My canonical headphones broke a couple days ago. End of an era. Replaced them with the nextgen version of the same thing. Stronger than ever. Most youtube viewers won't notice, but I had to say it somewhere. Might as well say it here on the edge realms. Hurts, man.

GM, doing a refresh of some of my giga-long macro charts. Figured I'd post my favorite one here on Nostr first. Readers of Broken Money will recognize the 1920-2022 version of this from that book, which is now extended through 2025. (Digging into this data super deeply back in 2018/2019, along with a bunch of related datasets, is how I came to see that nothing stops this train.)

Ratings are starting to come in for the audiobook version of Stolguard. Glad to see people are appreciating Walker and Carla’s performance as much as I did! The voices they provided and their attention to detail really helped make it come to life. https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Stolguard-Incident/dp/B0H29Y33PQ

My husband is like, "Lyn, whenever we're apart, you get weird online." I'm like, "what do you mean?" And he's like, "you make weird bets with people you don't know." And I'm like, "You have made a fair argument, sir. But here we are."

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! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H29Y33PQ 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).