Multi-year structural forces shaping the strategic landscape. Three categories: Active (currently navigating), Historical (resolved; serve as analog library), Emerging (early signals). Active shifts link to historical analogs they resemble — the wedge is where the analog’s power lives.
Multi-year structural forces shaping the strategic landscape right now. Each tracked through stages, beneficiaries, watch-for signals, and (where authored) named positions and quantitative thresholds.
Year 4. Picks-and-shovels exhausted. Vertical AI underexplored.
Nuclear renaissance + grid + storage. Solar already priced in.
Reshoring beneficiaries underpriced. Watch chip supply.
Japan was preview. Korea, Italy, China next. 30-year arc, structural-cultural substrate is the lever.
Year 1-2. Tesla Optimus, Figure, Agility, Unitree. Hardware-software flywheel just starting. Expensive, fragile, scaling fast.
Falcon-9 reusability rewrote unit economics 10×. Starship + satellite economy + lunar return. SpaceX dominant; competition emerging.
Casgevy approval (Dec 2023) was the threshold event. Research tool → approved therapeutic. Sickle cell first; oncology + ag pipeline next.
GLP-1s opened the door — metabolic health as treatable. Rapamycin, senolytics, regenerative medicine on deck. 5-10y arc to "aging as treatable."
Russia/Ukraine + Israel + Taiwan strait + Houthis catalyzed multi-year buildout. Munitions production capacity is the bottleneck.
2°C is locked. Adaptation infrastructure (water, ag, insurance, hardening) becomes its own thesis distinct from mitigation.
Bitcoin/Ethereum ETFs were institutional gate. Stablecoin legislation + RWA tokenization next. Settlement, collateral, payments rebuild.
$84T Boomer→Millennial transfer over 25 years. Estate, philanthropy, financial-advisory shifts. Already started; accelerating 2030+.
Outcomes are known. Each historical shift carries extracted lessons for analog application. Active shifts link to historical shifts they resemble — the wedge between them is where the analog's power lives.
Multi-century decline. Demographic + fiscal + institutional decay compounded. The fall was the cumulative effect, not an event.
30-50% mortality across Europe in 4 years. Sudden labor scarcity → wage premium → end of feudalism arc.
Mechanical power + steam + factory system. UK first; spread to Continent + US 1820-1870. Productivity ↑ 4-10× by 1900.
Demographic + institutional + geopolitical shift. WW2 mobilized economy; Boomer cohort drove 60-year demand wave. Suburbs, consumer credit, mass college, suburbanization.
Soviet collapse opened ~30y of globalization. Convergence between economies, capital flows liberated, post-1991 institutional architecture (WTO, EU expansion) built around assumed peace.
Browser → mass adoption → over-investment → bust. Consumer Internet built on telecom over-capacity. NASDAQ peak Mar-2000; ~78% drawdown by 2002. Survivors became 2010s incumbents.