Greetings folks,

Welcome to the 23rd Edition. The Department of War is having a rough month.

Last September, the Pentagon rebranded itself as the Department of War. The website is now war.gov. Pete Hegseth calls himself the Secretary of War. Workers physically removed the old lettering from the Pentagon facade. Hegseth said the name change would signal maximum lethality, not tepid legality. I am not sure what the second part means to be honest. Senator Mitch McConnell's response: If we call it the Dept. of War, we'd better equip the military to actually prevent and win wars. Ha!

Six months later, the Department of War's most expensive warship can't flush its toilets, is limping to Crete after a laundry fire that may have been set by its own crew, and the Secretary of War is asking Congress for $200 billion because they're running out of ammunition three weeks into the first war they've actually fought under the new name. Don’t worry the ship has a therapy dog named Sage. Meanwhile, a former NATO commander is already shopping for post-war real estate in Tehran, somebody made $580 million in oil trades 15 minutes before a presidential Truth Social post, a mysterious Farsi voice is broadcasting spy numbers on shortwave radio, and a burger CEO is referencing the Mangione assassination while giving away his wife's fur coat money. Lets go do it.

Semafor's Liz Hoffman interviewed Admiral James Stavridis on Monday, hours after Trump announced a five-day pause in strikes on Iran's electric grid. Stavridis is the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. He is now the vice chairman of Carlyle, one of the largest private equity firms on earth. Those two facts are doing a lot of work in the same sentence.

Stavridis sees two-in-three odds of a negotiated peace. The core trade: Iran gives up its uranium enrichment capability and the Strait of Hormuz reopens to global shipping. If that happens, he argued, Iran becomes the most interesting investment opportunity in the world. 90 million people. Demographics going vertical. Highly educated. A culture that believes in itself as Persian. He compared it to the reconstruction of the Korean peninsula after the Korean War. That being said, the one-in-three downside is continued bombing campaigns, Marines going ashore, and the strait closed to 90% of traffic. Those are not small probabilities attached to not small outcomes.

He is also bullish on Venezuela, Ukraine, and Cuba, which he described as having a population north of 10 million, underemployed, a potential agrarian powerhouse, with a Cuban diaspora just licking its chops to get back in there and reconstruct it. When asked about the risk of having employees in the region while missiles are flying, he said the current situation resembled two high-speed muscle cars going straight at each other. His boss Harvey Schwartz's take: We're going to assess the geopolitical risk. Which is private equity speak for: we're going in.

Stavridis also noted he was surprised oil didn't immediately hit $150 when the war started, and flagged fertilizer as the overlooked risk. A third of the world's fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike oil, where you can top up storage tanks anytime, if you miss a planting season, you never recover that. BlackRock's Larry Fink, who just weeks ago was telling investors to buy the dip, reversed course this week and warned of a recession if oil stays above $100. The consideration of post-war investment opportunities while the bombs are still falling is either visionary or macabre. Possibly both. I personally do not have a Carlyle-sized chequebook, but I appreciate their honesty.

Sentiment

The reaction online split roughly where you'd expect. On r/investing, the Stavridis interview was treated as a useful signal from smart money: several commenters noted that Carlyle has historically been early to post-conflict regions and that the Korea comparison is apt given Iran's demographics and educated workforce. On X/Twitter, the tone was darker, with critics calling it war profiteering dressed up as geopolitical analysis. Seeking Alpha contributors flagged the fertilizer point as the most underreported angle, noting that Nutrien and Mosaic have already moved sharply. On LinkedIn, a handful of former military officers pushed back on the two-in-three odds, arguing Stavridis is underweighting Iran's remaining asymmetric capabilities. On Hacker News, the discussion focused on whether post-conflict reconstruction in a sanctioned economy is even investable given compliance risk. Bluesky users were largely in the war-profiteering camp. The BlackRock Fink reversal from buy-the-dip to recession-warning within three weeks drew sarcasm across every platform.

The USS Gerald R. Ford is the most expensive warship ever built. $13 billion. 4,500 crew. Approaching 11 months deployed, the longest carrier deployment since Vietnam. It was supposed to project American dominance across the Mediterranean. Instead it is currently crawling toward Souda Bay, Crete, for emergency repairs after a laundry room fire on March 12 that took more than 30 hours to contain. Over 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation. 600 lost their sleeping quarters. The Navy stripped 1,000 mattresses from the USS John F. Kennedy, a carrier that hasn't even been commissioned yet, and shipped them over. Greek media outlet Kathimerini first reported that the fire is being investigated as possible sabotage.

The toilets are the real story. The Ford's vacuum toilet system has been described by crew and naval analysts as undersized and poorly designed since at least 2020. The system was reportedly breaking down daily before the fire. You have a $13 billion warship whose defining operational challenge is plumbing. The ship also has a therapy dog named Sage, who joined in 2023 as a pioneering operational stress control canine. Sage must be working overtime, poor thing.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is requesting a $200 billion supplemental from Congress to replenish ammunition stocks. The US spent $5.6 billion in munitions in the first few days of the Iran campaign alone. CSIS estimated $16.5 billion at day 12. Fortune calculated that $200 billion might fund only about 140 more days of operations at current rates. For context, the FY2026 defence budget is already $856 billion. Trump has pledged $1.5 trillion for FY2027. The federal deficit is projected at $1.9 trillion. Seth Jones at CSIS wrote in the WSJ that the US lacks the munitions stockpile to simultaneously execute war plans against China, Russia, and North Korea. Linda Bilmes at Harvard estimated long-term costs could reach trillions. Over 7,000 targets have been struck across Iran so far. Hegseth: It takes money to kill bad guys.

Now for the part that makes you get out of bed. On Monday March 23 at 6:49 a.m. New York time, roughly 6,200 Brent and WTI futures contracts changed hands in a single minute. The notional value: approximately $580 million. Bloomberg calculated that volume was nine times the five-day average for that time slot. Six million barrels against a normal 700,000. S&P 500 e-mini futures spiked simultaneously, with about $2 billion in notional value. There was no public news to explain it. At 7:04 a.m., 15 minutes later, Trump posted on Truth Social that the US had been having very good and productive conversations with Iran. Oil dropped up to 14%. The S&P surged 2.5%. Iran's parliament speaker denied any talks and called it fake news to manipulate the financial and oil markets.

Last April, bullish stock trades appeared minutes before Trump paused the Liberation Day tariffs. The DOJ's Public Integrity Section, created after Watergate, has been reduced from 36 lawyers to two. The SEC's top enforcement official resigned last week after agency leaders reportedly blocked her from pursuing cases touching Trump's circle. The White House said it does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge. I’ll let you be the judge, but I think we can fix the plumbing issues by reduced the amount of baked beans consumed at breakfast.

Sentiment

This is the story that broke the internet this week. On r/investing and r/wallstreetbets, the $580M trade dominated discussion for days, with the top-voted comment simply reading: Martha Stewart went to prison for $45,000. On X/Twitter, Sen. Andy Kim's post demanding immediate investigations was shared hundreds of thousands of times. Krugman's Substack essay was the most-read economics post of the week, with his line about decisions of war and peace possibly serving market manipulation rather than national interests drawing the sharpest reactions. Seeking Alpha contributors were more measured, noting that elevated oil trading volumes across March make it harder to isolate one spike as definitive proof. On Hacker News, the discussion centered on the structural impossibility of enforcement when the DOJ's integrity division has been gutted to two people. Stocktwits users focused on the Polymarket angle, arguing prediction markets are now functioning as front-running tools for insiders. LinkedIn was quieter, with compliance professionals noting that CFTC enforcement resources are even thinner than the SEC's. The CBS News interview with Tim Skirrow of Energy Aspects offered the most credible pushback: volumes were elevated but not excessively large given recent fund inflows. Nobody found that particularly reassuring.

It begins with a Farsi-speaking voice scratching out of the static. Tavajjoh! he demands three times. Attention. Then a steady stream of numbers: six, four, zero, nine, three, nine. The broadcasts have been running on long-distance shortwave radio from somewhere in western Europe since the hours after the first US and Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28. They run twice daily at 5:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m. Iranian time, roughly an hour and a half each session. Shortwave trackers christened it V32. It is the first Farsi number station identified in a quarter of a century.

A number station is a shortwave transmission used by intelligence agencies to send encrypted one-way orders to spies. The agent has a radio and a notebook. The numbers come in. The agent translates them using a one-time pad, a single-use decryption key that is destroyed after use. Unless someone catches the spy in the act of transcribing, there is virtually nothing counter-intelligence can do about it. You can't hack a notebook. You can't trace a radio that's been tuned to a different station within seconds. The technology is older than most of the people reading this newsletter.

John Sipher, a former CIA station chief in Moscow who was trained on number stations and served as a lead instructor on the CIA's clandestine training programme, told the Financial Times it was likely backup communications for our sources inside Iran. These are people that you cannot afford to be out of contact with. Chris Simmons, a former US counter-intelligence officer who spent years hunting Cuban spies using these exact systems, said: It is not a coincidence that it started on the day the war began. The broadcasts launched as Iran's government cut the country's internet connections with the outside world, standard procedure during a crisis, and precisely the moment when agents would need a fallback.

Members of Priyom, a shortwave monitoring group, triangulated the transmitter to western Europe by calculating signal arrival times across multiple receivers. Iran tried to jam V32 within days, flooding the frequency with electronic beeps and chirps. The station hopped to a new frequency and kept reading numbers. Robert Gorelick, a former CIA station chief in Lima and Rome, offered an alternative theory: V32 could be a deliberate psyop designed to stoke paranoia inside Iranian counter-intelligence. This adds to the pressure on them. If you proposed this to me, and I was sitting in Langley, I would say: Let's do it.

Listeners have detected sounds resembling Windows 10 error messages in the background, along with what might be an operator shuffling a microphone. They debate endlessly whether the broadcast is pre-recorded or live. V32 has little flair compared to V13, also known as New Star Broadcasting, which transmits from Taiwan and signs off with: Thank you for listening, and we wish you health and happiness. V32 offers no such pleasantries. It just reads numbers. In 2026, with AI generating deepfake voices and quantum computing threatening encryption standards, the most effective intelligence tool for reaching an agent inside a country being bombed by two militaries is a man reading numbers on a radio that your grandmother could have owned. It is one of those old-fashioned things that works, Sipher said. Honestly, I find that oddly comforting and loving the James Bond angle. Or maybe they placed the $580M bet on oil?

Sentiment

This is the article that people forwarded to friends this week. On r/shortwave and r/SIGINT, the V32 discussion has been running since early March with Priyom members posting frequency logs and recording snippets. The Windows 10 error sound detail became a minor meme on X/Twitter, with one widely shared post suggesting the CIA's budget could stretch to a Mac. On Hacker News, the discussion was characteristically technical: long threads on the mathematical unbreakability of one-time pads, comparisons to the Enigma system, and speculation about whether AI voice synthesis has made it harder or easier to run number stations. Seeking Alpha and Stocktwits had no meaningful coverage, which is expected for a story with no direct market angle. On LinkedIn, several signals intelligence professionals shared the FT piece with commentary noting that the public discussion of active intelligence methods was unusual and possibly itself a form of signalling. On Reddit's r/worldnews, the top comment was: this is the most James Bond thing that has actually happened in 2026. Bluesky users latched onto the Taiwan sign-off as the most human detail in the entire Iran conflict.

The productivity data from major enterprise employers is so consistent it is difficult to dismiss. JPMorgan Chase's Autism at Work program found that employees hired into neurodiversity tracks in certain tech roles were 90% to 140% more productive than neurotypical colleagues who had been in the same jobs for five to ten years, with near-zero errors. UiPath reported that neurodivergent associates in a pilot with AutonomyWorks were 150% more productive at AI data labeling tasks. Hewlett Packard Enterprise found neurodiverse software testing teams in Australia's Department of Human Services were 30% more productive. At SAP, a single neurodivergent employee's solution saved the company an estimated $40 million. These are not startup anecdotes. These are internal program metrics from four of the largest enterprise employers in the world, reported consistently over nearly a decade.

Roughly 15-20% of the global population is neurodivergent, encompassing autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and related conditions. In the UK, just 22% of autistic adults are in paid work, according to Office for National Statistics data. The Buckland Review of Autism Employment, a 2024 UK government report, found that only three in ten working-age autistic people are employed, compared to eight in ten non-disabled adults. A 2024 survey by Zurich UK found that 51% of neurodivergent people feel they cannot or should not disclose their neurodiversity to employers. Two thirds say employers view neurodivergence as a red flag. The talent pool producing some of the highest measured productivity in the workforce is also the most underemployed and the most hidden.

Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, has decided to build a company around this mismatch. Karp, who has disclosed living with dyslexia, runs a company now valued at roughly $370 billion. In late 2025, Palantir launched a Neurodivergent Fellowship: a dedicated hiring pathway for neurodivergent candidates in New York and Washington, D.C. Compensation ranges from $110,000 to $200,000 per year with stock grants and a sign-on bonus. Final interviews are conducted by Karp personally.

The broader data supports the thesis. 40% of self-made millionaires in the UK are dyslexic. People with ADHD are estimated to be up to 500% more likely to become entrepreneurs. Richard Branson built Virgin with ADHD and dyslexia. Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA and created its product naming system because he could not remember numerical codes. The counterpoint comes from Anthropic's Daniela Amodei, who argues the opposite: The things that make us human will become much more important instead of much less important. She looks for communicators with empathy and curiosity. She may well be right. I can finally say I have undiagnosed adult ADHD, and with my bad spelling I am set for sucess.

Sentiment

The Palantir fellowship has been one of the most-discussed hiring stories of the past three months. On r/ADHD and r/autism, the announcement was met with a mix of genuine hope and suspicion that it would be used as a marketing exercise rather than a sustainable programme. Several commenters pointed out that the no-diagnosis requirement was the single most important design decision. On X/Twitter, the Karp skiing video that launched the fellowship has been viewed over 40 million times, with reactions ranging from neurodivergent adults saying they cried watching it to critics accusing Karp of instrumentalizing disability for PR. The Gizmodo headline captured the sceptics well: Karp talks about neurodivergence in ways that are getting pretty weird. On LinkedIn, HR professionals were split between those who saw it as a genuine talent arbitrage and those who worried about reducing complex identities to productivity metrics. On Hacker News, the thread went deep on whether the JPMorgan and SAP data holds up methodologically, with several users noting selection bias in corporate neurodiversity programmes. Seeking Alpha contributors focused on Palantir's valuation rather than the fellowship itself, noting that at $370 billion the stock is pricing in a lot of things going right. Stocktwits was bullish as usual. On Bluesky, the Amodei counterpoint drew significant attention, framed as the empathy-versus-efficiency debate that will define the next decade of hiring.

On February 17, Five Guys launched a buy-one-get-one burger deal to celebrate the chain's 40th birthday. The promotion was supposed to be a nice gesture. Instead it broke the company. Stores ran out of food. The app crashed. Lines stretched out the door. Workers were overwhelmed. Five Guys had to issue a public apology and schedule a do-over, which they called the 40th After Party, from March 9-12. Jerry Murrell, the 82-year-old founder and CEO, told Fortune in a phone interview this week that he never believed in promotions in the first place. I never thought they worked. We tried this one, buy one, get one free. Holy smokes. I couldn't believe all the people who jumped on that.

When Fortune asked why he decided to give $1.5 million in bonuses, $1,000 per store across 1,500 US locations, Murrell said: I didn't want anybody shooting me in the back or anything after the first day, because we really screwed it up. The remark was widely understood as a reference to Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old who fatally shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York in December 2025. When asked where the bonus money came from, Murrell said he had originally planned to buy his wife a fur coat. She still looks at me like I'm stupid.

Five Guys is privately held. 1,900 locations. 30,000 employees. 28 countries. Murrell is 82 years old and apparently has zero media training, which is precisely what makes this interview so refreshing. The man admitted on the record that he screwed up, made a joke about corporate assassination, and told a national magazine his wife thinks he's an idiot. In an era where every CEO statement is filtered through three layers of PR, legal, and investor relations, Murrell just picked up the phone and talked. The do-over BOGO apparently went well. The crew did good that day because they were prepared, he said, but they worked so hard that he thought he'd better give them a bonus. There is something genuinely decent about a billionaire-adjacent fast food founder who responds to a crisis by writing 1,500 cheques from his wife's fur coat fund. Makes you wonder, how many Dalmatians were they going to use on the fur coat?

Sentiment

This is the story that made everyone smile this week. On r/fastfood and r/FiveGuys, the Mangione joke was the top post, with commenters calling Murrell the most honest CEO in America. The fur coat detail became its own meme on X/Twitter, with variations on the theme of CEOs who should spend their wife's fur coat money on employees. TMZ, Inc., NBC, Fox Business, and Fortune all ran versions of the same story, which tells you something about how starved the public is for a CEO who sounds like a human being. On LinkedIn, leadership consultants immediately turned it into a case study about authentic crisis management, which is exactly the kind of thing that would make Murrell look at them like they're stupid. On Hacker News, the discussion pivoted to Five Guys' pricing, with several users noting that a burger, fries, and a shake now costs $25-30 at most locations, making the BOGO deal less a promotion and more a one-time opportunity to eat there at a price that existed in 2015. Seeking Alpha and Stocktwits had no coverage since Five Guys is private. On Bluesky, the dominant take was that Murrell's interview was the best CEO communication of 2026, precisely because it wasn't communication at all. It was just a guy talking.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest-running study of human happiness ever conducted. It has been tracking participants since 1938. The conclusion, after 85 years of data: social connections matter more than genes, class, or IQ. Kasley Killam, a public health researcher, recently distilled the findings into something she calls the 5-3-1 rule. Five different people per week. Three close relationships you actively maintain. One hour of quality social interaction per day. I think the 5-3-1 rule is probably the most useful thing in this entire newsletter. Have a fantastic weekend and please forward this to friends and family. As always I welcome feedback. Let’s also hope that the US isn’t negotiating with the man in the mirror when it comes to Iran.

Many thanks,

Sam

Market Snapshot

Companies Mentioned in This Edition

Sources

CBO, ABC News, Military Times, Fox News, Executive Order 14347, NGAUS (McConnell quote) Semafor (March 23 2026, Liz Hoffman interview with Stavridis), Semafor (June 2025 interview), RT/Pravda NATO/BBC (BlackRock Fink reversal), Carlyle.com (Stavridis blog post), Motley Fool, NPR Telegraph, WSJ Opinion (Seth Jones/CSIS), USNI News, CNN, NPR, Fortune, FT (George Steer, Amelia Pollard, Malcolm Moore), Bloomberg (x2), CNBC, Greek City Times/Kathimerini, 19FortyFive, Axios, Salon, CBS News, Paul Krugman Substack, Common Dreams, Washington Times, The Real News, The Guardian (Polymarket), MS NOW (Public Citizen) FT (March 10 2026, Jacob Judah and Alan Smith), Priyom shortwave monitoring group Forbes (March 26 2026), Fortune (March 24), Tom's Guide, Gizmodo, Palantir job posting / X announcement (Dec 7 2025), Gartner (Feb 2024 study), JPMorgan Autism at Work program, UiPath/AutonomyWorks, HPE, SAP, ONS / National Autistic Society, Buckland Review of Autism Employment (2024), Zurich UK survey, Bloomberg/PYMNTS (Enabled Intelligence), Exceptional Individuals (UK dyslexia research) Fortune (March 25), Washington Times, NBC, Fox Business, Inc, TMZ, People, Rolling Out Gathered (March 19 2026), Harvard Study of Adult Development