Stephen.

Just came back to Dubai. Say what you want about this city it just feels good every single time you return. No other place in the world matches the energy and makes life feel this easy.

Many situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you start walking. You don't need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have the courage to get started.

You’re praying to be a millionaire or for financial freedom but you aren’t doing the work/learning to ensure you can manage it. Why should God answer your prayer? Remember God doesn’t put you in a situation you can’t handle weelllp Savings is a test of stewardship. Investing literacy is key. The man who buried the money lost money due to inflation and you’re in the same boat if you are hoarding cash. Save, learn, invest. Happy Sunday

A very expensive mistake is spending your 20s and 30s trying to look successful instead of becoming successful.

your favorite founders’ favorite founder

@mikefutia Avatar

This AI avatar system is f*cking ridiculous 🤯 One prompt → an AI character posts daily content across Instagram and TikTok, fully automated, zero filming. Same face + same voice. Different scripts, different settings. Every single day. All fully automated with n8n + Airtable. Perfect for DTC brands and TikTok pages who want to test faceless content channels without hiring creators or filming a single video. If you're seeing AI avatar accounts racking up millions of views and wondering how they're posting multiple times a day with perfect consistency — They're not doing it manually. They're running a pipeline that writes, animates, captions, and publishes on autopilot. Here's how to build the same system: → Create your AI avatar in Nano Banana → Preload 10-15 topics in Airtable for automatic rotation → AI agent writes a 60-90 second script per topic → HeyGen animates your avatar with lip-synced audio → Creatomate overlays auto-captions → Blotato publishes to Instagram and TikTok on schedule No filming. No editing. No manual posting. What you get: → A daily content engine running on a single scheduled trigger → Consistent AI character that builds audience recognition over time → Fully hands-off pipeline — new scripts generated and published automatically → A repeatable system you can spin up for any niche or client Built 100% with n8n + Airtable +Nano Banana I recorded a full walkthrough showing exactly how to build this from scratch. Want the full tutorial? > Like this post > Comment "AVATAR" And I'll send it over (must be following so I can DM)

@CoachDebs_spa With additional* meaning. Had this same thought before 🤣

@CoachDebs_spa The ability to distil disgust, dissatisfaction or another emotion into a single word that is coded with addition meaning. Could say I’m angry (factual statement, less emotive) or f*ck you (semi-abstract, highly emotive). Same as I’m surprised vs. oh sh*t Maybe 🤣

Just had a random thought - why is swearing even a thing? What stage of humanity? Why is the F word the go to what were the benefits

It doesn't matter if it takes years. What the fuck else are you going to do? You aren't going to learn, create, experiment, grow, and everything that makes life enjoyable because you have something better to be doing? Your mind is playing tricks on you.

@sodaguyx Ugc

This is the workflow I actually use to make AI UGC look real. Start with the fundamentals. Lock the model. Refine it. Then direct the video like a shoot. If you want the step-by-step breakdown, comment UGC.

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing… China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine the gap is ARCHITECTURAL it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study… and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure Merz at least had the courage to name it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

Arguably the most bearish factor in markets is the inability to think independently, as groupthink feeds a self-reinforcing doom loop. Ex (AI fears): AI is going to end the world. All white-collar jobs will be replaced. Humans won’t adapt, just like they’ve never adapted during prior technological revolutions (they have, every single time). While AI is certainly a different animal, history still says otherwise. - Agricultural Revolution Hunter-gatherer roles disappeared. Specialization, trade, & civilization emerged. - Printing Press (1400s) Scribes feared extinction. Literacy exploded, education scaled, & knowledge was democratized. - Industrial Revolution (1700s–1800s) Hand labor was replaced by machines. Factories formed, the middle class expanded, & urban economies emerged. - Railroads (1800s) Canals, horse transport, and local trade were disrupted. National markets, logistics networks, & time standardization were created. - Electrification (Late 1800s) Gas lighting declined and manual labor was reduced. Entirely new industries formed & productivity surged. - Telephone (Late 1800s) Messengers & telegraph operators were displaced. Modern communications & global business scaled. - Automobile (Early 1900s) Horse-related jobs collapsed. Manufacturing, highways, suburbs, & logistics boomed. - Assembly Line & Automation (Early 1900s) Craft labor was disrupted. Mass production, affordability, & job specialization followed. - Containerization (1956) Manual dockworkers and break-bulk shipping jobs were decimated. Global trade unlocked, supply chain logistics boomed, & international manufacturing scaled. - Automated Teller Machines (1970s) Bank tellers feared total replacement. Branch operating costs dropped, total branches multiplied, & teller roles transitioned from manual counting to relationship banking and sales. - Computers and PCs (1970s–1980s) Clerical and general bookkeeping roles declined. Software, IT, data, & digital work exploded. - Electronic Spreadsheets (1979) Manual "human computers" and paper ledgers were rendered obsolete. Wall Street financial modeling, corporate forecasting, & advanced data analysis skyrocketed. - Automated Switchboards (1970s–1990s) Hundreds of thousands of manual routing jobs vanished. Cellular networks, the structural groundwork for the internet, & multi-trillion-dollar digital economies exploded. - Internet and Dot-com Era (1990s–2000s) Retail, media, and travel agents were declared dead. E-commerce, digital marketing, and online platforms emerged. Retail didn’t end, travel agents didn’t disappear, and media didn’t vanish but they instead all adapted. Every time, the pattern has been the same. Old workflows break & new ones form. Productivity rises & lastly, humans always find a way to adjust.

It is extremely hard to tell this is AI, and we are not even halfway through 2026. This is going to be a crazy year.

Predicting the future accurately is the best measure of intelligence

Europe doesn't have "a problem". It has THREE problems: 3 European nations are suffering from a severe "post-imperial hangover". First, there is the United Kingdom, a nation that voted for Brexit to "take back control" only to realize it has completely forgotten how to drive. The British identity crisis is like watching a retired lion try to adopt a vegan diet. They traded imperial confidence for an HR department’s sensitivity training. The land of Churchill is now governed by a sprawling "nanny state" bureaucracy that is more terrified of offending someone on X than it is of actual decline. The British police, once the envy of the world, now seem to spend more resources investigating "non-crime hate incidents" and painting their patrol cars in rainbow colors than solving burglaries. It is a nation desperately clinging to the aesthetics of tradition—the Royals, the pomp, the tea—while its institutions have been hollowed out by a progressive rot that makes a California university campus look conservative. They want the swagger of the 19th century but are paralyzed by the emotional fragility of the 21st. Then there is France, the angry, chain-smoking aunt of Europe who refuses to admit she’s been unemployed for decades. France’s hangover manifests as a permanent state of insurrection masquerading as "civic engagement." Their identity is split between a delusional elite who still think Paris is the capital of the universe and a populace that expresses its "joie de vivre" by burning down bus stops every Thursday. The French suffer from a Napoleonic complex without a Napoleon; they demand the living standards of a conquering empire while working a 35-hour week and retiring at an age when most Americans are just hitting their stride. They preach "Republican values" and aggressive secularism, yet the state has lost control over vast swathes of its own suburbs. France is essentially a beautiful, open-air museum where the curators are on strike, the guards are afraid of the visitors, and the management is busy lecturing the rest of the world on "grandeur" while the electricity bill goes unpaid. Finally, we have Germany, the neurotic giant that has decided the only way to atone for its history is to commit slow-motion industrial suicide. Germany’s post-imperial hangover is a moral autoimmune disease: the country is so terrified of its own shadow that it has replaced national pride with aggressive self-flagellation and recycling regulations. Their identity is built on being the "Moral Superpower," which practically translates to shutting down their perfectly functional nuclear power plants to burn dirty coal, all while lecturing their neighbors on carbon footprints. It is a nation of engineers who have engineered a society that doesn't work. The German spirit, once defined by efficiency and discipline, has mutated into a paralyzed bureaucracy where filling out the correct form is more important than the outcome. They are so desperate to avoid being "threatening" that they’ve become essentially a large NGO with an army that has broomsticks for rifles, terrified that showing any backbone might be interpreted as a relapse.

I used to think success meant having a “bigger” life. More people. More goals. More things. I now believe that success means having an intentionally smaller life. Fewer friends, but deeper. Fewer goals, but clearer. Fewer possessions, but more meaningful. Simple is beautiful.

The older I get, the more I realize envy is just misdirected admiration. Instead of resenting what someone else built, default to curiosity. Study it. Ask what it required. Ask what sacrifices they made. Ask what it cost. If you’re not willing to pay that cost, let the envy go.

The most dangerous financial plan is assuming your employer will keep paying you.

There is one common conversation I am hearing between New York, London, Paris and Dubai All of which I have visited in the last 3 weeks Peptides.