Over 108 days, the war in Iran has cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $113.3 billion and counting. That's $1.05 billion per day, more than the Small Business Administration gets in an entire year, burned every 24 hours. In less time than a single baseball season, the government spent more than the combined annual budgets of NASA, the EPA, FEMA, and the Department of Justice. More than every federal highway, bridge, and road project in America for a full year. Every taxpayer's share: ~$691. A family of four: ~$1,360. For a war most Americans couldn't find on a map three months before it started. And these are just the direct costs. Brown University's research on Iraq and Afghanistan shows that long-term costs like veteran care, equipment replacement, interest on the debt used to finance it, typically multiply the sticker price by 3-5x. The real tab for this 108-day war could land somewhere between $340 billion and $567 billion. Afghanistan's first 100 days cost ~$31.5 billion. Iran's 108 days cost 3.6x that. The money is always there for war. It's never there for anything else.

Anthropic, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman just launched Ode, a $1.5 billion AI services firm that embeds engineers inside companies to build custom AI systems on top of their existing operations. Not a new model. Not a new chatbot. An implementation company. Walk into a business, map how it actually runs, and build the AI layer on top of it. The CEO says it's "pretty easy to imagine this as a trillion-dollar company someday." They currently have 100 engineers and demand already far outstrips supply. The private equity firms backing it will funnel their own portfolio companies as customers. Pay attention to what's happening in the background here. The biggest players in finance and AI just bet $1.5 billion that the real money in AI isn't in building models. It's in deploying them inside every business on the planet. That tells you where this industry is actually headed.

"China subsidized factories. We subsidized bank bailouts and $3 trillion to take Afghanistan from the Taliban and give it back to the Taliban." - Luke Gromen

"The Chinese said, 'We'll send you silk. We'll take some ceramics. But you don't make anything else we want. We'll take bullion.' History is repeating." Luke Gromen on China running the exact same playbook it ran against Britain in the 1760s.

"We took the inflationary hose off our front porch and stuffed it in through our own basement window." Luke Gromen on why US inflation got so bad when foreign central banks stopped buying treasuries.

"Gold can go to a million and nothing gets hurt." Luke Gromen argues gold is the only asset that can rebalance global trade without breaking the world.

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The Matthew Boyer Q2 report just dropped and it's stacked. An investigative report into CCP influence operations against American AI infrastructure prompted Senator Tom Cotton to call for a DOJ inquiry and landed on the front page of the New York Times. At an Armed Services hearing, Admiral Paparo revealed the military is studying how Bitcoin can strengthen American cybersecurity and that Indo-Pacific Command runs a Bitcoin node. The CLARITY Act cleared Senate Banking with developer protections intact. BPI launched "Satoshi Scholars," weekly educational sessions for senior Congressional staffers. And they filed to intervene in a New York lawsuit trying to claim legal title to 3.8 million bitcoin in "dormant" addresses under lost-and-found property law. Serious work being done on the policy front.

"Europe is the global center of beauty, which is really meaningful to me. Things that are beautiful are worth preserving. Why would you want that to be destroyed?" Tucker Carlson says America first means doubling down on Europe as an ally.

"You cannot allow a country of 9 million to make decisions that are critical to a country of 350 million. That's against nature. It's wrong. And it's against America's interest, as this war is." Tucker Carlson to The Economist.

Tucker Carlson: "No one's even arguing that Iran's nuclear program posed such a threat that we had to launch a full-scale war... This war is clearly contrary to what he promised and contrary to the idea that your leaders should put your interests before those of foreigners."

"How can you not be inspired to be brave when you hear about Beowulf showing up and saying 'You got a problem? I'll solve it.' No heading that says 'Today's lesson is about courage.' No worksheet at the end." (jcenters) & (hannahcenters) on living books vs dead textbooks.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells CNBC: Bitcoin now has "more stability at these levels" and he's "very bullish on the market over the next 12 months."

"The rabbit hole dwellers, the system thinkers who go against the grain? They're already here. What's left is people who don't think like us. Shouting about sovereignty on Twitter is falling on deaf ears." Brandon Quittem on why the next wave won't look like the last one.

"There's a world where Bitcoiners get rich and the protocol is totally neutered. We'll be telling our grandkids a tragic story where we fumbled the greatest opportunity to take money away from the state ever." Brandon Quittem on Bitcoin's third generation curse.

"Juniors in high school. 'What's a noun?' Crickets. They can decode a sentence but can't tell you what it means. All processing, no thinking. Spreadsheet brain." (jcenters) & (hannahcenters) on what's really broken in American education.

"No dollar says Republican or Democrat on it." Nick shirley testifying before the Senate on the billions in healthcare fraud he's helped expose.

Rogan breaks down the LA mayoral race: homeless people recruited with cigarettes and cash to submit mail-in ballots. Third-place candidate magically overtook the Republican in mail-in votes. "You were designing the vote share to kick Pratt out. Makes no sense."

JD Vance on going to a Christmas party in downtown LA. Convoluted directions to avoid Skid Row. Armed guards, fancy wine inside, squalor outside. "This reminds me of going to the US embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti."

Joe Rogan and JD Vance question election integrity. "I'm not skeptical. I'm accusing them. I think they stole the election." "Do you think other races are incapable of going to the DMV? That's insane. It's actually super racist."