A tanker at sea. Much of the world's oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz.

The United States has been at war with Iran since late February, and it has not let up. This week, Iran killed American service members at a base in Jordan. US forces answered with airstrikes on the port of Bandar Abbas and on Qeshm Island, night after night. The State Department told Americans across the Middle East to be more careful, and there is no sign of it ending.

The human cost is real and still contested. By most counts, at least a dozen American service members have been killed since the war began, though one recent tally puts it at eighteen, with hundreds more wounded. Iranian numbers are harder to verify under an internet blackout, but independent and Iranian sources put the civilian dead somewhere from the hundreds into the thousands. The financial toll is climbing too, with the Pentagon now putting the war past 37 billion dollars.

Here is why it reaches you from this far away. Much of the fighting is over the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel that carries close to a quarter of the world's seaborne oil. When Iran decided to close it in the spring, Brent crude jumped past 120 dollars a barrel. The International Energy Agency called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. So a war half a world away lands close to home, and you feel it at the gas pump. You feel it in the inflation number, and in the Fed meeting happening this week.

Worth watching closely. Not worth living inside.

The buildout the megacaps are betting hundreds of billions on.

For three years, the story of AI was a small group of American companies, with everyone else trying to catch up. This week that changed. A Chinese startup called Moonshot released a free, open model called Kimi K3. It shot to the top of a closely watched coding leaderboard. On that one test, it even beat the best systems from OpenAI and Anthropic. It is not better than them across the board, but it does the same work far cheaper. It runs about 15 dollars for a batch of output where the American version costs 50.

Regulators are also prying the field open. The European Union told Google it has to let rival AI assistants work on Android and share its search data. If Google refuses, the fines could reach into the tens of billions. Both stories point the same way: the lead the American giants were counting on is getting harder to hold.

It lands the same week Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Amazon all report earnings. Those companies are spending hundreds of billions to build AI, and those stock prices sit inside most retirement accounts. The whole bet is that the spending turns into a lasting lead. A cheaper rival out of China and a regulator forcing the doors open are the first real cracks in it.

The size of your engine is trainable.

You do everything you can to stay on top of your health. Bloodwork, cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, the usual panel. Almost none of you have ever measured the one number that may predict how long you will live better than any of those. It is your VO2 max, and if you have spent the last decade at a desk, it is probably falling.

VO2 max is just the most oxygen your body can use when you are working hard. Think of it as the size of your engine. A bigger engine moves more oxygen to your heart, lungs, and muscles. Oxygen is the thing every cell in your body runs on. Here is why it matters more than the numbers you already track. In a Cleveland Clinic study of more than 120,000 people, published in 2018, the least fit group was roughly five times more likely to die over the years that followed. That was not freak accidents. It was the ordinary things that kill most men, like heart disease, and low fitness predicted it better than smoking, high blood pressure, or diabetes. Read that again. Being out of shape tracked worse than being a smoker.

The good news is this is one of the most trainable numbers you have. You do not need to become a runner. Most of the gain comes from two simple things. First, spend real time each week on easy cardio, the kind where you can still hold a conversation. This builds your base. Then once or twice a week, push into a few short intervals that leave you out of breath. That mix is what grows the engine. The biggest payoff comes at the very bottom. Just getting out of the least-fit group and up to below average was linked to cutting your risk of death over the next decade by about half. You do not have to be an athlete. You only have to get off the bottom. Most men have never checked where they stand.

There is a quiet lie in a steady paycheck. It feels safe. The same number lands every two weeks, the bills get paid, and nothing feels like it is going backward. But if that number is not growing, it is not holding steady. It is shrinking. Prices rise a few percent every year, so a salary that stays flat buys a little less every single year. Standing still is a slow pay cut you never see on any statement.

Most men respond to this by trying to earn more money. Ask for the raise, chase the bonus, pick up the extra work. That is fine, but it is treating the symptom. The real shift is to stop thinking about earning money and start thinking about building earning power. Money is what you get paid. Earning power is what you are worth, and it is the actual asset. Picture two men on the same salary today. One is quietly building his skills, his reputation, and his options, and the other is not. Their paychecks look identical, but the first man is getting richer while the second slowly falls behind.

This is the move that pays off most in your late twenties and thirties, because you have decades for it to compound. Get measurably better at something people pay for. Do good work, and let the right people see it. Stay close to people before you need anything from them. None of it shows up in this month's account balance, which is exactly why most men skip it. Earning power is the one asset inflation cannot quietly melt. It is the difference between a career that drifts and one that climbs.

Watch who talks the most in a tense moment and you will usually be watching the most nervous person in the room. When a conversation goes quiet, most men rush to fill it. A joke, a follow-up question, anything to kill the pause. It feels polite. What it actually signals is discomfort, and people read it without knowing they are reading it.

The man who can let a silence sit reads completely differently. He answers a question and then stops, instead of piling on three more sentences to soften it. When someone speaks, he gives it a second before he answers. It comes across as considerate, like he is actually taking in what you said. He does not treat every quiet moment as a problem he has to solve. That stillness reads as confidence, because deep down we assume the person who is comfortable with the pause is just comfortable. You do not have to say more to seem sure of yourself. Usually you have to say less, and then sit in the quiet that follows. It feels uncomfortable for about two seconds. Then it starts to look like control. Try it this week. Answer, stop, and let the pause do the work.

The Big Three at Potsdam, July 1945. Public domain.

Eighty-one years ago today, on July 24, 1945, Harry Truman pulled Joseph Stalin aside. They were in a borrowed palace outside a bombed-out Berlin, at the end of a long day of meetings. Truman mentioned, almost in passing, that the United States had a powerful new weapon. He did not say atomic bomb. He kept it vague. Stalin nodded and said he hoped America would put it to good use. It was one of the quietest conversations of the century, and it changed everything that came after.

That was Potsdam. The war in Europe was already over. Truman, Stalin, and Churchill were not there to win it. They were there to carve up what came next. Over a couple of weeks, they drew the borders of postwar Europe and split Germany. They set the terms that would harden into the Cold War for the next fifty years. The striking thing is how human and improvised it all was. Churchill left in the middle because he lost an election back home and never came back. Decisions that shaped generations were made by exhausted men, over dinners, and on not enough sleep.

We look back at history like it was decided in clean, deliberate strokes. It almost never is. The biggest calls, the ones that end up in the textbooks, are usually made by tired people. They improvise with the information they have, on an ordinary day that only looks momentous later. There is something freeing in that. The people who shaped the world were not calmer or more certain than you. They were often running on fumes, and they had to decide anyway. Your big moments will probably come the same way, on a day you feel half empty. Decide anyway.