Ralph Bennett

@Wtrwrks | @ChicagoBooth | @IUBloomington | Ex @Dell & @Quaker

[Greg Harvey @BetweenTheNums]

Players in MLB HISTORY to have 12+ home runs, 6+ stolen bases & 16+ walks in a single calendar month:

Pete Crow-Armstrong - August 2026
Willie Mays - July 1955
Babe Ruth - May 1930, June 1920

That’s it.

[dnap @dnapway]

David Friedberg says Moderna is charging $500K for a ‘cancer vaccine’ that already exists

"What frustrates me the most about all of this, everyone's kind of lauding this as some unique breakthrough and special and powerful. It's not, a lot of people are going to places like Montana and getting peptides printed for their particular cancer sequence, making their own neo-antigens, and getting cured of their cancer.”

“You can pay someone $50,000 to do this for you today. There's a lot of clinics that will do it. And it's not a special FDA-approved drug. So why is Moderna saying that they're going to charge $500,000 for this?"

"I don't think that this technique, which has been developed through several decades of iteration, funded by NIH and other public funding dollars, should now be patented, FDA-approved, and charged half a million dollars for people to get treated for this."

"A private pharmaceutical company has seen their market cap go from $20 billion to $60 billion because they went through this regulatory process to create what, in my mind, is a form of regulatory capture.”

“They’re making the case that it's all about safety and trials, when fundamentally there's an underlying technique that was funded by a lot of public research dollars that I think should be more open-sourced, more ubiquitous. Every hospital should be trained on how to do this process to treat cancer patients.”

[Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 @MikeZaccardi]

GS: Short interest on the median S&P 500 stock jumped to decade-highs

[dnap @dnapway]

Jcal says Sam Altman provoked Jensen into directly competing with OpenAI

"I think Jensen is going all in on open source based on these two acquisitions, Hugging Face and Poolside. I think Sam Altman poked the tiger."

"If you look at what he did, he had done that huge $100 billion deal with $NVDA back in 2025. Then he announced the $AMD deal. Jensen was clearly not pleased about that."

"Right after, Sam said he's going to make his own inference, jalapeño, and that he was going to do the deal with $AMD, then Jensen came out was like, 'Well, by the way, we don't actually have to do these investments in OpenAI.'"

"I think he's speed-running open source, and you're going to be able to buy your entire stack from $NVDA next year. He is going to own open source. That is a really interesting moment in time because we were sitting here 6, 12 months ago saying open source would never catch up."

"Jensen is doing an open source self-driving project. Now he owns Hugging Face, the leading open source indexer where everybody goes to try the new models.”

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

6,000 years of world history on a single timeline. Zoom in. You could spend 30 minutes exploring this.

[Jurrien Timmer @TimmerFidelity]

Based on what I am hearing from within our walls, the jaws below are likely to get considerably wider as the hyperscalers continue to tap the bond market while also raising equity. The reverse crowding out in the corporate bond market has even gotten the Treasury Secretary’s attention. 🧵(1/3)

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

The most important structure in your cardiovascular system is one your doctor has never mentioned.

It is called the glycocalyx. A living shield of sugars and proteins that coats the inner surface of every artery in your body.

When it is intact, nothing gets through. Not LDL. Not immune cells. Nothing.

A 2022 study in the Journal of Cardiovascular Translational Research followed people for six years. Glycocalyx degradation predicted cardiovascular events more strongly than hyperlipidemia.

The barrier matters more than the cargo.

[Jurrien Timmer @TimmerFidelity]

And the hyperscalers haven’t gone anywhere since last year October.🧵(3/3)

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

I used to think a banana was just a banana.

Same fruit. Same sugar. Same result for everyone.

I was wrong.

I started wearing a continuous glucose monitor and watched my glucose spike to 160 after eating a single banana. My training partner ate the same banana at the same time. His glucose barely touched 120.

Same food. Same amount. Completely different response.

That's when I realized: nutrition advice that treats everyone the same is broken at the foundation. And the reason is written in your DNA.

Here's what I found.

[Liz Ann Sonders @LizAnnSonders]

AI capex boom = GDP growth tailwind?

Math: massive corporate spending on semiconductors/infrastructure is driving imports (Asian chip manufacturing); U.S. export benefits remain muted

Result? GDP’s import/export equation shows drag despite investment boom

[Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 @MikeZaccardi]

Median age of homebuyers is 56.

It was 31 in 1981. Torsten at Apollo

[Mike Zaccardi, CFA, CMT 🍖 @MikeZaccardi]

US household leverage (liabilities to net wealth) is the lowest in 50 years JPM

[a16z @a16z]

Humans are the minority user of AI

Agents burn nearly 5x the tokens people do, up 14x since February

Charts of the Week: https://t.co/7YT2BXvuUu

[Justin Mares @jwmares]

Nattokinase might be one of the most underrated supplements for heart health.

Josh got his ApoB down from 98 to 66 while taking it.

Then he removed NK for 3 months, kept the rest of his routine roughly the same, and ApoB rebounded to 91.

A very interesting n=1 experiment.

[Ralph Bennett @RBennettIV]

@GavinSBaker @vercel @rauchg The higher the open source token share, the lower the TAM in dollars?

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

More data than open-source AI is taking share from OpenAI and Anthropic. Open source has gone from 28% token share to 62% token share @vercel over the last 2 months. Chart from @rauchg

Super impressive given that the sum of OpenAI and Anthropic accelerated in July. So net token/AI infra demand accelerated even more than the acceleration we saw at the frontier. And suspect Grok growing even faster than open-source and we saw some of this in the @tryramp data.

Open-source AI taking share is positive for AI infrastructure demand as it lowers margins at the model layer and an open-source token costs just as much compute to produce as a frontier token. Nothing about open-source AI inference is “free.”

Most likely end state IMO is that closed, frontier tokens are 60-90% of economic value but only 15 to 25% of tokens.

[Siim Land @siimland]

Polyphenol cheat sheet 🫐🫒
- Anthocyanins: blueberries, cherries - heart, brain, blood vessels
- Flavanols: cocoa, dark chocolate - blood pressure, blood flow
- Catechins: green and black tea - metabolism, inflammation
- Flavanones: oranges, grapefruit - heart, blood vessels, inflammation
- Quercetin: onions, apples, capers - senescence, inflammation, blood pressure
- Resveratrol: grapes, berries - metabolic health, inflammation
- Ellagitannins: pomegranate, raspberries, walnuts - blood vessels, gut health, oxidative stress
- Hydroxytyrosol: extra-virgin olive oil - LDL oxidation, heart, inflammation
- Chlorogenic acids: coffee - blood sugar, blood vessels, metabolic health
- Curcuminoids: turmeric - inflammation, joint health
- Lignans: flaxseeds, sesame - heart, cholesterol, hormone metabolism

Simple daily polyphenol checklist: berries + coffee/tea + EVOO + colorful vegetables + nuts/seeds + herbs/spices.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

US economic momentum is accelerating:

The S&P Global US Composite PMI index surged +1.5 points in August, to 56.0, the highest since April 2022.

This marks the 3rd consecutive monthly improvement.

This comes as the Services PMI index jumped +2.2 points, to 56.8, the highest since March 2022.

At the same time, the Manufacturing PMI index fell -0.7 points, to 53.9, the lowest in 5 months but still firmly in expansion territory.

Meanwhile, businesses added workers at the strongest pace since January 2025, led by hiring in the services sector.

This data implies a +3.0% annualized YoY GDP growth for Q3 2026, up from +1.5% in Q2.

AI is driving a historic wave of growth.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk sent every Tesla employee a memo that took authority away from their managers and handed it to them.

He never asks for more hours. Every rule moves a decision closer to the person doing the work.

Musk: “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.”

Companies have a role for everyone who creates process and no role for anyone who removes it. Meetings and approval chains survive because removing them was never anyone’s job.

Musk: “Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value.”

Attendance has always been treated as proof of commitment. He made it worthless, and contribution became the only thing that counts in the room.

Musk: “It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”

Ordinary manners protect whoever called the meeting. He moved that protection to everyone else sitting quietly with real work waiting on them.

Musk: “Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software, or processes at Tesla. Anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication.”

Internal vocabulary converts knowledge into status and charges every newcomer a fee to participate.

A company that speaks plainly can absorb talent at full speed.

Musk: “Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the chain of command.”

Most good ideas die in transit, three levels below anyone with the power to act on them.

Musk: “Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.”

The only threat in the entire memo. A manager who insists on being routed through is buying his own relevance with everyone else’s time. Musk put a price on it.

Musk: “Always pick common sense as your guide. If following a company rule is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, the rule should change.”

Following a bad rule normally shields you. Exercising judgment exposes you.

He flipped which one carries the risk, and every rule now has to earn its place against the person applying it.

Every institution drifts toward protecting its own comfort. The ones that keep building are held together by people who rewrite the rules back down to something a single person can act on.

Nothing on that list requires a budget, a headcount, or a title.

You can run the entire memo from wherever you are sitting right now. Most people never test it and never learn it was permitted the whole time.

[Lloyd Blankfein @lloydblankfein]

Risk management 101—every exposure should have a limit, even when you’re sure nothing could go wrong. After all, the Titanic sank and AAA mortgage bonds went to zero. I worry about the market’s (and the economy’s) unlimited appetite for exposure to the positive AI revenue story.