Aug 6, 2026

After my daughter Hannah watched Queen's Gambit in January 2021, she said "Dad, let's play chess." With those fateful words, our lives shifted. Just over a year later, I could no longer beat my 16-year-old daughter. Neither could her 6'3 older brother Jonah.

I wrote this essay a few years ago. Hannah is off at...

Jul 31, 2026

Anthropic's revenue has grown nearly 10x a year, three years running. Its losses are accelerating with it. And here is Dario Amodei in February: "If my revenue is not 1 trillion dollars, if it's even $800 billion, there's no force on earth, there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that...

Jul 23, 2026

My wife and I are taking a perfectly good 25-year-old house and spending 20% of the purchase price on a sizable remodel. Parts of it are going back to the studs. I had never done a big remodel, I knew nothing about construction, and I was shocked by how many landmines, wrong decisions, and outright deceptions we had to...

Jul 16, 2026

I was at a conference in Switzerland. A reader came up to me and asked, "Vitaliy, I've been reading your articles for years. I'd like to write. How should I start?" This question spilled into a long conversation over dinner. When I told him what almost two decades of writing have taught me, his face fell. He'd tried...

Jul 10, 2026

Lately, I've been getting this powerful feeling that everything I touch turns to gold. Every time I buy a stock, it goes up. Did I finally figure out the stock market game? Did I find a secret way to follow Will Rogers' advice: Buy stocks that go up, and if they don't go up, don't buy them?

No. I didn't get much...