The Sunday Drive - 01/04/2026 Edition [#196]

Musings and Meanderings of a Financial Provocateur

A Sunday Drive Around the Internet

👋🏼 Hello friends! Let’s enjoy this year’s first Sunday Drive around the internet.

🎶 Vibin'

As 2026 greets us, I can’t shake a creeping sense of unease about what lurks beneath the surface of the current investing environment. I worry (as always) about risks we don’t see, perhaps in private credit and/or private equity.

So with that in mind, this week I’m vibin’ to one of my all time favorite artists, the amazingly talented vocalist and jazz guitarist, George Benson and his Grammy-winning 1976 hit, This Masquerade. Enjoy.

💭  Quote of the Week‌

“Fear of life closes off more opportunities for us than fear of death ever does.“
— Agnes Moorehead

📈  Chart of the Week

Big Things Happen When a Word Changes Its Class

Googol: the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.

While doing a search for available domain names, the founders of Google originally misspelled the name of their new company. They found the incorrect spelling to be more visually appealing and the name Google stuck.

What they built changed the internet and the advertising business forever… and changed the word “google” (googol) from a noun to a verb.

This week’s Chart shows the accelerating pace of change across a variety of growth cycles in computing power. Each cycle exhibited exponentially faster growth.

We stand today in the midst of another growth cycle in the form of what we refer to as Artificial Intelligence (AI). The speed with which this rapidly accelerating growth cycle has emerged has not disappointed and is consistent with historical patterns. Each cycle is exponentially faster than the prior cycle.

This cycle, too, has a new word that has changed its class. Compute.

Compute has historically been something one did, an activity, a verb. But in today’s parlance of AI, compute is now a thing, something that is created and measured, something sold and consumed…a noun.

Few would disagree that the AI growth cycle is indeed something significant and transformative.

Unprecedented levels of energy and capital are being poured into the creation of “compute” as our economy is being transformed, quite quickly it seems.

One way I think about AI is, in a sense, a rapid shortening of the distance between energy (power) and intelligence. Tremendous and accelerating amounts of “compute” are being created to drive that shift.

What we choose to do with the intelligence enabled by all of that “compute”, as a society and as an economy remains to be seen. Given the speed of the AI cycle, real answers could come much more quickly than most people imagine.

🚙 Interesting Drive-By's 🚙

🤔 Conviction Capitalists - The Clash of Conviction versus Consensus

📈 Our Post-Scarcity, ASI Economy - “Artificial Superintelligence (ASI)”

💯 Ten Things That Are Going Right in America - Is our society slowly putting itself back together?

💡 The Non-Linear Economy - Most of us are playing a game that no longer exists.

👀 Who Will Get Canned in 2026? - Disruptive technology doesn't replicate human work. It repackages it.

🎯 The Ouroboros Protocol - Systemic Fragility in the Post-2025 AI Capital Cycle

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👋🏼 Parting Thought

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If you have any cool articles or ideas that might be interesting for future Sunday Drive-by's, please send them along or tweet 'em (X ‘em?) at me.

Please note that the content in The Sunday Drive is intended for informational purposes only, and is in no way intended to be financial, legal, tax, marital, or even cooking advice. Consult your own professionals as needed. The views expressed in The Sunday Drive are mine alone, and are not necessarily the views of Investment Research Partners.

‌I hope you have a relaxing weekend and a great week ahead. See you next Sunday...

Your faithful financial provocateur,

-Mike‌

If you enjoy the Sunday Drive, I'd be honored if you'd share it with others.‌‌

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