled at the scale of the internet. For a professional household, the mortgage is a straight line secured on a house and paid out of an intangible asset whose price is now uncertain. Gromen counts roughly $10 trillion of consumer debt owed by Americans under 50 and says “everyone took out a mortgage on a belief that AI wasn’t going to show up.”

Capitalism without capital now needs more capital than anything in 200 years of American history. The hyperscalers and clouds are putting about $11 trillion into capex between 2024 and 2029 and borrowing $5 trillion of it. The intangible economy has become a tenant of the tangible one. Once thinking is abundant, what’s short is power, copper, transformers, skilled trades and land with a grid connection.

And the 4 properties help tell you how the boom ends and who gets paid. When an AI tenant goes under there’s not much for the lender beyond the chips and the lease. Canals, railways, telephones and fibre all went bust before they paid, and the fortunes went to whoever bought the assets out of bankruptcy.

Carlota Perez found the same pattern across 5 technological revolutions in her work.

Speculative finance installs the new thing, there’s a frenzy and a crash, and then a turning point when the institutions get rebuilt, and only after that the golden age. Her last American turning point ran from 1929 to 1943, Roosevelt’s years, and the golden age went to whoever held the infrastructure after the bust.

D. Surviving The Singularity

In 1985 memory chips were Intel’s identity and the Japanese were killing them at it. Andy Grove asked Gordon Moore what a new chief executive would do if the board threw the two of them out. Moore said he’d get out of memory, so Grove suggested they walk out of the door, come back in and do it themselves.

In Only the Paranoid Survive he calls these strategic inflection points, when some force gets 10 times stronger, and he’s candid that the people in charge are usually last to notice.

So the first job is in your own head, and most of it is letting go of things. Grove and Moore needed the trick with the door because of something Richard Thaler measured in 1990. He and two colleagues gave coffee mugs to half a room of Cornell students and let them trade, and the ones who’d owned a mug for a few minutes wanted about twice what the others would pay. We overvalue whatever we happen to be holding, and it works on a house, a portfolio, a job title, a view of the world. I spent years around endowments and family offices, and nobody defended the illiquid book harder than whoever had bought it.

The only cure I know is Grove’s question.

Try it on the portfolio, then on the career and your opinions.

Don’t treat memories like laws. The people hurt worst in the 1930s mostly knew the 1920s too well. Same in 2008 and 2020.

The other half is spending time in the future, using the tools, every day, on real work. Brown’s advice to sceptics was to try this month’s models, since most people’s view of AI dates from whenever they last looked. AI is going to keep blowing our minds, and you can get used to that. Once you have, you act sooner on what you see.

My guess, and I can’t prove it, is that 9 people in 10 aren’t doing any of this and won’t know what hit them.

In 1930, in the pit of the last Crisis, Keynes wrote an essay called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” It argues from compound growth that living standards would be 4 to 8 times higher by 2030, and he was roughly right. He coined “technological unemployment” there and called it a passing phase. His worry was for afterwards, when people freed from the struggle to get by would meet what he called their “permanent problem” of how to live.

That problem has arrived early for a lot of people, and the assets that help don’t have a simple market price. They’re slow to build. Every family and every firm is going to have one person who can see what’s coming and several who can’t. Bringing the others along is generous, and I think it’s most of the answer to Keynes’s problem. If you can’t earn recognition up a white-collar ladder any more, you’ll earn it where people did before there were ladders.

A state with promises at 105% of receipts is going to keep fewer of them, in real terms, than it made. When the institutions thin out, the people you can ring up are your institution. This means we are all going to find out the value of true relationships and doing things for others from a place of love than obligation or payment.

Then there’s the body. Again Gromen, keeps saying America’s entitlements are owed in hips, knees and hospital beds, which central bank cannot print. The cheapest hedge against a stretched health system is needing it less. The body is also the one asset nobody can separate from you.

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

- L.P. Hartley

E. What Short Volatility Looks Like

Twenty seven years on Wall Street has shown me what short volatility looks like. You all know these people. It looks a single income family with $1mm pre-tax income with a $500k burn rate. Being a “master of the universe” while living pay check to pay check.

Hyman Minsky’s warning was that stability breeds instability. Every calm year persuades people to borrow a bit more, until the whole structure needs calm just to stay standing.

Most lives and portfolios are short volatility. A mortgage paid from one salary is a short position. So are long government bonds, private equity with capital calls coming, and a company that’s signed take-or-pay contracts for compute. Every one of them is a straight line.

Nassim Taleb’s word for the long side is antifragile. Fragile things get hurt by disorder, robust things shrug it off, and antifragile things come out better for it.

None of this is prophecy, and the uncertainty is a reason to prepare.

F. What I’m Doing About It

If you are short vol at the event horizon of the singularity, and you are awake enough of to let go of the past like Grove and Moore what do you do prepare and become anti fragile?

Three things I would tell my children:

• Protect & Persist: You are going to need to go through your income and expenses and assets and liabilities and figure out how to make yourself more anti-fragile. When the singularity occurs, you need to make sure you have the skills and time to rise up again. Hope ain’t a strategy. What is hard is that no one clearly knows what is at the other end of the singularity. That is their nature and that is what makes preparation hard.

• People & Places: You are going to want to spend time with different people in different places. We are a creature of our surroundings. Not everyone will see the singularity or know how to benefit from it. Most people will pretend that tomorrow will look just like yesterday. It won’t. Spend a few hours every week the people you think understand what’s going on and be in cities where anti-fragile people live.

• Play & Practice: Use the tools every day, on something you love and not only on something you're paid for. The people who come through a change like this tend to be the ones who were already messing about with the new thing before anyone made them. Make small bets, lots of them, where being wrong costs you a weekend and being right changes your year. That's what long volatility looks like for someone without a trading book. And keep a craft the machine can't take the pleasure out of, a language, an instrument, a garden, because Keynes's permanent problem is coming for you too and you'll want an answer ready.

If you want somewhere to start, this month put Grove’s question to one thing you own and one thing you believe, and spend an hour a day with the tools on work you care about. It won’t feel like much, though it’s more than most people will do.

I keep going back to that night at Franklin Field. Roosevelt hadn’t walked on his own in 15 years and most of the country had no idea. When the brace gave way he went down hard, minutes before the biggest speech of his campaign, and he said afterwards it was the most frightful five minutes of his life. They hauled him up, brushed off the dirt, locked the brace and handed him back his pages, which were crumpled and out of order. He sorted them on the platform while the crowd cheered. Then he stood up and told a country seven years into a depression that it had a rendezvous with destiny.

He had no idea how it ended. The recovery would stall again the following year, the war was five years off, and he wouldn’t live to see the order he was building. What he had that night was a bad leg, a muddy speech and a view about what his generation was for.

“To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected.” Mine got the first half. We had 40 years of falling rates and rising assets and a straight line you could borrow against. You’re getting the second half. Some days I wish it were the other way round for you, and then I read Stoppard again and think you might have the better deal. The pages are all over the floor again, so pick them up, get them in whatever order you can, and go and give the speech.

With Love.

This is the last free Research Letter. From October it goes to paying subscribers only.

I said above that you should spend a few hours every week with people who understand what’s going on. The Letter is my attempt to be one of those hours. Each issue is the work I’m doing anyway for my own family’s money. It covers where the exponential is breaking straight lines, who gets paid when it does, and what I’m doing about it.

A good number of you have already joined on founding terms, and those terms stay open until the October issue. Reply with the word “Letter” and I’ll send you the details myself.

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"The future is only the past again, entered through another gate."

- Arthur Wing Pinero

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“At particular times a great deal of stupid people have…

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There’s a sentence in this issue that sounds wrong: a market can get worse at pricing while every single participant in it gets better at analysis.

It isn’t a hot take. It’s arithmetic — plain algebra, true of every group, every forecast, every time. And it’s the best explanation I’ve found for the strangest fact of this cycle: record-low correlations, healthy dispersion, and 79% of active large-cap managers underperforming anyway.

No. 2 works out what that arithmetic means for the next decade — and what I’d do about it.

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Ahmed

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Twelve days ago I published Curious Mind Research Letter No. 1. The argument was that the machinery of wartime finance — …

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We also launched the Curious Mind Research Letter, which you will hear more about in coming weeks.

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This is the 1st issue of the Curious Mind Research Letter. One deep dive like this every month, with a shorter letter of signals in between. It launches properly this autumn. Today’s issue is free, in full.

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Published 7 August 2026. Gold $4,377. Market levels as of the 6 August close.

Last week the new Fed chairman held his first rate decision, leaned dovish, and the long bond broke out; within two days his own Treasury was telling banks it might sell dollars. This year, gold overtook U.S. Treasuries as the world’s largest reserve asset. This piece is about the war those two facts belong to.

“Bond markets have taken out more governments than howitzers.”

— Scott Bessent, U.S. Treasury Secretary

1. The Undeclared War

A week ago Wednesday, on July 29, Kevin Warsh chaired his first full rate decision as head of the Federal Reserve. He arrived with six weeks of hawk talk behind him, traders pricing two hikes on the strength of it, Bloomberg celebrating him as the man unraveling what the desks call the debasement trade. Then he held rates, and the press conference was dovish.

The long end of the Treasury curve rose. By Friday the thirty-year had broken out of its range, and veteran technicians were publishing upside targets towards seven percent. Within forty-eight hours of the decision, the U.S. Treasury was checking rates on the yen and telling banks it might intervene alongside Tokyo, which is a polite way of saying it might sell its own dollars.

The long end rose through six weeks of the hardest talk Warsh could give, then rose through the softest delivery he could manage. Given price action since, the market has stopped grading the words and started grading the maths. The rest of this piece is my attempt to understand the maths.

Start with a renter I’ll call Maya, a composite of half the twenty-somethings I know. She’s twenty-three, does marketing for a skincare brand, pays $2,350 for the small bedroom in a Bushwick three-share, and holds $31,000 across a brokerage app and two crypto wallets against about $60 in savings. She can tell you the ticker of everything she owns and cannot tell you what a bond is, and she isn’t embarrassed about that. This spring a renter just like her told the Wall Street Journal that money feels safer in the stock market than in a house, and sixty percent of her generation, per a Harris poll, believes the only way to build wealth now is through what their grandparents would have called gambling. Crypto, meme stocks, prediction markets, sports bets.

Maya has read the terrain right. Homes at eight times her income. Entry-level postings down 35 percent. She went where the upside still lives.

She can’t see it from where she stands, but her adaptation has been noticed, measured, and built into the structure of the global financial system. Maya is now the marginal lender to three of the largest debtors in the history of money. She’s the war bond drive, minus the poster.

I keep a list of things that shouldn’t happen at the same time. This year the list got long. Bond yields rising on deflationary news. Stock markets booming in the countries with the worst demographics. Gold crashing thirty percent while central banks bought record amounts of it and stopped answering survey questions about where they keep it. An AI complex financed, when you read the contracts, like 2006 subprime. Teenagers levering the Seoul stock market to all-time-high volatility. The last week of July joined the list all at once.

For a while I treated these as separate stories. They read better as sector reports from one front. The major powers have slid into a conflict fought on balance sheets instead of beaches, and the financial machinery of total war is reassembling itself around them, piece by piece, whether or not anyone in charge decided to rebuild it.

The last century called it financial repression.

This century calls it innovation.

2. Learning From 1942

The Federal Reserve was designed, above all, not to do the thing it now does.

When Paul Warburg sold Americans on a central bank before 1913, the pitch was built around trade credit, stamps on bills for actual crates on actual ships. Lending to the government was considered a grubby old-world habit, beneath a proper central bank. The whole design was a machine that would never finance the state.

Thirty years later it was the state’s financing arm and little else. From 1942 to 1951 the Fed pegged Treasury yields and bought whatever it took to hold the peg. Inflation ran hot and quietly melted the war debt. Households were sold the other side of the trade as patriotism, with posters.

Then the 1951 Accord dismantled the machine, and the textbooks filed wartime finance under history.

The difference between an emergency and a regime is a date. An emergency ends when somebody says it’s over. A regime just is.

Nobody voted to bring the old machine back. What came back on its own were the conditions that made it useful the first time — supply shocks instead of demand cycles, inflation that won’t hold still long enough to be forecast, stocks and bonds moving together instead of against each other.

Every piece of the 1940s machine is back, wearing new clothes.

The yield cap returns as an acronym.

The captive saver returns as plumbing.

The posters came back as phrases.

And duty got rebranded as opportunity.

None of the parts that came back has an exit clause, because none was ever presented as an entrance. A war that’s never declared can never formally end.

Underneath the machinery sits a law that doesn’t change. No government in history, offered the choice between visible austerity and invisible inflation, has picked the visible one, and no electorate has ever asked it to. Default is a decision. Debasement just happens to you. Everything that follows is that one preference, compounding.

3. The Preview Is Playing In Tokyo

The endgame doesn’t need imagining. Japan is the territory the war reached first.

For years the Bank of Japan capped its ten-year bond yield near zero and defended the cap with unlimited buying. That was yield curve control, the actual thing, not the acronym under discussion. In July 2023 the cap came off. Today the ten-year JGB trades just under three percent, a level that would have been unthinkable to a Tokyo bond desk five years ago, and the thirty-year sits at generational highs.

Under the old rules, that’s a catastrophe. A country with the worst demographics in the developed world, debt beyond anything the West carries, and its borrowing costs roughly tripling. The old rule said sell that country’s stocks and hide in its bonds.

Look closer at the debt, though. Tokyo’s budget deficit is narrower than Washington’s, and its interest bill, measured against the size of its economy, is lighter than Germany’s, or France’s, or Italy’s. The country everyone assumes is the most fiscally stretched of the group is carrying the lightest debt-service burden in it. The Bank of Japan spent two years letting inflation expectations drift above target and holding policy easy through it, and bond investors are pricing that in.

Instead the Nikkei rose seventy percent in twelve months, accelerating as yields climbed. Bonds down, stocks up, and the yen quietly dying against gold. This is how a country trades when investors have stopped trusting its money rather than its government’s ability to repay it: get out of the currency, get out of the bonds, get into anything real. Tokyo’s answer to a central bank falling behind the curve was a $2.3 trillion spending plan, treating a credibility problem with the one tool guaranteed to make it worse.

Korea is marching the same route, stocks up 110 percent in a year against Chinese-grade demographics. Germany’s DAX and the FTSE have joined, each rising as their bond markets sink. Five governments with terrible balance sheets all ramping defence spending at once, all their currencies range-bound against each other while all of them fall against gold, which is either a remarkable coincidence or something closer to an agreement: if we all debase together, none of our currencies falls against the others, and we run hot until somebody’s bond market breaks. Last week the agreement stopped being tacit. Japan intervened and the yen jumped 3 percent; a Japanese currency diplomat described American assistance as “beyond psychological support”; and the U.S. Treasury told banks it might intervene in the yen itself, which means selling its own dollars. The pact now operates in daylight.

Japan matters because it’s furthest down the road. It shows you the sequence. Cap the yields, lift the cap when you must, watch the bond market reprice, and watch the stock market inflate as citizens flee their own currency in the most respectable way available. The West talks as if following Japan were still a choice.

4. Three Treadmills, One Law

A few weeks back a Substack post made the rounds on OpenAI, and in it was an interesting sentence:

A company funded by its own appreciation is solvent not in proportion to how high the mark stands, but in proportion to how fast it’s still rising.

He wrote it about one company. It’s a general law of terminal-stage credit, and it currently governs three balance sheets, each one inside the next: the AI complex, the U.S. Treasury, and China.

Call them treadmills. On each, the debt can’t be repaid, only rolled, and rolling requires the next mark, the next auction, the next quarter to price above the last. The markup is the cash flow.

The AI treadmill is the smallest and fastest. Strip the jargon and it’s potentially just a credit-driven real estate cycle in a technology costume: debt-financed construction, take-or-pay leases, supply guaranteed to land after demand turns. The $2.1 trillion backlog the hyperscalers report as contracted revenue is, read as credit, a loan book, half of it owed by two cash-burning labs with no operating income. Arguably most informed lender in the system, Microsoft, saw the books from inside for years and shortened its duration in April while keeping the equity upside. The IPO everyone is waiting for is the refinancing of last resort, and it might be delayed because the price that clears the public market doesn’t retire the burn, and the price that retires the burn doesn’t clear the market.

The tremors are on the tape. The semiconductor index doubled in six months while the companies funding the boom fell through the first half, Microsoft down 27 percent, Oracle 22, Meta 18, all now borrowing to fund capex that has blown past 100 percent of operating cash flow. Meta floated selling “excess compute” and the stock jumped nine percent, which is a market cheering the first admission of overcapacity because the alternative reading is unbearable. And the first dedicated AI fund blowup arrived at the end of July, a former OpenAI researcher’s hedge fund unwinding after losses. Whether that was 1998, a warning the cycle survives for another eighteen months, or the spring of 2007, the first domino, is precisely the question.

The bulls will argue that July earnings proved their case. The datacentres themselves are wildly profitable, cloud revenue up 43 percent on a $364 billion base, margins widening, capex guided higher again. All true. The profits are today’s. The backlog is tomorrow’s, and half of tomorrow’s is promised by frontier labs whose product is commoditising with token prices falling into rising demand.

Meanwhile the price of the roll is rising even as the belt speeds up. Bond supply from the AI complex reached $270 billion by early July, nearly double all of last year. Meta’s newest data-centre paper cleared at 7.5 percent, half a point above an identical deal a year earlier, and both Meta and Google have gone cash-flow negative for the first time in their histories. The chipmaker at the top of the chain is in talks to guarantee $250 billion of financing for its own largest customer, a sum equal to 135 percent of its retained earnings. Vendor financing at the summit of a capex cycle is one of the oldest bells in finance. And Washington, which calls the buildout a matter of national security, has just signed an executive order opening federal land and military bases to data centres. When the state starts leasing its bases to the boom, the distance to a formal backstop is short.

The Treasury treadmill is the largest and best disguised. Over eight trillion dollars of Treasuries mature inside twelve months, which works out to refinancing roughly one Marshall Plan every week, indefinitely, and hoping somebody shows up each time. The national debt has been converted into commercial paper, and the sovereign lives, like any structured vehicle, at the mercy of its next roll.

China’s treadmill is the strangest, because the operator chose to run it uphill. Total debt just crossed 300 percent of GDP on BIS figures and is still rising a point a month, a pace at which China borrows an extra year of its entire economy every eight years. Meanwhile the money data shows the tightest conditions in Chinese history, loan growth at all-time lows, the 2024 stimulus cancelled and reversed. Xi picked deflation on purpose, exchange-rate stability over growth. China’s belt is held up by state banks and the record price of its own bonds, which is to say, by the one buyer who can’t sell.

What makes this one story instead of three is the coupling. AI now drives more than a quarter of U.S. GDP growth. Foreign money is pouring into U.S. stocks at record rates, mostly unhedged, mostly chasing AI. So if the smallest treadmill stumbles, GDP loses its engine, the growth scare hits a bond market that now sends yields up on bad news, the unhedged money runs and takes the dollar with it, and eight trillion of maturities meets its auction calendar in the middle of the storm. Every government’s crisis plan quietly assumes the other treadmills fail first. That can’t be true three times.

Two things would kill this thesis: A) Real AI productivity showing up in the aggregate numbers, which would let the debt be serviced instead of rolled or B) A genuine collapse in long yields during a growth scare, the old world reasserting itself. Watch those two dials. Everything else is commentary.

5. The Conscripts: Maya Funds All Three

Every war-finance system in history has faced the same problem. The state needs to borrow more than willing lenders will provide, so unwilling lenders must be found and their unwillingness dissolved.

The 1940s solved it with patriotism and payroll deduction. The 2020s found something more elegant. It located a generation that no longer believes in the system, and turned the disbelief itself into the funding mechanism.

The raw material: sixty percent of young Americans see speculation as the only path to wealth. Forty-two percent of Gen Z investors hold crypto against eleven percent with a retirement account. Average personal debt of $94,000. A bachelor’s degree whose real median wage has moved two thousand dollars in thirty-five years.

You could call it a symptom, the sad output of a broken opportunity structure. I’d propose instead that the evidence supports that the despair is an input.

Follow the pipes. The AI complex’s terminal capital source is the pool the index funds and the retail bid sit in; the delayed IPO is a plan to hand the burn rate to the public. The Treasury’s manufactured bid runs through stablecoins, which are disproportionately the rails of the crypto-native young, and through baby accounts that convert birth itself into an equity inflow. Korea’s melt-up runs on retail leverage, famously including teenagers. American margin debt is up 54 percent in a year to 4.5 percent of GDP, half again the dot-com peak.

In 1943 the citizen-lender was recruited through belief in the flag, the cause, the certainty of victory. In 2026 the citizen-lender is recruited through disbelief. It’s precisely because the young concluded that wages, savings, and houses are dead ends that they arrive, levered and all-in, at exactly the assets the treadmills need bid. A generation that still believed in pensions would never supply this bid. The despair had to come first.

Two complications. First, none of this requires a conspiracy, just convergent opportunism: a Treasury finding stablecoins lying there, an AI complex finding the retail pool lying there, platforms finding gambling psychology lying there. Systems don’t need architects to end up with architecture.

Second, the trade could work. If the devaluation thesis is right, stocks do rise in nominal terms, and the young speculator front-running debasement is positioned correctly. The cruelty is that the young are the shock absorber either way. They win only if the treadmills never seize, and they are, by construction, the last money in, the pool the refinancing chain reaches after every informed participant has shortened duration. Microsoft saw the books and chose to rent. What Microsoft declined will be offered to Maya’s brokerage app.

Maya stores her savings in a system engineered, at the pipe level, to deliver her capital to the sovereign’s paper at negative real rates. She’ll take the haircut. She’s been told she’s being empowered.

6. The Quartermasters Are Provisioning Not Investing

Two facts from the second quarter of 2026.

Gold had its worst quarter since 2013, down nearly thirty percent from about $5,600 to under $4,000. Miner sentiment hit two percent bulls. A Wall Street Journal front page announced faith in the haven was shaken.

That same quarter, the People’s Bank of China bought gold for the eighteenth straight month, its biggest add since 2024. Chinese imports hit a two-year high, up 76 percent on the year. A record 45 percent of central banks told the World Gold Council they plan to raise their own reserves. And somewhere in this stretch, mostly unremarked, gold overtook U.S. Treasuries as the largest component of global reserve assets.

Same chart, opposite behaviour. Western fast money sold a volatile commodity. The official sector of the non-aligned world bought like bargain hunters. I think the second group is provisioning, treating gold as materiel, the monetary equivalent of a strategic petroleum reserve, rather than as a portfolio position.

The weapon teaches its targets. The more a hegemon uses its financial infrastructure as one, the less control it keeps, because every shot fired shows every watching treasury that the opt-in system was never really opt-in. The demonstration was February 2022, when the West froze Russia’s reserves. If you ran a central bank outside the alliance, the lesson wasn’t subtle. Your reserves are yours until the issuer decides they aren’t.

Everything since is that lesson at scale. Central banks custodying gold at home, up from 35 to 49 percent since 2023. The share refusing to answer the custody question at all jumped from 8 percent to 20, and respondents don’t start refusing a routine survey question unless the behaviour it asks about has turned sensitive. Swiss gold exports to Saudi Arabia, keystone of the petrodollar, are up eight-fold since 2022, while Riyadh ships four times more crude to Beijing than to America.

Why gold and not somebody’s currency? Because there’s no qualified successor and both sides know it. The renminbi can’t inherit the role while Xi refuses everything inheritance requires, an open capital account, a bond market foreigners trust, and his own money data shows him choosing the opposite. What’s being built instead is commodity trade priced in yuan with net settlement in gold, so no counterparty ever has to hold Chinese paper overnight. Gold as the bridge between two ledgers that no longer trust each other, the one collateral both sides take because it’s nobody’s liability and nobody’s weapon. Demand for a bridge is a function of the width of the chasm.

The fundamental valuations guys will say that a fair-value model built on real rates and central-bank demand will tell you gold is fully priced, and the record says treat it as a diversifier prone to violent swings, it lost 45 percent in 1980-82 and fell in the 2020 and 2022 crashes too. But models built on market-implied rates inherit the distortions of the market being managed, the same way breakevens said two percent in 2021 while inflation compounded at four and a half. A fair-value model calibrated on the old regime measures the old war.

7. Seeing The Map & The Dominos

In a bloc built on simultaneous mutual refinancing, a bond crisis anywhere becomes a crisis everywhere, shortly after. One point of failure, distributed across many addresses. So the question is which address.

Korea is the acknowledged one, the froth capital of the coupled system. KOSPI volatility is above its 2008 record, circuit breakers tripped six times in two weeks, teenage leverage converted by single-stock ETFs into structural fragility. It’s where a seizure of the AI treadmill becomes visible fastest, the war’s forward listening post.

Germany is the political one. Two straight years of contraction, Volkswagen announcing a hundred thousand layoffs, and the AfD, first in national polls, on track for its first state in September on a platform of restoring Russian energy and exiting the sanctions regime. Read coldly, that’s a proposal to defect from the western ledger, and German mid-caps rallying ten percent into it suggests markets pricing the defection as stimulus.

And then France, which almost nobody is watching, though a few desks have begun quietly shorting French bonds against gilts and Spanish paper. It tops my list. Total debt at 324 percent of GDP, above China’s, unimproved since 2019 while every peer deleveraged. A spread against Germany that widened sharply in a month when yields generally fell. A hard catalyst on a fixed date, the April 2027 election, with the Rassemblement National at the gates. The strange part is who’s missing. The countries seemingly debasing together, the US, Japan, Germany, the UK, Korea, don’t include France. It’s raising defence spending into the worst debt position of any western power without membership in whatever tacit pact the others struck. It’s inside the war and outside the alliance. The Liz Truss precedent says the break comes where debt is deepest, growth weakest, politics most combustible, and hedges least in place. That describes France better than it describes America.

The calendar, from where I sit in early August. The first dial has already reported: hyperscaler earnings landed strong and capex was guided higher, so the belt sped up rather than slowed. Under the treadmill law that defers the reckoning rather than cancels it, and it shifts the watch to the labs, where the price war has already started. Warsh has decided, for now. He held, into a Philly Fed print above 41 for only the eleventh time in sixty years, and in the only two prior instances where the Fed declined to tighten into a print that hot, gold has exploded higher. He didn’t hold unanimously — three regional presidents dissented for a hike, and two more Fed voices have already said, in public, that they’ll vote to hike in September unless core inflation cools within weeks. The long end voted within days of the decision itself, and Warsh’s own Treasury answered by preparing to sell dollars. The question from here isn’t hike or hold. It’s whether the debasement resumes in size, through the bank-rule changes and stablecoin legislation now being pushed, before the long end gets away from them, or September delivers the hike three of his colleagues already want. The France-Germany spread through autumn. China’s monthly credit prints. Saxony-Anhalt in September. Gold’s $4,000 line through the seasonal window.

When one of those dials moves, the response won’t be austerity or default, and it won’t be honest. My bet is the completion of the machine, the cap, the captive saver, the inflation tax, announced as innovation, adopted by acclamation, paid for by the conscripts.

I can even sketch the scene. A Sunday night, because these things are always announced on Sunday nights, with the Asian open looming. A programme with a reassuring name, something with Stability or Freedom in it. A cap on long yields, described as temporary. A notification on Maya’s app about new account protections, framed as being for her benefit. The biggest relief rally in years. Op-eds calling it prudent by Wednesday. Japan has already shown the sequence. After that, two ledgers, gold as the bridge between them, and Maya’s generation wondering, eventually, what exactly it was they funded.

8. What Am I Doing

For what it’s worth, my own book: some gold, some AI for momentum, some energy to hedge the mess. No long bonds. Nothing shorted, because I believe this story and I’ve also watched people who believed it get carried out on stretchers for two years running. Holding both of those thoughts at once is, I think, the honest position.

Systems only look like systems later. Monetary regimes are always built this way, messily, denied while under construction, obvious only in the archive. The bet here is that we’re standing inside one of those construction sites now, and that in twenty years these notes will read less like market commentary than like an early draft of the archive. If the bet is wrong, the dials above will say so within a couple of quarters. I’d rather hear it from them than from the crowd.

Written 7 August 2026. Market levels as of the 6 August close. Errors are mine.

Thank you for reading No. 1.

Two requests. If this is the kind of work you want arriving every month, reply “founding” and you’ll hear before anyone else, at the founding rate. And if one person came to mind while you read this — the person you’d have argued with about it — send it to them.

Research letters travel by forwarding; they always have.

Ahmed

This is not investment advice. Curious Mind Research Letter is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Do your own research and consult a qualified professional before making investment decisions.

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