My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• People Loved the Dot-Com Boom. The A.I. Boom, Not So Much.: The dot-com era generated genuine public excitement. The AI boom is generating anxiety, skepticism, and resentment — even as the money keeps pouring in. (New York Times)
• Constellation Brands: The Fastest Growing Beer Company in America: The parent company of Modelo and Corona has been on a tear, riding the wave of shifting American beer preferences and demographic change. (Fiscal.ai)
• Luxury’s Overexposure Is Biting: The luxury sector bet on ubiquity — logos everywhere, collabs with everyone, accessibility as strategy. Now the bill is coming due as exclusivity evaporates. (Matter / Substack)
• Crypto Is Pointless. Not Even the White House Can Fix That.: Despite unprecedented government support, crypto still hasn’t found a reason to exist beyond speculation. The problem was never regulation — it was utility. (New York Times)
• The Biggest New Fans of 401(k)s Are Small Businesses: New tax incentives and simpler plan structures are driving a wave of small businesses offering retirement plans for the first time. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Trump ‘Affordability’ Pivot That Never Came: The president promised to bring down costs for working families. Heading into the State of the Union, housing, groceries, and healthcare are all still crushing household budgets. (The Bulwark)
• 10 Least Reliable Cars of 2026: Consumer Reports’ annual survey of 380,000+ vehicles names the models most likely to leave you stranded. (Consumer Reports)
• Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras: Citizens are taking matters into their own hands, physically removing the license plate reader cameras that have quietly blanketed American cities. (Blood in the Machine)
• How scammers are using AI deepfakes to steal money from taxpayers: AI-generated voices and faces are being used to impersonate government officials and steal public funds. The fraud is getting more sophisticated faster than defenses can keep up. (Washington Post)
• How Did Hendrix Turn His Guitar Into a Wave Synthesizer?: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer who happened to play guitar. A technical breakdown of how he precisely controlled modulation and feedback loops to create sounds nobody had heard before. (IEEE Spectrum)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Jeff Chang, cofounder and President of VEST. The firm manages over $55 billion in client assets across various “Buffered” and “Target Outcome” strategies. Backed by Y Combinator, the firm launched in 2012 and pioneered an approach to portfolio construction based on defined outcomes and engineered certainty.
Irrational Exuberance vs Chat GPT Launch (No earnings versus earnings)
Source: @steve_donze
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