The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• The wild rise of Zillow Gone Wild: Samir Mezrahi posted his first outrageous house in 2020. Now he has 4 million followers and an HGTV show on the way. (Washington Post)
• Big Fridge: The hot business of cold storage: Diets, demographics, desertification: what trends aren’t growing the global cold chain? (Sherwood)
• The Price of Oil: The history of control and decontrol in the oil market: (Phenomenal World)
• I Wish I’d Never Become The NFL Weed Guy. There is a reason that ex-NFL players are four times more likely than the average American male to become addicted to opioids. “And you think weed was better than pills for recovery?” “I do. I weeded as needed.” I was proud of this quip, and it made it onto the show. Like Gore Vidal once said, never pass up an offer to be on TV. But for a kid who had spent his life chasing one dream—the NFL—I had just officially lost the plot. I was the NFL Weed Guy. (Defector)
• Meet the Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT—and Helped Set the Course for AI: Arati Prabhakar has the ear of the US president and a massive mission: help manage AI, revive the semiconductor industry, and pull off a cancer moonshot. (Wired) see also The Art of Work in the Age of AI Production. Ezra Klein’s podcast conversation with Nilay Patel. “As the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people…will go up.” (kottke.org)
• Why We Love Music: Researchers are discovering how music affects the brain, helping us to make sense of its real emotional and social power. (Greater Good Magazine)
• How ‘feelings about thinking’ help us navigate our world: The pleasant feeling of knowing, the frustration of forgetting, and other ‘metacognitive feelings’ serve as unsung guides. (Psyche)
• Brad Parscale helped Trump win in 2016 using Facebook ads. Now he’s back, and an AI evangelist. “You’re going to see some of the most amazing new technology in artificial intelligence that’s going to replace polling in the future across the country,” said Brad Parscale in a dimly lit promotional video accentuated by hypnotic beats. (AP)
• New particle at last! Physicists detect the first “glueball” Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one. (Big Think) see also Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse: cosmic inflation theory has largely settled the once-daunting existential question of ‘How did the Universe begin?’ for most physicists. That is to say that, from a singular hot, dense and small starting point, the just-right conditions for the emergence of the Universe were met. This set the stage for the unfathomably rapid expansion of the Big Bang and the emergent laws of physics that we observe today. the first fraction of a second of the Universe, just before the Big Bang, is still a wide-open scientific frontier. (Aeon)
• He Sang ‘What a Fool Believes.’ But Michael McDonald Is in on the Joke. The singer and songwriter with a silky-smooth voice has written a memoir with Paul Reiser that recounts his story of pain and redemption with dashes of humor. (New York Times)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with with Jim O’Shaughnessy, founder and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Ventures. He is also chairman of the board at Stability AI. He is the host of the Infinite Loops podcast and the author of How to Retire Rich, Invest Like the Best, and Predicting the Markets of Tomorrow
The CapEx spending at MSFT, META, GOOG will eclipse $150 billion this year alone
Source: Base Hit Investing
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