🤖 AI Makes Consulting Stronger ()
It would seem that rapidly improving generative AI tools would kill the consulting business. Why pay for slides your AI could make? It turns out the opposite is becoming true; AI amplifies expertise and raises productivity and billables. Jevons’ paradox in action.

💻 Remote Work Containerized the Office ()
Remote work moved conversations to Slack and paved the way for AI to be a decision maker, reducing junior roles along the way.

🔨 Why is Meta Destroying Its Engineering Org? ()
Meta had an amazing engineering culture for the last two decades. Here is what they are doing to destroy that investment and why they are doing it to themselves.

🤘 No, Everyone is not Using AI for Everything ()
Some people are using AI for some of the things. Stats are misleading, only a minority of Americans interact with AI on a daily basis. Two-thirds of consumers are rarely, or never, using AI.

👷 America Forgot How to Rare Earth ()
We started the rare earth mining game, then we forgot.

🏋️‍♂️ The Millennial Midlife Crisis Will Barbell ()
The millennial midlife dip will be real and barbell-shaped. The consumer economy is not ready for it.

💸 How to Invest in IPOs ()
This is a year of huge IPOs. Here is a great piece that helps you understand what is going on with the stocks and how you should engage.

😡 The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech (The Ringer)
Everyday tech rage. There are definitely implementation issues.

⚽ Hacking the World Cup Video Feed (bobdahacker)
If you are running a worldwide sporting event, please don’t forget to bolt the virtual door.

The Look

Ben Evans has updated his AI is Eating the World presentation.

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🥑 The Miracle of Year-Round Avocados ()
How would you feel if you could not get avocado toast year-round? What if Super Bowl parties were guac-less? We put them to sleep to keep them hard and green and let you ship them worldwide. Just-in-time ripening puts them in neat, day-coded bins at your local grocery store.

💵 A Minimum Wage Natural Experiment ()
The classic argument is that raising the minimum wage will hurt low-wage workers by reducing jobs or hours. Some 30 states have passed laws setting minimum wage above the federally mandated $7.25 an hour.

🤖 AI Washing Job Cuts ()
AI is an easy excuse for job cuts, but the Decide, Execute, Deliver sandwich needs human elements. The execution layer might get more AI but the surrounding decision-making and delivery is in the human domain.

👨We Borrowed the Wrong Words For AI ()
We talk about AI like we talk about the human mind. Fabrication might be a better term than hallucination. Words drive thinking.

🧑‍🎓 Graduating into a Dying World ()
The spring of 2026 probably feels like a not-so-great time to enter the adult world. 2021 graduate Jasmine Sun has some advice for her youngers. People skills matter. Touch grass. Be like Analyst #3 but remember to take breaks too.

💣 Can Ukraine Isolate Crimea? ()
Are better motivated, paid and trained Ukrainians using UAVs to isolate Crimea?

⚽ World Cup Match Geopolitics ()
There is a geopolitical story in every group stage game.

🏀 The Knicks Won the Parity Era ()
The Knicks could be called the NBA’s most under-utilized asset. The team broke conventional NBA wisdom about building around superstars on the way to the best-ever playoff point differential.

🍷 What Would Jesus Drink? (The Guardian)
Faith has found the energy drink craze.

The Look

Stock markets are booming, unemployment is low and life expectancy is high, yet belief in the American Dream is at an all-time low. Bruce Mehlman investigates why Americans are so anxious.

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⚽ FIFA and the Revenue Curve ()
FIFA, not unlike any other entertainment provider, has taken up revenuemaxxing, attempting to squeeze every dollar out of every touchpoint in its commercial universe. Corporate hospitality buyers might be happy, but nobody else is.

🏎️ The Monaco Grand Prix You Don’t See ()
How Formula One came to Monaco and why it keeps coming back.

👜 Why Gucci Needs F1 More than F1 Needs Gucci ()
How Gucci came to realize it could not afford to be absent from the F1 circuit.

💣 Tech I’m Skeptical of and Why ()
Why space data centers don’t quite make economic sense.

👀 The Attentionless Internet ()
The internet has always been about getting attention, but how does that work when there are more bots than humans looking at content?

🧠 Cognitive Uploading ()
Some people are saying AI makes you dumber. Author and NotebookLM creator Steven Johnson argues that you can leverage these tools to be terrific thought partners.

🤵 The AI Bowtie ()
An AI framework suggesting using a lot of AI for research, brainstorming and discovery up front and execution at the back end while keeping your thought process human.

♟️ Using Games for Motivation ()
Your brain loves playing games. Use that dopamine hit to motivate.

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🚗 Ferrari’s Electric Gamble ()
Ferrari has an EV and almost everyone hates it. They got on the path because the EU forced their hand. But you can’t just shoehorn a battery into an existing Ferrari frame; you need to build something different. Sir Jony Ive might not have hit the right design note.

🤷 Is AI Going to Destroy our Lives or Not? ()
Some advice targeted at new graduates. Is AI a good enough substitute for human labor? Is AI actually cheaper than humans? How many companies are really using AI? Will there be a permanent AI underclass? What can you do to differentiate yourself?

🎬 24 Tips for Great Demonstrations ()
Excellent tips for how to build an effective product demonstration. Applies to more than just software.

📩 How to Take Your Inbox Back ()
Use the concept of the Commander’s Critical Information Requirements to re-take control of your inbox. Written for construction management but applies to lots of jobs.

🏈 Solving the Quarterback Problem ()
The Quarterback problem — where one strong player makes all the decisions — is a tough one to design around. Naive approaches like adding unique powers actually make the problem worse. The fix is to build tension into the cooperation, so that the same play is not good for everyone at the table.

⌚ How a Soviet Watch Explains US Defeats ()
If you are used to western watches, it feels like it is falling apart. But the apparent flaw is a strength — the loose crown is designed to keep the watch alive in circumstances that would smash a Rolex. AK-47s have huge internal clearances that let them work covered in grime. F-15s, by comparison, are finely tuned machines that need a dozen hours of maintenance for every hour in the air.

😀 The Dark History of the Smiley Face ()
The emoji we all love started life as a corporate post-layoff morale stunt.

The Look

Analyst and independent thinker Benedict Evans posted an updated version of his AI Eats the World presentation. He is doing interesting work on AI job exposure. And he appeared on Lenny’s podcast this week where he talks about all of this and more.

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🫠Measuring the Rise of Slop ()
Daniel Parris made a name for himself by measuring hard-to-measure phenomena and telling everyone about it. He applies those skills to the question of the day — how much of what you see is AI-generated slop?

🚫arXiv Banned AI to Help Academic Gatekeepers ()
arXiv, the online pre-print paper repository behind a lot of the conversation in the AI space, increased penalties to a year-long ban for careless use of AI. Tenured professors rejoiced while independent researchers lack the means to properly check citations. AI is now doing real scientific work outside of the ivory tower.

✍️ LinkedIn Posts for $7 an Hour (Rest of the World)
Many of the LinkedIn posts you read from busy executives are really written for $7 an hour in Manila. Not all slop is AI-generated.

👷 After Automation (Every)
Every is an AI-first company. They have automated everything they can. They are discovering that AI and automation create more work for humans, not less. Agents can commoditize yesterday’s work, but you still need humans to differentiate the work.

💔 The Messy Middle ()
How do we get from the world today — still largely driven by human labor — to the world where AI is capable of doing most jobs? What will the political backlash to this disruption be? How does the world work where law firms, for example, only need partners?

🫗 How the AI Water Usage Myth Started ()
The Washington Post asserted that a 100-word email generated by GPT-4 took 519 mL of water. It was based on back-of-the-envelope math and raw conjecture about electric vehicles. The real number is much lower.

🤑 Software Was Easy, Now Physics is Printing Money ()
Venture capital spent the last decade-plus betting on the ephemeral. Those bets are swinging back into the physical realm with a massive structural bet on infrastructure.

📈 Consistently Outperforming the Market ()
One investor’s guide to how he consistently finds and multiplies his alpha to consistently beat the market.

📝 7 Prompts For Your ADHD Brain ()
ADHD can be a superpower if you harness it. Here are the prompts to get you there.

⚒️ Team Management Protips ()
Kevin Kelly has managed a few successful projects, such as launching Wired Magazine. It is about the team, and they need to succeed together.

✈️ Argentina: The Passport Everyone is Talking About ()
Are you thinking about diversifying your passport portfolio?

🎟️ World Cup Ticket Speculation ()
Will World Cup ticket prices drop in the coming weeks?

The Look

El Nino is coming. See it sketched and explained by .

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🧑‍🏭HI-C is the New Career Flex ()
Success was once measured by the size of the team reporting to you. Individual contributors capable of driving end-to-end projects delivering business value are rewriting this narrative.

🛠️ The New Work Stack ()
Integration and vision are becoming the key drivers of work. You can be a master builder, combining tools and building your own scaffolding to assist in your travails.

🔢 AI Now Integrates Seamlessly With Excel ()
In 2026 you don’t need to bring your spreadsheet to AI, your AI will come to your spreadsheets.

🤦 Why Competent People Disappear ()
Functional stupidity infects many organizations. People are punished for too much thinking out loud. Critical questioning and genuine reflection are discouraged. Competent people often disappear rather than learn to flip the script and deliver clarity.

📖 The Inference Shift (Stratechery)
The compute story in AI is changing rapidly. It was once about NVIDIA and GPUs but it is rapidly becoming focused on inference workloads. Plentiful, cheaper, good enough compute gives China everything it needs for this work.

🤖 AI, Labor and China ()
Jasmine visited Silicon Valley and China to get a read on the future of work in the AI era. The difference between American techno-pessimism and Chinese techno-pragmatism is stark.

🏝️ How Did Kitchen Islands Become a Thing? ()
These days, every kitchen seems to have an island. Blame TV.

🎸 The Greatest Guitar Solo Ever? ()
Personally, I’d go with Free Bird.

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🥊 Ted Turner vs Rupert Murdoch ()
Aside from inventing 24-hour news and marrying Jane Fonda, Ted Turner might be the only American who challenged Rupert’s news dominance.

✈️ Why Airlines Are Always Going Bankrupt ()
Airlines cannot be competitive and profitable at the same time.

🧾 Stop Microlooting the Tax Code ()
Everyone thinks their tax cut is the reasonable one. All the carve-outs cost us all.

🪦 On Superpower Suicide ()
Great powers don’t fall — they jump, usually while telling themselves the ground is rising to meet them.

🐎 People Are Not Horses ()
Human labor does not behave like equine labor.

🧪 I Don’t Think We Are Close to “AI Scientists” ()
Models can summarize papers; they don’t know the right paper to write.

🧠 The Human-Clanker-Human Sandwich ()
Put the AI in the middle and the humans on the outside.

🚿 The Slop Cannons in Your Engineering Org ()
Pull requests can be slop too.

🧱 Minimally Viable Consistency ()
How to build alignment with a combination of sharp and flexible consistency and some understanding of locally driven but documented inconsistency.

🛸 Drones and Ancient Revolutions in Military Affairs (Stephen Bryen)
Every “revolution in military affairs” looks novel until you notice the Assyrians did it first.

💵 Tethered Italian Efficiency ()
Tether was built by two Italians. It has a dozen or so employees and a balance sheet strong enough to make a hostile €1.1 billion offer for Juventus.

The Look

AI is both increasingly powerful and ubiquitous. Regulation is likely according to .

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🤦 The $375,000 Drinking Fountains ()
Replacing a broken water fountain should be easy and not insanely expensive. But a stack of well-intentioned rules and a system nobody designed conspired to drive costs to ridiculous levels. This is not an outlier but rather a symptom of the Machine.

🧒 Job Disruption: Now, Soon or Never? (Full Moon)
Young workers want to know if they get a share in the AI disrupted future too.

🌐 The Hidden World of Undersea Cables ()
We all know the internet travels the world in a series of tubes. Sometimes those tubes are deep under the sea, living in shark-proof Kevlar and are regularly scanned for sabotage.

⚡️ 100 Fun Facts about the Grid ()
Squirrels have shut down NASDAQ twice; China is adding a new medium-sized power plant a week and many more fun facts about energy.

🛢️ How an Oil Refinery Works ()
Oil refineries are huge, complicated complexes the size of small cities. Making big, naturally occurring mixes of hydrocarbons into little, refined batches of hydrocarbons is fascinating business.

📊 The Most Important Charts in the World ()
The Zvi asked X for the world’s most important charts. X delivered.

💵 Compounding Success ()
Software teams enforce hygiene and grow shared knowledge to build the right things and compound success.

🫧 End of the Open AI Bubble? ()
Henry Blodgett wonders if OpenAI looks more like MySpace than Facebook?

🥊 Musk v Altman Begins ()
Elon took the stand last week; Sam will be on the stand soon. But it started a long time ago and you can read the love letters.

🧑‍🏫 Google’s Secret Reference Desk ()
Gemini is amazing, but sometimes you need to be more deterministic. Here is how to use Google like a reference librarian.

💔 UI Patterns That Will Not Survive AI ()
Legacy UI patterns will not survive the era of intelligent assistants.

👍 Speak in the Affirmative ()
Telling people what to do is much more powerful than telling them what not to do.

📝 How To Read Like Virginia Woolf ()
Virginia Woolf might have been a better reader than writer. Her book review technique is worth emulating.

🏇 The OG Sporting Spectacle ()
Horse racing is a sport few Americans follow, save one Saturday in May where we put on our best hats, sip mint juleps, and soak in the Run for the Roses.

🏖️ When Club Med Met Atari ()
There was a brief moment in history when people went on vacation to learn to program Ataris.

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🛋️ The Interior Design of Software ()
Historically, software has been utilitarian. Interfaces have dramatically improved, and will only become more important in a world where anyone can build software but few have an eye for design.

🙁 The Unhappiness Permademic ()
COVID created a wave of unhappiness that has not left the anglophone world.

🚘 Waymos are Too Cautious ()
Waymo self-driving taxis have been involved in very few accidents overall, and most of them are in scenarios where they were too cautious and ended up doing things human drivers were not expecting.

💪 The Tokenmaxxing Trend (The Pragmatic Engineer)
Incentivizing anything often leads to gamesmanship. Especially among engineers. And especially when they are spending other people’s money.

🧪 A Robotic Biolab ()
Medra is building a biolab of the future with an army of seeing, sensing robotic arms. Are we on the cusp of real productivity gains in the lab?

🏃 You Are Not Racing AI ()
Signs of low-effort AI-generated work are obvious. Showing you care counts.

🧑‍✈️ Escape the AI Autopilot (Every)
AI is getting more reliable, leading you to have less incentive to check the work. Here are a few techniques to leverage AI while avoiding getting stuck in autopilot mode and letting slop slip out the door.

🖼️ Artifacts Are Alive ()
Artifacts are functioning little HTML+JavaScript programs created by claude and other AI tools. They are transportable pieces of software content. They are a new medium of the AI age.

🤵 Building a Management Flight Simulator ()
Figuring out a “what if” simulator for business has been a dream for a while. But in 2026, if you feed your enterprise world model enough email, you can relive the corporate dramas of your dreams.

📍 How GPS Works (PerThirtySix)
GPS is an astoundingly important component of the modern world. It is also disturbingly simple and fragile.

☎️ Using the Internet Like it is 1999 (Joshua Blias)
Turn the clock back to take control of your feed. Some of the advice is a bit extreme, but tools like RSS are amazing ways to follow many creators on YouTube or Substack.

🪶 The Meaning of Yankee Doodle ()
Yankee Doodle Dandy meant something very different to the British soldiers who created the song.

The Look

What happens when you have AI agents simulate famous technology company organizational charts? worked out the math.

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👨‍💻 The Hacker Mindset ()
Thinking outside the box lets you walk through walls. See through the abstraction and past the convention to win. Just do it.

⚓ Visualizing the Pace of Change ()
Change comes at you fast. Just ask the HMS Warrior.

⚡Trouble with Transformers ()
The bad news: transformers are getting harder to build in the US. The good news: we can fix most of that with the stroke of a pen.

🧙‍♂️ Mythos Misinformation ()
Claude Mythos has been said to be the end of software as we know it, finding all kinds of unpatched vulnerabilities. The truth is less scary.

🎬 The Clip Economy ()
People don’t watch content, they watch clips.

💾 How an SSD Works ()
SSDs exploit quantum physics to do their magic.

🏢 15 Observations on Life and Work in China ()
996+ and big family meals at malls.

💸 The “Passive” “Income” Trap (JA Westenberg)
A generation of young entrepreneurs got infected with passive income brain and kept losing money from ineffective “systems” instead of doing the thing.

🤡 Everyone You Meet Online is a Freak ()
Today’s reminder that the people you interact with online represent a very small subsection of humanity.

The Look

Openclaw creator Peter Steinberger walks on stage at TED 2026 with a beaming smile and lobster in his pocket and shares how Openclaw came to be one of the fastest growing platforms known to man. It is the kind of thing you could get fired for using — or fired for not using.

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🚤 Analyst #3’s Hormuz Adventure ()
He took $15,000 in cash, Zyn and Cuban cigars to the Strait of Hormuz and lived to tell the tale. What are the facts on the water of the most strategic waterway on earth?

💰 The Price of Cost Disease ()
Innovation has been driving the American economy for decades, but you cannot economize and optimize relationships effectively. Anti-social business has driven Americans apart.

🧑‍🦯 Vitality > Longevity ()
We have measured lifespan for decades, but we have only recently had the luxury of thinking about healthspan — the good years you live free of disease and disability.

💵 How the Wealthy do Taxes ()
How the truly wealthy structure their income to avoid tax and protect assets.

😖 Generation Cringe ()
Cringe is an ill-defined and confusing concept that Gen Z is working hard on navigating. Rejection and embarrassment are harder to process in a panopticon.

🥟 Notes on Hong Kong ()
Rohit’s notes on an amazing city.

🧱 How LEGOs are Special ()
Legos are a toy, a metaphor and a cultural icon. Explore how they can be used and the story behind the phenomenon.

The Look

Is the Strait open yet?

Bonus tracker: Are we Idiocracy Yet?

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🧮 How the Spreadsheet Reshaped America ()
The spreadsheet was a tool that let managers and policymakers imagine in numbers, enabling the age of financial engineering and changing organizations and America.

🧨 The De-Institutionalization of Society ()
We live in a world where you no longer need access to large institutions. The distribution of information means individuals now trade in spaces once reserved for the state. You need your own shingle.

🎙️ 8 Interviews That Will Make You a Better Investor ()
Eight interviews with investing legends that will give you structure and perspective for your investment strategy.

🤩 There Is Not Enough Claude ()
If AI is truly a self-improving, general-purpose technology then we will see a massive increase in AI demand, commensurate with improved AI capabilities.

🖼️ How to Design in English ()
How to partner with your AI designer more precisely.

🍗 Why China Hates Buffalo Wings ()
Buffalo wings were designed around bland 1960s American palates and it shows.

🖨️ The McNamara Family of Fallacies ()
Measuring what matters, without creating perverse incentives, is much harder than it sounds.

The Look

Microsoft named 80 products ‘Copilot.’ Tey Bannerman’s interactive graphic illustrates the confusion.

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♻️ The Transposed Organization ()
What if you transpose your operational flow and use AI and automation to enable people to own the full product loop rather than one piece in a chain?

🤔 Controversial Career Advice ()
This is not your typical career advice.

🐮 5 Types of BS Job ()
AI will come for the BS first. Here are five kinds of jobs most at risk. Taskmasters beware.

⚒️ Against the Luddites ()
Even Marx and Engels saw through the elitist Luddite movement.

⛓️‍💥 Disappearing Childhood Freedom ()
The supervision era has ended the freedom to roam the neighborhood.

⚾ Why I Love Baseball ()
I am not a baseball fan, but there are reasons to love baseball.

🥛 Soy Right Ascendant ()
The desperate need for approval and respect combined with a refusal of agency and responsibility is a special combination.

🌅 Was There a House In New Orleans? ()
How the Animals started singing about a fictional house in NOLA.

The Look

has dropped the Consumer Electronics Design Trends 2026 report. Electronics are twisting into different forms and hiding in plain sight.

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🦞 What is OpenClaw? (More or Less Podcast)
OpenClaw has been the Main Character in the AI world this week. It's an AI agent that runs on your computer and it's reshaping who controls the AI stack.

🏃‍♂️ The Great Claw Forward ()
While we debate security, China is mass-mobilizing.

💻 How to Use Perplexity Computer ()
Perplexity Computer is the new agentic tool that comes with your subscription. It is not a search engine but your own agentic worker.

🪖 The Art of War in the 21st Century ()
Warfare is different now. Electrically-powered, AI-enabled drones make asymmetric, omnipresent warfare a reality.

🦅 The Eagle and The Lions ()
America and Israel wanted a sprint, Iran is getting the marathon it wants.

🛢️Funding The Enemy ()
Waiving sanctions on Iranian oil is just rewarding Iran for closing the Straits.

🏝️ The Kharg Island Fantasy ()
Can you invade an island in the Persian Gulf without any ships in the Persian Gulf?

🎈 Don’t Buy the Helium Hype ()
Helium production has been curtailed, but how much does it matter?

🌍 Modeling the Messy World ()
What if you could tokenize and understand the real world like current LLMs work with language? World Models learn by seeing rather than reading and they are going to get very interesting soon.

🥊 Fight the Fight 3 Times ()
Figuring out when you should give up is hard.

🤓 Storytelling Mistakes by Technical Leaders ()
Technical leaders tend to give too much detail, overthink tactics, overshare back story and go on too long to be effective storytellers. Here are some ways to work on those tendencies.

🗺️ Non-Technical User’s Guide to Claude Code ()
In case you haven’t taken the plunge, this is a handy guide to getting going with Claude Code for the not-so-technically inclined.

💿 Cop Killer ()
The song Cop Killer struck a nerve in 1992. The band still rocks on.

The Look

Today’s reminder that oil and gas are in everything.

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🔮 Amy Webb (FTSG)
Amy Webb accepts the creative destruction of the Trend Report. Her Convergence Outlook sees a world with machines at the wheel and all-seeing eyes.

🏭 Dylan Patel on AI Compute Bottlenecks ()
There are three physical chokepoints in compute: logic, memory and power. They will determine how fast we can scale.

📱 The iPhone vs the Bank Teller ()
The ATM did not reduce bank teller jobs. It only replaced a single task. The iPhone replaced many other reasons you would need to visit a bank, and the tellers disappeared as branches closed.

🚲 Drones like Bicycles (Phenomenal World)
Iran’s Shahed-136 drone has changed warfare. The cheap cruise missile has changed the air defense equation, often being far cheaper than the interceptor vehicles sent to take it down. How does it come together? What does it cost?

🙋‍♂️ How to Start a One Person Business in 2026 ()
How you can build a $1m, one-person business today.

🔨 Atoms Are Cheap, Process is Pricey ()
How SpaceX rethinks from first principles and implements process to make amazing launch vehicles.

🪜 AI Wrecks the Corporate Career Ladder ()
Tools like Claude Code reduce the need for assistance with execution, breaking the breadth-first model many people have trained in. Taking a depth-first approach where juniors are given whole projects with AI assistants scales better in the new world.

🤖 How Can A Regular Person use an AI Agent ()
AI agents are a lot simpler than you think.

🎹 The Piano Bar is Musical Truth ()
Today I learned everyone requests “Pink Pony Club” at the piano bar when they are not singing “Teenage Dirtbag.”

📻 The Iconic Boom Box ()
Boom boxes were a cultural icon, delivering hip hop and the mixtape to America.

The Look

points out how much water farmland uses compared to ChatGPT:

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🙈 The Invisible Information War ()
Information warfare might be the most important kind of warfare. Here are six observations on how it is playing out in Iran today.

🌍 Is the Intelligence Monopoly Over? ()
You can reconstruct ongoing military operations from public sources.

🏖️ Special Update from Abu Dhabi ()
Stephen McBride lives in Abu Dhabi. He gives you a sense of what life is like at one facet of the front. He would remind you that drone warfare is important.

🔥The Ultimate LNG Report ()
Everything you need to know about liquid natural gas in the Gulf.

🤖 Why You Only Hear About AI Doom (Sahil Bloom)
It is far easier to monetize the negative doom loop than to sell positive stories.

📰 AI Will Reshape Public Opinion ()
Social media democratized public opinion, fueling the rise of populists. LLMs might be capable of pulling things in the opposite direction should they overcome their current shortcomings.

💿 Rick Rubin is the Future of Work ()
Rick Rubin has taste and can express what he feels. He does not know how to play an instrument or work a sound board. In a world of AI you do not need to know how.

💊 The Peptide Wave ()
Peptides are the drug of 2025. Here is a great rundown on a few popular models and the underlying science.

🪖 The 100 Year War ()
We have been fighting the war on drugs for a lot longer than we remember.

☀️ 64% of Americans Want to Stop Changing Clocks ()
We all just want to stop changing clocks. We don’t care which clock wins. Just pick one.

📚 Gen Z Lives in the Archive ()
Gen Z is actually reacting to everything that ever happened in quasi-real time.

🪨 A History of Rock, Paper, Scissors ()
Using hand shapes to settle disputes is a very old human tradition.

The Look

Beware of fake satellite images, via Flowing Data.

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Timeline

If you have not been tracking the conflict, here is a quick refresher on some meaningful events that materially shape the current engagement.

• 2017-2018: the Trump administration first renews sanctions then withdraws from the JCPOA nuclear weapons deal. Maximum pressure initiated.

• 2019: conflict heats up with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Tanker attacks in the Straits of Hormuz lead to a visit from a US Navy task force.

• 2020: A US drone attack kills IRGC leader Qasem Soleimani in response for strikes on US bases in Iraq.

• 2023-4: Iran backed Houthi rebels attack Red Sea shipping. US and UK forces launch strikes on Houthi missile and drone infrastructure, culminating in large-scale strike on 1,000 targets in March 2025.

• September 2024: Israel decapitates Hezbollah in a daring strike using booby trapped pagers distributed through a years-long supply chain attack. Hezbollah is rendered ineffective as a fighting force to this day.

• June 2025: Israel attacks Iran in the Twelve Day War. The US jumps in near the end of the fight, attacking Iranian air defense and nuclear capabilities directly. Proved US and Israeli assets were capable of penetrating Iranian airspace at will.

• January 2026: Nationwide protests erupt and are bloodily repressed. Thousands killed, many more detained during a brutal repression led by the IRGC. This wave of protests was much larger scale and more generalized than previous waves.

By February 2026, Russia is fairly consumed with the ongoing Ukraine War, unable to send material help. Iran is on her own, proxies like Hezbollah are diminished, rebuilding her air defenses and nuclear program. If there was a time to strike, it was now.

The Territory and the Lead-Up

Here are some curated background sources that should help make sense of the headlines.

🗺️ Land war is unrealistic. See ’s exploration of Iran to get a sense of how daunting the terrain is.

🚢 Can Iran close the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway carrying a fifth of the world’s oil trade? Keeping it closed would be harder than it looks according to the .

🔮 For a wider view of this conflict, explained the military and political situation effectively. Conflict was inevitable, there was no offramp between Trump and how boxed in Iran had become.

Staying Updated

For a raw but detailed and digestible feed keep an eye on the Institute for the Study of War’s Middle East desk for daily updates. This is the best way to keep up with the conflict on a detailed level if that is your goal.

The Bismarck Cables, mentioned above, are a succinct way to keep abreast of international affairs of all sorts.

From an investment point of view, the most important question is “what is happening in the strait?” Real-time shipping information is a good place to start. Check out this map on Marine Traffic to start. Traffic is very light going through the Strait at this time. The thing to look at is if we see significant mining or other activity and maritime insurance rates effectively close the channel. It is probably too late to buy Brent Crude Oil futures.

Let’s hope for a fast and peaceful resolution to the fighting. Hopefully involving the end of a horribly repressive regime.

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