From my émigré family stories under occupation to East India Trading Company, this is the second in a series of dispatches on what I’m paying attention to right now and the underlying questions guiding Potentia’s series buildout: who actually holds power, and how do you build your own?
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Family, Power & Why I Care: I come from a family with two very different kinds of experiences with power. One side of my family are Hungarian émigrés, who lived the difference between Nazi occupation and Soviet occupation, and different radio rules impacting accessing news from the outside world. First invasion: you could sew a radio inside a pillow and prod it with sticks to tune in to the outside world. Second invasion: they simply took the radios. My grandmother talks about crawling on the ground dodging bullets to reach the helicopter that got them out. They wanted New York; they landed in Canada and came down through Vancouver. My grandfather on that side learned English through mystery novels. My grandmother first worked at Carnation powdered milk factories, which is why my father won’t touch a glass of milk to this day.
The other side of my family: mathematics, satellites, Princeton, the Department of Defense. My grandfather who loved Kuwait, who introduced me to painting and the stars and, when I was eight years old, handed me a dictionary called Say It in Chinese. I enjoyed cryptology as a child, but still couldn’t learn Mandarin from a pocket dictionary at eight, but I never stopped being fascinated by it leading to learning later in life.
Both sides led to me asking questions of power: what are we in the systems we inhabit, and what can we actually do about it?
Multinational Companies & the AI Power Shift: When people ask who’s gaining power fastest from AI right now among companies, states, individuals, institutions? My answer is generally companies. Specifically multinationals.
We’re at an inflection point where the barrier to creating power through technology has genuinely dropped. Agents, automation, information parsing the tools are there for anyone with passion, willpower, and strategy. That’s the beautiful part of this moment, before too many structures calcify and commercialize around it, as we are increasingly and naturally seeing now.
But in terms of power by scale? The multinationals companies. These companies operate between sovereignties in ways that give them leverage governments struggle to match, not unlike the merchant power structures of the 1600s. The East India Trading Company ran its own military. It operated in India and the West Indies essentially as a sovereign nation. And what most people don’t know: a large driver of the American Revolution wasn’t just “no taxation without representation” as a slogan, it was the Founding Fathers watching what the East India Company had done in India and deciding they wanted no part of that model on American soil.
And when I was doing research on Amazon’s FTC trial, what struck me most was just how much of the logistics supply chain and e-commerce landscape hinged on decisions made within a single company. Then there’s what we see now in AI governance, policy and the Nvidia chip saga, which illustrates this dynamic in real time to essentially shape export control policy proactively rather than react to them.
Productivity Traits That Actually Compound: When I think about effective people over time, it comes down to three things, and none of them are what productivity culture usually emphasizes.
Strategy first. Know what you want, and you can reverse engineer how to get there. I learned this with my own health, but didn’t have the best strategy initially as I learned over time. I was cutting meals in half, running punishment miles in 95-degree California heat if I ate too much, obsessively counting calories. I got lean. I also got pretty unhealthy about it. It took years to rebuild a strategy that actually fit my life: strength training three to four times a week, movement I genuinely want to do, enough fuel to perform. Later, I got certified in Hatha yoga in Budapest. And in setting strategy for a goal, optimization isn’t always the leading priority, it’s building a life where you have the energy to do what you actually want to do.
Discipline second. Your feelings are clouds. They’re real and they’re information, but you don’t have to claim every one of them as permanent truth. Discipline is what closes the gap between knowing what you want and actually building it. Carrot or stick, figure out which motivates you, but understand that without it, you are at the whims of your emotions.
Belief and vision third. Decide comes from the Latin decidere, to cut off other options. You can change your mind. But without deciding, you’re not building anything, you’re just reacting to everyone else’s world. Anaïs Nin said it cleanly: “Had I not created my own world, I certainly would have died in other people’s.”
How to Manage Noise or feeling Overwhelmed: The world is loud right now. Human biology was not designed to process technology at this velocity.
When things get overwhelming, I reconnect with art, film, music. I’m careful about my mental diet in the same way I’m careful about my physical one. And meditation helps for vision setting and your goals. I have a memory I come back to often: standing in a snow clearing outside Irkutsk, Siberia, the forest behind me, snow falling and glistening over my tracks, the cold just sharp enough to feel completely alive.
Get outside, get some fresh air, connect with beauty.
Final Thoughts and Upcoming for the Potentia Pod:
RomCon: A friend on the Muslim List in Los Angeles is writing a script exploring early internet chat room romance, the depth of connection you could build with someone you’ve seen in real life, and your last conversation with them after they log off. Where’d they go? The twist: it’s a con. I think it’s going to be a fun rom com version looking at something that’s actually timeless, human desire for connection and human capacity for deception.
Power Profiles series: I’m launching a series profiling figures and the structures that built them. Jack Ma, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Napoleon. The Acquired podcast does something I love with company histories. I want to do something similar but wider, looking at individual power across history and context. If there’s someone you want me to cover, let me know.
Non-State Actors series: Starting with the East India Trading Company. The merchant sovereign model. How companies become more powerful than governments. How that happened before, and what it looks like now. I think this is one of the most important historical lenses we have for understanding the present moment.
That’s it for this dispatch. Tune in as we kick off the Power Profiles and Non-State Actors series, plus more interviews and weekly episodes.
Every like, follow, and share genuinely means a lot. See you next time at the Potentia Podcast.
Add to Your Queue!
Podcasts
Acquired - Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal
Supply Chain’s Paradigm Break with Nick Vyas - Potentia interview with Nick Vyas
Poetry
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931–1934 - Anaïs Nin
Geopolitics & History
Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, The Yale Law Journal - Lina Khan
The Last Days of Budapest: Spies, Nazis, Rescuers and Resistance - Adam LeBor
Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War - Rick Atkinson
A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960 -Milton Friedman, Anna J. Schwartz
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company - William Dalrymple
Multimedia
Video: On My Radar Dispatch: Who Builds the World, Who Gets to Live In It
