Where Am I Now
Here I am, at the end of May 2026: markets, crypto, AI, and wisdom
Markets
Stock markets sit high up on a wall of worry.
The pundit-o-sphere shows extreme concern about geopolitics / collapse of the current world order / weaker US hegemony1. But the price of crude futures reveals what the market's weighing machine thinks: that things are settling down around the Strait of Hormuz.
NVIDIA makes tons of money. The frontier AI labs, who pay this revenue to them, seem to have little moat or pricing power: enterprise quarterly assessment of agentic spend ROI seems bearish for the labs. Mass layoffs across tech. SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI mega-IPOs will saddle all index investors with frothy valuations that may take years to work out.
I have been heavy in cash since the US began blowing stuff up in Iran. The other part -- my remaining stock holdings -- have done great. Cash reduced my daily volatility, but at a significant cost.
Crypto
I pulled out of all onchain crypto and DeFi before Mythos, around the time Paradigm/Stripe/Tempo revealed corpo intentions to self-build. Every serious enterprise will build their own solution, in order to keep value, rather than paying it to a world computer that maintains global state, which they don't need to care about. This leaves less-monetarily-serious projects to operate in the global playground.
The apparent BD success of Canton's private approach was another signal. They outcompeted long-existing public, transparent, somewhat decentralized approaches2 to get commitments for institutions to use non-shared-state blockchain-tech solutions.
Most of my bitcoin is with BlackRock and Strategy. I pay BlackRock; Strategy pays me. I don't really forego yield from lending out my holdings via DeFi, since I can borrow against ETFs held in my brokerage account.
Holding bitcoin (in any form) feels scary because of a possibility of a later US regime retaliating against the Trump family. Such a horrendous ethical position: muh bloodline's alignment got hijacked by grifters. It is directionally in the interest of all our crypto bags that the Trump family keep their ill-gotten gains forever.
All hardware wallets feel super suss to me. Really bad tradeoffs of usability and long-term sovereignty. Ledger seems the worst; Trezor and KeyCard (plus Shell) seem the best of the rest.
I recently transferred hot wallets from old iPhone to new iPhone. The absolute worst experience was crypto wallets, where the seed phrase is kept in the iPhone's Secure Element. If you're not paying close attention, the wallets just transfer the accounts in read-only (public) mode by default. I visually confirmed I could see balances in my new phone's wallet. If I had wiped my old phone then, I would have lost my access to those accounts forever. This risk was hidden, because all the wallets push you to back up to iCloud as an easier solution with better UX. But I just can't upload all the keys to the kingdom in one place, to store them on uninspectable servers run by unaccountable entities.
My best migration experience was hot wallets backed up with my own Evolu-based sync. I understand the encryption end to end. And if I ever drop my phone off a boat, those secrets are not lost; they are secured by math plus biometrics.
AI
Mythos is a real threat and power in the world. Solving Erdős problems is real. AI is more than a parlor trick of lining up stochastic parrots.
With AI powering so many systems outages and exploits right now, it feels more important than ever for personal data to be compartmentalized. If I ever make one or two missteps, it would be best not to lose everything.
Geohot suggests that LLM coding will never be able to replace more than the 80 part of what a "real" software engineer produces as part of the 80/20 Rule.
I think this is mostly true, with three caveats:
AI can do the 80 part so much faster and cheaper (pennies and minutes, versus 100s of dollars and days). The ability to use AI at a high level is an artisan skill, and just like tea growing or the ability to make high quality porcelain goods ("china"), that skill will distill to India and Europe, mitigated by the relative geopolitical power of nation-states
goalposts keep moving. Maybe a web developer/app developer was never a "real" software engineer, but LLMs could not replace that aspect of software development a year ago, and now it can. For pennies, not $50/month forever paid to Lovable
open source gives a view of the real battle. Lowered barriers to innovation, versus valuable stuff getting buried by slop. There are some really exciting possibilities along the line of self-sovereign data and software, if we get past this Great Filter of Mythos-capability destruction of software
Private AI is already solved. The mass of people just don't know it yet.
If you are comfortable with society's ways of ensuring things3, pay money to Fireworks rather than OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. If you want a revolutionary approach, pay Venice. If you want a pure cypherpunk approach, look into TEE- and MPC-style approaches like Quilibrium and Near.
All of these are much cheaper than buying a DGX Spark. When Americans want to eat healthy, we buy organic food from Whole Foods, Wegmans, Gristedes, Hannaford, Piggly Wiggly. We never need to grow a vegetable garden, or raise livestock and hunt game.
Wisdom
It has taken me almost 50 circuits around the sun to discover the Magnificat. What an amazing counter-weight to the slings and arrows of modern life.
Our family sings the Regina Caeli three times a day, copying one aspect of the Gregorian monastic tradition.
It's very difficult to doomscroll after praying several decades of the rosary. Still tempting(!), but easier to resist.