Today's Wisdom - Aschenbrenner, Port and Sneezes

Welcome back to A Little Wiser. We have some exciting news launching over the next few weeks, stay tuned! Today's wisdom explores:

Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

Leopold Aschenbrenner's story reads like a parable of the entire AI boom, compressed into two years. German-born and startlingly precocious, he enrolled at Columbia University at fifteen and graduated as valedictorian at nineteen with a double major in economics and mathematics. He joined OpenAI's Superalignment team in 2023, tasked with keeping future superintelligent systems safe, then was fired the following year over an alleged leak of sensitive information (which he disputed, saying he had merely shared hypothetical safety scenarios with outsiders). Rather than fade away, he published a 165-page essay titled "Situational Awareness," a dense and widely read argument that scaling AI would demand a colossal build-out of chips, data centers, memory, and power.

Then he launched a hedge fund to bet real money on that very thesis, despite having no prior trading experience whatsoever. For a while, the bet paid off spectacularly. The fund, also called Situational Awareness, poured money into the physical backbone of artificial intelligence. The returns were the stuff of legend, with the fund reporting a 439 percent net return in the first half of 2026 alone and swelling to around $45 billion at its July peak, backed by Silicon Valley royalty including the Collison brothers of Stripe. Aschenbrenner, still only twenty-five, had become one of the most watched figures in finance. The trouble is that conviction and leverage are a dangerous pairing.

The unraveling was brutal and fast. In late July 2026 the AI infrastructure trade cracked, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index falling nearly 29 percent from its June high. Because the fund had leveraged its positions roughly fourfold, and had also bet against software stocks in a trade that moved sharply the wrong way, the losses compounded from both directions at once. Its prime brokers, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Bank of America, issued margin calls the fund could not meet. Even as the walls closed in, Aschenbrenner told investors on 24 July that the sell-off was one of the best buying opportunities since early 2025. That money never came. Instead, Ken Griffin's Citadel swept in and bought the entire portfolio of public stocks, a move straight from Griffin's well-worn playbook of scooping up quality assets when a leveraged rival is forced to dump them. Situational Awareness shrank to about $10 billion, surviving now mostly as a holding vehicle for its roughly $5 billion stake in Anthropic. The episode carries a lesson the tech world keeps relearning, that being spectacularly right about a technology and being right about how to invest in it are not the same thing.

There was a time in England when a man's capacity for alcohol was worn like a military honor. A "three-bottle man" was one who could sink three bottles of port in a single sitting and walk away, at least in theory, still upright. Far from a mark of shame, the title carried genuine prestige. The three-bottle man sat at the entry level of respectability, and there were said to be thousands of them. Curiously there was no such thing as a two-bottle man, since that amount fell below what a gentleman was simply expected to manage over a convivial evening, and the greatest minds of the age competed openly for this dubious celebrity. The Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, a Latin-speaking prodigy who ran the country at twenty-four, was a famous devotee.

The origins of this culture were oddly patriotic. Earlier in the 18th century, English gentlemen had favored lighter French wines and claret. After the country's poor showing in the Seven Years War, writers began blaming the nation's softness on its "Frenchified" and effeminate drinking habits. The manly, patriotic answer was port, the strong and fortified wine of Portugal. Demand grew so fierce that fraudsters routinely adulterated cheap port with raisin wine, Spanish plonk nicknamed "bullock's blood," and even berry dye to fake the color. Thomas Jefferson kept careful notes recording that his household got through roughly a bottle of wine a day, some 400 a year.

Before you picture the entire Georgian aristocracy as staggering wrecks, the numbers deserve a sober second look. The era's bottles and glasses were not our own. A bottle then was blown by hand from a single breath of a glassblower, which made it smaller and wildly inconsistent, holding perhaps 350 to 500ml against the standard 750ml of today. More importantly, the drink inside was far weaker, with port of the period sitting closer to 15 percent alcohol and table wine as low as 5 percent. Factor all this in and the heroic three-bottle man was consuming something nearer the equivalent of a bottle and a half of today's port, spread across a long evening of heavy food. It would take another fifty years, and the arrival of Victorian respectability, before getting roaring drunk at dinner stopped being the mark of a gentleman and started being the mark of a disgrace.

At its heart, a sneeze is one of the body's most violent acts of self-defense. It begins when sensory receptors lining the inside of your nose detect something they do not like, whether that is dust, pollen, cold air, a virus, or the sharp compounds in black pepper and chili. Those receptors fire a warning along the trigeminal nerve (located in our face) to a cluster of neurons in the brainstem sometimes called the "sneeze center." Once that center decides a sneeze is warranted, it choreographs a startlingly complex full-body sequence in a fraction of a second, drawing in a deep breath, building pressure, and then releasing it all at once through a huge contraction of the diaphragm.

A single sneeze can expel around 40,000 microscopic droplets, launched from the body at up to 85 percent of the speed of sound. This power also lies behind one of the most persistent myths about sneezing. The theory that your eyes will pop out if you keep them open is anatomically impossible since the eyes are anchored firmly in their sockets and a sneeze comes nowhere near generating the pressure needed to dislodge them. Closing the eyes is simply an autonomic reflex, something the body does automatically. It may be wiser to let them close, though, since doing so keeps the germs you have just expelled from drifting straight back into your own eyes.

The strangest sneeze of all is the one triggered by sunlight. Around a quarter of all people carry a genetic quirk called the photic sneeze reflex, sometimes given the wonderful backronym ACHOO syndrome, whereby stepping from a dark room into bright light sets off a fit of sneezing. This has puzzled some of history's finest minds, with Aristotle pondering it in 350 BC and blaming the sun's heat, before Francis Bacon disproved him two thousand years later by stepping into the sun with his eyes closed and refusing to sneeze, which showed light rather than warmth was the cause. Modern scientists believe the explanation is a case of crossed wires in the brain. The optic nerve, which fires to shrink your pupils in bright light, runs extremely close to the trigeminal nerve that governs sneezing, and in some people the light signal spills over and is misread as an itch in the nose.

Enjoyed today’s edition?

If you found it valuable, the single best thing you can do is share it with one person who would enjoy it. Every referral helps us grow and keeps the lessons coming.

— Share A Little Wiser below —

Until next time — stay curious.
The A Little Wiser Team