100 things I learned and did in 2025

  1. Welcome to 100 Things 2025, this is going to be fun! In 1968 a pig was nominated as a US Presidential candidate. The name of the pig? Pigasus. And he was brought by the Youth International Party into the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as a theatrical gesture to protest some government policies including the Vietnam War. A guy from the Party had a speech on behalf of the pig, but in the middle of the speech they were all arrested, including Pigasus.
  2. The word “freelance” comes from a medieval term for a mercenary warrior, that is free from any lord. So they’re literally a “free” lance.
  3. There is an animal that still exist today that already exist long before the dinosaurs. Can you guess what animal? No, it’s not sharks. It’s not chicken either, although that would be hilarious. Let me just tell you the answer: It’s scorpions. Scorpions already exist in the Silurian period (more than 400 million years ago), with the earliest know scorpion that had been found is in Scotland and dated to about 434 million years ago.
  4. Do you know what the oldest color in history is? Not black. Not white. But pink. Researchers concluded this when they were observing a 1.1 billion-year-old rocks deep beneath the Sahara Desert in the Taoudeni Basin, Mauritania, West Africa, and discovered ancient pink pigments in the rock. Making them the oldest colour in the geological record.
  5. On 28 July 1900, the King of Italy, Umberto I, went out to have a dinner in the town of Monza. When he arrived at a restaurant, the king was confused when he saw the owner: the man looked exactly like the king! “What is your name” asked Umberto? The man replied “my name is Umberto.” What a coincidence, thought the king. “Where were you born?” he asked. “In Turin”, replied the man. “Double odd. So was I!” said the king. “When were you born?” “On 14 March 1844”, the man replied. How bizarre, triple odd! That was the king’s birthday too. What was going on? As they kept talking, it gets weirder: the both got married at the same exact day, to a woman called Margherita. Their sons even have the same name: Vittorio. “How long have you had this restaurant?” the king asked. “I opened up shop on 4 January 1878” said the man. “But that’s when I was inaugurated as king!” the king replied. It was so amusing that as the night ended, the king invited the restaurant owner to join him at an athletics competition the next day. But the man never arrived, as he mysteriously passed away in the morning, in an accident involving a gun. The king was obviously disappointed, but not for long. Because later that day, the king himself was shot to death. This weird episode has since became known in history as the story of Umberto and Umberto.
  6. New Orleans-style chicken wings are a hit in China, but not in New Orleans. Furthermore, Hawaiian pizza was created in Canada, while Swedish meatballs? Originally came from Turkey. Oh there’s more: French fries are actually originated from Belgium, Danish pastry was originated from Vienna and was introduced to Denmark by Austrian bakers, Vodka is not from Russia but it was invented in Poland, Sushi was originally invented in region bordering present-day Thailand and Myanmar, French horn was from Germany, German chocolate cake was actually named after a man whose last name is “German” (and he’s English), the Venetian blinds were Middle Eastern invention that the Venetian merchants brought to Europe, Tulips were also originally from Turkey, while the bird “turkey” was first introduced by Turkey to the rest of Europe but in Turkey itself the bird is called Hindi (a bird from India). Isn’t the world a wonderfully chaotic place?
  7. There’s a point in the southern Pacific Oceans called Point Nemo. It is nothing more than a floating tube in the middle of the ocean, which marks the farthest place from any land on Earth. Even space is closer than any human civilization. Just in case you’re crazy enough to want to go there, it’s coordinate is 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W. It is named Nemo not from the Disney character, but from the character of Captain Nemo from the novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne. Speaking of Captain Nemo, in the book there’s a famous scene where the submarine led by Captain Nemo is being attacked by a giant squid. The thing is, this kind of incident is very rare in real life. Except for this one incident in 2003 when a giant squid was really seen attacking a ship. What was the ship? It was a vessel that was competing in the Jules Verne trophy race.
  8. What’s the most mysterious number? According to scientists the most mysterious number is 137. It is a number that keeps on popping up in research, but scientists are still unable to find out why, so much so that many physicists even believe that solving it might explain some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, which incidentally many scientists are estimating that the universe to be around 13.7 billion years old. As you may have imagined, a lot of scientists become obsessed with this number, including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was determined to solve it before he passed away. However faith had other plan for him, where one day he became very ill and was rushed to a hospital in Zurich, where he would die few days later. And his room number in the hospital, that was randomly assigned to him? Yup, 137.
  9. What’s the difference between socialism and communism? Both are economic and political systems with the goal to reduce economic inequality, but in a radically different approach. So socialism attempts to reach this through government regulation and intervention in the economy, which often means a mix between private and public ownership. Singapore, Canada, and of course the Scandinavian countries are the prime examples for this. Conversely, communist countries aim to eradicate economic inequality by creating a classless, stateless society where all the resources are controlled by the community, as well as eliminating private property and the concentration of wealth. Which are indeed a bit Utopian in nature, but not without a lack of trying from the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, or the extreme case Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as told in 100 things 2024 no. 7-9) all of which ended up being forced into the society and created a genocide.
  10. Now enter capitalism. One the most often asked questions in this topic is, which one is better socialism or capitalism? It’s not actually an apple-to-apple comparison. Because all socialist countries who have “failed” (like the many Latin American countries) all have US interferences or US sanctions written all over their history. And if you see those “socialist” countries who are socialist in every being of their fiber except for the name (i.e. welfare states in Western Europe or those that adopt social democracy) that are not being interfered, they are all successful today. Of course critics who don’t know the difference between socialism and communism will then have a cheap go by attacking socialism using the failed communist countries, because although on paper a classless and stateless society looks like a dream, human nature (with greed and fear) will always interrupt the process. Well, to be fair, we can also say the same with capitalism, which is theoretically great on paper but human nature gets in the way, creating predatory capitalism in the process in an environment ruled by corporatocracy and the Plutocracy behind them. So, which one is better? The answer depends on the leader, the type of society, and quoting the book Why Nations Fail by the Nobel Prize winners in Economics, it depends on whether they are inclusive or extractive.
  11. The first Barbie doll was modeled after a German sex doll named Bild Lilli. One day on a trip to Germany the creator of Barbie, Ruth Handler, saw the Lilli doll and ended up purchasing some and redesigned them to be more suitable for children (less make up, still keeping to curve, etc) before they were launched at the 1959 New York Toy Fair and became an instant hit. The Lilli doll, in turn, was based on a German comic strip character where the character was a “high-class call girl”, and in 1964 Handler’s company Mattel bought all the rights to the Bild Lilli doll. The name “Barbie”, by the way, was named after Handler’s 15 year-old daughter, Barbara Handler.
  12. The music genre R&B is short for Rhythm and Blues. But here’s what a lot of people don’t know, in the 1940s music were recorded in a vinyl plate that has 2 sides: the fast side and the slow side when being played. Rhythm music is where they put all the fast rhythmic music on the fast side, and blues is where they put the mellow music on the slow side of the vinyl.
  13. You’ve probably heard this story before: Vincent Van Gough, one of the most celebrated painters in history, died by killing himself while being broke and not knowing that his nearly 150 paintings would become world famous post-mortem. But do you know HOW his paintings eventually become famous? After Vincent passed away, 6 months later his brother Theo died after contracted syphilis from his earlier visits to brothels. Theo was an art dealer, who has just started a family with his new bride, Johanna. Now Jo is the real hero of the story. When Theo died Jo was left with a flat full of Vincent’s work, which amount to nothing valuable (in his lifetime Vincent only managed to sell 1 painting, the Red Vineyard, for 400 francs or roughly $2000 in today’s money). But how? Jo had a very low self esteem, where she often describes herself as ugly and some days she’s quick to judge herself as utterly and completely wrong in many situations. And on top of this, she didn’t have any training in arts and business, in a world entirely dominated by men. What proceeded then, was nothing short of a remarkable journey, where Jo transformed herself from a worthless widow into a marketing genius.
  14. First, she moved from Paris to a boarding house in the Netherlands. Then she settled in a cultural village where she can live among artists and intellectuals. And afterwards she began to put herself in a self education journey: reading art critic journals, books on art theories, biographies of inspirational figures, and attending discussion gatherings. Her approach was simple: gain networking and immerse herself in the art scene so she can understand Vincent’s place in it. And one year later, she decided to re-launch Van Gogh as an artist. Jo’s first step is to get Vincent’s work reviewed by art critics. At first the paintings were seen as a work of either children or a mad man, since classical art tradition at the time followed a theme of order and calmness, a total opposite of Van Gogh’s thick brush strokes and intense colours. His subjects were considered as too raw and vulgar. So Jo was fighting an uphill battle, where her persistence has begun to irritate many. But she didn’t give up.
  15. And then, from all of the rejections Jo noticed a harsh truth: Vincent’s artworks couldn’t stand on their own, due to the stiff zeitgeist of the time, and thus she needed to provide context and emotional resonance to them. And so she began to send letters to art critics along with the paintings to build a case: Vincent wasn’t failing to meet classical standards but he intentionally reject them, his bold style were deliberate and innovative, and he was trying to capture the essence of life in ways that traditional techniques fail to do. And it was a success (yes, sometimes all we need to do is to look at the same things from a completely different angle). One year later she organised the 1st of many Van Gogh’s solo exhibitions, working with one of the many critics whose opinion she managed to change. And over time Jo used more tactics to successfully increase the perception and value of Van Gogh’s painting, like gifted selected pieces to influential figures and prominent galleries, strategically withholding some of Vincent’s best paintings from sale (and instead, displaying them as “on loan” alongside works that are available for purchase, creating the illusion of scarcity), and partnering with international galleries like Metropolitan Museum in New York and lobbied for his inclusion in major exhibitions. And hence, Van Gogh’s paintings – the same exactly paintings that were worth nearly nothing – became world famous and expensive. In 2022 his “self-portrait with bandaged ear” painting alone was sold for $117 million.
  16. Belgium have 10 provinces: Antwerp, Brabant, West Flanders, East Flanders, Hainaut, Liege, Namur, Limburg, and Luxembourg. Yes that’s right Luxembourg. In fact, the Belgium province of Luxembourg is right next to the border with the country Luxembourg, and it is larger than the country.
  17. Australia wasn’t invented to solve Britain’s convict problem, but the convict problem was invented to solve a colony problem. So, the urban legend was Britain had so many crimes that the convicts were so abundant that it made the British to seek a solution by exporting all of them to another continent Australia. But apparently that wasn’t necessarily the case. You see Britain had a colony problem, where a lot of people (even peasants) are perfectly happy to live in Britain and nobody wants to move to a faraway land that they just conquered. But then the government started to change the law, where crimes as petty as stealing are suddenly punishable by death. That is, unless they can arrange some kind of agreement to move to some place (like, I dunno, Australia?) in order to populate the colony. So, yeah, same outcome but very different intention.
  18. Mount Rushmore used to be a sacred Native American mountain called The Six Grandfathers, with rock formations looking like six heads. It is part of the sacred Black Hills of the Lakota tribe, which was illegally seized by the US government in 1877 after gold was discovered there. US president Ulysses S. Grant then ordered the army not to protect the local tribes, and proceeded to put a bounty of money reward for each Native American killed. The carving of 4 US presidents into the hills happened much later, in the 1920s which was partially funded by the Ku Klux Klan.
  19. Do you know how they come up with the number of 6 million Jewish deaths at the Holocaust? It was primarily sourced from Dr. Wilhelm Höttl who first testified in a November 1945 Nuremberg trials and again in a 1961 trial of SS officer Adolf Eichmann. In both trials Höttl recalled Eichmann telling him that some 6 million Jews had died. Prior to this, a Riegner telegram in August 1942 warned that 6 million Jews were in danger of extermination (but not deaths), Korherr Report in 1943 gave deportation numbers of Jews from Germany (but also not death toll), Vrba-Wetzler report in 1944 showed mass killings in Auschwitz with figures in the hundred of thousands (but not 6 millions), while Jewish demographic studies in 1944-1945 showed millions missing but it was statistical deduction and not confirmed death toll.
  20. Hence, according to an investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Höttl’s testimony became the first reference for the 6 million Jewish deaths. Only after this that Yad Vashem (Israel’s principal Holocaust research center), by quoting Höttl’s Eichmann reference, estimates that there have been 5-6 million deaths by further justifying the figure by comparing pre-war census data with population estimates made after WW2. And the proceeding statistics and analyses by others are built around Yad Vashem’s findings. So, bottom line, is the 6 million Jewish deaths fabricated? It still looks plausible. But here’s the thing, if you do a deep dive into this you will most likely find so many gaps and holes. Even ChatGPT (before Israel signed $6 million contract to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel), when really prompted (like not taking a vague answer provided by it and demanding more specific answers), concluded this about the primary source of the claim (well, technically secondary source after Eichmann): “Höttl was known as an opportunist and an unreliable witness, trying to save himself after the war. Historians treat his claims with caution.”
  21. For me it doesn’t even matter. Like I said last year in 100 Things 2024 no. 22-23, even if the 6 million deaths are correct the bigger question is why do 6 million deaths (8%) are more important than the rest 92% of the total 75 million deaths in World War 2? And as mentioned in 100 Things 2024 no. 39-42, Hitler only began to prosecute the Jews in 1941 (2 years after the start of WW2) but most mainstream media and texbooks are saying it began in early 1930s, while simultaneously ignoring the actual event occurring in 1932-1933, the Holodomor, where between 3.5 – 10 million Christian Ukrainians were killed by Stalin and the Bolsheviks. And meanwhile, during the same WW2 Churchill made some decisions that would eventually led to the Bengal Famine in 1943, where 4 million people died. So, why the hell was Hitler the only villain in history, while Churchill and Stalin became the heroes of WW2 (that is, until Stalin enggage in the Cold War and he overnight turned into a new villain)?
  22. The northernmost point of Brazil, Monte Caburai, is closer to Canada (4279 KM) than it is to the southernmost point of Brazil, Arroio Chui (4393 KM). Yeah, Brazil is yuuuuge. And it is so fascinating how the identity of the nation is largely built around football.
  23. To avoid paying tax, lottery winners in North Macedonia never claim their prizes. And instead, they sell the winning tickets to wealthy investors for 80% of the prize money (a good deal considering taxes on lottery can get as high as 37-50%). This created an underground market where lottery tickets become a tradable currency. Now why would rich North Macedonians buy winning lottery tickets and claim it as their win and lose some money due to taxation? 1 word: money laundering (yeah sorry, 2 words). And everybody wins. Except for the government. And well yeah the owner of the dirty money that the wealthy stole from.
  24. A part of Spain-France 646-685 KM long border consist of the Bidasoa river, with 10 KM of its 66 KM length serve as a natural border between the 2 countries. And in the middle of this natural border lies an inhabited island called Pheasant Island. The immediate question is, who owns the island? This is where it gets interesting, as France and Spain signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees on 7 November 1659 (which ended the Franco-Spanish War) that included giving Spain the sovereignty of Pheasant Island from 1 February to 31 July each year, and to France from 1 August to 31 January. That’s right, the 2 countries have a joint-custody over the island. And where did they sign the peace treaty in? Where else than in Pheasant Island.
  25. Today there are a staggering amount of 35,000 different Christian churches in the world. This is a recap of the evolution: Martin Luther didn’t like the Catholic church and he founded the Lutheran church (the OG Protestant) to break out from the Vatican. John Calvin didn’t like the Lutheran and founded the reform/Calvinist church. Henry VIII wasn’t happy that the Vatican restrict him for having more than 1 wife, so he founded the Anglican church. John Smith didn’t like the Anglican and founded the Baptist church. William Miller didn’t like the Baptist and founded the Adventist. Ellen G White liked what she saw in the Adventist and founded the Seventh Day Adventist church mimicking the Adventist. Charles T. Russell didn’t like the Adventist and founded Jehovah’s Witness. So far so good, and can keep up?
  26. Ok let’s continue. John Wesley also disliked the Anglican church and founded the Methodist Church. Joseph Smith didn’t like the Methodist and founded the Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormon). An anonymous person also didn’t like Methodist and founded the Pentecostal church. Many didn’t like the original Pentecostal and founded many other Pentecostal-themed churches like Stop Suffering, Assemblies of God, Light of the World, etc. Meanwhile, the Evangelical movement came from the Baptist church, while the born again movement came from the Evangelical church. So, which one is the true one? Does it matter? Just like every other fractions of a religion, every single one of them claim to be the right path but us humans have no way of knowing for sure. For me, what’s important is whatever you choose (even for other religions and atheists) it should make you a better, kinder, more compassionate person with high tolerance.
  27. Loch Ness, Scotland, contains an estimated 263 billion cubic feet of water, which is way more water that all of the lakes, rivers, and reservoirs in England and Wales COMBINED. It is so huge that there’s a claim that all the population in the world x 10 can fit into the Loch or lake (which makes it 80 billion people!), which is sadly an exaggeration. But it is big enough for a perfect hide out spot for a certain monster. Wink wink. Anyway, there’s a guy by the name of Steve Feltham who has hunted Nessie (aka Loch Ness Monster) for so long that Guinness World Record awarded him with “the Longest Continuous Hunt” for 33 years and counting. Well, that’s one way to do it isn’t it? Dedicate your life to one single thing, however menial it seems, and you will forever become a legend while avoiding a Second Death (see the next fact).
  28. In Mexican tradition, there’s an interesting philosophy called the Second Death. The concept believes that there are 3 stages of deaths that a person will go through: 1. The moment the body cease to function 2. When the body is buried or returned to the Earth 3. The final remembrance, when the person’s name is no longer spoken by anyone, marking the complete erasure of their existence on Earth. That’s hauntingly poetic.
  29. Have you ever wondered what happens if 1 conjoined twin dies but the other continues to live? So, medically speaking conjoined twins are 1 fertilized egg that splits into 2 embryos. But unlike twins, the separation isn’t fully completed where some can be joined at the chest, abdomen, lower back, pelvis or head, and others may share certain organs depending on the type. Conjoined twins can feel each other’s pain, some even can feel each other’s stomach aches despite having separate organs from the waist up. It is estimated that 1 in 200,000 live births result in a conjoined twins, while more than half of conjoined twin pregnancies result in stillbirth or miscarriage and many die shortly after birth.
  30. But what if only 1 dies? The answer depends on the type of conjoined twins. For example, for thoracopagus twins (sharing a heart and circulatory system) the other twin will more likely to succumb to sepsis (blood poisoning) shortly after his/her twin died. Indeed, the probability of death following the twin is higher for those who share organs and systems, because in the occurrence of hearth failure in twin 1, the twin 2 will begin to lose blood and needed an emergency surgery for separation from twin 1. I hear you’re thinking, why not separate them from the start? Some cases can (and do) but for those who share organs it’s not possible. Which leads us to probably the most famous conjoined twins, the “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng Bunker who were born in Siam (present-day Thailand) and were connected at the sternum and shared a liver. One day in their mid-60s Eng woke up to see his brother passed away from a blood clot, and he also eventually also died 3 hours later from a pulmonary edema and hearth failure.
  31. The longest wall in the world is the Great Wall of China with 21,196 KM, but do you know the 2nd longest? It’s the Walls of Benin (16,000 KM combined). Also known as Benin Iya, it was a series of earth ramparts and moats that made a complex system of walls covering an area estimated at over 6500 square KM. It was constructed gradually from around 800 AD to 1460 AD by the Edo people of the Benin Empire (modern-day Nigeria), which primarily served as both defensive fort and boundary markers encircles Benin City and over 500 surrounding communities. It was a testament of West Africa’s advanced culture before the colonial era, showcasing the engineering and mathematical sophistication (centuries before Europe “discover” them) that was not made of stone but shaped from earth by organized human labor. Its streets glowed with palm oil lamps at a time when London still live in darkness, the Portuguese called it “greater than Lisbon”, with the city has no crime, no locks, and people live in perfect order. The walls were recognized by the 1974 Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest earthworks carried out before mechanical engineering, and only 2nd in length after the Great Wall of China. But sadly only few fragments remain today in Benin City, Nigeria, because the original structure was destroyed during the British Punitive Expedition of 1897 to legitimize their colonization and erase evidence of African urban development. Of course they bloody did. Just like how we hear a lot about the Roman Empire but never about their equally advanced rival in North Africa, the Carthage; or how ancient Persia was larger than Ancient Greek and Ancient Rome, exist in the same region and the same era, control 40% of the world’s population, contributed more to science, have better women rights, but hardly ever mentioned in history books because they’re not Western. And today where is the best place to see the Benin art? The British Museum.
  32. In 2012, an Emmy Award-winning wildlife photographer John Downer set up a bunch of underwater cameras in the waters off the southeastern coast of Africa, in order to film bottlenose dolphins in their natural habitat. The cameras were disguised as squid, fish costumes, even sea turtles; in the attempt to capture a more relaxed behaviour from the animals compared with the traditional filming techniques. And it worked. A bunch of dolphins in the footage did appear more relaxed than usual. Way, way more relaxed, in fact. First, a dolphin grabbed a puffer fish off the ocean floor, chewed on it for a while, then passed it along to another dolphin. At first it looked like the animals were playing catch with the poor puffer fish, but it didn’t take long for the scared little dude to release its primary defense mechanism: a yellowfish cloud of deadly nerve toxin, which was exactly the dolphins’ plan. While it is fatal in large doses, in small amount puffer nerve toxin is intoxicating, including a possibility of shift of consciousness that produces a trancelike state in dolphins. That’s right, these dolphins were high as a kite. After ingesting a hit, these dolphins huddled in a tight pod, smiles on their faces, tails pointed towards to seafloor, snouts tickling the water’s surface. When looking at the footage for the first time, Downer must be thinking what….. the hell am I witnessing here??
  33. In 2014, a British man named Kevin Mashford got a heart transplant. Prior to getting a new heart, he was never into cycling. But just 7 days after the transplant, he suddenly had this huge urge to start cycling. Not casually, but obsessively. And within weeks, he began to ride for hours, every single day. He had no idea why he suddenly get this obsession, until he found out that the donor of the heart was a man named John, a competitive cyclist who died in a tragic accident. And it suddenly made sense. Kevin then trained non-stop, and months later completed a 342-mile charity ride in honour of John. Kevin also met John’s family, and said “Ill carry him with me for the rest of my life.” Could it be possible that when inherited someone’s heart, we also inherit their spirit? Scientists call it “cellular memory”, a still controversial theory that argues a person’s energy, habit, or passion can live on in the organs they leave behind. Sure controversial, but what else can explain Kevin’s sudden change of entire personality to the previous heart owner’s personality?
  34. Can one telegram message change the course of history? On 3 January 1896 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany intended to send a telegram to president Kruger of South African Republic (Transvaal), which was meant to be a private diplomatic message to congratulates the Boers for defeating a British raid (the Jameson raid) without the German help. However, this message became public when British telegraph operators leaked it to the media, and it outraged the British public who saw this as foreign interference to their colonial affairs. This incident eventually destroyed the British-German relationship, which set the stage for the alliance system in the upcoming World War 1 where the British alliance fought against the German alliance. Mind you, this was a big deal because previously Britain and Germany were very close, where the current British royalty – the House of Windsor – even have German roots and was originally called The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha before King George V changed it in 1917 during World War 1 into a more English-sounding name Windsor.
  35. This incident got me thinking. If there was already bad blood between Germany and Britain (and similarly between Germany and Russia, France, etc) prior to the war, why blame the cause of the war to Gavrilo Princip? The early 20th century was the time of competing imperialism with military might, alliances between the super powers, and fierce nationalism to counter the imperial force. Now, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914 was widely regarded as the trigger that started a chain reaction that would eventually lead to World War 1. But do we know why Princip wanted to kill Franz Ferdinand? It was because the Astro-Hungarian Empire “expanded their borders” to Bosnia and Herzegovina (translation: annexed) in 1908, capturing lands from the Ottoman Empire and subjected the people to harsh treatment. It was few years after this latest annexation that the crown prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand decided to visit Sarajevo, on St. Vitus Day (a Serbian national holiday) that was seen as a deliberate insult. As a local guy living in a poor condition after the annexation, would you feel a grudge against the occupier? That’s who Princip was, a Bosnian Serb nationalist who was supported by the Black Hand, a secret society with ties to the Serbian military and aspiration of uniting Bosnia with Serbia. But yet it is Princip, and not the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who is labelled as the terrorist in the history book.
  36. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand triggered some chain reactions that began with Austria-Hungary issuing ultimatum to Serbia (due to Princip’s unconfirmed ties with Serbian military), ultimatum that largely consist of a demand to destroy anti-Austria propaganda and movements, which was not fully complied by Serbia. When this happened, Austria-Hungary (with the financial backing of Germany) declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 and in return Russia show backing to the Serbs. This Russian involvement prompted Germany (who hated the Russians) to declare on Russia on 1 August 1914 and later on France on 3 August 1914. And when Germany did this Britain then declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, and especially after Germany invaded Belgium. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire (who has a good relationship with the Germans) joined the war after on 2 November 1914 German warships took refuge in Ottoman waters and the Ottomans subsequently declared war on Russia, which is ironic because the whole thing started by Austria-Hungary who annexed Bosnia from Ottoman Empire, but now they’re allies simply because the have a common enemy in Russia.
  37. Hence, the alliances of Triple Entente or Allies (Russia, Britain, and France) vs. the Triple Alliance or Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman), while Italy switched from originally Triple Alliance (but took a neutral stance) to join Triple Entente in 1915. Did you see that? “World” War 1 was merely 3 countries fighting against 3 countries, with another 2 countries (Italy and the US) later join the Allies, all fought in Europe. The narcissistic ego on this bunch to call it a “world” war. And did I say the US? Perhaps it is a bit poetic, while an intercepted telegram started one of the bad bloods that created the sides for World War 1, another intercepted telegram kinda helped to end it. So in January 1917, in the midst of year 3 of World War 1, German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann meant to send a secret diplomatic telegram to the German ambassador in Mexico, with a proposal for a German-Mexican alliance against the US, and a promise to help Mexico to reclaim Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico (yes reclaim); as well as financial support. You know, a plan B just in case the US decide to join the war. The message, however, was intercepted by British intelligence (them again!) who then leaked it to American newspapers. When Americans read about it in the March 1917 publication, public opinion immediately shifted from neutral to demanding war and helped to push the US to declare war on Germany in April 1917, changing the outcome of the entire conflict. The war ended on 11 November 1918, with Austria-Hungary broken into Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and parts of Yugoslavia; Ottoman Empire dissolved into Turkey and several Middle Eastern countries divided by Sykes-Picot Agreement; and Germany burdened with the entire war reparations that will led to hyperinflation and paved the road for the rise of Hitler.
  38. Which brings us to Everton Football Club. Did you know that in 1912 Adolf Hitler used to live in Liverpool for a while? He stayed with his brother, Alois Hitler, and his wife Bridget at their house in 102 Upper Stanhope Street in Toxteth, after bailing Austria to avoid the military draft and came to study art. Hitler was a lonely man, used to spend most nights wandering the streets alone, and spent many nights drinking in the Poste House pub. And apparently he used to go to Everton games (of course he’s an Everton fan, no wonder he’s so bitter and angry LOL). However, this story is solely originated from Bridget Hitler’s diary, which many suspect to be exaggerated to make her book more appealing to publish after her brother in law became famous. Because records show that Adolf was supposed to be in Vienna in 1912-1913 during the time that he was reportedly in Liverpool. But Alois and Bridget really did live in Liverpool and visiting your brother overseas looks like a normal thing to do. So, who knows.
  39. There’s a bizarre tradition in Taiwan called funeral stripper. I’m sorry, a what now? Yeah, you read it correctly. The practice started in 1980 and was commercialized by the Taiwanese mafia, who began to offer strippers from their clubs to attract the crowds, honor the deceased, and ensure a lively afterlife for them. It is often seen in Buddhist-influenced funerals, because it is believed that a well-attended funeral signals the importance of the deceased and a good afterlife. Riiiight. This, uhm, “tradition”, is not weird though. Not weird at all. Because it derived from older practices of hiring female mourners to express grief, a cultural performance dated back centuries.
  40. There’s never a population in Central America who called themselves the Aztecs. And instead the natives called their civilisation as Mexica (a word where “Mexico” is derived from) where the people were called “Mexicans”, which looks and sounds awfully a lot like the “Mexicans” from Mexico today. This has caused some confusions, and in about 2 centuries ago anthropologists from some Ivy League university decided for themselves that they need to differentiates between the pre-Colombia Mexican culture and the present-day Mexican, and decided to change the ancient civilisation’s name to Aztec. The name was first coined by German explorer Alexander von Humboldt in 1810, using the origins story that these people originally came from the mythical land of Aztlán, and that “ec” in their language indicates “people.” Hence, Aztec, the people from Aztlán. I guess it never occurred by these high brows in Northeastern part of the US that “Egypt” never got confused with “Ancient Egypt” or “China” with “Ancient China”, and all they needed to do was to add “Ancient” to”Mexica.” Unless, of course, having an Ancient Mexica as your next door neighbour would make your dick feel small.
  41. Did you watch the 9/11 Files documentary by Tucker Carlson on September-October this year? In the documentary Carlson’s team interviewed some of the key people from the inside (inside White House, inside CIA, etc) that can provide more clearer view on what actually happened on 11 September 2001. And it was pretty clear, actually. According to 9/11 Files: “11 of the 19 hijackers had US visas issued in Saudi Arabia while John Brennan was CIA station chief there” and claims that Brennan was aware of it. The visa processing was, according to the documentary, part of a broader CIA-Saudi intelligence cooperation. Indeed, the CIA knew that Al Qaeda were planning for a massive attack but the CIA didn’t do anything to prevent it and blocked the information from the FBI (why?). And then once 9/11 happened the US government changed numerous laws – most notably the Patriot Act – including giving more power and money to the CIA (that’s why). Furthermore, as they began to investigate, the 9/11 Truth Commission was deliberately weakened and compromised, given no real access to the key information, having low budget and constrained resources, given a very tight deadline, and putting people inside that have conflict of interests, like Philip Zelikow; hence, the murky detail about what happened, even today 24 years later. Brennan eventually became CIA director under Obama, and Brennan tried to destroy former CIA official turned whistleblower John Kiriakou for speaking up against CIA’s new torture methods, their modus operandi, etc. So, what the hell was going on? Kiriakou on Tucker Carlson’s 9/11 Files documentary sums it best: “9/11 was the best thing that had ever happened to CIA.” Here’s his follow up in-depth interview with Joe Rogan, not long after the 9/11 Files was released.
  42. Yup, you wouldn’t be wrong if you say that 9/11 was an inside job or even a false flag operation, because they knew that it was going to happen and they did nothing to prevent it, while trying to cover it up during the investigation. The 9/11 Files documentary also clearly state that the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, also knew about the potential attack but they didn’t notify the CIA or FBI. Instead, they let it happened, and when it did those “5 Dancing Israelis” were actually real; not celebrating a job well done (as the widely held conspiracy theory suggest) but instead celebrating that it finally did happen and now Israel can milk it by provoking the US to stage a war in the Middle East, including Netanyahu’s famous plea to the US to invade Iraq. I think it’s very important to figure out the truth, so that we can truly understand how they really work: according to this documentary, Israel did not cause 9/11 BUT they didn’t share their prior knowledge to their ally US and after it happened they milk the most out of it. But then again, in the 1st episode, minute 23:03 the documentary shows a still picture of Condoleezza Rice with Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while narrating “when a man called Philip Zelikow took over as the [9/11 investigation] commission’s executive director, he reached a secret agreement with the White House to block his investigators from accessing records related to the hijackers until the White House had already screened them.”
  43. What are they trying to say, and what kept them from revealing it in the documentary? From the whole 5 episodes, it feels like they’re not revealing every information that they’d found. Just like at the end of episode 4 they said they will reveal who placed the put options on airline stocks and the overall market just days before 9/11, implying an insider information prior to the attack, but they never mention about it again ever in the last episode. Larry Silverstein wasn’t discussed, the mystery of building 7 that also collapsed wasn’t answered, the plane that hit Pentagon wasn’t discussed either. So, a little bit of grain of salt wouldn’t hurt, and we should treat this as another important puzzle piece of the big picture.
  44. Breaking mirrors is considered a bad luck because back in the day mirrors were made with toxic mercury backing that could poison us if the glass is shattered and releases deadly vapors into living spaces. Mercury poisoning could also cause severe neurological damage, organ failure and death. Ever heard a phrase “7 years of bad luck”? That’s actually the approximate length of time it took for mercury poisoning to show fatal symptoms. So, “breaking a mirror can cause 7 years of bad luck” was actually a health warning rather than superstition.
  45. The wonderfully colourful West African fabrics are actually rooted to Indonesian Batik. So, during the Dutch occupation the Dutch saw Indonesian Batik and thought that they can copy this, mass produce them, and sell them back to the Indonesians. But of course the demand for the knock-off Batik weren’t that popular. So instead, the Dutch took them and ship them to West African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Cote D’ivoire where the locals then took them but turned the prints into inspiration for local symbols of pride, power, and tradition, with more bright colours.
  46. There’s a theory called the “Bisley Boy”, where it is suggested that Queen Elizabeth I of England was actually a man. Not in a conspirational way though, like the arguments that suggest Michele Obama is Michael Obama or Brigitte Macron is a man. So when she was 9 years old Elizabeth was sent to a town called Bisley, because there’s a plague going on in the city. Now, King Henry VIII hasn’t seen her daughter for a long time, and one day he decided to go on a hunting trip near Bisley, and was planning to visit Elizabeth. But on his way there Elizabeth got sick and died. The people in Bisley were so afraid of getting the receiving end of Henry’s notorious anger, and the villagers decided to find another young girl with the same age to replace Elizabeth. But they couldn’t find one that look similar, and instead found a pretty young boy – Elizabeth’s friend, actually – that looks like her, and then dress him up as Elizabeth. King Henry wasn’t suspicious, and so the boy was raised to be Elizabeth I, one of the best queens in world history.
  47. The evidence cited by this bizarre theory are: Elizabeth’s masculine attire and behaviour, the fact that she always wear a high collar (to hide her Adam’s apple), it is said that she had no weakness of a woman and the mind of a man, and she never got married. And hundred of years later in Bisley they found an unmarked grave which when they excavate it, it contained a body of a young girl at the same age when Elizabeth would have died, wearing a Tudor royalty clothes. I dunno, I mean Elizabeth I’s story in the brilliant book The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty by G. J. Meyer looks pretty convincing that Elizabeth was indeed a woman. Otherwise, her “sexual adventures” described in the book will have a completely different twists.
  48. While Elizabeth I of England is one of the best queens in world history, do you know who is the worst? One strong candidate is a woman named Hope Cooke, an American socialite from New York City. Hope was travelling to India at the age of 19 when she met a 36 year old Palden Thondup Namgyal, the air to the throne of the kingdom of Sikkim. Kingdom of what? Exactly. This is where the story gets tragic. The Kingdom of Sikkim was a hereditary monarchy in the Eastern Himalayas, existed from 1642 to 16 May 1975. On the map, it is located snap bang in between Nepal and Bhutan (yes, that weird gap in the middle), where in 1861 it became subject to a British protectorate, but then gained independence alongside India in 1947, before Hope Cooke arrived and became one of the major factors that eventually make the kingdom vanished.
  49. So, upon meeting Hope, a widower Prince Palden immediately fell in love with her and after 2 year of writing letters to each others they eventually got married in 1963, with Hope moving from the US to the kingdom and renounced her US citizenship. The people rejected her straight from the start, however, due to her behaviour as a member of the royal family that was detestable. And it got worst when the king passed away 2 years later and his husband became the new king (and Hope officially became the queen consort). Hope reportedly showed a really bad mannerism during her time there, splashing money and only want to eat gourmet food, have luxury travels, as well as attempting to “westernized” the kingdom, while often flying back to the US to have an affair with a friend. To be fair, King Palden himself also had an affair with a married Belgium woman, but nevertheless his fragile marriage contributed to his depression and he famously drown his sadness in substance and alcoholism, which spiraling him down further to a point where he (as an unstable king in an already heated domestic political climate and annexation pressure from India), no longer have money nor power. Hope eventually left Sikkim in 1973 with their children back to the US, and king Palden then succumbed to India’s pressure and let India annexed his kingdom on 16 May 1975. The once-royal couple got divorced in 1980, and king Palden passed away in 1982. Hope is still alive today, now living in Brooklyn, New York, as a writer, historian, and lecturer.
  50. You know what the loudest animal in the planet is? Not lion, whose roar can reach 114 decibels and can be heard 8 KM away. Not elephant, who can produce a sound that reach 117 decibels. Not the blue whale with their 188 decibels, underwater. Nope, the loudest animal is a tiny shrimp at the size of our finger. They are called the pistol shrimp and they mostly live inside the warm waters of the Caribbeans, off the coast of Eastern Australia, and off the coast of east Africa. Pistol shrimps produce their sound through their claws that can snap and shut so fast – 580,000 m/s (as fast as a bullet) – that it creates a bubble. And inside the bubble the temperature rises to 4700 degree Celsius, almost as hot as the surface of the Sun (5500 degree Celsius), before it hit its target and snaps to create a sound of 210 decibels (louder than a gunshot, or a jet engine). So loud that it can scare or even kill other sea animals (yup, just like a bullet from a pistol). So loud that its snaps are detected even by military hydrophones on submarines.
  51. This guy should be one of the richest man in the world. But, just like Tim Berners-Lee who let everyone use his invention the internet for free, this guy also gave his invention away for all humanity to use for free. Meet Masahiro Hara. In 1992 workers at Toyota factory in Japan were scanning 10 different barcodes just to track 1 car park, it was so inefficient and workers were exhausted. Hara was a quiet 35 year-old engineer back then, who loves playing “go” during lunch breaks. One day, while starring at those black and white stones at the game board he realized something, what if the codes could work like go? Not just left to right like normal barcode, but also up and down too. Same space, more information. For the next 6 months he obsessively studies every piece of materials he can find, from magazines, to newspapers, even fliers, to hunt for the perfect pattern that scanners will never confused with random texts. And then he found the magic ratio: 3 small squares, that can be read from any angle instantly. That’s right, in 1994 the QR Code was born. His company immediately wanted to patent everything and charge royalty, but Hara made a decision that made his colleagues think that he’s lost it: he gives it away for free, no licensing fee, nothing. Because, if you want to change the world, you don’t own it, you share it. Fast forward 3 decades later, today QR Code process over $2 billion transactions daily in China alone, with the global QR payment is now a $35 billion market and growing. That decision to make his invention free has created the foundation of our cashless society.
  52. On 15 November 1883, there was a ship called Martha Cobb’s Cargo captained by Thomas Greenbank carrying goods across the Atlantic, when they encountered a giant storm. During the storm they saw another ship nearby in trouble, the Grecian, which was overloaded with grain bound for Portugal and got damaged by the storm and started to take on water. By the time Greenbank’s ship found the Grecian, the stormy ocean had destroyed all of their life boats and they were signaling for help. But it was too rough to send lifeboats, and Greenbank decided to wait for conditions to improve. But after several hours the conditions have not changed, and thus Greenbank decided to pump out the petroleum product that they were carrying into the ocean, but to no avail. So, the Martha Cobb crewmembers tried something else: dumping 5 gallons of fish oil into the water. And the rough seas immediately calms down. This was an old pirate’s trick, but it actually has the verification of science behind why it works. You see, fish oil has molecules with a water-attracting (polar) end and a water-repelling (non-polar) end. When poured on water, the oil will spread creating a thin single layer (monolayer), with the polar ends submerged in the water and the non-polar tails point upwards. This oil film then spreads out and lowers the surface tension at wave peaks, which eventually flattens the waves. This phenomenon is known as the Marangoni Effect. So, next time you’re going on an adventure into the sea, it won’t hurt bringing 5 gallons of fish oils along with you.
  53. Einstein once said the faster you go, the slower time ticks for you. And at the speed of light, time stops. That’s the origins of the thinking that if we can somehow manage to move at the speed of light, we can technically expand to inventing time travel. But do you know how fast is a speed of light is? It’s approximately 299,792,458 meters / second. Or roughly, to make it neater, around 300,000 KM / 1 second. That’s equivalent to circling the Earth around 7.48 times in 1 freakin second. That’s crazy fast! But imagine if we indeed can invent something that can go at the speed of light, and just travel away from Earth and never stop. What can happen, or where can we go?
  54. Well, at 8.3 minute we’d reach the Sun. After 4 hours and 6 minutes we’d passed the farthest planet in our solar system. And then we’d entered the Kuiper belt filled with large mess of comets and asteroids. After 23 hours and 19 minutes we’d reached the farthest object ever sent by humans up until now (remember, in the speed of light 1 second is equivalent to circling the Earth around 7.48 times). Beyond that, at 29 days we’d hit this cloud of icy debris that takes 1 year and a half to get out from. After 4 years, we’d pass Proxima Centauri, the nearest star from us. After 88 years, we’d arrived at the edge of our “radio bubble”, a some kind of bubble wrapping us and several other solar systems (the distance where radio waves have travelled out into the universe). That, by the way, in the grand scale of our Milky Way galaxy, where after 100 years of speed of light we’d just be coming out of this tiny bubble on the outer ring of the galaxy. And it would take us 27,000 years to go from there to reach the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (that bright white thing in the middle) and another 55,000 years to go to the other edge. If we keep going and going and going, in 46.5 billion years we’d reached the edge of our observable universe (so far) where our galaxy is only one out of 200 billion trillion galaxies. No light has ever arrived at Earth from places outside this edge. So yeah, insanely, utterly, massive! And surely, from places as vast as the observable universe, we can’t possibly be alone, can we?
  55. One possible “alien encounter” appeared in Mexico. On 21 June 1976 a 23 year old student pilot by the name of Rafael Pacheco Perez took his first practice solo flight, taking off from la Escuela de Aviacion “Mexico” on an XB-ZOX plane. In this solo flight he was planning to fly from the Mexico City airport to the las pistas de Chimalhuacan, an empty fields by lake Texcoco, in less than an hour flight. Right away after taking off he noticed that it’s very foggy around the plane and he doesn’t really have a good sense of where he is. He then tried to call the control tower but didn’t get a feedback and only static sound. So he tried to turn the plane left, but the plane kept flying forwards and ascend higher towards a big cloud, before he passed out. And when he got to 900 feet in the air, the plane disappeared from all radar. 1 hour later, Rafael finally resurfaced, a whole 3 hours distance away in Acapulco. The thing is, this training plane wasn’t made to travel that far, and it only had enough fuel for the trip to Chimalhuacan, not somewhere 3 hours away (and fly there within 1 hour), and he didn’t have the experience to make it over the huge mountains on that flight path. So what the hell happened?
  56. When he resurfaced the radio tower asked Rafael to identify himself, and he requested for a private channel to talk to them. In this private channel Rafael replied that this is his voice but he’s speaking not of his own free will, but rather being used as a microphone. By who? They say that they are beings from the same universe as ours, their planet is many light-years away, they are physically the same as us (and that all races in the universe are physically the same), they had always been here, but compared to them humans were primitive. They say that they can speak any language, and the air traffic controller happened to able to speak German, English, and Spanish, and these people were able to engage (while Rafael himself only knew Spanish). They said that they were watching us from the skies, that we are not alone in the universe, and we had to change from our habit to killing each others, otherwise there will be an irreversible global catastrophe. The transmission then ended.
  57. Not long after, the frequency changed and it was Rafael again. But this time he was calling out for help in a freaked out tone, saying he didn’t know where he is and he was 7000 feet in the air and he can only see water. He then was guided to safety, and when landed he was arrested. He was interrogated and screened for any type of intoxication but no trace of drugs or alcohol was found. Psychologically tested, but they also found nothing is wrong with him. So finding nothing’s wrong with him, they let him go home by bus to Mexico City, where he never piloted a plane again. And we never heard from our neighbours from the same universe again.
  58. Have you ever wondered why in England so many cities have names ended with “ham”, “ton”, “by”, or “chester”? As it turns out, they are historical stamps on who used to control the area. Like “Ham” in Birmingham, Nottingham, Gillingham, it is an Anglo-Saxons word for homestead or village, which the Anglo-Saxons controlled around 1400 years ago. And there’s “ton”, like Brighton, Luton, Taunton, where Tun means a farm; also controlled by the Anglo-Saxons. All of these Anglo-Saxons area are in the south. Now “by” – as in Derby, Grimsby, Whitby – is an old Norse word for village. These places are where the Vikings used to settle, which is all over the north and east of England. And then we have the “caster” or “chester” or “cester”, like Lancaster, Chester, Leicester, Manchester. These words came from Latin, where the area used to be Roman military sites over 1800 years ago.
  59. Speaking of Manchester, in Australia the collective noun for bed sheets, pillow cases, towel, bedding, etc, is “Manchester.” So when Britain invented cotton, Manchester was the center of what would become the cotton industry. And then after a while in the 19th century they started to ship away cotton to the colonies, including Australia. And when they arrived at the port in Australia, all the cotton-made goods are all boxed into one and labelled “Manchester”, as in the box that came from Manchester. I bet the locals sees the box with the label Manchester and thought, I guess these things are called Manchester!
  60. You know in fairy tales the story often begins with the sentence “once upon a time”? In Korea, they use this sentence instead: “back when tigers smoked.” Now that’s badass. The saying comes from a time when tigers were pivotal in Korean folklore, which symbolizes both danger and protection. But what’s with the smoking? It is a very human act, which when combining the 2 it will create an image that is so impossible that it placed the story outside reality. Indeed, this phrase signals right from the beginning that the story that follows will be something mythical or from the realm of imagination.
  61. In 16th century England there was an occasion called the Great Debasement (1544-1551), where under the order of Henry VIII the amount of precious metal in gold and silver coins were reduced, and in some cases even completely replaced with cheaper base metals such as copper. The idea was the debasement would give the Crown more gold and silver (aka, more money) to fund the overspending by Henry VIII due to his lavish lifestyle, and to fund more wars with Scotland and France. As a consequence, the debasement led to a surge of prices (where sellers anticipated the drop in value for the coins, and adjusted price accordingly for each coin, causing inflation). It also marked the loss of credibility for British merchants and the royal family, making foreign merchants to refuse to accept debased currency as payment, which eventually disrupted trade relationship with other countries. The debasement and inflation, naturally, also eventually led to widespread social unrest. The debasement was eventually revoked by Edward VI but was later continued, until 1560 when Queen Elizabeth I came to her senses and restored the coinage to its previous standards. A lesson apparently never learned by some people in history.
  62. Which brings us to today. In 2025 we saw a record jump in gold price, from $2075/ounce at the beginning of the year to breaching the $4000 mark in October, with economists from big names such as Société Générale and Bank of America all predicting gold price could reach $5000-6000 in 2026. The reason? To put it bluntly, Trump’s shenanigans over trade and fiscal policies that have the potential to drive the already massive US national debt of $38 trillion to even higher figures, which would further weakened the value of (and the trust towards) the USD. In other words, in this fiat-currency era: modern-day debasement. Now, the talking heads on the media can argue all they want about the positive and negative impacts of Trump’s actions, but the market cannot be fooled. The rise of the price of gold perfectly aligned with the timing when Trump first came to the office in January 2025, for his 2nd term. The lost of trust in the treatment of USD is eventually what led investors and traders alike to switch to a safer “risk-free-rate” asset of gold, which is why when gold breached the $4000 mark it has risen by around 50% by that point, with Bitcoin also risen by 18%, while at the same time the USD has dropped by 9% since the start of the year. And you know what happens if the USD is starting to lose its power (even before Trump shenanigans)? The collapse of the US Empire (that is powered by petrodollar recycling, which I covered here in 2012).
  63. So the Empire is crumbling, with another superpower looks set to rise as the dominant force. If you’re the leader of a crumbling power, with a giant ego, what would you do? Exactly, have a tantrum (yeah, I’m not going to get a US visa after this). That’s what the Trump tariffs were on 2 April, where out of the blue he announced a bombshell of tariffs for all countries around the world (including islands that only have penguins as its inhabitants). The market immediately crashed, whipping more than $6 trillion, hedge funds’ “Basis Trade” got exposed, Treasury yield spiked to 4.5% and was this close to needing a Fed bailout. And then, in what become a signature move with his passive-aggressiveness, Trump then gave a bizarre face-saving speech filled with ego, saying “these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are dying to make a deal, please, please sir make a deal. I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything sir.” Only to back off from the move (another Trump signature move that prompted the slogan of TACO: Trump Always Chicken Out), pausing the new tariffs for 90 days. Except for China, the superpower that look set to be the replacement of the US Empire, their tariff became 125% and the trade war is ON full blast, with tariffs increase and decrease and increase again for China became the dominant headline grabbers throughout 2025.
  64. But there was 1 other headline on 10 April 2025 that went under the radar, that can give us more clues over the way Trump operate. From Reuters, a week after Trump tariff bombshell: “US recognizes Panama’s sovereignty over canal, Panama says after talks.” Why Panama? In the first few months of his 2nd term, Trump has been obsessing about Panama alongside Greenland to be the country that Trump wants to grab for the US. The Panama Canal is controlled by a Hong Kong-based company CK Hutchison Holding (owned by Li Ka-shing), which operates both the entrance port at Pacific ocean and the Atlantic ocean. And on March 2025, the company said that it would sell its interests in a deal worth $22.8bn to a consortium led by US investment firm, BlackRock. The deal covered a total of 43 ports in 23 countries, including the 2 in Panama. But then on Monday 31 March the Chinese government blocked the deal (Hutchison is a private company but operates under Chinese government’s financial laws), citing a thread to its national interest. And two days later, on 2 April, Trump launched the tariff bombshell to all, but hit China in particular pretty hard. Coincidence?
  65. Less than a week later on Monday 7 April, Panama’s comptroller authority suddenly publish an audit that claims to have found irregularities in the renewal of a 25-year port concession with Hutchison, which put more pressure for Hutchison to let Panama go. And coincidentally (juuust coincidentally), the report was published on the same day the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Panama to participate in a regional security conference. He’s the first Defense Secretary to visit Panama in decades, and in the conclusion of his visit on Wednesday 9 April he said that the US recognizes Panama’s sovereignty over its canal, and announced an agreement to deepen US military training in the country – hence the 10 April Reuters headline (you know what happens when Murica decides that a country needs “freedom” LOL). But why the sudden interest on Panama? Because, get this, around 40% of US container traffic (roughly $270 billion/year) passes this canal. Imagine what will happen if “China” suddenly closes the canal? Looks like Panama is a key puzzle piece to this whole shenanigans, alongside China’s 70% control over Rare Earth Minerals, a key component to microchip that are being used to power AI and other tech innovations in Silicon Valley.
  66. Indeed, Rare Earth, which was what another Trump tantrum on Friday 10 October all about, where he announced a 100% additional tariff on China over their Rare Earth Mineral ban, creating a massive crash particularly in crypto market where Bitcoin crashed -12%, Ethereum -16%, Solana -20%, XRP -25%, Dogecoin -50%, among others, with $19.1 billion in total were liquidated in 24 hours, the biggest liquidation event in crypto history (20x larger than COVID crash). Curiously, 30 minutes before Trump’s announcement there was an unknown trader who opened a new account at that same day, placed a massive $190 million short on Bitcoin, closed 90% at the bottom after the crash, and walked away with $88 millions. And sure enough, by Sunday TACO Trump posted on his Truth Social that suggested he may not follow through with his treat on Friday. Indeed, it has market manipulation written all over this (and many pointed at Baron Trump, without proof, of course). But since the crypto market is not regulated, this were all legal. So, considering all of this shenanigans – not to mention many other things that Trump did domestically like the despicable ICE, National Guard deployments to Democrat states, the standoffs that created the government shutdown – can you really blame the lost of trust on the USD and investors’ exodus to gold? And this is just the 1st year (out of 4) of his 2nd term. Fun times ahead!
  67. In the Middle Ages, there was once lived a woman named Phyllis. She’s a great seducer, even became the mistress of Philip II of Macedon. She said to be very beautiful, so much so that Philip’s son Alexander the Great also had an eye on her, which prompted Aristotle (Alexander’s tutor) to warn him against her. So, what did Phyllis do? To teach Aristotle a lesson, she then decided to seduce him too. Hence, the many famous paintings and sculpture of a woman riding a sad old man like a horse. That was Aristotle! Oh dear, yes she got into him eventually, where Aristotle let Phyllis ride her around like a horse to prove his devotion to her. And the best part was, Phyllis had arranged Alexander to witness this humiliating scene LOL. Moral of the story: don’t mess with a seductress. And I must admit it tarnished the credibility of Aristotle in my mind.
  68. Sphincter control is our conscious ability to regulate the opening and closing of the sphincter muscle that control bodily functions like urination and defecation. In other words, it’s the ability to hold pee and poop. Do you know when do we learn to do it? The most common answer is around 18-24 months. But as it turns out, that answer is a lie. It was produced by the Pampers Institute in order to delay potty training (and thus sell more disposable diapers) and this information has spread all over throughout the years that it becomes a common knowledge. But the truth is, babies are born with sphincter control and with a proper training they can already hold it from an earlier age till you get the diaper off.
  69. There once a man in India by the name of Hira Ratan Manek, who had 1 question: can the body live on just light? Born in 1937, he was an engineer turned seeker of ancient wisdom; and in 1995 he undergone a spiritual journey that led him to survive 411 days without food. And instead, he lived just by drinking water and, more importantly, by doing “sun gazing.” This wasn’t a crazy guy trying out a crazy thing, as this practice have been implemented by Egyptian priests, yogis, and Tibetan Monks. No, Manek wanted a scientific proof, and his practice was being closely monitored by doctors 24/7, doing body scans, blood tests, retinal exams. So what happened? Days passed, then months, and no weight loss and no organ failure. Instead, he got energy, stability, and clarity. NASA heard about it, and in 2002 Manek was studied at the University of Pennsylvania, this time with neurologists, endocrinologists, and millions in funding. And the result: his pineal gland was enlarged, from the usual 6×6 mm to 8×11 mm. His serotonin and melatonin peaked, his brain showed regeneration instead of a decline. And weirdly, he wasn’t starving but instead adapting.
  70. So, what is actually “sun gazing”? Manek starts with 10 seconds of sun gazing (looking directly at the sun) at sunrise or sunset while being barefooted on Earth. He then adds 10 second daily until it reached 44 minutes/day (remember, during sunrise or sunset, and not when the sun is at full blast). By doing this, light enters the retina, which will signal the hypothalamus, which in turn will activates the pineal gland. Once it occurs, it will rewire energy, awareness and perhaps even biology itself. NASA, however, never released their full report, the project then was stopped, and the researchers stay silent. But Manek kept teaching his method, with critics called him pseudoscientific. But is he really? It is a know fact that plants convert light into energy, then animals eat those plants, and in turn we eat either the animals or the plants directly. So, why couldn’t humans go straight to the source: light? This of course raise another question, are we actually solar powered? (I’m pretty sure that cats are solar powered, just look at the way they “charge” everyday, but this is a story for another day LOL).
  71. You know that conspiracy theory about the Titanic? The one that suggest JP Morgan orchestrated the sinking of Titanic to eliminate several opponents of the creation of the Federal Reserve system? Indeed, it so happened that several wealthy individuals that opposed the creation of the Fed, such as John Jacob Astor, Isidor Straus, and Benjamin Guggenheim, were all on the Titanic when it sunk. The conspiracy theory emerged after JP Morgan was also supposed to be in the ship, but he cancelled last minute. But there’s another conspiracy theory about the Titanic that is equally intriguing: the Titanic never sank. Don’t get me wrong, a ship really sank on 15 April 1912 and around 1500 passengers aboard that ship died. But, as the theory goes, the Titanic ship was secretly swapped with its sister ship the Olympic as part of an insurance scam, where Olympic (now secretly operating as the Titanic) would be scuttled into an accident and the owner of the ship (White Star Line) could collect an insurance payment, while the original Titanic still in tact. This ship swapping also contributed to the JP Morgan theory, as Morgan (who own White Star Line) was the one who allegedly switched the Titanic to an inferior ship to drown his enemies. There are several reasons that supported these theories, but the number one reason was the fact that they didn’t allow the Titanic to be examined before its voyage, while when people were comparing the pictures between Titanic that was under construction and the Titanic on its first voyage, the 2nd picture were eventually changed with a picture that look closer with the Olympic.
  72. You know that famous moment in history when the library of Alexandria got burned and all the known knowledge of the world up until then were all vanished? Have you ever think that maybe there are other libraries that hold similar amount of knowledge? Well we actually have one, and it’s still exist today. They call it the Cave of 1000 Buddhas (or the Mogao Caves), and it is located in Tibet, no sorry, present-day China (located about 25 KM southeast of Dunhuang province). The library is located up in the mountains, and specifically cave 17 was sealed for a long time until it was discovered in 1900. It contains tens of thousands of manuscripts and relics from around 5th to 11th century AD.
  73. So what knowledge do they provide us with? Perhaps the biggest revelation from this library is an ancient map that shows a giant island of Atlantis (as big as North America, or at least bigger than Europe in the map) in, guess where? In Atlantic ocean (yeah, the clue is always there right in front of our faces). The island is located snap bang in now-empty space in the middle between 4 points (clockwise): North America at the top left, Europe at the top right, West Africa at the bottom right, and the Caribbean (or above Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guyana) at the bottom left. And if you recall in 100 Things 2023 no 11-12 about the Richat Structure, where evidence over the capital of Atlantis being in modern-day Mauritania, it’s still clicked. This also means the underwater ruins in the Bahamas and Cuba that have similar style with Egypt (shout out to Graham Hancock), were all part of Atlantis and further proof that they were all part of this intriguing ancient civilisations that all have similar style of architecture.
  74. There’s a golf course called Tornio golf club, where the first 7 holes are in Sweden and the rest 11 are in Finland, with the most spectacular part is its 6th hole: a 132-yard par 3 where the tee is in Sweden and the green is in Finland. You could say, you hit a golf ball so hard that you send it to another country.
  75. One day, a student by the name of George Dantzig was late to his grad stats class, and he was rushing into the classroom without talking to anyone, only to find an empty class and 2 math problems on the blackboard. He thought, this must be the assignment, so he copied them and went home to do the homework. But as he work on it, he realized that this is not just an ordinary homework, and that he needed more time to solve it. And thus, few days later he eventually hand in his assignment while apologising over the lateness of the submission. But 6 weeks later, his professor came to his dorm room being excited and shaking at the same time. It turned out that the math problems that Dantzig did was not a homework, but they were actually 2 of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. And Dantzig has just solved them. His work later transformed the fields of economics, engineering, and computer science. And perhaps more importantly (for me), his life later inspired the movie Good Will Hunting.
  76. Remember the kid who was reincarnated from Princess Diana? Meet a boy who used to be Lou Gehrig. So, at the age of 2 a boy named Christian started to say things that no child – who has never been exposed to baseball – should know, when he was remembering that he used to be a famous baseball player and that his name was Lou Gehrig (“the Iron Horse”). Of course his parents dismissed it at first, until one day Christian saw a bunch of photos and saw a photo of Babe Ruth and he immediately said “he was mean to me.” And then he saw a team photo as said, “I’m the one with dimples.” When his memory has become too vivid to ignore, his mother then started to investigate. Because Christian’s memory got weirder, as he remembered the smallest minute details, like being left-handed and Lou’s swing technique. And the thing was, Lou died in 1941 after being diagnosed with ASL, and Christian remembered it all when he said “I had to stop playing baseball because my body stopped working.” And when shown the photos of Lou’s parents, Christian can say their names. But just like the kid who was once Princess Diana, by the time Christian is 5, these memories were starting to fade.
  77. Not convinced yet? In 1963, in a quiet town of Ashford, Ohio, a little girl named Emily was born. From a young age she likes to say strange things that her parents couldn’t understand. And when she was 4 years old, she told her parents that she used to live in Egypt and that she was a servant for Cleopatra. Of course her parents laugh, as they thought it was just a child’s imagination. But then as Emily grew older, unlike the boy at previous story (and the reincarnation of Lady Di), her memories of her past life actually became stronger. And by the time she turned 6, she can draw and write in ancient Egyptian symbols, even though no one had taught her. Furthermore, she spoke about the royal palace as if she had lived there, describing the grand stone floors and the rich scent of perfumes. Curious, when Emily turned 18 her parents brought her to Egypt. When they arrived at the Pyramids, Emily could move through the ancient halls like she had been there before: she pointed out rooms few people know, can walk through secret passageways and able to describe hidden chambers in detail. At one point she stopped in front of a small chamber and told her parents that this is where she used to sleep. A few days later, they found a hidden tomb in one of the pyramids, where there was a mummified servant dressed in robes and she looked exactly like Emily. The tomb was unmarked, but above it there’s a symbol that Emily has been drawing since she was a child.
  78. Ok one more. There’s another kid in the US by the name of Ryan, who since he can talk he has been telling everyone that he has lived on Earth before, but he was murdered and buried. Of course at first people laugh at him, but his teacher became concern after he keep on repeating it, and told his parents. Ryan claimed that in his past life he was a 45 year old man who live in a small house near the woods, working as a wood cutter, next to his neighbour who one day murdered him with an axe struck to his head. Ryan even described the location of his home, the name of the neighbour who killed him, and where his body was buried. Curious, his parents then take him to the place that he had described, and found an older man who is still living in the same house. When they knocked on the door, he refused to answer, so they called the police. Good thing that they took Ryan seriously, as the began looking at the place where Ryan said he was buried, and in their disbelieve they found a human remains. And next to the skeleton was an axe, still embedded in the skull. When confronted with the discover, the old man finally admitted of murdering his neighbour years ago, exactly how Ryan described it.
  79. Do you know why some words in British English and American English are different? Like cancelled (UK) and canceled (US), colour (UK) and color (US)? It is because back in the day American newspaper ads charged by the letter, so to save money a lot of people began to eliminate unnecessary letters like the second L in cancelled or the U in colour. Some of these spelling changes were used so frequently in the ads that in time they became stuck and became the commonly used spelling. In short: American spelling changed because of capitalism.
  80. This year there’s another genocide apart from Gaza that keeps on getting worse and worse: Sudan. It is a gruesome picture where since the civil war broke in 2023 between 61,000 – 150,000 people have died, 12 million forcibly displaced, and 30.4 million people (more than half of Sudan’s population) are in desperate need of aid. What is happening? It can be traced back to the downfall of its dictator Omar al-Bashir, but to understand that we need to go back further. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1956 Sudan has endured 20 coup attempts, prolonged military rule, and 2 civil wars, with Bashir himself took power on 30 June 1989 when he led a military coup that ousted the democratically-elected government of Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi and President Ahmed al-Mirghani. He stayed in power for 3 decades, that is until he was toppled in a 2019 coup.
  81. During Bashir’s dictatorship there has been an ongoing conflict in Western Darfur due to ethnic tensions (between blacks and Arabs) and disputes over land and water. In 2003 the situation escalated into a full rebellion against Bashir’s government, where Bashir relied on the Janjaweed (a union of Sudanese Arab militias) to crush the rebellion. 300,000 people reportedly died and 2.7 million forcibly displaced. In 2013 Bashir announced that Janjaweed will be reorganised into Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and will be led by Janjaweed’s commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (or more commonly known as Hemedti). The RSF then conducted more mass killings, mass rapes, torture, pillage, and destruction of villages, as well as conducting an ethnic cleansing of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit people. RSF was also sent to quash an uprising in South Darfur. During this time RSF developed a working relationship with the Russian paramilitary Wagner Group (who are used by Putin in Russia’s invasion on Ukraine). In short: RSF was Bashir’s trusted attack dog, even when there’s an official army of Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). This was further shown by a 2017 new law that gave the RSF the status of “independent security force” and Hemedti received several gold mines in Darfur as patronage from Bashir (these gold mines will later be a main source of funding for RSF in the civil war since 2023, with the gold traded to UAE and become the main focus of the international pressure and activism).
  82. But then in April 2019, after widespread protests against Bashir due to economic crisis, the military (including SAF and RSF) ousted Bashir and established a Transitional Military Council (TMC). In August 2019 the military agreed to share power in an interim joint civilian-military unity government headed by a civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, with elections planned in 2023. But then in 2021 the military changed their mind and seized power once again, led by SAF’s leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF’s Hemedti, and the leadership of Sudan was reconstructed as a military junta led by Burhan. After the 2021 coup, tension began to rise after the weak Sudanese economy steeply declined, which further fueling protests demanding the junta to return power to civilian authorities. And tension between Burhan and Hemedti also arose, after Burhan’s restoring old-guard officials – who had dominated the Bashir government – to the office, which Hemedti saw as Burhan’s attempt to maintain the dominance of Khartoum’s traditional political elite, a danger to RSF because the elites were hostile against Hemedti due to his ethnic Darfuri Arab background.
  83. Tensions between SAF and RSF then escalated in February 2023, as RSF began to recruit members across Sudan and the capital Khartoum, until a deal was brokered in 11 March and the RSF withdrew. But the deal was shaky, with disputes occurring around the plan to integrate RSF into the military (the army’s proposed 2 years timetable vs. RSF’s preferred 10 years timetable) and whether RSF should be under the command of the army chief rather than its commander-in-chief Burhan. On 11 April 2023, RSF finally deployed forces near the city of Merowe and Khartoum, and led to clashes with the government forces when RSF took control of the Soba military base south of Khartoum, raising fears of a potential rebellion against the military junta. Hence, the civil war between the 2 military powers erupted, with fighters from both SAF and RSF proceeded to conduct a genocide in various towns and villages, creating humanitarian catastrophe.
  84. This is where it gets interesting. Look at the foreign involvements in Sudan’s civil war. Countries supporting SAF: Egypt, Eritrea, Russia, Saudi, Ukraine. Countries supporting RSF: Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Russia’s Wagner Group, UAE, UK. While countries supporting both: China (supplying weapons to both), Iran (supplying drones to both), Turkey (supplying weapons to both). It’s important to highlight that Saudi’s proxy is fighting against UAE’s proxy, Libya is supporting RSF to counter Egypt’s support on SAF, and funny how Russia (SAF) is on the same camp as Ukraine (SAF) and both are fighting against Wagner group (RSF). So, the ultimate question is, who is the bad guy here? The media and international activism are quickly pointing out RSF’s war crimes in Darfur and Geneina as the demon here, which is justified. But it doesn’t mean that SAF is a saint, as they also have conducted lethal attacks on civilians, bombing infrastructures, torturing, rape, etc. Indeed, this is one of those classic cases of assholes fighting against assholes, and it is the civilians in the middle who are paying the price. But you won’t see this big picture in the mainstream media, as the focus is oddly solely on UAE’s support for RSF in exchange of its gold (which is true and it is highly questionable, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg isn’t it?).
  85. BB King named his guitar “Lucile” after he had to rescue the guitar from a burning building, where the fire was started by 2 men fighting over a woman named Lucile. Unlike many of us, whenever they’re flying, his guitar “Lucile” flies in first class.
  86. Norway is one of the largest countries in the world that uses electric cars (95%), where 88% of car sales in 2024 were all Electric Vehicle. And this trend is arguably started by the band A-Ha. In 1989 A-Ha’s lead singer Morten Harket and environmentalist Frederic Hauge imported a converted electric Fiat Panda from Switzerland, and drove it around Oslo while refusing to pay toll roads and incurring fines to show the advantages of electric vehicles. The stunt caught media’s attention and the public’s attention, and since then they were credited with helping to introduce incentives for EV adoption in the country.
  87. One day in 19th century England, a man by the name of John Brooks of Brooks Brothers was attending a polo match when he noticed a specific feature in the shirts of the polo players: the corners of each collar were buttoned down, to prevent the collars to flapping up and down during the match and hitting the face of the players. John thought it was so good that he became obsessed with it. So he went home and immediately created the original polo shirt, not the ones that we know today, but what we now refer as the Oxford cloth buttoned down. So why do they call today’s polo shirt, a “polo shirt”? In the early 1900s people who play tennis used to wear stiff pants, a button up shirt, and boots. That was until 7 times grand slam champion Renee LaCoste entered the game, who thought the common outfit to play tennis is impractical. So one day, in an utter shock to everyone, he came out in a match wearing a (gasp) short sleeve collared piquet cotton shirt (faints). And shortly after his retirement, he launched his namesake brand with its knitted cotton tennis shirt, and it was instantly a hit in Europe (and that crocodile logo came from his nickname “le crocodile”). By the 1950s LaCoste partnered with ISOD to produce the shirts in America, and by the 1960s the shirt was everywhere in popular culture, from universities to the Oval Office. But during the polyester boom in the 1960s, most of these shirts ended up being woven along with synthetics, which helped to keep the structure of the shirt and to keep the colour from bleeding, making the shirt to look brand new all the time.
  88. Ok, so what’s that got to do with “polo” shirt, you’re asking? One person who hates to see shirt looking brand new all the time is Ralph Lauren. And in 1972 he dropped a 100% cotton version of the shirt with a whooping 24 colour variations, labeled with the Polo player icon on the left chest (to convey luxury, sophistication, and a sense of exclusivity). The tagline: it gets better with age. These shirts were so popular that it became synonymous with the brand – Polo Ralph Lauren – so much so that through time this type of shirt is no longer called the knitted tennis shirt. Here’s a twist that makes it a full circle: Ralph Lauren worked for Brooks Brothers before starting Polo by Ralph Lauren.
  89. There’s a young man from Libya by the name of Amer, who was travelling to go to the Hajj pilgrimage this year when he suddenly encountered a security problem involving his name during the airport procedures. The airport staff said they will try to solve it for him, but he will have to wait. During the wait, the other pilgrims have completed their procedures, have boarded the plane, and the door was closed. Only minutes later Amer’s problem was resolved and he was allowed to leave, but the pilot refused to open the door back and the plane eventually took off without him. The airport staffs tried to console him, but Amer refused to leave the airport and insisted “I intend to perform Hajj, and Insha Allah, I will go.” Suddenly, they received a report that the plane is having a malfunction and that they needed to return. However, despite returning to the airport and waiting while the plane is being maintained, the pilot is still refusing to open the door for Amer. The airport staff again said “it was not meant for you” but Amer again said with certainty “I intend to perform Hajj, and insha Allah, I will go.” And right on que, when the plane is starting to move again, a report came in that it had another malfunction and needed to return for the 2nd time. It was at that moment that the pilot realised what had happened, and said “I will not fly without Amer.” They eventually fly with Amer, and arrived in Saudi safely. The moral of the story? Yes, sure, when it’s meant to be it will happen, but more importantly, the pilot was a dick.
  90. Speaking of dicks. Some species in the deep sea have a detachable – sperm-filled – penis that can swim on its own, and seek the female species to procreate (like a heat seeking missile). Indeed, during mating season species such as Argonauta releases this special force using muscle movements and (possibly small) fin-like motions, which is guided by instinct or chemical cues to reaches the female, delivers the sperm, and in some cases embeds itself in her body. This bizarre function is likely evolved as a solution to the challenges of locating a mate in the dark, vast, sparsely population depth of the ocean (somewhere in here there’s a potential of a very funny yo mama joke, but I can’t think of one).
  91. Perhaps the most pressing question in today’s modern world is whether AI will be a threat to humanity? Let’s see what history can teach us. The printing press was introduced in the mid 1400s, which allowed for a more proliferation of writing and replacing error-prone (and laborious) manual hand copying. But yet, so many people complained that intellectual life as they knew it was doomed, doomed I tell ya! Erasmus even went on a tirade in 1525 against the “swarms of new books” and blamed printers (whose profit motive was to seek to fill the world with books) were “foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive.” Meanwhile, another intellectual Gottfried Leibniz complained about “that horrible mass of books that keeps on growing” which would ultimately end in nothing less than a “return to barbarism.” Descartes also chimed in by saying “even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life and more effort to select the useful things than to find them oneself.” The complains about books hilariously reverberated way, waaaay, too long into the late 1600s, with intellectuals warned that people would stop talking to each other, burying themselves in books instead, and polluting their minds with useless and fatuous ideas.
  92. Of course, as we all know, these warnings resurfaced again and again in our lifetime when radio was invented, then television, computers, iPods, internet, e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Every single one of them were decried as an addiction, a distraction, that will make us unable to engage with real people and real-time exchange of ideas. Even the dial phone was heavily criticised when it replaced operator-assisted calls, with some worried that they will not remember all those phone numbers. So relax, tranquillo, the AI can be very useful for humanity if utilised correctly, as proven today in tech-heavy China, not to mention the many benefits that we already unconsciously use like algo in social media, suggestions in Spotify or Netflix, etc, or how the likes of ChatGPT can be a very useful research assistance. After all, as David Epstein (no relation) remarks in his book Range AI is focusing more on the small tactics and humans have more on the big-picture strategy. And someday, soon enough, all of the skepticism of its usage will eventually die down and we’ll adapt to a world where AI will become a subtle presence in our lives.
  93. Book of the year: This year I read the usual 50+ books, including the hilarious Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player In a Whorehouse by Paul Carter. I enjoyed reading it so much that I immediately purchased and read the sequel This is Not a Drill: Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield, which is equally amusing. I also enjoyed reading Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries (about his trip around Latin America in the 1950s), and then a book by Patrick Symmes that re-traced Guevara’s journey in Latin America 50 years later (which makes it an even better book), and Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare – which I agree is way too much Guevara in a year. Moreover, 2025 is the commemoration of Indonesian legendary writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 100 years and I’ve managed to read 6 books by/about Pram. I also read books by the best writers: Tolstoy, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Coelho, Hemingway, Wilde, books by other Indonesian legends (N.H Dini and Tan Malaka), a thick-ass book about Ian Fleming, a tale about the intellectual scene of 1940s New York City, and many more. But 2 books stand out from the crowd: 1. Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom, which is so refreshing and engaging in a good way 2. Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Giuffre, which is very gripping but in a bad way, due to its nature as a memoir by the most recognisable face among Epstein’s victims. And the winner? Due to the wide range of topics that I’ve read, the comparisons between the books are not necessarily apple to apple. But, the one book that I can’t seems to put down, where I produced the most notes from, and it provides very useful insights into the psychology of sex abuse victims and their perpetrators, not to mention the impact that this book could potentially have on world politics in the near future: Nobody’s Girl.
  94. Btw, when Epstein’s New York town house was raided on 6 Jul 2019, the police found “extraordinary volume” of nude pictures of young women, $70,000 in cash, 48 loose diamonds, and 3 passports belonging to Epstein: US, Israel, and an expired passport from Austria with a fake name and listed a home address in Saudi (a getaway plan). And then on 8 Aug 2019 Epstein moved his entire fortune to a trust. On 10 Aug 2019 he “killed himself”, with guards asleep, cellmate transfered, 2 CCTV malfunctioned and the only working one missing a minute in recording from 11:58:58 to 12:01:01, and died by a broken hyoid bone from hanging using a fabric – something unlikely. On 5 Oct 2019 a prominent plastic surgeon Dr. Daniel P. Greenwald had a plane crash, with technical explanation pointed out that it was a deliberate sabotage. On 19 Nov 2019 Epstein’s private banker committed suicide. Suspicious line of events? Yeah I think Epstein is still alive, with a new face, living in a getaway country or simply back in Israel. Here’s more clues that Epstein is likely to be a Mossad agent. And if this isn’t enough, on 21 November 2025 Benjamin Netanyahu bizarrely posted this article about Epstein’s work in Israel (supporting Ehud Barak to fight against Netanyahu).
  95. You know that moment just right after hitting rock bottom, when you suddenly have this surge of energy back to life? After my Kafka-fueled existentialist crisis in late 2024, thanks to the feeling of helplessness with the many situations that I cannot control (like the genocide in Gaza), this year I suddenly have this burst of angry energy, which was initially fueled by a book about the history of Punk music and further sparked at the Green Day concert that was just electrifying. And just like that, 2025 became a no-bullshit year for me, fueled with high-Beta wave of loud music, with so many domestic incidents filling the rage that were just so damn exasperating (which I won’t discuss here, because this neo-orba Indonesian government is increasingly Orwellian and authoritarian), with the Foo Fighters concert as the cherry on top.
  96. This is also an eye-opening year, where I also learned that a lot of the knowledge we have in the world are heavily Western-biased. Hence, suddenly plenty of books that I still have in my to-read pile are becoming obsolete, just a bunch of propaganda filled with BS or at the very least trying to normalize certain views that looks harmless at first but helps maintaining the status quo. For example, normalizing seeing the US as the innocent victim of 9/11 or Israel as the victim of October 7th, while ignoring the magnitude of events beforehand that will show them as the original perpetrators. Blaming Princip for the start of World War 1 and not Ferdinand who had no right to annex Bosnia to begin with. Or being upset about the Ukraine-Russia latest peace deal where Crimea and Donbas looks likely to be given to Russia, but fine with US’ annexation of Texas, Nevada and New Mexico from Mexico in the same manner (or conversely, how distributing a “frozen Russian asset” among themselves is not considered theft). Or seeing white men as discoverers of foreign lands instead of settler-colonialists, uniterally renaming an ancient Mexica civilisation, normalizing British Museum as THE place to see world artefacts instead of seeing it as the largest exhibition of stolen things from other countries, depicting Africa as backward (but secretly destroyed sites like Benin Iya), or erasing the history of the Carthage and Ancient Persia to make Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome look better, or celebrating the 4 presidents carved on Mount Rushmore but being oblivious over the history of this sacred mountain for Native Americans, or as menial as celebrating Thanksgiving (and largely ignoring the dark twisted history behind the heart-warming family holiday). Or normalizing seeing resistance to occupation as “terrorism” and not “freedom fighters”, or even as petty as labeling brown people as “immigrants” but white people as “expats.” Moreover, I also learned to see international organisations as a growingly Western hand to control the world. Sure, 22% of UN is funded by the US (and its headquarter is in New York rather than in Geneva), or the IMF and World Bank are headquartered in Washington DC (forming the Washington Consensus), but no not that. I’m talking more about the more casual aspects in our global society, like FIFA, UEFA, IOC (the International Olympic Committee), even the Eurovision Contest, all of which can quickly [and rightly] ban Russia from competing after they have started to invade Ukraine, but these organisations are not banning Israel for doing something even worse. In fact, Indonesia got banned by the IOC after Indonesia is refusing entry to Israeli athletes into athletics championship in Indonesia. Let me repeat that, you will get banned by banning a genocider, but not when you’re doing the genocide. What kind of sick delusional world that we’re living in? An inequal world designed to cater the status quo.
  97. Which brings us to person of the year. It’s appalling that the Nobel Peace Prize this year is won by Maria Corina Machado, an opposition in Venezuela who encourages the US to attack Venezuela and take its oil, and even pleaded to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to help. I mean, that’s the complete opposite of a PEACE advocaat. But what do you expect, really? Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize just months after he bombed Laos and Cambodia killing hundred of thousands, Barrack Obama won the Peace Prize after launching attacks on Syria and helped to topple the democratically-elected Egyptian PM Mohamed Morsi, among many other crimes he committed. So, even an institution as dignified as the Nobel Foundation is also incredibly crooked, another “international organisation” that is very questionable in giving out their awards. And instead, my person of the year is the one individual whom many people, including the President of Slovenia, consider as the worthy real winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for this year: Francesca Albanese. She’s a UN special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who is so very brave in standing up for the Palestinians, criticising the genocide, but of course this kind of hero is being attacked by the corrupt and crooked Western governments, and she is even heavily imposed with US economic sanction. Of course they bloody did. This is a fucked up world where protesting against a genocide will get you sanctioned, fired, or cancelled.
  98. Just ask Gabriele Nunziati, an Italian news reported who got fired after simply asking EU Commission spokesperson Paula Pinto whether Israel should pay for the reconstruction of Gaza. Or this guy, who exposed the hypocricy of the police who protect anyone who said they are supporting the genocide (using the lame excuse of freedom of speech) but yet will arrest people who are expressing that same freedom of speech to protest against the genocide. And don’t forget what Charlie Kirk did just days before he was murdered. I mean, these examples are only 3 of the plenty of hypocrisies blatantly displayed this year, where rape allegations by Hamas was met with an outcry in the media (but later proven to be false) while an actual admission of IDF soldier raping Palestinian hostages are met with almost a complete media silence (an admission that was even celebrated in Israel, where the rapist Meir Ben-Shitrit has become a media sensation). I mean, what kind of sick society is this? One that the likes of Thom Yorke defended, where they can only blame Netanyahu for everything, and ignoring all the nasty shit Itamar Ben-Gvir, Yoav Gallant, Bezalel Smotrich, etc have said and done, not to mention all the violations of international law occurring everyday by illegal settlers in the West Bank. But I have to give credit where credit is due: Israel is a small nation with only 10 million people, but yet they can control the US like their sad pathetic little puppet, a country that is 423 times larger and with population of 340 million people that have huge pride to be an American, but yet the sheer majority of their politicians and billionaires are all being submissive to their master. Just look at the 250 member of US Congress who went to meet their master in Israel, all the Israeli flags proudly displayed in the office doors in Capitol, the very long list of AIPAC bribed politicians, and how Trump held the chair for his master Netanyahu during his visit.
  99. And just in case you’re still skeptical, the following experts on genocide have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza since 7 Oct 2023 constitute a genocide: Raz Segal, Martin Shaw, William Schabas, Melanie O’Brien, Shmuel Lederman, Dirk Moses, Ugur Umit Ungor, Iva Vukusic. Notable human rights groups or organizations have also concluded that it is a genocide: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, International Association of Genocide Scholars, Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, Genocide Watch, War Resisters’ International, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, B’Tselem, International Federation for Human Rights, Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Center for Constitutional Rights, Action Against Hunger, International Court of Justice, UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry. You’re not smarter than so many genocide experts, are you? Even without the opinion of these experts we can all see clearly what’s going on in the most recorded genocide in history, Israeli ministers are even bragging on air about their genocidal plans. All the constant bombings, the hospitals and school destroyed, the starving people, the mass graves, the flat cities, the intercepted aid, even the bragging by Israeli officials and IDF soldiers for getting away with their shit, are all very well documented for all to see. So my question is, why do some people are still either in denial of this and defending this as if what Israel is doing is a moral thing to do, or insisting that they are a victim that are having a revenge while completely ignoring what had happened for 75 years before October 7th? It’s been 2 years, and at this point those genocide lovers who are still defending Israel are either blind, brainwashed, have a vested interest, genuinely evil, or just incredibly fucking stupid.
  100. 2025 has been a weird revealing year, where abusive grip in power being challenged all over the world with One Peace flag became the unlikely symbol of resistance: starting from Indonesia, to Philippines, Madagascar, France, the US, all the way to Nepal whose corrupt government was successfully toppled and was replaced through an election conducted in a game app Discord (what a time to be alive). Meanwhile, the global protests over the Gaza genocide are still regularly occurring, with people increasingly immune to Israel’s Hasbara propaganda and always call bullshit whenever a genocide lover is trying to play their old tricks in any social media post. It’s also so refreshing to see that the younger Gen-Z are mostly a bunch of people who cannot be bossed around and cannot be easily manipulated, and instead they fully utilise the information age and are not afraid to stand up for the truth. Just like the Gen-Z uprising in Mexico, or the resignation of the government in Bulgaria after Gen-Z protests. So, there’s still hope for the world after all. And you’re damn right we’re angry for all the injustices and power abuse and all the blatant lies and hypocrisies. And for once, people are not afraid of the status quo anymore. The tide is really turning, the Pandora’s box cannot be closed again, and 2026 is going to be very interesting indeed!

2025 Book Reviews

This year I read the usual 50+ books, including the hilarious “Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player In a Whorehouse” by Paul Carter. I enjoyed reading it so much that I immediately purchased and read the sequel “This is Not a Drill: Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield”, which is equally amusing. I also enjoyed reading Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries (about his trip around Latin America in the 1950s), and then a book by Patrick Symmes that re-traced that Guevara’s journey in Latin America 50 years later (which makes it an even better book), and Guevara’s Guerilla Warfare – which I agree is way too much Guevara in a year.

Moreover, 2025 is the commemoration of Indonesian legendary writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s 100 years and I’ve managed to read 6 books by/about Pram. I also read books by the best of the best writers: Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Paulo Coelho, Ernest Hemingway (2 books), Oscar Wilde, books by other Indonesian legends N.H Dini and Tan Malaka, a surprisingly bland book by Chuck Palahneuk, a thick-ass biography about Ian Fleming, a tale about the intellectual scene of 1940s New York City by Anatole Broyard, and a book that teaches about writing – “A Swim in a Pond in a Rain” – that uses Russian short stories as the examples. But probably the most touching fiction book I’ve read this year is “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.”

For the non-fiction portion, I read “The Longevity Diet” by Victor Longo after I first heard the news that my aunt had cancer (she’s thankfully fine now). I also read some of the most mind-bending, out-of-the-box, books such as “Infinite Game” (about different timelines to success), “Stealing Fire” (about group flow), “Range” (about jack of all trades vs master of one), “What the Dog Saw” (perspectives from the other side of the story), “Black Swan” (about sudden and unexpected events), “How Not to Be Wrong” (the application of math in the real world), “How to Work a Room” (about how to act and behave in social settings), and “The Organized Mind” (about storing knowledge in an age of information overload).

I also read the history of the Tudor dynasty, a book by a former Indonesian president Gus Dur, a very interesting story about Brazil as a footballing nation, the most fascinating history of punk music, a heavily paraphrased Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great (which was awful), and the most disturbing book I’ve read this year (but highly eye-opening and impactful): Virginia Giuffre’s autobiography “Nobody’s Girl.”

Moreover, in the religious month of Ramadan, this year I read a book about science and religion, stories of all the Prophets of Islam, a book about the great religions, a story about Jerusalem, and a book by a Zen Buddhist master.

And specifically for finance, I read “Warren Buffett’s Ground Rules” (about his partnership era, pre-Berkshire), “Utopia for Realists” (about Utopian thinking, where the author also formulate a realistic Utopia for modern world), and “The Way to Wealth” (tales of wealth from 17th century Japan). I also read a less impactful ones, “Smart Couple Finish Last”, and “The Complete 101 Collection” by John C. Maxwell; which I read after I reached 50 books target and wanted to just get done with some of the menial books I have in my pile.

Here are the full list of the books I’ve read in 2025:

  1. Tolstoy in Search of Truth and Meaning by Leo Tolstoy and Bob Blaisdell
  2. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
  3. Monumen by Nh. Dini
  4. Ernest Hemingway on Writing edited by Larry W. Phillips
  5. Larasati by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
  6. The Economics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained by Niall Kishtainy
  7. Pramoedya Ananta Toer Dari Dekat Sekali by Koesalah Soebagyo Toer
  8. Guerilla Warfare by Ernesto Che Guevara
  9. Gus Dur on Religion, Democracy, and Peace edited by Hairus Salim HS
  10. Longevity Diet by Valter Longo, PhD
  11. The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
  12. Manuscript Found in Accra by Paulo Coelho
  13. Cerita Dari Jakarta by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
  14. Saya Ingin Lihat Semua Ini Berakhir: Esei dan Wawancara Dengan Pramoedya Ananta Toer by August Hans den Boef and Kees Snoek
  15. Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion by Nicholas Spencer
  16. Stories of the Prophets by Ibn Kathir
  17. Beliefs That Changed the World: The History and Ideas of the Great Religions by John Bowker
  18. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths by Karen Armstrong
  19. Dropping Ashes on the Buddha by Stephen Mitchell
  20. Warren Buffett’s Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom From the Partnership Letters of the World’s Greatest Investor by Jeremy C. Miller
  21. Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  22. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
  23. The Castle by Franz Kafka
  24. Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare
  25. Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
  26. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg
  27. “The Invention of Sound” by Chuck Palahniuk
  28. Drama Mangir by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
  29. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
  30. Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War by Larry Hedrick
  31. Gadis Pantai by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
  32. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  33. Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard
  34. Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman
  35. The Tudors: The Complete Story of England’s Most Notorious Dynasty by G. J. Meyer
  36. The Way to Wealth by Saikaku Ibara
  37. Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player In a Whorehouse by Paul Carter
  38. A Swim in a Pond in a Rain by George Saunders
  39. Alyosha the Pot by Leo Tolstoy
  40. This is Not A Drill: Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield by Paul Carter
  41. Indonesia Tidak Hadir Di Bumi Manusia by Max Lane
  42. What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
  43. The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey by Ernesto Che Guevara
  44. Madilog by Tan Malaka
  45. How to Work a Room by Susan Roane
  46. Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey In Search of the Guevara Legend by Patrick Symmes
  47. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  48. Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
  49. Futebol Nation by David Goldblatt
  50. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin
  51. Smart Couple Finish Rich by David Bach
  52. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  53. The Complete 101 Collection by John C. Maxwell

A book of business cliches

“The Complete 101 Collection” by John C. Maxwell

John C. Maxwell is an evangelical pastor turned speaker on leadership. He is named as the no. 1 leader in business by the American Management Association, a recipient of the Horatio Alger Award, and named as an influential leadership expert by Business Insider and Inc. magazine, among other credentials. He has written a whopping 132 non-fiction books, sold over 20 million copies, with some translated into 50 languages and others hitting the New York Times Best Seller list; making him a so-called global leadership guru.

But you don’t have to read all 132 books to get into his insights, you just need to read this one. This particular book is the merging of 6 volumes of his 101 series that are crammed into 1 complete collection. It covers attitude, self-improvement, leadership, relationship, success, teamwork, equipping, and mentoring. “Each 101 book is an introduction to a subject, not the “advanced course””, Maxwell remarks, and so you would think that this ultimate introductory book will instead be a concise but highly informative one. But no.

Despite being an introduction book, it is still a 616 pages book. Confused? Indeed, the book is filled with plenty of repetitive writing over the 6 volumes, with the same favourite anecdotes, many cliche jargons and pep talks, where at times can contradict some of his points against each other, while the rest of the stories are so basic and bland that they make me wonder whether they are real or just fabricated to make a point (except, of course, his personal stories or the stories from the Bible that he suddenly can tell in details).

But nevertheless, if you can filter out a lot of these unnecessary extra stuffs, the basic content of the book is still pretty insightful. That is, if only you can hold your cringe at times. Because think about all the most cliche business buzzwords – such as “success is a journey”, “if we don’t change we don’t grow”, “accomplish more than expected”, or “inspire others” – and you’ll most likely find it here in abundance.

To be fair, this is after all a book published in 2010 by a person who were born in 1947. The old school style of writing and way of thinking are very much apparent in this book, for better or for worse, where Maxwell believes in good old American values and the American dream where if you work hard you can make it rich, but being oblivious over the harsh truth of success in the predatory capitalism environment: to be really rich, you either need to exploit people or exploit the planet; or the corruption, the nepotism, the criminal ties, the insider trading, the dodgy dealings, the race privilege, the government subsidy, etc, that are more scrutinized these days but often edited out in business biographies.

But this is ultimately what this book is about, an unapologetic set of cliche old-school knowledge. One that is important enough to re-read as a refresher and perhaps become an anchor for your general principles in life. If this is your first ever self-help/business book, it is a pretty good place to start.

A tale from the native land of the hypocrite

“The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde

Dorian Gray is a handsome man. So much so that after having himself painted for a portrait, he becomes obsessed with his own beauty that he makes a Faustian bargain with the devil to trade his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty.

First published in 1890 during the Victorian era, this novel shows the zeitgeist of the time where public face and respectability was in the highest order, while behind closed doors anything goes. Similarly, Dorian is obsessed with maintaining his youthful beauty and remaining a gentleman in public appearance, while indulging in a life of hedonism and sin behind closed doors. It is a perfect representation of the 19th century society in England.

But his portrait tells another story. While he retains his public face, his picture begins to age and shows the true state of his soul. And the more sins he committed, the more the picture becomes growingly distorted which reflects the rottenness of his soul.

Dorian’s obsession with beauty and sinful pleasures eventually led him down to a road of destruction, causing harm to his surroundings. And Dorian’s guilt and paranoia finally get to him when he realizes that he’s been living in a hell.

And then in a fit of rage, he stabs the portrait (the symbol of his true soul), which the portrait then reverts to its original form to show a beautiful young man that he once was, while Dorian himself instantly died, turning old and ugly, with a knife through his chest.

It is such an intriguing novel with powerful messages that addresses the themes of vanity and narcissism; sinful desire and hedonism; the tension between outward appearance and inner soul; and the relationship between beauty, morality, and art.

But perhaps most significantly it tells a story about the problems of living life with not a single consequence for your actions, and living life with a two face. A subtle way for Oscar Wilde to criticize the Victorian way of living.

Smart couple plan their future together

“Smart Couple Finish Rich: 9 Steps to Creating a Rich Future for You and Your Partner” by David Bach

It’s almost the end of year, holiday mood already sets in, and I’ve reached my yearly goal to read 50 books minimum. What else can I do to enjoy the last month of the year? (No, not taking a break from reading a book, are you mental?)

Instead, I’m doing the second best, having a semi-break while reading some of the fringe books that I have purchased over the years. You know, just to get them over with. They are those books that I bought on a whim from an algo recommendation (during a price drop under $2-5 at Amazon), which on hindsight I should’ve double checked first before buying and piling them up. This is one of those books.

The book is written by David Bach, a financial consultant for couples; so it is a book written by an expert on his field, which gives early credibility to the book. And some of the messages are actually pretty good, which can be summed up more or less into these 12:

  1. Smart couple plan their future together.
  2. How you spend money has nothing to do with how much you love each other.
  3. The two of you were most likely raised differently when it comes to money.
  4. The two of you probably value money differently.
  5. The two of you probably spend money differently.
  6. Most couple don’t have money problem, they have spending problem.
  7. Your life values should determine every life decision that you make.
  8. Our financial behaviour should match with our value circles.
  9. Figure out what the purpose of money in your life.
  10. You can’t plan your finances if you don’t know where you’re starting from or where you want to end up.
  11. In order to stay on track from your starting point to your destination, you have to monitor your progress.
  12. You need to clean up the mess before you can move forward.

Indeed, the “couples stuffs” in the first few chapters of the book are actually sound. The Purpose-Focused Financial Plan story, in particular, with the example of Bill and Kim is actually a great insight into how to merge a husband’s and a wife’s different values into one. Jerry and Lisa’s story is also sobering, how a couple with little money can retire relatively young at 52 with 2 houses and several cars, by just planning them out since they were 20 years old and had the discipline to save up and pay the mortgages on time.

However, Bach elaborates a little too much on these main 12 points or so, with many repetition and unnecessary gibberish along the way that makes the book extra long to read.

And after the initial 30ish% of the “couple stuffs”, the rest of the content of the book are your typical personal finance books, which are filled with the technical stuffs that only applicable for US readers – with advices such as how to navigate the 401(k) plans, the IRA, and the likes – which seems like a content from his other book focusing on individual finance and less so on couples.

Moreover, in the getting rich part, Bach presented the usual formula: Set aside 10% of your income for investment (just like the advice from the book The Richest Man in Babylon). Bach then told the story of his grandmother who did exactly this, setting aside 10% of her husband’s income and invest it where the investment eventually turned her into a millionaire. But Bach didn’t elaborate on which financial instruments she invested in, and instead he wrote what his grandmother said “if we were going to get rich, I was going to have to learn how to get rich! I needed to take classes, read books, study the stock market, and make friends with rich people.”

Yeah ok, it’s not necessarily the “what” or the “why”, but when it comes to getting rich the most important part is often the “how.” The “how” is what’s lacking in this book (other than putting your money in a mutual fund or ETF index).

And instead of focusing on the technical know-how of investing, Bach is focusing more on “becoming rich is nothing more than a matter of committing and sticking to a systematic savings and investment plan.” I mean, if you consistently committing to set aside 10% of your income and put it in Enron’s stock in the late 90s, you’ll get wiped out. Put it in Apple? You’ll get rich. Smart investing also being able to determine whether put your 10% investment money to Google instead of Yahoo despite Yahoo being the bigger company back then. Even mutual funds and ETFs were down during a bear market or a market crash.

To be fair, had this be the first personal finance book that I’ve read, I’d probably gain more value from it. But instead, I’ve read my fair share of them over the decades, from the questionable Think and Grow Rich, to the British version Think Yourself Rich, The Millionaires Mind, Tony Robbins’ weird venture into personal finance (I read 2 books – both awful – but his earlier works are masterpieces), an ancient Japanese financial wisdom (the Way to Wealth), to the best one in the genre for me the Psychology of Money, and many more, including The Opposite of Spoiled (a parenting book that teaches about money to kids) and of course the dozens of books on investments from Market Wizards series, to Money Masters of Our Time, to any book by/on Warren Buffett, Jim Rogers, George Soros, Charlie Munger, Benjamin Graham, etc.

And if I learn anything from these books, those who are truly successful in finance won’t tell you their “secret formula” at its entirety, those who are successful and do write about it won’t package it as a way to get rich (instead the money is only a result of their main focus: their craft), and hence those books that have “rich” in the title is usually nothing short of a get-rich-quick kind of scam.

Just like Rich Dad Poor Dad whose author, Robert T. Kiyosaki, had 2 failed businesses and only became rich after writing the book in 1997, with the “rich dad” character turns out to be fictional (read: fabricated, fake). And he became rich after riding the housing bubble in late 1990s early 2000s, but has since publicly made many predictions wrong and ended up having 1 of his companies being bankrupt and he himself (a millionaire) is actually $1.2 billion in debt and using the debt to speculate in the market. But yet he still has cult followers, especially in the multilevel marketing scene. I should know, since I used to be one of his eager followers when I was a teenager.

Not saying that this book is similar to Rich Dad Poor Dad and its kind, since Bach looks like a legit personal finance advisor, whereas Kiyosaki himself stated in Rich Dad Poor Dad that he is a best “selling” author and built an empire from that (implying that he’s only a salesman). But this book does have this borderline misleading feel to it, as it’s not really a book about couples’ finances (only a slight repackaging from his usual personal finance stuff), one that lures you into wanting a quick fix simple solution in the road to become a millionaire without giving you the proper tools.

Hence, a little grain of salt is needed when reading this book, but overall it’s still can make your money’s worth if you’re new to the personal finance genre.

How the mind operates and how to organize them

“The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin

Humans are not the strongest species on Earth. We’re not the quickest, nor the biggest neither. But we’ve risen to the top of the food chain largely because of our cognitive capacity, and the ability of our brains to handle information.

And in this modern world in order to be an apex predator in an already abundance sea of information we need to be able to filter and organize all of the information that we receive, by distinguishing what’s important and what’s not, how and where to store these important information, and how to quickly recall them when needed.

As the author, Daniel Levitin, remarks in 2014 (the year of the first publication of this book), “In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986—the equivalent of 175 newspapers. During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words every day. The world’s 21,274 television stations produce 85,000 hours of original programming every day as we watch an average of 5 hours of television each day, the equivalent of 20 gigabytes of audio-video images. That’s not counting YouTube, which uploads 6,000 hours of video every hour. And computer gaming? It consumes more bytes than all other media put together, including DVDs, TV, books, magazines, and the Internet. Just trying to keep our own media and electronic files organized can be overwhelming.” Presumably the numbers are even far greater today, 11 years later.

This is where the book comes in handy. It provides the neurobiological explanations of how the brain functions, and the hacks and tricks on how to utilize these functions properly. In a way, this is some sort of a manual book for our brain.

Part 1 of the book discusses a long list of factors that influence our brain’s ability to process information. Such as the invention of language, the organization of life through towns and cities, commerce and the recording of transactions, the recording of knowledge (in scrolls, books, poetry, songs, etc), or the fascinating different ways that ancient societies organised time.

It also dives deep into how our brain perceive change or micro change. As Levitin remarks, “The brain’s change detector is at work all the time, whether you know it or not. If a close friend or relative calls on the phone, you might detect that her voice sounds different and ask if she’s congested or sick with the flu. When your brain detects the change, this information is sent to your consciousness, but your brain doesn’t explicitly send a message when there is no change. If your friend calls and her voice sounds normal, you don’t immediately think, “Oh, her voice is the same as always.” Again, this is the attentional filter doing its job, detecting change, not constancy.”

Another aspect that influences the brain to filter and record information is how important that message is to you. As Levitin explains, “The second principle, importance, can also let information through. Here, importance is not just something that is objectively important but something that is personally important to you. If you’re driving, a billboard for your favorite music group might catch your eye (really, we should say catch your mind) while other billboards go ignored. If you’re in a crowded room, at a party for instance, certain words to which you attach high importance might suddenly catch your attention, even if spoken from across the room. If someone says “fire” or “sex” or your own name, you’ll find that you’re suddenly following a conversation far away from where you’re standing, with no awareness of what those people were talking about before your attention was captured. The attentional filter is thus fairly sophisticated. It is capable of monitoring lots of different conversations as well as their semantic content, letting through only those that it thinks you will want to know about.”

And then there’s the importance of letting our mind wander to relax our brain and turn inward to recalibrate. As Levitin explains, “Daydreaming and mind-wandering, we now know, are a natural state of the brain. This accounts for why we feel so refreshed after it, and why vacations and naps can be so restorative. The tendency for this system to take over is so powerful that its discoverer, Marcus Raichle, named it the default mode. This mode is a resting brain state, when your brain is not engaged in a purposeful task, when you’re sitting on a sandy beach or relaxing in your easy chair with a single malt Scotch, and your mind wanders fluidly from topic to topic. It’s not just that you can’t hold on to any one thought from the rolling stream, it’s that no single thought is demanding a response.”

Because here’s a simple truth, “the act of remembering something is a process of bringing back on line those neurons that were involved in the original experience.” And mind-wandering is beneficial to connect the many neurons of the brain. As Levitin explains, “the mind-wandering mode is a network, because it is not localized to a specific region of the brain. Rather, it ties together distinct populations of neurons that are distributed in the brain and connected to one another to form the equivalent of an electrical circuit or network. Thinking about how the brain works in terms of networks is a profound development in recent neuroscience.” Hence, the many random thoughts that often appear when you let your mind wander, or meditating, or moments just before you sleep.

Furthermore, part 1 of the book also addresses our brain’s ability to switch focus: “In addition to the mind-wandering mode, the central executive, and the attentional filter, there’s a fourth component of the attentional system that allows us to switch between the mind-wandering mode and the central executive mode. This switch enables shifts from one task to another, such as when you’re talking to a friend at a party and your attention is suddenly shifted to that other conversation about the fire in the kitchen. It’s a neural switchboard that directs your attention to that mosquito on your forehead and then allows you to go back to your post-lunchtime mind-wandering. In a 2010 paper, Vinod Menon and I showed that the switch is controlled in a part of the brain called the insula, an important structure about an inch or so beneath the surface of where temporal lobes and frontal lobes join. Switching between two external objects involves the temporal-parietal junction.”

And then we get to part 2 and part 3, where Levitin shows us how to keep track of our lives in order to be productive, efficient, less stressed, and happy in a world increasingly filled with distractions. Which comes down to this: Externalize (write it down), categorize (between things to do now, or delegate, or do later), compartmentalize, protect your mind (plan a schedule to maximize effectiveness), plan a downtime (to recalibrate), have a “junk drawer” where you put all the things that hard to categorize, and so much more.

Indeed, the large majority of part 2 and part 3 of the book are more tips and tricks to live an organized life, in our home, in social settings, and in business. Which is a great premise on itself, but unfortunately (and ironically) they are written in such an inefficient way that they failed to reflect the main essence of the book. It is way too long at times, with examples that are often drifted too far away from the main points that he wants to make, and filled with too much informational gimmick that distracts us from the points.

That’s right, the book about thinking straight in the age of information overload is contributing to the information overload. Because it seems that Levitin is trying to get as much information as possible into his book, including topics that are a bit of a stretch for the main subject of organized minds: topics such as flow state, statistical bias, media partisanship, or parenting.

But still, when he’s drilling in the right place – so to speak – he strikes gold. Like one of the more eye catching brain organizing techniques, a method called satisficing. That is, not dwelling too much on the decision-making for small insignificant stuff (like deciding which dry cleaner to choose from, as long as they’re good enough), and using your mental energy for more important decision making (like choosing the right doctor for your disease). As Levitin remarks, “Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.”

Another gold strike is the description of how our memories are captured in neurons, and when we recall it, those same neurons will become active in the way they were during the original event. But our memory is highly susceptible to interruption and distortion, and most intriguingly, can be altered. As Levitin remarks, “When they are retrieved they are in a labile or vulnerable state and they need to be reconsolidated properly. If you’re sharing a memory with a friend and she says, “No, the car was green, not blue,” that information gets grafted onto the memory.” Which means, we can actually change the past!

Levitin then continues, “Memories in this labile state can also vanish if something interferes with their reconsolidation, like lack of sleep, distraction, trauma, or neurochemical changes in the brain.” Indeed, our current mood and environment when we receive the information can also influence our interpretation of the event, our beliefs about which events that actually occurred, and the emotional tone of the memory recall later on.

Moreover, in a lighter note, every now and then Levitin points out the amusing everyday stuff that are taken for granted today, which are actually designed to help us store information. For example in office doors, the side that meant to be pushed will normally have a flat plate while the side that meant to be pulled will have a handle on it. Or ever notice that scissors have 2 holes with different size? It is so that we instinctively know which hole meant for thumb and which other meant for the rest of the fingers. Not having to try to figure out how doors or scissors work, among many others, is contributing to the preservation of our mental energy that we can use for other more important stuffs.

All in all, this is a pretty useful book to help us understand the mechanism of our brain in filtering and receiving messages, then to organize them in the sea of abundance of information, so that we can retrieve them quickly when needed; which caters nicely to my mild OCD trait. It’s just that it could use a little de-cluttering, organizing, and re-editing, so that this almost 500 pages book can become an easier-to-digest, and more concise, 300+ pages book.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to daydream for a little bit and calibrate.

The wonderful chaos of Brazilian football

“Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil” by David Goldblatt

Brazil is the 5th largest country in the world by size, 7th largest by population, and it is among the top 20 largest economies in the world. But yet their presence in the world is often subtle. Their cuisines are top notch but are not as well known as the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or even Mexican. One of their main exports, coffee, is also superb but also lose in competition compared with Ethiopia or Italian coffee. Their academic research are excellent and their movies are exceptional, but none of them has won any international awards, except for the movie City of God.

But there’s one area that Brazil is undeniably very famous for: Football. Brazil is the only nation that have participated in all of the World Cup finals, winning 5 of them and lost 2 finals. Apart from its successes, what makes Brazil stand out from the rest is their style of play, which Pelé refer as the Jogo Bonito, the beautiful game. As the joke goes, the English invented football and the Brazilians perfected it.

This book is about that passion for football and how it helped to shape the nation’s identity.

Published just before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the book is a story about how football was first introduced into the country and how they grew to become the absolute craze of the nation and its most famous image of the country. It is a wonderfully written piece of history, alongside the bosa nova, the samba, the capoeira, and the carnival. It also tells the story about the founding of the football clubs, the many important matches, the match brawls and stadium deaths, and of course the story about the insanely long list of footballing legends from Pele, to Socrates, to Romario and Ronaldo.

But perhaps more intriguingly, the book also gives us the big picture of a nation with brutal political environment that have endured so many coups and corruptions, harsh economic reality where poverty and crimes are common sights, not to mention terror under brutal dictatorial regimes that tried to whitewash their crimes through football. It also paints the bleak condition of their domestic league, with the minimim wage reality and so many late payments of salary, which prompted the exodus of talented players to constantly go abroad whenever they can or even change nationalities.

Indeed, it is after we understand the big picture of the country, that we would begin to understand why they play football the way they play. As the author, David Goldblatt, remarks, “the real price of making football the avatar of the nation is that the game’s deep connections to Brazil’s social structures, economic institutions and political processes are also laid bare.”

This, in the end of the day, is the overall feel of the book. The passion, the brilliance, the magic, mixed with the tragedies and miseries, the poverty and violence, the class war and political injustices, and the one thing that can unite the entire nation into one big harmony: the love of futebol.

A memoir of a sexual abuse victim

“Nobody’s Girl” by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

In a post on Twitter in December 2019, Virginia Giuffre stated that “I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape or form am I suicidal. I have made this known to my therapist and GP. If something happens to me – in the sake of my family do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.”

This statement was made long after she became the most recognisable face among the victims in Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s underage sex trafficking case. But crucially it was important to declare because on 5 October 2019 Dr. Daniel P. Greenwald, Epstein’s plastic surgeon, died of a weird plane crash; on 19 November 2019 Epstein’s private banker, Thomas Bowers, died by “an apparent suicide” before the FBI got the chance to question him; and these suspicious deaths happened after Jeffrey Epstein himself was reportedly died by suicide in jail on 10 August 2019.

But yet, 6 years later on 25 April 2025 Virginia herself was reportedly died by suicide, in her remote Australian farm, leaving behind her husband Robbie and 3 children (Alex, Tyler, Ellie). Who are these rich and powerful people that want to cover their trace?

Co-written with journalist Amy Wallace, this memoir is published posthumously and it gives Virginia the voice to speak even after she’s being silenced. It is a very difficult book to read, a sickening book, but a very important one in order to understand how diabolical sex predators work.

The book cleverly switches back and forth between her happy normal childhood, to her Epstein experience, back to her dark teenage years, and to her eventual family life in a quiet farm outside Perth, before spending the rest third of the book on the fight to bring Epstein and Maxwell to justice. It is deliberately structured as such in order to form a big picture narrative (rather than a linear narrative) of the puzzle peace of Virginia’s life before she tragically passed away.

It is a surprisingly very well written book that is gripping to read, but at the same time it is also very hard to read exactly due to the switching back and forth between her gruesome past and her wholesome family life before she died. Because as I gotten to know her more and more, with growing empathy on her wellbeing, all I can think of when reading about her quiet normal life now is that she already has a deserved happy life now, why risk it all by going after the most powerful people in the world?

Of course, the book later reveal that this was the plan after all, but just like any other things that were happening in her life, she got dragged into it and had no other choice but to fight on.

Virginia was spotted by Ghislaine Maxwell working as a 16-year-old locker room assistant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, where she was then brought by Maxwell to Jeffrey Epstein’s house to be “interviewed” as a possible masseuse. Yup, it went exactly as you imagined it to be, she was forced to have sex with Epstein that day, and both that day and in subsequent assaults Maxwell also participated in a threesome. She eventually stuck with them for a little more than 2 and a half years.

Indeed, the immediate question that comes in mind is, why stuck with them and not run away? The answer to this went beyond Epstein, in another disturbing account of Virginia’s even darker and sadder past that was started since the age of 6, when she was molested by her father, who then “swap” her to a family friend to molest (fellow child molester uncle Forrest – whom disgust me when reading that uncle Forrest later was transformed into a man of God, and then had the audacity to tell Virginia to ask forgiveness to God for what she has done with her dad and him).

The childhood story and the wildly rebellious teenage story (as a response to her painful childhood) are so disturbing that at one point it clicked on me: Epstein’s and Maxwell’s treatment of her are angelic – with wellbeing, luxury living, and world travels – compared with the rest of these scums. That’s why she sticks with them longer than the other victims.

Moreover, also hard to read is her description of her happy childhood before the age of 6. The decently functioning family (with dad, mom, little baby brother, and an older step brother), nice neighbourhood, a loving grandma, family dinner every night, liking the Simpsons, living in a ranch, having a favourite teacher Mrs. McGirt, with Virginia love to wander around at the outdoor and even got a horse that she absolutely adored named Alice.

It was hard to read, because knowing what would happen to this innocent happy little girl not long after, when her dad began to molest her (and threatened to kill her baby brother – whom she love very much – if she ever tell a soul about this assault) and her mother almost immediately transformed from a loving caring mom into a jealous cold b*tch that growingly resort to alcoholism and abuse towards her, instead of protecting her. Maybe what makes it worse is, as we later found out in the book, her uncles and aunts knew about it and also didn’t do anything about it. As Virginia explains, “Young girls (and boys, too) don’t end up being sexually trafficked in a vacuum. Serial sexual abuse doesn’t happen to them—to us—out of the blue. In many cases, we are first abandoned by those who claim to love us.”

With this kind of environment at home, no wonder that she began to turn into a disturbed teenager full of anger with self-destructing tendencies. With Virginia recalls, “At ten years old, I saw my preadolescent body as an enemy. I couldn’t control how it drew the attention of the men who caused me pain, so I began to starve it.”

It is especially hard to read the abuses that she began to suffer at pre-teenage years, because she was exactly the same age as my daughter today, whom also love animals and love listening to music like Virginia did. My fatherly instinct prompted me to want to protect Virginia like my own daughter, and feeling utterly helpless as I read on to the next pages.

The teenage years

The angry teenage years were filled with so many runaways from home, picking fights everywhere she went, and eventually culminates in being accused of being “out of control” by her mother, and was then tricked by her mother to join a tough-love treatment centre called Growing Together, that resembles more of a prison, complete with a solitary confinement (where at one point she spent 3 weeks there – “which had no toilet, no mattress, only a cold concrete floor coated in the filth previous occupants had left behind”). As Virginia recalls, “In the name of healing, Growing Together’s staff forced kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen to stand in front of the mirror and berate themselves at the top of their lungs. “I am a whore, a slut, a druggie,” we girls would yell, staring into our own eyes. We had no choice but to comply.” She was even got raped inside the facility by 2 boys (aged 17 and 18), with the perpetrators were protected and never punished.

Virginia then further recall, ““What goes on here, stays here,” staff would often say. The longer I spent at Growing Together, the more I understood why. Rules were rigid. Boys had to keep their heads shaved nearly bald. Girls, though, weren’t allowed to shave their legs or underarms. It was as if the staff wanted to mark us, to make us look as abnormal on the outside as they told us we were on the inside. Strip searches and pepper spray were the methods they used to keep us “in line.” The squalid building, meanwhile, was overrun with cockroaches and rats.”

She then eventually managed to run away from that hellhole. As Virginia remarks, “Those girls and boys, women and men, will likely attempt to flee between three and seven times before they succeed, according to recent research. Many of them will not be offered help by a single caring stranger. In America, where only 4 percent of law-enforcement agencies have personnel dedicated to exposing human trafficking, most victims must rely on their own wits, and on luck, to survive.” And so she learned to rely on herself.

But the unlucky streak didn’t stop there, almost immediately after she ran away, she was lured by a man in a white van to offer her a lift, but he ended up raping her in a dodgy motel. When she can somehow escape from that, she then met an “old man with a limousine” – Ron Eppinger – who claimed to own a modelling agency, who showered her with gifts but eventually made her as one of his concubines and trafficked her to a friend of his.

As Virginia recalls of her interaction with Eppinger, “That’s when he reaches for me and strokes my hair. “If you want,” Eppinger says, “I can be your new daddy.”” Virginia then reasoned, “Part of me feels a familiar dread. Is it too late to get away? But another, bigger part remembers how life was in rehab and in foster care and, worst of all, on the run. Maybe this is the way all men behave? I am tired. I want to feel nothing. The old man calls me “Baby.” I am the youngest girl there, so the nickname sort of fits. I want to become someone new so badly that I accept it. “Baby” is now who I am.”

Eppinger eventually held her captive for around 6 months. And during this time he growingly became more violent during sex, which prompted Virginia to resort to the drugs that Eppinger and the other girls offered her like Xanax or oxycodone, anything to numb the pain. She even began to fantasizing about killing herself.

After half a year, Eppinger began to give her away to his friend, a man in his fifties and had connections to Fort Lauderdale’s seedy nightclub scene, who began to introduce her to everyone as his girlfriend. “Maybe someone there noticed how young I looked and reported it,” Virginia recalls, “because on a bright June morning in 1999, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the local police broke down the door of the man’s apartment, where I was sleeping naked next to him.”

Afterwards, she had multiple brief encounters, including being sent back to Growing Together, before escaping again and staying at her parents’ house for few days (but they made it very clear that she wasn’t accepted there), moving to a friend’s house, ended up living together with a boy who works at Taco Bell, and as a high school dropout had several jobs that she loves like working in a pet store, before she eventually landed a job in Mar-a-Lago.

The Epstein years

It is no wonder that by the time she met Epstein she said “I had been sexualized against my will and had survived by acquiescing. I was a pleaser, even when pleasing others cost me dearly. For 10 years, men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of ‘love.’ Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.”

This is how Epstein and Maxwell lured Virginia, break down her defenses, and eventually control her: It began with Maxwell inviting Virginia to come to Epstein’s house to learn how to become a masseuse. With every doubt or shock when massaging him Maxwell will respond by downplaying it as an overreaction. As Virginia remarks, “Only later would I see how, step by practiced step, the two of them were breaking down my defenses. Every time I felt a twinge of discomfort, one glance at Maxwell told me I was overreacting. And so it went for about half an hour: a seemingly legitimate massage lesson.”

I’m not going to quote how the detailed account of the abuse went, but I will show you what Virginia was thinking afterwards: “Only after buckling my seat belt did I begin to return to myself. Having escaped from an imminent threat, my brain came back online, but all it wanted to do was scream. During the half-hour drive inland to Loxahatchee, Alessi [Epstein’s driver] and I didn’t speak. If I opened my mouth, I just knew I’d start sobbing, so I clamped my lips shut. I didn’t know then what a therapist would tell me a decade later: that when children are abused by people they love, as I had been by my father, they start to believe that love and pain, love and betrayal, love and violation all go together.”

Indeed, abuse victims often struggle to see red flags because they’ve become conditioned and familiarized to inappropriate behaviour. As Virginia further explained, “I didn’t know that a common coping mechanism during sexual abuse is to distance oneself from what is happening in the moment—to “split” into parts: the obedient body and the walled-off mind. All I knew as the black Suburban headed west was that I felt gutted, as if someone had reached down my throat and scraped out my insides with a silver spoon.”

So begins the period of her life that has since become world famous, for all the wrong reasons. In the book Virginia then reveals Epstein’s modus operandi: “So many young women, myself included, have been criticized for returning to Epstein’s lair even after we knew what he wanted from us. How can you complain about being abused, some have asked, when you could so easily have stayed away? If you didn’t like feeling dirty, you could simply have never gone back. But that stance wrongly discounts what many of us had been through before we encountered Epstein, as well as how good he was at spotting girls whose wounds made them vulnerable to him. Several of us had been molested or raped as children; many of us were poor or even homeless.”

Virginia then continues, “Before meeting Epstein, one of his victims had watched her father beat an eight-year-old boy to death; another was present when her boyfriend killed himself. We were girls who no one cared about, and Epstein pretended to care. At times I think he even believed he cared. A master manipulator who excelled at divining the desires of others, he threw what looked like a lifeline to girls who were drowning, girls who had nothing, girls who wished to be and do better. If they wanted to be dancers, he offered dance lessons. If they aspired to be actors, he said he’d help them get roles. If they said the only thing they yearned to do was paint, he bought them canvases and introduced them to key people in the art world. And then, he did his worst to them.”

And when it comes to Virginia personally, “For so many years, I had been sexualized against my will and had survived by acquiescing. Even as a girl on the precipice of womanhood, I was a pleaser, even when pleasing others cost me dearly. For ten years, men had cloaked their abuse of me in a fake mantle of “love.” Epstein and Maxwell knew just how to tap into that same crooked vein.”

And when this approach is wearing off, “Epstein must’ve sensed my qualms, though, because he walked around his desk, picked up a grainy photograph, and handed it to me. The image had been taken from some distance, but it was unmistakably my little brother. Skydy was walking away from the camera; I could see his backpack, and the outline of the side of his face. I felt a stab of fear. Why did Epstein have a photo of the person I loved most in the world? “We know where your brother goes to school,” Epstein said. He let that sink in for a moment, then got to the point: “You must never tell a soul what goes on in this house.” He was smiling, but his threat was clear: should I ever be tempted to betray him and go to the authorities, he would hurt Skydy. I stared at him. He stared back. “And I own the Palm Beach Police Department,” he said, “so they won’t do anything about it.””

Virginia whole ordeal lasted more than it should, during which she met numerous world famous personalities that she has saw with her own eyes, which I will categorized into two: 1. Direct predators 2. Name dropping that knew Epstein or worked together with Epstein and Maxwell but not necessarily an abuser (at least not from the stories written in this book):

  1. Direct predators: Prince Andrew, the French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, Marvin Minsky, Bill Ricardson (the former governor of New Mexico), a well known Prime Minister who brutally rape her (whose name is not mentioned), a gubernatorial candidate who was soon to win election in a Western state (whose name she also didn’t mention), a former US senator, 3 billionaires, and many more men that she didn’t mention by name whom were “illustrious in their fields.” Note on those names that she didn’t mention, she was afraid that these rich and powerful men can go after her family or, as 1 billionaire had threatened to do, drown her in never ending court cases that it will bankrupt her.
  2. Name dropping: Donald and Melania Trump, Leslie Wexner, Heidi Klum (hosting a party), Ian Schrager, Bill Clinton, Al and Tipper Gore, Bill Gates, James “Jes” Staley (CEO of Barclays Bank), Leon Black (CEO and cofounder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management), Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, George Clooney, Stephen Hawking, Simpsons creator Matthew Groening (only hitched a ride with them on Epstein jet, although Epstein asked Virginia to massage Groening’s feet), Nadia Marcinkova, Chris Tucker, Kevin Spacey, Naomi Campbell, a photograph Epstein took with the Dalai Lama and members of the British royal family.

Furthermore, Virginia also explains the dynamism of the relationship between Epstein and Maxwell: “I gathered that she’d met Epstein not long before her father passed, and I suspected that had something to do with their connection. And what was that connection like? While they usually slept in separate bedrooms, and rarely kissed or held hands, it seemed to me that Maxwell and Epstein lived in complete symbiosis. Epstein, who described Maxwell as his best friend, valued her knack for connecting him to powerful people. Maxwell, in turn, appreciated that Epstein had the resources to fund the lavish life she thought she deserved yet had trouble affording after her father’s death. In social settings, Maxwell often appeared vivacious, entertaining, the life of the party. But in Epstein’s household, she functioned more as a party planner: scheduling and organizing the endless parade of girls who she and others—particularly Sarah Kellen—recruited to have sex with him.” Virginia then concluded that “Over time, I would come to see Epstein and Maxwell less as boyfriend and girlfriend, and more as two halves of a wicked whole.”

But still, in their daily routine Epstein and Maxwell behaved like actual parents to her, something that she didn’t get since the age of 6. As Virginia recalls, “The first time we ate a meal together, for example, they were appalled by my table manners. So Maxwell taught me how to hold a knife and fork, just so, and to fold my napkin in my lap, the way civilized people do. Soon, she’d be telling me how to do my makeup, how to dress, and where to get my hair cut (the celebrity stylist Frédéric Fekkai groomed many of the girls in Epstein’s world, including me). Even then, part of me knew she was having her dentists whiten my teeth, or sending me to a waxer to remove my body hair, to please Epstein.”

And they also did show genuine affections towards her: “But the role Maxwell played in my life sometimes felt like more than that. One day in the fall of 2000, we heard “Yellow,” Coldplay’s new love song, on the car radio. I loved it and couldn’t get the tune out of my head. A day later, Maxwell presented me with the CD as a gift. She also gave me my first cell phone. Of course, it served her to have me on a short tether, for her and Epstein’s use. But the gift also felt vaguely protective. I was no expert on mothers, but in those early days, I sometimes imagined Maxwell as mine.”

This view was reiterated many pages later when Virginia said, “This is complicated to explain, but that echo of past hurts was somehow bearable to me because I’d felt it—and somehow endured it—so many times before. It was like finding myself once more in a room I’d lived in for years. I hated that room, but I knew its contours—the shape of its windows, the nap of its carpet beneath my feet, the click of the door lock when it was thrown. I knew I could exist in that room because I’d existed there before. At that point, at least, this made me feel less afraid.” Moreover, “Returning from trips to service other men, I’d be greeted not only with money but with something I wanted more. “We’re proud of you,” Epstein would say, and despite my shame and embarrassment, I’d feel something I thought was contentment. That knot of contradictory feelings would take me years to untangle.”

This whole thing made Virginia realized that “Today, I can see how this, too, was an echo from my childhood. I hated the sexual duties that Epstein and Maxwell required of me, but I bargained with myself, just as I had when my father abused me: “Just get the icky part over with so the good parts of life can go on.””

Indeed, the classic technique of abuse: love bombing after the assault, that create a Stockholm Syndrome.

Only this time, it appears that Epstein also enjoyed her company: “Now he began asking me to tuck him into his pink satin sheets each night. While “tuck him in” might sound like a euphemism for sex, it didn’t always mean that to Epstein. Though my job during the day was to arouse and satisfy him sexually, at night he mostly wanted to be soothed—and then left alone. He liked me to reach under the covers to massage his feet and maybe then his scalp. Only after he fell asleep was I permitted to pull the covers up to his chin and quietly exit his room. I am the only one I know of who was asked to do this for him, and at the time he told me that signified that I was “Number One” among the many girls and servants who attended to him. That designation gave me a proud feeling.”

And this is what makes her, years later, a very important witness for the Epstein case. As Virginia remarks, “It wasn’t until we returned to Florida that I realized the bedtime rituals I’d been performing for Epstein had unlocked something in him. Suddenly he was confiding in me. One day we were in the massage room in Palm Beach when he showed me a hidden doorway next to some paintings of naked people stretching. I’d been in that room dozens of times by then but had never noticed a door there. Opening it, Epstein revealed what can only be described as a trophy closet. On the walls, from floor to ceiling, he’d tacked up hundreds of photos of young girls. All of the girls were naked, many of them quite obviously underage, and the images were raunchy, not demure. A stack of shoeboxes in the corner held the overflow. He had so many photos that he’d run out of display space. I turned to him, speechless. He didn’t speak either, but the smug look on his face said, “Look at my conquests. Look at how powerful I am.””

Also equally important, Maxwell also began to trust her and started to assign her to a new job: recruiting girls for Epstein. As Virginia recalls, “I’d already been told his criteria: recruits were preferably white, with wholesome, “girl next door” looks that made them appear between twelve and seventeen years old. No piercings, no tattoos, and definitely no call girls. But his key requirement, other than looks, was vulnerability. Recruits had to be enough “on the edge,” as Epstein and Maxwell put it, that they would submit to sex in exchange for money.”

Virginia then continues, “Maxwell, particularly, was amazing at sussing out what a particular girl might want or need, and she tailored her pitch for maximum appeal. After a girl visited Epstein for the first time, she’d be told she could make double the money if she brought a friend along next time. The incentive to lure another girl into the web was twofold: not only would the procurer make $400 (instead of the $200 she’d been paid the first time), but she’d usually avoid having to service Epstein herself, since the new girl would satisfy him.”

But what’s with his obsession with young girls? Virginia actually gave the reasoning when she explains, “Epstein liked to share with me what he insisted were “scientific” justifications for his yearnings for young girls. For example, he would only have sex with girls who had started menstruating. Why? So he could assert that—since they were biologically able to bear children—they were “of age.” I was flabbergasted when he said this stuff, but I held my tongue. No matter how young a girl looked, or how sexually inexperienced she was, if she had her period, he felt he could defend his abuse of her as part of the natural order of things.”

Moreover, “The fact that different nations and states define the age of consent differently (in Florida it’s eighteen; in New York it’s seventeen; in England it’s sixteen) only gave him ammunition. He said these inconsistencies proved these laws were arbitrary and meaningless; no one could convince him that sex with minors was wrong, because no one could agree on what a minor was!”

Was the lust of young women the only reason why Epstein and Maxwell did this? Virginia didn’t think so. As she remarks, “Once Maxwell and Epstein had started trafficking me to strange men, I often wondered what they stood to gain. One theory is that they trafficked girls to some of their powerful acquaintances in the hope of being owed future favors. My impression of many of these men is that they didn’t know how to pursue women. Awkward and socially immature, it was as if their big brains were missing the ability to interact with other people. By giving them obedient girls, Epstein eliminated their need to persuade or entice potential sexual partners, and they were grateful for it. Another theory—which is supported by the fact that Epstein’s houses were all outfitted with video cameras in every room—is that he wanted to record men in compromising positions in order to blackmail them later. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that Epstein kept a huge library of videotapes that had been recorded inside his houses. In the Manhattan townhouse, Epstein himself showed me the room in which he monitored and recorded the camera feeds.”

But still, the sexual assault, even rape, not to mention the guilty conscience of luring other young girls into the Epstein trap eventually take their toll on her, with he body started to resist the stress from them and she became very ill. Afterwards, she began to plan her escape, by agreeing to be a surrogate to Epstein and Maxwell’s baby (a long, sick, story) but only with a condition that they teach her how to be a masseurs properly. To her surprise, Epstein and Maxwell then send her to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to learn about Thai massage. And that’s where she met Robert Giuffre.

As Virginia recalls, “Then, just after my nineteenth birthday, I met someone who seemed to give a damn about me. I took a chance, and in 2002 I escaped.”

Life after Epstein

Robert Giuffre is a breath of fresh air in a damp and dark place of Virginia’s past, as they instantly hit it off and even got married in less than 2 weeks since they met.

As Virginia recalls, “Robbie asked more questions about Epstein and Maxwell. How often did they check in on me? How soon was I expected to return to the United States? I remember I was crying as I told him I wasn’t sure how I could ever break free from Epstein and Maxwell’s web. But Robbie shook his head. “You don’t have to live that way,” he said, taking my hand. “Come back to Australia with me.” A week into knowing each other, he dropped down onto one knee and proposed. “You won’t be rich,” Robbie told me, “but I will work hard to support you. I’ll never hurt you. Never betray you. I’ll be here for you and always love you. I’ll have your back until we die.” I’d never thought I’d hear those words from anyone, and as I told him yes, happy tears ran down my cheeks. “I love you, too,” I said.”

It is so nice to read how Robbie is treating her for a change, and how his family also embraced and love her fully, everything that she never had since 6 years old.

Like the story how Robbie’s dad took care of her when she was ill: “A few days after our return, I fell terribly ill with some sort of flu. When I spiked a fever, Robbie was at work—he’d gotten a construction job. I felt awful: clammy and hot. I didn’t want to be a pain in anyone’s ass, and—especially since I’d just learned the Aussie phrase “having a whinge” (complaining for no reason)—I was determined to be stoic. But when Robbie’s dad discovered how sick I was, he swung into action, whipping up his special zuppa di lenticchie, or lentil soup. I was too weak to get out of bed, but Frank propped me up on my pillows and then sat beside me, feeding me spoonfuls until I was full. Later, as I passed in and out of a sweaty, delirious sleep, he returned every few minutes to cool my forehead with a damp cloth. When my fever broke, Frank brought me coffee that was creamy from the raw egg he’d stirred into it. After I’d recovered, Frank sat with me and showed me how to peel a prickly pear, teaching me to avoid the nettles, which will embed themselves like fiberglass in your fingers if you aren’t careful. He didn’t say much, just as Robbie had warned that he wouldn’t, but in those first weeks that I was in Sydney, Frank gave me more nurturing than I ever got from my own father.”

Or how Robbie’s mum and aunties accept her: “The women of the Giuffre clan were more skeptical of me. Robbie’s mom, especially, is blunt and quick to call out wrongdoing, and at first she was suspicious of this skinny American who’d crash-landed on her doorstep. Then, just before Christmas, Nina took me to the home of some of Robbie’s aunties, or zias. It was cannoli-making day, and I was being drafted to help. I knew nothing about making cannoli, of course, but I quickly figured out the assembly line: pounding out the dough, then rolling it thin and wrapping it around bamboo poles that we dipped into a fryer, taking care not to burn them. Then we stuffed the crispy shells with three kinds of fillings: ricotta, vanilla cream, and chocolate. We must’ve made three hundred cannoli that day, and when I returned home, I had ricotta in my hair. But I’d passed some sort of test. The zias were proud of me.”

But of course it was never going to be easy, with past traumas often reappear in a form of dream and paranoia. That is, until one afternoon in 2007, 5 years since she escaped in Thailand, when her 1st child was sleeping and she was 8 months pregnant, the phone rang and she picked it up only to hear Maxwell’s sound at the other end of the line. And few days later Epstein himself called Virginia.

The Epstein case

2 years prior to this phone call, on 14 March 2005 a stepmother of a 14 year-old girl contacted the Palm Beach Police Department and reported that her child had been molested by a wealthy Palm Beach resident. “The concerned woman told police she’d learned about the incident from another mother who overheard the girl tell a friend that a forty-five-year-old man had paid her to have sex with him.” As Virginia recalls, years later when reading the police report she identified all of the similar modus operandi implemented by Epstein and Maxwell.

And thus the police initiated an investigation and surveillance on Epstein, where over the next 13 months they managed to track down more than 30 victims and interviewed them. This led to 20 October 2005, when the police execute a search warrant on Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, but the police noted that “it appeared Epstein knew they were coming – it seemed computers had been removed from desks.” But still, the police managed to seize the photographs of naked young girls, as well as incriminating message pad, and many other evidence from lubricants to hidden cameras.

But then the investigation met by an intimidation campaign and interference, with Epstein eventually being charged in July 2006 on only 2 state felony charges: procuring a minor for prostitution, and solicitation of prostitute. And then he was allowed to post a $3000 bond and go home. Meanwhile, “the state attorney, Barry Krischer, finally convened a Palm Beach County grand jury, but presented evidence from just two victims”, with the grand jury charged him with a single charge of felony solicitation of prostitution, where Epstein then pleaded not guilty in August 2006.

This would be the major theme of the next decade or so of Virginia’s life, where she juggle between family life and trying to bring down the most powerful people on Earth, where they (meaning Virginia and her lawyers) often met with corrupt judges, defamatory, backstabbing, media framing (which only embolden my judgement that the Daily Mail is an utterly trashy media), injustices where Epstein and Maxwell can get away with court date or slapped only with light sentences with small bail money, etc.

The long saga also took its toll on the family, where several times they were surveilled, followed by paparazzi, had pictures of her children taken, and even approached by mysterious men snooping at their house or monitoring from a distance (which prompted them to move houses a few times, from several places in Australia, to several places in the US, and back to Australia again), having difficulties to seek employments (because “no one wants to hire a sex slaves”), even growingly distant to her husband and children due to the demand of the law suits. That were the real human costs that often brushed away from the reporting in the media.

But then, on 6 July 2019, 14 years later, Jeffrey Epstein was finally arrested on federal charges related to sex trafficking. He was apprehended after his private jet touched down at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, while at the same time his New York town house was raided and the police found an “extraordinary volume” of nude photographs of young-looking women. They also found a safe containing $70,000 in cash, 48 loose diamonds, and 3 passports belonging to Epstein: United States, Israel (an important subject for another time), and an expired passport from Austria that included a fake name and listed a home address in Saudi Arabia (a getaway plan).

Ghislaine Maxwell was not off the hook. On 9 August 2019 a judge made public for the first time of what would be several batches of previously sealed documents in Virginia’s defamation case against Maxwell. But before anything happened on Maxwell, the day after on 10 August 2019, Epstein reportedly committed suicide.

And it was indeed fishy. As Virginia remarks, “As the details came out, nearly everything about Epstein’s death seemed fishy. Even Attorney General William Barr would acknowledge he initially had suspicions that Epstein had been murdered. Instead, he concluded otherwise: that Epstein’s death was a result of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” There was the fact that Epstein had tried to harm himself before but then been taken off suicide watch. While he’d had a cellmate at some point, on the night of his death, he did not have one. Two prison guards who sat at a desk just fifteen feet from Epstein’s cell were supposed to check on him every half hour from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. Instead, they’d napped and browsed the internet, then falsified the logs to say they’d completed their rounds. Security cameras that could have captured Epstein’s self-harming behavior—or, if conspiracy theorists are to be believed, the actions of whoever murdered him—were not functioning. Other cameras that were working showed that no one had entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died—so that seemed to rule out the possibility of an assassin sneaking in. But then his brother hired a forensic pathologist to examine the official autopsy report. That expert concluded that the broken bones and cartilage in Epstein’s neck “point[ed] to homicide.””

So, was he killed or did he really commit a suicide? “I’ll tell you one thing, though”, Virginia remarks, “while I’ve read that Epstein was buried in an unmarked grave not far from his parents, in Palm Beach, Florida, I don’t believe that at all. Epstein had repeatedly told me exactly what would happen when he died: his body would be placed in some sort of cryogenic chamber to be preserved until technology advanced far enough to bring him back to life. That’s what he’d always bragged to me, with that satisfied smirk on his face. I know it sounds far-fetched, but I wouldn’t bet against the notion that he somehow got his way on this.”

Furthermore, “Investigators would soon discover that on August 8, two days before his death, Epstein had placed his entire fortune into a trust—“The 1953 Trust,” apparently named for his birth year—in the Virgin Islands. This legal maneuver would be widely interpreted as Epstein’s final thumbing of his nose at those who’d survived his predation, because it made it much more difficult for his victims to get restitution. Even after death, Epstein seemed to be asserting control.”

This got me thinking, was he really dead? Because look at the timeline: on 8 August Epstein moved his entire fortune to a trust. 10 August he committed suicide. And if you recall earlier on 5 October Epstein’s plastic surgeon had a plane crash (with details suggest a murder). And on 19 November his private banker committed suicide. Should we be looking for him in Austria, with a different face?

For the time being, it doesn’t matter. Because 3 days after Epstein’s death, on 13 August 2019 the New York Post published a photograph of Naomi Campbell’s 31st birthday party in a yacht in St Tropez, where Epstein attended. And most importantly in the photo there was Virginia and a glimpse of Maxwell’s hair, with the caption “Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Sex Slave’ seen at Naomi Campbell’s birthday party in 2001.” And that’s how they eventually get Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2022.

And later, after unsuccessful previous attempts to bring Prince Andrew to court, on 12 January 2022 Virginia’s case against Prince Andrew finally got a green light, during the wave of the #MeToo movement. And Prince Andrew’s lawyers moved quickly to settle. As Virginia recalls, “On February 15, the settlement was announced. We issued a joint statement that made clear Prince Andrew would pay me money, though the amount was kept confidential (later it was reported that his mother, the queen of England, had footed the bill). The statement said he would also make a “substantial donation” in support of victims’ rights to my nascent nonprofit organization.”

And equally important for Virginia, Prince Andrew agreed to release an apology (well, sort of): ““Prince Andrew has never intended to malign Ms. Giuffre’s character,” the statement read in part, “and he accepts that she has suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks.” Yes, indeed, including attacks from the prince’s own camp! “It is known that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked countless young girls over many years,” the statement continued, acknowledging vastly more about Epstein’s predatory behavior than the prince himself had in his fateful BBC interview. “Prince Andrew regrets his association with Epstein, and commends the bravery of Ms. Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others. He pledges to demonstrate his regret for his association with Epstein by supporting the fight against the evils of sex trafficking, and by supporting its victims.””

Nobody’s girl

If you think this story has a happy ending, sadly you are mistaken.

First, Virginia began to have a health problem, which innocently enough started during a family break when she got infected with a meningitis. As she recalls, “Butterfly Valley lived up to its name: we must’ve seen thousands of Cairns birdwings in all shapes, sizes, and colors. But when I returned home, I spiked a temperature and my head hurt like hell. When I became delirious, Robbie took me to the doctor, who did some tests and concluded I must’ve been bitten by a mosquito, because I had meningitis. I couldn’t believe it: during the trip, I’d been the only one in our group slathering myself with bug spray.”

And then things got worse, “I was admitted to the hospital, where things got so much worse. Not realizing how delirious I’d become, at one point I got out of bed to go to the toilet and lost my footing. When I fell to the floor, I heard a cracking sound. I’d broken my neck.” Moreover, “In August 2020, I had what’s called an anterior cervical discectomy; doctors at Sunnybank Private Hospital in Brisbane went in through the front of my throat and removed a shattered disk, then attached metal swivels in my neck to allow me to continue to have some mobility.”

But things just spiraling down afterwards, as Virginia recalls, “In February 2021, my health worsened. First, I developed a high fever, then a place on my thigh where I’d received a steroid injection became inflamed. My doctors speculated that maybe I was having an allergic reaction to the antibiotic I’d been taking after my neck surgery, but mostly they seemed stumped. Soon my inflamed thigh turned into a staph infection that refused to heal. Then, I got another case of pneumonia. It was as if my immune system was overloaded. I couldn’t catch a break.”

And again, “I’d been in the hospital again, having laparoscopic surgery to remove cysts from my ovaries and polyps from my uterus. For weeks leading up to that operation, I’d been bleeding nonstop. Doctors wondered whether my string of health problems were somehow related to the staph infection on my thigh, which was still not fully healed. No one was quite sure of anything, it seemed, except that my body seemed to be staging a revolt.”

If you notice the timeline (2020-2021) she’s having the health problems at the same time the legal battles took place. All of this court hearings, and all the media scrutiny, not to mention many harassments, on top of the health problems, were beginning to take its toll on Virginia. In particular, the constant focus on her deeply painful past, which she has to relive over and over again, eventually got to her and triggered a PTSD.

As Virginia recalls, “So when my trauma tricked my brain into telling me lies, I listened: “It would be better for everyone if you weren’t here,” my brain said. “You bring nothing but stress and worry into your husband and children’s lives. Why should they suffer because Jeffrey and Ghislaine caused you pain? You have let your family down. They deserve better. They will be happier without you.” My trauma took aim at my very existence: “Aren’t you exhausted? Unconsciousness would be a relief. Robbie and the kids are safe at home, so none of them will find you. It won’t hurt a bit. The pills are on the bedside table. It will be easy. You can just quietly slip away.” I believed my brain, so I reached for the painkillers that I had smuggled into the hospital and I swallowed as many as I could—later they’d estimate 240 pills—before I passed out. I’m told that I was revived with Narcan, the opioid overdose treatment. My fragile self-worth had imploded. All that remained were the shards of me.”

Luckily she survived, but just days later, “after I got out of the hospital, I would try to kill myself again, with more pills. It was only because our son Alex came to check on me that I did not succeed. For a second time, I woke up in the hospital, revived once more by Narcan. After that, it would be a long time before my thoughts of self-annihilation would truly begin to subside. Only then could I promise my husband and kids that I would try with all my might to believe that I mattered.”

Virginia later reasoned, “That is the price of serious trauma: it lays you low, and sometimes makes you your own worst enemy. My goal now is to prevent the emotional time bomb that lives inside me—my toxic memories and devastating visualizations of myself being hurt—from ever detonating again.”

But sadly, she eventually lost that battle.

Which makes me think, her eventual death from a reported suicide was perhaps legitimate after all? Because she reportedly passed away due to suicide – when she was alone in her ranch outside Perth – one month after she was involved in a car accident with a school bus that led to another period of hospitalization after she had a kidney failure.

And at the time of her death on 25 April 2025 Virginia was shockingly in the middle of divorce proceeding with Robbie, after splitting in 2023-2024, and after also becoming estranged with their 3 children, even got a restraining order in which Virginia expressed on Instagram that her children have been “poisoned with lies.” What happened here? An allegation of domestic abuse by Robbie was also reported by few media, where he said to become increasingly controlling and violent, although judging from the way Virginia portray him in this book, how could he? Nothing about this makes sense, after reading how their family was like.

But then again, we’ll never know what actually happened. Was she still being targeted by rich and powerful people in this ongoing battle to release the Epstein Files and to hold these names accountable, or were all of this just genuinely too much to handle in the end for Virginia?

Everyone’s an idiot and all correct predictions are just sheer dumb luck

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is not a book about how to spot a Black Swan event, but rather a book that is trying to prove that we’re all helpless in the face of a Black Swan event.

The concept of Black Swan comes from the discovery of a literal black-coloured swan in Australia, that destroyed the common believe among ornithologists that all swans are white. Before this discovery even the empirical evidence were all pointed to swans being only white, which, according to the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.”

He then continues, “One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.”

This is the core premise of the book, the highly unexpected occasion when our widely held perceptions are destroyed into pieces in an instance, and we have to bear the consequences of the risk associated with it. The book covers Black Swans in many different areas of life, including psychology, business, finance, and natural science, among others; analysing limitations, how humans deal with knowledge, when smart people are dumb, even the unpredictability of war.

Taleb (or what he likes to refer himself to as NNT, even use NNT to talk about himself in a third person’s point of view, which was weird) expands this thesis by categorising events into 2 camps: Mediocristan vs. Extremistan.

Mediocristan is an utopian province where particular events do not contribute much individually, but only collectively. The idea behind it is “when your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total. The largest observation will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum.” Weight, height, and calorie consumption are from Mediocristan, so do income for a baker, a small restaurant owner, an orthodontist, a prostitute, or random statistics such as gambling profits, mortality rate, IQ, or car accidents. “Mediocristan”, as NNT remarks, “is where we must endure the tyranny of the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted.”

Meanwhile, Extremistan is a place where inequalities are such that one single observation can highly impact the aggregate or the total. Almost all social matters are from Extremistan, such as wealth, income, name recognition as a celebrity, book sales per author, book citation per author, number of references on Google, populations of cities, number of speakers per language, uses of words in a vocabulary, damages caused by earthquakes, sizes of planets, sizes of companies, stock ownership, height between species, financial markets, commodity prices, inflation rates, economic data, deaths in war, deaths from terrorist incidents, and so much more.

Interestingly, before the advances of modern technology wars used to belong to Mediocristan, as it can only occur locally and it is quite difficult to kill so many people at once. But today, with weapons of mass destructions, all it takes is a button, a crazy person, or a small error to wipe out a population. As NNT remarks, “Extremistan is where we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.” This is where Black Swans live.

Moreover, NNT also introduce the concept of the turkey problem. As he explains, “Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey [getting slaughtered]. It will incur a revision of belief.”

Indeed, this is another core argument of the book, that we’re all living life like the turkey, being conditioned to the daily routine under the illusion that everything is normal and becoming oblivion to the huge risks that are facing us.

The book also teaches us to see the other side of the coin, to be a successful turkey – so to speak – where our victories or achievements are actually the result of dumb luck or a streak or dumb lucks that cannot be replicated anymore even with huge efforts (AKA, positive Black Swan). And after about 30% of the book, after all the important theories have been discussed, that’s all that NNT is talking about, the stupidity of people.

In what becomes a tiringly repetitive and bulky rants, he then proceeded to provide “examples” when experts from many different fields are wrong. For instance, he is mocking those who predicted a landslide win of Al Gore against George W. Bush (but Gore did win the popular vote by a landslide, but then Bush + Fox cheat through the electoral college recount in Florida – ironically THIS will be a Black Swan moment, one that NNT failed to address and instead blame it on the economic failures of the Clinton-Gore era).

He also mocks the bell curve as an intellectual fraud, and dedicate one whole chapter 15 about it. He insulted Nobel Prize winners in economics Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe for creating the Modern Portfolio Theory (which he called phony), insulted another Nobel Prize winners in economics pair of Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, he even mocks Plato for creating the “Platonic fold” to understand reality (and use “Platonic” word as a derogatory term throughout the book), while also disagreeing with [the followers of] Karl Marx and Adam Smith.

Meanwhile, throughout the book he also tries so hard to portray himself as an intellectual, by inserting stories about him being invited to multiple intellectual gatherings, which reminds me of the behaviour of the Sophist in Ancient Greek, that would do anything they can to appear sophisticated by any means necessary other than their actual intellectual arguments.

Because what is his intellectual argument, really? His basic premise is all experts whether it’s scientists, economists, bankers, investors, are all successful not because of their skills, but down to luck. Except for him and his favourite philosophers (of course). He even use Orwell’s 1984 as a failed prediction over the future (who’s going to tell him?).

Surely not all experts or all predictions are just dumb luck? There are patterns, early signs, and experts that can predict a Black Swan before it happened. Like Paul Tudor Jones famously predicted the Black Monday 1987 crash during the weekend, highlighting a pure competency. Or those traders who placed a huge sums of put options starting from 5 September 2001 all the way to 10 September 2001, before 9/11 occurred, highlighting insider information that were not readily available to the rest of the world.

To be fair, NNT did somewhat address this, in what he call a reverse turkey move: “From the standpoint of the turkey, the nonfeeding of the one thousand and first day is a Black Swan. For the butcher, it is not, since its occurrence is not unexpected. So you can see here that the Black Swan is a sucker’s problem. In other words, it occurs relative to your expectation. You realize that you can eliminate a Black Swan by science (if you’re able), or by keeping an open mind.”

But still, rather than teaching us how to spot a Black Swan event early (maybe by diving deeper into those who did predict the 1987 crash or who were in the know of 9/11 beforehand), he dedicate the entire book to ridicule experts for being unaware of Black Swan events and unable to cope with them.

Ironically, he himself said in the book that when pressed by the press to provide examples of the upcoming Black Swans, he couldn’t answer it. He even tell the story when one time a business was trying to hire him to be a forecaster of events, but he said he doesn’t do forecasting, in which the business promptly dropped him (and he mocks them for being closed minded when it comes to predictions). Oh the huge ego on this fragile diva.

NNT’s thesis reminds me of the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which argues that asset prices always reflect all available information, making it hard to achieve return in excess of the market’s average. It is an utopian view of the market, a good benchmark but not a realistic view in the real life where in reality human behaviour matters more in the ever inefficient market that can produce higher returns for those who understand market psychology.

Likewise, in his thesis NNT failed to highlight those who have inside information, the perpetrator, or even the early receiver of the information, – AKA all the reverse turkeys – over the upcoming Black Swan. This makes him similar like the Efficient Market Hypothesis hardliners that refuse to budge, even during the market meltdown in 2008 that was not supposed to happen in an efficient market.

Which is a bit of an anti-climax for the book. Because NNT doesn’t provide any way to spot a Black Swan, and instead only encourages us to adopt a mindset that accepts the randomness of reality, get comfortable in uncertainty, and prepare for the unexpected. Because by doing so, we get to minimize the impact of any Black Swans. In this regard, just like the Efficient Market Hypothesis supporters, he really is a Black Swan purist that is unwilling to compromise his utopian thesis.

But still, what can we learn from a person we grow to disagree? When we strip away the ego and the intellectual douchebaggery, quite a lot, actually. Here are some of the better insights from him, on the fascinating world of randomness:

  1. The dynamics of the Lebanese conflict had been patently unpredictable, yet people’s reasoning as they examined the events showed a constant: almost all those who cared seemed convinced that they understood what was going on. Every single day brought occurrences that lay completely outside their forecast, but they could not figure out that they had not forecast them. Much of what took place would have been deemed completely crazy with respect to the past. Yet it did not seem that crazy after the events.
  2. I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible “because”; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations. But silent evidence masks this fact.
  3. Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.
  4. Matters should be seen on some relative, not absolute, timescale: earthquakes last minutes, 9/11 lasted hours, but historical changes and technological implementations are Black Swans that can take decades. In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly—it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.
  5. We have a natural tendency to look for instances that confirm our story and our vision of the world—these instances are always easy to find. Alas, with tools, and fools, anything can be easy to find. You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence. For instance, a diplomat will show you his “accomplishments,” not what he failed to do. Mathematicians will try to convince you that their science is useful to society by pointing out instances where it proved helpful, not those where it was a waste of time, or, worse, those numerous mathematical applications that inflicted a severe cost on society owing to the highly unempirical nature of elegant mathematical theories.
  6. The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event.
  7. We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads.
  8. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.
  9. Think of the world around you, laden with trillions of details. Try to describe it and you will find yourself tempted to weave a thread into what you are saying. A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived “chaos of human experience.”
  10. People in professions with high randomness (such as in the markets) can suffer more than their share of the toxic effect of look-back stings: I should have sold my portfolio at the top; I could have bought that stock years ago for pennies and I would now be driving a pink convertible; et cetera. If you are a professional, you can feel that you “made a mistake,” or, worse, that “mistakes were made,” when you failed to do the equivalent of buying the winning lottery ticket for your investors, and feel the need to apologize for your “reckless” investment strategy (that is, what seems reckless in retrospect).
  11. How can you get rid of such a persistent throb? Don’t try to willingly avoid thinking about it: this will almost surely backfire. A more appropriate solution is to make the event appear more unavoidable. Hey, it was bound to take place and it seems futile to agonize over it. How can you do so? Well, with a narrative. Patients who spend fifteen minutes every day writing an account of their daily troubles feel indeed better about what has befallen them. You feel less guilty for not having avoided certain events; you feel less responsible for it. Things appear as if they were bound to happen.
  12. If you work in a randomness-laden profession, as we see, you are likely to suffer burnout effects from that constant second-guessing of your past actions in terms of what played out subsequently. Keeping a diary is the least you can do in these circumstances.
  13. It happens all the time: a cause is proposed to make you swallow the news and make matters more concrete. After a candidate’s defeat in an election, you will be supplied with the “cause” of the voters’ disgruntlement. Any conceivable cause can do. The media, however, go to great lengths to make the process “thorough” with their armies of fact-checkers. It is as if they wanted to be wrong with infinite precision (instead of accepting being approximately right, like a fable writer).
  14. Adding the “because” makes these matters far more plausible, and far more likely. Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it—an unspecified cause means no cause at all.
  15. The first question about the paradox of the perception of Black Swans is as follows: How is it that some Black Swans are overblown in our minds when the topic of this book is that we mainly neglect Black Swans? The answer is that there are two varieties of rare events: a) the narrated Black Swans, those that are present in the current discourse and that you are likely to hear about on television, and b) those nobody talks about, since they escape models—those that you would feel ashamed discussing in public because they do not seem plausible. I can safely say that it is entirely compatible with human nature that the incidences of Black Swans would be overestimated in the first case, but severely underestimated in the second one.
  16. We learn from repetition—at the expense of events that have not happened before. Events that are nonrepeatable are ignored before their occurrence, and overestimated after (for a while). After a Black Swan, such as September 11, 2001, people expect it to recur when in fact the odds of that happening have arguably been lowered.
  17. The economist Hyman Minsky sees the cycles of risk taking in the economy as following a pattern: stability and absence of crises encourage risk taking, complacency, and lowered awareness of the possibility of problems. Then a crisis occurs, resulting in people being shell-shocked and scared of investing their resources.
  18. Terrorism kills, but the biggest killer remains the environment, responsible for close to 13 million deaths annually. But terrorism causes outrage, which makes us overestimate the likelihood of a potential terrorist attack—and react more violently to one when it happens. We feel the sting of man-made damage far more than that caused by nature.
  19. He tells you that his cousin (with whom he will celebrate the holidays) worked in a law office with someone whose brother-in-law’s business partner’s twin brother was mugged and killed in Central Park. Indeed, Central Park in glorious New York City. That was in 1989, if he remembers it well (the year is now 2007). The poor victim was only thirty-eight and had a wife and three children, one of whom had a birth defect and needed special care at Cornell Medical Center. Three children, one of whom needed special care, lost their father because of his foolish visit to Central Park. Well, you are likely to avoid Central Park during your stay. You know you can get crime statistics from the Web or from any brochure, rather than anecdotal information from a verbally incontinent salesman. But you can’t help it. For a while, the name Central Park will conjure up the image of that poor, undeserving man lying on the polluted grass. It will take a lot of statistical information to override your hesitation.
  20. Now, I do not disagree with those recommending the use of a narrative to get attention. Indeed, our consciousness may be linked to our ability to concoct some form of story about ourselves. It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.
  21. The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.
  22. These nonlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we only focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand.
  23. Making $1 million in one year, but nothing in the preceding nine, does not bring the same pleasure as having the total evenly distributed over the same period, that is, $100,000 every year for ten years in a row. The same applies to the inverse order—making a bundle the first year, then nothing for the remaining period.
  24. Let us separate the world into two categories. Some people are like the turkey, exposed to a major blowup without being aware of it, while others play reverse turkey, prepared for big events that might surprise others.
  25. A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Likewise, the risk of a Black Swan is invisible.
  26. In fact, economic growth comes from such risk taking. But some fool might argue the following: if someone followed reasoning such as mine, we would not have had the spectacular growth we experienced in the past. This is exactly like someone playing Russian roulette and finding it a good idea because he survived and pocketed the money.
  27. I am not dismissing the idea of risk taking, having been involved in it myself. I am only critical of the encouragement of uninformed risk taking.
  28. I insist on the following: that we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks.
  29. We have been playing Russian roulette; now let’s stop and get a real job.
  30. The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort.
  31. Evolution is a series of flukes, some good, many bad. You only see the good. But, in the short term, it is not obvious which traits are really good for you, particularly if you are in the Black Swan–generating environment of Extremistan. This is like looking at rich gamblers coming out of the casino and claiming that a taste for gambling is good for the species because gambling makes you rich! Risk taking made many species head for extinction!
  32. Worse, in a Black Swan environment, where one single but rare event can come shake up a species after a very long run of “fitness,” the foolish risk takers can also win in the long term!

The context around Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries

“Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend” by Patrick Symmes

This is a highly amusing book where the author, journalist Patrick Symmes, traced back the journey that Ernesto Guevara and his buddy Alberto Granado took in 1952. Armed with a little more than Ernesto’s and Alberto’s diaries of the trip, in 1996 Symmes rode his BMW R80 G/S motorcycle and followed the footsteps that both Ernesto and Alberto took nearly 50 years before, searching for the people they met and places that they visited.

And it was pretty impressive, as he met Chichina herself (Ernesto’s girlfriend that they visited in the trip), traced down Oscar Von Puttkamer (whose family hosted Guevara and Granado during their trip), visited the fire station where the 2 boys helped to save a cat in a house fire, got himself written in a small town newspaper in Chile (just like Ernesto and Alberto), visited the lepers hospital that the 2 boys had come to see in Peru, among many others, including drinking himself blind in Cuba at the end of the trip with none other than Alberto Granado himself.

Along the journey, Symmes fill up the political, economic, and social contexts of each country that he visited; describing what’s going on during the 2 boys’ trip in 1952 and what have happened since then. Starting from the background of Ernesto’s family, his upbringing, even giving the context of Germans living in Argentina (which predated the fleeing Nazis). He then provided the explanation of the Chilean economic miracle (where as it turns out the rich got richer and the poor get poorer), the brutality of the Pinochet regime, and later told the stories of everyday struggles of people in Peru and Bolivia.

And as the trip proceeds he also paints a clearer picture on what happened with Ernesto that turned him into the fabled Che Guevara not long after the 1952 trip. To his credit, Symmes isn’t one of those groupie or blind follower of Che, but an objective journalist that can see both the positive and negative parts of things, including on Che’s conducts. Which makes this book objectively pleasing. And perhaps the best part of this book is, you don’t really need to read Ernesto’s diary beforehand (or watch The Motorcycle Diaries movie) as this book also narrates the 2 boys’ journey alongside his.

Moreover, the book is also Symmes’ tale of adventure by his own right, with him being a “gringo”, driving past the steepest mountains and the driest deserts, through wild animals and thieves and guerilla fighters. With crazy stories such as running out of gas in an Argentine desert, falling from the motorcycle and fracturing a rib cage, got bitten by a dog, meeting Douglas Tompkins (the founder of North Face and Esprit) and hanging out with him for a while, eating at a whorehouse, sleeping on top of a mass grave, sleeping at an abandoned gas station, witnessing rain in the Atacama desert (yes, there’s no recorded rain there, but there are short burst of rains every now and then), fell in love with almost every woman he met in Peru, visiting a prison to speak with the Shining Path revolutionaries, interviewing a man who was one of Che’s soldiers in Cuban revolution, speaking with Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (the photographer who took that most-famous picture of Che one overcast day in March 1960 – that became the icon of Che Guevarra), and so much more.

Near the end of the book, when Symmes was in Bolivia (Che’s final resting place long after the 1952 trip), he encountered several more books about Guevara: one written by his father, the other one written by Che’s travel companion in 1954, while Symmes also found Che’s diary in Bolivia. And it provides a much clearer picture over the Ernesto of 1952 that evolved into the Che of 1966, who became world famous for being the number 1 Guerilla, who has amassed a giant ego, and a lust for cold bloodedness.

All in all, the book is so very well written, even poetic at times, with bits of comedy every now and then that makes it thoroughly enjoyable to read. Absolutely superb.