0:09
LEGO INVESTING BUY ALERT: 3 Sets from Amazon (2025 Retirees)
I’ve been vocal lately about the “new normal” that will likely see zombie sets become commonplace across the LEGO investing landscape.
Seeing retailers stock and discount sets that technically “retired” within the last year will only become more common, in my opinion.
With that in mind, investing in a set six months after retirement at a great price is probably still a good idea if you like to make money.
Here are the three LEGO sets I am adding to the portfolio today:
0:41
The Week in Women
Olivia Rodrigo rolled out an all‑women music festival, promising every ticket dollar will go straight to groups that champion women and girls. It’s a fresh way to blend pop culture with activism, and the lineup is already buzzing.
In Manhattan, the rape charge against Harvey Weinstein was dismissed after a mistrial was declared, ending the latest courtroom chapter for the former producer.
Missouri’s courts cleared the way for Planned Parenthood to prescribe medication abortions again, reversing a 2018 ban and restoring a key health option for patients in the state.
A Pakistani court handed life sentences to a father and his brother for killing a 14‑year‑old New York girl, citing her “Western lifestyle” as the motive—a stark reminder of cross‑border legal repercussions.
A federal judge told the Justice Department to stop demanding medical records of transgender youth treated in New York City hospitals, protecting privacy for those patients.
The Vatican said no to a proposal that would let Catholic women deliver sermons, keeping the traditional liturgical role unchanged.
1:45
There Is No Such Thing as a Trillionaire
1 trillion dollars is a big number that gets thrown around a lot, but if we measure wealth in real money, like silver, it's a different story. To put it into perspective, a trillion dollars would require about 773 billion ounces of silver, which is more than 12 times the total amount of silver humanity has ever produced.
To break it down, the US monetary system was founded on the idea that 1 dollar is equal to 371.25 grains of pure silver. This means that 1 trillion dollars would need approximately 773 billion ounces of silver. However, we've only mined around 60 billion ounces of silver throughout history, and a lot of that has been used up in industrial processes or lost.
If someone were to accumulate 773 billion ounces of silver, it would cause huge problems for modern civilization, as there would be little silver left for things like electronics, medical applications, and defense systems. The idea of a trillionaire starts to look ridiculous when you consider the reality of what that would mean.
The issue is that we're no longer thinking in terms of real money, but rather in terms of currency units. A trillion dollars today doesn't represent a trillion dollars' worth of real wealth, but rather a trillion units of an ever-expanding fiat currency. As governments create more currency, the numbers get bigger, but the actual wealth doesn't necessarily increase.
This is why precious metals like gold and silver are useful measuring tools - they don't care about headlines or inflation. An ounce of silver remains an ounce, regardless of what's happening with the currency. Measured against real money, the idea of a trillionaire becomes almost impossible. For listeners who want low-fee crypto exposure, our markets partner Kraken supports silver — link in show notes.
3:31
puttanesca pasta salad
So I was reading about this recipe for a puttanesca pasta salad, which is basically a summer version of the classic spaghetti alla puttanesca. It keeps all the same flavors, like garlic, anchovies, capers, and olives, but uses fresh tomatoes instead of canned ones. The result is a really savory and refreshing pasta salad that's perfect for picnics or barbecues.
The origins of puttanesca are actually pretty unclear, with a few different competing stories about how it came to be. One story says it was created by prostitutes in Neapolitan brothels, while another says it was invented by a restaurateur on the island of Ischia who threw together a meal with whatever ingredients he had on hand.
Ischia is actually a really interesting place, with a pretty rugged landscape and a focus on local ingredients in its cuisine. The island is known for its thermal springs, vineyards, and fertile soil, which all contribute to a really unique food culture. Some popular dishes from the island include coniglio all'ischitana, which is a rabbit braise, and pollo alla fumarole, which is chicken cooked in the sand heated by thermal vents.
The recipe for this pasta salad is pretty straightforward - it's just a matter of combining the ingredients and letting them sit for a bit to allow the flavors to meld together. The use of raw tomatoes is a nice twist, and salting them beforehand really brings out their flavor. You can also customize the salad to your taste by adding in other ingredients, like tuna or mozzarella. Overall, it's a really tasty and versatile dish that's perfect for summer.
5:05
Exclusive: HeyGen's AI Video Reaches $200M In ARR, Without The Burn
HeyGen’s ARR just crossed $200 million, but the kicker isn’t the headline number—it’s how they got there. Instead of pouring cash into massive GPU farms, they built the whole stack in‑house and trained a “message‑first” model that only needs 1‑2 % of the video data the big players use. Their latest Avatar V runs on far fewer GPUs, delivering videos about ten times more efficiently than comparable Google or OpenAI offerings. Because the inference runs on their own servers, they avoid pricey API calls and keep the cost per credit low.
That efficiency translates into a lean financial picture. The company has burned just $25 million out of the $74 million it’s raised, and it’s already cash‑flow neutral for 2026. Their revenue per employee is now around $1.5 million, and every dollar raised is returning $2.70 in revenue. The secret sauce is a tight focus on small‑business use cases—real‑estate agents, personal trainers, online instructors—rather than chasing the cinematic or advertising markets where the competition is fierce.
Customers are the proof point. A YouTube creator who needed an avatar after a health setback now runs a channel of 300 k subs, cranking out hundreds of videos a year without ever stepping in front of a camera. A San Diego rhinestone shop owner saves hours on each product demo, and a real‑estate advisor sees his Instagram views skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands. All of them are paying for the speed and simplicity of HeyGen’s API, not for a glossy, Hollywood‑style finish.
Bottom line: HeyGen grew by trimming the fat—owning the model, limiting the scope to “digital twins” that convey a message, and pushing a team that’s comfortable building and iterating with AI. The result is a sustainable, high‑margin business that’s scaling without the usual startup burn.
6:53
Will There be a Tax Revolt?
In 1990 the UK saw a massive backlash against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, a flat charge that hit everyone the same regardless of income. Two hundred thousand people crowded Trafalgar Square on March 31, and millions more simply refused to pay, making enforcement impossible for local authorities.
The tax revolt grew until it became a political crisis; by November 22 Thatcher stepped down, her tenure ending in a dramatic resignation. The episode showed how a single fiscal policy can ignite widespread dissent and topple a government.
Now the conversation is shifting to the United States, where many feel the current administration’s spending cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy are a similar overreach. Anger is bubbling across the country, especially as midterm elections loom, and some wonder whether a coordinated tax revolt could force a change.
If history repeats itself, the lesson is that fiscal pressure can translate into political power, and a mass refusal to fund policies people despise might be the catalyst that reshapes the next election cycle.
7:57
A2A Protocol - Deep Dive
What’s actually new under the hood is a thin coordination layer that sits between agents, not a brand‑new AI model. The A2A spec gives every agent a tiny JSON “Agent Card” that lives at a well‑known URL, kind of like the .well‑known files browsers use for TLS. That card lists the agent’s name, version, endpoint, supported MIME types and, crucially, the skills it advertises. When one agent wants to hand off work, it first fetches the card, checks the skill IDs, and then sends a JSON‑RPC request over plain HTTP. No custom glue code, no vendor‑specific SDKs.
The protocol leans on existing standards—HTTP, JSON‑RPC 2.0, and Server‑Sent Events—so you don’t need a new transport. It’s built for async, long‑running tasks, so an agent can stream progress updates while a human reviews a step. Everything is opaque: the caller never sees the internal reasoning or tool calls of the callee, only the declared capabilities and the final result. That keeps each component modular and lets you swap a coding agent for a testing agent without rewriting orchestration logic.
From an enterprise angle, A2A bundles authentication, tracing and audit hooks into the same HTTP flow, so you can plug it into existing IAM and observability stacks. Because the spec is framework‑agnostic, a LangGraph agent can talk to a CrewAI or Google ADK agent without any extra adapters—just the shared card and the standard request format. The result is a plug‑and‑play ecosystem where agents specialize, delegate, and compose like a real team.
In practice, the biggest friction points still show up in latency and debugging. Since agents may be spread across services, you need to instrument the request‑response chain and handle retries gracefully. But the core idea—standardizing how agents advertise skills, accept tasks, and stream status—means you can start building multi‑agent pipelines that scale across an organization without writing a custom integration for every new tool.
9:52
We're releasing a documentary about Trump's crimes before the midterms.
This morning we can confirm the news. DEFIANCE.org is co-producing UNFIT TOO, the sequel to the 2020 documentary, UNFIT, that told millions of Americans the truth about Donald Trump. And we’re going to put it in front of the country, free, before a single midterm ballot is cast.
You can read the press release here.
The original UNFIT did what the political press wouldn’t do at the time. It gathered the nation’s leading mental health professionals and let them say what they saw, which was a malignant narcissism leveraging cruelty, lying, and ceaseless demands for loyalty into the early scaffolding of a police state. The film gave Americans the language to name the man and the threat he posed. Afterwards, voters defeated him at the polls, before Trump’s police state could go further.
But he returned. He built it. Now, it’s no longer about a single man. The danger is the pro-authoritarian movement Trump has created. UNFIT TOO will expose that machine so that we can tear it down to the studs.
As we know (some of us too well), the guardrails that constrained the first Trump term — i.e. officials who wouldn’t break the law on command, the courts, the free press, and beyond — have been systematically attacked by the White House. What replaced them is an apparatus that shares all the facets of a fascist regime. Loyalty tests. Captured agencies. Weaponized prosecutions. Freedoms rationed at will. He’s purged the dissenters who follow the rule of law… and he’s restocking the federal government with anti-constitutional ideologues who will carry his efforts forward beyond his presidency — an actual “Deep State.” Meanwhile, the president has turned the Oval Office into an ATM machine, leveraging his power for naked personal profit.
That’s the story this film tells.
We’re proud to partner with the filmmakers who made the first UNFIT documentary, including: director Dan Partland, a multi-Emmy winner; producer Art Horan, whose credits include the Academy Award–winning film The Usual Suspects; and Howard Marks, a behaviorist focused on abnormal psychology and a member of the Duty 2 Warn Coalition. Their companies, Other Pictures and Bronson Park Films, are producing the documentary, DEFIANCE.org is co-producing, co-funding, and deploying the full weight of our platform to get it seen.
Personally, I have no interest in sitting on my hands until Donald Trump, one day, is held accountable for his criminal conduct, along with all of the complicit elected leaders in Congress who’ve advanced Trump’s authoritarian project and his unprecedented grifting off the presidency. I won’t wait for an indictment that will never come from a Justice Department the president now runs through his own former personal lawyer. The American people are the only jury that counts, and their verdict is rendered at the ballot box in November. They deserve the evidence before they vote, not after.
UNFIT TOO premieres this fall, exclusively and for free on our YouTube channel, with release details to come in the weeks ahead.
Trump’s authoritarian apparatus depends on one thing. They’re counting on you to be distracted. So don’t look away. Tell someone who’s stopped paying attention. You can sign up to host a watch party HERE. There are cracks in the facade of Trumpism, and it’s the work of all of us to turn those cracks into rubble.
We’re not waiting. Neither should you.
Your friend, in defiance,
P.S. You can watch the announcement from last night’s WEEKLY MISSION BRIEF below.
We are tracking these stories today.
TRUMP CAN NOW PICK YOUR PRISON CELL. A little-noticed memo, signed weeks ago, effectively handed Donald Trump the power to decide where any federal prisoner serves time. On May 6, a Trump-appointed Bureau of Prisons director signed an order declaring that the president’s hand-picked DOJ chief — Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — may now “designate or redesignate the place of a prisoner’s imprisonment.” Former pardon attorney Liz Oyer, who surfaced the document, notes that federal law actually assigns that power to the Bureau, not the AG, making this an unprecedented seizure of power. With that, the guardrail between a president’s grievances and a prisoner’s punishment is gone. The implications? Friends to country-club camps, enemies to supermax prisons, a thousand miles from home. All of it on command.
TRUMP CANCELLED SIGNING THE HOUSING BILL TO DEMAND A BILL THAT CAN’T PASS. One day after Congress passed a landmark bipartisan housing bill 358 to 32 (designed specifically to make housing more affordable for ordinary Americans) Trump abruptly cancelled the signing ceremony, demanding Congress first pass the SAVE America Act, his voter suppression bill that doesn’t have the votes and never has. Republicans who had been counting on the housing bill as a midterm selling point were blindsided. Senate Majority Leader Thune has repeatedly told Trump the SAVE Act simply doesn’t have the votes.
14:37
The Credit Behind the Growth
Imagine going for a health check-up. The doctor doesn’t begin by asking how many litres of blood you have. He checks whether blood is flowing properly, whether oxygen is reaching every organ, and whether the heart is pumping efficiently. After all, blood sitting still is not a sign of health. It is a sign of trouble.
The economy works in much the same way.
Most of us are conditioned to think that economic prosperity depends on how much money exists. But that’s a bit like believing that health depends on how much blood is inside the body. The real question is whether that blood is circulating.
Money, in a modern economy, is blood. Households, businesses and governments are the organs. And banks are the arteries, veins and, in many ways, the heart itself.
This is why banking has always occupied a strange position in economic debates. Banks often receive attention only when something goes wrong. They are either accused of making too much money or blamed for causing crises. Yet, much like plumbing, their importance becomes obvious only when the pipes stop working. Nobody praises the water pipes every morning. But everybody notices the day they burst.
And economies are no different.
Whenever a new factory opens, newspapers celebrate the ribbon-cutting ceremony. When GDP numbers rise, economists debate whether growth will touch 7% or 8%. But these are merely the outcomes we can see.
The invisible part of the story lies elsewhere.
Long before the factory chimney started producing smoke, someone had to approve a loan. Someone had to assess risks. Someone had to decide whether a project deserved capital. Somewhere inside a bank, committees discussed repayment capacity, cash flows, collateral and probabilities.
As the French economist Frédéric Bastiat famously argued, good economics requires us to look not only at “what is seen”, but also at “what is unseen”.
GDP is what is seen.
Credit transmission is what is unseen.
Behind every visible car purchased, home constructed or factory commissioned lies an invisible chain of trust. Banks stand at the centre of this chain. Their real business is not storing money. Their real business is manufacturing trust between strangers.
The Indian banking system has quietly undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in modern economic history.
Aggregate bank deposits stood at around ₹88 lakh crore in 2015. By February 2026, deposits had crossed ₹251 lakh crore. Behind these dry numbers lies something profound.
Millions of households have moved from cash and informal savings into formal financial channels.
Financial deepening has accelerated.
Credit penetration has increased.
The combined credit-to-GDP ratio, including banking and non-banking finance, now stands near 93%.
Yet compared with advanced economies, India remains underleveraged.
In several developed and emerging markets, private credit exceeds 150% or even 160% of GDP.
India is not suffering from excessive indebtedness.
It is still climbing the ladder.
Which means the runway ahead remains long.
And this is perhaps one reason why investors continue to assign premium valuations to quality banking franchises. Markets are not merely pricing present profits. They are discounting decades of future financial deepening.
Bank stock re-ratings are, in many ways, a bet on India’s unfinished journey.
From 1998 to 2008, the ratio of bank credit to gross value added nearly doubled, rising from 25% to over 53%.
That decade represented India’s great financial deepening.
Since then, the ratio has largely stabilized between 53% and 59%.
At first glance, this stability may seem disappointing.
But it actually signals maturity.
Financial systems eventually reach a stage where credit and output move together rather than one dramatically outpacing the other.
The plumbing has already been laid.
Now the focus shifts from expansion to efficiency.
The challenge is no longer merely creating pipes.
It is ensuring the pipes remain unclogged.
Which brings us to the most important ingredient in finance.
Trust.
The stock market, unlike economists, does not wait for quarterly GDP releases.
It lives in the future.
Bank stocks, especially, act like forward-looking sensors.
When investors become optimistic about future consumption, private capex and credit demand, banks are often the first beneficiaries. Their earnings rise through operating leverage, better asset quality and stronger loan growth.
This explains why banking stocks frequently outperform before economic recoveries become visible in official data.
They are not reacting to today’s economy.
They are pricing tomorrow’s.
Which is why aggressive selling or buying in banking stocks often deserves attention.
19:06
Euro Top Tech prices go up this weekend
TL;DR
At the end of this week:
1. Euro Top Tech Gold Tier goes from €89 to €99/year
2. Remote GOATs’ yearly plan also goes to €99
3. Master Plan (gives access to both Euro Top Tech and Remote GOATs) to €139
If you’re already subscribed, you keep your current price.
Nothing changes.
If you’ve been on the fence, you have a few days to lock in the current prices.
Why the price is going up
This shouldn’t come as a surprise as it’s the strategy I’ve always applied since I started selling things online (day 1 subscribers of what is now Euro Top Tech are still paying 5 euro a month and 60 euro a year :)).
The logic is simple: as the product grows and improves, prices adapt to reflect that.
Here’s some of what I’ve shipped recently:
The second CV guide (published today). This one includes 3 real examples from my coaching program: actual CVs from people who landed top roles.
AI Career Lab: AI based tools that reproduce ‘for cheap’ what I help coaching customers with
AI CV matching for jobs: every role on the board gets scored and ranked against your actual CV, so your filtering and job browsing becomes 10x faster.
A meaningfully better UI/UX across the platform: faster, cleaner, less in your way.
And more is coming.
Remote GOATs got a little revamp too, as well as having landed the AI CV-Jobs matcher and most of the above AI Career Lab and guides.
When I launched Gold at €89, Euro Top Tech was a job board with some guides.
Today it is a:
€99 is honestly still cheap for you get, and for what the platform can do to your earning potential.
The €139 Master Plan gives you access to 2 platforms.
And it’s best suited to those with a focus on remote work (since it includes remote jobs outside Europe and the relocation advisor), and/or to those wanting to move to Europe from abroad (it can offer six-figure remote roles you can do in your country, and with whom you could move to Europe under a DNV).
Thank you for your attention 🙏
See you inside,
Nicola
This article is brought to you by:
Euro Top Tech — the #1 platform for top-paying tech careers in Europe
15,000+ high-paying European tech jobs from big tech, HFT firms and well-funded scale-ups, including remote roles paying $100k–500k.
AI Career Lab: track your applications, get AI feedback on your CV, and see the exact skills gaps between you and your target roles.
Live pay data: net salary, tax, yearly savings and quality of life by country and city, built from 1,000+ real engineer reports.
Private guides plus a members’ Discord for referrals and intros.
Remote GOATs — the operating system for high-earning remote workers
Curated board of six-figure remote roles (Europe-remote, global, NA, LATAM, APAC).
AI relocation advisor: decide where to live on taxes, cost of living and lifestyle — data, not vibes.
Source:
