➺ March 3, 2026

Hey {{ first_name | Neighbor }}. I'm caffeine-sensitive and lactose-intolerant, so I often order hot chocolate at coffee shops – an odd look, but instructive. There are, as it turns out, two types of coffee shops: ones that offer 40-year-old men marshmallows and ones that don't.

Ones that do cluster near bookstores. Ones that don’t cluster near banks. - AB

➺ Q1 Review: This is your last chance to participate in our “Working Relationships Survey” looking at why people stay or leave comfortable gigs.

➺ Continental Buffet: If you haven’t yet had a chance to paw through the European properties listed on Pacaso (today’s sponsor), carve out a few minutes.

Your Place In Europe

You walked the streets, learned how to order coffee, looked enviously at listings, then flew home. Makes sense. Owning abroad feels like something for people in a different tax bracket – until you do the math.

Second homes require chunky down payments and constant upkeep even when they’re sitting empty. And, yes, international ownership adds another layer of complexity. Or it would if the team behind Zillow hadn’t already solved those problems by building Pacaso, which offers shared, true ownership in a fully furnished luxury homes located in 40+ destinations worldwide (European expansion beyond London and Paris currently underway). Pacaso simplifies the buying process and handles management. All that’s left to do is settle in.

Stop being a tourist and start being a person who lives in London, Paris, Florence, or Barcelona 5-6 weeks a year. Have a go-to coffee place where they know your order. Have friends. And have a real asset in a remarkable place.

What we’re drinking about while talking.

STATUS ➽ Shah of Nah
Why is Hollywood's biggest studio head its first anti-mogul?
The word "mogul" traces to the Mughal emperors, whose courts were so extravagant Europeans needed a stronger word than King. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal because he was sad about his wife. Akbar built an entire city at Fatehpur Sikri, then abandoned it when he got bored. The term made its way to America during the age of the Robber Barons and eventually settled, as ambitious immigrants do, in Los Angeles, where it was used to describe the Warners, Adolph Zukor, and Louis B. Mayer, who lorded over their lots so lavishly the orientalist callback felt apt. None of those men, however, ran an empire as big as the one David Ellison will run when his $111B acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery gets the green light from its MAGA champions in Washington. But that doesn't make Ellison a mogul.

The combined Paramount-Warner company will carry roughly $90 billion in debt. Scale financed by surplus lets you take creative risks. Scale financed by debt requires reliable debt service, which, in turn, requires bottom-line focused decision-making. Emperor Akbar kept a hundred artists on staff just to illustrate the story of his own reign. Robert Evans greenlit a weird Nicholson film about incest and water rights. Ellison can't afford to do anything but double down on what's already worked¹. That's not mogul stuff. It's not king stuff. Frankly, it’s not even Robber Baron stuff. A baronet now rules Hollywood..

TASTE ➽ Tee Drex
Why do your pajamas need a provenance story?
Alex Mill, the nineties J. Crew tribute band run by former Crew C.E.O. Mickey Drexler, just doubled down on its collaboration with Schostal, a 150-year-old Roman pajama brand that makes the kind of thoughtfully tailored sets Nick and Nora Charles wore while nightcapping their way through murder investigations. But that was a different time. By the latter half of the 20th century, the American pajama market was so child-centric that sleepwear became Hollywood's visual shorthand for sexlessness and infantilization. American dads slept in boxers and maybe a Big Dog shirt. American moms stuck to nightgowns unless they were making pancakes.

No longer. The $10B global luxury sleepwear market is projected to grow 40% over the next six years. That growth will be driven by what we might call “Manifest Best-iny,” the now-prevalent, but historically aberrant idea that the mass affluent Americans who own nice stuff should only own nice stuff. No more oversized Big Dog shirts. What makes the Alex Mill x Schostal play smart – vintage Drexler – is that the heritage narrative normalizes an eccentric new consumer behavior, creating a “when in Rome” dynamic despite the fact that we definitely ain’t in Rome. And maybe that’s a good thing. A casual nightcap doesn’t sound half bad..

MONEY ➽ Secure the Bag
Why did a Substack essay move the stock market?
In 1984, the Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov gave a now-famous interview describing the KGB's strategy of "demoralization" – the systematic saturation of a population with so many competing narratives that it loses confidence in its own judgment, fetishizes the past, dismisses evidence of progress, and defaults to whatever confirms its negative bias. Last week, the stock market sold off after Citrini Research published "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," a speculative Substack essay imagining AI hollowing out white-collar employment, detonating PE-backed SaaS companies, and cracking prime mortgages across high-income zip codes. The essay coined the term "Ghost GDP," which named the class-coded fear that productivity could further decouple from the material circumstances of professionals' lives.

The professional-managerial class, still skittish post-Great Recession, has been told by both its techworld antagonists and its alarmist, anti-oligarchical allies that both soft and hard skills are depreciating assets. Regardless of whether that's true, it conforms to a negative bias. The Citrini sell-off didn't happen because investors ran the numbers; it happened because they lacked confidence in their own judgment. Well, most of them did. A few days later, Citadel Securities responded by pointing out that AI diffusion is following the same S-curves as every prior technology – slow adoption, rapid scaling, eventual plateau – and that productivity shocks historically expand consumption rather than destroy it. Citadel was probably right on the economics, but it's unclear whether that still matters.

Upper Middle is an independent publication helping oat milk elites reframe their relationships with status, taste, and money. Please help us keep the lights on (dimly) by joining Upper Middle Research, which pays mid-career professionals as much as $200/hour to take targeted surveys.

What gets lost when we measure progress?

Most critics of modern institutionalism are selling something, rending their garments in despair, or both. But C. Thi Nguyen, the philosopher and author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game doesn’t play like that. Instead, he describes the process by which institutions and individuals go from measuring what matters to defining what matters by what can be measured. Nguyen argues that metrics and scores generally don't distort reality so much as mash it into a rollerboard so it can travel between all kinds of contexts – some institutional, others more playful and humane. The big question at the core of his work: What should we pack?

Upper Middle spoke to Nguyen about why transparency is a trap, why cost-benefit analyses are way more subjective than we think, and why scoring makes gameplay beautiful. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The Score, which moved me, is available at Amazon or better places run by better people.

The central claim of your book is that metrics are not neutral. They're engineered to travel, and what makes them portable also makes them lossy. Can you walk us through that?
Qualitative reasoning – reasoning in words and justification – is context sensitive and rich, but it travels poorly between contexts. The essential insight I got from the historian Theodore Porter is that institutional quantification is about creating a nugget that is stable across contexts. That kind of context-independence is really valuable. It enables high-speed coordination and a certain kind of objectivity. The problem is focusing on those nuggets creates a systematic bias in value and attention towards the kinds of things that are easy to measure.

In my field, it's easy to count student graduation rate, graduation speed, and starting salary, and so those got prioritized over virtue, reflectiveness, and creativity. And it's not just the stuff that's impossible to measure. Philosophy majors tend to, over their careers, make more than almost any other major, but because those earnings tend to come later² and are therefore harder to measure, that measure gets thrown out.

It would be simpler if your book was an argument against metrics. It's not, is it?
It would be easier if this was a story about why metrics are bad and everything is about context. But there are lots of really good metrics. I think of vaccination rates, CO2 emissions, basic poverty levels — there are all kinds of cases where, even when we know it's not capturing everything that's important, the metric allows for coordination in a super powerful way.

Metrics compress information to a centralized source. That's a very costly goal. If you're willing to pay it, pay it. Sometime it’s actually worth it. You should just know that is an incredibly information-costly function.

You coined the term "objectivity laundering" to describe what happens when subjective choices get buried inside mechanical-looking systems. Cost-benefit analysis is your go-to example.
It's when you have a genuinely subjective, value-laden choice – something that at the bottom is just a choice – and then you pile a lot of mechanical processing on it, and that hides the degree to which it's choicey. My favorite example comes from Porter. Cost-benefit analyses have two deep, subjective, value-laden choices at their bottom. One is just how you assign dollar values to particular values – every cost-benefit analysis for the National Park Service has to assign an equivalent dollar value for the joy of outdoor recreation. And two is the discount rate. Every cost-benefit analysis has to decide on a relative value of future events to current events and discount the future to some degree. And that's another completely value-laden choice. Every cost-benefit analysis, as objective as it looks, just sits on top of this highly subjective choice structure at the bottom, and then it hides it.

We know how to deal suspiciously toward people. We're like, what are their motivations? What are their interests? What are they trying to do? And then large-scale technological systems we just ingest unthinkingly. But that shit was made by people for a purpose.

The natural response to that problem is transparency — just show people how the sausage is made. But you argue transparency has its own pathologies.
This is an extension of an idea from the philosopher Onora O'Neill. She says people think transparency and trust go together, but transparency asks experts to explain themselves to non-experts, so they have to lie or – even more worrisome – act like non-experts in order to be comprehensible. That sounds really democratic and awesome and anti-elite until you think about what it looks like in practice.

An example I think about a lot is that leftists tend to believe in both transparency and standpoint epistemology, the idea that particular groups – especially oppressed and marginalized groups – understand certain things about the world that can't be transmitted well. These ideas are deeply in tension and obviously a recipe in combination for bad metrics.

So metrics are lossy, objectivity is often laundered, and transparency doesn't fix it. That's a pretty bleak set of conclusions. But then your book takes this turn into games, and suddenly scoring systems sound wonderful. What changes?
Playing a game is voluntarily undertaking unnecessary obstacles in order to create the possibility of struggling to overcome them. If you have your friends over for a night of cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. What makes good games special is that they create the conditions for process beauty³, graceful reactions to self-imposed restraints. Institutions can be games too, of course, but they aren't designed around process beauty.

Your book is a critique of accessibility and simplification, written in a way that is extremely accessible and clear. Is that a contradiction?
A lot of it is a complex meta-joke, because it is an attempt to make as accessible and clear as possible a criticism of the process of making things accessible and clear. But there's something more serious going on too. Philosophy tends to be abstract. This book let me alternate between abstraction and story. When philosophers write popular stuff, they think they have to put in stories to dumb down the ideas. What I found was that putting in stories forced me to reckon with the thickness of the world, which then tells you when your abstract theory is a lie.

You write a lot about rock climbing — an activity you clearly love — and how the beauty and profundity of the activity is a product of self-imposed restraints that force climbers to care about the specific rock. It made me think of financialization, which feels a bit like using a ladder and calling it rock climbing. How do you think about the activities you've devoted yourself to — including being an academic and writing books? They are very rock-forward activities, but difficult ways to get up.
The hyper-clarity of the scoring system in rock climbing is what got me to pay attention to my body in the first place. So, again, I'm not saying that all numbers are bad, all scoring systems are bad. That said, there's a reason people go into philosophy and it's not the money. People want to be in it because it is satisfying in and of itself – a refuge for the human and creative. But that demand itself creates an issue: You have a bunch of people that want to move into a space with too few resources. Artists wind up getting dumped into Lord of the Flies.

Last question: what's a game that changed how you see the world?
Imperial. It looks like Risk – it's World War I, different countries are playing against each other – but you play investors trading bonds and stocks in the countries and controlling the war for profit. The first time I played, I invested in one country then tried to win with that country. Then I realized it's a game about shared incentives, about giving your opponents equity in your project and staging fake wars or even real wars to drive up profits. It's a very cold way of thinking about how to navigate the social space, but a useful one. (Editor’s Note: I bought Imperial after this conversation and it’s (disconcertingly) fun.)

The “WORKING RELATIONSHIPS SURVEY” uses Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, Loyalty framework to understand how Oat Milk Elites think about their jobs and about professional optionality.. Full results will be shared with members and those that complete the survey.

Mr. Market is Andrew Feinberg, a retired hedge fund manager who has beaten the S&P 500 for the last 30 years. He is the author/co-author of four books on personal finance.

Dear Mr. Market,

Did any of the 13f filings on February 15 strike you as interesting? I don’t know what to think.

Filing and Forgetting in Frankfurt, KY

Dear F&F,

The good news about 13f filings, the quarterly asset reports from institutional investors managing over $100 million made available every three months, is that there aren’t many great investors you really need to track. The last 15 years have been very humbling for many once-elite managers. 

Still, there are nuggets. The shiniest one may be at $12.7 billion Altimeter Capital Management, where terrific investor Brad Gerstner dramatically increased his Nvidia position from 18.81% of assets to a stunning 22.68%. He’s been a long-time Nvidia bull, but I’ve never seen him anywhere near this weighting before. (He has 18.28% of assets in Meta Platforms.) Nvidia sells at 24.5 times 2027 earnings as its biggest customers dramatically ramp up their AI spending. This is crazy cheap. Not so cheap, though, if it soon emerges that we are in an unsustainable AI bubble or if Open AI goes bust. And, man, it sure looks as if OpenAI is trying. Forget drunken sailors. It’s spending like Buzz Aldrin on a coke binge. Yet I remain overweight Nvidia.

David Tepper’s $6.9 billion Appaloosa LP reduced its huge China bet but still has 18.9% of its assets there. It added a 2.63% position in a South Korea ETF (as opposed to the North Korea ETF, which I own), an interesting move given that South Korea was the best-performing market in the world last year with a 76% gain. 

Philippe Laffont’s $69.5 billion Coatue Management added a 1.44% slug to its microscopic holdings in Natera, which provides molecular testing. Yay! It’s one of my larger holdings and the top holding – by far – at Stan Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office. 

Pershing Square Capital Management, run by flaming asshole Bill Ackman⁴, established an 11.37% position in Meta. Ackman’s purchase of Alphabet in 2023 was prescient, so this could be important, but also… Ackman has since sold 40% of his Alphabet holdings so you don’t want to read too much into these things.

Sincerely,
Mr. Market

[2] Same is true of English majors. Over time, most white-collar workers wind up in the abstraction biz.

[3] Let’s this in and you’ll wind up thinking about it all the time. There’s something really deep here that explains that period in life when your smartest friend got weirdly obsessed with Mario Kart or Super Smash Bros.

[4] There’s nothing worse than I guy who spends his days shouting “I’m the voice of reason” as loud as he possibly can. Never be that guy.