Twelve days ago I published Curious Mind Research Letter No. 1. The argument was that the machinery of wartime finance — the 1942 playbook, where the state quietly supports the price of its own debt rather than pay the market’s rate — was reassembling itself piece by piece. Not through crisis. Through technical measures, announced in language so boring that almost nobody notices.

This morning, with the 30-year yield at its highest level in nearly two decades, the U.S. Treasury announced it is at least doubling its buyback operations for long-dated bonds — the 10-to-30-year sector, from a $2 billion maximum per operation to at least $4 billion — effective next month. The announcement was unscheduled, coming two weeks after Treasury had already set the quarter’s buyback plan. The stated reason: “liquidity support.”

Long yields fell immediately.

To be precise about what this is and isn’t: it is not a yield cap. The sums are small against the roughly eight trillion dollars of Treasury paper rolling over in the next twelve months. Anyone telling you this is yield curve control is ahead of the evidence.

But watch the shape of it. Long rates blew out, and within days the fiscal authority was in the market buying its own long bonds, under the most anaesthetic label available. The essay’s claim was never about the size of the first step. It was that the reflex now exists — long rates rise, the state buys — and reflexes like this one only ever get exercised in one direction. 1942 started small too. What made it a regime wasn’t the first operation. It was that nobody ever found a good day to stop.

Gold, meanwhile, was $4,377 when I published. It’s around $4,528 today (and rising).

If you haven’t read No. 1 yet, today is a good day to. It’s free and public, and it reads differently than it did two weeks ago:

Curious Mind Research Letter No1

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Handling Information Overload

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

- Herbert Simom

“The calamity of the information age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.”

- Nassim Taleb

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.”

- Mortimer Adler

Summer gives me time to think and reflect. One of those reflections has been on the absolute deluge of information we live in daily.

Blogs, pdfs, books, movies, tv, digital messages in countless formats, emails, in person meetings, virtual meetings, Facebook, Twitter / X….. And each of one of those platforms is also getting bigger and busier and shittier.

What can we do to keep our sanity and not lose the signal in the noise?

If you reflect on it, most information is ephemeral and will be irrelevant tomorrow. We should ignore that.

A few rare things are enduring. Ideas, frameworks, principles that will stand the test of time and provide a latticework on which to build something real.

When AI first came out, my initial reaction was to try to fight the deluge using LLMs, you know the usual summarising tool that we have all used. Turns out it’s the AI gateway drug and a dangerous one.

The reason why it’s dangerous is that it makes you think you understood something or actually did something, but you actually just ate a ton of junk food. Cause distilled noise is still noise. These tools don’t have any judgement, so the more junk you feed them, the more junk arrives on the other end.

and you can spend hours reading those summaries and reports, but its still contextless garbage.

So here’s what I've decided to do last week for all digital communications, reports, blogs, emails.

DELETE - my initial reaction to any information is to delete it, remove it, make it go away. That’s the baseline and maybe you will delete this email.

Why?

• Most things absolutely don’t matter, and it’s just my FOMO causing me to treat any single piece of data as important. Most stuff especially now days is slop and that is not to say before AI everything was amazing. Because its about the fundamental quality of what is produced, most things are ephemeral.

• Now if you fall into the LLM summary trap, sure you might process more information, but in the end you are still consuming junk. Plus I think information / knowledge is only valuable if truly embedded deeply into your brain, not skimmed. Which is by the way why I have never been a fan of these book summary companies like Blinkist which friends keep recommending!

• Now getting deeper, what you read impacts the rest of the network of knowledge in your brain - so if you are going to update that network of knowledge sitting in your neocortex, you need slower, deeper reading, learning, absorbing that actually impacts the rest of the network, rather than just inputting data into a system that doesnt know what to do with it.

• Ok now for the real problem, going deep on anything builds focus and patience in the mind. It’s a muscle and I can feel it atrophying. Secondly, going deep builds judgement, which is again a muscle that atrophies.

I am trying to read or process far fewer things and hitting the delete button far more often. All of that means I just leave a lot more things undone. I taste a lot, I eat very rarely. Most things go into the deleted items. At the same time I am trying to have more real world experience, which remains unpolluted and enduring.

No, I am not being luddite and saying AI sucks, I am saying let AI do the building, but do not let it do your thinking.

Maintain your brain’s muscle tone, don’t let it atrophy.

I know if you look at your day, you can see where it’s already wasting away. Where some skill, patience, concentration has been lost.

As I have gotten older, part of me is also realising that even reading can be a distraction from doing. Why do we read: to be entertained, to be informed, to be moved, to live a different life. I am a fan of any and all of these, BUT as long as it is not getting in the way of actually living. When reading becomes a crutch to living is when it becomes dangerous and I am realising that I might have a lot of living to do still.

P.S. When it comes to books, one simply test is Lindy. Which means I am far more likely to read the old classics than anything less than 5 years old. It just hasn’t earned its place yet in what will endure.

The Adaptability Quotient

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

- Mike Tyson

Some conversations make you realise how stupid and unsophisticated you are. This conversation with Alec Litowitz (founder of Magnetar Capital, now QStar), was one of them. He made a ton of money and has now written book on his framework for developing a high Adaptability Quotient (AQ)—the capability to think clearly, act decisively, and pivot when navigating environments defined by rapid change and uncertainty.

A couple of lessons I will carry with me.

• 3 Buckets Of Opportunity: Risk: you know the possibilities and the probabilities — expected value works, IQ helps, the edge is small because everyone’s there. Black swans: you know neither — survive, stay convex. In between sits Knightian uncertainty: known possibilities, unknown probabilities. Here’s where real money can get made: You convert uncertainty into risk before anyone else. He had a great story from his time at Citadel learning merger-arb, on how that conversion looks like when you industrialise it. Everyone else called a DC lawyer who said a deal was 70/30 — “what am I going to do with that?” So he built a captive expert network, hundreds of consultants, calling the same customers and competitors the DOJ called, doing the government’s antitrust analysis before the government finished it. A production line for resolving uncertainty. Made me think about how the hedge fund guys who have made real money at platform level have figured out uncertainty resolution as an industrial process.

• Diversification is an artifact, not a function. Real estate, power, semiconductors, software used to be a spread-out portfolio; today they’re all correlated to one hypothesis. Run the old risk tools and “you have the artifact of diversification, you don’t have the function.” His fix: diversify by hypothesis, not by asset class.

• We Will Become Median: Social media was a twenty-year experiment: give up attention, get connection — except most people got the artifact of connection instead of the function. “I used to go on vacation with Dean, but now he shows me pictures of a vacation and I thumb up and like it.” Hence the loneliness epidemic. AI is the same experiment run on cognition because it compresses for you. On the internet, engagement-optimised feeds serve the extremes, an LLM serves the mean answer, so “you’re getting the worst of the polarized extremes and you’re getting the middle of the distribution.” The more you ask the LLMs for advice the more median your decisions become.

• Where he’s putting his own money now: QStar (his family office) barbells “capability” (what humans can do — tech, healthcare, grid) against “belonging” (what makes it mean anything) — a soccer team, hospitality, five assembled city blocks in Chicago for a cultural arts hub. The implicit bet: when knowledge is free, gathering is the scarce asset.

• The irreversible-option rule: if an opportunity can’t wipe you out and passing on it is irreversible, take it even though you can’t price it — that’s how he got into SpaceX, which only ever raised about $9 billion of primary capital.

Enshittification

"Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.”

- Charlie Munger

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

- Upton Sinclair

Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification”; he’s an author of many books including the most recent: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

He’s a great presenter and worth watching or listening to.

Enshittification, is he describes it is platform decay, a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time (think Facebook, X, even Google). Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users. Over time, they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers.

Enshittification is a constraints story, not a greed story. Don’t ask why services got worse; ask why they were ever good. Firms were always tempted to abuse users and were held back by four outside disciplines — competition, regulation, interoperability, labor scarcity — each dismantled over twenty-five years. “We took away the reasons not to cheat, and then they cheated.”

Here’s a few things I will remember:

• Why the stories keep getting bigger: a growth stock is currency — you buy companies by typing zeros into a spreadsheet — and when growth stops the currency dies and the collapse self-accelerates. So saturated firms must claim markets that don’t exist yet (metaverse, web3, now AI), because “who is anyone to argue with you about the size of that market opportunity? You literally just made it up.” “We are now at the peak of narrative” — except this time the narrative is chained to capex: $1.4T by Q2, Gartner saying $2.5T by year-end. And the state is already propping it. SpaceX was admitted straight into the Nasdaq-100 with no record of profitable quarters and a waiver of the insider lock-up, so index funds were legally obliged to buy while the insiders who funded Twitter and Grok cashed out into them. A bailout by regulation, with index savers as the designated bag holders.

• Whether AI augments you or replaces you is not a fact about the technology. It’s a fact about your bargaining power. Radiology: the same software supports two sales pitches — ride shotgun and catch tumors humans miss (radiology gets slower and more expensive; no OpenAI investor wants that), or fire nine of ten radiologists and leave one to sign every scan and take the blame when someone dies of cancer. Radiologists are scarce, so they’re getting the first version: “Someone tells us that’s the new job, we quit.” Everyone without leverage gets the reverse centaur — the horse’s head on a human body, auditing machine output at machine pace, the “accountability sink” (Dan Davies).

• AI Firings. Bosses fire people not because chatbots do the jobs but because “bosses are patsies for investor stories about firing workers” — like selling supplements to Andrew Tate’s audience, the product doesn’t have to work, the buyer just has to want the pitch. His sequence for how it ends: “We’re firing millions of people, we’re replacing them with defective chatbots that do their jobs badly, and then we’re going to turn off the chatbots.”

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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.

Whether you are into living longer, making money, finding edge or just being happier this asset is the answer!

Ok enough of the hyperbole….

Let’s Start With Health and Happiness

In 1938, researchers at Harvard began following 268 sophomores to see what makes lives go well. The project later absorbed a second cohort of 456 young men from Boston’s poorest neighbourhoods, then the wives, then some 1,300 of the children, and it is still running — through a depression, a world war, and every fashion in psychology since. And across all of it, the people who stayed healthiest and lived longest were the ones most satisfied with their relationships, an effect that beat wealth, fame and class. How satisfied participants were with their relationships at fifty predicted their physical health at eighty better than their cholesterol levels did.

Robert Waldinger, the study’s fourth director, compresses the finding into a warning: loneliness kills, as powerfully as smoking or alcoholism. George Vaillant, who ran the study for three decades before him, put eighty years of data into one sentence: the key to healthy ageing is relationships, relationships, relationships.

Robin Dunbar’s work gives the signal a structure. Human social worlds, he found, arrange themselves in layers of roughly five, fifteen, fifty and a hundred and fifty, and the layers are not interchangeable. The inner five — the ones needing weekly contact — carry nearly all of the health and longevity effect on their own. Relationships behave less like a pile and more like a portfolio, with almost the entire return concentrated in a handful of positions.

That’s why picking a life partner or spouse is probably the most important decision you can make. I know cause I messed it up the first time.

Now the other side of the ledger. In 2023 the US Surgeon General issued a formal advisory declaring an epidemic of loneliness, and its headline number reads like a pack warning: disconnection raises the risk of premature death by an amount comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. In 1990, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2021 it was 12% — one person in eight. And the fifteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds coming up behind them spend roughly 70% less in-person time with friends than the same age group did twenty years ago.

Screens and AI will make this number worse.

Ok so hopefully I’ve proven that relationships, and the right ones are pretty good for your health. Now let’s talk about jobs and career.

Getting A Job In This Market

Of the eight jobs I held across twenty-seven years, only the first came from sending in a CV. Every other seat I heard about, and was interviewed for, because of people willing to help me. I’d have got nowhere without them, and I say that as someone who was reasonably good at the work.

I also watched promotion rounds inside big banks for two decades, and the pattern became obvious. The people who rose were rarely the best modellers or even the biggest producers. They were the ones other people wanted to succeed — not the flatterers, who everyone can smell, but the genuinely liked. It spoke for them in rooms they weren’t in, and every consequential decision about your career happens in a room you’re not in, decided partly on small interactions you assumed didn’t count, years earlier, when nothing was at stake. I traced the mechanism back through Machiavelli in 2500 Years of Strategic Wisdom, but you don’t need Machiavelli. You need to have watched one promotion round from the inside.

If people know you, like you and trust you, they will do a lot for you. Not anything, but a lot.

The problem is that the job market is getting really bad for those graduating and has been bad for probably almost a decade. All job applications are online, interviews are about sending a video for an AI to review. Writing an essay that a machine will grade.

This is a horrible way to get a job, yes in many ways it is the one filled with least friction - you press a button and you have uploaded your CV and application and it feels like the job is done.

But the thing is that this is a DEAD END.

Its a dead end because you will just end up in one gigantic stack of CVs or applications fed through a AI filter machine and that is no way to judge a 4D human!

And in reality, it is always a human who is making the hiring decision, it’s always a human deciding whether something gets done, and if it’s not then a human definitely has the power to intervene in that process.

I tell young people applying for jobs, get off LinkedIn Jobs and go meet people a few years older than you in real life. Go speak to people you don’t know, because only they might know new information you couldn’t get off the internet or a LLM. Meeting people in person will arm with you intel that no one else will have, and will allow you develop character, trust, and judgement. Which are the only edge humans will have versus the machines.

It is similar but harder if you are mid-career, those jobs are definitely like icebergs only 20% of the jobs are advertised, the remaining 80% are silently under the waterline and only available for those that are actually out there having the conversations.

How About Making Money?

Markets have understood this longer than economists have. In the late 1990s Paul Zak and Stephen Knack showed, first in a model and then across countries, that high-trust societies grow faster for a plain reason: where people trust each other, less capital goes to verifying, monitoring and lawyering, and more goes to building. Let trust fall far enough and investment stops compounding altogether — the low-trust poverty trap. Trust did the job for free before clearing houses, escrow and compliance did it expensively. It was the original transaction-cost technology.

I thought about the criticality and absoluteness of trust a lot listening to discuss Merchant Bankers like Rothschild and Warburg (thank you Nader). Trust and judgement was how the great fortunes were made.

Anyone who has worked in private markets has seen the same force. The best opportunities never reach a screen. They travel through people, over the phone, across lunch tables, inside networks where reputations took twenty years to build.

Today AI, is making one input (intelligence, data, processing power) to a system abundant, value will migrate to whatever stays scarce, and intelligence is being commoditised faster than anyone quite believes.

In public or private markets what will be valuable because it’s scarce is the nuance, the understanding, the feel. These are hand wavy words because it’s at the edge of being human where our edge lies: inside feelings, gut reactions, intuitions and imaginations that can’t be swallowed by the machines, but will remain with the best humans.

The search then is for the most interesting, curious, and original thinkers in the world.

What I Try To Do About It

A decade ago, between after leaving Goldman but before starting in Asset Management, I wrote a short manual teaching students how to network their way into banking — contact lists in spreadsheets, warm and cold tiers, scripts for the first email. Most of it I’d still stand behind: never ask for the job, ask for advice; rank people by who wants to help you, not by who has the grandest connections; give something, however small, before you ask for anything; send the handwritten note nobody sends any more. But re-reading it recently I found a line that was the one that I’ve tried to live the most:

The long-term relationship, is more valuable on every measure including the financial one, and it becomes real when you stop keeping score.

The most important part is not keeping score. A real relationship is built on creating value for others and not worrying about the score.

If I could bottle the mindset into 5 words, they would be: Authentic, Generous, Confident, Relentless and Curious.

A few other things I’d recommend if you are looking to build a network of trust.

Go first. It’s the nearest thing I have to a method — act first, thank first, ask first. If you meet someone at a party or conference, and they seemed cool, reach out first. You listened to a great podcast and loved it, reach out to the guest or host telling them why. You read about someone in the magazine, shoot them an email. Relationships start small and simple. The magic is just beginning. When I audit what I have to give, it comes down to three currencies: the people I can connect, the knowledge I can share, and the willingness to show up when it isn’t convenient. Everyone holds all three in some denomination, including the twenty-two-year-old convinced they have nothing to offer.

Be a convener. Host small breakfasts, lunches or dinners. If that seems too hard, just bring 6 people who don’t know each other (but should) together for a coffee. Being that person is the most underpriced act of generosity. Priya Parker has turned it into a craft anyone can learn. Her rules are simple to the point of discomfort: know what the gathering is for, invite the people it is for, plan how you’ll get them to say something true, and end by letting them tell each other what they learned. The cadence I’d add is one small gathering a quarter, around a question you genuinely care about — four rooms a year, which after a decade adds up to a community.

Make Introductions. Two people a week, most weeks — people who would benefit from knowing each other and might never otherwise collide. An introduction costs minutes, gets remembered for years, and asks nothing back. But by making introductions you are treating social capital, like financial capital, which is to say it only grows when its being invested and not when its kept locked in a box.

Stay Curious. The deepest thing I know about keeping a relationship alive is that loving someone and staying curious about them are the same activity. The people who hold you for decades keep surprising you with depths, and the moment you decide you’ve figured someone out, the relationship flatlines into knowledge. David Brooks divides the world into Diminishers, who use others for their own ends, and Illuminators, whose curiosity makes people feel seen.

The Special Sauce. Benjamin Zander gives everyone he meets an A and invites them to live into it — The Art of Possibility is quite possibly a top-five book of my life. Cal Fussman, who spent a career interviewing everyone from Gorbachev to Muhammed Ali, says the craft reduces to aiming questions at the heart instead of the CV. Brooks keeps a rotation of questions for his own family, and the two I’ve stolen are “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?” and “what has become clearer to you as you’ve aged?” Ask either at your next dinner and watch the temperature of the conversation change.

None of these habits is clever, and that’s the point. Naval Ravikant’s line about playing long-term games with long-term people gets quoted mostly for the money; the returns he meant come from compound interest, and relationships compound the way money does — slowly, invisibly, and only if you don’t interrupt them. Every practice above is just a deposit small enough to repeat for thirty years.

And that reminds of James Clear’s 1%: If you can improve by just 1% a day, you would be 37x better in a year. It might be hard to grow your capital by 1% a day, but I think it’s fairly easy to grow your network and social capital by 1% a day.

Here’s what Uncle Warren would tell you to watch out for.

Listen To Uncle Warren

Everything above reads like an argument for more — more dinners, more curiosity, more rooms. So let me argue the other way, because the biggest mistake I’ve watched successful people make, and made myself for years, has nothing to do with toxic ties.

There’s an exercise usually attributed to Warren Buffett. Write down your twenty-five goals, circle the top five, then treat the remaining twenty as the danger list — close enough to your heart to steal time from the five that matter.

builds Four Thousand Weeks around the same uncomfortable math, and it applies to people at least as brutally as to goals. The threat to your closest relationships comes less from enemies than from the plausible, half-warm commitments you never quite say no to. I’ve yet to watch anyone’s inner five lose ground to a rival; the ground goes, hour by pleasant hour, to the twenty.

When I have reflected back on a bad month or year, it was always the half assed meeting, the uninspired coffee I knew I didn’t need to have.

That’s where Alfred Adler comes in. His psychology reached me through The Courage to Be Disliked (a book I have recommended to many, including my wife) holds that all problems are interpersonal problems, and his discipline for them is subtraction. Ask whose task this actually is, then hand back every task that isn’t yours, including the task of managing what other people think of you. He is ruthless about the warm-seeming stuff too: much praise is manipulation with good manners, delivered down a vertical relationship, and much helping is intrusion. What survives the subtraction is his definition of real connection between equals — confidence in another person, extended without conditions.

If you want to try something less philosophical, my old firm’s COO made his entire team read Greg Mckeown’s Essentialism, the main idea is the aim, you have to get better at knowing who is worth being with and what is worth doing, and ruthlessly prune the bullshit.

The blank spaces in my calendar are the most valuable ones, and guarding them — saying no to perfectly nice people making perfectly reasonable requests — is what turned “I’m too busy” back into “I can think again.”

This little segment on Charlie Rose with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates is a fun one with that exact message.

Brooks noticed the same paradox in the lives he studied for The Second Mountain: the people who end up deepest in community usually crossed a stretch of wilderness alone first.

What Am I Really Telling You To Do?

Tim Urban did some math that I re-read every year and have never got comfortable with. If you leave home at eighteen, you have already used up roughly 90% of the in-person time you will ever spend with your parents. What remains is the tail end, and it passes mostly unnoticed, in visits that feel routine until they stop. I’ve done the sums on my own parents, and then on my daughters, who are with me now in a way they will not always be. The numbers changed how I schedule my weeks.

There are maybe ten people on earth who love me with no scoreboard, and my only real job is to know exactly who they are and deliberately make memories with them. Everything else is networking — useful and worth doing well, but not the point. Maybe the point is love, validation, connection — to know we mattered to the people who shared our room with us.

So write down your five. Notice who is on the list, and notice who you assumed would be and isn’t.

Then before the quarter is out go think about the next 15, 50 and 150, build one room — a breakfast, a call, a walk — around a question you care about, with people you chose on purpose. Go first: act first, thank first, invite first. Most of the network you have today was assembled by seating charts. The one you build next, you get to choose.

My Reading List

The Art of Possibility — Benjamin & Rosamund Stone Zander. Give everyone an A, don’t take yourself so seriously, and when it goes wrong say “how fascinating.” Possibly a top-five book of my life.

How to Know a Person — David Brooks. The Illuminator’s handbook — how to make another human feel seen, and why you’re worse at it than you think.

Never Eat Alone — Keith Ferrazzi. I read it in 2009 and again in 2018. Generosity-first relationship building, decades before the algorithms made it countercultural.

Ten people applied in the first week to join the Brain Trust. This note is for those who missed it.

The Brain Trust is a confidential group of 75 investors, founders, and family office principals. We meet over meals, Zoom sessions, and an annual summit, and run a 24/7 WhatsApp community where members share ideas and opportunities most weeks. It is capped at 100.

The benefit is simple: Your cognitive diversity goes up by 10x by being exposed to a 100 curious, generous and deeply original thinkers who surface investments and introductions.

We are admitting five new members this cycle. Applications close 31 August. To apply, reply to this email with a few lines on what you are working on and the question you would bring.

Membership is $7,500 a year.

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