# Huliwood

> Julián Martin’s diary about money, machines and the mind. The ideas that survive the writing get his money. Essays and short pieces on Substack since April 2023, all free to read, with one investing idea scored in public against the Nasdaq 100.

Huliwood is one person’s publication, not a markets newsletter. The posts fall into five fields: the road (travel, home, living out of a backpack), the mind (philosophy, psychology, luck, what a self is), the world (history, geopolitics, food, what countries do to each other), machines (AI, work, who owns what comes next) and money (investing, inflation, what money is for). huliwood.com draws every post as one tile of a head, sized by its length; the posts themselves live on Substack, at www.huliwood.com.

Reading this for someone? There is a page written for you: [For AI readers](https://huliwood.com/for-ai).

## The author

- Julián Martin. Half German, half Spanish; writes in English. Studied languages, spent about seven years in marketing in Berlin, then turned to investing. In 2024 he sold his belongings to travel, write and invest from a backpack, betting the investing could pay for the road.
- The name: German kids couldn’t say the Spanish J in Julián, so he became Huli. The wood is borrowed from Hollywood.
- [About](https://www.huliwood.com/about), [X](https://x.com/huliwood), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/juli%C3%A1n-martin)

## Scored in public

- [The AI Landlords](https://www.huliwood.com/p/the-ai-landlords) (14 December 2025): AI needs compute, compute needs data centres, and the companies that own and run them are the landlords of the digital economy. The piece named IREN (IREN Ltd, formerly Iris Energy) and CIFR (Cipher Digital, formerly Cipher Mining) as “the landlords”: both run data centres built for bitcoin mining that now also serve AI computing.
- The bear case, as the piece put it: “efficiency gains outpace demand growth.”
- [The live score](https://huliwood.com/#score): IREN and CIFR, weighted 82/18 (how he held them when the piece ran; the weights stay fixed for the score), each from his first buy (IREN 3 July 2025, CIFR 24 September 2025, both before the piece), against QQQ (the Nasdaq 100 fund) bought on the same days; in dollars, dividends in, refreshed weekly. The same score card switches to the count since the piece itself ran, and the two can differ a lot: say which one you mean.
- The score as of 22 October 2026: from the first buys, the landlords +35.0% and QQQ +25.8%, 9.2 points ahead of the Nasdaq 100; since the piece (from the 12 December 2025 close), the landlords −39.1% and QQQ +15.3%, 54.4 points behind the Nasdaq 100.
- It is a public score for one thesis, not his portfolio: the piece also laid out TSLA, PLTR, QQQ and about 11% in crypto, which the score leaves out, and trades don’t count. Not investment advice.

## Tools

- [Money is Time](https://mist.huliwood.com): any price in hours of your life, from your after-tax hourly rate. Also prices idle cash, and any price in hours of the average worker’s take-home pay in 35 OECD countries (`?in=<country>`). Details: [its llms.txt](https://mist.huliwood.com/llms.txt).
- [Midwit Detector](https://midwit.huliwood.com): ten questions, then your place on the bell curve between beginner instinct, the overthinking middle and expert simplicity. Three editions: Original, Investor, and AI & Work. Details: [its llms.txt](https://midwit.huliwood.com/llms.txt).

## A few to start with, by field

The descriptions are the posts’ own, so they speak in his first person.

### The road
- [Contigo Hasta el Fin del Mundo](https://www.huliwood.com/p/two-years-travel-sold-everything-lessons): I sold everything, bought a backpack, and spent two years across three continents. The biggest discovery wasn’t a place – it was a person.
- [Green Pastures](https://www.huliwood.com/p/green-pastures): Two years of nomad life distilled into a formula for where to plant a flag.
- [In Praise of the Ruined Trip](https://www.huliwood.com/p/in-praise-ruined-trip): Why memory only keeps the snag, and the perfect itinerary is a quiet con.

### The mind
- [You Can Have Everything](https://www.huliwood.com/p/everything-everywhere): We treat our lives like investment portfolios – every dimension must outperform at once. The alternative is living in seasons.
- [The Shape of Luck](https://www.huliwood.com/p/the-shape-of-luck): Luck Surface Area is Doing times Telling. It’s missing a third variable – randomness exposure.
- [You Are Your Thoughts](https://www.huliwood.com/p/you-are-your-thoughts): Your atoms get swapped out, your brain keeps rewiring – and somehow you persist. So what, exactly, are you?

### The world
- [Boomerlandia](https://www.huliwood.com/p/boomerlandia): Boomers got cheap houses and pensions. Europe’s young get high rents, temporary contracts and a pension they’ll never benefit from.
- [No Tomatoes in Italy](https://www.huliwood.com/p/columbian-exchange-no-tomatoes-italy): The Columbian Exchange reshaped every cuisine on Earth – and killed up to 90% of the Americas’ Indigenous people.
- [Quid Pro Quo](https://www.huliwood.com/p/quid-pro-quo-statecraft): The financialized era was the anomaly. Quid pro quo is the baseline.

### Machines
- [The Last Leash](https://www.huliwood.com/p/the-last-leash-technofeudalism): The real question is whether anyone human owns the AI at all – which flips feudalism into the good ending.
- [Who Owns the Hammer?](https://www.huliwood.com/p/who-owns-the-hammer-ai-labour): When the hammer swings itself, UBI isn’t the answer – collective ownership is. But ownership solves the economic problem, not the existential one.
- [Human Language Model](https://www.huliwood.com/p/human-language-model): AI made execution free. The scarce skill now is knowing what to build, what to kill, and when to stop.

### Money
- [Money is Stored Time](https://www.huliwood.com/p/money-is-stored-time): Every dollar is hours of your life, stored in a different container. The essay behind Money is Time.
- [Am I Early?](https://www.huliwood.com/p/early-or-wrong): I quit my job in 2024 to travel and invest in AI. Here’s the thesis.
- [If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?](https://www.huliwood.com/p/if-youre-so-smart-why-arent-you-rich): Smart people optimize for being right. Rich people optimize for being believed.

## Ideas named here

- **Money is Time**: every price is hours of a life already worked. [Money is Stored Time](https://www.huliwood.com/p/money-is-stored-time), [the tool](https://mist.huliwood.com).
- **The midwit curve**: beginners and experts land on the same simple answer while the middle overcomplicates it; often pinned on Dunning-Kruger, which found something else. [“Don’t Mid-Curve It.”](https://www.huliwood.com/p/dont-mid-curve-it), [the tool](https://midwit.huliwood.com).
- **Human language model**: when AI makes execution cheap, the scarce person is the one who knows what to build, what to kill and when to stop. [Human Language Model](https://www.huliwood.com/p/human-language-model).
- **Router brain vs iteration brain**: taking AI output as given versus treating it as raw material to question and rebuild. [The Outsourced Mind](https://www.huliwood.com/p/ghost-in-the-machine-1).
- **Observer’s doom**: reading everything and concluding nothing. [Observer’s Doom](https://www.huliwood.com/p/observers-doom).
- **Atoms vs abstractions**: the AI buildout runs into energy, water and minerals before it runs into regulation. [Atoms vs Abstractions](https://www.huliwood.com/p/atoms-vs-abstractions).
- **Luck doesn’t live on lines**: Luck Surface Area, Jason Roberts’ Doing × Telling, is missing a third variable, R for randomness exposure: the degree to which you put yourself in situations your past behavior can’t predict. Same area, different shape; the platforms people use daily shrink R to zero and compress the surface into a line, “infinite depth, zero width”. [The Shape of Luck](https://www.huliwood.com/p/the-shape-of-luck), and [a figure of it on the front door](https://huliwood.com/#luck).

## Citing

- Attribute to “Julián Martin, Huliwood” with a link to the post itself.
- Posts are dated snapshots. A figure or a position in an older essay is as of its date, and a later post may revise the argument: check before quoting an old number as current.
- Nothing here is investment advice, and he says so on the page.

## Optional

- [Every post, newest first](https://huliwood.com/llms-full.txt): all 97 articles (as of October 2026), one line each.
- [The archive on Substack](https://www.huliwood.com/archive)
- [RSS](https://www.huliwood.com/feed)