Peptide BPC-157, AI capex math, Buffett's industry graveyards, TV deflation, restorative mortuary art, Assyrian tin smuggling, invisible profitable companies, Norway's subsea tunnel, Nolan's Bronze Age collapse, and celebrity equity.
A Peptide, a Secretive Scientist, and a Debate Over Evidence
Predrag Sikiric spent decades hunting for what he calls "Body Protection Compound 157," a 15-amino-acid peptide he claims to have isolated from vats of gastric juice collected from slaughterhouses, hospitals, and emergency rooms across the former Yugoslavia. His team insists BPC-157 heals everything from muscle tears to glaucoma with zero side effects, but critics point out there's almost no human trial data, and some suspect the sequence doesn't even exist naturally in the body. Now RFK Jr. wants an FDA advisory committee to greenlight pharmacies selling it this summer, framing peptides as supplement-adjacent substances that shouldn't need rigorous vetting. Sikiric remains secretive about his extraction methods and has never published key details of the discovery, which makes this less a story about a miracle drug than a test case for how low the evidentiary bar can go.
This Obviously is an AI Bubble. The Math Says So.
Everyone is talking about “bubble, but this article helps frame the high level math. The hyperscalers will spend $1.6 trillion on AI infrastructure by 2026, and the revenue required to justify it doesn't exist. J.P. Morgan calculates the industry needs $650 billion in new annual revenue just to hit a 10% return; current AI-attributable revenue sits somewhere between $50 and $150 billion, leaving a gap of 4x to 13x. Amazon's capex now exceeds its operating cash flow entirely, pushing free cash flow negative for the first time. Meanwhile, $662 billion in data center lease commitments sit off balance sheet, quietly contradicting the story that this buildout is prudently self-funded. The bull case essentially hinges on demand materializing faster than depreciation schedules collapse.
Buffett on Autos, Airplanes, and Airlines
Buffett's parade of graveyard industries makes the point with brutal clarity: 2,000 car companies collapsed into three wheezing survivors, 300 airplane manufacturers became a handful, and the airline industry collectively made zero dollars from Kitty Hawk through 1992 (Karl Marx couldn't have sabotaged capitalism better than Orville Wright). Transformative doesn't mean “profitable for investors.” It means fierce competition, capital destruction, and a long tail of bankruptcies nobody remembers. The real edge isn't predicting which industry changes the world, but finding the rare company with a durable moat trading at a price that assumes it might fail, because in dynamic industries, most do.
How Did TVs Get So Cheap?
In 2001, a 50-inch TV cost $1,100 at Best Buy. Today, the same size runs under $200, even before adjusting for inflation. Brian Potter traces the 90%+ price collapse to one unglamorous culprit: bigger glass sheets. LCD "mother glass" went from 12-by-16 inches in Generation 1 to 116-by-133 inches in Generation 10.5, and because equipment costs scale more slowly than glass area, each jump slashed per-panel costs (Gen 4 to Gen 8 cut equipment costs per unit area by 80%). Layer on top of that semiconductor-style yield improvements, the shortening of the liquid crystal filling process from days to minutes, and extreme competition and the deflationary pricing trends becomes clear.
A Dying Art, by John Semley
Mitford skewered open-casket embalming as gaudy death denial, and now cremation rates are climbing toward 82% by 2045. This means restorative art, the mortuary specialty of reconstructing damaged corpses, is quietly dying out. Corporate funeral chains view restoration as inefficient (one director was told if a body can't be fixed in thirty minutes, just close the casket), and mortuary schools have slashed training time. The showcased competitors traveled from across the country to spend three hours sculpting silicone heads riddled with trauma, using techniques borrowed from Hollywood gore artists like Tom Savini. One contestant, an Iraq vet turned mortician, calls himself "a sheepdog for the dead," which captures the odd tenderness lurking beneath a profession now squeezed between cost-cutting and the death-positivity movement's conviction that we should witness decomposition unvarnished.
Trade and contraband in ancient Assyria
Assyrian merchants 4,000 years ago were writing letters about smuggling tin ingots in their underwear to dodge customs taxes. Their clay tablets reveal an entire shadow economy: the "narrow track" through Anatolian mountains to avoid checkpoints, bribes for guards, partial declarations at the border. One merchant, Pushu-ken, got his house raided and went to jail for contraband. Then his son Buzazu grew up to coordinate the same schemes, casually instructing partners to conceal shipments "gradually into Kanesh, concealed in their underwear" if the smuggling route was blocked. Tax evasion as a multi-generational family business, preserved in cuneiform.
Invisible Companies
Steve Ross parlayed funeral home limos, parking lots, and plumbing companies into Warner Bros. These businesses had zero moat, yet he extracted enough value to buy a Hollywood studio for $400 million. Invisibility pays. Whole categories of mundane, profitable companies persist below the radar because no one bothers gathering data on them, VCs filter them out as too small or boring, and status-conscious operators won't touch trash hauling or HVAC no matter the returns. Constellation Software has compounded at 34% annually for two decades buying exactly these overlooked niches (marina management software, funeral home databases), and estimates there are still 38,000 more out there.
Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel
Norway is drilling a 16.6-mile road tunnel that sits over 1,200 feet below the North Sea at its deepest point, using drill-and-blast methods and a relentless fight against seawater that seeps through every fracture in the rock. Two teams are boring inward from opposite ends, checking their alignment with lasers multiple times a day, aiming to meet in 2029 with only a few centimeters of error after carving through phyllite, granite, and gneiss that changes properties every few meters. Workers do 12-hour shifts in wet caves lit by flickering electric lights, eating lunch at folding tables while millions of tons of ocean press down overhead, grouting cement into the ceiling to push back leaks they can never fully stop.
Odysseus at the End of Civilization
Nolan's Odyssey treats the Bronze Age collapse not as a historical curiosity but as a moral reckoning, framing the fall of civilization as the consequence of violating xenia — hospitality toward strangers. The Greeks themselves become the sea people, their brutal sack of Troy the original sin that sends the dominoes toppling, and Odysseus spends the film processing the trauma of realizing he authored his own world's end. It's a warning to today’s society. Our collective real threat isn't structural flaws but the collapse of norms, and Agamemnon's faceless, menacing armor beats any MAGA hat as a symbol of toxic, dominance-obsessed masculinity. The film's preoccupation with cruelty to foreigners makes the contemporary parallel impossible to miss.
Kim Kardashian, Ryan Reynolds and the age of the celebrity brand
Celebrity brands now are shifting from a licensing to equity model and the numbers have gotten absurd. Clooney sold Casamigos to Diageo for $1 billion in 2017. Reynolds flipped Aviation Gin for $610 million three years later. Kardashian's Skims just raised at a $5 billion valuation with Goldman Sachs leading the round, and Hailey Bieber's Rhode sold to e.l.f. for up to $1 billion. The celebrities who built real wealth picked categories where people buy symbolism over function (clothes, booze, beauty), took equity instead of endorsement fees, and treated the brand as an operating company rather than a side hustle. The playbook is now so visible that every talent agent in Hollywood has memorized it, which means the window for capturing a category is closing fast.
Extras:
Flash Invaders street art scavenger hunt, Yuan Longping saved millions from famine, the FatFIRE subreddit, Rome's invisible ordinary people, Dallas H1B housing crunch, AI lottery ticket, Ardern joins NZ's brain drain, China's new space race, octopuses on ecstasy, Ming dynasty's vanished everyday objects, Aurora mayor sleeps at homeless shelter, and Silicon Valley's trust-stacking obsession.