2026

I'm Back(ish)

A few years ago, in 2024, I had a heart attack.

I'm OK now.

But I had been on a hiatus, licking my mental and physical wounds, and trying to figure out what to do.

Prior to that, I'd given this project a go, and it hadn't grown as fast or as far as I'd hoped.

The very last post I'd written prior to my hiatus was a very raw reaction to the Israeli-inflicted genocide in Gaza.

Between my last post and my heart attack, I joined an anti-Zionist Jewish group, got involved with a now-defunct "left" political/activist group, went to a demonstration, became even more active on X, and also continued getting frustrated as the demonstrations in NZ stopped being covered on the news, which led me to thinking, "what even is the point…?"

The heart attack put a pause on my already limited activism, though I kept reinforcing anti-imperialist voices on X—which was about the extent of my abilities.

In the meantime, as of early 2026, the world saw continued genocide in Gaza, continued NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, worsening economic situation in the West, even more US belligerence under Trump (who managed to match or even exceed Obama's record of bombing 7 countries in a year, in complete contrast to his pre-election promises), yet another apparent Western-backed destabilization effort in Iran (which requires its own category), and the "imperial boomerang's" continued return to the Imperial Core, the latest being the civilian killings by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.

I was very close to just giving up; my attempts to influence anything, however small, was proving fruitless: real-life peaceful activism seemed pointless and providing analysis online didn't seem to convince anyone, neither on Ukraine nor on Israel, which increasingly felt more like shouting in an echo chamber.

But I was also sitting on several unpublished hours of podcasting material from a few years back and the inkling of a desire to grow my newsletter and be useful, in general.

But how?

What would be the point?

I keep coming back to my basic values of justice and learning, critical thinking and cooperation, but I'm also mindful that I cannot be an effective activist at this stage in my life; my experience also skews towards intellectual knowledge production. Can I therefore produce material that would be useful to move people along towards political awakening and get them excited about action?

In short, yes: I'll attempt at re-starting and growing the newsletter/podcast/website, but the focus will be an evolution of where this started.

Before I explain the latest concept, we need to discuss why it might be useful to you, but before we do that, I need to go back to 2008 and explain how I was impacted by the Global Financial Crisis.

GFC and Me

In 2008, I graduated magna cum laude with a PhD in Economics from the top German university, and one of the top-35 in my subfield of Industrial Organization, and started working in the field of credit risk modelling; my first model was for the securities industry / investment banking.

When we started, the client's subject-matter experts told us that when we finish our model, the industry won't exist any more.

GFC hit in the middle of our modelling; Lehman Brothers etc. collapsed; other investment banks went retail and got bailed out.

The crisis, the severity of which had been unseen since the Great Depression, and which my neoclassical economic training told me shouldn't have happened, happened.

This was also the start of my looking for alternative economic theories—because if the predominant orthodox dogma says something cannot happen, but does, then a well-trained economist which I considered myself to be must find alternative theories, more consistent with the observable evidence.

Over time, this search brought me to the Marx's critique of capitalism and Lenin's work on imperialism, which in my view explained the capitalist crises and history much better than the neoclassical school; i.e., Marxist economics fit the data better.

Of course, you cannot read Marx's critique of capitalism and ignore the Marxist views on how economics is intertwined with political power, the theories of the State, and philosophy. The whole thing either works together or it doesn't work at all—something that neoclassical economists for example completely ignore, by modelling economics outside the political forces, voting, and regulatory decision-making.

Emergent Philosophy

Why, then, is moving people along towards political awakening important?

For most of my life, I was interested largely or even solely in understanding how the world works; why people behave the way they do; why systems evolve the way they do.

If you only focus on understanding the world, I found, eventually you see the behavioural patterns, and you get bored. If, on top of this, you care about justice, then you also get frustrated with seeing the injustice, and you start wanting to change the status quo.

This change can be local (personal growth) or global (systems change)—but in any case, there is knowledge-to-action link, which we looked at in Business Games from the very beginning. Indeed, our first Seasons were dedicated to business experimentation and emergent strategy; in our episodes with JP Castlin specifically, we talked about integrating theory and practice into praxis and emergent strategy.^[1]

In other words, Business Games were set up to drive action, not just knowledge, since what would be the point of pure knowledge if not to drive action?

In parallel, reading around Marx's works brought me to the philosophy of dialectics, where I saw huge overlaps with complexity theory from my conversations with JP.

Imagine my bemusement when it turned out that praxis—that imperative to act based on knowledge, in an iterative, experimental fashion—has a strong tradition in philosophy from Aristotle through Hegel and to Marx, culminating in Marx's famously saying that:

[…] philosophers have only interpreted the world… the point is to change it. ^[2]

From Business to Everything

Once I understood the repeating patterns across domains (complexity theory applied to business and economics, Marx's philosophy and analysis of political economy, Lenin's development of this to include modern geopolitics through his analysis of imperialism), recent history made much more sense.

Indeed—and I will investigate this claim further in these pages—in my opinion, this synthesis of economics and politics and geopolitics is the most consistent systematic approach that makes sense of the historical and emerging data.

The natural next step, then, was to take Business Games into these macro narratives; to take what I like studying about human interactions, about individual and collective decision-making under uncertainty, and applying it to geopolitical and economic topics.

"The Point Is to Change It"

The vast majority of alternative media voices that I follow are A) large but also B) content to just observe the world and comment on it. I don't think I'll compete with them, even though I do have some novel/better views, sometimes—but often times, the individuals I follow on various topics have solid takes.

They typically—with some exceptions—are not calling for change. In most cases, they fall into recovering liberal or constitutionalist categories, who for some reason still believe in "voting harder" so they tend to be stumped when facing situations where voting clearly achieves nothing. And so, while they can analyse the Gaza conflict correctly, they cannot provide a solution of what to do.

Nor can I, at present.

But my hope is that over time, my writing encourages people to go and get politically active. Because as Charles de Montalembert (1810–1870), a prominent 19C liberal Catholic politician and writer, once said:

«Vous avez beau ne pas vous occuper de politique, la politique s'occupe de vous tout de même.»

… which in English translates to:

"You may not concern yourself with politics, but politics concerns itself with you all the same."

My first goal, therefore, is to move people away from apathy, saying things like, "I'm not really that much into politics", and also thinking that the extent of being "into politics" is voting once every 3-4 years. This liberal BS attitude to politics by the vast majority of the Western populace must be dismantled—it's imperative.

Concrete actions should be directed towards building personal and community resilience. This includes, but is not limited to: joining reading groups or local mutual aid, self-help, activist, or political organizations; learning self-defence, tactical First Aid, and firearms proficiency (where legal—Second Amendment or equivalent is your biggest friend, depending on the jurisdiction); learning to operate quadcopter drones or similar tools; hitting the gym; and using your social media presence to amplify anti-war/anti-genocide voices. Basically, it's a combination of personal action and collective organization.

My second goal is what it's always been: to investigate together with you how to process information better and how to make better decisions under uncertainty. You can apply it to personal life, to business, to political organization, or to activism and revolutionary change. It's up to you. I give you tools.

My third goal is to provide information on economic and political trends. I'm going to be leveraging my economist hat to give you some data and models and predictions—also testing myself on how well I can forecast things. This could be useful for traders—if your job requires access to economic forecast and if you find mine useful, send some money this way.

Finally, I want this to be self-sustaining—so my fourth goal is to grow the audience. I'm not independently wealthy, so I cannot do this for free forever, and I will depend on donations—fully understanding that for you, this might mean not funding something else. I'll make this your decision: I'll still provide the content for free, and you decide if you want to give me money to support this work. If you find better usage of the money elsewhere, please do that. I'm keeping the "subscriber" functionality on the website, but for all intents and purposes it's effectively "regular donations"—please, do not ask for refunds, just cancel whenever you want if you don't want the card to be billed regularly.

To deliver on this, I'll occasionally produce the kinds of content you've seen before—interviews, analytical pieces, commentary, and educational articles that draw on economics, behavioural sciences, and strategy consulting experience.

I will no longer publish in Seasons; instead, I will create a different categorization of my content, highlight key topics on the front page, and experiment with speculative fiction whenever I feel it can present complex ideas more effectively.

Cheers
ai