Weekend Reading #347

This is the three-hundredth-and-forty-seventh weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 17th January 2026.

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What we're thinking.

The themes of early 2026 are now quite clear as tech/ai continued to churn and sell off in spaces whereas US small caps, emerging markets and commodities have been going up. These are funnily enough the exact same themes as we ended the year with! Proving once again that just because a date ticks over, not much really changes apart from some early calendar flows. There is one new theme blooming and performing well. We have written many times before about the business of space which now seems to be coming to mainstream attention courtesy of SpaceX's rumoured upcoming IPO. Keep any eye on this space (sorry).
 
We are sharing our year-end investor letter which has just gone out to our investors yesterday. It was another good year for our fund but as we know in this business, one year ends and a new one begins so we start all over again. Again. That is what we love about it. It's always changing, and we can't afford to take our eye off the ball even for a moment.


What we're reading.

Josh Wolfe gave a great answer to his friend who asked him what he thought about AI taking over and making us subservient. His view is teenagers and jihadists (or the combination of both) are far more dangerous. According to him, AI is still a construct replicating a brain rather than a brain and implies that there is no consciousness - something I tend to agree with. The risk is the AI will do something procedurally that is damaging rather than maliciously.
 
In a recent conversation, Nir Bar Dea, Bridgewater's CEO, made an interesting comment. He said that they have 400 people spending all day every day doing research ("mapping cause and effect linkages") and they still get 40% of their calls wrong. It goes to emphasize our approach to fund management as highlighted in our investor letter mentioned above. Either you are all-in in terms of left-brain analytics and trying to back engineer the machine to the nth degree or you are trying to map the patterns and behaviour and let it unfold in front of you with the other part of your brain (while still being aware of what the left part does!). Bridgewater and most firms out there choose the former. We choose the latter. DC
 
On the point of SpaceX’s growing mindshare, a concept for a space-based passive cooling system which ejects heat directly into the absolute zero of space could be the lynchpin for space-based data centres, a tantalising prospect given the ongoing scramble for data centre capacity – in both chips and electricity. After all, more than 90% of a data centre’s power consumption goes to cooling, so getting that off the bill of expenses could be a huge saving. Already, we have a Nvidia H100 launched by Nvidia backed Starcloud on its Starcloud-1 satellite training Google’s Gemma AI model in space, and Google’s announced Suncatcher project looking to test its TPU chips in space in 2027. Looks like the only way forward is upwards.
 
Looking in the other direction in time, back to the past, this article about self-healing concrete was quite the eye-catcher. Concrete was very much the basis of much of the Roman empire, constructing everything from the Aqueducts to the empire’s great bridges and buildings. But self-healing concrete is one level up. Benefiting from studying the perfectly preserved ruins of Pompeii, a team from MIT worked out how the Romans mixed highly reactive lime into the concrete, like granules in the mixture. As cracks inadvertently form over time, the lime redissolves and fills the cracks, making the concrete effectively self-healing over a much longer period of time. Properly ingenious. EL

What we're listening to.
 
In a similar vein to Wolfe's comments above, I listened to this fascinating conversation with a chap named Stuart Hameroff... He is an anaesthetist (or anaesthesiologist if you are American) by training and had his curiosity piqued by the relationship between anaesthesia and consciousness. He now is a purveyor of the view that quantum states in neural microtubules are responsible for consciousness. This is not a novel idea but one that it increasingly becoming touted. He views machines as also not being truly sentient but rather a copy of something sentient. We can replicate the machinery of how we think but we cannot replicate the ingredients as the truth is we don't really know how it works. His view that consciousness is primary is something I have also come round to in recent years. This has it all if you like this topic.
 
The founder of Netflix appeared in a really cool conversation on Invest Like The Best. Reed Hastings is longer involved in the day-to-day of the business, the whole conversation was much more relaxed and philosophical and covered everything from successes and failures at Netflix to what he thinks of AI in his industry and beyond. This is really good.
 
This was a real treat. Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher series is full of fun and stories in his edition of Desert Island Discs. Turns out he doesn't really like his parents much and he was a rather big fellow himself. My favourite anecdote is how he came up with the name of his main character (Reacher) and his pen name (his real name is James Grant). Well worth your time this one. Another reminder to remember everyone's life story is always written backwards. DC