Hey, it's Gabriel.
These are my private notes this week on building wealth, raising my family, and breaking the generational patterns I inherited.
This week, we dropped the kids off at Zoey's mum's place.
Not for a date. For a build.
Four days. Head down. No interruptions. We built our company a second brain.
⚡ The Leverage
Last week I showed you my second brain. This week Zoey and I built one for the company.
Quick recap if you missed #015 — my personal second brain runs on Obsidian + OpenClaw + Claude Code. I dump raw notes into an inbox all day. A nightly agent files, tags, links everything, and drafts short wiki-style articles. It's my own private Wikipedia, and it gets smarter every night.
This week we took that exact pattern and scaled it to my company
Same architecture. Different scope:
Every SOP, process, and client decision — ingested
Every Slack conversation — digested nightly for inefficiencies
Every P&L number and campaign result — rolled into a daily digest
Every decision made in the business — logged with context so future-me never re-asks the same question
A vision of how our company second brain will look like
The design borrows from Jack Dorsey's world model idea — a company should run on a machine-readable map of how the business actually works, not on tribal knowledge trapped inside one founder's head.
(My head, specifically.)
Four days of building day and night. That's why the "how to build your second brain" video I promised last week didn't ship. I'll drop it next week — now with both versions. The personal one, and the company one.
The Uncrowded Take: Most founders build a company around themselves and call it leverage. Real leverage is building a brain that keeps running when you don't.
❤️ The Partnership
We're pulling our oldest out before she ever starts.
Ayla is 5 years old this year. Singapore Primary 1 starts at 7. Zoey and I have been circling the homeschool decision for months.
This week we decided.
Not because school is broken. Because one-to-many stopped making sense.
Think about what a 35-kid classroom actually optimizes for. One teacher, 35 different brains, one average pace. It's a compromise structure from a pre-AI world.
AI doesn't compromise.
I spent an hour this week playing with an open-source tool called Clicky. Hit two keys, said "teach me how to edit this video in Descript," and it literally moved my cursor to the exact button I needed to click next. Voice explaining as it pointed. Adapted to how fast I was keeping up.
That's a 1-on-1 tutor. Never tired. Never shames. Never moves on before the kid is ready.
My five-year-old will have a tutor like that before she learns cursive.
So here's the honest-traveler question I keep landing on: If AI can teach my kid 1-on-1 at the pace of her own curiosity… why would I ship her into a room of 35 to learn at the average?
I don't have every piece of it figured out. Social development, discipline structure, how Zoey and I divide who teaches what — all still being worked out. But the default option isn't the safe one anymore.
The "Uncrowded" Move: Don't pick the default because it feels safe. In a world where AI teaches 1-on-1 for free, one-to-many is the expensive option.
💰 The Portfolio
Zero trades this week. The last two are playing out.
Quick scoreboard so you don't have to dig through old issues:
Tesla: Trimmed ~20% of the position at ~$450 in January. Bought it back at ~$360 two issues ago. Now ~$390. Up ~8% on the re-entry.
NET (Cloudflare) + PATH (UiPath): Still loading. Agentic AI isn't a trade for me — it's infrastructure. These are picks-and-shovels.
The Bet: I still think we're in an agentic AI supercycle, not a hype cycle. Claude Opus 4.7 just dropped, expect OpenAI, Google, and to follow with another frontier model of their own.
And don't discount xAI, they have the single largest data center cluster, and Elon Musk just confirmed they turn on pre-training for 7 new frontier models, including a model with 10 trillion parameters (In comparison, most frontier models are at 1-5 trillion), and said it will be done in two months. They started late, but I believe they will catch up soon.
The cycle continues 🤣
Models get cheaper every quarter. Context windows get longer. Tool use gets more reliable. The companies selling the rails — NET for delivery, PATH for automation — win regardless of which model vendor comes out on top.
Signal vs. Noise: A 10% Q1 drawdown felt like noise. Using it to re-load on a multi-year thesis was the signal.
🧬 The Protocol
I forgot my AirPods at the gym. Best workout I've had in months.
I've been building 12-hour days. Codex open. Claude Code running. Brain on fire. Motivation to train has been garbage.
Dragged myself in on Thursday anyway. Got to the bench. Reached for the AirPods.
Empty case. I forgot to bring.
Normally, I'd turn around.
I stayed.
60 minutes. No playlist. No podcast. No dopamine IV.
Something weird happened. I felt every rep. I could tell which lat was firing on the row. I was more focused. I didn't need hype music to get through the last set — the intensity came from inside.
Went home, researched why. Here's what was actually happening:
Interoception sharpens. Your ability to sense internal signals — heart rate, muscle tension, breath — gets masked by audio. Silence unmasks it.
Mind-muscle connection becomes default. Real EMG data shows internal focus (feeling the muscle) activates different patterns than external focus (just moving weight).
You stop outsourcing your arousal state. Music regulates your nervous system for you. In silence, you learn to generate intensity on demand. There's a reason elite lifters go quiet before heavy attempts.
Flow wants a single channel. Music adds a second channel competing for attention. For precision work, it fragments focus more than it enhances it.
The subtle thing I didn't expect: silence at the gym is the same move as phone-away with the kids, same move as tab-closed with Zoey. Undivided attention to what's in front of me.
The gym stopped being entertainment. It became practice.
The Uncrowded Move: You can't add more focus. You can only remove what's stealing it. Start with the earbuds.
See you next week,
Gabriel Judah
P.S. The second-brain video I teased last week is delayed — we built the company version in parallel over four days and it ate the week. When it drops, I'll cover both stacks: the personal Obsidian setup and the Ascend Group world-model version. Reply "show me the vault" if you want to be informed first