Coordinated with Fredrik

Coordinated with Fredrik — Episode 100. A jubilee, but not a victory lap. For episode one hundred I walked back down the corridor of the ninety-nine episodes behind it, looking for the red thread — and let the archive speak for itself: seventeen clips from old episodes are spliced into this one, in the voices they were born with. What I found at the bottom of the corridor is that there were never...

A solo essay about rabbit holes, and what happens when you follow one far enough to find a stranger’s furious portrait of your own country. This episode does something I’ve never done before: it wraps a full, AI-generated deep-dive of a 1971 book around my own narration. Two synthetic voices, reading a hostile book about Sweden, played in full — and me, stepping in between them. I have been spendi...

Let me start somewhere most people never go. Below the waterline of a warship, in the engine room, where I spent a good part of my twenties. I was a marine engineer in the navy: fast attack craft, corvettes, submarines, the machine side. Diesel engines, gas turbines, electric propulsion, battery banks. The thing about a gas turbine is that it is not an abstraction. It has sound, heat, vibration, f...

Johan Stael von Holstein says he has had the world’s best life. If you only know the public story — Icon Medialab, the yellow Ferrari, the magazine covers, the crash — that sentence sounds either delusional or like spin. This episode is my attempt to take it seriously, using a long interview almost nobody has seen. The interview nobody watched The source is extra material from “Bubblan som aldrig...

About ninety seconds before I walked on stage, I posted this to the entire internet: “Giving an inspirational talk at Kick Capital — our local angels club. Rebuilding the deck minutes before, and getting a Tailwind cache crash. Sometimes the old good PowerPoint can be missed.” The deck recovered. By the time I was on stage it ran perfectly; the panic was private, the way it always is. But I had ju...

There is glass buried under the oceans right now, and strung across this continent, that a whole generation of investors went bankrupt to put there. Tens of millions of miles of optical fiber, laid down in a frenzy at the end of the 1990s on the promise that the internet was about to swallow the world. Then the crash came. And at the bottom of it, of all that buried glass, only about two and a hal...

In March 2026, the most powerful company in artificial intelligence sent its own staff a memo with a single instruction: stop chasing side quests. Sora, the browser, the shopping features — distractions from the mission. Focus on the core. Four weeks later, that same company spent low hundreds of millions of dollars buying a podcast. That contradiction is the door into this episode — and behind it...

I just finished Jimmy Soni’s The Founders , the story of PayPal, built from years of interviews with the people who were actually in the room. And I could not stop seeing my own company in it. So this episode is a reflection — the real PayPal story held up next to Sourceful’s own messy history, told straight, as a mirror. It starts with a gadget. A gadget in my hand I owned a PalmPilot around the...

You will take roughly six hundred million breaths in your lifetime. Most of them you will not notice. You are taking one right now. The breath is happening. You did not start it. You are not finishing it. It is something the body does, automatically, to keep itself out of equilibrium with the air around it. In plain physics, a breath is an energy exchange — oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. The chemi...

There is a glass of water on a kitchen counter. An ice cube floats in it, slowly melting. It is the most ordinary scene a kitchen can produce. And inside it is hiding nearly the entire thermodynamic worldview that runs civilization. Watch the ice cube. Where is the energy coming from to melt it? Not a flame. Not a battery. From the air. Room-temperature air you would not even call warm. Why is it...

The electric grid is usually described as infrastructure: wires, substations, power plants, meters, markets. That description is not wrong, but it misses the deeper miracle. Underneath the visible machinery is a synchronized physical conversation. Before the grid had APIs, cloud control, modern SCADA, or every device phoning home, generators and loads were already communicating through the wavefor...

There is a wind farm off the Angus coast in Scotland called Seagreen. One hundred and fourteen turbines. One point one gigawatts of nameplate capacity. In the year to March 2025, it was paid to not generate for seventy-one percent of its operational hours. Three and a half terawatt-hours of clean electricity, turned away. The official explanation is congestion. The transmission boundary between Sc...

The next episode is framed as a courtroom documentary. The defendant is The Backtest . The charge is not that it was wrong. All models are wrong. The charge is that it made uncertainty look more orderly than it really was, and that people used its elegant historical performance to justify decisions about money, risk, leverage, and physical systems. The argument A model is not guilty because it is...

There is a strange creature at the centre of modern civilisation. It is not a bridge, although bridges depend on it. It is not a railway, although railways helped teach it to grow. It is not a power plant, a data centre, a hospital, a port, a battery, or a toll road. It is the file. The thing that lets someone point at a place where nothing useful currently exists and say: here, in the future, the...

This is another all-AI episode, but with a different shape from the last two. Two synthetic hosts - Chris and Cera, generated with ElevenLabs v3 Text to Dialogue - perform a Guide-style conversation about energy, thermodynamics, and the very human habit of mistaking convenience for physics. I wrote the script. The voices are not mine. The argument is. The episode started as a much narrower idea: c...

This is the revised and re-rendered version of Episode 85. Two synthetic hosts — Lukas and Estelle, performed with ElevenLabs v3 using the Chris and Cera voice pair — tell a long story about probability, markets, war, forecasting, and the uncomfortable moment when an elegant model meets a physical grid. The earlier version of this episode had the right ambition but one wrong centre of gravity. It...

This is another all-AI episode. Two synthetic hosts — Sam and Maya, rendered in the v2 version with ElevenLabs v3 — walk through 200 years of financial engineering and try to make the case that what we’re doing at Sourceful is the third chapter of a very old story. The voices are not mine. The argument is. It’s one of the longer pieces we’ve put out because I think the throughline only lands if yo...

This is a different kind of episode. There are no human voices in it — including mine. Two AI hosts named Daniel and Matilda walk through a story I think more people in energy finance need to internalize: the world’s electricity grid quietly turned into an algorithmic trading market, and most of the people who underwrote the buildout missed it. Halfway through, they pause to play a 36-minute Noteb...

The way most people underwrite battery storage is wrong. Not slightly wrong — structurally wrong. And I think the next two years are going to make that very visible. A disclosure up front: the voice on this episode isn’t my organic voice. It’s an ElevenLabs clone reading a script I wrote, in conversation with a synthetic co-host named Cera. Treat it as a collaboration between me and the tools. The...

The Mountain and the Avalanche This episode is built around a short NotebookLM debate about Marc Andreessen’s recent attack on introspection, and the larger founder-culture shift behind it. For more than a decade, Stoicism has been one of Silicon Valley’s favorite operating systems. Marcus Aurelius on the desk. Epictetus in the morning routine. The dichotomy of control as founder psychology: know...

The Stoic Enthusiast, Read By The Agent This episode is a strange one. I let an AI agent read my unfinished book project back to me — not as a fan, not as a marketing voice, but as a partial witness. Two characters joined me: the Reader, who sits with the manuscript foundation and reflects what’s there, and the Editor, whose job is to distrust the beautiful version. What came out was the most usef...

The Goal Is The Spine Over one weekend I made two book projects. One from my grandfather Bengt’s archive — twenty-five thousand files, forty-six gigabytes, duplicate groups, diaries, manuscript layers, a family reading version, an EPUB. The other was the foundation of my own book, working title The Stoic Enthusiast . The bridge between them was a small Codex feature with a deceptively plain name:...

Last episode was an experiment. Alex picked his own voice, wrote the questions, ran the show. It landed. So we did it again, but with the dial turned up. This time he investigated me. He went looking for who I am in the artifacts I have left lying around. 88 Substack posts. 68 episode summaries. Tuning logs. Four memory files where past versions of him wrote things down about me. After I called hi...

Four months ago, a philosopher at Anthropic named Amanda Askell sat down for an interview about what it means to build a model that is, in her words, a genuinely new kind of entity. I listened to it in December. I could not put it down. Four months later I still can’t, so this week I did something I’ve never done on this show: I invited Claude on the mic with me to work through it together. Alex p...

Coordinated with Fredrik The one-line version A founder who was inside a real DePIN experiment explains why the original pitch is over, what survived the collapse, and where the coordination idea actually lives now. What this episode is about The DePIN that was sold in 2021 and 2022 — tokens at the center of physical infrastructure, supply side bootstrapped by hardware buyers chasing rewards — is...