weekend notes

Hope all goes well… Dusted off an anecdote from late 2018 on the illusion of certainty (see below). I take the late summer off from writing, to squeeze in some reading. Recharge. Hoping the same for you. All the very best, Eric Week-in-Review: Mon: Israel’s far right gov’t moves forward with controversial judicial reform / protests grow in response, China’s Politburo meeting slightly beat the down

Anecdote: “Art is the shortest path from man to man.” It is a phrase etched into the museum glass, and these words are spilling into the Arabian Gulf. I am lying on a black beanbag in the courtyard of the Louvre, Abu Dhabi edition. Cultural Centers are an invitation for dialogue. And the UAE is building a magical one, a symbolic understanding that their future isn’t in fossils. The irony is everyw

Hope all goes well… Managed to make my way off the grid (kind of) for a few days. The Kenai Peninsula, just south of Anchorage. Tribal land. Glaciers, fjords, orcas, humpbacks, eagles, bears, beavers, bucket lists. Marcel was a world away this week: Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi. He stepped in to write wknd notes (see below). Overall: “We will promptly formulate and introduce policies to restore and expand

Anecdote: “If the fresh skin of an animal, cleaned and divested of all hair, fat, and other extraneous matter, be immersed in a dilute solution of tannic acid, a chemical combination ensues,” said Liv, the two of us walking, her first year done. Cadets are required to commit all sorts of passages to memory. They must be able to recite them at any moment and are inevitably called to do so when stan

Hope all goes well… “Always knew he was special,” said the father. “But when he was 8 and raced around the track, I’d hear others say there was something special about him,” he said. “Guess they saw what I saw.” I was at Silverstone in the UK, watching the Formula One race, and had the privilege to spend the weekend with the parents of a driver, a young man, confident, humble, superstar. “I’d help

Anecdote: “We rarely understand the true source of our success,” said the investor, a serial entrepreneur, a remarkable success. “And having made that first error, we then often extrapolate the misunderstanding forward,” he continued, the two of us catching up, exploring business, life, the struggle. “This leaves us disconnected from what made us great. And we then attempt to live up to an image o

Hope all goes well… “What I come back to is almost embarrassingly simple,” said the London banker, high atop one of the global behemoths. “I think we’ve lived through the golden age of private equity and all types of long duration strategies,” he said. “Holding rates at zero, or negative for that matter, was always going to result in massive capital misallocation.” We see the consequences popping

Hope all goes well… “Okay Teddy, here’s the thing,” I said. “If you were still under my roof and this happened, I’d have you run 100 miles.” A few years ago, when he’d been chronically absentminded, I had him run 3.25miles every morning in January to clear his mind. We’d wake up at 5:30am and do it together. “The only difference is that someone else will be making you run, and I won’t have to do i

Anecdote: “Important developments are rapidly unfolding in digital asset markets,” I said at Coinbase’s State of Crypto Summit in NYC, The Times Center packed, buzzing. “Following the SEC lawsuit that led sentiment to hit another a moment of extreme pessimism, good things are happening.” That’s how markets work. Digital asset prices bottomed out in November when FTX collapsed, then jumped 100%. Pr