Power rarely comes from cleverness. It comes from patience paired with infrastructure.

Across geopolitics, corporate finance, and AI, the same pattern keeps repeating: those willing to invest quietly, wait longer than feels comfortable, and own the boring systems underneath the economy eventually win. Rare earths aren’t rare—long-term commitment is. Cashflow isn’t an accounting result—it’s organizational behavior. And AI isn’t a software story at all, but an infrastructure race disguised as magic.

In a world obsessed with speed, the real advantage belongs to whoever can afford to wait.

We are living through a quiet power transition — not from one institution to another, but from one way of knowing to another.

Data no longer needs to be right. It needs to resonate. AI doesn’t win by proving itself correct, but by feeling aligned. Executives don’t ask for dashboards; they ask what customers are “vibing with.” Even burnout is no longer framed as failure, but as the body rejecting a story it no longer believes.

In a world where meaning is contested, narrative has become infrastructure. And power now accrues less to those who are correct — and more to those who can shape what feels right.

Progress doesn’t eliminate cost — it just moves it. This week’s reflections explore how AI, markets, startups, and even therapy culture disguise risk, defer responsibility, and quietly accumulate fragility.

“The more we try to escape the existential burdens of being human — fallibility, fragility, fear — the more we forfeit what makes us human in the first place.”
A reflection on what never changes, why synthetic intimacy is a dangerous mirage, and why Warren Buffett’s final letter might be the most important document of the AI era.

This week I explored how scale reshapes meaning — and often corrodes it. Google grew from a search engine into a civilization-scale operating system, but lost narrative coherence along the way. Open source ideals eroded under commercial pressure. Even intimacy is now monetized through platforms like OnlyFans. Yet in education, Alpha School shows scale can be rebuilt human-first. The age of “platform decay” demands we return systems to a scale where integrity thrives.

In a world where facts are cheap and narratives compound, the ultimate currency is belief—story sells, and those who master narrative hold the real power.