#applied-materials — Wealth & Means

Episodes tagged #applied-materials on Wealth & Means.

Everything Has a Substitute Until It Doesn't — 2026-08-08
There's a question sitting underneath almost every decision anyone makes about money, and it's so simple that most people never actually ask it out loud: if I can't get this, what do I use instead? For most of the last twenty years the answer was reliably "something." Another supplier, another platform, another cheaper version arriving from somewhere else. Abundance made the question feel rhetorical. Optionality became the default assumption, and the whole discipline of managing risk quietly turned into the discipline of keeping alternatives available. But optionality isn't a law of nature. It's a condition, and conditions expire. This week the expiration showed up everywhere at once. A metal piling up in the wrong ports for the wrong reason. A raw material given a price floor rather than a tariff, because a floor takes away the seller's only move. An entire basket of elements rising in lockstep, which is what a supply signal looks like when a demand signal would show dispersion. And an employment report where the number improved because people stopped participating — the one input for which there's no substitute at all. That tension carries into The Greater Debate, where two people end up arguing past each other because they're answering different questions entirely, and into Let's Invent Again, where an entire layer of internet security turns out to have been built on a human advantage that was always going to expire — and the man who built it knew it. The uncomfortable part isn't discovering that some things can't be swapped. It's realizing you never checked which ones.

#applied-materials — Wealth & Means

Episodes tagged #applied-materials on Wealth & Means.

Everything Has a Substitute Until It Doesn't — 2026-08-08
There's a question sitting underneath almost every decision anyone makes about money, and it's so simple that most people never actually ask it out loud: if I can't get this, what do I use instead? For most of the last twenty years the answer was reliably "something." Another supplier, another platform, another cheaper version arriving from somewhere else. Abundance made the question feel rhetorical. Optionality became the default assumption, and the whole discipline of managing risk quietly turned into the discipline of keeping alternatives available. But optionality isn't a law of nature. It's a condition, and conditions expire. This week the expiration showed up everywhere at once. A metal piling up in the wrong ports for the wrong reason. A raw material given a price floor rather than a tariff, because a floor takes away the seller's only move. An entire basket of elements rising in lockstep, which is what a supply signal looks like when a demand signal would show dispersion. And an employment report where the number improved because people stopped participating — the one input for which there's no substitute at all. That tension carries into The Greater Debate, where two people end up arguing past each other because they're answering different questions entirely, and into Let's Invent Again, where an entire layer of internet security turns out to have been built on a human advantage that was always going to expire — and the man who built it knew it. The uncomfortable part isn't discovering that some things can't be swapped. It's realizing you never checked which ones.