Traditionalist think the greatest James Bond car of all time is the Aston Martin DB5, some think it's the Lotus Esprit S1 submarine edition. Truth is it's a stretched Corvorado combining Corvette (C3 chassis) and Eldorado (Cadillac Eldorado). Chop the backend off this and you can own one too!

You must remember that all philosophy is a confession. People become obsessed with stoicism because they are naturally neurotic. That doesn’t mean stoicism can’t help you. If you are neurotic, it will help you a lot. Marcus Aurelius was neurotic. But it does mean you need to update your mental model of “this stoic guru will be stoic” to “this stoic guru will be neurotic.” Thinking the DailyStoic guy must be mentally stable is like thinking someone on anti-depressants must not be depressed.

Nothing sums up the Biden legacy more than his highway in Pennsylvania still being under construction six years after @PeteButtigieg what’s given $1.2 trillion to fix all the roads and highways.

$VLO Valero to Buy Former Houston Refinery From LyondellBasell Valero Energy says Valero Refining-Texas entered into a pact to acquire all the outstanding equity interests of LYB Houston Hub Holdings from a unit of LyondellBasell Industries for $320.5 million. (Bloomberg)

You think you’ve met some tough sailors? Let me introduce you to one of the most badass sailors ever Commander Bill King, Royal Navy. This absolute BADASS survived SIX YEARS of submarine warfare during WWII. No significant breaks. As other submarine captains were getting slaughtered by Germans, he kept returning to even the odds. The he decided the best way to recover from the experience was to sail ALONE around the world in a 42-foot sailboat. And somehow, that’s not even the craziest part of his story. King was born in 1910. His father was killed fighting in WWI. At just 12 years old, he entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. By the outbreak of WWII, he was commanding British submarines. Think about what that meant. No nuclear propulsion. No modern sonar. No satellite intelligence. No helicopter rescue waiting overhead. Just diesel engines, batteries, torpedoes, and a steel pressure hull separating you from a horrible death. He fought through the Battle of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean campaigns before taking command of HMS Telemachus in the Pacific. In July 1944, King hunted down and sank the Japanese submarine I-166 in the Strait of Malacca. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order TWICE, along with the Distinguished Service Cross. He was reportedly the ONLY British submarine commander to remain in submarine command from the beginning of WWII to its end. SIX YEARS. Imagine the accumulated stress of six years hunting enemy warships while knowing that one depth charge could send you and your entire crew to the bottom. The war ended, but it never really left him. King later admitted that the experience had reduced him to a nervous wreck. So what did he do? He bought a ruined castle in Ireland, took up farming, and eventually decided he needed to get away from EVERYTHING. In 1968, at the age of 58, he entered the inaugural Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. The mission? Race 9 other competitors to be the first to sail alone, nonstop, around the entire planet. He built the 42-foot junk-rigged schooner named Galway Blazer II. No GPS. No Starlink. No weather routing. No EPIRB. Just celestial navigation, seamanship, and a lifetime of experience surviving in places where mistakes get people killed. He sailed south into the Atlantic. Then the Southern Ocean came looking for him. A monstrous storm capsized his boat, destroying his masts. King survived, rigged emergency sails, and eventually made it to South Africa. Race over. Worse? He lost the race to a young Merchant Navy officer. You laugh but the other Royal Navy commander whose boat sunk in that race, was so embarrassed by being shamed by other naval officers that he hung himself. Most men would have called it quits. Not Bill King. He tried again. And again. On a subsequent attempt, something enormous, possibly a shark or whale, slammed into his boat off Australia, punching a hole in the hull. He spent DAYS making emergency repairs at sea. Again, he survived. Finally, in 1973, at the age of 62, SIXTY TWO, he completed his solo circumnavigation. He had survived two world wars’ worth of family tragedy, six years of submarine combat, a dismasting, a capsizing, and a terrifying collision at sea. And he was STILL sailing. In 1975, the Cruising Club of America awarded him its prestigious Blue Water Medal. But there’s one more part of his story I find extraordinary. Decades after King sank the Japanese submarine I-166, the son of one of the Japanese sailors killed aboard that submarine visited him in Ireland. Instead of hatred, the two families developed a friendship. They planted trees together as symbols of peace. Think about that. A submarine commander who had spent years trying to kill the enemy ultimately found friendship with the family of a man he’d killed in battle. Bill King lived to be 102 YEARS OLD. He simply refused to die. Fair winds Commander 🫡

So Lula cheats in Brazil and threatens all who support his rival. Then Tusk conducts a coup in Poland against the populist-leaning President there. The rest of Europe is staging non-organic revolts to justify crackdowns, thus slamming a lid on any potential popular populism in those states. All while these color revolution plotters are hatching plans here just prior to our elections. Trump's populist war on globalism threatens establishment control and we are witnessing the globalist reaction world-wide.

No, Mr. Kinzinger. Let's grant you that you will have a blue tsunami on Election Day. You have a mandate to do anything you want. You restore USAID. You start jailing everyone remotely associated with Trump. You pack the Supreme Court. Guess what you've not solved? The sovereign debt crisis still is accelerating at full speed ahead. Even George Soros warned that this was a supercycle that could not be sustained forever. DOGE was your best, last attempt at saving your regime from yourself. Whatever fiscal apparatus comes next will be multilateral in scope - yes - but it will not be your coronation. It will pop the final epistemic bubble. You have sided yourself with slow, bureaucratic systems which cannot adapt, which cannot maneuver, which only know how to make progress through coercion. Your entire power foundation is based on a civil society playbook that is 30+ years old, runs on enormous amounts of unsustainable deficit spending, and is increasingly ideological. We all saw what's happening to Brazil. We all see what's happening to Poland. We all know what you're trying to do here in America. We embrace change. You fear change. We embrace SI. You are trying to cancel SI and data centers. We abhor bureaucracy. You embrace it as your power foundation. Legitimacy has only ever lived in the consent of the governed, as the Founding Fathers wrote. You may have done regime change all over the world, but your color revolutions have never been successful in bringing prosperity because you do not believe humans possess God-granted natural agency. My book UNELECTED is much more than a polemic, it is a manifesto to take our own sovereignty back. A meteor is coming for you, and you can't even see it coming because you are drunk on your power.

In just these past two weeks we have seen: 1. Widespread civil unrest and riots in France. 2. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Albania. 3. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Italy. 4. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Spain. 5. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Portugal. 6. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Belgium. 7. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Serbia. 8. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Georgia. 9. Widespread civil unrest and an apparent judicial coup in Poland. 10. Widespread civil unrest and riots in Czechia (including an attempted takeover of the Parliament building). 11. Widespread student protests in Greece. 12. Targeted student protests in Indonesia. 13. Localized violent protests in India. 14. An apparently fraudulent election in Brazil where the presumed presidential election winner was forced to flee the country under threat of arrest by his opponent. 15. The uncovering of a Color Revolution plot in the USA led by embittered former USAID employees and ex-military members. That’s a lot to be happening all at once, don’t you think? And the USA is having midterm elections next week. You know, if I was a conspiracy-minded type I might be connecting some dots here. 🧐

The greatest ocean race of all time was between… 2 Navy Commanders 2 Army Paratroopers 1 Merchant Mariner 1 French Vagabond And a tech bro The Golden Globe solo around the world race. Of course the Merchant Mariner won 😜 Absolutely a 10/10 must read:

You think you’ve met some tough sailors? Let me introduce you to one of the most badass sailors ever Commander Bill King, Royal Navy. This absolute BADASS survived SIX YEARS of submarine warfare during WWII. No significant breaks. As other submarine captains were getting slaughtered by Germans, he kept returning to even the odds. The he decided the best way to recover from the experience was to sail ALONE around the world in a 42-foot sailboat. And somehow, that’s not even the craziest part of his story. King was born in 1910. His father was killed fighting in WWI. At just 12 years old, he entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. By the outbreak of WWII, he was commanding British submarines. Think about what that meant. No nuclear propulsion. No modern sonar. No satellite intelligence. No helicopter rescue waiting overhead. Just diesel engines, batteries, torpedoes, and a steel pressure hull separating you from a horrible death. He fought through the Battle of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean campaigns before taking command of HMS Telemachus in the Pacific. In July 1944, King hunted down and sank the Japanese submarine I-166 in the Strait of Malacca. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order TWICE, along with the Distinguished Service Cross. He was reportedly the ONLY British submarine commander to remain in submarine command from the beginning of WWII to its end. SIX YEARS. Imagine the accumulated stress of six years hunting enemy warships while knowing that one depth charge could send you and your entire crew to the bottom. The war ended, but it never really left him. King later admitted that the experience had reduced him to a nervous wreck. So what did he do? He bought a ruined castle in Ireland, took up farming, and eventually decided he needed to get away from EVERYTHING. In 1968, at the age of 58, he entered the inaugural Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. The mission? Race 9 other competitors to be the first to sail alone, nonstop, around the entire planet. He built the 42-foot junk-rigged schooner named Galway Blazer II. No GPS. No Starlink. No weather routing. No EPIRB. Just celestial navigation, seamanship, and a lifetime of experience surviving in places where mistakes get people killed. He sailed south into the Atlantic. Then the Southern Ocean came looking for him. A monstrous storm capsized his boat, destroying his masts. King survived, rigged emergency sails, and eventually made it to South Africa. Race over. Worse? He lost the race to a young Merchant Navy officer. You laugh but the other Royal Navy commander whose boat sunk in that race, was so embarrassed by being shamed by other naval officers that he hung himself. Most men would have called it quits. Not Bill King. He tried again. And again. On a subsequent attempt, something enormous, possibly a shark or whale, slammed into his boat off Australia, punching a hole in the hull. He spent DAYS making emergency repairs at sea. Again, he survived. Finally, in 1973, at the age of 62, SIXTY TWO, he completed his solo circumnavigation. He had survived two world wars’ worth of family tragedy, six years of submarine combat, a dismasting, a capsizing, and a terrifying collision at sea. And he was STILL sailing. In 1975, the Cruising Club of America awarded him its prestigious Blue Water Medal. But there’s one more part of his story I find extraordinary. Decades after King sank the Japanese submarine I-166, the son of one of the Japanese sailors killed aboard that submarine visited him in Ireland. Instead of hatred, the two families developed a friendship. They planted trees together as symbols of peace. Think about that. A submarine commander who had spent years trying to kill the enemy ultimately found friendship with the family of a man he’d killed in battle. Bill King lived to be 102 YEARS OLD. He simply refused to die. Fair winds Commander 🫡

Everyone planning to sail solo asks a million questions about sleep schedules, catnaps, and keeping a proper lookout. Then you reach a certain age and apparently just say, “F it. I’ve had a good life.” And sleep for 11 straight hours. 💀

If you spend your life on X, you’d think Americans are deeply concerned about the war with Iran. As I’ve been saying for months, and as countless sources have confirmed, the vast majority aren’t. And I suspect even fewer give a damn where their diesel comes from Russia or Canada or Timbuktu. That’s what stripping our manufacturing and refining capabilities for decades has produced: apathy when you cry about sourcing. But there’s a deeper problem with this post… Between Ukraine’s devastatingly successful strikes on Russian refineries, the acute global shortage of available oil tankers to move diesel long distances and the abundance of potential buyers closer to Russia than the United States, I suspect very little Russian diesel will actually reach American shores. Then there’s the logistics. A VLCC supertanker carries roughly 2 million barrels of diesel. A highway tanker truck carries about 200. Do the math. You’d need 10,000 truckloads to replace the cargo of ONE supertanker. Not. Gonna. Happen. And even if you could somehow find tens of thousands of trucks, moving crude oil by road is vastly less fuel-efficient than moving it by sea. Trucks burn more than 10 times more diesel per ton mile than supertankers do. You’d burn considerably more diesel getting the cargo to market, eating into whatever diesel output at the docks in Russia you hoped to gain. But here’s what I really don’t understand. Why is it so difficult for people to recognize that Putin has repeatedly prioritized saving face over delivering tangible victories for the Russian people? If handing Putin a minor, fleeting PR victory helps end the war… or even gives Ukraine a meaningful strategic advantage… that’s a win. And for those who haven’t read The Art of the Deal, perhaps you should. Trump has spent decades trading symbolic concessions for tangible gains. Let the other guy claim victory in the headlines while you walk away with something that actually matters. The man has been president for roughly six years. Why do you people keep falling for the same routine? If Putin wants to move massive logistical mountains to move diesel at an outrageous cost from Iran all the way to the United States and sell it to us at a discount to his cost just to save face… why wouldn’t you let him? Actually, never mind. The fact that so many gullible Europeans allow their hatred of Trump to cloud their judgment is precisely why many of these deals work. They’re so busy obsessing over who won the headlines that they forget to ask who actually won the deal. But whatever. The fact is most Americans don’t care what you post on X about Russian diesel anyway.

So I lease a new car every three years (yeah, I know) and I always pick a different make and model. Honestly, that’s half the fun of leasing. Except Tesla’s Full Self-Driving has gotten so good that, for the first time, I decided to trade my Model Y for… another Model Y. ONE PROBLEM: THEY’RE SOLD OUT. Not just the Model Y. $TSLA has sold out of every model they make. My lease is up next month, and I genuinely have no idea WTF I’m going to do. So much for all those protests outside Tesla dealerships. Seems like the Cancel @elonmusk campaign just ain’t working. (Apparently I can lease a “pre-certified” used Model S or X, though… 🤔)

My month-long California vacation is over. I spent most of it on my yacht—but I also stayed in a number of motels. Yes. Motels. Cheap motels. I normally stay at Hiltons. The first week of my vacation, I did. Then I woke up sweating in the middle of the night because of lousy AC controlled by a gaslighting thermostat (post below), took a weak shower, and discovered I’d paid $35 a night to park at a highway hotel surrounded by acres of empty asphalt. So I tried an experiment: forget the brand. Prioritize cold AC, hot showers, and good reviews. My criteria were simple: Giant AC unit visible in the photos. Recently remodeled. No horrifying guest photos. Rating above 8/10. In one month, I saved $1,359. And it’s been glorious. I did walk into one terrible room. But it cost less than half the Hilton rate, so I ate the charge, walked out, and booked another cheap motel. Will I do this again next trip? I don’t know. There are three major drawbacks: Every motel smells like lemon Lysol. Most of the lighting has all the warmth of a police interrogation room. The walls are sometimes approximately three molecules thick. But I’ll take all three over waking up drenched in sweat, then standing under a low-pressure Hilton shower wondering why I paid 3x for the privilege. So what did I choose for my last night in California? The Vagabond Inn in San Luis Obispo. It’s clean and the AC could preserve a cadaver. The shower has the water pressure of a fire hose. Five stars. No notes. Now I just have to explain to my wife why our credit-card statement looks like I spent a month in California having a string of affairs with truck stop barmaids. 💀