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Imagine waking up tomorrow and civilization is gone.
Not humanity. Not life itself.
Just civilization.
The power grid is dead. The internet is gone. Fuel pumps don’t work. Supply chains have collapsed. The grocery store shelves are empty. Nobody is coming to fix anything.
How long would it take us to get back to where we are today?
The answer is both reassuring and terrifying.
The internet feels permanent.
It’s there when you wake up. It’s there when you go to bed. It’s there when your boss sends an email at 9:47 p.m. and there when you spend twenty minutes watching videos about restoring rusty tools.
It feels less like a technology and more like a force of nature.
Which raises an interesting question:
Could the internet actually be destroyed?
Most expensive mistakes happen slowly.
A bad acquisition. A failed product launch. A CEO who spends years steering a company into a ditch.
Then there’s what happened to Knight Capital.
Victor Wembanyama is one of those rare athletes who breaks your brain a little the first time you watch him.
At first, you think it’s the height. He’s 7-foot-4. That’s obviously part of it. But the NBA has seen tall guys before. We’ve seen giants. We’ve seen shot blockers. We’ve seen players who could dunk without jumping.
Most people imagine spy recruitment happening like it does in movies.
A mysterious man in a dark suit approaches someone in a bar in Vienna. A coded phrase gets exchanged. A briefcase changes hands. Suddenly someone is betraying their country for millions of dollars.
Real intelligence recruitment is usually slower, quieter, and far more psychological than that.
It all has to do with how you carry yourself.
Problems arise when people act hard and tough when they are not. The thing is that some one WILL ”check your nuts” if you portray yourself to be something you’re not. And if you’re running around with your chest out, that is just asking for trouble, especially if you ain’t tough.
There’s a pretty significant shake-up happening in the diamond industry right now, especially in natural diamonds. “Reckoning” honestly isn’t an exaggeration.
The biggest issue is that the old diamond business model depended on three things staying true:
All three are getting challenged at the same time.
There’s a moment that happens in a lot of families that feels weirdly universal.
A teenager who used to happily wave at you in public suddenly pretends not to know you at the mall. You pick them up from school and they ask you to park “like… way over there.” You crack a joke in front of their friends and they look at you like you just detonated a bomb in the middle of their social life.
And if you’re a parent, it can feel personal.
You think: What happened to my sweet kid?
Let’s cut to the chase: a country with a declining birth rate is like a car running on empty. You might be cruising smoothly now, but sooner or later, you’re going to stall. And when a nation’s population begins to shrink, the gears of its entire system—economics, social structures, even its identity—start grinding to a halt.
The problem is that my clients don’t enjoy the advantages of a well groomed lifestyle. Half of them don’t even know what I mean when I say “dress nice for trial tomorrow when the jury first sees you.”
They think that means show up in jeans with their shirt tucked in, and if they know what kinds of clothes I’m talking about, odds are they can’t afford those ones.
