McDonald's collected $10.4 billion in rent in 2025 and $6 billion in royalties. The McNugget only went national once a little-known Ray Dalio worked out how to hedge chicken through its feed. This week is about the business behind the business: the moat behind Nvidia's chips, the rent a familiar brand collects, the volunteers who keep your phone's clock right, and who pays when money gets expensive. Plus what actually gets a colleague promoted.
🐣 Hedge the Feed, Price the Nugget (Quartr)
McDonald’s needed to fix chicken prices before launching McNuggets nationwide. In 1983, there was no chicken futures market. A then little-known Ray Dalio saw that broiler chickens are just chicks that got fed and the price of the chicken was just a function of the price of the feed. Hedging the feed fixed the price of the nugget.
🪤 Agents and the Better Mousetrap (Why is this interesting?)
With tireless agents looking for products, having a better product is going to be more important than being on the eye-level shelf in the box store or ranking first in search.
🕰️ How a Single Volunteer Keeps the World’s Time (sheets.works)
Time zones are a complicated problem that must be solved on billions of devices worldwide. They all depend on a file maintained by a UCLA researcher in his spare time. That is not a unique case.
🤷♀️ Sailing the Shrugflation Triangle (kyla scanlon)
Oil pushes up inflation, so the Fed raises rates. The two biggest borrowers, the government and the AI buildout, shrug and keep borrowing. Everyone else pays the higher rates and the higher energy bills.
👖 The Inefficiency You’re Paying For (Gad’s Newsletter)
Selvedge denim requires slow, narrow shuttle looms. The kind of looms long gone from American factories, but the kinds of looms that hang on in Okayama and Hiroshima. The looms are old, the mechanics are retiring and the customers are willing to wait and pay.
⌛ Being Right Five Years Early (Capital Flows and Asset Markets)
Matching politics with market outcomes is tough work; even the best macro guys can be right about the direction but wrong about the timing.
💉 The Shot that Outsold the Chatbot (Exponential View)
GLP-1 revenues surpassed generative AI revenue. Obesity is measurably down; studies hint at further positive effects. Could they be more important than the chatbot?
⚽ Man City vs Every Other Club in England (Grace on Football)
Chasing trophies is insanely expensive. Every other team loses when one team plays with unlimited funds. Punish City for the sake of every other club in the pyramid.
🤝 Dependability is a Career Skill (Beyond tweets)
Being easy to work with — being reliable and drama free — can be a bigger career boost than virtuoso talent. Showing up and doing what you say you will is an understated superpower.
🐁 If You Give a Mouse a Job (Experimental History)
We have been through centuries of automation and labor saving devices without diminishing the need for humans. Will this time really be different?
🧮 Down With Oracles (Pessimists Archive)
Computers proved that four colors were sufficient for any map. Hamos balked and said “down with Oracles!” The mathematicians eventually admitted the machine was correct.
🎸 Working the Punk Playbook (Work3 - The Future of Work)
Creatives and freelancers have much to learn from Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten. Independence needs company.
The Look
Latent.Space gathered six leading AI figures following OpenAI’s DevDay for a 75-minute debrief. The crew held a lively discussion about their AI assistants and shared how much access they are giving them to their lives. The show gives real insight into how some of the most forward-thinking people are leveraging these tools and their sense of where they think this is all going.
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