👋 ASB Partners Nuggets 8.8.25
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)
Profile of Campus Reform (NYT).
Dr. Marschall, who is Jewish, may be the most prolific filer of antisemitism civil rights complaints to the federal government. He says he has filed 33 against colleges around the country, leading to 16 investigations.
Its articles have been picked up by outlets like Fox News and Newsmax. It has provided grist for a movement of like-minded, right-leaning activists. Similar groups have formed, mimicking its tactics, and in recent years its concerns that colleges have left-leaning biases have gained some traction in more moderate circles, including among some who argue free speech has been stifled on campuses.
But Campus Reform updated the strategy for the internet era, and others followed. A similar website, The College Fix, started around the same time. A much larger group, Turning Point USA, started a watch list of professors it deemed purveyors of “leftist propaganda” and launched Charlie Kirk to conservative stardom.
“When we started,” said John J. Miller, the founder of The College Fix, “we didn’t feel like we had a ton of competition.”
2. Balaji on AI.
AI is amplified intelligence, not artificial intelligence. Today’s AI is not truly agentic because it’s not truly independent of you. The current crop of agents can’t set complex goals, or properly verify outputs. You have to spend a lot of effort on prompting, verifying, and system integrating. That just means the smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. It’s really amplified intelligence, more than agentic intelligence.
AI doesn’t take your job, it lets you do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job well, as a specialist is often needed for polish.
AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job, and GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image generation, AI code generation, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model. Hence, AI takes the job of the previous AI.
Killer AI is already here, and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about.
Are U.S. securities markets moving on-chain? (When might this start affecting
current exchanges?)
The Roaring ’20s spawned two of the most important medications ever: insulin and penicillin. The 2020s may repeat this feat with another incredible medical innovation—GLP-1 weight-loss therapies. Drugs like Zepbound (Eli Lilly) and Wegovy (Novo Nordisk) are delivering phenomenal results in a country where some 75% of adults are overweight or obese.
Americans spend hundreds of dollars a month on food—an $1,442 a month for households in the top income quintile and of $616 in the second lowest quintile. Some may find that lower food spending offsets half—or even all—of monthly GLP-1 costs. A 2024 paper in the International Journal of Obesity found a median reduction of $240 a month in food and drink costs among surveyed U.S. GLP-1 patients.
Podcast/Videos
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam
Everything I read today was highly informative. From the personal to the national from the religious to the size of my waistline, all of it has been good.