Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself reflecting on milestones and inflection points.
This past Sunday, my daughter graduated from high school (woo hoo!). A few weeks earlier, I returned to NYU Law for a milestone reunion. Walking through those halls again brought back memories not only of classes and late nights studying, but of the relationships that shaped me: fellow students who challenged and inspired me, professors who expanded how I thought about the world, and leaders like John Sexton, whose intellectual curiosity and humanity left a lasting imprint.
On that note, Ray Dalio’s recent commencement speech resonated with me because it focused less on achievement and more on the deeper work of building a life. He speaks about understanding your own nature, finding the path that genuinely suits you, and defining success not by someone else’s standards but by whether your life contains meaningful work, meaningful relationships, and sound principles.
I appreciated his formula, “Pain + Reflection = Progress,” and the idea that one of life’s central tasks is to understand who you are and what kind of life fits you.
Watching my daughter graduate, I found myself thinking about the long journey of discovering that for oneself. Returning to NYU Law, I found myself reflecting on how much of adulthood is spent refining, and sometimes revising, our understanding of success and ourselves. The older I get, the more I believe that a good life is built not only through effort, but through self-knowledge, self-compassion, and relationships that nourish.
2. FirstTrust's “Making the Fed Great Again”
This article focuses on the Fed and what a different monetary regime might look like under Kevin Warsh. Prior to the invention of the Fed in 1913, other than during wars, there was almost no inflation. In fact, in between wars, the economy experienced deflation, partly due to the now-defunct gold standard. The Fed’s tremendous amount of money printing over the past few decades (a tripling of the money supply in the past 18 years) has contributed to significant inflation both in terms of the cost of goods, as well as the value of assets.
QuantitativeEasing (QE) flooded banks with reserves as the Fed grew its balance sheet to unprecedented levels. It fundamentally changed the banking system and monetary policy. The authors suggest that by keeping rates unusually low and supporting asset prices, Fed policy may have worsened inequality and widened the divide between younger people trying to build wealth and older generations who already own appreciating assets.
Under Warsh, we may be approaching the end of a post-2008 Fed framework. The implications could extend well beyond the bond market, affecting housing, interest rates, currency, liquidity, equity valuations, and the broader cost of capital.
3. The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam - WSJ
This article highlights a part of the AI story investors may need to pay closer attention to: public resistance.
For the last few years, the dominant AI narrative has focused on innovation, productivity, and value creation. But this piece points to a growing backlash tied to the real-world costs of building and powering the AI economy, especially rising energy demands, data-center expansion, pressure on local infrastructure, and concerns about job displacement. Despite a reported housing shortage of 10 million units, the US spent more money last year building AI infrastructure than single family homes. We built 10x as many data centers as the next biggest builder (Germany). And we invested more than 20x as much money into AI as the world’s next biggest investor (China).
This article suggests that AI’s next phase may not be shaped only by technological progress, but also by public acceptance. If communities increasingly resist data-center development, and if concerns about energy costs and economic disruption continue to grow, the path forward may become more politically and economically complicated than many investors expect.
Transformative technologies do not unfold in a vacuum. They are shaped not only by capital and innovation, but by trust, public sentiment and the people and systems that bear the costs and reap the benefits. These considerations may become an increasingly important part of the AI investment story.
If any of these spark a thought or raise a question, I welcome the conversation.
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