💩 This Liquid Glass iPhone OS update sucks. Apple has almost become completely unrecognizable — what happened to simplicity? If the rumors are true, I would be excited to move off of the iPhone and back to a Jony Ive designed product. I imagine he HATES what Apple has become since his departure. 

🎶 Bob Dylan – Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

The Palantirization of everything
High-touch, forward-deployed engineering is not a flaw, it is the product. Palantir’s use of embedded engineers was not “expensive services disguised as software,” but a deliberate strategy to bridge complex environments and accelerate outcomes. What started in defense is moving everywhere. Enterprises now operate under regulatory pressure, fragmented tooling, and real consequences for failure. The article argues that the future belongs to platforms that can operate inside chaos, not just analyze clean data after the fact.

Series D Fundraise

2026 Predictions

TLDR...

• AI Bubble bursts wide open
• We finally emerge from the oversized trend and return to form-fitting clothes
• American Heritage/Prep returns in a big way – think Ralph Lauren / Brooks Brothers 
• The defense tech influence – companies move away from virtue signaling and the performative language/posture that has dominated the last 10 years

AI Reckoning 

The AI bubble will become clearly visible in 2026, and the inevitable IMPLOSION will officially begin! The surge in AI investments and INSANE valuations has outpaced real-world deliverables. Most companies can agree... There has been a lot of experimentation, but relatively little quantifiable impact. The result is disillusionment. 2026 will likely be the year when enough enterprise AI pilots will have reached the renewal or cancellation stage. Investors and boards will begin to demand unit economics, not narratives. 

What happens next?

I don't think it's a big public crash. 

First, renewals quietly fail. In 2025, enterprises were largely experimenting and piloting AI. In 2026, those contracts come up for renewal. Boards stop asking “Are we using AI?” and start asking... “What did it replace? “Are we saving money?” “Are we more efficient?" Copilots and agents that sounded impressive but did not eliminate headcount, reduce spend, or materially change cycle time get cut. This is the first leak in the hull, and it won't make headlines.

Many startups have down rounds and silently shut down. They won't fail publicly. They will merge, pivot, acqui-hires etc.. We will stop seeing these MASSIVE rounds of investment. The valuations will reset. And we will all return to reality.

During all of this, credibility begins to fracture. Conflicting outputs, hallucinations, and governance failures move from edge cases to board-level concerns. Trust dwindles. 

The market quickly moves away from "AI First" language. 

Finally, capital consolidates. Spend is consolidating into a small number of platforms. Everyone else is squeezed. This looks less like a pop and more like the established players reasserting themselves. There will be a very small handful of startup winners, but for the most part, the big companies win again. 

American Heritage!

AMERICAN HERITAGE is back in a BIG way. Suddenly, everyone is cosplaying WASP and prep is back. We finally emerge from this oversized trend. We see waistlines again. Pants are straight-leg. Ties come back into the mainstream. A return to formality and form-fitting clothing (praise be to he!). It's cool to dress like a grown-up again! Ralph Lauren is the brand in 2026. HORSE POWER!

The End of Neutral!

This past year, defense technology moved from a fringe category to mainstream, with record venture funding flowing into startups developing next-generation military and national security technologies. Startups like Anduril, Shield AI, and Palantir became household names (for households following this type of stuff at least)... They looked and behaved more like consumer brands – they had merch, cool websites, and founders with big personalities. 

The rise of defense technology reflects more than just venture capital chasing a new category. I believe it mirrors a deeper cultural shift away from the liberal ideal of consensus and neutrality toward a worldview that embraces purposeful power, decisiveness, and things that actually work. In 2026, more companies will quietly drop the performative language and virtue signaling that defined the last decade. The empathy statements, purpose decks, and neutral-sounding fluff give way to clearer positioning and a more direct explanation of what a company actually does and why it matters. 

At the same time, in 2026, you’ll see more startups outside defense adopt defense-adjacent aesthetics. Hard edges. Monochrome palettes. Utilitarian typography. Fewer gradients and smiles, more schematics and systems. The huggy, cartoony shit (the new, but equally shitty version of corporate memphis) that has dominated the last 5-10 years of design is officially out. We see design language becoming a proxy for seriousness (whereas in the past, a lot of corporate design language has veered more towards friendly, open, inclusive, etc.).

A few more predictions...

• Google is the biggest winner of 2026 (AI, Waymo, YouTube)
• Apple buys something (maybe perplexity) and the foldable phone is a hit 
• Midterms are insane. Both sides are convinced the other side is cheating
• I wrote about this last year, but still relevant this year... phone bans
• Big tech turns on Trump (happens really fast)
• Aliens... I'm not gonna say much more, just aliens
• The prediction markets... something is gonna happen with Kalshi
• Vice signaling/Mad Men aesthetic resurgence (cigs, ties, booze)

Social Media Regulation

A year ago, I predicted a wave of phone bans and cultural shifts around social media, and Australia is now leading the charge. Their landmark Online Safety Amendment, which went into effect on December 10, 2025, requires major platforms to bar users under 16 or face significant financial penalties. 

While Australia’s move is a massive step, broader phone and social media regulation hasn't quite kept pace with my expectations. I believe the public is starting to view phone addiction through a mental health lens, and the tide is certainly shifting just more slowly than I thought. But that is the nature of change: it rarely moves as fast as we anticipate.
*worth calling out that banning any form of communication, even if it is detrimental to health, is a slippery slope... Instead of sweeping bans, change in the U.S. is more likely to come from evolving social norms, local policies like school phone bans, and cultural shifts that reduce teen social-media use without outright legal prohibition.

Holidays in Laguna 2025

The Spielberg Disclosure Theory: Cinema as Ontological Shock Absorber

There is a problem with extraterrestrial disclosure that has nothing to do with technology, evidence, or credibility.

It is psychological.

If tomorrow morning every government on Earth held a joint press conference and confirmed the existence of non-human intelligence, the shock would not be scientific. It would be ontological. People would lose their shit. It would be a DISASTER. It would destabilize religion, identity, power, and meaning all at once. Humans are not built for sudden redefinitions of their place in the universe. 

So the question becomes not if disclosure happens, but how.

This academic white paper (disguised as a personal blog entry on don.earth) proposes a speculative but structurally coherent theory. That Steven Spielberg, the most culturally influential filmmaker of the last half-century, has functioned (knowingly or unknowingly) as the primary narrative instrument for gradual extraterrestrial disclosure. Not through facts or announcements, but through emotional rehearsal. Through cinema.

This is not a claim of conspiracy (although it sounds like it). It is a theory of cultural conditioning.

Phase 1: Awe Without Threat

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Any responsible disclosure would begin by removing fear.

Close Encounters does exactly this. The aliens are not invaders. They are not conquerors. They are musicians. They communicate through tone, pattern, and harmony. The first language between species is not English. It is through a frequency, a resonance.

Importantly, the government already knows. Civilian populations are evacuated under false pretenses. Information is controlled. Contact is staged carefully, in isolation, with selected individuals.

The film establishes the core architecture of the disclosure framework. The truth exists. Institutions manage it. The public is not yet ready.

And crucially, contact is framed as transcendent rather than catastrophic.

Phase 2: Emotional Normalization

E.T. (1982)

Once awe is introduced, the next step is intimacy.

E.T. relocates the alien from the cosmic to the domestic. He is small, fragile, and childlike. He suffers. He needs help. He forms emotional bonds with a suburban family.

This is a critical psychological shift. The alien is no longer an abstraction. He is a being with fear, attachment, and vulnerability.

Authority figures, meanwhile, are portrayed as invasive and harmful. Their faces obscured. Their methods clinical. The threat is not the alien. It is how institutions respond to the alien.

Spielberg reframes the moral hierarchy. Contact itself is not dangerous.

Phase 3: Reversal of Perspective

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

A.I. is often miscategorized as a film about machines. It is more accurately a film about post-humanity. And this is one of the quietly most emotional films Spielberg has made. It's a deeply unsettling and cold movie about humanity viewed from afar.

In the final act, humans are extinct. Advanced non-human intelligences study human artifacts like we study fossils. Human emotion is a curiosity. A data set.

The film subtly trains the audience to accept a future in which humanity is not central. Not only does non-human intelligence exist, but it may outlast us, understand us better than we understand ourselves, and remember us as artifacts.

Phase 4: Public Reckoning

Disclosure Day (2026)

Spielberg’s latest film is not subtle.

Disclosure Day centers on a global moment where the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence can no longer be contained. A whistleblower seeks to release the truth to the entire planet simultaneously. Media collapses into spectacle. Institutions scramble. The public is forced to confront something undeniable.

The tagline matters.
“The truth belongs to seven billion people.”

This is the culmination of the arc.

Earlier films were private, selective, and symbolic. Disclosure Day is public, chaotic, and irreversible. Spielberg is no longer asking whether humanity can imagine contact. He is asking whether humanity can survive knowing.

Notably, the threat is not framed as the aliens themselves. The threat is the social response. Information velocity. Media amplification. Psychological overload.

Disclosure becomes not a scientific event, but a cultural one.

Conclusion

When you line these four films up chronologically, a few clear timing patterns emerge that strengthen the argument that this arc is not random, even if it is not intentional in a conspiratorial sense.

1. Each film arrives at a moment of cultural anxiety about human identity

None of these movies appear during periods of confidence. They land during moments when humanity is quietly unsettled about its place in the world.

• Close Encounters (1977)
  Arrives post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, during the Cold War. Trust in government is fractured, but belief in progress still exists. The film channels uncertainty into wonder rather than fear. It reassures rather than alarms.

• E.T. (1982)
  Released during early Reagan-era America, nuclear anxiety, suburbanization, and rising institutional power. The film retreats inward, shrinking the cosmic question into a child’s bedroom. The timing suggests emotional grounding during an era of abstract existential threats.

• A.I. (2001)
  Released months before 9/11, at the height of early internet optimism and quiet dread about technology surpassing humanity. It arrives right as humans begin to fear replacement rather than invasion. The alien becomes time, intelligence, and extinction itself.

• Disclosure Day (2026)
  Lands in an era defined by AI acceleration, information overload, collapsing trust in institutions, and ongoing public discourse around UAPs and non-human intelligence. The cultural conditions now mirror the film’s premise. Too much information, too fast, with no shared meaning-making structure.

2. The films escalate alongside information density in society

Each release corresponds with a new media environment.

• 1977: Broadcast television, limited channels, shared narratives

• 1982: Home video, mass entertainment, family-centered storytelling

• 2001: Internet age, early digital consciousness, fragmented meaning

• 2026: Algorithmic feeds, deep fakes, AI slop, real-time global discourse, no narrative gatekeepers

As society’s ability to process information changes, Spielberg’s framing of contact scales accordingly. Private encounter. Domestic intimacy. Post-human observation. Global reckoning.

The timing suggests an intuitive alignment between narrative scale and media capacity.

3. Spielberg waits until the culture is already asking the question

When you line it all up, what’s most compelling about this theory is not any single film. It’s the timing.

Each of these movies arrives precisely when human confidence is already cracking. Not before. Not after. Right as the question is forming, but before anyone knows how to articulate it. Spielberg does not introduce new fears. He gives shape to existing ones. He does not provoke the panic. He absorbs it.

And perhaps most telling of all, he never gets ahead of the moment. These films do not predict cultural anxiety. They arrive once it is already unavoidable. Once the questions are circulating. Once the old answers no longer hold.

Which leaves us with an unsettling possibility. If Disclosure Day is the final phase, then the work may already be done. The shock has been softened. The emotional groundwork laid. The audience has been trained patiently and subconsciously for over half a century.

🎶 Krishna Das – Mere Gurudev

While riding on a train goin' west

I fell asleep for to take my rest

I dreamed a dream that made me sad

Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

With half-damp eyes, I stared to the room

Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon

Where we together weathered many a storm

Laughin' and singin' till the early hours of the morn

...

How many a year has passed and gone?

Many a gamble has been lost and won

And many a road taken by many a first friend

And each one I've never seen again

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain

That we could sit simply in that room again

Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat

I'd give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

I wonder if these lyrics were about a WeWork room and a bunch of co-workers spending years together building stuff, and maybe not realizing that it wouldn't always be like that.