Weekend Reading #321

This is the three-hundredth-and-twenty-first weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 28th June 2025

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What we're thinking.

It’s raining all time highs everywhere we look. U.S. markets are flying and so are the rest. When we said a few months back that the market behaviour reminded us of 2020 and 2022 we weren’t kidding. It always darkest before the dawn. And vice versa. We urge anyone feeling giddy with victory like we are to think twice and have a plan to exit should things go the other way. Right now, we are in a parabolic upswing and as we always do, we ride it into the sunset. But after a parabolic move usually comes selling. We don’t think we are there yet but we in our fund have had 10 up months in a row and counting and we are aware that nothing lasts forever. If you are aware that you are aware that’s great news. If not, maybe you should be.
 
Markets are so bullish than Nvidia has retaken the most valuable company on earth tag, Coinbase even is an all time high and space stocks like Rocket Lab are mooning (sorry). The dollar is being trashed across the board and copper is pushing its tariff related highs.
 
The Middle East is breaking out into peace as Israel’s war on Iran is seemingly over and now Trump et al can move on with their resolution of the Gaza conflict and then the expansion of the Abrahamic Accords. The Americans even signed a deal with the Chinese!
 
All the worries of the past few months seem to be disappearing one by one. What will markets worry about next? More on that another time.


What we're listening to.

Dwarkesh had on his pod this week another great in depth conversation this time with George Church, the so called grandfather of synthetic biology. His latest venture, Colossal, aims to bring back the Wooly Mammoth and has already brought back the Dire Wolf (or some version of it). This is a great deep dive into some of the advances in synthetic biology including how Church believes the industry is slightly ahead of Moore Law in terms of its advancement. Superb all round.
 
Next up was a listen to comedian, Jimmy Carr, on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom series. Carr is one of the few genuinely funny comedians out there and is well known for how many performances he gives and how much travel he does. In this conversation they chat about everything on earth and you get to see how bright he is and how wide his array of topics is. Highly recommend. DC

What we're watching.

This week I stumbled onto one of my greatest finds in years. A Canadian born, Chinese, history professor with a YouTube channel called Predictive History. I have been devouring his videos almost consecutively for two days straight. He teaches at a private high school in Beijing and has uploaded 60 videos on a class he has about human history all the way from the Ice Age to the American Empire. His name is Jiang Xueqin and he is the best thing I’ve ever seen. The insights! Omg. Here is one of the latest videos into what he believes drives Trump, Netanyahu and the Ayatollah. I’ve always looked for something this and now here it is for anyone to take in. DC

First there were supercars, and now I’ve recently learnt of a new thing called “hypercars”. A video of this from Top Gear (unfortunately nowhere as hilarious as it used to be after Clarkson et al walked off) came up featuring the Rimac Nevera which goes from 0-100km/h in 1.81 secs – with the g forces being tested with… a watermelon. Definitely up there in terms of unconventional methodology for a physics experiment. For myself, I’d never heard of Rimac before, so I did some digging and the story behind Rimac (under which the Bugatti brand now sits after a share swap with Porsche) is an even more fascinating one, from garage to hypercars – nicely encapsulated into this video. EL
 
What we're reading.
 
Last week I wrote about Chris Arnade who travels the world walking city after city. And this week he published a brilliant interview. A few months back I wrote about how it was no coincidence that Donald Trump had chosen Mcdonalds for a major campaign stop and photo opportunity. This interview is with a guy named Gary He, author of a booker called McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches. He spent time travelling to McDonald’s restaurants (or community centres as he calls them) in 6 continents and over 50 countries! Each is different in terms of the melting pot of culture, food and people and leads to great stories and photos. So cool! DC
 
As budget deficits rise all around with governments trying to stave off the (probably inevitable) economic weakness that is filtering through macro data, the confluence of rising government spending and persistent populism leads to a natural outcome of crowding out – both of private investments, but also of the financially mobile. Most in focus is the exodus of millionaires from the UK as the tax noose tightens and its tax base contracts sharply, but on the winners’ list is a new contender in Asia challenging the old favourites: Thailand. This article in the Business Times flags up this interesting new development in light of the inflows of millionaires into Singapore – still a positive inflow number, but half of Singapore’s 2024 projection for this year. Indeed, where some governments are happy to roast and villainise their golden geese, at the other end of the world these very same “villains” are welcomed with open arms. Added to good food, low costs and great weather, who could blame them for accepting the offer? EL

Reading Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence was a genuine delight—not just because it vividly lays out how the various forms of intelligence and processing co-exist and interact in our brains, but because it shed fresh light on the layered, multi-faceted nature of cognition and intelligence. Bennett eloquently maps out how our neural systems evolved from simple, reactive structures to complex, predictive networks, each serving distinct but complementary purposes. This echoes quite closely the trajectory that is unfolding in artificial intelligence. Just as the brain uses distinct types of processing—fast, intuitive, heuristic-driven modules alongside slower, logic-based reasoning—so too must AI move beyond large language models alone, integrating multiple specialised intelligences, each optimally suited to different tasks.

What Bennett’s book clarifies brilliantly is the notion that intelligence isn’t about one approach dominating, but about orchestrating an ensemble of methods working harmoniously. This feels like a strong indication on where the future of AI lies: not simply pushing bigger language models to their limits, but assembling intelligent systems that mimic neural architectures by blending deterministic, heuristic, and adaptive modules together. Seeing these parallels so clearly articulated felt reassuring, like spotting landmarks on a previously hazy map. Bennett provided a framework that isn’t just intellectually stimulating—it’s practically useful in thinking about the AI architectures we are like to see emerging at scale soon. LM