Good morning, hello, howdy ho, fellow fine friends. How are you today? All well? What is it? Tuesday. Cool, cool. Tuesday. Taco Tuesday. I bet my wife is very excited. She loves the Mexican places in our hood up in MA. We’ll probably get those delicious El Salvadoran burritos with the carrots and the peas in the rice mmmmm…

My alarm clock did not go off this morning, it seems to have gotten distracted playing cozy games on her Nintendo Switch, so, oh, poor me, I got nine and a half hours of sleep on a work night. This was awesome, but it means I do not have time to finish this missive before my morning work meetings begin, so god knows when you’ll actually get this.

Had two crazy dreams last night. I had a Trump DEATH WATCH PARTY dream. Like. It was like a conference like SXSW or the RNC or Davos or something, where they have all those sponsored houses, sponsored by brands and media publications and such. And Trump was, like, in a coma or something, and everyone was throwing these parties where you stand around like on election night waiting for the… erm… results. The one I was at was sponsored by Axios. Hasan Piker was a keynote speaker. A lot of those smug, ambitious, smart, energetic kids with microphone headsets and clipboards bossing everyone around and telling people where to stand. A band was ready to play. But no one really had anything to do.

Felt very realistic AND disturbing AND like there was an imminent moment of catharsis. But, alas, I had to wake up and pee.

Then I had — possibly relatedly — a post-apocolyptic dream, sorta a mix of the world of the Leftovers (which I am re-watching and obsessed with) and the 28 Years Later movies. It was not good, man. The thing about those worlds and dreams is they always seem sorta bucolic and nice to be alone amongst the ruins and nature but then some psychopath always comes along and ruins it. And this happened in that dream, and through an unfortunate set of circumstances I ended up running over a kid and that sucked.

Not good dreams! D- on the dreams last night!

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Again not listening to music this morning. Emma’s still asleep, apartment is small, got a meeting in 20. I did add a bunch of albums to the TO INVESTIGATE queue last night, thank you Suzy, thank you Bluesky. Hopefully I can put a few of ‘em away this afternoon.

SO. If a normal-ass dude who did not, as a rule, play the markets, decided they wanted to somehow buck the trend that things the private credit markets are fucked and make a few bucks because he did not think the private markets were all that fucked, is there a way to do this? Not really, right? And, like, actually, I don't even really know the mechanics, too much, of private credit funds. Do they do… fixed interest rates? Floating rates of return based on how the fund is doing? Seems weird. I am clueless. I should get my AI Goy to ask ChatGPT lol. Anyway I don’t really know how to short anything or, in this case, do whatever clever thing acts like a proxy for a short, like those nerds did in The Big Short. Wait I don’t want to short. I want to long. Shit. Any ideas?

Another question. SO: what is the most normal-ass, boring, non-technical-company CEOship out there? Like: no financial shenanigans, ideally not public, doesn’t do anything with computers, doesn’t manufacture anything in China, doesn’t have a bunch of bonds, just… makes a thing and sells it. I mean, there are probably thousands of these in America in the, like, $1 million to $20 million revenue category, right? But, like, what about big? A furniture company? A deodorant company? Ben and Jerry’s before it got bought by an evil empire and all of their corporate protections got slowly and methodically tripped away? Uh, then, like, Jeni’s, then? An ice cream company? A company that makes those little white chalky pens that you wet and stick on your little shaving cuts?

(Oh shit tangent have I ever told you about my lifelong obsession with those things? Styptic pens? They are so great. Oh shit the Internet tells me they are styptic pencils. Anyway, I am obsessed with those things).

Maybe Prid? It’s at every CVS and Walgreen’s in America, but no one knows what it is or thinks about it until one day they get a splinter and can’t get it out with tweezers and suddenly it is the greatest thing ever. I wonder where they manufacture Prid. Or Carmex. Ever since leaving the blistering dry climate of Alaska I do not use as much Carmex as I used to, but I still keep, oh, I don’t know, five bowls of the stuff in every convenient location in every office and bedroom in my life.

McDonald’s? Think they get anything from China? Probably. Plus they’re really just a financialized real estate empire like GE in its worst days.

Maybe Rivian?. Bit too tech, though. Oh right. And public.

Probably Berkshire Hathaway company like See’s candy or something.

Long ago I co-founded Barbarian Group and my personal (not to say everyone else’s) goal was to build it up enough to sell it to Omnicom and John Wren, whom I was pretty obsessed with at the time. And sure enough, four years later John Wren was sitting in our Newbury Street office poking around and me or Ben said something like “we’ll email you” and he said “oh I don’t use email, they’re listening” and I thought John Wren, who I was convinced was both my uncle and Brian Dennehy at the same time, might be a little crazy. But, nah, he proceeded to tell us a bit about some of the, ah, government contracts he had through certain subsidiaries. And he was like “so I don't really use a phone or a computer” and oh my god can I just be a CEO like that.

People make fun of luddite CEOs but they are probably onto something.

Oh shit I gotta go to a meeting now, hosted on Google infrastructure, with AIs transcribing and, thus, listening, and you know they are writing that shit down whether or not they are giving you a copy and honestly how hard would it be at this point for Larry and Sergei to get a morning briefing with ten bullet points of the most interesting shit Gemini learned from Google Meet calls in the last 24 hours and honestly, are they even doing their job if they are not getting such a briefing? What’s to stop them.

In the immortal words of Jason Pierce, I am “feeling just fine” today, “with a headful of shit.”

Jane is… Well Emma would like to object to my characterizing of Jane as well-behaved on this trip, but really she is just a smidge better-behaved. She did have a 30-minute long meltdown about going to the playground the other day. But I do believe she is somewhat better nonetheless. And me? I like our mornings. I mean I get time with Jane almost every morning of my life either way, but a walk and a nice bagel is a nicer morning for us than sitting in a car in a drop-off line. Today she invented a new kind of cheese that would have at least three colors and called Bobbily.

I want that cheese.

Gonna just end this here today. Got four minutes till the meeting and if I just do the bolding and send this I can be almost, a bit, back on time for the day.

Hope you are all having a schpedoinle day.