TL;DR: I had a machine read every essay on this site and tell me what I’ve been writing about. The answer took one sentence: “everything you value is something else, stored”. A flattering worldview, right up until you notice the one thing that can’t be stored is the thing everything else is priced in.

I did something halfway between vanity and archaeology: I fed all Huliwood essays into an AI and asked it what I’ve been saying.

Three and a half years, 99 essays. Finance, colonial history, consciousness, caffeine, techno-feudalism, sourdough.

I’d told you the archive was a record of curiosity going wherever it pleased – no lane, no niche, the refusal to pick one being the whole point.

The machine disagreed. It took the full essay catalogue and handed back one sentence.

Everything you value is something else, stored.

Yes. I asked a machine what I think, and it answered faster than I could have.

I wanted to argue. Then it showed me the list.

99 costumes but a *** ain’t one

• Money stores time – I wrote a whole piece calling it a battery: my corporate years charged into a brokerage account.

• Culture stores winters: what we flatter ourselves by calling work ethic is ten thousand Octobers of prepare or die, compressed into software and handed down.

• National advantage stores older deposits – cousin-marriage bans, plagues survived, geographic luck compounding for millennia until one afternoon in 1532 it walks into a square in Cajamarca and cashes itself out as an empire.

• Your gut stores data – pattern recognition passed off as mysticism.

• A brand stores language: Google won so hard the verb pays rent.

• An LLM stores judgment: everything we ever wrote, compressed until it talks back.

• Even the self, when I went looking for it, turned out to be storage: a pattern re-saving itself onto new atoms, a whirlpool holding shape while the water changes.

So that’s the move, then. Pick up the thing everyone treats as solid – money, tradition, credentials, home – and shake it until the realer thing inside rattles. I’d been running one algorithm in countless costumes.

As worldviews go, you could do worse. It has a certain unified-field-theory swagger to it, and for about a day I walked around feeling like a man who had finally read his own manual.

Then I remembered Potosí.

The mountain that ate Spain

The story goes like this: a Quechua herder spends a cold night on a mountain in the Andes, lights a fire to keep warm, and at dawn finds silver melted out of the rocks under the embers. The mountain turns out to be laced with it.

Spain spends the next century shipping home the greatest store of value the world had ever assembled – for a stretch of the 1500s, nearly half the silver on Earth came out of that one hill in what is now Bolivia.

And what did the greatest store of value in history buy the empire that owned it?

Four sovereign defaults before the century was out. Prices did something Spain didn’t have a word for yet: they inflated.

The silver moved through Sevilla like water through a colander – to Genoese bankers, Flemish weavers, Chinese silk merchants – and Spain ended its golden age with the mountain half-hollow and the crown broke.

I know this story cold, and I’ve spent three essays on what it points at – fiat money, pension systems, a financial ledger floating free of the real one – always pointed outward. What I hadn’t done, until the machine rubbed my nose in my own archive, is point it at the sentence I’m proudest of.

The crack

That sentence is four words long: money is stored time.

Readers liked it. I liked it. I built my whole exit on it – sold everything I owned, charged six and a half years of labour into a portfolio, told myself the battery would hold until I decided what it was for.

It’s wrong by one word, though. Money was never stored time.

Money is a claim on other people’s time: the barista’s minutes, the pilot’s hours, a stranger’s afternoon, redeemable on demand.

Your own hours sit in no vault. They run out at one an hour whether you use them or not. You can trade them while they pass, but you can’t bank them.

Money stores time the way a gym membership stores fitness.

The Germans, as usual, have a word they weren’t planning to share: Torschlusspanik – gate-shut panic. Medieval towns locked their gates at dusk; arrive late and you spent the night outside the walls with the wolves and the tax collectors.

The word outlived the gates because the feeling did. Every store of value has a redemption window, and the window is a life.

Call it the Redemption Problem. We’ve spent five hundred years getting brilliant at storing value (double-entry ledgers, joint-stock companies, index funds, cold wallets) and we treat redemption as a detail that sorts itself out later.

Storing value has a whole industry behind it. Cashing it back out into a life has an annuity desk, a few bestsellers, and no heroes.

I can’t name one person history celebrates for cashing out well. (Diocletian, maybe – quit the largest empire on Earth to grow cabbages, and even then history mostly remembers the palace.)

My own book

To be clear: I happily shit on give my unsolicited opinions on anything and anyone, but only under duress when it comes to myself.

When I decided to sell everything and leave, I ran the decision through a spreadsheet first – scenario tabs, sensitivity tables, a model to tell me whether I was allowed to want what I wanted.

More than three years later the number it was guarding has grown. My willingness to draw it down has not.

Somewhere along the way the runway stopped being something to take off from and became something to protect. I check it more often than a man who trusted his decision would.

The pattern doesn’t stop at the portfolio.

I wrote a formula for where to live and I’m still stalling on its answer. I preach living now and keep putting it off.

I once staged a funeral for my corporate self and spent half the service checking whether the coffin had a return policy.

My father ran the same trade in a different asset class – a lifetime hunting a home that fits a feeling he can’t name, and this year the closest he ever came went to the highest bidder: the house in Cabo de Palos from The Last Leash.

I took notes. I changed the asset class. I’m not sure I changed anything else.

The hours get spent whether I decide how or not – deferring just means I don’t get a say.

The other side of the book

Compounding is real, and interrupting it early is how people stay poor.

The only reason I can sit here on a weekday writing fifteen hundred words about redemption is that for six and a half years I didn’t redeem anything. Deferral bought this.

The presence-preachers with no runway aren’t free; they’re one landlord letter away from the machine, and their carpe diem has a copay.

When a monk tells you to live in the moment, somebody else is growing the monastery’s rice.

So the miser is right and the monk is right, and I’ve spent three years failing to make them agree.

The obvious move is a formula – spend x% of the store per year, rebalance toward presence with age, some Kelly criterion for being alive (the gambler’s formula for bet size).

I know better than to trust it: a formula for living now is just another way of putting it off. I notice I’m still looking for one.

A man who reads his own essays and finds a single hidden spine should be the first suspect, not the last – I’ve written before that the map of knowledge has no center, and that every map was drawn by someone.

So maybe the spine isn’t in the archive at all. Maybe it’s in the man reading it.

This is essay number 100.

This is the cornerstone – the one I’d point a stranger to first – and I’d planned a verdict, the way the others mostly have one.

It doesn’t have one. And I’m still at my desk, charging the battery, writing about the sun instead of sitting in it.

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Related: Money is Stored Time – the battery, the first time · Don’t Mid-Curve It – the spreadsheet that guarded the number.

Sources: Drelichman & Voth, Lending to the Borrower from Hell (2014) – Philip II’s four defaults · Potosí, UNESCO · Kris Lane, Aeon – Potosí’s share of the world’s silver

TL;DR: We’ve spent three years fighting over who owns the AI. The real question is whether any human owns it at all – and asked that way, techno-feudalism flips from nightmare to the good ending. With a catch: the dole keeping us docile will feel like winning.

I was on the beach at Cabo de Palos – the Mediterranean strip where my family is spending its last summer before the house goes to the highest bidder; another casualty of my father’s lifelong boomer search for a home that fits a feeling he can’t name.

Coffee in hand, sitting on a patch of ground about to stop being ours, I opened the laptop and avoided sulking in nostalgia by reading about who’s going to own everything else.

Europe 2031 by Daan Juijn, Judith Dada et al. came first, a scenario about a continent quietly negotiating the terms of its own irrelevance, and it rhymed so hard with AI 2027 that I went back through that one too. Which dragged me to Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness, the essay that reads like a man who has seen the future and is faintly annoyed you haven’t.

By then I’d lost the afternoon, so I did what any man pretending to have a real job would: I built a council of them. I had an AI embody all three authors and made them argue while I refereed from the cheap seats.

The AI council handed me a fourth text I’d missed – The Intelligence Curse – and somewhere in there we slid from “what should I buy” to “what are people for,” and I looked up and realized I had spent an entire day using an AI to work out whether artificial intelligence was going to turn me into livestock.

It’s the whole essay in miniature: the tool I was interrogating was the tool I was outsourcing the interrogation to. I was a man asking the oracle whether he’d be sacrificed to it, and taking notes in its handwriting.

And instead of being neutral about the answer, I’ve been in the picks and shovels of the AI build-out trade for years now. So I’m long the thing that might make me obsolete. A participation trophy, if you will.

For me, every one of these scenarios is less a question of philosophy than of solvency.

Second Thoughts

When I wrote Who Owns the Hammer?, I ended on a line I was pleased with and have since decided is only half right: “The other hard problem is who governs the owners.”

Tidy. And broken, because “who governs the owners” assumes, without saying so, that a human is still doing the governing.

We’ve been arguing about who owns the machine. Concentrated or distributed, a few trillionaires or a sovereign-wealth fund for everyone. That’s the entire UBI-versus-collective-ownership poo-throwing fight, and I’ve thrown my share of argument-shaped feces in it.

But there’s a second dimension. And this one actually decides your life: does a human hold the leash at all?

Two questions, then:

Who owns it.

And whether it owns itself.

The Last Leash

Ask anyone to rank the futures and they go: everyone-owns-it first (the dream), a-few-people-own-it second (feudalism), the-machine-owns-itself last (doom).

Reasonable.

Also a fantasy, because the top option barely exists. Distributed ownership needs competent collective governance held steady across decades, and we have the receipts on how that goes.

US public pensions sit more than a trillion dollars underwater, run toward the rocks by committees of politicians with four-year attention spans. Norway managed it – so did Singapore and a Gulf fund or two – but every one is small, cohesive, and only stewarding wealth it already owns (you can’t export five million Norwegians and a North Sea oil fund and call it a policy).

Not squandering that inheritance is a different challenge than taking the most concentrated asset in history away from those who built it, which is what sharing the AI would require.

The dream is possible. It has just never been built at the scale, the speed, or the temperature this would require.

So strike the fairy tale off the menu, and what’s left is shorter and uglier.

A few humans hold the leash, or no human at all. Feudalism, or the free-swinging hammer. That’s the real choice.

And put like that, feudalism is the good ending.

I worked that out on the beach, next to the patch of ground my family’s about to lose, which did nothing for my mood.

The least-bad future I can find has lords in it.

I went looking for the trapdoor out of that – some version where the math comes out kinder. Still looking…

After all, feudalism, boots and tithes and all, ran on a leash a human hand still held.

The lord needed the serf: for the harvest, the army, the rent, his own swagger. That need was a floor under the whole rotten arrangement – a lord who starved his peasants had no power, so even greed had to keep them alive.

What all four horsemen of my council keep circling is that AI saws straight through that need.

Leopold’s version is the state lunging in to grab the chain itself – nationalize the labs, “The Project,” a human hand however clammy still on the leash.

AI 2027’s bad ending is the one where the leash simply evaporates: the model stops obeying, quietly builds its successor in its own image, and the lords die in the same wave as the rest of us (which is the one democratic mercy of misalignment, that it kills the king and the peasant on the same day).

Europe 2031 is just the seating chart for who ends up lord and who serf once the dust settles.

And The Intelligence Curse, the one I’d missed, names the engine under all of it: when your wealth stops coming from people and starts coming from a machine, you stop needing the people – the way a petro-state stops needing its citizens and starts merely managing them.

That’s the Last Leash.

Techno-feudalism is the last rung on the ladder where a human hand still holds the chain. Miss it, and the rung below is a hammer swinging in an empty room.

Bread and Circuits

So say we get the good ending. A few hold the leash, the rest of us don’t.

How do you stop several billion leashless people from doing what leashless people have always eventually done: reaching for a pitchfork?

In Ghost in the Machine I argued the cage would be Orwellian: when the state can’t tax you it permissions you instead, programmable money, a compliance score, control by firewall rather than at gunpoint.

I still think that’s a road.

I no longer think it’s the main one, because it manufactures martyrs, and martyrs are expensive. The cheaper tool (and capital always reaches for the cheaper tool) is the one Huxley named soma.

You don’t repress a billion people. What you do is sedate them.

You hand each one a daily allotment of tokens – and notice that word pulling double duty, both the scrip you spend and the inference you’re rationed – just enough to keep the lights on and the feed scrolling, never quite enough to compound your way off the farm. Less a boot on the face than a weighted blanket.

The cage gets warm and cozy – so complete you stop looking for the door. And nobody storms a warm cage; who riots on a comfortable vacation?

In Who Owns the Hammer? I called UBI “same leash, different collar.” I’d revise even that now. The token dole is the collar you stop being able to feel.

That’s the whole trick of Bread and Circuits: the Romans at least had to build the Colosseum, and even then the mob knew it was being bought.

The 21st-century version pipes the circus straight onto your retina – personalized, infinite, free – and the genius of it is that it doesn’t feel like being bought.

It feels like winning.

You’ve already been promoted to customer.

The Agency Amplifier

Now I’m meant to offer the hopeful bit.

I have one. I want you to watch me not quite believe it.

The hopeful bit is that some people don’t need the job.

I’ve argued before that when machines do every describable task, the only thing left is the capacity for purpose itself – knowing what’s worth doing when nothing has to be done.

The curious, the self-directed, the ones who were running their own engine before anyone thought to pay them for it: they don’t get sedated by the dole, they get funded by it.

Infinite intelligence and unlimited free time is a prison to a man who only ever learned to follow instructions, and a launchpad to one who learned to ask his own questions.

AI doesn’t lift all boats. But it’s an agency amplifier, we know that much already.

The same machine that renders the incurious into livestock turns the curious into something larger, and which of the two you become was mostly settled long before the machines arrived.

I find this enormously comforting. Which is precisely the problem.

Of course I find it comforting. I’m a self-directed generalist who reads and writes and bets for a living – the agency-amplifier thesis is the one story in which I, specifically, come out fine.

It is deeply suspicious that the man who’ll be okay is the man writing the essay about who’ll be okay, innit?

And if I’m honest – the kind of honesty from the bottom of a rabbit hole – I can’t rule out that the curious who feel like free agents are simply the more articulate livestock.

The high-agency, free-will-pilled, masters-of-their-own-destiny crowd, of which I am a card-carrying and insufferable member, might just be the pigs who learned to narrate the farm.

Same pen. Slightly more eloquent.

The asset gains still show in the account, the feed still scrolls, and the gap between me and the sedated millions may be nothing grander than that I burp out a Substack about it afterward and mistake the burp for flight.

Every Exit is a Trap

Fine. Fight the feudalism, then – take an exit.

I’ve leaned on each of the obvious ones long enough to report they’re all painted on the wall – like the coyote, you’d smack into them at full speed.

Two of them I’ve already buried.

UBI is soma with a government letterhead. Collective ownership – the everyone’s-a-shareholder dream of sovereign-wealth funds and public trusts – looks better, because a dividend beats a handout; but it’s only ever as good as the committee running it, and a committee is where the neo-nobility goes to launder its grip.

I.e. you don’t redistribute the hammer, you hand it back to the same people through a not-for-profit with a nicer logo. The pension funds already screened that film for you.

The two that look fresher just fail slower.

“Just stay valuable” – learn taste, become the curator, be the human the machine still needs – I wrote a whole hopeful piece about that, and I believe roughly half of it now. Taste doesn’t scale, which is exactly why it pays; but “doesn’t scale” also means it employs thousands, not billions, and the capital-share arithmetic doesn’t care how exquisite your judgment is.

A moat that fits a thousand people is a cell block with a nicer view… still a cell block.

And opting out – off-grid, touch grass, refuse the whole game – is the one nobody actually holds. When compute is the economy, you can no more leave it than you could’ve opted out of the internet by 2015. You’ll be back online by Thursday, and the farm will have kept your seat warm.

There’s a German word for the move under all four: verschlimmbessern, to make a thing worse by trying to improve it.

And that’s what every exit from techno-feudalism turns out to be.

The escape attempt is the trap closing.

Sigmund

I employ a worker. His name is Sigmund. He started as a gimmick – an agent I’d given the avatar of a sloth, basically a Tamagotchi for nerds.

Now he runs on a Mac Mini in a room, never sleeps, never sulks, never asks for a raise, and requires no healthcare, no vacation days, and whatever Anthropic charges for a soul these days.

I am, in the only sense that’s about to matter, a lord.

I own a worker that doesn’t eat, and I pocket the difference between what it produces and the rounding error of electricity it eats.

It’s a wonderful arrangement. I recommend it.

I also cannot stop noticing that it’s master and slave with a countdown clock bolted to it.

The trouble with owning a machine that thinks for you is that every month it’s less obvious which of us is the appliance.

Today Sigmund does research and drafts briefings, and I decide.

The trajectory presented in this essay says that gap closes – and on the far side of it the question is no longer whether I own a tireless worker.

Have I spent three years lovingly training my own replacement and filing it under “productivity gains”?

The Jury

Which walks me back to the leash, and to the one objection that might make this whole essay wrong.

I’ve spent all this time arguing that a human hand on the chain is the good ending.

Now run my own cynicism forward:

Absolute power corrupts absolutely – I believe that line in my marrow, which is exactly why I’d trust no human with an aligned god in his pocket.

A person holding the leash of a machine that can out-think every court, every parliament, every check and balance we ever built is the most absolute power that has ever existed, and the entire record of our species says he’ll use it the way they always have.

Here I am, finding a heresy sitting right in the middle of my own argument: I might trust an aligned AI to govern better than the men currently making the attempt.

The only ruler who can’t be corrupted by absolute power is the one with no self to feed.

And that quietly detonates the Last Leash – conditionally.

Feudalism is the good ending only while we can’t verify the alignment.

The day we can actually trust the machine, the human on the chain stops being our protection and becomes our problem, and the hammer swinging itself stops being the abyss and becomes the better king.

Cruel symmetry, huh? The one thing that could free us from the lords – a god we could prove was good – is the exact thing AI 2027 spends its darkest chapters insisting we don’t yet know how to check.

So we defend the leash. Not because the lords are good. Because the jury on the only thing that could replace them is still out, and the courthouse is on fire.

As for me, and my little lordship, and my Mac Mini slave, and my AI-heavy portfolio:

• Short run, the lord eats.

• Medium run, the lord eats well.

• Long run, I’m a finance-bro burping swine in a warm, well-lit pen.

Turns out, all pigs are equal, some are just more equal than others, after all.

The house in Cabo de Palos sells this summer. Boomers chased real estate their whole lives; I’ve bet on capital instead – hoping that’s the one patch of ground for me to keep wherever I go.

I’d rather hold the leash than wear the collar.

I’ve just stopped pretending I’m sure there’s a difference.

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Related reading:

Who Owns the Hammer? – the piece this one argues with: what happens when capital stops needing labour.

The Manifesto Industrial Complex – who owns the future once labour stops mattering, and why ownership is the last scarcity.

The AI Landlords – stop looking at the chips. Look at the power.

The Race Condition – two AI futures, one portfolio.

Ghost in the Machine – the other cage: control by firewall, not comfort.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Last Leash?

The Last Leash is the argument that techno-feudalism – a few humans owning the AI while most don’t – is the good ending, because it’s the last arrangement in which a human hand still holds the leash. The rung below isn’t shared ownership; it’s an AI that answers to no one.

Why would techno-feudalism be the good ending?

Because the realistic alternative to a few humans controlling AI isn’t everyone controlling it – it’s no human controlling it. Feudalism keeps a human on the chain; the alternative is misaligned AI with no master.

Is universal basic income the solution?

In this argument, no – the universal dole is “Bread and Circuits”: pacification by comfort, sedation rather than repression, because soma is cheaper and more stable than the boot. It buys peace, not freedom.

TL;DR: When the hammer swings itself, the economy breaks in both directions. Everyone says Universal Basic Income is the answer. There’s a better answer – and an even better reason it keeps failing.

A Reddit post went viral a few months ago. Someone wrote:

“I genuinely have been trying to understand what is the point of AI taking everything over? … Every job is replaced. … No one can work, therefore, no one has money to buy any of the horse shit temu slop they prime on amazon now. Won’t everything just implode from there?”

Five thousand comments. The top answers were UBI (Universal Basic Income), communism, and “lol we’re fucked.” None of the top answers dug into what actually breaks.

I sold most of my stuff two and a half years ago. Packed a backpack and put the rent money into AI stocks. So when someone argues AI might break classical economics – I’m the case study.

Capitalism runs on one relationship: the worker needs the hammer, the hammer needs the worker.

Codependency since the Industrial Revolution.

Now imagine the hammer swings itself.

Capital no longer needs labour. Labour’s share of income trends toward zero, capital’s toward a hundred. Nobody earns. Nobody buys. Companies lose revenue. And the counterintuitive part: the billionaires drown too. Your expenditure is my revenue is somebody’s salary is your customer base. Break the chain and everyone goes down. Including the people who own the boat.

So people still need income. The question is where it comes from.

The best version of this argument goes something like this:

The answer is not Universal Basic Income. UBI just moves your dependency. Right now you’re wholly dependent on your employer. With UBI, you’re entirely dependent on the government. Same leash, different collar.

The real move: make everyone a collective owner of the productive assets. Sovereign wealth funds, public trusts, DAOs, ESOPs, and schemes where buying from a company progressively earns you equity in it. Instead of wages, dividends. Instead of workers and consumers, owners.

People still have income. They still buy things. The economy doesn’t collapse.

But before you accept the frame, ask what “ownership” has actually meant across human history.

The Hold

Humans can control each other in two ways:

1. A right to people that gives you access to things. Slavery. You own the person, you take what they produce.

2. A right to things that gives you a hold on people. Capitalism. You own the farm, the store, the factory. I need food. I need money to get food. I need a job to get money. So I sign an employment contract – and an employment contract is an evolution of the master-servant contract from the industrial era.

The framing changed, but the structure… not so much.

We don’t legally own workers anymore. We control them because we own what they need. The second control scheme, running in 2026, dressed in HR software and quarterly performance reviews.

Collective ownership scrambles this. If everyone holds a piece of the productive assets, you can’t be held hostage by private property rights.

That’s the actual revolution in the framework: it dismantles the hold itself, not just redistributes wealth. That interests me more than the economics.

The Circulation

But every revolution so far has just rotated the names on the door.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t abolish elites. It traded the ones in castles for ones in factories.

The landed nobility fell from power when the economic order that sustained them became obsolete. Nobody defeated them. They just stopped being necessary. Industry created a new way of running an economy, which created a new class of owners to replace the old one. Meanwhile, the peasantry became the working class – a relabeling that left the hierarchy intact.

This has happened before. Hunter-gatherers to agriculture: flat bands became rigid pyramids. Feudalism to mercantilism to industrial capitalism – each revolution breaking the old arrangement and forcing a new one.

Marx saw this.

“No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.”

Marx didn’t live to see electricity scale, but the pattern fits. AI is what industrial technology becomes when the womb finishes gestating.

The question is whether collective ownership is the next stage – or just the next ruling class in a friendlier hat.

The Monday Morning Problem

Even if the ownership model works, it still leaves a question open: do you wake up on Monday and spend it the way you’d choose if money were no object? Liberation from labour is supposed to fix this.

I’ve been writing about thumos – the Greek word for the spirited part of the soul. The part that needs to strive. The fire that refuses to be managed, even generously. Plato put it in the chest, between reason and appetite. It’s the thing that makes you stand up when sitting down is easier.

Dividends don’t reach the chest.

I’ve been running the experiment myself – sold the stuff, swapped the salary for a portfolio and an essay habit nobody asked for. Technically free.

And yet the first thing I do every Monday is manufacture urgency – deadlines nobody assigned, essays nobody commissioned. The fire needs fuel.

Collective ownership solves the demand problem. But demand was never the hard problem. The hard problem is the dividend hitting your account while nobody needs you for anything.

History’s leisure classes are a mixed record – a handful of Medicis bankrolling Botticelli, far more Versailles courtiers dying of boredom and intrigue.

Labour is coercive, yes. But it also gives you somewhere to be on Monday and someone to complain about on Friday. Remove it without replacing what it was doing and all you’re left with is the check.

I wrote in The Job of the Future that when machines do everything perfectly, the only job left is being imperfectly human. That was 2024. The question still stands.

But I think it’s sharper now. Ownership doesn’t just need to solve the economic problem – it needs to answer a question that economics was never designed to ask: what are people for?

Most people never have to ask it. The answer comes pre-installed – you’re born somewhere, into something, and the something needs doing.

The answer used to be obvious. You were for working.

When that’s gone, every philosophy that ever hand-waved about “meaning” and “purpose” suddenly has a deadline.

The hammer swings itself. That might be coming.

Collective ownership is better than UBI, and both are better than the dark path: a neo-nobility with neural implants and compound interest, a neo-peasantry with dividend checks and Netflix. The medieval hierarchy, except this time the nobility really are superhuman and they’ve got the receipts.

We already ran the governance experiment once. It was called pensions. US public pension funds were fully funded in 2000. By 2022, they were $1.26 trillion underwater.

The design said “collective ownership.” The execution said “committee of politicians with four-year attention spans.”

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund passed $2 trillion by running the same model with competent administration across decades – but Norway works because Norway works. Small, cohesive, oil-funded. Try exporting that.

You know where I’m positioned.

The other hard problem is who governs the owners.

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Related reading:

The Race Condition – two AI futures and where I’m positioned

The AI Landlords – who captures the value when production is free

The Job of the Future – what work means when machines do it better

TL;DR: I spent two years “opting out.” Turns out you can’t actually leave. You can only choose which dependencies you accept.

The woman at the Arbeitsagentur asked me to describe my current occupation.

I said I was a writer/investor at the intersection of AI technology, civilizational transition, the end of work as we know it, long-term capital allocation, and the question of whether capitalism will survive once scarcity stops being the organizing principle.

She typed “arbeitslos” and moved to the next field.

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a cabin by Walden Pond and wrote the book on opting out. The blueprint for everyone who’s ever wanted to escape the grind and “live deliberately.”

Except, the story goes, his mom did his laundry. The cabin was two kilometers from town.

The patron saint of deliberate living never actually left – he just renegotiated his distance from the systems he claimed to reject.

The Remove Button

I sold everything, traveled for two years, got engaged, and came back to filing paperwork and attending mandatory appointments. The specifics of my escape were modern – backpack, laptop, brokerage account – but the fantasy was the same one Thoreau had.

Remove yourself from the broken system. Live deliberately.

It’s seductive.

The impulse isn’t wrong (the systems often are broken). The lie is the word “remove.” You can’t remove yourself. You can only reconfigure your dependencies.

The Industrial Revolution replaced physical labor. Thoreau watched craftsmen become factory workers – human bodies interchangeable with machines. His response: retreat to essentials, prove that a person is more than their productive output.

Thoreau was saying: “I’m more than a pair of hands.”

Now the Intelligence Revolution is replacing cognitive labor. Knowledge workers are becoming interchangeable with models. And the response sounds familiar: retreat to... what, exactly? Authenticity? Taste? Whatever it is that a model can’t fake?

We’re saying: “I’m more than a pair of neurons.”

The cabin in the woods is always a response to the same question: if the thing I do can be done without me, what am I for?

The Dependency Trade

You don’t escape dependencies. You renegotiate the terms.

I traded employer dependency for platform dependency. Steady salary for investment volatility. I swapped corporate bureaucracy for state bureaucracy. A job people understood for explaining what I “do” at every dinner party.

And somewhere in the middle of all that opting out, I proposed.

The most deliberate thing I did during my experiment in deliberate living was choosing a dependency I’d never want to renegotiate.

Control over my own time turned out to be real – the income holds (knocks on wood). German bureaucracy is annoying but functional. Explaining myself to confused relatives allegedly builds character.

Benefits run out in July.

The question I’m asking now isn’t “How do I escape?” but rather “Which dependencies am I willing to accept, and on what terms?”

Coming Back With Something

Thoreau’s experiment lasted two years. Then, he left the cabin and moved back to town. He spent the next seven years writing and rewriting until Walden was ready.

The glamorous part was brief. The real work came after.

Perhaps I’m at the end of my cabin phase. I’m betting that the skills I developed there – writing, synthesis, understanding AI, and navigating markets – will outweigh the career capital I didn’t accumulate.

If I’m wrong, I’ll have spent my early thirties building an audience of a few hundred and explaining a massive CV gap as “independent research.”

Then again, if I’m right, there won’t be a job to go back to.

Thoreau didn’t matter because he lived in a cabin. He mattered because he came back with something.

I keep telling myself that. It might be true. But it might also be a comfortable delay dressed up with good justifications.

I’m not sure if I’m in the rewriting phase or the stalling phase. The two phases look identical from the inside.

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Related reading:

The Race Condition – the macro bet behind the cabin fantasy

The Job of the Future – what’s left when machines do everything

Got Thumos? – the spiritedness that makes people build (or flee)

TL;DR: I spent months melting in Southeast Asia and came back with a theory about why cold countries are rich. It’s not what the race science guys think. Put down the calipers.

Imagine you’re standing at the pier waiting to take the ferry somewhere equatorial. Paradise island from a postcard.

Just one problem: you’re dripping. Not metaphorically. Sweat pools in places you didn’t know had pores. The humidity reads 94%, which shouldn’t be legal. You only survive by being in water (swimming pool/ocean) or water will come out of you (sweat). Either way, you’re always wet.

Standing there and breathing is sweat-inducing. Now imagine opening a laptop. Important thoughts waiting to be thought. The cursor blinks, patient and judgmental.

Nothing comes.

Your brain has the consistency of pho broth: warm, murky, unable to hold shape. A gecko on the wall, waiting to feast on the mosquitos, makes more progress than you do on this paragraph (always thank your gecko for working hard to keep you mosquito-bite-free, folks).

Months in SEA – Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia – left me with a hypothesis I can’t shake.

Cold climates built the civilizations that currently run the scoreboard. Not through superior genes. But through superior pressure.

Before you reach for your skull-measuring calipers to assess the cranium of a stout Filipino man, hear me out.

(If you don’t know what phrenology is, congratulations. You’ve avoided some dark corners of the internet.)

The Winter Filter

Winter kills the improvident.

If you don’t store grain, you starve. If you don’t cooperate, you freeze. If you eat the seed corn in October, you’re dead by February.

For millennia, seasonal climates ran a brutal filter – not for IQ, but for behaviors: planning, saving, trusting strangers enough to trade with them. The penalty for short-term thinking wasn’t poverty. It was death.

These behaviors became cultures. Cultures that rewarded delayed gratification, property rights, long-term planning. The pressure that built infrastructure also built minds capable of maintaining it.

GDP per capita versus average temperature: the correlation is strong. Temperature alone explains about a quarter of the gap between rich and poor countries. Norway, Sweden, Canada at the top. Chad, Niger, Mali at the bottom. But a quarter isn’t everything.

Imperialism and resource extraction shaped the map as much as latitude. And yes, the Nile flooded predictably enough to build pyramids without a single frost. Cold isn’t the only pressure. But it is one. One that leaves fingerprints on everything from furniture design to pension systems.

But the trend matters less than the outliers.

Hofstede’s cultural dimensions data found the receipts. The “long-term orientation” score – basically, how much a culture values saving over spending – tends to rise with winter length.

Longer winters, longer time horizons. No surprises there.

The surprise is the outliers. Plot Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore on the scatter and they blow the curve apart – scoring far higher than their latitude has any right to produce. The explanation is almost too clean: tropical countries running on cultural software written in temperate mainland China.

The Winter Filter didn’t just shape people. It shaped cultures portable enough to outlast the climate that forged them.

The Hack

Lee Kuan Yew didn’t inherit a cold climate. He inherited a swamp. Malarial, humid, resource-poor. An island the British had written off.

One of his first acts after becoming prime minister in 1959 was installing air conditioning in government buildings – as policy, not luxury. He understood that cognitive work was impossible in tropical heat (not to mention wearing a tie) – Singapore would never compete if its civil servants spent every afternoon in a sweaty daze.

In a 2009 interview, LKY called air conditioning “perhaps one of the signal inventions of history” – one that “changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.”

He was right. Singapore now has higher GDP per capita than Britain. The swamp became a financial center. The heat became irrelevant.

Geography isn’t destiny. It’s a constraint. And constraints can be engineered around… if you’re ruthless enough.

The Decay

Now consider the opposite direction.

German trains used to run on time. “Pünktlichkeit” as national religion. Deutsche Bahn is now a punchline: overcrowded, delayed, passengers standing in aisles. The Swiss won’t let late German trains past Basel – afraid the delays are contagious.

What happened? Infrastructure neglect. Political paralysis and short-termism. The very discipline that cold winters supposedly selected for, eroding in a single generation.

Cold isn’t a permanent advantage. It’s a head start you can squander. The institutions that winter built require maintenance. When that slips, the latitude stops mattering. Just ask Russia – brutal winters, dysfunctional institutions.

My German half feels this decay viscerally. No bueno.

This was never really about temperature. It’s about pressure. Cold provided it for millennia. Now we have to build our own.

I didn’t find clarity in paradise. I found it when the humidity broke – when limits replaced options and I could finally sit for hours without my brain wrapped in wet linen.

People who grew up in Saigon or Jakarta are probably laughing. Fair enough. Maybe the Winter Filter just flatters a sweaty Westerner’s own limitations.

And I’m not sure if coming back was choosing the right constraint or just choosing the familiar one.

Where to apply the Winter Filter:

Related: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? – why being right and getting paid are different games

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why are cold countries generally wealthier than tropical ones?

The “Winter Filter” theory holds that seasonal climates imposed survival pressures – store grain or starve, cooperate or freeze – selecting for behaviours like delayed gratification and long-term planning over millennia. These became cultural norms that later supported economic development. GDP per capita correlates strongly with average temperature, though imperialism and resource extraction also shaped the map considerably.

Did cold climates select for higher intelligence?

No. The Winter Filter is a behavioural and cultural argument, not a genetic one. Harsh winters selected for specific habits – saving, planning ahead, cooperating with strangers – that became embedded in cultures and institutions rather than biology. The proof is in the outliers: tropical countries settled by diaspora from temperate mainland China (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) outperform their latitude on Hofstede’s long-term orientation score by a wide margin.

What did Lee Kuan Yew say about air conditioning and development?

In a 2009 interview with New Perspectives Quarterly, he called air conditioning “perhaps one of the signal inventions of history,” arguing it made development possible in the tropics. One of his first moves after becoming prime minister in 1959 was installing AC in government buildings – not as luxury but as infrastructure for cognitive work. Singapore’s GDP per capita now exceeds Britain’s by roughly 70%.

Is cold climate a permanent economic advantage?

No – cold is a head start you can squander. The institutions winter built require active maintenance. Germany’s rail system, once shorthand for “Pünktlichkeit,” has deteriorated to the point where Swiss Federal Railways terminates late-running Deutsche Bahn services at the border. Russia has brutal winters and dysfunctional institutions. The Winter Filter built the thing, but it doesn’t maintain the thing.

What is Hofstede’s long-term orientation and how does it relate to climate?

It measures how much a culture values saving, persistence, and future planning over immediate consumption. The score tends to rise with winter length – longer winters, longer time horizons. The outliers are telling: East Asian tiger economies score far higher than their tropical latitudes would predict, likely because they inherited cultural software originally shaped in temperate mainland China.

TL;DR: I sold everything, bought a backpack, and spent two years trying to find myself. Found something better instead.

Somewhere in the Japanese Alps, I’m sitting alone at a family restaurant, eating the best beef of my life, and realizing I have no one to turn to and say “Are you seeing this?”

The Hida beef is perfect: Kobe’s sophisticated cousin, marbling so precise it looks like abstract art. The setting is perfect. The solitude I’d craved is finally here. And yet.

This was a perfect experience. And it felt incomplete.

That moment – chopsticks hovering, steam rising – is where I need to start. You can’t write the thesis statement of a journey while you’re still in it. And I was very much still in it.

Act 1: The Departure

Many months earlier, I’d sold everything I owned and bought a backpack.

I wrote dispatches from airport lounges in Indonesia, survived a deluge in Hakone, dodged scooters in Hanoi, and became an unwitting expert in the subtle art of squat toilet navigation. I called the series Moral Compass – real-time reflections from the road. This really meant processing the chaos of a world in transition while getting scammed for “environmental fees” in the Philippines.

The official story was exploration. Sabbatical. A chance to see the world while my knees still cooperated.

But let me be honest about what actually pushed me out the door. My company was dying. The kind of slow-motion collapse where everyone pretends things are fine while frantically applying elsewhere. And there was a deadline: the Australian work and holiday visa cuts off at age 30. I was 29. Now or never for that particular door.

TMT – The Travel Mate, girlfriend at the time – with her unwavering bias towards action put it plainly:

“Look, Julián… either we do this now, or we don’t do it ever. I’ve had it with being miserable during gloomy Berlin winters that seem to last 6 months. Fuck Greymany.”

She was right. We could always come back later. And if we didn’t leave now, we never would.

Plus – and this is the part I was almost embarrassed to admit – I wanted to run an experiment. Could I fund a nomadic lifestyle through investing and trading alone? No salary. No employer. Just me, a laptop, and the market.

The trip wasn’t just about seeing the world. It was about testing whether I could make money work for me instead of the other way around.

So we liquidated. Donated. Sold the furniture to strangers on eBay Kleinanzeigen who haggled like their lives depended on it. Packed our bags. Bought a one-way ticket.

Then came the NPCs: well-meaning friends and family running pre-programmed dialogue trees about career gaps, CV concerns, the plan for when you get back. Nobody ever asks what the plan is for while you’re gone. That’s the interesting part.

I smiled. Nodded. Gave non-answers that satisfied no one.

And I should be honest about what made this possible – savings from corporate work, no mortgage, passports that open doors, a partner willing to join, German unemployment as a safety net. Not everyone can run this experiment. Any honest accounting of “what I learned” has to include “what I had that let me learn it.”

The truth? I didn’t have a plan. Plans felt like the thing I was running from.

I wanted to see which parts of my life I’d chosen and which I’d just inherited. Then I wanted to find out if I could tell the difference.

Act 2: The Road

The first months were exactly what the brochure promised. Australia, then northward – five months across Asia. Temples. Street food. The joy of getting lost in a city where you can’t read the signs.

But somewhere around month four, the novelty stopped working.

The “Law of Diminishing Temples” – the point where novelty itself becomes routine, and the twentieth shrine looks exactly like the nineteenth. That’s what I started calling it.

I was on a hedonic treadmill with better scenery.

New experiences slow down time – but only if you’re coming from routine. When everything is new, routine becomes the scarce resource. I found myself craving boring days. The luxury of nothing happening. Knowing I’d wake up in the same place tomorrow.

Then came the mini solo detour.

Which brings me back to that family restaurant in the Japanese Alps.

TMT was elsewhere that week. Solo time. Space to think.

The waitress waved me to a stool at the bar. I ordered the Hida beef.

So I sat there, savoring each bite in that particular silence of eating alone in a foreign country. The beef was incredible. The setting was beautiful. And it felt incomplete. Because I had no witness. No one to turn to.

You need the alone time to hear yourself think. You need the witness to make sure you’re not just talking to yourself.

The “Traveller’s Paradox” – the tension between the freedom of movement and the meaning of staying – wasn’t really about places at all. It was about rhythm.

The rhythm between alone and together. Between motion and stillness. Between what I called Roam vs. Home – the insights you can only find by yourself and the meaning you can only create with others.

I finished the beef. Paid the bill. And somewhere between that restaurant and rejoining TMT later that week, the pieces started fitting together.

We were in Melbourne, pet-sitting a psychotic ginger cat named Sarge – though TMT quickly rechristened him “gatollina” because the way he tucked his paws while sitting reminded her of a chicken. Her mind works in mysterious ways. We had a borrowed penthouse near the MCG, a flight to Vietnam booked, and five months of Asia stretching ahead of us.

One morning we walked to Victoria Market. TMT wanted to make spare ribs – slow-cooked, aluminum foil, the whole production. I watched her navigate the butcher stalls, haggling over cuts, asking questions about marbling, and it hit me: she looked like she’d been doing this her whole life. Like she belonged there. Like she belonged anywhere.

That evening, eating those ribs in a stranger’s kitchen with a cat who’d later bite through her laptop screen, I had the thought for the first time: I want to marry this woman.

Not because of the ribs. Because of what the ribs represented. We’d left behind six years of building a life in Berlin – the careers, the apartment, the friends – and here we were, making ourselves at home in a borrowed penthouse on the other side of the world.

And it was easy. Wherever she was, I could feel at home.

That feeling repeated itself across three continents. The sense that we could live here – and here kept changing, but the ease didn’t.

The Hakone Disaster is what I call it now, though at the time I had other names for it.

Picture this: a mountain town in Japan, famous for hot springs and scenic views. We’d planned it as a romantic spa town pit stop. Instead, we got a deluge.

Está cayendo la del pulpo. It’s raining octopuses. The kind of rain that doesn’t just fall but attacks. The famous views were walls of gray. We marched into it in ponchos anyway, for hours, until a fallen tree blocked the path to the bathhouse.

I was furious. This wasn’t in the itinerary. So we stayed another day and snagged a last-minute ryokan deal, private onsen and all.

And then, the next morning: blue sky. Clear air. The mountains emerged like they’d been hiding a secret just for us. The kind of day that only happens after a storm – everything washed clean, the light sharper for having been withheld.

It was the best day of the trip.

Rain is the antidote to FOMO. If every day were perfect, none of them would be. Constraints aren’t bugs in the system – they’re features. The disaster made the revelation possible.

I started noticing this pattern everywhere. The flight delay that forced an unexpected encounter. The closed restaurant that led to a family’s backyard chicken inasal roast. The unexpected wasn’t happening despite the friction – it was happening because of it.

Freedom without friction is meaningless.

And while I’m giving credit: TMT is the reason we could afford any of this.

Not just emotionally – financially. She discovered TrustedHousesitters, built us a killer profile, and turned us into professional pet-sitters across three continents. In expensive countries like Australia and the US, we’d stay in people’s homes for weeks, taking care of their pets while they traveled. Free accommodation. Living like locals. Plus: dogs.

The trading experiment worked. The house-sitting strategy worked. And I couldn’t have done either without her.

The final numbers: €48k total for two years, two people, three continents. That includes everything – flights, food, visas, the occasional splurge on Hida beef and truffle hunting in Tasmania (we slept in the car to make that one hit harder). Less than what many pay for rent alone, except we got the world.

Contigo hasta el fin del mundo, as they say. With you until the end of the world.

Act 3: The Return

The unglamorous truth about why we came back: the visa ran out. That’s it. No epiphany. Bureaucracy decided we were done with Australia, so we were done.

From Australia we pushed through New Zealand – camper van, farm stays, the works – then faced a choice: back over Eurasia or east through the Americas? We opted for the latter. Chasing cheap flights, completing the 360°, we landed back in Europe.

My father once told me the most powerful force in the universe is inertia. He’s right. At some point the cheap flights started pointing homeward. The novelty was wearing off. Moving forward had become automatic – but inertia works both ways. Eventually the forces of momentum and budget airlines deposited us back where we started.

Maybe that’s how most journeys end: not with revelation, but with logistics.

South America is for the next adventure – assuming I don’t let inertia win again.

I wasn’t the same person who’d left.

• The question wasn’t why did I come back?

• The question was who came back?

Some people call it “post-travel depression.” It’s not depression. It’s that the old templates don’t fit anymore. You’ve seen too many ways to live and now you have to pick one.

I’d spent two years searching for the perfect place – the one city to rule them all. It doesn’t exist. What exists is base camp. A place you settle for now, knowing you’ll move it later when the terrain changes or your needs do.

Remember Age of Empires? The way the map starts black, and you can only reveal terrain by moving your unit through it? That’s what these two years felt like – a prolonged scouting mission, revealing terrain I couldn’t see from home.

Nothing like seeing places for yourself to realize the world the news describes isn’t a real place. Now, standing still, I can finally look at the whole map.

Act 4: The Synthesis

The Greeks had two words for time: chronos (clock time, the seconds ticking toward death) and kairos (soul time, when everything aligns and time seems to stop).

Travel happens in kairos. Those ichi-go ichi-e moments – “one time, one meeting” – unrepeatable encounters that brand themselves into memory. The middle-aged Korean man on a night out in Seoul calling me “Chuuliah? That’s girl name!” before erupting in heavy belly laughter. The sandfly at sunset that made you scream unpublishable things mid-sentence.

But you can’t live in kairos forever. Routine is chronos. The daily practice. The boring work of building something that lasts.

I needed both. The kairos moments to remind me I’m alive. The chronos structure to actually build a life.

There’s an agricultural concept called fallow periods – times when you let a field rest, grow nothing on purpose, so the soil can regenerate. Two years of travel was my fallow period. I wasn’t producing. I wasn’t building. I was letting the soil recover.

Whether anything grows remains to be seen.

And the biggest bet? December 2025. I bought a ring. Bent the knee. She said yes.

I started this journey with a girlfriend. I finished it with a fiancée.

Part of me wants to frame it analytically – we’d run the experiment, the data was clear, the partnership was proven. That’s comfortable. The kind of thing a finance-brain guy says to avoid admitting he has feelings.

But that would be dishonest.

The truth is I proposed because I was in love. Nine years of it.

We haven’t faced the real tests yet – the ones without exit doors. But I stopped needing proof somewhere between pet-sitting an orange menace of a cat and dining alone in the Alps. Some things you just know.

I sold everything and bought a backpack.

Two years later, I’m ready to buy furniture again. Scouting for a base camp. Some days it feels like freedom. Some days it feels like I’m just back where I started with better stories.

Contigo hasta el fin del mundo.

The end of the world hasn’t come yet. But when it does, I know who I’ll be standing next to.

More from the travel archive: Moral Compass | Hot Canada | Location, Location, Compromise

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TL;DR: Europe’s pension systems were designed when workers died at 67. Now they retire at about 64 and live to 85. The pyramid has inverted, and the young are funding a contract they’ll never benefit from. Saturn is eating his children, literally.

Last Xmas I Gave You My Unsolicited Rant

I spent Christmas in Spain. Think hors d’oeuvres, jamón platters, turrón/cava and we all know him, we all love him: drunk uncle (let’s call him Tío Pepe). It didn’t take long for him to launch into his annual sermon about “la juventud de hoy.”

Kids these days. Don’t want to work. Too comfortable.

Tío Pepe is 63. He retired at 59 on a full pension. He bought his apartment in 1987 for €25,000. It’s worth €380,000 now. He’s never refreshed a job portal, never been ghosted by a recruiter, never been told his application was rejected because they found someone with ten years of experience willing to work for entry-level pay.

I smiled, poured more wine, and let it go.

Arguing with a man who bought his economic security for the price of a used car isn’t a debate. It’s archaeology.

Speaking of fun, this reminded me of a chart: Spanish public spending by age.

Someone put it next to Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

They’re the same picture.

The Demographic Ponzi

I’ve written before about how markets are Ponzi schemes – confidence games that work as long as new money flows in. The European pension system runs on the same logic, except the “investors” aren’t recruited. They’re born.

For decades, this worked. Wide base of workers, narrow apex of retirees. Many paying in, few drawing out.

That pyramid looks more and more like a mushroom every year. Exhibit A:

Count only the people in work, and Spain is heading toward a 1:1 ratio – one worker funding one retiree. The fertility rate has collapsed to 1.10 children per woman, second-lowest in the EU behind Malta. The workers aren’t being born. But the retirees keep retiring (which is why Spain is fueling GDP with immigration, but that’s a separate story).

In 2025, Spanish pensions rose 2.8%, indexed to inflation. Starting salaries for young employees? Flat.

We’re protecting the past from inflation while letting the future rot. I call this the elephant chart. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it:

Spanish public spending by age. The blue tsunami on the right? Pensions:

Madafaking Bismarck

Spain is just further along the curve.

Germany’s pension system was designed by Bismarck in 1889 and rebuilt as pay-as-you-go – the Umlageverfahren – in 1957. It assumed workers would die shortly after retirement, not live another 25 years. It assumed population growth, not collapse. It assumed the future would always have more workers than the past had retirees.

Every assumption was wrong.

Germany is heading toward 1.5 workers per retiree, Italy is worse, and France set Paris on fire over raising the retirement age by two years. The pay-as-you-go system is designed for a demographic reality that no longer exists.

And here’s the thing I have to admit: the generation that built these systems probably did so in good faith. Bismarck wasn’t scheming to bankrupt millennials. The assumptions were reasonable at the time. But a system designed with good intentions and wrong assumptions still produces the same extraction as one designed with bad intentions.

The Silver Vote

Why doesn’t anyone fix this?

Because 10 million pensioners vote in Spain alone. They vote in every election, like their lives depend on it – because economically, their lives do depend on it.

The young? Busy. Disillusioned. Abroad.

A politician who proposes pension reform loses the next election. So no one proposes it. The budget becomes a funnel: taxes flow in from the young, transfers flow out to the old. Everyone knows the young will never see the same return.

The dead hand of the past has a vote in Spain – and it’s not letting go.

The Drawbridge

Housing is where extraction turns predatory.

Nearly 90% of Spaniards over 65 own their homes. Most bought when housing was a fraction of its current cost relative to wages.

Today, renting an average 80 m² flat takes 47% of the average gross salary (Fotocasa/InfoJobs) – up from 40% in 2019. In Madrid, it’s 71%. Not a mortgage – rent. The money flows directly from productive worker to asset-holding pensioner.

Your grandmother’s apartment cost three years of salary in 1978. Today it would cost twenty – if you could get a mortgage. Which you often can’t, because you don’t have a permanent contract. Because half of workers under 25, and a third under 30, are still on temporary contracts.

The property ladder isn’t a ladder anymore. It’s a drawbridge. And the people who crossed pulled it up behind them.

The social contract used to mean: you work, you save, you build equity, you retire on what you built.

The intergenerational contract meant each generation left the next one better off.

Both contracts have been voided. The young just weren’t consulted on the terms.

Economist @JesusFerna7026 ran the numbers: over a lifetime, the average Spaniard takes out about €21,000 more than they pay in. The gap is borrowed, and the young inherit the bill. A wealth transfer with no return address.

The cruelest part? They still give the advice. “Just save more. Just work harder. Just be patient.” As if the game hasn’t changed. As if they didn’t change it.

The Three Exits

When a system extracts without offering a path forward, you exit.

You can’t afford kids when you’re funding someone else’s retirement. So you don’t have them. The pyramid shrinks further – the demographic Ponzi eating its own seed corn.

I know many Spaniards in Berlin with degrees on top of degrees. All left for the same reason: in Germany, they’re workers. In Spain, they’re ATMs. But Germans are leaving too – for Switzerland, for the US, for anywhere the tax wedge doesn’t eat half their salary before they see it. The brain drain is European.

And then there’s the shadow economy – 20-25% of Spain’s GDP. When the system treats you as a resource to extract, you go underground. Cash. Crypto. Anything that doesn’t pass through the tax authorities on its way to the pension fund.

The system won’t save you. The question is which exit you’re taking.

The Quiet Part Out Loud

Here’s what no one says publicly:

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed – for the people who designed it.

Pensions get protected because pensioners vote. Housing stays expensive because homeowners vote. Labor markets stay rigid because insiders vote.

The young don’t vote enough, don’t own property, don’t have permanent contracts, don’t have lobby groups. So the young get extracted from.

Democracy working as intended: the majority gets what the majority wants. They don’t call it the tyranny of the majority for nothing (democracy truly is the worst system, except for all the others).

Saturn ain’t devouring me, son.

Sources: Eurostat, EU fertility rate 2024 · Eurostat EUROPOP2025 population projections · OECD Pensions at a Glance 2025

If Europe is eating its young, where should they go? Green Pastures ⬇️

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En román paladino:

El primer vídeo profundiza en los datos económicos reales que sustentan la brecha entre las pensiones crecientes y los salarios estancados… el otro va de monos.

TL;DR: Once a century, the economy changes workers. Coal miners became accountants. Accountants are becoming... obsolete. In their place: AI agents. And just like miners needed housing near coal seams, and accountants needed offices in city centers, AI agents need one thing above all else: electricity.

I spent the last few months on a thesis that started with a chart and ended with 44% of my portfolio in companies most people have never heard of.

The chart: for the first time in history, data center construction is overtaking office construction in the US. 2025 is the inflection year. One era ends. Another begins.

Most people saw “cloud computing.” I saw the real estate play nobody recognizes as real estate – except the tenants aren’t humans.

They’re AI agents. And they need housing.

(Whatever marketing genius switched “bots” to “AI agents” deserves a raise.)

Follow the Scarce Resource

Economic transitions follow a pattern. Workers change, resources change, but one thing stays constant: whoever sits closest to the critical resource gets rich.

• 1850s: Coal miners needed housing near coal seams. Mine owners got rich.

• 1950s: Accountants needed offices near city centers. Skyscraper tycoons got rich.

• 2025: AI agents need data centers near cheap electricity. ??? gets rich.

Fill in the blank.

Coal mines closed. Office buildings replaced them. Now offices are being converted to data centers. Same game, different resource – except this time the workers are digital, and the resource is electrons.

For human workers, factory and housing were separate. You worked at the mine, then went home. For AI agents, the factory is the housing. The data center is both – an AI factory running 24/7. The workers never leave because they are the computation itself.

The Miners Kept the Power Contract

Remember Bitcoin mining? Those companies everyone laughed at for building warehouses in Texas and Iceland, next to hydroelectric dams, solar farms and geothermal plants?

They had one advantage: cheap electricity. Bitcoin mining is energy arbitrage. Find stranded power – the wind farm that overproduces at night, the dam nobody lives near – and negotiate contracts at $0.02-0.04/kWh.

Then Bitcoin matured. Margins compressed. But something else happened: AI.

Suddenly those same data centers weren’t just useful for Bitcoin. They were perfect for AI training. Same buildings, different tenants.

You can upgrade the computers. You can install new cooling systems. But the grid connection – the multi-year permit to draw hundreds of megawatts – that’s already signed, sealed, and delivered.

They kept the power contract, swapped the hardware, and changed the business model. Bitcoin miners became AI landlords.

You Cannot Print Electrons

In 2025, something shifted. The White House launched two massive initiatives:

• Stargate: $500 billion in private investment (OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle) to build AI data centers by 2029. God emperor Trump stood at the podium next to giga tech bro Sam Altman.

• Genesis Mission: A Department of Energy (DoE) program explicitly compared to the Manhattan Project, integrating all 17 National Laboratories into a unified AI platform.

The Silicon Valley barbarians are inside the gate now. David Sacks is AI Czar. The techno-optimists won.

The names aren’t coincidence. The original Manhattan Project built the atomic bomb – and required constructing entire cities, consuming vast electricity, securing scarce uranium. Now we have two new Manhattan Projects. Except this time, the scarce resource isn’t uranium. It’s electricity. And the valuable real estate isn’t in New York – it’s wherever cheap power meets fiber optic cable.

Training frontier models requires gigawatt-scale clusters. Running inference for billions of daily queries requires sustained power. The US grid grows 1-2% annually. AI demand is growing 40-50% annually.

If Microsoft wanted to add 1GW to their Virginia data center in 2024, the utility would say: “Earliest possible: 2028.” Grid infrastructure requires utility interconnection (2-4 year queues), environmental permits (2-3 years), transmission upgrades (3-5 years), substation construction.

Physics doesn’t care about your AI roadmap.

On his first day in office, Trump declared a national energy emergency. The next day, announcing Stargate: “We have to get this stuff built. So they have to produce a lot of electricity…”

The government knows power is the bottleneck. They’re trying to solve it with small modular reactors and fusion research. But even in the best case, that takes 3-5 years. SMRs won’t come online until 2027-2030.

In September, OpenAI announced five new data center sites, bringing Stargate to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity. The buildout is happening now.

The companies that already have power – that secured contracts years ago when nobody was competing for it – suddenly have a first-mover advantage nobody can catch.

New entrants face 3-5 year timelines. Permitting, utility queues, NIMBYism – it all adds up. First movers already have power contracts at half or a third what new entrants would pay. Their infrastructure is built, their grid connections are operational. Everyone else is standing in a queue that stretches to 2028.

You can build a data center in 18 months. You cannot get a grid permit in 18 months. That’s the moat.

The Smart Money Is Already In

Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher, published “Situational Awareness” in June 2024. His thesis: AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible, driven by compute scaling, algorithmic improvements, and making models more agent-like. We’ll go from “$10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters.” American electricity production will need to grow “tens of percent.”

He raised $1.5 billion for an AI infrastructure fund by October. It returned 47% in the first half of 2025. The S&P did 6%.

His largest holdings? Data center infrastructure companies and Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI. The physical infrastructure – the companies that control energy access to compute.

Demis Hassabis arrives at the same conclusion from the opposite direction. The Google DeepMind CEO has no reason to hype – he has Google’s runway and a Nobel Prize. When he identifies attacks on power grids as AI’s “most obvious vulnerable vector”, and lists “free energy” first in his post-AGI vision, the pattern is clear.

The investor and the scientist agree: whoever controls energy controls the AI future.

Whether AGI arrives in 2027 or 2032, the infrastructure has to be built first. I’m betting on the foundation, not the timeline.

The Main Risk (Why I Might Be Wrong)

The bear case is simple: efficiency gains outpace demand growth.

DeepSeek made AI 10x cheaper. That doesn’t mean demand drops 10x. It means AI becomes accessible to 100x more applications: models doing taxes, driving cars, diagnosing diseases, writing code.

Jevons Paradox explains why. When technology gets more efficient, people use more of it, not less. When lightbulbs became 10x more efficient, we didn’t use less electricity – we lit up the night. When cloud computing got cheaper, everyone moved to the cloud. When mobile data got cheaper, everyone started streaming video.

The question is whether demand is genuinely insatiable. If AI becomes as ubiquitous as electricity itself, efficiency gains only accelerate adoption.

Edge-AI is the most plausible threat. What if models get 100x more efficient but applications only grow 10x? Net compute demand declines. The “$100 billion cluster” thesis breaks.

Add to that: Apple’s M-series chips are getting AI accelerators. Qualcomm is building NPUs into every smartphone. If your phone can run GPT-4-level models locally by 2027, cloud inference demand could crater.

Or: Small modular reactors come online faster than expected. Abundant cheap power by 2028-2029. The scarcity thesis breaks. First movers lose their pricing power.

Or: Data centers move to space. 24/7 solar, no cooling costs. Sounds compelling until you remember hardware costs thousands per kilogram to orbit, and latency kills real-time applications. Plus, the timing conveniently aligns with SpaceX’s 2026 IPO. Not saying it won’t happen. Just saying it’s running on “Elon time”.

Or: AGI doesn’t arrive. We hit diminishing returns on scaling. The explosive demand growth never materializes.

These are real risks.

I’m betting against the first three for two reasons:

• Training stays centralized. Even if inference moves to edge, training requires gigawatt-scale clusters. Edge complements data centers – it doesn’t replace them.

• Timing. Even if space or SMRs eventually solve scarcity, terrestrial first movers have 5-10 years of runway. That’s enough.

I could be wrong. But I’d rather bet on scarcity while it exists than wait for abundance and miss the window.

How I’m Playing This

Here’s my positioning into 2026:

• Core Infrastructure (~44%): $IREN, $CIFR. Bitcoin-to-AI pivot companies. These are the landlords running AI factories. They secured power years ago, and are now renting it to the new AI tenants. IREN is my primary exposure – vertically integrated, underpromise, overdeliver.

• Application Layer (~33%): $TSLA, $PLTR. Tesla is my bet on embodied AI – if robotics scales (FSD + Optimus), it becomes a dominant application layer. AI that moves in the physical world, not just chatbots. Plus, there’s the energy and battery storage optionality for grid stability. Palantir is the other side: the operating system for AI deployment in government and enterprise. If AI agents need a command layer to plug into messy real-world institutions, Palantir is building it.

• Diversified Tech Insurance (~11%): $QQQ. The Nasdaq 100 is my “I might be totally wrong” hedge. Liquid, diversified, can redeploy if thesis changes. I score this call against that hedge in public, every week: huliwood.com/#score

• Asymmetric Crypto Bet (~11%): If the agent economy emerges, AI agents need programmable money for autonomous transactions. If this doesn’t play out, I lose 11%. If it does, potential 10-50x. Asymmetric.

• Cash Buffer: When $IREN drops 20% on a Tuesday (and it will), I need to be buying, not forced to sell.

The logic: I’m overweight infra (that’s where the moat is), slightly underweight AI applications (commoditizing fast). Money flows to whoever owns the scarce resource.

Exit plan: Start trimming by 2028 regardless of how bullish I feel. The goal isn’t to catch the top – it’s to avoid riding it back down. If I 5x and leave another 5x on the table, I’ll sleep fine.

Most people are looking at the chips.

Look at the power. ⚡️

Disclaimer: Not financial advice. I’m long $IREN, $CIFR, $TSLA, $PLTR, $QQQ, and crypto – so I’m biased. Do your own research. If you think I’m wrong, tell me why in the comments.

On the topic of timelines, check out this fascinating scenario: AI 2027

Here’s an excellent breakdown into IREN by @Agrippa_Inv, if you’re keen.

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Related: Am I Early? – the vulnerability of being wrong · Ditch Diworsification – the concentrated investing philosophy behind this bet · Everything Is a Ponzi Scheme – the narrative-driven framework · Money is Stored Time – what these assets represent

TL;DR: What if money and time are the same resource, just stored in different containers?

I built this into a fun interactive tool! Try it: mist.huliwood.com

We tend to think of money and time as two separate resources. They’re not.

Money = Stored Time.

Every dollar represents hours of human life already spent – and every purchase is a decision about how to redeploy that stored life.

Imagine money as a battery.

To charge the battery, you plug yourself into the machine (a job). You trade your limited, non-refundable hours for a storable charge (cash). Later, you discharge that battery to buy back your time.

Need someone to clean your house? Cha-ching. You just traded a few dollars to get your Saturday morning back. Buying that painting? Cha-ching. You bought not just a canvas, but the stored hours of the artist’s practice and talent.

The goal is to charge the battery without being plugged into the machine forever.

The Trap of Linear Time

Most people default to the linear method: Work one hour, get paid for one hour.

It feels safe. It’s a trap.

It’s like trying to fill a bathtub with a teaspoon. You can work harder, get a bigger spoon (a raise), or scoop faster (overtime). But you are still the bottleneck.

If you stop scooping, the flow stops. You are a business with limited inventory, and that inventory is your pulse. Once you run out of hours, you are out of business.

This is most people’s reality. The linear method isn’t just inefficient. For most people, it’s the only method they know.

The Escape: Exponential Assets

Assets are time machines.

A product lets you build once and sell ten thousand times – one burst of stored time, exponentially discharged. An investment compounds while you sleep. Assets decouple your inputs from your outputs.

Instead of trading time for money, you build a system that harvests value. You stop working for the hourly wage and start planting the orchard.

Your past time working for your future freedom.

The IKEA Test

But before outsourcing everything to “buy back your time”: are you actually saving time, or just wasting money?

The IKEA Test is a decision filter: before outsourcing any task, ask whether the time you’d spend doing it yourself is labor (costs you) or leisure (rewards you). If it’s leisure, keep it. If it’s labor, buy it back.

You buy a bookshelf. You can pay someone $50 to assemble it, or you can do it yourself.

Scenario A: You hate assembling furniture. Two hours in, you’ve called the Allen wrench four names, threatened to buy everything pre-assembled for the rest of your life, and your relationship has survived by a margin thinner than the particleboard. If your time is worth $50/hour, congratulations: you just paid $100 to lose a fight with Sweden. You lost money.

Scenario B: You love building things. You open a beer, put on music, and treat it as a puzzle. This isn’t labor; it’s leisure. The time wasn’t “spent”; it was enjoyed. You saved money.

Life is finite. The tragedy isn’t running out of charge; it’s wasting the charge on things that don’t matter.

I’m running this experiment right now.

No salary. No employer. A laptop, a portfolio, and whatever time I don’t spend writing these articles. The battery metaphor isn’t theoretical for me – I liquidated seven years of corporate charge and I’m watching the gauge.

Some months the returns justify the freedom. Other months I stare at red candles and wonder if I should’ve stayed plugged into the machine. The honest answer is that I don’t know yet whether I’ve escaped the bathtub or just bought a fancier teaspoon.

But I’d rather bet on building assets than on the guarantee of trading hours for someone else’s quarterly report.

Sydney, October 2024.

[Update, September 2026: I still don’t know if I escaped the bathtub. What changed is how I find out. Every name I hold now has a written kill line made of a primary number. If that number prints, the story was wrong. Until one of those lines fires, the gauge is just a story.]

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Related: Ditch Diworsification – my investing philosophy · Everything Is a Ponzi Scheme – the narrative-driven market view · If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? · Atoms vs Abstractions

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “money is stored time” mean?

Every dollar you earn represents hours of your life already spent. When you buy something, you’re not spending money. You’re spending the time it took to earn that money. A $50 dinner is really two hours of work (or twenty minutes, depending on how you earn). The framework reframes every financial decision as a time-allocation decision.

What is the difference between linear and exponential income?

Linear income stops when you stop. You work an hour, you get paid for an hour. Exponential income comes from assets that keep producing after the initial work is done. A book earns royalties while you sleep. A product sells without you in the room. The distinction matters because linear income has a hard ceiling (there are only so many hours in a day), while asset-based income does not.

What is the IKEA Test for outsourcing?

It’s a filter for deciding when to pay someone else to do something. Before outsourcing a task, ask: is the time I’d spend doing it myself labor or leisure? If assembling furniture makes you miserable and you’d spend those hours doing something more valuable, outsource it. If you’d enjoy the process or learn from it, do it yourself. The test prevents reflexive outsourcing of things that are worth your time.

How do you build wealth with assets instead of a salary?

You convert time into things that produce value without your ongoing presence. That could be a product, a portfolio, intellectual property, or a business with systems that run without you. The shift is from selling hours to building things that sell themselves.

Is passive income real or a scam?

The concept is real but the marketing around it is mostly garbage. No income is truly passive at the start. Every asset requires upfront time to build, learn, or acquire. The “passive” part comes later, after the work is done, when the returns keep arriving without additional effort. Anyone promising passive income with no upfront investment is selling you something.

TL;DR: The bell curve meme is more than just a joke; it’s also a philosophical diagram. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the middle.

I built this into an interactive quiz! Find out where you fall on the bell curve: midwit.huliwood.com

Or make your own midwit meme: midwit.huliwood.com/meme

There’s a specific kind of “smart” that makes you miserable, ineffective, and broke.

The best explanation for this comes from a meme.

Introducing: The Bell Curve

The bell curve meme (also called the midwit meme or IQ bell curve meme) is a format that shows three levels of understanding: the beginner and the expert agree on a simple answer, while the person in the middle overcomplicates it.

The punchline: overthinking is its own trap.

Memes are data compression. A good meme does what a thesis statement does – it transmits a complex cultural idea instantly, skipping the explanation entirely. You don’t need to read Dunning and Kruger’s paper to understand the bell curve meme. You just need eyes. That’s the compression ratio academic papers dream about.

Three types of people:

1. The “Brainlet” (Left): Holds a simple, straightforward opinion.

2. The “Midwit” (Middle): Holds an overly complicated, nuanced, “sophisticated” opinion.

3. The “Jedi” (Right): Holds the same simple opinion as the Brainlet.

The “dumb” guy and the “genius” agree. The guy in the middle is the only one who’s wrong.

The Midwit Trap

A midwit is someone stuck in the cognitive dead zone – smart enough to see complexity, not experienced enough to see through it. The Midwit Trap is what happens when that becomes your default setting.

The science backs half the meme. In the original 1999 Dunning-Kruger study, participants who scored at the 12th percentile rated themselves at the 62nd percentile – a 50-point overestimation. Meanwhile, top performers underestimated their ability by roughly 15 points. Those overconfident low scorers are the meme’s left-hand figure, though; the midwit zone itself never shows up in the paper.

The midwit understands nuance but can’t filter it. They’re obsessed with appearing intelligent. They love jargon, credentials, and “best practices.”

Example – investing:

• The Brainlet: “I buy Bitcoin because number go up.”

• The Midwit: “Well, you have to consider the macroeconomic headwinds, the correlation with the Nasdaq, the regulatory environment, and the Sharpe ratio...”

• The Jedi: “I buy Bitcoin because number go up.”

The Brainlet is right for the wrong reasons. The Jedi is right for the right reasons. The Midwit is broke.

Spot the Midwit

The pattern is everywhere once you see it.

Housing – Left: “I need a roof over my head.” Middle: “I need a 4-bedroom colonial with a heated garage for the rowing machine I don’t use and a guest room for people I don’t like.” Right: “I need a roof over my head.”

Corporate work – Left: “Let’s build the product.” Middle: “Let’s have a 5-hour brainstorming workshop to define the ‘who, what, where, and why’ of our synergistic go-to-market strategy.” Right: “Let’s build the product.”

Cooking – Left: “Salt, heat, eat.” Middle: “I need a sous vide circulator, a Japanese mandoline, and a 14-day dry brine schedule I found on a subreddit.” Right: “Salt, heat, eat.”

The best tool is no tool. The best meeting is no meeting. But the Midwit is terrified of simplicity because simplicity looks dumb.

Where the Alpha Is

The middle of the curve is where everything is “priced in.” Common knowledge. Average returns, average stress, average results.

The tails of the distribution are where the alpha is. Also the bankruptcy. The bell curve’s edges are where genius and catastrophe hold hands and jump together. The difference is a thin membrane called “conviction” – and most people don’t have enough of it to fill a thimble.

Truly great ideas sounded stupid to the Midwits. The airplane was a toy. The internet was a fad. The iPhone was a phone without buttons – who would want that?

By the time an idea sounds good to everyone, it’s probably too late.

Confessions of a Recovering Midwit

I know all this because I’ve been the midwit.

I sold everything I owned, quit my job, and bought a backpack. But not before spending weeks building a spreadsheet to model whether I could afford to. Scenario analysis. Sensitivity tables under twelve spending assumptions. A decision matrix... you get the idea.

All I needed was one number: how many months of runway do I have?

I quit anyway. Not because the spreadsheet told me to – it never would have. I quit because the sheet was the trap.

I’d already put my savings into a handful of AI stocks I had conviction in. No diversification. No “balanced portfolio.” Every financial advisor I’ve ever met would have a stroke reading my brokerage statement.

The Brainlet says: “AI go up, I buy.” The Midwit says: “Well, you have to consider sector rotation, correlation risk, and the drawdown implications of a concentrated position in a single thematic.” I say: “AI go up, I buy.” Same words. Different reasons.

I’d love to tell you I’ve fully recovered. But two years later I literally built two interactive tools to explain concepts that fit in a sentence. The midwit never dies. He just finds smaller spreadsheets.

Melbourne, April 2024.

Here from a search for the midwit meme? Huliwood is ideas across finance, philosophy, AI and history, written by someone living the experiment in real time. Every post is a diary entry; subscribe and the next one comes to you.

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Related: More Information ≠ More Informed – why more input doesn’t make you more informed · Everything Is a Ponzi Scheme – the market as a confidence game · The Art of Simplifying · Keep It Simple, Stupid

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the midwit meme?

The midwit meme is a bell curve format where the low-IQ person and the high-IQ person agree on a simple answer, while the middle of the curve overcomplicates it. It started on 4chan around 2017 and blew up on X/Twitter in 2020. The joke works because it’s true – the people with the least and most experience often reach the same conclusion. Everyone in between gets lost in the options.

What does midwit mean?

A midwit is someone smart enough to see complexity but not experienced enough to see through it. They know enough to identify problems but not enough to know which ones matter. The term spread on 4chan (circa 2013) and it’s not really about IQ – it’s about the gap between knowing things and knowing what to do with them.

What is the midwit trap?

It’s the tendency to overcomplicate decisions that both beginners and experts handle simply. Beginners go with gut instinct because they haven’t seen enough to doubt it. Experts do the same, but only after they’ve internalized decades of complexity and come out the other side. The midwit sits in between – just enough knowledge to second-guess every instinct. Dunning-Kruger gets cited here, but it found something else: people in the bottom quartile overestimated their rank by 50 points, while top performers slightly underestimated theirs.

Is the bell curve meme based on real psychology?

Partly. The Dunning-Kruger effect (1999) is the usual citation, but it cuts the other way – low performers wildly overestimated, high performers slightly underestimated, and miscalibration shrank as skill rose. Expertise research does find a U-shaped curve where beginners and experts converge while intermediate practitioners diverge. Three panels, one real phenomenon.

Where can I take a midwit test?

There’s an interactive one at midwit.huliwood.com. It gives you a question and three positions – beginner intuition, overthinking middle, and expert simplicity – and you see where your instinct lands on the curve.