My wife and I keep having the same conversation. It starts with one of us showing the other a stone farmhouse somewhere in rural Europe. It ends with the same question: why don't we own one yet? Owning doesn't mean living there full-time. That's the part people get wrong. A base you use four months a year changes your life more than an apartment you use twelve. So this time, instead of talking, I did the homework. 12 rural areas of Italy where you can buy a house with land, build a small farm, and still be an hour from a real city. Some are obvious names. Some you've never heard of. All of them are underpriced for what they are. Real places, picked on my own taste, from someone who's actually Italian. 🧵

The World Cup is an example of what the world will be if we don’t win. Browns everywhere. Brown music that doesn’t make sense. Brown food. Brown chants. Brown on brown death over brown teams rivalry. Brown medals. Brown street vendors selling brown stuff. Just brown. An endless sea of brown entropy engulfing the world until we’re all back to living in huts and tearing hearts out of slaves to get cheap help from demons slowly making their way into the world. The end of the Universe isn’t black, it’s brown, and there is a mariachi merchant trying to sell you glazed pineapple at the end of the tunnel

Would add: - Thomas Sowell: Vision of the Anointed - George Orwell: Road to Wigan Pier - James Burnham: Suicide of the West And others depending on which part of Marxist ideology really got to you.

I have never seen an animal commit suicide. I find it interesting that animals, especially apex predators, don't appear to conceptualize “hopelessness” the way humans do. Even at the brink of death, they fight, bite, claw, and persist without turning their suffering into despair.

Elon Musk's first wife once described what it's like to watch him fail. She said he doesn't react the way normal people react. When a rocket explodes, most people in the room go silent. Some cry. Some start calculating the financial damage. Musk pulls out his phone and starts making calls. Not emotional calls. Engineering calls. "What failed. When can we fix it. When's the next launch." His voice doesn't change. His face doesn't change. The rocket that just cost $60 million is already in the past. The next one is all that exists. She said it was the most unsettling thing she'd ever witnessed. Not because he was cold. Because he genuinely wasn't affected. The failure didn't register as failure. It registered as data. An experiment that produced results. Results that inform the next experiment. This is why he wins. Not because he doesn't fail. He fails more spectacularly than anyone in history. He wins because failure occupies zero psychological space. It enters as data and exits as action. Most people lose not because they fail but because they spend weeks processing the failure before acting again. Musk spends zero seconds. The gap between failure and next attempt is a phone call.

The average person is wholly unconscious of the depths of evil inside of them. Before that realization, morality is simply naivety, conditioning, and identification with a persona.

Our civilization is going to die from an ADHD epidemic. The attention span required to maintain a complex society — to read contracts, to follow arguments, to sit with difficulty, to defer gratification long enough to build anything that lasts — is being systematically destroyed. ADHD as a clinical category is real. But what is happening now exceeds any clinical definition. What is happening is the mass production of attentional incapacity in people who were never neurologically predisposed to it. The smartphone did in fifteen years what lead paint took generations to do — it rewired the cognitive architecture of an entire population. The difference is that lead was an accident. The feed was engineered. Every pull-to-refresh, every notification badge, every autoplay was optimized by teams of engineers using casino psychology to make the interruption irresistible. They succeeded. The product works exactly as intended. The product is you, stripped of the ability to concentrate. The consequences are not abstract. Democracy requires citizens who can read a long argument and evaluate it. Juries require people who can hold complexity in mind across days of testimony. Science requires researchers who can sit alone with a problem for years without external validation. Literature requires readers. Architecture requires clients who can hold a vision across the time it takes to build. All of these institutions were designed for a cognitive profile that is becoming statistically rare. The human attention span did not evolve for depth — but culture trained it there over millennia, through apprenticeship, through scripture, through the novel, through the slow disciplines of craft. That training is being undone in real time. What makes this terminal rather than merely troubling is the feedback loop. A distracted population elects distracted leaders who make policy in the format of a tweet. A distracted workforce produces goods and services of diminishing complexity and ambition. A distracted electorate cannot sustain the long attention required to hold power accountable across the years it takes for consequences to arrive. And a distracted culture cannot produce the art, the philosophy, or the science that would allow it to understand what is happening to itself. The diagnosis requires exactly the cognitive capacity that the disease destroys. Arrighi described capitalism consuming itself through financialization. This is the human correlate: a civilization consuming its own cognitive substrate. The attention economy is not a metaphor. It is an extraction industry. What is being extracted is the capacity for sustained thought, and like any extractive industry it does not stop until the resource is gone. The ore here is THE ABILITY TO BE BORED, to wait, to follow a thread to its end — the unglamorous mental furniture of every functional society that has ever existed. Rome did not fall in a day. But there was a moment when the complexity required to maintain the empire exceeded the institutional capacity to manage it. We are approaching an equivalent threshold — not military, not economic, but cognitive. The infrastructure of modernity is too complex to be operated by minds that have been optimized for the scroll. Nuclear plants, financial systems, legal codes, diplomatic negotiations, climate modeling — none of these run on dopamine hits and six-second videos. And the people being trained right now, on devices handed to them at age three, are the people who will be asked to run them. The epidemic will not be declared. There will be no moment of recognition, no wartime mobilization of attention. There will only be a slow, well-documented, heavily monetized degradation — and a civilization too distracted to read the report.

"Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in" - Napoleon Bonaparte

What rich families really educate their boys on: -never look expensive look unbothered. -don't explain yourself, power never over-explains. -keep assets boring and pleasures private. -learn which laws matter and which ones are for poor people only. -never fall in love before you understand leverage. -your surname opens doors. Don't embarrass it. -cash is for emergencies. Credit is for opportunities. -friends are categorized: useful, neutral, entertainment. -if something is loud, emotional, or viral, its already a bad deal. -always know who actually owns the room. It's rarely the loudest person. -don't argue with broke people about money. Don't argue with emotional people about logic. -learn taxes before you learn multiplication tables properly. -you don't work hard forever. You work hard early to stop later. -never let pleasure habits become visible patterns. -reputation is currency. One scandal costs more than ten failures. -silence is safer than honesty in most rooms. -if you can't control your sleep, hunger, lust, or temper, you can't control money. -marry someone who improves your bloodline, not your mood. -keep one legal problem away from disaster at all times. -always have an exit plan. For jobs, cities, county, relationships, even friendships. Just rules whispered under their roofs.

Napoleon on Just Moving Forward: “The truth is, I never was master of my own actions. I never was entirely myself. I might have conceived many plans; but I never had it in my power to execute any. I held the helm with a vigorous hand, but the fury of the waves was greater than any force I could exert in resisting them… I never was truly my own master, but was always controlled by circumstances. Thus, at the commencement of my rise, during the Consulate, my sincere friends and warm partisans frequently asked me… what point was I driving at? and I always answered that I did not know. They were surprised, probably dissatisfied, and yet I spoke the truth... In fact, I was not master of my actions, because I was not fool enough to attempt to twist events into conformity with my system. On the contrary, I moulded my system according to the unforeseen succession of events.”

Something I noticed about people who bounce back fast: They don't build a story around the pain. Something bad happens. They feel it. They move on. No three-week analysis of what it means about them. No "why does this always happen to me." No turning one event into proof that the universe is against them. The event was just an event. Most people aren't wrecked by what happened to them. They're wrecked by the six months they spent replaying it.

I've worked in IB & PE. Now I run a hedge fund. So I'm pretty qualified in knowing what good analysis looks like. One key thing I've learnt in my career is that you *have* to enjoy reading equity research so you don't get burnt out. But naturally, only a few firms/people are talented enough to put out truly enjoyable, digestable research. Some of them are hiding in plain sight, right here on @X ----- So with that, here's a non-exhaustive list of people on @X I look forward to reading on a daily basis, in the hopes that some of you will too (if you're not already!) In no particular order: > @illyquid - mainly Asian related AI semis/hardware research & live analysis > @damnang2 - in-depth, technical semiconductor research/theses > @aleabitoreddit - deep thematic research/theses & company/sector analysis > @PhotonCap - technical photonics & semiconductor research/theses > @pepemoonboy - mix of macro/company specific comms > @crux_capital_ - technical photonics deep dives & crucial updates on key players > @Frenchie_ broad macro commentary & analysis > @Blinklebloop - data centers / AI value chain analysis > @KawzInvests - deep AI/tech/space analysis > @degentradingLSD - broad macro/AI aligned commentary & analysis > @michaelsikand - photonics/AI aligned research & commentary > @Kaizen_Investor AI supply chain analysis & other sector specific trades > @Yeah_Dave - broad macro comms & space/AI specific > @TheValueist - AI-aligned research & company specific analysis

“Celts, Germans, Hellenes, Slavs, Scandinavians, Latins, Iberians or rather we, their descendants, we must think of ourselves as one and the same people, heirs to the same land, a vast homeland.” — Guillaume Faye

The good man, as described by Job (29:12-17). The last line hits especially hard: "I had delivered the poor man that cried out; and the fatherless that had no helper. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me, and I comforted the heart of the widow. I was clad with justice: and I clothed myself with my judgment, as with a robe and a diadem. I was an eye to the blind, and a foot to the lame. I was the father of the poor: and the cause which I knew not, I searched out most diligently. I broke the jaws of the wicked man, and out of his teeth I took away the prey."

Viscerality map.simonsarris.com/p/viscer…

We will find the galaxy filled with B-52's, the evolutionary optimal platonic ideal of a stratospheric munitions delivery vehicle, like drilling beneath the ice of Europa and finding an ocean full of sharks.

What's the most profoundly beautiful piece of music you have ever listened to?

Rage Against The Machine is a great example of the Leftist pipeline. "Fuck you I won't do what you tell me" they shout, in defiance of the "evil empire" Children resonate with this as they relate to their parents taking away their XBox controller. Soon your identity is oppositional defiance disorder, and you've fully projected your own relationship with your father or mother onto the entire world. And there's only one ideology that placates that internal turmoil. Only one group of people who can possibly relate to the antisocial attitude you have. Only one that can reassure you that it's not your own decisions, but the world conspiring against you. Marxism is a masterpiece in grooming, manipulation and collectivised codependence.

“The people will rise” has consistently ranked among the most disastrous political miscalculations of all time. All movements predicated on this belief have ended in total disaster. “The people” will never rise. They’ll never “wake up.” The people are incapable of political action as a cohesive entity with a singular will. This is not a flaw that can be fixed with proper education or mobilization or a change in the news cycle or the economy. It is a fundamental law of reality, and anyone who fails to recognize this is doomed to failure. The ones who “wake up” and “rise” are counter-elites, and they displace other elites in the process. There has only ever been one political order to ever exist, and that is oligarchy. Elites alone rule, not the people. The only question is who makes up the ruling class, and to what ends do they rule?