July 2026
Steven Davis’s interview with economists Aaron Chalfin and Max Kapustin examines Baltimore’s 2022 adoption of focused deterrence, a strategy aimed at the small number of people, groups, and disputes driving serious gun violence. Chalfin and Kapustin argue that the evidence does not prove the strategy caused Baltimore’s full 60% homicide decline, but that district-level comparisons, crime-specific declines, and changes in enforcement patterns point to a material effect on shootings and homicides. Their case is that focused deterrence is neither saturation policing nor a services-only model, but a targeted approach whose promise depends on sustained coordination among police, prosecutors, service providers, and community leaders.
Alex Hormozi argues that setbacks are useful only if they are read at the right level: a failed result may mean a founding assumption has been disproven, or it may only expose weak execution. In a discussion with Chris Williamson, he frames the decision to pivot or persist as a question of whether reality has invalidated the premise behind the effort, rather than merely made the effort uncomfortable. The broader case is that people misread reality when they mistake labels for explanations, leave expectations undefined, or generalize too much from early losses.
Gusto co-founder and head of technology Eddie Kim argues that AI for small businesses should automate recurring work, not present owners with another blank chat box. In a conversation with YC’s Harj Taggar, Kim explains how a missed-flight prototype evolved into Gusto Cofounder, an AI product that uses Gusto’s business context to run tasks such as payroll prep, approvals, reminders, and customer communications through SMS or Slack. He also uses the project to make a broader case for AI-assisted product development: smaller teams can build faster by testing working implementations instead of debating abstractions, but need more discipline as the cost of trying ideas falls.
Brent Barcimo, an aerospace industry manager, argues that Stanford Online’s Engineering Leadership Program was valuable because he could apply its material at work immediately. In a learner testimonial, he says the Stanford affiliation first drew his interest, but the course quality, presenters and 60-day completion window shaped his endorsement, while the certificate became both a resume signal and a personal accomplishment.
Bloomberg Technology reporter Brody Ford says Microsoft’s plan to cut about 20% of Xbox staff and divest several game studios is a margin reset, not a retreat from gaming. Ford frames the overhaul as part of Microsoft’s broader AI-era discipline: Xbox remains a material platform business, but its profitability has lagged comparable businesses while AI infrastructure spending and component costs put more pressure on the division.
Alex Hormozi argues in a TBPN conversation that founders overrate effort, novelty and status while underrating the leverage of the opportunity they choose. He makes the case for selecting businesses backward from the desired outcome, using AI to increase output inside an existing operation rather than chase a new category, and treating media and personal brand as useful only when backed by proof and tied to business results. He also describes Acquisition.com’s move from a cash-flow family office toward a model built around brand, capital and operating work.
Devvret Rishi, Rubrik’s GM of AI and former Predibase chief executive, argues that the main enterprise AI security risk is not the model but the access granted to agents that can act inside databases, email, code repositories and other systems of record. In a conversation with Craig Smith, Rishi presents Rubrik Agent Cloud as a governance layer for that access: a platform meant to discover agents across an enterprise, monitor their prompts and tool calls, enforce natural-language policies at runtime, and help recover from destructive actions.
Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan assess Anthropic’s J-space work as a potentially important interpretability advance: a computed Jacobian lens that appears to expose a model’s internal workspace rather than merely its written chain of thought. Labenz argues the finding could matter for AI safety because the space seems causally tied to flexible planning, hidden objectives and strategic reasoning, while Narayanan treats it more cautiously as a useful but incomplete tool whose larger claims remain unsettled.
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, election-law scholars and political practitioners argued that the immediate danger for 2026 is less a miscounted Election Day than a close election whose count is challenged, delayed or delegitimized afterward. Rick Hasen, Benjamin Ginsberg, Sarah Isgur and Janai Nelson largely trusted local administrators to count ballots, but split over what makes elections legitimate: administrative competence, equal access to the franchise, limits on federal and judicial power, stronger parties, or a constitutional right to vote.
BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink used an Aspen Ideas Festival conversation with Fareed Zakaria to argue that AI can sustain a new phase of U.S. growth only if the country builds the physical infrastructure behind it. Fink’s case was that power grids, data centers, skilled labor, faster permitting and deeper capital markets matter as much as algorithms — and that the political test is whether more households can own a share of the gains rather than watch them accrue to a narrow set of companies and investors.
Lanhee Chen argues that California’s initiative system still serves as an escape valve when Sacramento will not act, but has become increasingly dominated by the moneyed interests, consultants and procedural insiders it was designed to bypass. In a Hoover Institution discussion with Bill Whalen, Chen uses the state’s crowded November ballot to show how direct democracy now functions not only as a vehicle for voter policy choices, but as leverage in negotiations, a turnout tool and a way for entrenched actors to preserve power.
ERShares founder and CIO Joel Shulman told Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow that SpaceX’s Nasdaq 100 inclusion should create a structural buyer base for the stock, even if the immediate trading move was lower. Shulman argued that passive index demand could reach about $25 billion across Nasdaq, Russell, MSCI and related flows, while his longer-term case rests on SpaceX’s launch-cost advantage, Starlink pricing power and a conditional opportunity in orbital data centers. His XOVR ETF has built SpaceX into its defining holding, with exposure rising to about $370 million after gains.
Bloomberg’s Ryan Vlastelica argues that the Magnificent Seven are no longer the market’s default AI trade after years of setting the direction for the S&P 500. Investor attention, he says, has shifted toward the current bottlenecks in AI infrastructure — especially memory, storage and semiconductors — while the largest platform companies face more scrutiny over heavy AI spending and uncertain returns.
Amazon’s plan to raise at least $25 billion in a U.S. bond sale is less a one-off financing move than another sign of how large its AI infrastructure spending may become, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Robert Schiffman. Speaking with Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow, Schiffman argued that Amazon’s borrowing is scaling because capital expenditure needs are rising faster than near-term cash inflows, even as the company still has low leverage, strong cash generation and access to cheap credit.
In an Aspen Ideas Festival talk, David Brooks argues that a passionate life is not a matter of intensity or youth but of forming desire around what is worth loving. Brooks sets that view against institutions — schools, meritocracy and AI among them — that define people too narrowly by intelligence, measurement and efficiency. His answer is a humanist one: people remain capable of growth at any age when curiosity, beauty, work, responsibility and love continue to enlarge them.
DeepSeek’s DSpark paper argues that large language models can be made faster at inference without making them more capable, by reducing waste in speculative decoding. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér presents the technique as a serving-side change: a smaller draft model proposes tokens, the larger model verifies them, and DSpark improves the process through short-range draft memory, early rejection of weak continuations, and confidence-based scheduling. The practical claim is a reported 60% to 85% per-user generation-speed gain over DeepSeek’s MTP-1 baseline, not the 661% throughput figure shown in exceptional cases.
David Yelland, the former Sun editor turned communications adviser, argues that public relations has become part of the machinery of power rather than a layer applied after decisions are made. In conversation with Andrew Roberts, he says the collapse of mass tabloid influence, the rise of financial media and digital platforms, and the speed of modern politics have made communication central to how governments, companies, monarchies, and foreign states exercise authority. His recurring test is whether the principal is credible enough to lead that process, because even the strongest advisers cannot rescue a leader the public does not believe.
Caleb Hammer argues that Gen Z’s debt problem is not simply a failure of financial education, but a loop between pessimism, media consumption and frictionless credit. In a conversation with Chris Williamson, Hammer says bleak economic narratives can make spending now feel rational, while buy-now-pay-later tools and normalized consumer debt turn that mood into monthly obligations that make young borrowers’ futures harder.
After a week in New York, Shaan Puri argues that proximity, trust and positioning are not soft business ideas but operating choices that change what gets built, sold and believed. In a conversation with Sam Parr, Puri uses meetings with creators, restaurateurs and brand operators to make the case for extreme in-person density balanced with protected maker time, for asking what a situation really means, and for treating trust and a single sharp sentence as increasingly valuable commercial assets.
Performance psychologist Gio Valiante argues that elite performance is less a natural extension of talent than a deliberate effort to work against the brain’s defaults: comfort, fear, social belonging, old self-talk and unresolved identity patterns. In a conversation with Shane Parrish, Valiante says durable improvement begins with behavior, environment and systems rather than intentions, and that confidence is built by interpreting small wins, failure and feedback in ways that keep people capable of taking risk.
John Coogan and Jordi Hays frame Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs as a financial and strategic reset rather than an AI-driven productivity story. Coogan argues that Xbox’s weak margins, layered management and uncertain role inside a cloud-and-enterprise Microsoft make its future harder to defend, while Hays questions the decision to announce a second wave of cuts before resolving who will be affected. The rest of the discussion applies the same practical lens to product design, AI interfaces and a disputed Arizona lottery ticket: incentives matter more than surface narratives.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple’s expanded Broadcom agreement, which runs through 2031 and covers custom chips for multiple generations of Apple products, is chiefly about server-side AI silicon rather than another connectivity component for consumer devices. He says Broadcom is working on technology for a new Apple server chip, known internally as Baltra, as Apple moves its Apple Intelligence infrastructure beyond repurposed Mac processors toward purpose-built ASICs.
Anthropic argues in a research article that Claude appears to have a small, readable internal workspace: a set of word-linked representations separate from both its visible output and its broader automatic processing. Borrowing from global workspace theory in neuroscience, the company says this “J-space” can support hidden reasoning, be steered only imperfectly, and sometimes reveal concepts the model is not saying aloud. Anthropic says the finding does not show Claude is conscious, but does suggest that some important model behavior passes through an accessible intermediate layer.
Evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams argues that sex differences can be real, partly evolved and socially consequential without justifying unequal treatment or fixed roles. In a wide-ranging discussion with Chris Williamson, he says the evidence points against purely social explanations for many average differences in interests, sexuality, aggression, parenting, health and personality, while stressing that overlap between men and women is large and individual freedom should govern policy and personal life.