Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the Wall Street Journal on the bizarre claim of Gov. Gavin Newsom and others that the Framers would have supported wealth taxes, including the proposed Billionaire’s Tax. It is a claim that seeks to mask the economically unwise with the historically unfounded. The Framers sought to protect property from legislative redistributive impulses. James Madison wrote that the bicameral system, and particularly the Senate, “ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” That does not sound like an ally of Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna.

Was James Madison the Zohran Mamdani of his time? Gavin Newsom appears to think so. In joining the growing number of Democratic leaders supporting a wealth tax, the California governor claimed that the U.S. Constitution and our Founders were all about wealth distribution: “The system America’s founders built,” he said, “was designed to prevent the concentration of power in a few hands, but we have allowed that concentration to happen anyway, slowly, in plain sight, over decades.”

The only problem with this argument is that it is utterly and demonstrably false. The Madisonian democracy is designed to avoid the concentration of political power, not the concentration of wealth.

The Founders were great believers in capitalism and the free market. In my recent book, “Rage and the Republic,” I discuss the economic philosophy of the Founders in exploring the history and future of this unique republic. This isn’t simply the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but also the anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” which the Founders embraced.

Many of the Founders were themselves quite wealthy, including banker Robert Morris Jr., who was known as the “Financier of the Revolution” and would be a billionaire today.

Our revolution was the first true Enlightenment revolution, heavily influenced by writers such as John Locke, who believed in a natural right to property. That right came not from the government, but from God, and “excludes the common right of other Men.”

That Lockean principle was manifest in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was a basis for the Declaration of Independence. It extolled “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

James Madison drafted protections from government seizure of property, including the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires compensation for any property taken by the government.

The Constitution not only protects property, but was later amended to allow for income taxes rather than wealth taxes.

Far from supporting a wealth tax, the constitutional system referenced by Mr. Newsom makes a federal wealth tax unconstitutional.

Mr. Newsom’s recent endorsement of a national wealth tax was likely meant to blunt the outrage over his opposition to the resolution to create a state Billionaires’ Tax on the coming November ballot.

California has reportedly lost trillions of dollars in the exodus of billionaires and other wealthy taxpayers fleeing the high taxes and class politics of the state. Mr. Newsom knows that this draining of wealth spells doom for his state, which is already grappling with a massive, growing deficit. He offered a curious argument for opposing the state wealth tax: “You may not be able to pick up and move to Texas or Florida to shelter your income from taxation, but I promise you that billionaires can, and do.”

The argument suggested that most citizens are effectively a captive population to be culled by California leaders, dupes who are unable to escape a state with a deadly combination of some of the highest taxes and highest living costs in the nation.

Unions and others pushed the Billionaire Tax to avoid budget cuts and fund the state’s runaway expenditures, from pension funds to projects such as the infamous high-speed train to nowhere.

To deal with California’s reverse Gold Rush, drafters made the proposed Billionaire Tax retroactive to claw back money from those who have escaped.

The national Billionaire Tax pushed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) seeks to cut off any escape for the wealthy short of leaving the country. When she ran for president, Ms. Warren warned the wealthy that she was coming for “your Rembrandts, your stock portfolio, your diamonds and your yachts.”

Of course, this assumes that the wealthy would be little more than passive prey in a hunt by the Internal Revenue Service. That is precisely what socialists thought in France decades ago, before an exodus from the country that, along with other socialist policies, brought it to near economic ruin. It was later rescinded.

Nevertheless, wealth taxes make for great politics. What is concerning is that, in addition to a wealth tax, Democratic leaders like Ms. Warren are pledging to pack the Supreme Court if they retake power. A packed court with an insistent liberal majority would let the Democrats push through measures that would otherwise be declared unconstitutional, including a wealth tax.

Congress could then gradually lower the level of wealth needed to trigger the tax, opening up the homes and estates of citizens as an untapped reservoir of money for the taking.

“You’re next” could then apply not just to office holders but to property owners in a push to redistribute wealth.

That strategy may well unfold in coming years, but it will be the realization of a Mamdanian, not a Madisonian, system.

Mr. Turley is a law professor at George Washington University and author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

President Trump this weekend mused in an interview with Axios that so many people and officials are currently gathered for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s funeral in Tehran that they could all be taken out in one fell swoop.

“They are all there. One shot [and we can take them all out], but we are not going to do that because then we would have nobody to negotiate with,” Trump said.

He again emphasized that the Iranians “are begging to make a deal” but said both sides decided to take a week off from the conflict as well as talks to give time for Khamenei’s funeral events to end. There are major public events scheduled to go for up to a week.

Trump acknowledged that neither side will shoot at the other as the funeral procession and multi-city observances continued. Predictions in international press accounts have said events are expected to attract some 30 million mourners.

The first and second days of public funeral ceremonies in Tehran attracted millions of people, after Friday saw top representatives from at least 70 foreign governments pay last respects.

Amid the scenes of public mourning, and also with some Iranian officials loudly calling for ‘revenge’ – Trump made this interesting comment to Axios:

He added that he was surprised to see some Iranians crying at the funeral, saying he thought people hated Khamenei. “Maybe it’s fake tears,” Trump mused.

Footage and images of massive crowds of people packing out central Tehran squares and roads have flooded social media over the weekend. External critics and enemies of Iran have been claiming that millions of people were ‘forced’ by Iran’s security services to attend the funeral.

⭕️🇺🇸 President Trump told Axios U.S.-Iran negotiations are paused until the funeral ceremonies for the late Iranian Supreme Leader conclude on July 9, saying both sides agreed to “take a week off” and that “neither side will shoot at the other” during that time.

Referring to… pic.twitter.com/MqabN3ojTJ

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) July 4, 2026

Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Iran has described the following in a Sunday report:

Thousands and thousands of people are streaming through to pay their respects on the second day of the public farewell ceremony for the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

We know that tomorrow, in the capital of Tehran, there will be a funeral procession, and we are expecting millions of people to attend.

Also on the schedule, the bodies of Khamenei and his slain family members are also going to be taken to the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq.

Khamenei and his family members are later to be buried in the city of Mashhad, which is his birthplace. His surviving son, Mojtaba Khamenei – the current supreme leader – is still in hiding and has yet been seen at the funeral.

Reports say the Iranians are fearful that US and Israeli intelligence, or their potential spy assets on the ground, could track Mojtaba’s movements if he were to make public appearance at his father’s funeral.

🇮🇷 Aerial images are emerging of massive crowds of Iranians gathered for Ali Khamenei’s funeral.

After today’s ceremonies, the body will be moved to Qom on Tuesday and then to Iraq for further religious processions around holy sites and shrines before finally being buried on… https://t.co/bV5WNMm365 pic.twitter.com/FkDkKQM5Tj

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) July 5, 2026

As for Trump expressing ‘surprise’ that millions of Iranians would mourn the late Khamenei, this seems but the latest admissions (in a long familiar pattern) of Washington getting pretty much every key assumption wrong about Middle East states and cultures it seeks to do regime change it. 

This also hearkens back to US claims in Iraq that they “would greet us as liberators”… the same sentiment was at times expressed just ahead of the Feb. 28 US-Israeli attack on Iran. But a mass uprising strong enough to topple the government never materialized – though the US and Israel tried to encourage this.

Just after 2:00 p.m. (ET) today, President Trump published the following statement on Truth Social:

What is he talking about? What is the “great injustice”?

As Noel S. Williams explains via American Thinker, he’s referring to the moment during the U.S. vs. Bosnia & Herzegovina World Cup match when the referee issued a bizarre, unwarranted red card to star striker Folarin Balogun.

Initially, that made him ineligible to play in the crucial last-16 match against Belgium on Monday. Great or not, there was an injustice – I just hope Karma and those mercurial soccer gods agree in the coming days.

It’s clear that Balogun didn’t deliberately stamp on the B&H defender’s ankle.

I just wonder, now that FIFA has bent over backward to re-institute his eligibility to play against Belgium, if that will dull the U.S. team’s cutting edge. Sometimes, when a team feels “hard done by,” it solidifies their sanctimonious indignation, giving them more power.

Our team is already pulling together, but the “great injustice” added more “all for one, and one for all” spirit.

Given President Trump’s post, the spotlight has just intensified on an individual player.

Additionally, the media is piling on, increasing performance expectations upon a person they describe as our best striker (with some creative player repositioning, Christian Pulisic could be deployed as a striker). Plus, there are other options. We have brilliant players all over the field, actually.

LOL!!! “Nah bro I have the Trump card, I win.”

Trump card always wins! pic.twitter.com/gGTlmDm0wH

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) July 5, 2026

In a statement, the US Soccer Federation said:

WE ACCEPT THE DECISION OF THE DISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE AND ARE PLEASED THAT FOLARIN BALOGUN IS ELIGIBLE TO COMPETE TOMORROW.

OUR FULL ATTENTION IS FOCUSED ON THE ROUND OF 16 MATCH AGAINST BELGIUM IN SEATTLE, AND WE LOOK FORWARD TO THE CONTINUED SUPPORT OF OUR AMAZING FANS.

Understandably, the Belgian Soccer Federation is furious:

“The Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) is astonished by FIFA’s decision to declare suspended United States player Folarin Balogun eligible to play in the USA–Belgium match on Monday, 6 July at 5:00 p.m. (Seattle time).

FIFA bases its decision on Article 27 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code.

…

❗️In order to safeguard the legitimate rights of all participating teams and to protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport, both at this FIFA World Cup and at future editions of the tournament, the RBFA is investigating all potential options.“

With the Belgian coach exclaiming: “I did not know that July 4th was April Fools day…”

pic.twitter.com/fpY45ODoFr

💣🗣️ Journalist:

“What is your reaction to the possibility of Folarin Balogun playing against you tomorrow?”

🎥 Rudi Garcia, visibly furious: 😱🔥

“As I told your colleague earlier during the one-on-one interviews, I didn’t know that at the World Cup,…

— Pitch Wire (@wire_pitch) July 5, 2026

US odds improved after the suspension was lifted…

Go USA!

But before that, Go England!!

OPEC+ agreed a further increase in output targets from August, the group said in a statement on Sunday, ‌adding to global supply at a time when oil prices are falling due to the gradual reopening of the Strait of Hormuz for oil exports. 

Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman adjust production and reaffirm commitment to market stability

Read Press Release▶️https://t.co/dyMd6A6Fpj

— OPEC (@OPECSecretariat) July 5, 2026

The oil-producing cartel, which recently lost the UAE as a core member, agreed during an online meeting to increase quotas by 188,000 barrels per day from August, on top of similar increases for June and July. That said, the producers reserved the right to increase, pause, or reverse the phase-out, including the November 2023 cuts already unwound. Furthermore, every country that overproduced since January 2024 still has to fully compensate for it, tracked monthly by the JMMC. 

The seven ​core members of OPEC+, which groups OPEC and allied producers including Russia, have hiked their output quotas from April through July ​by almost 800,000 bpd. Yet the increase has remained largely on paper because of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, ⁠which closed the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic for some of the most important OPEC+ members, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and ​Iraq.

According to Reuters, OPEC+ output fell to 33.13 million bpd in May, according to OPEC data, from 42.77 million bpd in February. It began ​to recover in June thanks to U.S. efforts to help the UAE and other OPEC+ nations export more oil, but is still below pre-war levels.

Despite persisting supply disruptions, oil prices have returned to pre-war levels, pressured by sharply lower Chinese imports, higher exports from non-Middle East producers, and a record global strategic stock release coordinated ​by the International Energy Agency.

“The group of seven kept unwinding their production cuts as widely expected,” UBS analyst Giovanni Staunovo said. “The near-term focus ​will remain on how many tankers will manage to cross the Strait of Hormuz and how quickly demand and Chinese crude imports recover.”

A memorandum of understanding ‌between Washington ⁠and Tehran to end the war, which has been breached on several occasions but is still holding, has also helped convince traders that supply will ultimately return to normal levels.

Brent crude prices traded near $72 per barrel on Friday, down from recent peaks of more than $120 per barrel and back to levels traded just before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

Besides agreeing production targets, OPEC+ is also facing other challenges after the United Arab Emirates left ​the group and Iraq signaled it wants ​higher quotas.

OPEC+ includes 21 members ⁠including Iran, but in recent years only the seven nations – and the UAE until its departure – have been involved in monthly production management. Those seven producers, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan and Oman, are ​boosting output as part of the phased rollback of a 1.65 million bpd supply cut agreed ​in 2023, when ⁠the group still included the UAE.

In a stunning twist, the UAE quit the alliance in late April because it wanted to align its capacity more closely with its production, free of production restraints imposed by the group. From August, taking into account the UAE’s exit from May 1, the seven core members will still ⁠have about ​379,000 bpd of the original cut to return to the market, according to ​Reuters calculations.

With the August increase now decided, they will have fully unwound the 2023 cut if they make one more hike of around the same size for September at ​their next meeting on August 2.

By Christopher Penn, of Almost Timely News

What’s the biggest problem in AI today? Is it cost, with token budgets being blown out of the water by agentic AI? Is it sustainability, with AI consuming electricity and fresh water? Is it ethics, with tech companies cramming AI into everything?

I think it’s deeper than that. Those are all symptoms of a much deeper-rooted problem: nobody’s making decisions.

Or more correctly, we’ve abdicated far too much of our executive function to AI. We’ve surrendered our thinking. 

Let’s dig in.

Part 1: Where This Issue Came From

On Friday afternoon, I was mulling over what I wanted to cover in this week’s issue. It’s a holiday weekend here in the USA, so not as many folks will be reading, and that’s okay. (I appreciate that YOU are) And I’ve covered a ton recently:

• How to improve advertising with AI
• Why listicles may cause more harm than good
• Setting up private, local models
• How AI detection works
• AI for GEO mental models
• AI for retail GEO
• 18 ways to save token budgets
• How to make AI write better

So on a whim, I set up a NotebookLM with the last 180 days of conversations from over 40 different subreddits, like r/marketing, r/chatgpt, etc. – everything around marketing, business, and AI. I connected it to Claude Code with the NotebookLM command line tool (the most token—efficient way for Claude to talk to NotebookLM), and then put all of my 2026 newsletters year to date into an input folder.

I asked Claude to compare what I’ve written about thus far this year with what folks are finding their hardest problems are with AI. Claude spit out a list of 10 major things derived from over 800,000 words of foaming at the mouth on Reddit that it thought might be good newsletter topics:

• AI Visibility challenges
• Agentic oversight is degrading
• AI deployment is broken
• 40-60% of company budget is wasted on the wrong models
• AI is a rental
• AI sycophancy is screwing up synthetic focus groups
• AI detectors don’t work
• AI is hollowing out corporations and no one’s hiring junior staff
• People measure AI by tokenmaxxing
• Marketers are basically unpaid labor for AI companies training data

Claude was REALLY pushing for me to write about how measurement is broken in marketing and AI today, and I might do that at some point, but that’s not what I see when I look at this laundry list. Yes, there are measurement issues in many of them, data issues in many of them, but… measurement being broken is the symptom of what I said earlier – we’ve abdicated executive function.

For those who aren’t analytics nerds, you know that measurement is a trailing indicator. It’s not a leading indicator.

Part 2: Executive Function Recap

As a reminder, I bucket executive function into four categories that I call PODS:

• Plan: you think about achieving something in the future and make a plan to get there from here
• Organize: you take what you have and try to make sense of it
• Decide: you take what you have and make decisions about it
• Solve: you solve the problems you have

Yes, there is more nuance to executive function than this, but this handy, short list is an easy way to see what our brains are doing. That’s critical thinking, one of the worst-named practices we have.

Why? Because critical thinking isn’t about being critical, per se. It’s about metacognition – the definition of which is thinking about thinking. When you’re thinking about how you think, you open the door to improvements, to growth.

Thinking about thinking means asking questions and reflecting – is this the best way to do something? How could I do this better? How could I derive more enjoyment from this thing I’m doing? It’s not criticizing yourself as much as it is recognizing what you’re doing and whether it’s working or not.

When you’re planning, organizing, deciding, and solving, you’re inherently thinking about thinking. Every time you plan, every time you bring order to chaos, you have to check in with your own brain to see if what you’re doing is moving you closer to the goal posts.

Executive function is one of the things that defines our sentience as living creatures. Every sentient creature from a mouse to us does these tasks. You’ve read or heard stories about crows fashioning tools from wire to solve problems, you’ve watched dogs and cats make decisions and plan. I’ve watched my own cat measure optically whether or not she can make a particular jump.

Properly prompted, today’s AI tools are superb at executive functions as well. Given the right frameworks, harnesses, and data, they can plan, organize, decide, and solve better than we can at most language-based tasks.

And therein lies the actual problem.

Part 3: The Tale of the Tape

Let’s look at each of the 10 topics Claude suggested to see the threads that connect them.

AI Visibility challenges: when you read the verbatims of what people are saying about AI visibility measurement, you can tell they’re pretty much making it up. This is especially true of software vendors that are offering and peddling solutions that have very little grounding in reality – and yet, stakeholders eat this stuff up because they’d rather have certainty about a wrong number than accept uncertainty or no number at all. they are not thinking about their thinking.

Agentic oversight is degrading: the commenters on Reddit focused on the fact that as agents get more sophisticated, it’s harder and harder to follow along to see what they’re doing. So we just hit OK all the time – if we’re even thinking about a human in the loop. We’ve forfeit our authority here. In fact, some AI tools have this built in as a feature. Claude calls it dangerously skip permissions. Qwen calls it YOLO mode.

AI deployment is broken: here, the discussion is about stakeholders telling their stakeholders that the organization has deployed AI without any sense of the impact that it’s had. One poster cited a statistic that 29% of companies see significant ROI from AI, even though individual employees are claiming 5x productivity increases. The math doesn’t math. Here, people don’t want to think and reflect about what deployment even means. Katie’s been writing a lot about this in the Trust Insights newsletter the last few weeks. At its heart, we are confusing using AI with getting results out of AI.

40-60% of budget is wasted: here, folks are talking about how everyone just accepts the default model in AI tools, which is typically the most expensive one. Claude, for example, defaults to Opus 4.8, which is a much more expensive model than Sonnet 5 or Haiku 4.5. We’re not thinking. We’re not making decisions about cost trade-offs versus effectiveness. Another person pointed out that this is by design to create habits. It’s about habit formation for the most expensive models so that when the subsidization of today’s AI ends, we are accustomed to using the most expensive models. This is brain hijacking in a way.

AI is a rental: in this particular topic, the discussion centers around what you actually own in AI, which is very little if you are using today’s closed weights frontier models. Particularly Anthropic’s on-again, off-again rollout of Fable 5, thanks to U.S. export controls, was a wake-up call to the entire industry that you don’t own anything in SaaS, any more than you own music in Spotify or own videos in Netflix – but people think they do.

Sycophancy in focus groups: even though we have good academic research showing that properly prompted AI models can emulate human purchase intent with about 90% accuracy, the level of sycophancy in AI models steers them towards confirmation bias in most situations. This is especially true of synthetic focus groups; when people use AI to simulate consumer intent, what they’re really doing is reinforcing their own biases most of the time. There’s no reflection or questioning the AI output.

AI detectors don’t work: A perpetual favorite topic of mine. This thread of conversation revolved around how companies are using AI detectors to identify the use of AI in situations where it’s not appropriate, without recognizing that the detectors themselves are also broken. In testing I did 3 weeks ago now, AI detectors falsely flagged human outputs 1 out of 7 times. No one is thinking and reflecting enough about who’s watching the watchers.

AI is hollowing out companies: I really liked this quote from the agency owners subreddit:

“What’s strange is nobody decided this. There was no meeting where we discussed this. We automated one annoying task, then another, and one day the job had hollowed out from the inside.“

This erosion of tasks is all about a lack of cognition, a lack of reflection, a lack of a plan. No one’s making decisions – just leaving it up to the machines, a bit more each day.

Tokenmaxxing: this was reflecting on Meta’s most recent news story in which they were on track to spend several billion dollars in AI tokens because they measured AI productivity based on token spend, the dumbest possible way to measure AI.

Marketers as unpaid trainers: this was a whole bunch of ranting about how marketers are effectively unpaid trainers for AI platforms. The more content we produce, the more AI has to train on while simultaneously competing for the tasks we’re paid to do. Here, the thread was about how the average marketer isn’t thinking or reflecting about their relationship to AI.

And this laundry list of 10 items isn’t everything, not by a long shot. Think about how else people use AI without thinking, without thinking about their thinking. Go on LinkedIn and look at the endless streams of comment-bots all paraphrasing the same template over and over again. Look at the workslop flooding your inbox, read the reports your agencies send you that are clearly copy paste jobs.

When we put aside the direction that Claude wanted to nudge this issue of the newsletter, it becomes pretty apparent that it’s really about how much we think about thinking. How self-aware are we? How well and accurately do we perceive our relationship with AI?

Most of all, do we see the amount of executive function we’ve ceded to AI?

Part 4: The Antidote

“Nobody decided this” is haunting me. When you hand off executive functions to AI, who is making the decisions? No one. There’s no one accountable for a decision because the machine is making it for us. Whether it’s building a PowerPoint deck, assembling a report for a client, creating content for a newsletter, when the machine does it, there’s no accountability and there’s no decision making on our part other than approving it.

And this leads to a bunch of bad outcomes, everything from job loss to dissatisfaction with your own work. You know, when you use AI to offload a task, that you didn’t do the work – and you take no pride in it, any more than you’d take pride in the work that a contractor did on your behalf.

Think about this in the context of parents. Go to any parent’s house and you’ll likely see art that the kids made when they were young. The art is generally, objectively, pretty bad. But the parent values it not because of the quality of the art, but because of the level of effort made by the child. They take pride in their child’s efforts, and the child takes pride in what they did in their efforts. For good or ill, when people use AI, they themselves feel like they haven’t made an effort, and the person on the receiving end also feels like they didn’t make an effort.

Sometimes, you don’t even understand the work if you’ve outsourced it. You present it to your stakeholders, and the first question they ask that isn’t in the prepared materials leads to panic city because you can’t answer it, like buying a cake at the store instead of baking it yourself and then having someone ask if a specific allergen is in it. And you’re left scrambling, looking for the label to see what’s actually in the cake.

So my suggested antidote is this: for every task that matters, always start with someting you lead, and force the machines to educate you.

For example, when I compile monthly reports for Trust Insights clients, I turn on my voice recorder and I review the data myself. I talk out loud what I see, what I think, what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense, and then I have AI transcribe it. After the transcription is complete, I ask AI to review it and show me what I missed. I ask it to ask me questions, to record more information, to fish more information from me.

I also ask it, especially around anything in my subject matter expertise, to find me resources to learn and read about its recommendations. Recently, I was asking it to choose from a catalog I’d prepared of over 1,000 different analytical techniques, and it chose an interesting ensemble of 3 techniques, one of which I didn’t know well. So I had it teach me that, so that instead of me passively accepting its recommendations, I learned something. I got better as a professional. I grew my subject matter expertise.

If you think about it, this is not only rational from the perspective of delivering great quality work, it’s also rational from the perspective of my value. If I’m nothing more than a copy paste drone, a meat-based interface to an LLM, then why does my company need me? Why would my clients pay for me when they could just pay to ask ChatGPT or Claude the exact same things?

What they’re paying for is my expertise, my skills not only at using the technology, but the specific lens I direct it with, and the perspective that only I can bring. And if I’m using AI to constantly improve that expertise, to improve that domain knowledge, then they should keep paying for me.

Outside my subject matter expertise, I start with deep research, using AI tools to gather information and then having them create a synthesis. Once I’ve got that, then I have it create a checklist of what constitutes quality in the domain I’m working in. Finally, I sit down with the creations and I read and learn for myself. I have AI make infographics or podcast summaries to learn the domain so that I can connect it to my expertise.

Agentic AI – tools like Claude Code, OpenCode, etc. – are phenomenal researchers, far better than the web-based deep research tools folks have become accustomed to in the past couple of years. When you use a research agent, it has a lot more latitude to gather up sources, to take the time to write down notes and observations, and to synthesize conclusions from the data it has. If you use something like the Trust Insights CASINO research framework, you’ll get some amazing results from the tools that tend to have fewer hallucinations than their web-based counterparts.

Then with that research data in hand, you use it to become a better professional within your domain. You use it to level yourself up. You use it to add to your insights instead of substitute for your insights.

Part 5: Wrapping Up

The biggest problem in AI today is the delegation of our executive function to machines. Whether it’s accountability (machines have none), deskilling, or dissatisfaction with our work, the moment we forfeit executive function is the moment when AI becomes more problem than solution.

We can boil it all down to a simple set of questions:

1. Does the use of AI make the output better?

2. Does the use of AI make me better?

If the answer isn’t yes to BOTH, then you’re not using it well.

Properly used, AI is one of the greatest professional development tools ever created.

Improperly used, it’s one of the most destructive forces your career has ever known, because the moment you offload a task to AI, your own skills at that task get rusty.

And once something becomes rusty enough, it’s cheaper and easier to replace it.

More in the Almost Timely Newsletter

In recent months one of the more frequent questions in FX trading has been the relentless collapse in the yen, which recently sank below a 40 year low despite rate differentials stubbornly headed in the opposite direction, and is increasingly flirting with levels which on previous occasions always prompted BOJ intervention.

Among the reasons cited for the chronic weakness of the Japanese currency have been the following three:

1. Real short-term rates in Japan are negative, which is why Ueda has been slow to hike
2. There is a growing perception that Japan’s PM Takaichi doesn’t want a higher rates or a stronger yen.  A weak yen certainly helps big JP firms profits (while hurting households) so there is a clear weak yen constituency inside the LDP. Japanese financial institutions are also short the yen generally
3. JP financial institutions (notably lifer insurers) see the upfront cost of hedging (the nominal ST rate differential) and have made a mint on unhedged fx assets, and they have been reluctant to change their position just because the yen looks exceptionally undervalued.

Effectively a feedback loop has emerged, whereby the weaker yen leads to an even weaker yen, and despite token resistance by the BOJ – the latest long overdue rate hike being an example – the market clearly anticipates further weakness in the currency, and is pushing it to new lows.

However, a limit to the yen’s weakness is now emerging, and it goes to the growing damage on the country’s households noted in point 2 above.

As Bloomberg reports, Japan’s weak currency caused the most bankruptcies for the first half of a year since 2022, underscoring the growing economic costs of the currency’s slump. 

Forty-five firms failed from January to June for that reason, up more than 30% from a year earlier, according to a report by Tokyo Shoko Research published last Wednesday. The figure was the highest since 2022, when the data firm started counting companies that specifically cite currency weakness in filing for bankruptcy.

The findings suggest the smaller firms that employ most of Japan’s workers are finding it increasingly difficult to withstand the yen’s prolonged weakness, casting a shadow over the nation’s economy, even as large-cap exporters benefit. 

The data also strengthen the case for continued interest-rate hikes from the Bank of Japan. While higher borrowing costs alone would typically push more firms toward insolvency, closing the gap with US rates could help support the yen.

The yen has steadily weakened against the dollar in recent years as US interest rates climbed to combat pandemic-era inflation while Japanese rates were negative to break free of deflation. While the rate differential has since narrowed, a rally in the dollar and high oil prices from the war in Iran are pressuring the yen.  

The yen hit a new 40 year low of 162 per dollar on Thursday, before rising higher amid some speculation that Japan’s financial authorities may finally seek to rein it in. While the weaker currency has boosted exporters’ earnings, it has also driven up import costs, squeezing profit margins across a broad range of import-dependent industries, and has also helped sustain the worst inflation in Japan’s recent history.  

The conflict in the Middle East has also drastically boosted costs. A price index for raw materials and merchandise purchases among a broad range of smaller firms surged in the second quarter, according to a survey by the Organization for Small & Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation. The Bank of Japan’s producer price index has also jumped in recent months.

Tokyo Shoko Research’s report showed bankruptcies were particularly concentrated in the wholesale sector. One example was Tokyo-based Merry Time Foods, an importer of crab, shrimp and tuna from other parts of Asia. The company went bankrupt in May, citing deteriorating profitability due to the weak yen and political instability in its supplier countries.

The research firm said in the report that currency-related bankruptcies are likely to remain elevated for some time, particularly among wholesalers, retailers and manufacturers with limited pricing power.

According to Bloomberg, the strain has been acute for small- and mid-sized businesses, who are more affected by higher borrowing costs than their larger counterparts. They’re also contending with mounting wage hike pressures amid persistent labor shortages. Smaller firms often have limited ability to pass higher costs onto customers due to intense competition.

“The weak yen is one contributing factor,” said Yoshihiro Sakata, manager at Tokyo Shoko Research. “Combined with inflation and rising labor costs, it is creating a cumulative burden on businesses.”

Another source of pressure on smaller businesses may be foreign-exchange hedging, including the use of so-called reverse knockout options, according to Yuji Saito, executive adviser at SBI FXTrade. Such products are widely sold by regional banks as structured hedging products, particularly to small and regional importers seeking to minimize upfront option premiums.

Once the exchange rate reaches a preset knockout level, the option expires and the hedge ceases to provide protection. Companies needing dollars must then either purchase them in the spot market, enter into a new hedge – often at less favorable levels – or leave themselves exposed to further currency moves.

“The weaker the yen gets, the more importers roll into increasingly risky option structures,” Saito said. “Once the knockout level is breached, they are forced to buy dollars in the spot market, creating a negative spiral that puts even more downward pressure on the yen.”

Analysts estimate that remaining reverse knockout levels are clustered between 163 and 170 yen per dollar, territory that many firms didn’t think the currency would reach as intervention from the central bank would likely be forthcoming due to the adverse economic impact of such unprecedented currency collapse.

“The number of knockouts could increase if the yen weakens further,” said Hiroyuki Machida, director of Japan FX and commodities sales at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group. “The situation is becoming significant for companies that are unable to pass on higher costs.”

Russia has announced that one key measure that will be taken in response to Ukraine’s ramped-up drone attacks on Russian territory, including last month’s major strikes on the Moscow area, is the significant expansion of the border ‘buffer zone’ between the waring countries.

“A security buffer zone on the Russian-Ukrainian border is conditioned by the aggressive nature of the Kiev regime and the Russian military is engaged in this process systematically reaching the appropriate progress,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Sunday.

In essence this is the Kremlin saying that Russian forces plan to permanently take over territory deeper into Ukraine.

“Based on the aggressive nature of the Kiev regime and in order to insure the safety of our citizens, we are setting up a security zone, or the so-called, buffer zone,” Peskov continued. “This buffer zone is being created systematically. We do register significant results regarding the terms of our troops’ advancing.”

“There area should be no in no one doubts that it would will be serve to extend the necessary area ensuring our security,” he added.

“Our troops are advancing,” Peskov continued. “No one here should have any doubt that our military is proceeding systematically, and we are seeing concrete results.”

He cited the taking of Konstantinovka: “This is a milestone, it is the most important step towards taking the common fortified area of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk,” he claimed according to TASS.

President Putin has of late been taking steps to strongly signal he’s committed as ever to completing the war aims of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ – despite reports of nationwide fuel shortages, and also a full-blown gasoline supply crisis in Crimea.

The Kremlin released footage on Friday evening of the 73-year old Russian leader visiting an auxiliary command post to meet with the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces.

Putin wore a military uniform, which Russian state sources described as a sign of his resolve to “finish off the terrorist neo-Nazi vermin”.

English-language RT’s response: “…seems to desire for that security zone to begin on the Polish border.”

Putin: “The more strikes the enemy attempts to carry out on our civilian facilities, the larger the security zone we will have to create in adjacent territories.”

Sadly, the current Kiev regime seems to desire for that security zone to begin on the Polish border.…

— Chikhi Cato (@KatoHus56872326) July 4, 2026

The scene appeared aimed primarily at the West, which has been questioning Moscow’s resolve due to the now frequent Ukrainian drone hits on sensitive energy infrastructure.

President Trump has also lately appeared to pivot back to wanting the resolve the Ukraine conflict, while still seeking permanent offramp regarding to the Iran war crisis.

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

Burning Down The House…

“I forgot to get napkins. I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.”

– Darializa Avila-Chevalier, primary election winner, New York’s 13th Congressional District

Who are all these Democratic Socialists of America, anyway?

DSA on the March shoulder to shoulder with the Pride Brigade

“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” one of their spoxes declared on Instagram in 2024.

Hmmmm . . . . I wonder if you can be a little more specific. Like, including democracy and socialism, two western civ constructs? Kind of looks like a baby / bathwater situation, followed by burning down the house where the baby lived. Do we get a chance to debate this proposition in the midterm election?

Likewise, a St. Paul, Minnesota, school board member, one Chauntyll Allen offered the following policy recommendation on the We Love Our Dog Park Facebook page:

A bad moon is rising on our nation’s 250th birthday. The country is in a rancid mood. You begin to see what happens when political ideas are carried to their last limits. Question is: does all this add up to a winning party platform? You must suppose that higher-ups in the Democratic Party are asking themselves the question now. What do Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer think when they see these Angels of Death on the march (or in flight) over the midterm battlefield?

Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Melat Kiros are going to Congress to link arms with “The Squad” — AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley — and they will bring their cargo of DSA policy ideas with them: racial, gender, and social justice; abolish ICE (no more deporting anybody); defund the police; end incarceration (no more jails); free housing and medical care; green this-n-that; government ownership of business; abolish the Senate and the electoral college; pack the SCOTUS…

The platform apparently has a lot of appeal to a certain demographic — which, I suspect, includes the many young recent graduates of the diploma mills who are pissed-off that Mr. Trump & Company are methodically shutting down the NGOs that were supposed to furnish these young race-and-gender studies majors with cushy, six-figure jobs doing “activism.” Alas, that pathway is increasingly blocked and the country only needs so many baristas.

What to do then? Take it to the limit! Be communists. . . with all that entails. 

What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, too.

This new gen of Democratic Socialists is arguably worse than the Confederates of 1861. Those Rebs only wanted to secede from USA and go their own way in one corner of the land. They didn’t want to piss on Johann Sebastian Bach, Leonardo DaVinci, Jane Austen, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as they walked out. The Democratic Socialists of our day are fully aligned with their avatars: Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, who operated human meat-grinders at scale to tamp down the opposition. Not a great look to align with the great mass-murderers of history.

It must be agony for Schumer and Jeffries. Eradicate Western Civ. . . ? Piss on white people’s corpses. . . ? Are they really going to get behind that? No-o-o-o-o. But they will try to wriggle around this steaming pile for some weeks to come until it is obvious that the Democratic Party has blown itself up, hoisted itself on that old petard. It may be too late for the party’s old guard. No matter how many rain-dances Elizabeth Warren does, nothing will put out this dumpster fire.

Another question for the months ahead: can that party control its increasingly maniacal street warriors, the Antifas, the Pink Pistols, the Transgender Armed Defense forces, and whatever remains of BLM. There is still a lot of money in circulation for public demonstrations and disruptions from George Soros and other sponsors. And apart from that are the forces of jihad, with their own foreign patrons. Gawd knows how many jihadis came into the country during “Joe Biden’s” orchestrated alien invasion. Not just a few, you can be sure.

By the way, can somebody at the Office of Management and Budget do an audit of the $370-billion that “Joe Biden” handed over to John Podesta in the fall of 2024 to administer “climate-related provisions” of the Inflation Reduction Act, and figure out how much of it bounced right back into Democratic Party-adjacent NGOs and down to party capos like Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and Karen Bass in LA?

And happy 250th birthday to you, America — if you can keep yourself.

Paul Pelosi, the 86-year-old husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), faces misdemeanor charges for a hit-and-run after allegedly striking a parked car in Napa, California on Friday. 

According to a statement from the Napa County Sheriff’s Office, the collision occurred around 2:30 p.m. on July 3, 2026, on the 6700 block of Yount Street in Yountville. A witness reported seeing a brown convertible traveling northbound on Yount Street strike a parked car that was legally positioned on the shoulder of the roadway. The parked vehicle sustained significant rear-end damage. Pelosi briefly stopped before continuing on.

The witness called 911 to report the hit-and-run. Deputies responded and located Paul Pelosi a short time later, roughly a quarter-mile away. His brown convertible was found partially blocking Yountville Cross Road, with a California Highway Patrol vehicle positioned behind it. The front right side of Pelosi’s car showed significant damage consistent with the rear damage on the parked vehicle.

Pelosi told investigators that he knew he had hit something but did not know what it was or when it happened, so he kept driving until his vehicle became disabled and he could no longer continue.

No injuries were reported in the incident. A preliminary alcohol screening device administered at the scene detected no alcohol in Pelosi’s system, and deputies ruled out suspicion of driving under the influence.

Because there were no injuries, deputies did not arrest Pelosi at the scene – and instead issued him a misdemeanor citation for fleeing the scene of an accident. The Napa County Sheriff’s Office has submitted the case to the Napa County District Attorney’s Office for review and possible prosecution.

The sheriff’s office also submitted a referral to the California Department of Motor Vehicles to initiate a re-evaluation of Pelosi’s driving privileges, a process it described as common for older drivers.

Prior Legal History

This is not Pelosi’s first encounter with law enforcement in Napa County. In May 2022, he was involved in a DUI crash in the county. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence of alcohol causing injury. He was sentenced to five days in jail, three years of probation, ordered to complete a three-month driving class, install an ignition interlock device on his vehicle, and pay $5,000 in restitution for the victim’s medical bills plus $2,000 in additional fines.

In a separate 2022 incident, Pelosi was seriously injured when a suspect broke into the couple’s San Francisco home and struck him with a hammer. He underwent surgery for a skull fracture.

A spokesperson for the Pelosi family issued the following statement regarding the latest incident:

“Mr. Paul Pelosi has personally apologized to the owner of the vehicle and assured them that he would take responsibility for the damage to their vehicle. Speaker Pelosi will not be commenting further on this private matter.”

The Pelosis maintain ties to the Napa Valley region. Yountville is located approximately 50 miles north of San Francisco.

The Napa County Sheriff’s Office said it is continuing to investigate and will forward its findings to the district attorney. No further details on the condition of either vehicle or the identity of the parked car’s owner have been released.

* * * Next-level Wagyu, now at ZeroHedge Store

Submitted by Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

Let’s start with the important stuff: Hope you are having a great 4^th of July 250^th Anniversary Weekend.

Yields gained back some ground after the relatively weak jobs report (headline plus revisions was negative, the private sector underwhelmed, and unemployment only dropped because the labor force participation rate dropped by a relatively large 0.3%).

I will continue to pound the table (or rant and rave as the case may be) that this Fed Will Cut Rates in September. That was our main topic of discussion on the Bloomberg Radio segment above (and I did get to hear Tom Keene say my view looked smarter after the jobs data, than it had before the jobs data, when we spoke). MarketWatch also picked up on the interview and our prospect for cuts rather than hikes.

I have yet to hear compelling arguments on:

• Why the Cleveland Fed’s Rent metrics are not more accurate than what is currently used in “official” data?
• Why Truflation doesn’t deserve a lot more attention than it gets?

If anything, we’ve received comments pointing us to additional indices, surveys, etc., that likely present a more accurate picture of inflation (and they virtually all signal that we understated inflation post-Covid (hence Affordability is the Issue) and we are overstating the inflation rate now).

I really like the 2-year Treasury here, given what the market is pricing versus what I expect the reality to be.

The TV interview wound up focusing on AI. It wasn’t the topic I was most looking forward to, but was difficult to avoid when overnight headlines included:

• OpenAI potentially “giving” the U.S. a 5% stake.
• Meta offering to sell compute rather than using all of their compute for themselves.
• Apple requesting the ability to use Chinese made memory chips, in phones to be sold in China.

On any given day, one of those headlines would be interesting. To get all 3 in one day certainly attracted a lot of attention! It gave us a chance to talk about some of our main themes in AI:

• The need for the AI and Data Center Industry to ramp up their community outreach. My view that this industry needs to do a better job convincing people why they not only want and need AI, but that they also want it in their backyard.
• The comparisons to the fiber buildout during the dot.com boom!
• The risks of an AI “Revolution” (i.e., political backlash with negative consequences) and the risk to jobs. Trying to answer the question of whether humans are the horses in the current “Buggy Whip” transformation playing out. I admit that every time I write Buggy Whip, Rihanna’s song comes to mind, which is maybe why I didn’t say it on national TV. 

In case you missed it, Academy published this month’s Around the World this week focusing on Iran, Cuba, Russia/Ukraine, and Economic Tensions with China.

ProSec 2026 and Vertically Integrated Nations

We started 2026 with a comprehensive view of ProSec 2026 (yes, the font is obnoxiously large, but if you haven’t read that report, we urge you to read it now). The concept had evolved from National Production for National Security and Resilience to ProSec. There are many names attached to what is going on (HALO, Mercantilism, etc.) but we think ProSec captures the concept of “needing to produce more of some things for true national security” more fulsomely. Academy does have the advantage of being able to tap into the Geopolitical Intelligence Group for behind the scenes insight into national security discussions, both here and abroad.

Before we update our thoughts on ProSec, I want to go back to something we published back in October of 2025 – Is ProSec the New ESG? Even suggesting that something could replace ESG, let alone something along the lines of ProSec replacing ESG, less than a year ago, seemed half (or fully) insane. Now, people mostly shrug, or provide us examples (at the very least) of how they’ve seen thinking in their organization adapt ESG to incorporate the key elements of ProSec.

We won’t spend much time on these two thoughts today, but they should be highlighted:

• ProSec is Going Global. We won’t spend time on this today because it seems self-evident (and also I haven’t been able to work in the lyrics of Going Underground to Going Global, but I’m confident that eventually I will).
• ProSec will continue regardless of election outcomes. We won’t dwell on this, but the 250^th birthday of a nation doesn’t seem like the appropriate time to sound political, and it is pretty difficult to not sound political when addressing this subject (though I think we have done a decent job on that front in reports, interviews, and presentations).

A Nation as a Human Being

We have discussed Vertically Integrated Nations, but I think this concept of trying to think of a nation as a living breathing organism (which it pretty much is) helps frame the prioritization of ProSec Industries.

The decision to include this chart from the start of the year report makes me cringe for a couple of reasons:

• The chart is pretty pathetic looking, even by my relatively basic charting skills. I spent some time using AI to try to make some cooler looking charts, but I was struggling, and it is a long weekend, and I might as well just accept my inability to make nice charts.
• I was horribly worried the chart would be missing a lot! Not like 6 months is a long time to withstand the pressures of time, but the chart (as ugly as it is) has held up reasonably well, at least in terms of the information it was trying to convey.
  • One regret (and poor decision) that we rectified months ago is that we gave SPACE short shrift. We did not highlight space appropriately. We did “lump it into” Defense, but if we wanted to redo the industry table, SPACE would have its own vertical.

The “chart” attempts to convey the following information:

• The sectors that we view as playing a crucial role in ProSec. For many people, their first thoughts on Production for Security is Military and Defense spending and production. That is only a small part of ProSec (at least in the U.S. which has invested heavily in this space for decades; whereas it might be a bigger part of ProSec for countries that have neglected spending to protect themselves on the military front).
• The width of the columns was meant to give an indication of the importance (the wider the column, the more there is to be done in that sector). I’d probably give SPACE its own column now.
• The colors were meant to be a “guesstimate” of how easy or difficult it would be. I’d probably reduce the amount of green in AI and Data Centers, as well as Electron Production, because I did think there would be a lot more progress on deregulation than there has been. NIMBY is strong in much of this country. I thought the defense spending would be easier (green), and may have underestimated entrenched politics and how long it can take the military to change direction. Drones seem like such an obvious area to focus on, and Undersecretary of War (for Personnel and Readiness) Tata had discussed the importance even before he submitted his information for the confirmation process. It seems slower to develop. I do think that Europe needs an Airbus type of consortium framework for drones to get some sort of reasonable defense capability built in a reasonably short time.

Let’s look at how we’d prioritize them now.

The ProSec Equivalents of Air

Humans cannot go more than a few minutes without air. We cannot exist without air. It is just that plain and simple.

What is the equivalent of air to a nation?

• Electricity. Not too long ago Spain suffered a major disruption in its ability to get electricity to its people. Industry (and the economy) ground to a halt. People died. Lack of electricity is hampering rescue efforts in Venezuela. The ability to generate electricity and get it to where it is needed should be one of the most important priorities for a country! We were trying to “solve” for many things with “sustainable energy” and I fully expect over time, we will get there on sustainable energy, but first and foremost we must prioritize our ability to generate plentiful amounts of electricity and ensure that it can get to where it is needed. This is a hill I’m prepared to die on. We need all forms of electricity and a plan to build out a backbone with supplemental capacity, that can, over time, include a different mix than today, but we (and every nation) needs to focus on this (possibly with a single-minded determination that I don’t think we’ve seen, even in the U.S.).
• Semiconductors. Every time I think that maybe chips aren’t the equivalent of “air” to a nation, at least a developed nation, I find it difficult to move it lower in prioritization. I had picked Intel in my start of the year favorites, but I regret not being even more vocally bullish on companies with strong U.S. roots in the industry.
• Fresh Water. Maybe living in the United States and Canada has made me “complacent” on water. I didn’t really include it as a critical industry or part of our U.S. ProSec theme, largely because it is so abundant. We have been arguing that areas with access to fresh water are increasingly attractive to industry, but that was more a function of ProSec than part of ProSec. We will be thinking of how to correct this mistake, especially for nations where access to fresh water is far from a given and needs to be part of their version of ProSec.

We will discuss the allocations between:

• Domestic production.
• Working with close allies and neighbors.
• Using the “open” market and global trade.

Those allocations will differ by country (maybe even by region). They will differ based on their trust of their neighbors and allies, as well as what the neighbors and allies can produce.

In conversations, the 80/20 rule has been discussed. That makes sense to a large degree. Achieve 80% of what you can, for 20% of the cost. Having said that, I would be willing to pay more to do more domestically with respect to sectors that are the equivalent of air to a nation.

The ProSec Equivalents of Hypothermia

General Spider Marks is a wealth of knowledge. He pointed out that humans in cold water die within 3 hours. He is correct, and it would fill a gap in my narrative, but it just doesn’t resonate with how I think about humans – sorry Spider.

The ProSec Equivalents of Water

Humans cannot last more than about 3 days without water.

What are the ProSec sectors that are the equivalent of water? Yeah, I get that I put fresh water in the air category, but work with me.

• Some processed and refined rare earths and critical minerals. First, for almost all rare earths, critical minerals, and commodities, I would prioritize the smelting, processing, and refining over the extraction. Sourcing the underlying elements is important, but the current/real bottleneck is the processing, refining, and smelting! The U.S. Department of the Interior is one source that can help prioritize which subsectors will be treated as the highest priorities. It is clear that the U.S. has taken the time to prioritize certain things and is executing a plan around those priorities.
• Defense. Other countries probably need to do this. For the U.S. I would prioritize drones (surface, air, underwater, etc.) as well as SPACE. Where are we at risk of being deficient? It seems incredibly difficult to argue that after years of Russia/Ukraine and a couple months of Iran/U.S. that we don’t need to close the gap in asymmetric warfare. We still need the exquisite platforms, but we cannot be expending difficult to make, time consuming to make, and expensive to make weapons systems to defend against cheap drones. In space, the U.S. is the world leader, but we may not have spent enough time and energy on “protecting” space, from potential bad actors. For the U.S., for the vast majority of areas, I’d put defense into the next category, but right now, it is difficult to argue that drones and space aren’t the equivalent of water when we look to the nation’s ability to be secure and prosperous.
• Some portion of biotech and pharma. Similar to the rare earths sector, not everything within the biotech and pharma sectors should be given the same priority that humans give to having access to fresh water, but some should be. This industry is incredibly complex, and I’m not yet sure of how I would even think about prioritizing this. I suspect that the current administration has some of the same issues. Tiering rare earths and critical minerals seems relatively simple compared to tiering things in this sector (not that it is less important to do so, it is just a lot more difficult). Should we be more worried about the highest end of tech? Or should we be more worried that the precursors and base drugs come primarily from China and India? Or both?
• A smattering of some heavy industry, commodities, and maybe even ship building. On the ship building side, drones and subs would be a priority. Surface and underwater drones will play a key role in warfare going forward. Submarines, according to most of Academy’s GIG members, is one area where we are still massively ahead of any other nation. Let’s maximize that advantage.

The ProSec Equivalents of Food

Apparently, humans can go 3 weeks without food. 3 weeks without food seems ridiculous, but I’m told it is true. So, if you are part of ProSec but not given the priority of air or water, you are part of the “food” category.

I did not include food as a sector, which might be fair in the U.S. with the amazing agricultural bounty we have, but it would be a sector for many other countries.

Just because the “food equivalent” is the “third” category of ProSec doesn’t mean these sectors shouldn’t be given a much higher priority than they have been. The rest of biotech, pharma, rare earths, commodities, ship building, heavy industry, and defense all need attention and prioritization.

We all spend time making sure that we can put food on the table for our families. Prayers include “our daily bread.” We celebrate as a nation – Thanksgiving – of which an element of the thanks is directed toward food.

Investment, prioritization, etc. will be done for these sectors (and subsectors too), but there is probably more time before it is urgent to be overweight these areas in your portfolio (for asset managers) or in your supply chain (for corporations).

The Founding Fathers Would Likely Be In Favor of ProSec

While I don’t want to appropriate the 4^th of July, it does seem like ProSec is about as American as things can get in the economy. I do argue that ProSec is doing a couple of major things:

• Revitalizing areas and geographic regions that may not have been engines of growth for the past few decades. Areas that are ideal for manufacturing, that struggled while the U.S. was busy de-industrializing? Could we see the return of the “Company Town”? Think about the access to logistics for some of the “company towns.” Highways were built around their production. Many are situated on useful waterways. Certainly, access to fresh water helped situate many of these “company towns.” There are the bones of real prosperity there – historic, often magnificent buildings. Affordability may also be addressed by this revitalization. There may well be new “company towns” formed. I think the potential benefits for affordability and to geographically spreading wealth cannot be overestimated. Think about pride in communities, which already abounds in the U.S., growing! I’m excited about this front and think commercial real estate needs to be thinking about what areas will benefit from ProSec.
• A Resurgence of the Middle Class. I’ve always thought that the “middle class” was more of a vibe than an “income level.” Going home for the weekend and knowing will you have a job Monday morning, and that job is important to the fabric (and survival/sustainability) of a nation is very different than wondering if the owners found someone, somewhere in the world, who will deliver something 20% cheaper than you can. Pride in jobs and knowing that whatever you are doing (maybe even writing weekend financial missives) is part of something bigger.

Since I’m sounding a bit like I’ve got the rose-colored glasses on, I will say one thing that can be construed as negative, because it probably is.

When I think about humans’ ability to live without air, water, or food, versus our ability to adapt to a 1 degree temperature change over the course of a decade, you can guess what I’d prioritize. I am all for having bigger plans for a “better” future, but that “better” future should make sure we are taken care of with respect to things we cannot live long without.

I hope everyone is enjoying their long weekend and I hope that not only does this report resonate with you on the business front, but that I can also convey why I’m so excited about this concept on a much bigger level than what we do in our day jobs!