Recently boring Nvidia reports next week. Did we just see German green shoots?

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Today’s Links

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Chinese medicine, or at least, Chinese healthcare and its contents
Arnaud Bertrand weighs in with some eye-opening observations on I have experience with the US, UK and Danish healthcare systems and their patchwork of good and very bad experiences and found this intriguing. The US system is particularly horrific judged from an "average price for the average income” perspective, even if some of the very best care is available here and there, particularly for those with deep pockets.

OpenAI - how will it compete?
HT to FTAlphaville for the link to a piece by Benedict Evans trying to understand OpenAI’s business model and how it can ever compete when “the incumbents have matched the tech”.

Can’t miss this one - Steen Jakobsen interview.
My mentor and former boss Steen Jakobsen put in an appearance with the Top Traders Unplugged team, talking macro observations across markets. Steen will always have a unique voice that will force you think ahead and answer important questions - he is often very right as well as a bit earlier than most to see what is coming.

Art Berman talks up the declinist view and the US and China “fighting over the remains”.
Art is an experienced oil industry hand with great perspective and pulls in compelling observations on what is going on in the world and connecting it with the energy industry in this appearance on the Planet Critical podcast, one I have never heard of before. Would like to get him in a room discussing the same thing with Doomberg and Elon Musk, who would heartily disagree, but it is worth considering whether our energy systems and our planet are starting on a decline gradient in terms of the available energy and other minerals per person and what it means if so.

Your brain is amazing - from Aakash Gupta (a wild rabbit hole of cool stuff on his X feed)
A breakdown of the complexity of our brain, a far more efficient parallel processor than anything etched on silicon. “Mapping [a human brain at the high resolution achieved in a recent Harvard and Google effort] would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.”

Your next books if you haven’t read them.
If you haven’t read Antifragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, it’s time to order yourself a copy - it’s practical philosophy, just like almost everything else he has written from Fooled by Randomness to The Black Swan and Skin in the game. Antifragile and Skin in the Game are the two books we will go back to time and time again, especially the former as the system we are in faces its great reset. (The latter as our inequal and bureaucratic societies do likewise). Right now, we are feeling around the edges, and gold and silver prices are the most prominent reset indicator - but these are very early innings of the rubber hitting the road, even if we are further into the game in terms of our awareness of the dilemma.

AI is going to kill us all - so let’s build it as fast as possible!
The New Yorker profiles Nick Land an “accelerationist” in favour of developing AI as quickly as possible, since, as ChatGPT summarizes his thinking, capitalism is “an alien intelligence using humans as a substrate” and “Civilization is being transformed by self-accelerating technological and economic systems that humans neither control nor fully understand — and resisting that process is futile.” Silicon valley types love him, of course.

William Shatner announces intent to release heavy metal album
You read that correctly. To boldly go…at the age of 94. A true inspiration.

Chart of the Day - Deere & Co. (DE)

Deere & Co is shooting the lights out, with another 11.5% gain yesterday after reporting earnings. I haven’t give Deere & Co enough credit in recent podcasts, as there is certainly an AI angle beyond the significant growth in its construction division linked in part to increased AI data center construction and maybe even mining (about 25-30% of Deere’s machinery sales are in the “construction and forestry” category, which saw a 34% growth rate in the most recent quarter). The company is also investing heavily in “Robo-tractors” and also provides a lot of sophisticated crop management services that allow large-scale farmers to pinpoint trouble spots and reduce the levels of fertilizer and herbicides used to optimize cost versus output, etc. Down the road, you might even imagine the company harnessing physical AI to its machines and even the creation of new machines to reduce the need for human operators. One physical AI use I would find particularly compelling, IF it can scale “weedbots” that can recognize and physically extract small weeds to protect crops rather than the widespread application of herbicides that are toxic, destroy insect life and create super-weeds. Certainly an autonomously driving tractor has a far less complex environment to operate in (and a large field can be marked with sensors) than a complicated city environment. One problem is that Deere & Co. already sells for over four times sales with net margins averaging around 13% or less recently, with price to estimated 2026 (year ending Oct 31) free cash flow around 44 times. The AI future don’t come cheap. This is not investment advice.