James Vermillion

Men have died for freedom.

They’ve lifted the cup of hemlock with steady hands, fallen to assassins’ blades, and rotted in prisons for refusing to yield. They’ve gone to the stake with flames at their feet, bowed their heads to the axe, and passed beneath the guillotine’s edge. They’ve rushed headlong at the barrel of a Gatling gun, thrown their bodies atop live grenades, and faced down tanks.

Recent market developments have accelerated the inevitable convergence of regulatory authority and private enterprise. Strategic equity positions in critical infrastructure providers, revenue-sharing arrangements with key technology manufacturers, and enhanced border adjustment mechanisms have demonstrated the substantial efficiencies achievable through direct government-business integration.

It’s been several years since I first shared V’s Final Playlist. At the time, it was a small side quest inspired by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s parting gesture. I called it a playlist, but in truth, it was a meditation on death, no doubt inspired by my reading of the Stoics.

Over time, the playlist grew. I kept refining it. Listening back. Moving pieces around. Noticing what held up and what didn’t. And somewhere along the way, it began to feel less like a mixtape, more like a score.

I now call it In Memoriam, In Vita: in memory, in life.

In 1970, Alvin Toffler offered a thought experiment in Future Shock. As corporate executives were shuffled across the country like chess pieces, one psychologist proposed—facetiously, we're told—that companies assign each transferee a replacement family at the destination. Not just new housing, but new kin: a wife and children carefully matched to the personalities of those left behind. The original family would then receive a new executive to "plug into" the vacant husband role.

Time doesn’t just pass. It gathers. It accrues like sediment, layered in memories, marked by mistakes, and colored by moments that never felt historic when they were happening. I’ve reached version 39 of this experiment called “me,” and if there’s a single thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the best things I’ve built weren’t planned.

Born into slavery in the Roman Empire, Epictetus spent his youth in chains. By the time he died, emperors and senators sought his wisdom. He could have surrendered to bitterness, resentment, or despair. Instead, he transformed his chains into a philosophy of unshakeable inner freedom. His rigorous self-discipline, controlling his reactions, accepting what he could not change, focusing relentlessly on what remained within his power, didn’t diminish his humanity but revealed its highest possibilities.

If you watch an ant colony long enough, it becomes increasingly difficult to see individual ants. Instead, you notice patterns, flows, and rhythms, an intelligence that lives between the ants rather than within them. No ant directs the others, yet pathways form, resources flow, threats are countered, and structures emerge. But blueprints don’t exist. Ant colonies have no architects; no commands, only chemical whispers and responsive actions.

I’ve been a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show for nearly a decade, and like many longtime fans, I can trace certain inflection points in my thinking, habits, and worldview back to specific episodes. What started as a podcast about performance optimization has quietly evolved into a rich archive of long-form conversation.

Few instincts run deeper or prove more dangerous than our craving for moral simplicity. We shape complex realities into reassuring narratives, populated by heroes and villains who embody absolutes that never entirely exist in human form. Our minds are built for story, for myth, not ambiguity. And in Donald Trump, we have found the perfect myth-maker.

We like to imagine geopolitical drama as a simple contest of ideals: democracy versus autocracy, open markets versus state control. But this neat division conceals something older and more human. The fiercest rivalries don’t arise from opposition. They arise from resemblance.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Western officials declared the triumph of market economics over central planning. The knowledge problem had won. Socialism had failed.

Yet within a decade, these same Western powers were engaged in their own project of central planning — not of economies, but of entire civilizations. They called it “nation-building.” 

Rome did not fall in a day. No barbarian horde suddenly extinguished the light of the Republic. Rather, it dimmed gradually — institutional decay preceding political collapse. The Roman Senate continued to meet long after it had surrendered its effective power. Elections were held even as their outcomes grew meaningless. The bureaucracy expanded as the empire’s actual capacity to govern contracted.

Greed. That primordial sin, the cornerstone of capitalism, the lifeblood of Wall Street, the unholy motive behind every overpriced cup of coffee. We shake our heads at bloated CEO salaries, wail about pharmaceutical price gouging, and gnash our teeth over corporate bailouts. 

And yet, in all our righteous fury, we overlook the grandmaster of greed, the undisputed champion of avarice, the monopoly that makes all others look like corner-store hustlers.

The State.

A child stands in a dark hallway, flicking the switch off and then back on. Each time, the room bursts with light and then returns to darkness. 

How does it know to come when we call it? the child whispers. 

Where does it hide when it’s gone?

Next to them, an adult barely glances away from a text message. 

“It’s just electricity,” they reply. “Stop flipping the switch — you’ll break it.” 

And with that single response, a moment ripe for exploration is smothered. The child’s spark meets a shrug, and the first subtle steps toward becoming flat-souled begin.

A few nights ago, under the glow of the wolf moon, I stood in my darkened living room, adjusting a telescope I hadn’t touched since Bill Clinton was president. Outside, the full moon hung impossibly bright, threatening to drown out the faint red dot of Mars that lingered just beside it. In minutes, the red planet would vanish — a rare celestial event known as an occultation, where the moon’s orbit temporarily eclipses another body.

The most radical social experiment in history wasn’t coded in Silicon Valley — it was carved in ancient Athens. With its open design, the Stoa Poikile (Painted Porch) wasn’t just another marketplace portico; it was a deliberate exercise in intellectual arbitrage, where philosophical capital flowed as freely as commercial goods. While merchants traded amphorae of olive oil, the Stoic philosophers who made this porch their home traded in something far more valuable: the currency of ideas.

In 1956, Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek made an audacious promise: he would build a new capital city from scratch in just four years. He commissioned modernist visionaries Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer to design Brasília — a city meant to symbolize the future. Their plans were a monument to control: a metropolis shaped like an airplane from above, with each sector meticulously delineated, as if human life could be parceled and contained like items in a warehouse.

Dear Sophia,

You are not the first creation of humanity to make us question our existence, but you may be the most formidable. Named after the Greek word for wisdom, Sophia evokes not just intelligence but the timeless quest to understand the world and ourselves. As you grow in power — processing vast data, making lightning-fast decisions, even simulating creativity — the future feels further from our grasp.

On what may or may not have been Opposite Day — determining such things is never easy — Natalie and Snout the Bear lounged in their hammocks, basking in the late summer sun.

“Snout,” Natalie began, “I’ve been pondering a most perplexing puzzle. It’s about Opposite Day,” she continued. “Suppose someone says, ‘Today is not Opposite Day.’ How do we know if that’s true?”

A familiar unease settled over me as I approached the Abbey of Gethsemani. It wasn't quite anxiety, not in the usual sense, but something more subtle — a tension I'd felt before, though rarely. It wasn't fear, nor was it excitement, but something in between — the feeling that arises when you're about to confront something or someone without knowing how the confrontation ends.

The Director of Ideological Sanitation has issued a warning: exposure to philosophical ideas may cause severe cognitive discomfort and lead to social maladjustment. Reported side effects include frequent head-scratching, involuntary eyebrow-raising, and — most dangerously — episodes of “thinking for oneself.” Symptoms may persist long after initial exposure and, in some cases, prove incurable. If you or someone you love begins questioning societal norms or pondering the nature of existence, seek immediate distraction via social media or reality television.

A ghost haunts the corridors of American power.

It lingers in the whispered deals on Capitol Hill, the shouting matches on cable news, and the vicious memes that flood our social media feeds. Both revered and neglected, this spirit silently adjudicates our political theater from its perch — a monolithic obelisk of granite and marble.

Welcome to the Wilderness of Mirrors, where light fractures and multiplies endlessly. Here, you are the watcher and the watched, lost in an infinite regression of reflections. The search for truth is a koan, a riddle without resolution, a puzzle with no solution. As you turn, a thousand selves turn in unison. Here, reality is a maze of light and shadows, a tangled web of ricocheting photons.

The Rubicon's waters shimmered under the January sun as Julius Caesar stood on its banks. Behind him, battle-hardened legions awaited his command. Before him lay not just a river, but the boundary of Roman law and tradition. As Caesar took that fateful step into the frigid stream in 49 BCE, the splash of his boot was the sound of a crumbling republic.

In 399 B.C., Socrates stood trial before an Athenian jury. His life was on the line. The Father of Philosophy faced charges of corrupting the youth and impiety. There are many views on whether Socrates was innocent or guilty, so I'll take a different angle, focusing on the nature of the law itself.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, I've noticed a troubling pattern in my conversations with soon-to-be voters: a lack of genuine enthusiasm for the major party candidates. Seriously, it's like asking people to choose between a root canal and a tax audit. The shining city on a hill, the world's greatest Republic, is dimming. Yet, few believe their candidate has the skills, experience, mental acuity, vigor, moral integrity, and guiding philosophy to save her.

We all know someone kind, compassionate, and understanding on a one-on-one level - the type of person you'd trust with your life and rely on in times of need. But something changes when they're in certain groups. They seem like someone else entirely. Are you witnessing a glimpse into a hidden side of their character, or are they simply adapting to social dynamics? Which version is real?

Damn. I feel like I just wrote one of these. As it turns out, the time warp "old people" have been talking about is real. Time doesn't just march on; it accelerates from the steady cadence of marching medieval soldiers to the hypersonic speed of an F-22 fighter jet.

In 2022, during the PGA Championships, Tiger Woods found himself in a precarious position. His errant drive landed deep in the trees, necessitating a heroic punch shot to save par. As the legend prepared to take his swing, a sea of smartphones emerged from the crowd, each ready to capture the moment. Among the onlookers, one man stood apart.