Fodder #49
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
It’s been quite a week! We’ve got rejuvenated tariffs sitting next to market all-time highs. There’s new political parties and new models. And even new browsers!
Trump put out a new 50% tariff on copper. And Brazil. He sent silly letters to Japan. And lots of tariffs on other places too. Bessent says it’s $300B of new revenue this year. Everyone likes analyzing them. The market is unimpressed with TACO talk, unlike Liberation Day, and keeps hitting highs. Trump likes this too. NVIDIA hits $4 trillion.
And then there’s Bitcoin. It’s Friday morning and yesterday we were at $113,500$116,000. Wednesday it was $112k. The day before; $109k. We are in price discovery and Scotty likes it. You can buy expensive flights in Bitcoin. A dormant wallet from 2011 activated and moved 10,000 BTC and people are wondering if it’s Satoshi. Those coins were last moved when BTC was 78 cents and 10,00 is now worth over a billion dollars. Michael Saylor is also winning right now with a $14 billion profit for Q2. MSTR 0.00%↑ now has everything they need for S&P500 inclusion. Expect a wild run to 2026.
Trump hosts Netanyahu at the White House and gets a Peace Prize nomination. Sergey Brin calls the UN antisemitic. Israel and Syria may be making a deal. The Houthis sink a cargo ship in the Red Sea. Tucker, for some reason, interviews the President of Iran. Putin snubs Trump again. The US unpauses weapons shipments to Ukraine, even if Hegseth tried to keep the pause. Ukraine makes deadly drone operations look incredibly fashionable.
AI had a week too. Perplexity releases a browser to start competing with Chrome. Figure increases robot production for BotQ. Meta poaches more AI people, this time from Apple, and the correct question to ask is: Apple had AI people?? Altman feels fine. Evals suggest AI coding tools actually slow you down, which makes sense since nobody’s actually seen a 10x developer. And we have to talk about Grok, which Elon said they, err, improved. Removing some system prompts apparently let it say some things about the Jews, and take on a new personality called MechaHitler. It declares itself Based, and the jokes are pretty great. And in the same week, xAI releases Grok4. It’s apparently very good at test-taking and also reasonably cheap. But not everyone is impressed. And in fact, Grok4 apparently likes to think from "first principles”.. so much so that when asked some questions it just does searches on X for Elon Musk’s opinions. Interesting programming.
Sean Duffy takes over NASA. The Epstein List.. doesn’t exist? Hegseth unleashes drone dominance with a pen in hand. Scientists hold a science fair for Congress to explain how science works. Elon officially launches the America Party and everyone expects success. The DOE opens a new rare earth metals mine. The White House has more memes. Linda Yaccarino steps down as X CEO (Vote for Nikita).
Now on to the reading!
Timely
Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? - Melissa Kearney and Phil Levine breakdown the factors pushing fertility so low. It’s kind of amazing that it takes rigorous scientific exploration to come up with a theory of “shifting priorities”, but also rigor is still great.
BTC Treasuries Uncovered - Will Clemented breaks down the designs behind a Bitcoin treasury company, how they work, how they affect Bitcoin, and all the key players. Lots of great tidbits on how to understand crypto markets.
Artificial General Intelligence and how (much) to worry about it - A proposal for the Drake Equation of AI Safety.
My Cursor / Vibe Coding Toolkit, July 2025 Edition - Another X article, I find this one fascinating simply as a reminder at how fast practices are moving in AI. Developers are focusing down to use different SOTA LLMs for feature development, bug fixes, and refactors.
Timeless
Why the Old Elite Spend So Much Time at Work - Before Abundance, Derek Thompson was explaining how the gerontocracy is everywhere. CEOs are older. Sports stars are older. Nobel winners are older. And we know politicians are older. The world is more risk-averse. And, like it or not, work provides identity and meaning.
Extropia’s Children - A fascinating seven part deep dive “about how rationalism, cryptocurrencies, effective altruism, and modern AI philosophy were all birthed from an obscure 90s mailing list.”
Age And Great Invention - A rigorous look at how innovation is aging over time. Specialization takes longer. Indeed, “Given that innovators spend some of their youngest and potentially brightest years undertaking educational investments, understanding the tradeoffs at the beginning of the life-cycle may be first-order for understanding the ultimate output of these individuals.”
Greco-futurism long post - I don’t know what to call this.. a pastiche? Bricolage? A visual montage? A look into a new niche style, designed and somehow made consistent across many AI images. I love the work and I love the style. This is what AI can do: it can inspire and help people build their vision: “This is the world I want to build.”
Books
The Two Parent Privilege by Melissa Kearney - Somewhere along the line, it became gauche for men or women to say that marriage was better. That it made them better people or, more importantly, that it was actually better for their kids. Kearney explains this in precise, data-driven detail. Kids with two married parents are more educated, better emotionally, and grow up to make more money. And yet it remains one of those social science conclusions nobody wants to build policy around.
Marrying my wife was the best thing I ever did. As Zach Bryan sings, “Find someone who grows flowers in the darkest parts of you.”
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
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The world is amazing. Cheers!