Weekend Reading #325

This is the three-hundredth-and-twenty-fifth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 26th July 2025

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What we're thinking.

A somewhat quieter week all round - in our view anyway. Diversified miners finally went up for more than a day with the likes of Glencore moving for the first time in A LONG time. Funny how founder Ivan Glasenberg bought the low a few months back. Again. What it astonishing is that Copper prices are closing in on $6 a pound, very new territory, but copper mining stocks despite being strong are not at new all-time highs. And this with oil prices low too and the dollar weak. Is it still coming or is there something wrong? Time will tell! Ethereum had a massive move in the early part of the week closing in on $4000 but since has pulled back somewhat. Nothing in a straight line, right? Right? Elsewhere not much going on as we slip into the summer period. Trump met with Powell, providing some fun memes for everyone but not much else.

 
What we're reading.
After consuming more videos from my new recent find, Predictive History, I came across a link to an article written before the War on Ukraine which discusses the link between Vladimir Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Under Putin the influence of the Church has risen once again. The question is whether its because Putin is a man of faith or whether he is just using the Church as a tool for influence. This article seeks to answer that and as you can imagine, it isn’t clear cut.
 
This is an article written by Tony Leon, the former leader of the DA in South Africa. It is a short one about the rise of Zohran Mamdani, the new Democrat candidate for the mayor of New York. It covers how he managed to win the Dem primary against a far better funded, establishment candidate in the form of Andrew Cuomo. Bottom line, viral social media and addressing the main issues (even though his solutions may prove cataclysmic). Worth a read.
 
I’ve written many times about the work of Jonathan Haidt on smartphones and their negative influence on society in general but particularly on kids. Here, he and some colleagues write about the problem of sports betting. It’s something I’ve also thought a lot about. It is almost impossible to talk about sport anymore without there being some kind of betting involved. And it’s mainly a male problem, which is beginning at a younger and younger age. It sucks all the enjoyment out of watching sport. I used to play the fantasy league for football, but stopped many years ago as I realised I wasn’t enjoying watching the matches anymore as all I cared about was how my players were doing points-wise. I actually think sports betting is a MASSIVE issue as society has encouraged it and governments desperately need it for tax revenues. This is a must read.
 
And if you are wondering how much more this market has to go then simply look at this chart shared on Twitter by The Kobeissi Letter. It shows the 4-week average of buying and selling of US stocks per segment. This has been the story since Liberation Day on April 7. Institutions don’t buy it. Retail does. When the institutions capitulate, we may get the final vertical move. Or maybe not. Who knows? But that’s how we are playing it as our base case (with kill switches of course!). DC

When I spotted the title of this article which said “BBC Learning English – 6 Minute English: What is degrowth?”, my first response was that this was just bad English entering the accepted vernacular, along with other interesting constructions like “upgradation”. But when I clicked on it, what I found was WAY worse. Under the banner of “inspiring language learning since 1943”, the BBC has pretty much dropped any pretence of not being a propagandistic media outlet. So, what is “degrowth” in this context? It’s more than just being the passive opposite of growth (i.e. shrinking), rather it is an active effort to shrink the size of the economy “for the sake of the planet”. At best, this is a well-meaning (albeit still perverse) notion; at worst, along with other emergent ideologies like “decolonisation” (wait till that gets an explainer), it is a sinister, subtle nudge of an idea to get the ball rolling on public acceptance of a future with non-existent economic growth in the UK. Pretty much like “take a cold shower and stick it to Putin!”. Growth is gone – but it’s good for the planet! If the latter situation is true, that prospect is absolutely petrifying.
 
And as if we didn’t have enough tragedy already, it was with great sadness that I read this week that after a iconic farewell tour to bookend an equally iconic career, Ozzy Osbourne has passed away. The Prince of Darkness delivered one last show, got the job done, and has clocked out. RIP. EL

What we're listening to.

I had this one on my list for a while and finally gave it a listen and it was fantastic. Aravind Srinivas is the founder of Perplexity, which has rapidly become my only LLM that I use. To me it just feels more real, less chatty, less BS and more to the point of getting you the answers you need. No flattery or any of that crap. And apparently that is exactly what Srinivas wants. His comment was that they are not aiming to be the biggest or have the most users. He wants to be the go-to LLM for curious people to ask questions and to give them useful answers. In contrast, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is looking to scale to billions of users, so it needs to have a wider appeal and be chatty, sassy or whatever as there is a large group of people who want that. I like the authenticity as it resonates with me. I also like that it allows you to choose from all the other models which one to use, so for 20 bucks a month you basically get all the models – Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Deepseek etc. Well worth a listen! DC