Why is everyone obsessed with travelling?

I’ve been asking myself this question a lot.

I’ve been lucky enough to see a lot of the world. I’ve been to almost every major city in Europe. I’ve seen the museums, the beaches, the old buildings, the tourist traps, the tiny streets, the beautiful views, the overpriced restaurants, all of it.

And after a while, I have to be honest.

A lot of it starts to feel the same.

Maybe living in Orange County has spoiled me, but I had no desire to go to the beaches in Barcelona. I live near some of the best beaches in the world. I do not need to fly twelve hours to sit on sand and sweat through my shirt.

Also, Europe is not always as glamorous as people make it seem.

No air conditioning. No ice water. Everything is slightly inconvenient for no reason. No Diet Cokes. The service is horrible. And half the people there seem deeply annoyed that tourists exist, despite building entire economies around tourism..?

So why do I keep going back?

Is it the freedom to stay out until 6 a.m.?

The food?

The wine?

The girls with accents who may or may not understand what I’m saying?

The culture?

I really don’t think so.

Because the truth is, I’m not great at relaxing. I cannot just sit on a beach for eight hours and “unwind.” I need stimulation. I need movement. I need a dinner reservation, a plan after dinner, and then probably another plan after the plan.

I also do not think I travel to escape.

I love my life. I’m not trying to run away from it.

But somewhere during this last trip, I realized something.

It was never really about the place.

It was always about the people.

It is my friends from London, Spain, Chicago, Seattle, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany. People I barely get to see, but somehow pick right back up with every time.

It is the late dinners.

The stories that only get told after the second bottle of wine.

The inside jokes that make no sense to anyone else.

The random nights that turn into memories you talk about for years.

And the funniest part is, the best moments are almost never planned.

At a club in Mallorca, I met a DJ right after her set. She was standing at the bar backstage next to my table, so I introduced myself, offered her shots of tequila, and we started talking.

She gave me her number and told me if I needed anything while I was out there, I should hit her up.

A few days later, when I was in Barcelona, she invited me to see her rooftop set at the Nobu hotel.

After her set, we went to a random tiki bar, and then somehow ended up backstage at a club in Barcelona, drinking and partying until sunrise.

That is the kind of thing you cannot plan.

The next day, I met a painter from Argentina.

He looked interesting so we got beers and he told me his life story.

He told me how he moved to Europe with no money in his pocket, eventually learned how to paint, and opened his own studio in Barcelona.

Then he painted me a custom giant piece that I’m going to hang in my house.

Again, not planned.

And that is what I mean when I say the people are the trip.

Not the landmarks. Not the beaches. Not the Instagram posts. Not the idea of becoming some cultured, mysterious international man.

It is the people you meet.

The stories you hear.

The friends you only see once or twice a year.

The random nights that make no sense on paper but somehow become the only thing you want to talk about when you get home.

The feeling of being in some city across the world and realizing the actual place almost does not matter, because the table is full of people you love.

That is what keeps me going back.

The people.

The people are the trip.

To be honest, I had something completely different written for this section.

Then, about a few hours before this newsletter was supposed to go out, something very interesting happened in the stock market.. So let’s talk about it.

Coming into this month, AI stocks were the hottest trade in the market. Anything tied to AI infrastructure (chips, data centers, power, cloud, memory) had been ripping. It felt like every company that could somehow attach itself to AI had investors throwing money at it.

Then came Leopold Aschenbrenner.

He is a 25-year-old German-born former OpenAI researcher who started a hedge fund called Situational Awareness (the name is ironic but you’ll see why later). The fund became one of the most watched AI-focused funds in the world because it was making huge, concentrated bets on the AI infrastructure boom.

And for a while, it worked insanely well.

But the most important part of the story is leverage.

Leverage basically means borrowing money to make a bigger trade.

Simple example: say you have $100, and you borrow another $300. Now you can buy $400 worth of stocks.

If those stocks go up 10%, your $400 becomes $440. You pay back the $300 you borrowed, and now you have $140. You made 40% instead of 10%.

Beautiful.

But leverage works both ways.

If those same stocks fall 25%, your $400 becomes $300. You still owe the $300 you borrowed, which means your original $100 is basically gone.

That is why leverage is so dangerous. It turns normal losses into life-or-death losses.

And that seems to be what happened here.

A lot of the AI stocks that Situational Awareness owned started falling.

Hard.

Once losses get big enough, the banks and lenders financing those trades get nervous. They ask for more collateral.

That is called a margin call.

If you cannot come up with enough cash, you have to sell.

And when a big leveraged fund has to sell, it does not sell calmly. It dumps.

That is when the market gets chaotic.

Imagine one person has to sell billions of dollars of AI stocks, quickly. Prices fall. Other investors get scared. More selling starts. Prices fall again. Then more people panic.

It becomes a feedback loop.

Then Citadel stepped in.

Citadel, a massive hedge fund, bought a large portion of Situational Awareness’s public stock portfolio after the forced selling pressure hit. Basically, while everyone else was panicking, Citadel came in and bought the assets for 40 to 50 cents on the dollar.

Interestingly, a lot of those AI stocks rebounded after the deal.

Now, this is where it gets interesting..

People are speculating Citadel helped add pressure to an already fragile market by warning investors of a surprise interest rate hike, creating the exact kind of panic that allowed them to come in and buy distressed assets at a discount.

I have no idea if this is true, but I do know this:

This is Wall Street at its most ruthless.

And whether it was genius, luck, or just ruthless execution, the result was the same: one of the biggest firms in the world bought when everyone else was forced to sell.

It is brutal.

It is fascinating.

It is beautiful.

And honestly, it is a perfect reminder that being right is not enough.

You also have to survive long enough to be right.

Investments -

Don’t wanna talk about it. After writing an entire section about leverage and forced selling, I have decided my own portfolio deserves privacy at this time.

I used to think traveling was about seeing new places.

This month reminded me it is really about seeing old people in new places.

The cities were beautiful. The food was great. The nights were long. But the moments I will actually remember were the dinners, the conversations, the wedding, the laughs, and the people I do not get to see enough.

Maybe that is the whole point.

Not escaping your life.

Just expanding it a little.

See you next month (or maybe sooner 👀..) Anyways, love you all. :)

P.S. I spend the most time writing the Business & Finance section when I know most of you skip past it. 😒

Until next time,

Mohammad Kevin El-Ajouz