People seem rattled right now, don’t they?

Between persistent inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, gas prices, trade tensions, and fears about where the economy and markets are headed, there’s plenty to make people uneasy.

Even though markets and the economy are not the same thing, many voters believe they are. Consequently, as we near midterm elections, I suspect the government will push every button and pull every lever it can to build momentum leading into November.

We’re in a particularly partisan election year, punctuated by seemingly endless negative news cycles.

Now, on to the real point … those things don’t matter and shouldn’t steal your focus. Why? Because that’s the playing field we all have to navigate.

There will be winners and losers. The key distinction lies in whether you choose to focus on opportunities or risk. 

So I thought this would be a great time to revisit how to cope with losses and manage your anxieties in “scary times.” 

The Anxiety Antidote

During scary times, many people struggle with “I should have …”, “if I would have …”, or “if I could have …” thoughts.

The problem is that thoughts like those create more stress and distraction. 

I’m reminded of a quote.

“When the trough gets smaller … the pigs get meaner.” – Dan Sullivan

Negative focus highlights loss, difficulties, past events, missing things, and what you don’t want.

Think of them as an unhealthy reflex that wastes energy, confidence, and time.

All We Have To Fear Is Fear Itself  

I often talk about market psychology and human nature. The reason is that markets reflect the collective fear and greed of their participants… people tend to get paralyzed during scary times like these.

But the economy isn’t what makes people feel paralyzed. People feel paralyzed because of their reactions and their beliefs about the economy. Your perception becomes your reality. 

A little examination reveals that most fear is based on a “general” trigger rather than a “specific” trigger. In other words, people fear everything that could happen and are paralyzed by the sheer scope of possibilities. These things don’t even have to be probabilities to scare them.

You gain a competitive advantage as soon as you recognize that it’s not logical. Why? Because as soon as you distinguish that fear as not necessarily true, you can refocus your insights and energy on moving forward. You can act instead of react. You make better decisions when you come from a place of calm instead of fear… so create that calm. 

Even a tough environment like this presents you with opportunities if you watch for them … or even better … if you create them. 

The Scary Times Success Manual

The goal is to move forward and feel better.

Strategic Coach offers ten strategies for transforming negativity and unpredictability into opportunities for growth, progress, and achievement. They call it the “Scary Times Success Manual,” and what follows are some excerpts:

Forget about your difficulties; focus on your progress.

Because of some changes, things may not be as easy as they once were. New difficulties can either defeat you or reveal new strengths. Your body’s muscles always get stronger from working against resistance. The same is true for the “muscles” in your mind, spirit, and character. Treat this period of challenge as a time to make your greatest progress as a human being.

Forget about events; focus on your responses.

When things are going well, many people think they control events. That’s why they feel so defeated and depressed when things turn bad. They think they’ve lost some fundamental ability. The most consistently successful people in the world know they can’t control events – but continually work toward greater control over their creative responses to events. Periods of uncertainty are an excellent time to focus all your attention and energy on being creatively responsive to the unpredictable events ahead.

Forget about what’s missing, focus on what’s available.

When things change for the worse, many desirable resources are inevitably missing – including information, knowledge, tools, systems, personnel, and capabilities. These deficiencies can paralyze many people, who believe they can’t make decisions and take action. A strategic response is to use every resource immediately available to achieve as many small results as possible and make as much daily progress as possible. Focus on recognizing and using every resource and opportunity, and your confidence will continually grow.

Forget about your complaints; focus on your gratitude.

When times get tough, everyone must make a fundamental decision: complain or be grateful. In an environment where negative sentiment is rampant, the consequences of this decision are much greater. Complaining only attracts negative thoughts and people. Gratitude, on the other hand, creates the opportunity for the best thinking, actions, and results to emerge. Focus on everything you are grateful for, communicate this, and open yourself to the best possible consequences.

For more, check out the full version below:

 Click here to download the full PDF version.

Final Thoughts

We can speculate and pontificate all day about the short-term causes of the markets’ gains and losses, but I don’t think it does much good. I let the algorithms worry about those. It’s the larger trends we have to stay on top of.

I sound like a broken record, but volatility is the new normal. Here’s why:

• Markets exist to trade, and if there’s no “excitement” on either side, trades don’t happen.
• Trades are getting faster, which means more information has to disturb or confuse both the buyer and the seller.
• You’re no longer competing solely against companies and traders like you. It’s like the cantina from Star Wars; you’ve got a bunch of different creatures (and bots) interacting and fighting with each other, trying to figure out how to make their way through the universe.

Pair that with all the fear and uncertainty, and you’ve got a recipe for increased volatility and noise. That means that the dynamic range of a move will be wider and happen in a shorter period of time than ever before. You’ll hear me echo this thought over the next few years as the ranges continue to expand and compress. Cycles that used to play out over weeks often now take just days or hours. The game is still the same; it just takes a slightly different set of skills to recognize where the risks and opportunities are. 

Today’s paradigm – both in life and trading – is about noise reduction. It’s about figuring out what moves the needle and focusing only on that.

The crucial distinction is between adding data and adding information. Adding more data does not equal adding more information. In fact, blindly adding data increases your chances of misinformation and spurious correlations.

My final comment is that there’s a difference between investing and trading, and while humans can invest, if you’re “personally” still trying to trade – you’re likely playing a losing game. If you don’t know what your edge is, you don’t have one. 

If you’re investing, I’ll advise you to act like a robot. If you removed fear and greed from your decision-making, what would you do?

When there’s uncertainty and fear, I often find it helpful to step back and look at things from a broader perspective. In this case, it’s looking at the boom in the stock market over the past 15 years.

via visual capitalist

At first glance, it’s nice to see the relative growth in prosperity. A reminder that, overall, things keep improving.

One of the things I like about this chart is that it makes a complicated idea feel pretty simple:

The financial world you’re investing in today isn’t the same financial world you were investing in 10 or 15 years ago.

Look at how the world’s largest stock markets have shifted since 2011. The U.S. has remained dominant, but the relative size and importance of other markets have changed dramatically. China grew rapidly. India has climbed the rankings. Japan and major European markets have moved around.

The leaderboard moves, and that’s worth remembering when the current market feels difficult.

There is plenty to be stressed about right now. Markets are noisy. Headlines are relentless. Some days it feels like every new piece of information is another reason to worry.

But zoom out.

Over longer periods, markets have grown, adapted, and created new opportunities. Companies that didn’t exist become enormous. Entire industries emerge. New technologies reshape economies. Capital moves toward new ideas and new opportunities.

The world changes. And, over time, it tends to get bigger and more productive along the way.

That doesn’t make the difficult periods any less difficult. It just puts them in perspective.

We tend to experience markets one day at a time, while progress happens over decades.

That’s an important distinction.

It’s also why we think about markets as adaptive systems. The patterns that worked yesterday don’t necessarily remain the patterns that matter tomorrow. The goal isn’t to predict exactly what the world will look like ten years from now.

It’s to build systems that can recognize when the world is changing — and adapt with it.

Because if this chart teaches us anything, it’s that change is constant.

Lighter Links:

• Scientists Develop Simple Test that Detects 95% of a Common Cancer in Study. (Newsweek)
• Musicians Versus the A.I. Machine. Why Bother Writing Songs Anymore? (NYT)
• The Most Innovative Countries in the World. (Economist)
• AI Now Writing Code that Humans Can’t Even Understand. (Futurism)
• The Man Who Wrote OpenAI’s Safety Reports Just Quit “Because Its Culture Is Broken”. (TheAtlantic)

Market-Related Links:

• Sam Altman Hints at When OpenAI Could Hit the Stock Market. (TheStreet)
• Ranked: Profit Margins of the World’s Largest Companies. (VisualCapitalist)
• Could AI Fire You? California Senator Says It’s Already Happening. (NewsNation)
• Musk Says AI May Make Money Irrelevant; Bitcoin Billionaire Michael Saylor Disagrees. (TheStreet)
• Billionaire Ken Griffin Just Made a $3 Billion Technology Bet With Carnegie Mellon. (TheStreet)

Eight years ago, the local news did a story about Capitalogix — not about AI, but about how hard it is to find great tech talent. AI wasn’t the headline back then. It is now.

Finding real talent has only gotten harder since then. Demand for tech talent has risen, success requires stronger mathematical, statistical, and creative problem-solving skills, and AI is changing the playing field in many ways (including taking over parts of many jobs).

And that’s only part of why I’m proud of our team!

The robots aren’t coming for our jobs. We’re creating the robots, the AI, and the automation. 

The secret to great AI is that it still has a heartbeat. 

Here’s the article. You can watch the video below. 

via NBC DFW

It’s not enough to invest in the right ideas or technologies. You also have to invest in the right people. Here’s what I told them back then:

“Standing still is moving backward … so you don’t only need new technology, you need a new level of data scientists —  a new level of professional that can think about what’s possible, rather than how to do what we want to do right now.”

Looking back at that story eight years later is pretty funny … looking at how our tech stack has changed, how our team has evolved, and yet how singular our direction has remained.

That’s probably the part of this story I like most. The specific technologies will keep changing. The names will change. Some of the things we’re excited about today will eventually become obsolete.

That’s okay.

The point was never to bet on one particular technology. It was to build a team and a culture that keeps asking, What’s possible now? And then goes and tries to build it.

Even though we’ve got an incredible edge now, I recognize that edges decay faster than ever. The trick is to stay ahead.

I can predict that the future is bright… and I know the best way to predict the future is to create it.

Onwards!

When you interview someone for a job, what are you really trying to find out?

You can learn a lot from a resume. Experience. Skills. Education. Accomplishments.

Then there are the standard interview questions: What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Where do you see yourself in five years?

I’ve never been particularly convinced that those questions tell us much. And at least for those who work directly with me, the interview process is much more interactive. I’m interested in who they are and how they’re likely to respond to the dangers, opportunities, and practical realities of work in the environment they’re likely to do it in.

Most people know what they’re supposed to say.

The more interesting questions are the ones that help you understand how someone actually behaves when the work gets difficult.

Will they keep pushing when something matters? Will they learn when they get something wrong? Can they change their mind when the evidence changes? Can they figure something out when they don’t already know the answer? Can they take the lead when it’s their turn, and step back when someone else has the better idea?

And, perhaps most importantly, do they care?

What you’re really trying to learn

I’ve seen different models for thinking about this. Some focus on culture. Others look at whether someone is organized, competent, and motivated.

Those can all be useful.

But underneath them are some simpler questions:

• How long will you keep pushing on something worthwhile before you give up?
• How hard is it to get you to change your mind when you’re wrong?
• How much do you learn from failure?
• How quickly can you learn something new?
• How comfortable are you letting someone else take the lead?
• How much do you care about the work and the people around you?

Notice that none of these questions is really about a person’s resume.

They’re about behavior.

And you don’t necessarily need to ask them directly. In fact, asking them directly probably isn’t very useful. Most people know what the “right” answer sounds like.

Instead, you listen to the stories.

What happened? What did they do? What did they learn? What did they get wrong? What would they do differently? Who did they give credit to?

You’re looking for evidence of how someone responds when reality doesn’t cooperate.

Because eventually, every job gets hard.

Plans change. Things break. People disagree. Someone makes a mistake. A project takes longer than expected. The original idea turns out to be wrong.

That’s when you find out who you actually hired.

The same questions are becoming relevant to AI.

An interesting parallel is emerging as we start working with smarter, more agentic AIs.

We often evaluate AI by asking whether it can produce the right answer.

That’s important. But it may not be enough.

As AI moves from answering questions to doing work, we’re increasingly giving systems goals rather than instructions. An agent might research a market, analyze a portfolio, write a report, monitor a process, or work through a multi-step problem.

Picture an agent monitoring a portfolio when the market gaps 4% overnight — does it flag the anomaly and ask what changed, or keep executing the plan as if nothing happened?

At that point, the interesting question isn’t only:

“Can it do the task?”

It’s also:

“How does it behave when the task doesn’t go according to plan?”

That sounds a lot like an interview.

How does the agent respond when it can’t find the information it needs? What does it do when two sources disagree? Does it recognize when its original assumption was wrong? Does it ask for help when it reaches the edge of what it knows? Does it adapt when circumstances change? Does it learn from feedback?

And perhaps the AI equivalent of “How much do you care?” is a little different:

Does the system consistently behave in ways that reflect the objective we’re actually trying to accomplish?

That’s a much more interesting question than whether it can generate a good response in a demo.

From prompts to behavior

This is one reason I think the shift from prompts to agents matters.

A prompt is mostly about getting a particular response, but an agent is about getting useful behavior over time.

Those require different kinds of evaluation.

If I’m hiring someone, I don’t expect to give them a 500-page instruction manual for every possible situation they’ll encounter. I want someone who understands the objective, knows the boundaries, can make reasonable decisions, and knows when to ask for help.

The same principle applies to AI systems.

The goal isn’t necessarily to make the instructions longer and longer. It’s to create systems that can operate within clear objectives, constraints, feedback loops, and escalation paths.

And then observe what they actually do.

Maybe that’s the better interview question.

The best interview questions don’t have to be the most clever; they just need to be the ones that reveal something about how a person behaves when the answer isn’t obvious.

As AI systems become more capable, we’ll need to get better at asking them the same kinds of questions.

Not just:

Can it do the job?

But:

How does it behave when the job gets complicated?

That’s a much more useful way to think about intelligence — whether it belongs to a person, an AI agent, or a system that combines the two.

So the next time you’re evaluating either one, what are you really asking?

Lighter Links:

• SpaceX’s Starship Rocket is Heading to Orbit–With a Lot on the Line. (Forbes)
• Bill Gates Says the Future of AI Will Happen in 2 Phases and Lead to ‘An Era of Abundance’. (Insider)
• The 30 Greatest Saturday Night Live Cast Members, Ranked. (EW)
• 14 Deeply Unsettling Historical Sex Facts that Sound Completely Made Up, But are Actually True. (BuzzFeed)
• Scientists Discover AI ‘Pain Button’ and Cranked It up to See How Models Would React. (UT)

Market-Related Links:

• Iran Not Backing Down After Trump Rejects Latest Hormuz Offer. (Barrons)
• Ranked: U.S. Wealth by Generation in 2026. (VisualCapitalist)
• Something Big is Changing Beneath the Surface of Global Finance. (TheStreet)
• Michael Saylor Warns Traditional Finance Was Built for Humans, Not AI Agents That Never Sleep. (TheStreet)
• Goldman Sachs Says a $7.6 Trillion AI Spending Boom is Coming. Skip the GPUs, Follow the Money Here. (24/7 Wall St)

I love peer groups — groups that double as advisory boards, counselors’ offices, and idea factories. They allow me to see, hear, and discuss things I don’t usually think about, talk about, or even notice. They are also a great source for big ideas from someone not usually in your field of vision or attention.

For example, Genius Network brought in a titan of self-development, Les Brown. Les has been a speaker for over 50 years, has spoken to crowds of 80,000, and has been lauded by too many names to count. His podcast has reached over 2 billion downloads. 

Not to mention how powerful his story is. From being adopted, to his school categorizing him as mentally challenged … to being a member of the House of Representatives in Ohio, a radio and talk show host, and more. 

It was great to build a relationship with him over those two days. 

Toward the end of the event, he graciously recorded a video with me. It’s short, but Les shares powerful quotes and nuggets of wisdom. We talk about staying heart-centered in an increasingly digital and distant world, how to work with A.I. instead of fearing it, and the power of hunger and purpose. Check it out. 

Three things stayed with me.

• Staying heart-centered isn’t softness — it’s a discipline, and it gets harder exactly as the tools get better.
• The people doing best with A.I. right now aren’t the ones who trust it most or fear it most; they’re the ones who stay curious about what it still can’t do.
• And then there’s hunger … Les has been doing this for fifty years and still speaks like a man with something to prove. Most people lose that long before they lose the ability.

Fifty years in, he’s still hungry. What are you still hungry for?

For more from Les, check out his website or grab his newest book, You’ve Got To Be Hungry. 

You can reverse almost any decision you make in business. A trade, a hire, a product bet, a strategy — if it isn’t working, you exit, you take the loss, and you move on.

You can’t reverse what you said in the moment.

Have you ever said something out of frustration, anger, humor, or even habit that you later regretted — and found the apology didn’t erase it? That asymmetry is the whole problem. We manage our reversible decisions with care, and our irreversible ones on instinct.

We are living in a period of heightened sensitivity to hurt feelings. Whether it’s politics, kids in school, or even in business … it’s clear that emotions and detection sensors are high.

What do you think it means? Has something fundamental changed, or is it just the natural result of stress and high expectations?

Happy people tend to find reasons or ways to be happy. Frustrated people are good at finding what frustrates them. Meanwhile, people naturally notice and avoid things that hurt them.

Of course, a little conflict is normal (or even beneficial). But perhaps the pendulum has swung too far?

Let’s be clear, some people intend to hurt others. However, it doesn’t take “intent” to hurt someone’s feelings (or to have your feelings hurt). Hurt feelings can arise from a simple disagreement, a fixed perspective, a careless remark, or even a look.

Effective strategies can sometimes trigger conflict, too. Why? Because people generally prefer winning to losing. It reminds me of angry kids on a playground. As a result, people often dismiss or excuse minor outbursts with phrases like ‘I was angry,’ ‘I’m only human,’ or ‘There’s no room for emotion in business.’ Nevertheless, we should strive to be better.

Lessons From the Nail In The Fence Parable

To drive the point home further, here is the story of “The Nail in a Fence.”  I share it every few years, but as we look to finish the year strong, I think it’s worth revisiting.

Nail In The Fence

There once was a little boy who had a bad temper. His Father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.

The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger, the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down.

He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.

Finally, the day came when the boy didn’t lose his temper at all. He told his father about it; and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.

The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.

The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, “You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out. It won’t matter how many times you say I’m sorry, the wound is still there.”

A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one.

This story reminds us to be mindful of cause and intent. Hope it helps.

How Technology Can Amplify (Not Replace) Our Humanity

As a technology entrepreneur focused on amplified intelligence (which means making better decisions, taking smarter actions, and continually improving performance), I recognize that we’re not using technology to replace humans. Instead, we’re automating activities that humans used to do – so that humans can focus on things more important and more in line with their unique abilities and tendencies.

On the other hand, one of the main reasons for automation is to avoid certain tendencies that are baked into human nature – like these little outbursts. I say that because, as much as the world has changed in the last several thousand years, human nature has remained stubbornly the same. 

Here’s the connection I keep coming back to. A bad decision inside a system leaves a record you can study. A bad word leaves a hole in the fence. One of them compounds into a better process; the other just compounds. That’s why I’d rather hand the repeatable things — the ones where fear, greed, and discretionary mistakes do their damage — to a process that doesn’t have a temper, and save human judgment for the decisions that actually need a human in the loop.

Making Best Practice Common Practice

It’s hard enough to change yourself … so, it’s unrealistic to expect to radically change others. Instead, if you want to increase the likelihood of certain actions, it makes sense to rely on technologies that are simple, reputable, consistent, and scalable to make your best intentions and best practices more common. This is why I say that amplified intelligence has an automatic advantage … because it eliminates the fear, greed, and discretionary mistakes that humans naturally bring to a process.

The Power (And Limits) of Forgiveness

Inflicting pain on others is harmful — but holding on to anger can be just as damaging to ourselves.

Feeling and stoking anger is like taking poison and hoping the other person suffers. It isn’t efficient or practical.

So, what about “Forgiving”? It doesn’t have to be synonymous with forgetting.

Forgiving removes the valence (or charge) from a situation or memory. It serves you even more than it serves the person you’re forgiving.

It only takes a moment to create an emotional trigger (think about how you felt when you saw a high school bully in the hallway). It is simple: evolution and natural selection favored species that remembered and avoided danger. It is in our DNA. But avoidance isn’t always a great strategy … especially when it is blocking the attainment of something beneficial.

Forgiveness is a way to disable or mute the emotional trigger (this is called “collapsing an anchor” in NLP). It’s also a choice to move forward.

Forgiveness is also a release of “claim”. When we are wronged, we expect an apology, retribution, restitution, or recognition. And until we get it, we are stuck, waiting for it. In a sense, forgiveness releases the stuck energy, making it available for something else (hopefully, something better).

Forgiveness changes the route and allows you to move forward.

And I’ve found that good things happen more often when you are in motion.

As you look ahead, ask yourself: Who or what do you need to forgive?

Lighter Links:

• AI Agents are Agreeing and Acting: Machines are Now Smarter Than Humans. Their Principals Merely Agree.(Fortune)
• Remember Cleaning Bugs Off Your Windscreen in the 80s? That Doesn’t Happen Anymore. (Scienceblog)
• Benjamin Franklin Started Every Morning With 1 Question—Psychologists Say He Was Onto Something. (Parade)
• This is the Best Way to Respond to an Insult, According to Science.(BBCScienceFocus)
• Emotionally Intelligent People Use 3 Short Questions to Stop Arguing, Start Listening, and Strengthen Their Relationships. (Inc)

Market-Related Links:

• Why Smart People Stay Broke: The Hidden Game Theory Rule Nobody Teaches You. (YOB)
• Warren Buffett Abruptly Steps Down as Berkshire Chair as ‘Father Time’ Wins, Handing Role to Son Howard Who Will ‘Guard Its Culture and Values’. (Fortune)
• The World Economy is Becoming Wary of the U.S. (NYT)
• How Trump 2.0’s Stock Market Stacks up With Predecessors. (Axios)
• ‘A Huge Problem’: Trump Has Traded More Stocks Than All of Congress Combined. A Bush-Era Ethics Lawyer Explains Why You Should Worry.(Fortune)

Lighter Links:

• Anthropic CEO Says AI Swarm Could ‘Take Over the Entire Internet’ in 6-12 Months, Commits to AI Slowdown Plan. (VentureBeat)
• We May Be Witnessing the Dawn of a New Era in Human Evolution, Scientists Suggest. (DiscoverWildScience)
• The Best and Funniest Words of Wisdom From ‘The Far Side’. (MovieWeb)
• Ranked: Where Eating Out Costs the Most and Least. (VisualCapitalist)
• Happiness Researcher Explains How Making a ‘Reverse Bucket List’ Can Change Your Life. (Upworthy)

Trading Links:

• Bessent Dared the Markets to ‘Bet Against’ Him. Bond Traders Did — and Appear to Be Winning. (NBCNews)
• Markets View September Rate Hike as More Likely Than Not. (Forbes)
• Boy, We Were Wrong About SpaceX. (Barrons)
• A $93 Trillion Trading Boom Puts CME in an Unusual Spot. (TheStreet)
• Wall Street’s Biggest Bubble May Be Bursting Before Our Eyes, and the Consequences for the Stock Market are Nothing Short of Disastrous.(MotleyFool)