During my first month in the United States, I had to send an urgent document to immigration. My English was fragile, rigid, and terrified. At the post office, the counter clerk asked three routine shipping questions. My mind went blank. The words turned to stone in my throat. I couldn't understand her dialect. Behind me, eight people were waiting in line during their lunch break. In my home culture, holding up a line is a sin worthy of exile. Sweat poured down my spine. I was trembling, about to grab my envelope and flee out the glass doors. The clerk, a tall Black woman with silver glasses named Brenda, looked at my hands, softened her voice, and reached across the counter to touch my wrist. 'Look at me, honey,' she said gently. 'Breathe. Take all the time you need. Nobody behind you is going anywhere.' I looked back. Not a single person in line was huffing or checking their watch. An older man in a baseball cap gave me a patient, reassuring smile. That was the day I realized American impatience is a myth. When a human being is struggling, they build a wall of patience around you.

Break out the marching band, America! Congress has finally done it! I mean, they still haven't passed the SAVE America Act, or a balanced budget, or spending cuts. But the House has passed bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent! Of course, it'll probably die in the Senate. But FINALLY! I'm so glad I voted for these amazing people. And if you thought that was great, get this: they also NAMED A POST OFFICE! Now that's what I pay taxes for! Still no SAVE America Act. But at least they're tucking it away into a "must-pass" bill. I sure hope John Thune doesn't notice and remove it or something. Surely, that'll never happen!

When Gabriel García Márquez was just thirteen years old, he crossed a crowded dance floor and made a declaration that sounded impossible. He walked up to a young girl named Mercedes Barcha and told her he wanted to marry her. “I've realized all my poems are about you,” he said. Mercedes did not laugh at him or dismiss the idea as childish fantasy. Instead, she answered with remarkable calm. “Alright,” she said. “But let me finish school first.” There was no engagement ring, no ceremony, and no plan beyond those few words. Just a simple promise between two teenagers who still had years of life ahead of them. Against all odds, that promise endured. Thirteen years later, Gabriel and Mercedes finally married. Yet the greatest challenge to their relationship would come long after the wedding. By the mid-1960s, the couple was living in Mexico City and raising a young family. Around that time, Gabriel became obsessed with a story he had carried inside his mind for years. It was unlike anything he had written before. The story followed generations of a single family in a fictional town called Macondo. In this world, ghosts mingled with the living, miracles appeared without warning, and extraordinary events felt as natural as everyday life. That manuscript would eventually become One Hundred Years of Solitude. But first, it had to be written. Gabriel locked himself away and devoted nearly every waking hour to the novel. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. For roughly eighteen months, he lived almost entirely inside the world of Macondo. While he focused on writing, Mercedes took responsibility for everything else. There were children to care for. Bills to pay. Rent to manage. Groceries to buy. And as time passed, money became increasingly scarce. The family's financial situation grew so difficult that many people would have urged Gabriel to abandon the project and find more stable work. Mercedes never did. Whenever he worried about their circumstances, she gave him the same response: “Don't worry about that. Finish the book.” She had no guarantee the manuscript would succeed. There was no publisher waiting with a contract and no promise of fame or fortune. There was only her belief in the man she had known since childhood. So while Gabriel wrote, Mercedes carried the weight of everyday life. She bought necessities on credit, negotiated with creditors, and somehow kept the household running despite mounting financial pressure. When Gabriel finally completed the manuscript after a year and a half of work, the struggle wasn't over. The enormous stack of pages still needed to be mailed to a publisher in Buenos Aires. The couple gathered the manuscript and headed to the post office. Then came another setback. They discovered they didn't have enough money to pay the postage. The manuscript was simply too heavy. Unable to afford the full shipping cost, they mailed only part of it and returned home. By then, there was little of value left in their apartment. Mercedes searched the house for anything they could sell. She found two items: A hairdryer. And a blender. She pawned both. The money was enough to cover the remaining postage. With those final dollars, the rest of the manuscript was sent on its journey. Gabriel later recalled Mercedes joking about the situation. After sacrificing so much to mail the book, she remarked that it had better be worth it. It was. When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967, it became a literary phenomenon. Readers around the world were captivated by Macondo and its unforgettable characters. The novel blended history, memory, politics, love, myth, and magic in a way few had ever seen before. The book transformed Gabriel García Márquez from a struggling writer into one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century. Millions of copies were sold. His influence reached every corner of the literary world. And in 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. By then, the world recognized his genius. Mercedes had recognized it decades earlier. She had known him when he was a hopeful thirteen-year-old boy making impossible promises on a dance floor. She had stood beside him through years of uncertainty. She had watched him pursue journalism and fiction long before success arrived. And when the book that changed his life demanded nearly everything they had, she refused to let financial hardship destroy it. Gabriel created Macondo. He wrote the words. His name appeared on the cover. But great works of art are never created in isolation. Someone still has to handle the rent. Someone still has to buy food. Someone still has to face creditors and keep life moving while another person chases a dream. For Gabriel García Márquez, that person was Mercedes Barcha. Long before critics praised him and readers celebrated him, she believed in him. And when their future depended on a manuscript few people had ever heard of, she was willing to pawn a hairdryer and a blender to make sure it reached the world. Sometimes behind every masterpiece is not just talent, but one person who never stopped believing.

San Francisco held roughly 1,000 residents in January 1848. Two years later it held 25,000, with wharves, newspapers, banks, and functioning courts, and no government planned any of it. James Marshall pulled gold from the American River at Sutter's Mill on January 24, 1848. California at that moment had no legislature, no land registry, and a military governor commanding a few hundred soldiers who kept deserting to the goldfields. Every textbook predicts Hobbesian chaos. Instead, miners wrote their own law. Each camp held a meeting, set claim sizes, elected a recorder, and enforced the rules themselves. Hundreds of mining district codes emerged independently and converged on the same principles: first use establishes ownership, abandonment forfeits it, disputes go before a jury of fellow miners. Congress found the system so effective it codified it in the Mining Act of 1866. Commerce ran ahead of any charter. Samuel Brannan got rich selling shovels instead of swinging them. Eggs fetched a dollar apiece in 1849, a lot of money for the time, and that price pulled flour and lumber around Cape Horn faster than any ministry of supply ever moved anything. Wells Fargo carried the mail because the Post Office couldn't. Merchants wrote contracts and extended credit with no commercial code on the books. City planners insist order requires their permission. Property law, courts, and trade networks all emerged before any planner arrived: built by profit-seekers under rules they drafted themselves at camp meetings. California's first cities stand as proof that humans can flourish without bureaucracy. The next time a bureaucrat tells you markets collapse without government, ask them who surveyed San Francisco.

Every time I’m in NYC, I find myself gravitating back to the @alliance office. It might be the least furnished among all the investor and ecosystem spaces I visit, but it’s easily my favorite. @alliance founders and portcos are just getting more and more cracked. Tons of novel primitives on pred mkts, stablecoin infra/distribution, and some vertical ai agents. Can’t resist writing angel checks here. Feels good to be back where the dream started, now with a fresh mindset post-TGE and ready to sail again. HMU if you’re a founder, builder, investor, or part of a strong ecosystem. I’ll be in NYC until July 28 here for serendipity of novel ideas, product directions / PMF, potential cofounder relationships, etc. (also we're still hiring: Making more friends in the bear market and we will win big when the market is back in 1-2 years.

BREAKING: The delinquency rate on Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) for offices rose +9 basis points in August, to 12.0%, its 2nd-highest reading on record. This is now only below an all-time high of 12.3% set in January 2026. The CMBS delinquency rate is now 6 times higher than it was in early-2023. By comparison, the post-2008 Financial Crisis peak was ~10.8%. Meanwhile, the overall US CMBS delinquency rate has more than doubled since 2022, to 7.9%, its highest since early 2021. Excluding the 2020 pandemic, this is the highest delinquency rate in 13 years. The commercial real estate downturn is intensifying.

I wanted to take a moment to post about communications and transparency. Over the past week, my colleagues and I have spent a lot of time reading the questions, feedback, and criticism that you have shared.  Thank you for your passion, and for your belief in Metaplanet. One thing that has become clear is that we have not done a good enough job of explaining how our structure and decisions are designed to create long-term value for all shareholders. We can do better, and we will.  It has also become clear that while opinions differ, we all want the same thing: for company leadership and shareholder interests to be aligned in creating as much long-term value as possible, and for Metaplanet to operate with the highest standards of transparency and governance.  Through this lens, we announced several significant changes to the 10th Series stock acquisition rights on August 18, including eliminating the adjustment provision, fixing the share count, and implementing additional alignment measures. We are continuing to review our governance and compensation policies and will share any updates when that work is complete. Separately, I’d like to clarify details regarding the structure of MMXX Ventures. The basic facts are these: MMXX is a shareholder in Metaplanet, and I am a significant but non-majority shareholder of its parent company. I am neither a director nor officer of MMXX, and have no role in its investment or trading decisions. What I can speak to, and will, are the decisions made at Metaplanet. Bottom line: going forward, you should expect to hear more from us around the decisions we make and how they shape the future of the company.  Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to engage.

Wrote some thoughts in my latest Substack post. After “making it,” the game is no longer just about stacking more money. It is about avoiding the two biggest failure modes: full hedonism or full drift mode. In this post, I write about escaping the hamster wheel, living as a digital nomad, and why routine is not the enemy of freedom. About crypto, taxes, moving countries, potentially building a lean personal family office, and finding the highest-EV use of time. About why I do not want to retire yet, and why I also refuse to sacrifice health, relationships, and spending every living moment in front of the chart and on Twitter/TG. Well, I will still spend 10+ hours daily, but not 16-18 hours. After all, there is a difference...