What I Am Reading:
Morgan Housel opens with a fact that resets everything: Adam Smith wrote that it was common in 18th-century Scotland to meet a mother who had borne twenty children and had not two alive. Queen Anne of England had 18 children. Not one made it. Today we complain about grocery stores having too many options. The piece is a meditation on how profoundly life has improved in ways so total and complete that we've lost the ability to see them as progress. The compounding of human knowledge across generations is the most underrated investment thesis of all time, and this piece makes that case better than almost anything I've read.
A Navy SEAL Breathing Technique to Stay Calm and Focused
Former Navy SEAL Mark Divine's box breathing method has been around for years but I keep coming back to it. The technique is almost embarrassingly simple: inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for four, hold empty for four. What I find interesting is the physiology behind it. At 16 to 20 shallow breaths per minute, most people are running their nervous systems slightly hot all day. Slow that to five or six full breaths and you're running a completely different operating system. Divine practiced this standing in line, sitting in traffic, before workouts. The point isn't that breathing is magic. The point is that you have a direct line to your autonomic nervous system and almost nobody uses it.
On a recent episode of No Priors, investor Elad Gil made an observation that's worth sitting with: for most companies there is roughly a 12-month period where the business is at peak value, and then it crashes out. Lotus, AOL, Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com all caught that window. A lot of great companies didn't. This matters especially right now because a significant portion of today's AI startup landscape exists because the foundation models haven't expanded into their category yet. As founders openly acknowledge, that won't last forever. The question for everyone building in this space is: do you know which phase you're in?
If We Ever Solve Consciousness, Reality Would Collapse
The premise here is Nietzsche's eternal recurrence, and the thread draws out a question I find genuinely difficult to put down: if every configuration of matter recurs infinitely, then every moment you have ever lived has already happened an infinite number of times and will happen an infinite number of times more. Including this one. Most people scroll past it. I find it one of the more productive things to sit with, not because it's terrifying, but because it reframes the weight of any given moment in an unexpected direction. Whether the physics holds up or not is almost beside the point.
Palantir published a mini manifesto: Silicon Valley has a moral debt to the US
Alex Karp and Palantir put out a 22-point manifesto that has racked up 32 million views on X, built around a central argument: the engineering elite in Silicon Valley built their fortunes on the infrastructure of American democracy and defense, and have contributed almost nothing back to it. The piece is pointed and intentionally provocative. You don't have to agree with every position to find the core argument worth engaging with. The question of what the tech industry owes to national security is not going away, and the people building in this space are increasingly having to answer it.
10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now
MIT Technology Review's annual signal map on AI. What I found most useful about this one is how clearly it separates the things that are happening now from the things that are still mostly noise.
Is your supplement stack boosting longevity? Experts say probably not the way you think
A contrarian take worth reading: the supplement stack many people have convinced themselves is extending their lives is more likely to be an expensive placebo than a biological intervention. The piece doesn't argue supplements are worthless across the board, but it makes a pointed distinction between supplements that have clinical backing and the vast majority that are being promoted by influencers based on cherry-picked data or no data at all. What I find valuable here is the reminder that optimism about your own biology is not the same thing as evidence, and that the biohacking space produces a lot of the former dressed up as the latter.
What I Am Listening to:
State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex brings in two of the most trusted practitioners in machine learning, Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka, for a four-hour breakdown of where AI actually stands right now rather than where the hype says it does. They go deep on China versus US in the model race, the real state of scaling laws, which labs are actually winning in enterprise, where coding agents are heading, and whether the dream of AGI is strengthening or fraying. If you want one conversation that gives you the map of 2026 in AI without the noise, this is it.
Andrej Karpathy on AutoResearch, AI Agents, and the Future of Engineering | No Priors Podcast
Andrej Karpathy joins Sarah Guo for one of the more intellectually honest conversations I've listened to this year on where AI agents are actually headed. He's been building AutoResearch, a system where AI agents can design experiments, collect data, and iterate without a human in the loop, and the conversation pulls in what that signals for the future of engineering as a profession, how education needs to change, and where humans still have a durable edge. Karpathy has a way of being sober about what AI can and can't do without being dismissive in either direction.
What I Am Watching:
The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness
Robert Pantano from the Pursuit of Wonder channel asks a question that sounds simple and turns out not to be: at what point does self-awareness become self-sabotage? The more you examine your own thinking, the more the act of examination starts to interfere with the thing you're examining. There's a level of meta-cognition beyond which you're no longer living, you're just watching yourself. It's one of those videos I found myself pausing repeatedly not because it was hard to follow but because it kept producing thoughts worth stopping for.
Jerry Seinfeld: How Warren Beatty Changed His Mind on Kids
From The Blocks with Neal Brennan. Seinfeld tells the story of how Warren Beatty, one of the most famous holdouts on the subject of marriage and family, looked him in the eye and said that having children was the greatest thing he had ever done. Seinfeld had his own complicated feelings about it and explains how those feelings shifted.
Palantir's Shyam Sankar and Anduril's Trae Stephens sit down with the All-In crew for one of the most substantive conversations on defense tech I've watched this year. They cover the drone gap between the US and China, why the shipbuilding deficit matters more than most people realize, the Arsenal-1 factory and what it actually takes to scale autonomous munitions production, and where AI-assisted decision-making is already changing how wars are fought. If you have any capital deployed in this space, this one is required watching.
