Health, Habits, and Exercise — Consistency is Key
🏃♂️➡️ What’s a habit you have to break to improve your health and well-being?
🤸♂️ For me, I was taking on too much working out. It became an obsession to the point where it became unsustainable and created an environment of burnout. Consistency is key.
💪 I had to tone it down or else my body would tone me down. A new baseline had to be created. My new routine is to run 10 miles each weekday to improve weight and heart health.
📈 Running is a high-impact exercise. It must be coupled with lower-impact activities, and recovery. Each weekend, I make it a point to walk 10,000 steps each day. This is up from me being a slouch. Thus far, I’ve had positive results.
🤔 Think about what your health means to you — how it improves your emotional, cognitive, and physical wellness. Make adjustments as only you can see fit.
This was originally a post on LinkedIn on May 23, 2026.
Quick Hit: Microsoft is Making Windows 11 Changes
💻 Microsoft recently announced that it intends to make Windows 11 more reliable, while removing certain Copilot features that have been ‘jammed’ into the product with no rationale.
🧭 While Windows is no longer the largest revenue segment for the firm, always listening to customer feedback and beta testers is vital to improving software products — while continuing to use the platform as a gateway to its more lucrative AI, Office, and server-side segments.
⚖️ Causation is not correlation, but it worth mentioning that Chromebooks and Apple’s new lower-cost MacBook Neo have and will slowly be eating away at these margins and user adoption rates unless changes are made.
This was originally a post on LinkedIn on March 23, 2026.
Don't Discount What Smaller Tech Firms Have to Offer
🧑💻 In a world quickly shaped by ‘big tech’, we often forget that they are not the only hubs of innovation and feature enhancements. Smaller tech companies, like Notion, Affinity, Brave, and for these purposes—Kagi remind us that breakthroughs can come from less known and capitalized firms.
🔎 Kagi, a pay search service that lets you choose LLM models and thrives on curation is a ‘come back to Earth’ moment with all the negative effects of AI-hype marketing.
🙋 There is still a time and place for human curated feeds, and at times we can all benefit from such work.
🛠️ As you search for new tools in the AI era for yourself, or your business—do not discount all of the other options out there. They may not have the market capitalization of an OpenAI or Microsoft, but there is also utility and productivity to be had elsewhere.
This was originally a post on LinkedIn on March 18, 2026.
MIT Tech Interview: Yann LeCun — LLMs Are Not Enough
🚀 Yann LeCun recently created AMI (Advanced Machine Intelligence) Labs. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, he revealed how we’re focused too much on LLMs while ignoring (at our advancement peril), other methods of attacking the problem that GenAI is trying to solve.
💡LeCun states that while LLMs are useful for text and code, they lack a true understanding of the physical world. They cannot reason, plan, or predict consequences because they are limited to the discrete world of language—To reach human-level AI, we need a “conceptual breakthrough”. Our currently application stack in the business world doesn’t cut it.
🌍Instead of just predicting the next word, these systems learn by observing video and sensor data—much like a baby learns about gravity—to build an abstract representation of how the real-world operates, (i.e. digital twins).
🔓LeCun is an advocate for open-source AI, criticizing the “closed” approach of labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. He believes AI should be an open platform to ensure a high diversity of “AI assistants” reflecting different languages and value systems, rather than being controlled by a US-China binary system.
🏭The goal isn’t just better chatbots. AMI Labs is targeting agentic systems that can predict the consequences of their actions: Level 5 autonomous driving and truly useful domestic robots, and holistic modeling for complex industrial processes like jet engines and chemical factories.
World Book Day 2026: AI Snake Oil
📚 In honor of World Book Day, I’ll talk about my current read, “AI Snake Oil” by Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor from Princton University Press.
📱 Between the doomers and the accelerationists, there lies the middle ground of AI where most of us fall. Despite the promise of taking over the world, your job, and the planet, and the dangerous practice of bashing any new technologies—is where the truth lies.
⚖️ This unbiased book discusses the dangers of bias, the hype of predictive AI while also dissecting what’s marketing and what’s real, while quite bullish on the future of GenAI.
✅ It’s a great primer to ground views. A few years old now, it still is relevant in this ‘hockey-stick’ growth era that we find ourselves in with developments for 2026.
This was originally a post on LinkedIn from March 5, 2026.
Quick Hit: Warren Buffett's Final Quarter
🧭 Berkshire Hathaway just posted their last quarter’s results under the leadership of Warren Buffett.
🪢 The culture of continuity with this ‘brand" as I’ll call it is important to those who follow the Buffett style of investing.
📈 New CEO Greg Abel believes the best way forward is to continue the methods that Buffett and Munger grew into the mainstream that made the firm so successful.
🎯 Discipline in all business is important, but especially in a large conglomerate such as Berkshire.
🚂 Slow and steady is an ultimate investment strategy.
This was originally a post on LinkedIn from March 1, 2026.
The Netflix-Paramount-Warner Brothers Saga has Ended
🎥 It is fascinating after Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos met at the White House with President Trump, he dropped his company’s bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, literally handing it to Paramount-Skydance, ending the month’s long saga.
💸 Either he understood the President would not allow it to happen, or he has great discipline in deal-making, or both. Either way, Netflix walked away with a $2.8b fee from WBD from walking away, which Paramount has already paid.
💼 This is a case in risk when considering the domestic regulatory environment and understanding what leveraging up debt means to a firm—a textbook and historic lesson in dealmaking.
This was originally a post on LinkedIn from February 28, 2026.
When CISA Falls by the Wayside
⚡ Critical infrastructure is just that — critical to the well-being and national security of a nation. It is one of the most vital components of any coherent domestic threat mitigation strategy.
💡 Over the past year, CISA, the agency tasked with protecting the United States from cyber-attacks and infrastructure (power grid, election systems, water systems, etc.) has been severely gutted of personnel and leadership for most of that time.
🪙 With vast underfunding and depriortization within the United States government, this space is a must watch for security experts and the general public moving forward.
This was originally a post from LinkedIn from February 26, 2026.
Reflections on the Blizzard of 2026
Yesterday’s Blizzard of 2026 was a forced reminder to enhance and reevaluate my work-life balance as it kept me in check to balance my productivity while embracing the outside world around me.
As the snow kept falling, I was nudged in the back of my head to “chunk my work” into pieces and mentally forced me to take breaks so I could take care of the next 4 to 5 inches that had just fallen over the next 2-hours.
For those twenty minutes of catching up with my own conditions outside like shoveling, plowing, salting, helping neighbors — I didn’t think about what I had to come back to do for the day, it was my own personal productivity.
Sometimes we have to be reminded that work-life balance is real thing. Taking the time to step away and complete a different, personal task, can be a powerful reminder that we are control of own lives.
Breaking work into pieces is completely okay, and oddly enough (aside from the physical labor involved) can rejuvenate our brains into a fresh line of thinking when we come back and warm up ourselves inside, once again.
Nothing is meaningful unless if you are safe. If you were affected by yesterday’s blizzard, I hope you took the time to take care of yourself and those around you. That is the ultimate reward in life.
This was originally a post from LinkedIn from February 24, 2026.
The Future of Xbox Can Tell Us About the Future of Gaming & GenAI
🎮 Xbox veteran Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are leaving Microsoft. This can tell us a lot about the future of gaming and AI.
💡 Microsoft’s GenAI expert, Asha Sharma will be heading the division. With video and image creation AI tools becoming more common place, this will make game development more automated for open-world scenarios.
💹 As a result, these tools will create more options, less expensive development costs, and shorter windows between releases in future years.
🏭 The Xbox itself may be discontinued (hardware cost and availability issues aside), but Microsoft Gaming has an entire portfolio that can be revamped utilizing GenAI. Much like the film industry, gaming is ripe for this disruption.
This was an originally a LinkedIn post from February 21, 2026.
Use Your Public Library — A Case in Always Be Learning
In the United States, we often take our public libraries for granted. The old days of going to a physical location to check out a limited number of books, having to keep track of due dates by hand are long gone, yet many of us seem to forget that all of these institutions have been in the digital age for quite some time.
In my reading journeys last year, over half of my books read either came in eBook or audiobook forms with lots of other free materials to spare (mostly through Libby). You can easily download materials to your eBook reader or listen to audio within the app. In most cases, it isn’t just limited to Kindle devices. Be sure to check the available formats for a specific title before checking it out.
I read 35 books last year and so far in 2026, I’ve completed my third title. This makes it easier than ever to consume relevant and interesting content. I’d still like to keep my goal in that general ballpark.
With lots of us cutting back on spending (I spent incredibly too much money on physical books in 2025), it’s time that we reconsider what we already pay for in taxes. If you don’t use your library, your city, county or municipality will notice and ultimately decrease funding based on lack of use.
Often the benefits go beyond this. I’ll take my library, The Jersey City Free Public Library as an example. Just the other day, I received an email announcing that they had struck a deal with LinkedIn Learning for free use of over 16,000 courses and experiences, with even more on the way as the program rolls out. Currently, my library system also utilizes Udemy and various other learning-on-demand platforms as a service to you.
As many of you know, I’m an advocate of the ABL (Always Be Learning) methodology. If you aren’t constantly learning, you’re falling behind. That affects your job prospects, promotions, and voiding yourself of crucial skills, especially in the era of GenAI.
Between Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, Hoopla, Libby, and various other tools at your disposal, you can arm yourself with opportunities to succeed in today’s rapidly changing global economy. At the very least you can utilize Kanopy to view different films from a variety of genres.
To some of this, utilizing such a public resource may seem like a no-brainer, but if that’s the case, why aren’t more of us doing it? Limited funding and outreach can often to be to blame, so we must continue to do the work to spread the goodwill of these wonderful institutions for ourselves and future generations.
I’m curious to know how you currently use your library’s offerings. Please comment below on tools you’ve utilized or what you’d additions you’d like to see included.
Michael Martinez is a freelance strategic analyst and writer with experience in non-profit, government, and data. He has degrees in business management and intelligence management. He is also an AmeriCorps VISTA alumnus. You can read more of his work at michaelmartinez.co.
This article was originally published as a LinkedIn article on February 14, 2026.
Quick Hit: Merck and Moderna Skin Cancer Promising Developments
🧑⚕️ With health & science initiatives and funding under attack in the United States, it’s important to always consider the capabilities of mRNA. The rest of the world will move forward into this frontier research—therefore, it will continue.
Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has railed against mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, making false claims about their safety and efficacy. In August, Kennedy unilaterally canceled $500 million in grant funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats.
Moderna and Merck’s personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, when combined with Keytruda, maintained a 49% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death for high-risk melanoma patients after five years of follow-up.
In a small clinical trial, customized mRNA vaccines against high-risk skin cancers appeared to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and death by nearly 50 percent over five years when compared with standard treatment alone."
🩺 This medical development is highly worth a read from The Verge. As mRNA brought society through the worst of the COVID pandemic, the breakthroughs are still quite in its infancy and has a lot of upside from here.
Quick Hit: The Hidden Cost of the Ocean Economy and Climate Change
🌊By including ocean impacts like coastal destruction, the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) has added $2 trillion to the annual bill. This is a wake-up call for the global finance sector.
🥬Including greenhouse emission projections, this report estimates the annual damages to traditional markets alone will be $1.66 trillion by 2100.
This article by Ars Technica discusses integrating ocean damage into economic models nearly doubles the estimated social cost of carbon, as previous calculations ignored trillions of dollars in projected losses to fisheries, coral reefs, and coastal infrastructure.
The social cost of carbon is an accounting method for working out the monetary cost of each ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. “[It] is one of the most efficient tools we have for internalizing climate damages into economic decision-making,” said Amy Campbell, a United Nations climate advisor and former British government COP negotiator.
🪸Taking into the account the ocean economy, the failure to act on climate change by integrating the economic cost (especially smaller island nations) can be detrimental to sovereign debt, financing, the cost of living, and quality of life are all ignored by most — something Wall Street and development corporations alike must accept.
It's Google's Year and their Momentum to Lose
In the area where LLM products are commodifying each other, it’s increasingly difficult for one company to jump ahead of another in this horserace. One day we see OpenAI, for example, release a new model that leapfrogs Anthropic, then DeepSeek does the same thing, then Google the next—and the process continues, but one thing is certain—Google made the most progress in 2025 and continues to build market share this early into 2026.
Apple has chosen Google’s Gemini model to the backend of most of Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” features moving forward, including Siri. Apple has famously lagged behind all competitors when it comes to any sort of innovation in this field. This is much needed to put the mostly hardware firm on level with Android and other platform capabilities.
The new capabilities will include better understanding of a user’s personal context, on-screen awareness, and deeper per-app controls. For example, Apple showed an iPhone user asking Siri about their mother’s flight and lunch reservation plans based on info from the Mail and Messages apps. - Mac Rumors
Google found itself bursting out of a crowded field in 2025 with Gemini 3 improvements. Additionally late last year, Nano Banana; Gemini’s innovative image creator ran circles around OpenAI and Anthropic’s complimentary imagery products. On a personal note, I’m an entirely Gemini house when it comes to using these tools.
Unless another firm leapfrogs with an equally innovative jump, I do not see myself jumping either. Wall Street also had a lot to say last year about Google’s parent company, Alphabet:
Among the eight tech companies valued at over $1 trillion, Alphabet was by far the biggest gainer. The next sharpest rallies came from chipmakers Broadcom and Nvidia, which gained 49% and 39%, respectively. - CNBC
On top of all of this, the catalyst (at least financially) last year was Google’s ‘slap on the wrist’ remedies in this monopolistic court case which allowed them to move forward with additional Gemini integrations into its Chrome browser. Most recently, Google has had success in adding AI integration into its Gmail service, and continued integration into the Workspace suite of products.
Google seems to be firing on all cylinders at the moment, but keep in mind this is the technology sector—any firm can be dethroned at any time, for any reason. Lack of innovation, falling behind competitors, or consumer’s changing behaviors can rear their heads at any time and put another product (or product suite) on top.
Riding into 2026, on top of a successful 2025—this seems to be Google’s momentum to lose. This field is still considered new technology. It’s always best not to rule out new entrance, but until there’s evidence to the contrary—this remains to be true.
Finished reading: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain 📚
Leadership Isn’t Found in a Report—It’s Found in a Conversation
I recently reflected on a powerful case study: a CEO who realized his monthly town halls were becoming a formality rather than a tool for connection. His solution? He started calling his employees—one by one—for 30-minute candid conversations.
In a world obsessed with “AI-ifying” everything, we often forget that growth cannot occur by cutting communication.
Three takeaways for leaders today:
Break the “Planet” Barrier: The gap between management and the front line is growing. If you don’t proactively reach across it, you’re leading in a vacuum.
Seek Radical Feedback: Real insights don’t show up in automated reports. They come from creating a space where people can speak without fear of reprisal.
Finish What You Start: One of the biggest drains on team morale is “project jumping.” Clarity and commitment to a goal are the ultimate synergies.
Technology is a tool, but community consensus is the engine. Get your house in order, listen to the “alarm bells” coming up the chain, and remember— serious feedback is where real growth begins.
Michael Martinez is a freelance strategic analyst and writer with experience in non-profit, government, and data. He has degrees in business management and intelligence management. He is also an AmeriCorps VISTA alumnus. You can read more of his work at michaelmartinez.co.
This was originally posted as a LinkedIn article on January 3, 2025.
The Complete Listing of my Readings Throughout 2025
After reading 35 books this year, on a diverse set of topics, I’ve learned a lot and blew away my own goals and expectations for 2025.
I’ve included a link from Goodreads, summarizing all that I’ve read. You’ll notice titles that discuss AI & technology, biographies, business & management, and international relations.
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Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller
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The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity, Amy Webb
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Autocracy, Inc., Anne Applebaum
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Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, Jason Schreier
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The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, Amy Webb
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Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, Satya Nadella
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From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, Michael McFaul
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The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet, Jeff Jarvis
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The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, Chris Hayes
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Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Sarah Wynn-Williams
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Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, Michael Hayden
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Beneath a Surface, Brad Sams
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America’s New Map, Thomas P.M. Barnett
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Facts & Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence, James Clapper
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On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder
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21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari
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Who Knew, Barry Diller
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Illiberal Trends and Anti-EU Politics in East Central Europe, Astrid Lorenz & Lisa H. Anders
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AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence, Gary Rivlin
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Nuclear War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen
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Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television, Todd Purdum
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No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer
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Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte
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Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, Saul Griffith
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Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You, Ali Abdaal
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Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate, Spencer Rascoff & Stan Humphries
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Magazine, Jeff Jarvis
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Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Economy, Patrick McGee
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Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty, Hillary Clinton
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A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, James Comey
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107 Days, Kamala Harris
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Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, Adam Aleksic
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Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, Rachel Maddow
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Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, & Roy Schwartz
For more information about what I’ve read this year, you can find summaries from my Goodreads account.
Finished reading: Smart Brevity by Jim VandeHei 📚
On News Articles and Understanding What's Behind the Headlines
It’s not just enough to keep yourself informed by watching television news, reading blog posts, or flipping through social media posts. These all contain bias to an extent and rely on sensational headlines to grab attention and your clicks. Sure, reading a WIRED article or swiping through that influencer on Tik-Tok may tell you what’s going on, but what’s the validity to it?
Do you truly understand what message and information is being conveyed. In today’s era of AI generated news clips and politically charged headlines, what does keeping up with the latest mean to you? Does it really make you understand the underpinning of why world events unfurl or are we really on the edge of some big space boom? These are questions that also took me a long time to answer.
A few years ago, I began really digging in and reading “backstory” so to speak about what terms being thrown around mean, and histories behind certain industries' to better portray context. They used to say content is king, but I’d rather believe that context is king. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
If you consider recent global headlines about tariffs, the Straits of Hormuz, Chinese technological embargos, SpaceX colonizing Mars, and AI taking your jobs, for example, you’d think that we have a lot to be afraid of. You might be right, but it all matters about context, and as most history goes — we’ve all been here before.
To understand the history and to better inform yourself, I recommend seeking out books authored by subject matter experts in their respective fields. Recently, I’ve read “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare” by Edward Fishman, a former diplomat and economist. In his rather lengthy but easy to read chronology, he discusses a brief and recent history of what ‘blocking sanctions’ do, how tariffs are properly used, and what the role the US has played in Iranian diplomacy in the past.
Recent headlines don’t have the time nor inclination to help the reader delve further into these topics, so understanding a primer to these terms in the news gives you a better understanding so better decisions can be made by the reader’s part.
To give another example, the wild, but speculative SpaceX IPO by Elon Musk is all the rage. In the S-1 filing, Musk promises “A million people on Mars” as a goal of its organization. But also, if you parse what the company is, it’s not solely a rocket nor space exploration company. It’s a rocket manufacturer with X (formerly Twitter), xAI (including Grok, the controversial chatbot), and Cursor AI, a firm that has absolutely nothing to do with space colonization all rolled up into one company.
If you listen to the clickbait headlines, you’d assume that Mars colonization is only about a decade off. Can you be sure? I’ve been reading, “A City on Mars” by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. A fairly levelheaded deep-dive into the complexities that Moon, Mars, and other off worldly colonization need to realize before any of SpaceX’s lofty goals can be realized. Hint: It is not 10-years off. As far as SpaceX and it’s S-1 have told us, there is nothing to protect potential habitants of Mars from dust storms, radiation, and basic necessities for moving around a habitat.
It’s important to create context for yourself when reading headlines and clicking news articles, especially with AI taking on a lot of journalistic activities — especially the errors. If you really want to learn more about why things work, books by SMEs are still your best bet to understanding what’s going on in an ever-complicated world that sinks us in headlines, such as this one.