Book of the Day

'Pachinko' author Min Jin Lee says writing 'American Hagwon' transformed her

I felt so sad for all these people who were spending so much of their very hardearned money, money they really didn't have to help their kids. It's not true. Like you could go to a fancy school and not have things work out. Every single person that you and I know can find five examples, not like one example, five examples, maybe 10 examples, maybe 20 examples of people who went to these schools. And these people did not have the life that you thought they would have or they thought they would have as a result of having gone to a name brand school.

The Week

The Iran War Is Costing You Money. Here’s How Much. | The Week

When you look around the poker table and wonder who the sucker is, it's you. because not because it's a bad business, just because what's happening is this is not a financing event anymore. They're not raising money for anything other what's really going on is people are unloading shares.

Pivot

Why Scott Galloway Is So Worried about Democrats' Midterm Chances

Selling shovels in a gold rush is great. Using your shovel profits to buy your own stock, it basically says that the shovel seller isn't sure how long the rush is going to last or how deep the mine is going to go.

Throughline

Forty years of what if

I thought to myself, would I be the only one in this room who would disagree with a launch decision? I asked myself in my mind, do I have the courage to say that?

TED

The Energy Mess AI Is Creating — and How to Fix It | Ari Matusiak | TED

Meanwhile, your furnace is getting older, your water heater is about to give out, you are one hard winter or hot summer away from a repair bill you didn't budget for. Not surprisingly, people do not like this deal.

Office Hours

The $750,000 Head Start Rich Kids Get | Office Hours

Happiness is not only a function of what you can get or what you have. It's a function of an absence of anxiety of what can be taken from you.

Office Hours

The AI Boom Looks Exactly Like 1999. Here’s Who Pays. | Office Hours

The scary part is what's not in plain sight here and that is 800 plus billion is pushed off the books into shell companies. So it's hard to see who's going to eat the losses. Plus, this debt is backed by chips that can lose value overnight if a better one emerges.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]

The thing that I've observed about the truly great investors is that they have an absolute obsession about not losing money. It's a very different orientation from people who are obsessed with making money. The ones obsessed with not losing money tend to make a great deal of it.

TED

Why You Fear the Unknown — and What It Can Teach You | Maya Shankar and Simone Stolzoff | TED

So somehow, we would rather a certain bad thing happen to us than have to deal with the ambiguity of not being sure.

Hidden Brain

Blowing Up Your Life

We tend to think of big life changes as responses to crises — job loss, divorce, illness. But sometimes people blow up their lives not because something went wrong, but because everything feels too comfortable, too predictable, too safe. The very stability they worked so hard to achieve starts to feel like a trap.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]

The thing that I find so hard about venture capital is that you might be right about a company, but if you make your investment at the wrong time, you can lose all your money. You can be right about the destination but wrong about the timing, and it doesn't matter that you were right about the destination.

Hidden Brain

Blowing Up Your Life

Most of us, most of the time, make decisions incrementally. We don't blow up our lives — we make small adjustments, trying to improve our circumstances bit by bit. But some people, at some point, feel the urge to do something dramatic: quit a job without another one lined up, leave a relationship, move to a new city where they know no one.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]

The venture capital business is one of the few endeavors where you can be wrong the vast majority of the time and still be considered successful. The reason is that the gains from the rare, extraordinary winner so thoroughly dwarf the losses from all the failures combined that the overall outcome can be spectacular.

Diet TBPN

METR and AI Regulation, Zuck Pushes Back on AI Slowdown, Fed Hikes Rates | Diet TBPN

You can be 22 years old, not graduate from college, go into the Navy, enlist in the Navy, not even in the officer training program, and in 18 months you can be responsible for the security of a nuclear power plant on a submar. Your pdoom on nuclear is completely irrelevant to you doing this job, right?

Fresh Air

Best Of: Life in the Mojave Desert / Director of ‘The Uprising’

Taking action, even though you don't have a real grounded expectation of being successful, I think there's still value in the action to watch and witness and be able to say that you saw what was there.

Fresh Air

Stories of survival & loss at Ground Zero

Every fiber in my being was screaming at me to get out of this building. Every second that we wasted was one second closer to us not getting out of the building. But that's not what firemen do. We were there to save people's lives. And that culture, that firefighter culture, overtook whatever personal need I felt to get out of the building.

It's Been a Minute

Would you let your kids play football?

We're getting more and more evidence there might be like no amount of football that is actually safe for people to play.

The a16z Show

Gavin Baker: Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply

David explores whether the bigger near-term risk is not overbuilding, but failing to build enough.

It's Been a Minute

Hitting the open road can lead to new beginnings | It's Been a Minute

If we wait for the financing, sometimes the timing of a project just doesn't ever materialize. And I watched so many things, great ideas die on the vine and I didn't really want that to keep happening.

The Prof G Pod

Why the Climate-Doom Story Is Wrong — Hannah Ritchie

The climate impacts scale with the the the temperature rise we experience, which kind of means there's no point at which we should just give up, right? Because the hazards at 1.7 are better than they are at two. And if we go past two, then it's worth trying to stay below 2.3 rather than 2.5.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]

The interesting thing about AI is that the returns are so uncertain. You could imagine a world where AI is transformative and these investments are the best ever made, or you could imagine a world where the returns never come and it's the biggest misallocation of capital in history.

The a16z Show

The State of AI: Macro, Apps, and Consumer

the biggest risk for today's founders may no longer be thinking too big, but thinking too small

China Decode

The China Robot Boom Is Here | China Decode

It seems like everyday Taiwanese people don't have the same uh sense of uh battle preparedness and and bellacosity when it comes to uh mainland China as the Ukrainians do towards uh Russia. Maybe I'm misreading this. Uh, but I when I go to Taiwan, I I and even mainland China, I don't sense, you know, this degree of urgency that, you know, one would have sensed in the in the years leading up to the Russia Ukraine crisis.

The Prof G Pod

"AI Is a Power Story" — Hannah Ritchie on the Energy Squeeze

People have this image of nuclear when they think about nuclear they think about Chernobyl they think about Fukushima these really salient high impact single events and I think that in some sense that skews our perceptions to thinking that nuclear is incredibly unsafe source of energy.

Fresh Air

‘The Dog Stars’ novelist Peter Heller / Remembering rock critic Dave Marsh

On some of these trips, actually, when you get into the kayak, you don't even know. You stretch the spray skirt on over the cockpit and you don't know if that's the last time you'll ever be doing that and you sort of pray that it's not.

The a16z Show

Microsoft's Deputy CISO on Securing AI Agents

AI is shifting the CISO's role from saying "no" to safely enabling new technology.

The a16z Show

How Do You Defend Against AI That Can Hack?

the same AI capabilities creating new attack surfaces could ultimately give defenders their biggest advantage yet

The Week

The Week: How Leverage Broke the AI Trade

The fraud cycle follows the financial cycle with a lag. And the longer the financial cycle goes on, the more amount of fraud is ultimately uncovered on the down cycle. The harshest prosecutor and the staunchest defense attorney of a company is its stock price. Nobody goes after frauds at all-time highs.

The Week

The Week: How Leverage Broke the AI Trade

The fraud cycle follows the financial cycle with a lag. And the longer the financial cycle goes on, the more amount of fraud is ultimately uncovered on the down cycle. So, I've already dubbed this the golden age of fraud. And I suspect that when we're on the down part of this cycle, the bodies will float to the surface as they always do.

Freakonomics Radio

684. He Helped Clean Up the Last Crash. Does He See Another One Coming?

Former S.E.C. chair Gary Gensler has had a front-row seat to numerous financial booms and busts. How does he feel about America's massive bet on A.I.? "Something has to give."

Book of the Day

'Torched' and 'Wildfire Days' look at California's wildfires from the front lines

We have fewer firehouses today than we had in the 1960s and the population has nearly doubled since then. There needs to be a holistic approach to how and where we build and to how we provide safety.

Fresh Air

Novelist Claire Vaye Watkins on the beauty & brutality of the desert

I guess I kind of just feel like if you only engage in an action that you're certain is going to be successful, that's pretty cowardly, really. You know, I mean, we want to be strategic and effective as activists, but there's no guarantee in any of this stuff. And that doesn't mean it's not still a worthwhile way to spend your life.

Hidden Brain

Making the Most of Your Mistakes

When you're learning, or trying new things, you're going to make mistakes. The trick is to try to fail in a way that gives you useful information.

TED

Inside Dubai’s Mission to Build the City of the Future | His Excellency Khalfan Belhoul | TED

If rules are an issue, we can change them for you. We can connect you with any relevant decision maker to break those rules. We will not be upset if you make mistakes, and we will support you on every winning bet you make.

TBPN

Martin Shkreli Breaks Down the Collapse of Situational Awareness

The smart guys get in early, start buying, see the prices go up, buy some more. And then less smart guys take note and say, I want to do that. I want to be up 400% this year, too. And then but by the weakest hands are buying at the top. So they're also the first to sell. The first to panic. And it just creates this like, you know, every bubble's sort of the same. You have this euphoria, this peak, and then, you know, everyone sort of panics at once.

Pivot

Kara Swisher Calls It Now: the Paramount Merger Won’t Go Through | Pivot

Investors understand something executives often don't, and that is winning in court can still mean losing economically.

TBPN

Leopold is Back! Big Tech Earnings, Beautiful Debt, Defense Tech Deep Dive

But our fund must always be structured such that we can take a loss and fight another day.

Diet TBPN

Leopold Stays in the Game, Big Tech Earnings, OpenAI Slashes GPT-5.6 Prices | Diet TBPN

When AI stocks draw down dramatically while AI technical business fundamentals are improving, you should expect our fund to be down a lot. We embrace volatility, but it should never jeopardize the fund.

The Week

The Week: The Hidden Debt Behind the AI Boom

When you're hiding a bigger number than what you're reporting, that's not accounting, it's concealment. And Meta's off-balance debt is $420 billion, which is 3x what they report. That's not a rounding error, that's a second company hiding liabilities inside of the first company.

TBPN

Martin Shkreli Breaks Down the Collapse of Situational Awareness

The 80 or 90% of the assets shareholders don't change hands. It's that 5% of the margin that's deciding the price. And if that 5% is in the state where they're they're levered up 3x or 4x as we heard uh SALP is uh was a 4x levered fund, which is that's a lot of leverage. You know, a 25% draw down takes you out of business.

Diet TBPN

The Collapse of Situational Awareness, Ferrari Luce Stays on Track for 2026 | Diet TBPN

When leverage is involved, things just move so so so fast, right? You remember with FTX, there's kind of some rumblings, a couple couple posts from SPF saying like we're fine, it's all good, and then it was over. And then the same thing with SVB, like couple rumblings, maybe like a a couple weeks, a week beforehand, few posts here and there, and then it just moves so so fast, right? quite a bit different than traditional venture world where when a company's dying it dies over two, three years often sometimes more.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think most people, if they reflect on it, would say, well, of course I want my children and grandchildren to have cures for diseases, cheap energy, and whatever, but somehow the actions that society takes show that we're way more focused on preventing downside than enabling upside. And I think that's a mistake. I think the expected value of the world is so much better if we can figure out how to build a world of radical abundance than if we just prevent bad things from happening.

Diet TBPN

AMD Advancing AI, Google Q2 Earnings, OpenAI Plans $750B Cloud Spend | Diet TBPN

As someone who has personally spent $500,000 a month plus on Google ads for years, I can tell you with certainty, this revenue growth in search is artificial and extremely unhealthy for Google's business long term.

Book of the Day

Colson Whitehead on 'Cool Machine,' the final in his Harlem Trilogy series

There's no pension plan for a safe cracker. He doesn't have like a an IRA or 401k. What's next for him?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Matthew Smith — Natural Gas: The Next Bottleneck - [Invest Like the Best, EP.483]

Starting in 2028, AI data centers and LNG exports will need more gas than the country can produce and deliver. By his math, the US could exhaust its working natural gas storage by 2030. In his words, the upside risk to prices becomes unbounded and convex.

Pivot

Andrew Tate and Brother Charged with New Sex Crimes. "It's Epstein in Real Time" | Pivot

When you have this much money wagered on matches, they're no longer it's no longer a gambling story. It's a capital market story.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The nice thing about buying things in private markets is you can buy a business at eight times earnings that a public market might price at 20 times earnings, and that gap represents the opportunity. The issue is the information set you're working with is much worse, the liquidity is much worse, and the alignment between you and the people running the business is often much worse.

Radiolab

Atomic Artifacts

If Washington DC were hit, every object in the the National Archives would be eviscerated in a moment. Terrified by this reality, they set out to save some of America's most precious stuff.

The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

Rep. Jim Himes: America Is Losing Leverage in Iran

There's about 4,000 years of Persian history to suggest that that's not a happy place to be.