Weekend Reads #425
A collection of cross-disciplinary thoughts, perspectives, and opinions
News
Private Credit - Pricing Opacity and Preserving fees - Link Private Credit/Equity thrives in darkness - Link
Do consumers still have primary financial relationships? Does that concept still make sense? - Link
Crypto Credit Cards - Link and Stablecoins might not be a smart idea - Link
“Essentially, stablecoin, this private form of money, is going to be part of the mainstream financial system,” It’s going to be incredibly confusing. And there will be no guarantee that these new forms of dollars will always be worth a dollar.” - Link
The Bank for International Settlements said stablecoins fail the three main tests of any money because they are not backed by central banks, lack sufficient guardrails against illicit usage and do not have the flexibility of funding needed to generate loans. - Link
US liability insurance on verge of ‘breakdown’ from tide of claims - Link
Pimco has been buying long-term Japanese government debt - Link
Costco has said its Executive customers account for about 73% of its global sales. Now they get one extra hour. - Link
In the U.S., there will soon be more people over 65 than there are under 18 — and it’s not just lifespan that’s improving, it’s “healthspan” too. - Link
Inside a Dark Adtech Empire Fed by Fake CAPTCHAs - Link
Perspectives
We're all participants in a cognitive economy that trades in attention, belief, and behavior. Shape the feed, shape the future. What happens when everything becomes an attention-speculation machine? - Link
Stripe: An index on the AI Economy - Link
AI and The Big 5 - What may end up happening — and DeepSeek pointed in this direction — is that China ends up commoditizing both chips and AI; if that happened it’s Big Tech that would benefit the most - Link
The Occam’s Razor is that in the end all of these metrics resolve to money and time. But the fuzziness today also reflects how early and unclear all of this is. - Link
As attention spans get shorter, so does the SAT - Link
A curious and open-minded media ecosystem is undoubtedly important, but so too are curious and open-minded citizens. biased assimilation of information - Link
Something consequential happens right before our eyes, and after a little while we just shrug it off. for now at least, this seems to be a St. Sebastian market. - Link
Lifetime Certainty-Equivalent Return Calculator - Link
It simply takes an awful lot of hits to sink a US expansion. “economic expansions don’t die of old age. They are murdered.” - Link
Google news events for the last 80 years. There are an astonishing number of reasons not to invest or to exit the markets or to dig a hole and go all prepper. - Link
Expected Returns in the Stock Market - Link
The value of trust networks follows a non-linear growth pattern that finance often fails to appreciate. The systems thinking perspective reveals how trust creates compound value through distinct stages. - Link
Even at a distance, we can sometimes tell if someone is educated, rich, powerful or physically attractive. But that doesn’t always correlate with smart, kind or honest. Strong signals might not be the same as useful ones. - Link
Trust as a leading indicator, the invisible asset that compounds for decades. - Link
Giuseppe Paleologo on Quant Investing at Multi-Strat Hedge Funds - Podcast
Walleye’s Will England - Why AI is essential operating leverage. - Podcast
The distinctions between hospice and palliative care, the nature of suffering beyond physical pain, and the transformative role of honesty, forgiveness, and relational awareness in the dying process. - Podcast
Ken Griffin - Tensorflow was a gift to humanity. Impact of GenAI. - Podcast
YC StartUp School interviews. - Podcast and State of Consumer Tech in Age if AI - Podcast
Peter Deng has led product teams at OpenAI, Instagram, Uber, Facebook, Airtable, and Oculus and helped build products used by billions - Podcast
STEM
Roger Penrose Life: Everybody has a life; not everybody lives the life of the mind. Ordinary people can do the ordinary things. The duty of genius may be total dedication to solving scientific puzzles, but the price of genius will be paid by other people. - Link
Genius: The label is exclusionary, inconsistently applied, and a license to behave badly. Why can’t we give it up? - Link
The basolateral amygdala - guides generosity - Link
Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. - Link
Consciousness can only awaken when there are connections between brain areas called the thalamus and the cerebral cortex. Consciousness does not emerge from one moment to the next but builds gradually. - Link
I came to believe that intelligence is not a byproduct of the brain, but a fundamental property of the universe - Link
Life is a physical process that gives rise to systems that are statistically unlikely to assemble and persist - Link
Miscellaneous