If you prefer to receive these recaps weekly instead of daily posts, you can manage your subscription preferences right by viewing this email on the web. Look for your profile icon in the top right of the browser, and you can update your settings from daily to weekly (and vice versa) there. However I can get you the full narrative arc without it feeling cluttered - I'm just happy you're here!

Let's connect some dots from this week's notes...

A fish thinks its lake is the universe until somebody pulls it out of the water, and the Man in Black says as much in Book 1 of the Dark Tower, which I finally got back into after 25+ years thanks to a Ben Hunt piece. A pencil tip, magnified, turns into a world of atoms with huge spaces between them, and I read that very differently as an adult than I did in high school. Probably you too, if you've ever zoomed in on something and lost your footing.

Quote from the Personal Archive - my take on the Man in Black's speech about size

We suffer a limitation of perspective. Always. It's only a flaw if we allow it to be one.

John Montgomery gave away a portion of Bridgeway's profits in year one, when the profit was $30,000. He and his wife had already agreed to NOT raise trust fund kids, and nobody in his industry had a model to copy, so they decided to forge their own. Thirty-three years and north of $5 billion in assets under management later, he's still the guy who told his psychiatrist daughter "I was the exact age you are right now when I had you," and I love how much compassion and accountability fit into one line. It's the fish getting pulled out of the lake again, this time between a father and a daughter. Watch the full conversation with the founder of Bridgeway Capital Management.

Quote from the Personal Archive - John Montgomery on why Bridgeway gives as it goes

"Why not do this along the way and enjoy the process?"

[JOHN MONTGOMERY YOUTUBE EMBED GOES HERE - final URL pending]

Semi-spoiler of an 80s movie's plot: A grieving dad asks the creepy old witch lady to help avenge his murdered son, and he is not prepared for what he's asking for. My wife agreed to horror for the month of October (minus Sleepaway Camp), and with a botched execution in Tennessee and a firing squad livestream in the headlines, this cautionary tale hit differently on the rewatch. I can't tell you what justice looks like from the top down, but I do want to know who the audience is, who the performer is, and why each of them showed up.

Quote from the Personal Archive - where I land after the movie and the headlines

I'd rather be somebody who flinches than somebody who cheers.

The THX Deep Note, that sound before every movie you've seen in a theater, starts as about 30 chaotic voices and settles into one giant D chord, and 100 Gecs borrow it, then cram in a ray-gun fart machine, gunshots, a Papa Roach-ish riff, and a barely processed human "woohoo" before the first lyric shows up 45 seconds in. Dave Nadig pitched the song for the Cultish Creative Music Club with a twist (focus on the music, not the lyrics), and I got to watch Joseph slowly become a fan while I made Red Hot Chili Peppers metaphors and retold Vandals lore. To me that intro sounds like a message in a bottle from a young adult trying to talk across generations, and I love how this club keeps pushing my brain.

Quote from the Personal Archive - my take on what this song reminds us

When all of our words get compressed and sorted by algorithms, we have to learn to look at how the other person is communicating.

Youtube: Dumbest Girl Alive by 100 Gecs: Songs That Describe American Life | Cultish Creative Music Club

My chapter for How I Invest My Money, Vol. 2 hit draft 7 at about 3,400 words, and the assignment was 1,500, so Brian Portnoy's note back was basically "if you can cut it, I can use it." It's about how everything compounds, for you or against you, across all five capitals, and I wrote it for the version of me who was climbing out of the hole 5-10 years ago. The book is out October 20th, I'm sharing pages with Morgan Housel, Ben Hunt, and Daniel Crosby, and the impostor syndrome only backed off because I've shared belly laughs with a bunch of them.

Quote from the Personal Archive - on who the chapter is for

And if I've been that far behind and climbed back, I'm not the only one.

One block off the porch the sun has me feeling good, a few turns later I'm sweating through layers like it's 90, and under the canopy at the cemetery loop it's suddenly 40 degrees and I'm wishing for gloves. Same walk, same me, and the light keeps rewriting how I feel about it every 50 yards. Somewhere between the shade and the sniffles I decided "What the f*** + oh well" isn't such a bad mantra.

Quote from the Personal Archive - how the whole walk goes

I walk. I think. I talk to myself.

Click Beta had Barry Ritholtz and Dave Nadig on why AI's real productivity gains don't automatically hand you an investing edge. Barry walks through how his team uses AI to spot portfolio drift and flag clients who may need a rebalance, and we spend a good stretch on the financing behind the data center buildout. The part I keep chewing on is deciding which tasks to automate and which are worth doing yourself, and somehow we also end up on baseball tools and astronomy dashboards.

Youtube: AI Productivity Is Real. 83% of Stocks Are 10% Off Highs. Why Does Barry Ritholtz Like Bonds Again?

Then Ben Hunt, the guy whose Panoptica piece sent me back into the Dark Tower, joined me live to walk through the updated World War AI presentation. His argument is that America is pouring World War II-scale resources into the AI build-out and selling it as a war we have to win against China, so we dig into AI capex driving an outsized share of GDP growth, power and grid demands the math may not support, and a financing burden drifting toward government backstops. I'm still thinking about who ends up paying for it.

Youtube: What Am I Reading This Now? - Ben Hunt Live on World War AI

Also this week on Excess Returns, the Weekly Wrap has Jack Forehand and me connecting Ed Yardeni, Chris Davis, Robert Hagstrom, Katie Stockton, and Tom Maher on a record S&P, narrow leadership, and what your index fund is really betting on.

Three rooms, one reminder from the Dark Tower. Whether it's an index fund, an AI buildout, or a walk past the cemetery, you only ever see the slice from where you're standing.

Write about a time you were the fish in the lake, when something pulled you out and changed how big the world looked.

WHO COULD USE MORE CONTEXT FROM YOU THIS WEEK, THE WAY JOHN GAVE HIS DAUGHTER THE ONE FACT THAT EXPLAINED A LOT?

Pick one small thing you could start giving now, whether it's time, money, or attention, and write down what the first version looks like.

WHAT MAKES YOU FLINCH RIGHT NOW, AND WHAT IS THAT FLINCH TRYING TO REMIND YOU OF?

Think of a message in a bottle you've sent, like a song, a post, or a note, to someone from a different generation. Write down what you hoped they would hear.

WHICH OF YOUR FIVE CAPITALS HAS COMPOUNDED AGAINST YOU, AND WHAT IS ONE SMALL HABIT THAT COULD TURN IT?

Describe a walk, a day, or a season of life when the conditions changed every 50 yards, then write down the mantra that got you through it.

As always, I did my part, now it's your turn to write some reflections in your own Personal Archive.

(then, be sure to let me know where you're keeping it, I'm in search of the others too)

ps. Claude helped me organize and synthesize these thoughts from the week's posts. If you are curious how I use AI, read this post: Did AI Do That: Personal Rules