John Cook

Chemical Engineer Recruiting for Engineering and Technical Sales Roles

[Norman Ornstein @NormOrnstein]

Dear Scott Pelley: pull the entire 60 Minutes team together and go to MSNow and offer a package deal to recreate the show for Sunday night and call it The Hour

[Tracy Shuchart (𝒞𝒽𝒾 ) @chigrl]

Thank you for having me on the podcast! We hit on everything from O&G, to critical minerals, to precious metals, to miners, to AI datacenter buildout, to corporate bond issuance, to the Federal Reserve pickle, and so much more!

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@slash1sol Interesting

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@BillHarder4 sounds interesting here

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products.

My Take
The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested.

This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown.

Hedgie🤗

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

BREAKING: A Syrian billionaire needed U.S. sanctions lifted so he could cash in on $12 billion in reconstruction contracts, per NYT.

In an attempt to influence American foreign policy, he proposed a Trump-branded golf course, cut Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar real estate deal for a resort in Albania, and had someone physically deliver a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican Member of Congress with instructions to take it to the White House to get the President's attention.

Trump threw his weight behind repealing the sanctions. They were lifted. The contracts are moving, and the Trump family’s deals are expanding.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.

He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.

When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.

Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.

The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.

Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.

The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.

That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@DanCjtgb @PowerLunch @CroftHelima Helima is blunt and brilliant as usual.

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@AppleTV please do better with F1 coverage. Sky Sports replays should be available longer. This F1 coverage that’s available on a Thursday is just pathetic

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@notrabkcirtap @CroftyF1 @shontong81 @MBrundleF1 @tedkravitz @AppleTV It’s pretty pathetic whether you like it or not. Replays seem to be available for 36 hrs only and only available on a newer iPad. Replays aren’t available very long on the Telly

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@citygalsports Not here for the graphics. The F1 commentators are pitiful compared to Sky Sports. Wanting to watch a replay this morning and poof Sky Sports is gone. Just pathetic.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

"Trump pardoned nursing home owner Joseph Schwartz just 3 months into his sentence for a $39 million fraud scheme. Meanwhile, families who won multimillion-dollar wrongful death suits against Schwartz haven’t collected a cent," per ProPublica

[ron insana @rinsana]

@davidaxelrod Someone bought $1.5 billion of S&P futures 5 minutes before Trump’s announcement and sold $192 million of oil futures. It ain’t just the prediction markets getting tips!

[Bloomberg @business]

The amount of oil stored at sea — a vital buffer for markets — is running down fast https://t.co/ah4nGEmgqh

[RBC Capital Markets @rbccm]

Helima Croft, Head of Global Commodity Strategy and MENA Research, joined The Long Game with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer to unpack the escalating global energy crisis triggered by the war in Iran. https://t.co/X3q9tDSSox

[Will Meade @thechartdr]

Tomorrow is a monster quadruple witching OpEx Day. These events occur only 4 times a year and tend to put tops and bottoms in the mkt.

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@KobeissiLetter @BillHarder4

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

WOW! Biden's former Secretary of State Todd Blinken on how the Israelis tried to get Biden to initiate a war, but he refused:

"The Israelis were insisting that in the North, Hezbollah, and from Lebanon, was about to attack, and they wanted to strike preemptively against Hezbollah. President Biden said, ‘we will always be with you in defending Israel, but we’re not there if you are going to start something.’ And we came within about 30 minutes of having a war in the North based on bad information that the Israelis had about an imminent attack from Hezbollah. But Biden was very insistent."

[Audrey Fahlberg @AudreyFahlberg]

SCOOP: Trump's furious that Noem said under oath in her Senate Judiciary hearing that the he had advance knowledge of the $220M DHS ad campaign & approved its release

He's privately floated Markwayne Mullin as prospective replacement, @NRO has learned
https://t.co/7KyWyACkhB

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

Fantastic advice

[Chidanand Tripathi @thetripathi58]

During a job interview, if they ask: "Why do you want to leave your current job?"

USE THE GOLDEN RESPONSE:

[John Cook @JohnCookconsult]

@Seventy2MX And apparently they botched that on their schedule and then showed highlights AHEAD of the replay on Peacock