Sen. Warren on Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh: "Evidently, he learned his lesson. This time around he sucked up to Donald Trump to snag his dream job." "The Senate should not be aiding and abetting Donald Trump's illegal takeover of the Fed by installing his chosen sock puppet."

Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh: "I believe a reform-oriented Fed can make a real difference to the American people, and if confirmed, I will seek to create an environment in which the best people do their best work."

Sen. McCormick: "The Federal Reserve must not be ruled by pointy-head economists poring over outdated models and reams of market data."

"You said that gas prices may not fall below 3$ a gallon until 2027, do you stand by that today?" Sec. of Energy Chris Wright: "I don't know the future of energy prices."

Its our favorite time of the week: Takedown Tuesday Member paid $0 (she had already contributed $500 to this health event) The Crowd picked up $3,000 Exit the system. Join CrowdHealth.

AI adoption hits 50% among US employees in Q1 2026, up from 46% last quarter and more than double since 2023.

In 2011, an ounce cost 233 bitcoin. Today it costs 0.00195 bitcoin. Bitcoin makes everything cheaper.

Tim Cook on Steve Jobs’ final leadership advice: “Never ask what I would do. Just do the right thing.”

Incredible Bitcoin inspired artwork by (VenusRose_art).

The quantum debate is pulling people into short-term thinking that rarely ends well. "That is a great way to optimize for decisions that will not help and will not drive value and will not drive stability and sustainability in the long term for any system." - @JOHN ARNOLD

John Ternus is either the best or worst possible choice to run Apple. He's a 25-year hardware veteran who built Apple Silicon, led the Mac transition, and oversaw every iPad ever shipped. He started at Apple in 2001 designing monitors, worked his way up through every major product line, and became SVP of Hardware Engineering in 2021. Cook called him someone with "the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator." He takes over September 1. The bull case writes itself. Apple hasn't launched a transformative product since the Apple Watch in 2015. Vision Pro underwhelmed. iPhone cycles are incremental. If the problem is that the products stopped surprising people, putting a lifelong product engineer in charge is the obvious fix. The bear case is harder to dismiss. Apple's biggest gap is AI. Siri is years behind ChatGPT and Google. Apple Intelligence has been delayed repeatedly. Ternus has no public track record in AI or software architecture. If the real battleground is cloud intelligence and agentic capabilities, Apple just picked a hardware leader for a software war. Cook became CEO at 51. Ternus takes over at 51. Last time Apple bet on an engineer, it was Jobs.

The de-dollarization narrative is getting challenged in real time. "The US still does have cards to play on the financial front. There is still a significant network effect built up around the dollar and the dollar system." - @JOHN ARNOLD

Anthropic just signed a deal with Amazon for up to 5 gigawatts of compute capacity and more than $100 billion in AWS spending over the next decade. Amazon is also investing another $5 billion in Anthropic today, with up to $20 billion more to follow, on top of the $8 billion already invested. To put 5 gigawatts in perspective, that's roughly the electricity consumption of a mid-sized country. It would power about 3.75 million homes. Anthropic currently runs Claude on over one million Trainium2 chips and this deal secures capacity through Trainium4, with nearly 1 gigawatt coming online by the end of 2026. The numbers underneath are striking. Anthropic says its run-rate revenue has surpassed $30 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. That's more than 3x growth in under four months. Consumer usage has surged so fast that it's degrading reliability for paying users during peak hours. Amazon gets a decade-long anchor tenant for its custom silicon. Anthropic gets infrastructure at a scale that only a handful of entities on Earth can provide. The full Claude platform will be available directly inside AWS with the same account, controls, and billing, removing one of the last friction points for enterprise adoption. This is what the AI infrastructure race looks like now. Not billions. Hundreds of billions committed over a decade to power a single model family. The capital requirements to stay at the frontier are becoming indistinguishable from those of nation-states building energy grids.

Apple names John Ternus as new CEO, with Tim Cook transitioning to Executive Chairman effective September 1, 2026.

Buckley Carlson tells Tucker when he started to break with Trump. "Really initially it was the attack on Iran. What will probably be a forever war that has killed Americans and is going to degrade us as a country. It already has." "His complete failure the first year to hold anybody to account for all of the crimes, the obvious crimes, all of the things that had been exposed. From Russia to COVID policy to the January 6th stuff."

"Does the president of the United States, the current president, ever call major bank CEOs and ask them to come in and give advice what he should be doing?" Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf: “I’d broaden it to the administration, the White House is very, very accessible."

Buckley and Tucker Carlson on whether Trump 2.0 was the plan all along. "The enormous amount of money he got from Miriam Adelson seems suspect. Why would someone who has obvious and demonstrated allegiance to a foreign power give Donald Trump $250 million while he's running for president?" "The only people he's been loyal to are the neocons and his donors."

The US has been showing the trademarks of a declining great power for 20 or 30 years now. The question is which part is actually dying. "Are we entering the decline of the republic stage or the decline of the empire stage?" - @JOHN ARNOLD

"What do you think the biggest impact is on the economy of the war today?" Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf: "Right now, from everything that we see, the economy is still extremely strong. The real question is going to be is how long do oil and gas prices stay high."

"Are you worried about the value of the dollar? " Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf: "I think it's something you got to be conscious about. The position the U.S. dollar has in the world, we can't assume that we have this God-given right to be the reserve currency."