My morning train WFH reads:
• The Coming Loop: I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. The Flask creator on agentic AI and the feedback loops we’re about to build into everything. Thoughtful, from someone who actually ships code. (Armin Ronacher)
• Europeans Are Terrified of Spending Money, and It’s Hurting the Economy: Recent inflation has taken a larger psychological toll on the continent than in the U.S. Precautionary saving as a drag on the Continent. The flip side of the American consumer who never met a credit limit. (Wall Street Journal) see also US manufacturing jobs fall at fastest rate since the pandemic: The FT on a factory-floor contraction not seen since 2020. Awkward data for anyone promising a manufacturing renaissance. (Financial Times)
• Biopharma Market Update: Stifel’s investment-banking deck on the state of biopharma deals and valuations. Industry plumbing, for those who like their sector reads in chart form. (Stifel)
• How Apple’s Anticompetitive Walled Garden Cost It the AI Race: Apple walled itself off from the competitive forces that punish bad products and allow innovation to flourish organically. The contrarian case that the very moat protecting Apple left it flat-footed on AI. Whether you buy it or not, a sharp argument. (The Sling)
• YouTube Lays Claim to Another Crown: The World’s Largest Media Company: The influential financial research firm MoffettNathanson suggests that the Google-owned video platform passed Disney’s media business in 2025. It quietly passed Disney. The piece everyone in legacy media should read and few will enjoy. (The Hollywood Reporter)
• Copycats: How big a problem is plagiarism? “I’m still surprised by who has engaged in this practice. Yes, this group includes plenty of hacks and students. But they are also joined by the highest elected officials of several countries, as well as Nobel and Pulitzer Prize recipients, bestselling authors and artists, and distinguished faculty at elite universities.” The book’s epigraph is “Plagiarism: it’s not just for mediocrities anymore.” (Commentary)
• On the Difference Between Rest and Idleness: A small, well-made case that doing nothing and recovering are not the same thing — and that we’re bad at both. Worth reading slowly. Why the wellness industry loves rest, fears idleness, and has spent a great deal of money to keep you from noticing the difference. (The Idle Gazette)
• The MAGA stars freaked out by their own movement: Vox on the conservative-media stars who built the audience and are now alarmed by what it’s becoming. The base often outpaces its leaders. The right’s leading lights are looking for anyone to blame for the right’s growing extremism — except themselves. (Vox)
• War and Consequences: The damage will not be undone when the Trump administration is gone. (The Atlantic)
• The AI-powered World Cup runs on thousands of data workers: Behind every slick AI highlight reel sits an army of underpaid annotators. Rest of World keeps doing the unglamorous reporting on who actually powers the magic. Human annotators in Brazil, Cambodia, and the Philippines are tracking every movement in the football tournament for teams, broadcasters, and the betting industry. (Rest Of World)
Video of the day: Can you really reach anyone in 6 steps?
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Carl Richards, a financial advisor who is also the creator of the Sketch Guy column, which ran weekly in New York Times for a decade. He hosts Behavior Gap Radio (1,300+ episodes) He co-hosts “Kitces & Carl — Real Talk for Real Financial Advisors” with Michael Kitces.” Richards latest book is Your Money: Reimagining Wealth in 101 Simple Sketches.”
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