Weekend Reading #350

This is the three-hundredth-and-fiftieth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 7th February 2026.

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What we're thinking.

This week was one of those weeks in markets where the men get separated from the boys as they say. This is what is commonly called a CORRELATION 1 selloff and it is what we have been waiting for since the price action suggested it as a possibility already late last year. Everything went down except the US dollar. The leaders of the rally became the leaders of the landslide as the memory names and the space stocks got hammered finally too. Not much was spared. Gross was net over the past few days in stocks. And the crypto markets got absolutely decimated. It has become increasingly clear to us that the bubble was not in crypto but rather in tokens as almost no tokens have escaped the punishment. And for good reason. As we have written at length, there is not much that tokens have to offer as a standalone investment without economic incentives or value capture. Blockchains are wonderful but it turns out that proper companies with a good product and distribution will capture the margin opportunity of the blockchain rather than the tokens as was once hoped for by many crypto ideologues (including previous versions of ourselves). 

What we're reading.
 
I simply have to give an opinion on the panic around Clawdbot/Moltbot/Moltbook. For those living under a rock the past week, some guy created a Facebook style social media page for AI assistants. And the words they spewed have generated quite a furore as we read what they appear to think about their "humans". Are they conscious is the question on everyone's lips. I don't think they are, as they are simply next word generators mimicking human thinking or as I like to say cosplaying as humans. But the truth is that it doesn't matter whether they are or not. It matters what they can do and what good or bad they can cause. Given access to APIs and private information they can cause havoc - conscious or not. If these algos get access and destroy the world as we know it, will we care if they are conscious or not? DC
 
The idea of a star straying too close to a black hole and getting spaghettified as popularised by Hawking intriguing, and pretty scary if one tried to imagine what it’d be like to experience getting ripped up by a black hole. But while everyone looks at the star, the Black Hole seems to be just a passive incident. In this case, a black hole named AT2018hyz, aka “Jetty McJetface” seems to be experiencing a case of indigestion, emitting increasing radiation many years after the initial star consumption event happened. Data collected seems to suggest the Black Hole is “burping out” its meal, emitting still-growing electromagnetic radiation with a peak that is 50x brighter than in 2019, and supposedly a trillion times what the Death Star (fictionally thankfully!) expended to blow up Alderaan.
 
I also did some reading on the history of Bandung after spending some time up in the mountains in the Lembang area. Bandung is obviously a popular destination for weekend breaks from Jakarta for the local tourism scene, but when we started spotting buildings like the Cathedral of St Peter or Braga Permai clocking in > 100 years old, it’s obvious that Bandung’s importance isn’t a recent thing. It turns out that at one point the Dutch wanted to move the colonial government from Batavia (now Jakarta) to Bandung, but those plans were interrupted by the 2nd world war. And even at that time, Bandung was already a cool weather holiday destination, known by the Dutch as Parijs van Java (the Paris of Java). Bandung subsequently hosting the Asia-Africa conference in 1955 (hence the many references to Asia-Afrika in Indonesian roads and historical buildings) also marked a key milestone in the entire non-aligned movement of which Indonesia was always a key part. And in the current day and age, it looks like that initiative might be coming back into play in a significant way. EL

What we're listening to.

In a similar vein I also watched this extraordinary interview of none other than Jeffrey Epstein. It turns out as part of the massive 3 million document release last week, there was an interview of Epstein in 2019 by Steve Bannon. This 2-hour interview is part of a 15-hour interview series in which Bannon interviewed him. Apparently, the interviews were intended to be released to the public in order to try rehabilitate Epstein in the eyes of the public. It never happened for reasons we all know. But this interview is incredibly revealing. Putting aside the fact that this man was a despicable human being, it certainly seems that he was also a very bright one. High IQ and what I found unsettling was how much I wanted to keep watching him speak as he spilled some insights into how power works at the highest levels - things we just don't usually get to see. He was also questioned by Bannon on his work at the Santa Fe Institute. I have wondered for some time whether the child trafficking and even the spy agency activity was not the real reason why he was so protected, but rather that he was involved in classified scientific programs. He speaks on topics in this conversation that allude to that possibility. And of course, also about how the plumbing of the global financial system works. He speaks a lot about complex systems and how we simply don't know how one action will impact the system as a whole. This takes me back to these AI assistants. We actually don't know what will happen when they are released into the wild. This week we got a glimpse. On the one hand it's tantalizing to think of the positives. On the other, it's pretty frightening to think how much damage can be done. And as Epstein says in this interview, consciousness is just a word we have made up. The machines don't even know what it means. And to be fair, neither do we.  
 
Unfortunately I sat down to watch The Beast in Me this week. It's a supposed psychological thriller on Netflix with Claire Danes. I must admit that the hype machine got the better of me, playing on my positive memories of her in Homeland. I got drawn in and kept hanging on hoping it would improve. Just like stocks, I should have cut my losses early. Utter rubbish. Time in my life I will never get back. I really hope Netflix get the Warner deal through cos they really need better content.
 
Mike Benz returned to Joe Rogan this week and was on top form once again giving all sorts of examples of how the world really works in terms of interplay between spy agencies, militaries, governments and illegal activities. This guy is an absolute must-watch because you will understand so much more about what we see and hear once you understand this interplay. The main takeaway for me once again is that nothing is binary in terms of good versus evil. There are both, together, all the time. DC