I feel like beards need more study. -Measurable differences between bearded and beardless men. -Measurable differences between women who like bearded vs beardless men. It seems like one of the most binary decisions/preferences out there.

Good afternoon. My June public newsletter, "The Wild West" is now available: https://www.lynalden.com/june-2026-newsletter/ This issue discusses: -How the modern period of investing coincided with the comparatively peaceful post-war period, and how that is changing. -Strategies for investing in this new "Wild West" geopolitical environment. -The information bell curve and its implications. -The latest snapshot of the newsletter portfolio.

When my husband Mohamed first visited London a few years ago, his first remark was, “why are there so many foreigners here? I wanted to see more Brits.” And as he was dismayed by the high ratio of foreigners, he ironically meant people who looked like him (and he was aware of the fact). He was like, “I’m not visiting Turkey or Dubai or Pakistan or my own country. I’m visiting Britain. I want to see British people.” Anyway, not all foreigners want to destroy or displace the West and so forth. Even some them are like, “why are you guys doing this?”

Let’s just say without spoilers my novel doesn’t pull any punches, but also doesn’t set out to make despair-porn either. Choices matter, outcomes are messy, and realism is paramount in that sense. This description, lol:

I was talking to my half-brother about his world travel plans like, “btw if if you ever want to come to Egypt let me know”. And he’s like, “that’s awesome, how about in 3 weeks? Can you be our tour guide for the last five thousand years in the region?” And I’m like, “yeah man, it’ll be fun. Let me, uh, check with our two dozen local relatives and our summer beach plans so we can coordinate between them.” “Checks details.” “…Shit. Alright let’s go!”

I wrote a longform piece for Bitcoin Magazine's latest print issue, which includes a series of essays about the world 10 years from now in 2036. They've put up an online version now too:

Bitcoin Magazine

The 2036 Issue: What Choices Will You Make On The Way To A Multipolar World?

From The 2036 Issue: How will Bitcoin fare as the world shifts into a state of increasing multipolarity? By Lyn Alden

Here's the portion where I talked about risk, about downside scenarios: "If Bitcoin fails to catch on by 2036, I think it will be because humanity didn’t want it, or wasn’t ready for it. The technology itself is robust. Proof of work helps keep the network secure. Tight limits on bandwidth and storage help keep the network decentralized. Layers built on top of it help provide scaling and privacy. There is more work to do, but the foundation is already strong, open for business, and being used at scale. To the extent that major challenges arise, the network is upgradable whenever sufficient consensus is achieved. In this latest bull/bear cycle, Bitcoin further separated itself from other cryptocurrencies, but failed to attract many new users. AI services caught on with the public far more quickly, leapfrogging Bitcoin in adoption, because people and businesses could see AI’s immediate benefits to them, while Bitcoin’s benefits were unclear to many who haven’t gone down a rabbit hole of research. There are many stores of value to choose from, and volatility is painful. In order for Bitcoin to truly catch on, it will need to be because people value financial sovereignty. It will need to be because hundreds of millions of people, not just several million as we have now, appreciate the importance of self-custodied savings, permissionless payments, and financial privacy. Those collectively are the attributes that Bitcoin uniquely provides at scale." In other words, bitcoin is money. To succeed, it'll be because people value it for its monetary properties. That doesn't mean I'm against bitcoin companies. Bitcoin is open for anyone, and most things are better when bitcoin is added. And there's no world where bitcoin at scale is only used by people but somehow is magically avoided by companies and governments. I bought MSTR the week they announced their bitcoin strategy back in August 2020. I invite more companies, especially cash-flowing companies, to use bitcoin as a treasury asset. But it does mean that bitcoin cannot *only* scale that way. Bitcoin's core value is that if you hold it yourself, it gives you a unique superpower: you have debasement-resistant and confiscation-resistant liquid savings, and you can permissionlessly send portions of those savings around the world, and with decent privacy if you use the right tools. Bitcoin's long-term success relies on one or two more orders of magnitude of people desiring those traits. TL;DR Bitcoin is money.

A really cool (and quite rare) aspect of The Stolguard Incident audiobook is that @walker and @CARLA⚡️ perform full duet narration. In most dual-narrated audiobooks, the male narrator reads all male point-of-view sections, including any female dialog that occurs in them. And vice versa: the female narrator reads everything, including all male lines, in the female POV sections. A harder subset is duet narration, where the male narrator reads every male dialog line, and the female narrator reads every female dialog line, while one of them reads the narration for the section depending on which POV it is in. This makes it feel more immersive, realistic, and well-acted. I initially assumed we would just do standard dual narration, though I brought up duet as an option. The reason duet narration is not more popular is because it is far more complex to produce. But it was Walker and Carla who convinced me, since in their unique case they were able to do duet narration rather efficiently (the narrators are married, already do skits together, won’t have the scheduling issues of nonlocal narrator teams, and thus can perform live duet recordings together). The result is truly special, and it’s thanks to Walker and Carla. Can’t picture the audio version of the story any other way. https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Stolguard-Incident/dp/B0H29Y33PQ

GM Not sure why, but I liked the look of this desert sunset last evening.

GM. The audiobook version of The Stolguard Incident is now available!

Amazon.com: The Stolguard Incident (Audible Audio Edition): Lyn Alden, Carla Bitcoin, Walker America, Timestamp Press: Books

It’s dual-narrated by @CARLA⚡️ and @walker , and they brought their full voice acting ability to this.

So there's this 2025 movie called Dust Bunny that only grossed about a million dollars at the box office. But from the few who saw it, it has good ratings from both critics and audiences. The premise is that a young girl hires a hitman (Mads Mikkelsen) to kill a monster under her bed. My husband and I watched it last night, and it has the most fascinating visuals I've seen in a movie in years. The settings, the costumes, the cinematography, the casting choices, everything. Each individual scene was an art piece. I think the reason it went so dramatically under the radar despite being well-crafted is because it couldn't find an audience. It feels like a dark action-comedy urban fairy tale, and it was supposed to be for both adults and mature kids, and yet they misjudged and it was rated R. (It should be rated PG-13 imo; I'd show this to an older kid before I'd show them Dark Knight, and yet Dark Knight is rated PG-13). The vibe feels like Bullet Train or The Fifth Element, with some Tim Burton-esque visuals blended in, where it's purposely more about style than rationality. It heavily leans into visuals and whimsy. By the time I finished I was like, "I don't know what the hell I just watched, but I'm glad I did."

A good 10-minute video on Egypt's economy. -Use public resources and debt to build a massive vanity ghost city, prioritizing this over more utilitarian uses of money. -Have the military compete in all sorts of businesses. Hotels, consumer products, stores, etc. The military has inexpensive forced labor (mandatory military service for most young men) and tax/legal advantages vs the private sector. -Then get hit by things outside of their control while they were already self-weakened (Suez Canal revenue down, due to the Red Sea being unsafe to navigate, periods of high grain prices since they buy most of it from Ukraine/Russia).

I had a great uncle named Hugh. When he turned 18 in 1943, he decided to enlist in the military and go fight Nazis in WW2. As one does. In early 1944, he found himself as the radioman on a B-17 bomber, as the Americans upped their bombing raids on Berlin. Their bomber was attacked by German pilots, heavily damaged, and the pilot said they gotta parachute out, it's going down. So, Hugh funds himself parachuting over German countryside from a destroyed bomber. Early in the war, it was relatively uncommon for American/British/German pilots to shoot at enemy parachuting pilots. It was considered dishonorable. However, when the Americans/British really upped the bombing over Germany, and the war was increasingly turning against Germany, the German pilots increased their rate of shooting at parachuting American/British pilots. Their cities had been disastrously struck, some of them lost friends/family in the bombings, so they were more likely to just finish off downed enemy pilots. Hugh, as he parachuted down, was terrified at that thought, expecting that the German pilot who destroyed his bomber would finish him off. He watched as the pilot performed a wide arc and come back around, and he's like, "oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit," but then the German pilot flew by him and saluted, and left. Trolled him but let him live, basically. Showed him he could've done it, but didn't. So Hugh lands in a tree in German farmland. He cut the parachute and fell to the ground, fracturing three vertebrae. So he's 19, injured, and realizes he doesn't know shit about geography, but decides he'll try to make his way in the general direction of Switzerland. He spends a week sneaking around the farmland, injured, and eventually gets severely dehydrated. So he sneaks up to a well to get a drink, and comes across a 10-year old German girl, who stares at him wide-eyed since he's a disheveled soldier-looking foreigner. He panics, and has absolutely no idea how Germans greet each other. So he does an enthusiastic Nazi salute and yells "Sieg Heil!" which of course is *not* how most Germans greet each other. The girl screams and runs away, so he's like, "oh shit" and goes to hide in a tool shed. The townsfolk come out and find him, capture him, and turn him over to the authorities. He gets sent to a prisoner of war camp for the next 16 months. Him and his fellow detainees circulated a newsletter within the camp at one point, and formed a music band out of like discarded cans and pots and stuff. Toward the end it got trough, because as Allied forces took more and more land, the outer prison camps would do forced marches where the prisoners would have to walk to a deeper camp, while malnourished, and if they got exhausted and couldn't go on, they'd be shot. So he had to do two of those forced walks, but eventually got rescued by Allied forces. Came back to the US, used his GI bill to go to college, and became a social worker at a hospital. Really quiet, calm guy. Most people didn't know he had this crazy story arc. Anyway, that's the post.

-You’ve got to fly somewhere, but the only flight available that day leaves at 6am. You begrudgingly book it anyway. -Then the day before, you get an email from the airline saying “we regret to inform you that your flight has been delayed by two hours” to a far more reasonable 8am.