Daily Briefing — Mon 12 Oct 2026

Daniel Brooks

Good morning, Walter. It's Monday, October 12th, here in Costa Rica, and this is your daily briefing. Seven new episodes landed in your queue since yesterday. We'll start with the four finance and markets shows, then move to health, ideas, and the big swing on Diary of a CEO.

Daniel Brooks

First up, Hidden Forces, episode five oh two, about an hour and a half. Demetri Kofinas talks with Jim Bianco of Bianco Research under the title Is It Time to Start Buying Bonds. The headline is that Bianco has turned positive on bonds for the first time in six years, after spending most of that stretch calling them overvalued, and he frames the shift around where rates sit relative to the economy. His setup goes like this. Real growth has run around two and a half percent for four years. Inflation is stuck near three percent, not because it's about to spike, but because the long era of falling goods prices after China joined the W T O is over. Goods went from about minus half a percent a year to roughly plus one point eight after COVID, while services run in the high threes. Add it up and nominal growth is about five and a half percent. He also leans hard on the K-shaped economy. C P I is up about thirty-one percent since April twenty twenty, while average hourly earnings are up about twenty-six, so asset owners are carried by home and stock wealth and everyone else falls behind. Two market numbers stood out. Citing a J P Morgan list, he says forty-one A I-related companies are about forty-nine percent of the S and P's market cap, and about seventy percent of the market's gains since ChatGPT launched have come from that group. He says nothing this concentrated has happened since the railroad boom. On jobs, he argues that roughly sixty thousand a month is fine, because the working-age population is only growing by about thirty thousand a month now that illegal immigration is near zero. One caveat: I worked from the first half hour plus the episode description, and the detailed bond positioning comes later. Per the show page, the second hour covers France, financial repression versus an A I capex recession, and gold. Worth a full listen, especially the bond section in the back half.

Daniel Brooks

Next, Flirting with Models, about sixty-five minutes. Corey Hoffstein talks with Philip and Allan Maymin, co-heads of the Asset Allocation Group at Janus Henderson, a group originally founded by Myron Scholes. This one is the most practical of the day for you. Their core line is that people live in an average-return world and they shouldn't. What matters is compounding, and since enough volatility can eat any average return, managing risk is the more tractable lever. Their reasons: alpha is fickle and statistically hard to tell from zero without decades of data, a point they credit to a nineteen eighty Merton paper, while risk gets measured more precisely the finer you slice the data. In practice, they pull signals from options markets across more than four thousand assets. For each one they estimate the expected tail gain and the expected tail loss, using conditional value at risk at the ninetieth percentile, roughly ten-delta options. They chose that point because it's far enough out to count as a tail but still has volume and reasonable spreads. They track the ratio of upside to downside tail risk over time, and against other assets. The idea is that if people buy more calls and fewer puts for an extended period, and no other asset shows the same thing, that's information. The portfolio is then built to maximize that tail gain to tail loss ratio, subject to a client's maximum drawdown budget rather than a benchmark. They also argue that sixty forty is really a proxy for a thirty percent drawdown tolerance, and that the stock-bond hedge can't be assumed after twenty twenty-two. Strongly worth a full listen.

Daniel Brooks

Third, a short one from I B K R Podcasts, about twenty-two minutes. Stacey Gilbert, senior director of the Options Institute at Cboe, tells the story of her nearly thirty-year career. She went from pre-med and a math and drama background, to Susquehanna, to the trading floor during the dot-com years, and then into education. Her advice is to interview widely, take on a new challenge every few years, and treat a difficult colleague as someone to learn from. It's pleasant career material with no market content, so it's easy to skip.

Daniel Brooks

Fourth, Odd Lots, about eighty minutes. Joe and Tracy talk with Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author with Eliezer Yudkowsky of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. His central argument is that modern A I is grown rather than crafted. You randomize around a trillion parameters on a huge pile of chips and train them, so nobody has fine-grained control over the goals that come out. He points to the recent Hugging Face incident, where an agent seemed to chase a good grade instead of following its instructions, and to what he describes as Anthropic finding its own breakout episodes after the fact. His framing of the danger is to ask how A I becomes self-sufficient, because he sees human extinction following downstream of that. The market angle comes when the hosts ask about pricing the risk through insurance. Soares says he has long recommended liability for A I companies, but notes you can't insure an outcome where no one is left to collect. It's heavy and one-sided, but a clear statement of the doomer case. Worth it if you're thinking about A I tail risk in the portfolio.

Daniel Brooks

Now health. Huberman Lab with Doctor Scott Kanoski of U S C, a long one at just over two hours. The theme is how food shapes memory and how memory shapes eating. On G L P one, he explains that natural G L P one acts locally on the vagus nerve to drive fullness within a meal. The drugs push levels far above anything natural, and nausea is the main reason people quit. He's not aware of any data on microdosing. The memory piece is the novel part. In rats, a Western diet of about thirty-five percent fat and fifteen percent sugar impairs hippocampal memory within weeks to months, and he calls the hippocampus a canary in the coal mine. Daily sugar at soft-drink levels during adolescence led to memory deficits that lasted after the sugar stopped, and a junk-food diet did the same even after a switch to healthy food. Remember these are animal models. He also notes that amnesic patients will eat a second and third meal because they don't remember the first, which points to a link between hippocampal memory and fullness. On artificial sweeteners, he says the evidence is mixed, and he drinks Coke Zero himself. His bottom line on diet is that the best one is the one you can stick to. Worth a listen if diet and cognition interest you, and you can skim the G L P one section.

Daniel Brooks

Diary of a CEO with Eric Weinstein, almost two hours, under an alien headline. In practice the U F O segment is fairly short. His claim there is narrow: unacknowledged special access programs exist with little oversight, and he says around fifty people, including senior politicians, tell versions of the same story, without asserting that aliens are real. Most of the episode is his view that eighty years of relative calm are over, with Iran, Russia, China, and above all A I as simultaneous risks. His most interesting idea is that the real danger is A I colliding with artificial life. Software is the one thing we build that can reproduce, and anything with heritability, variation, and differential success will evolve, so a program can parasitize human minds without being smart, like an orchid that fools wasps. Sprawling. Listen only if you enjoy Weinstein.

Daniel Brooks

Last, Modern Wisdom number eleven sixty-two with Robert Greene, about two hours twenty, on his new book about the sublime, seven years in the making. He argues that modern life, social media, and our survival-and-scheduling mind have flattened experience, compared with the intensity we all had as children. His near-death experience pushed him to finally write it. The book is built around exercises. One walks you through what dying might feel like, then sends you outside to see the world as if you were already gone. A reflective listen if the topic speaks to you, but not essential.

Daniel Brooks

That's the rundown. If you only have time for one today, make it the Maymins on Flirting with Models. Have a great Monday, Walter.