Reading Roundup - June 2025
A monthly roundup of random readings from around the web.
Cemeteries, Christian cults, CAPM, Bruges, Albania, LLMs, NYC, and more. Enjoy!
(1) Green-Wood Cemetery’s Living Dead
Green-Wood is the largest cemetery in NYC. Despite a slow start after launching in 1838, Green-Wood gained popularity with “celebrity” burials like former NY governor DeWitt Clinton. Famous burials soon followed: Samuel Morse, Boss Tweed, Charles Tiffany, Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry George, and Leonard Bernstein. Green-Wood has more than 600,000 permanent residents on its 478 acres, among the most densely “populated” parts of NYC: “A grave at Green-Wood is the only real estate that some New Yorkers ever own.” Spaces are running low: “Green-Wood will be out of room for burials in 5 years.” But as that deadline looms, they are turning to tourism with concerts, movies, and tours. The cemetery hosted 300 events last year, and some are quite popular: “A recent panel featuring gravediggers sold out.” People are dying to get in!
(2) The Doomsday Cult’s Guide to Taking Over a Country
South Korea has a weird number of end-of-the-world Christian cults (an estimated 3% of South Korea’s population belongs to a Christian cult). One of these cults, known as Grace Road, has been repeating the Jonestown Guyana playbook in Fiji. Grace Road emerged in South Korea in 2008, and then moved to Fiji in 2014. Since then, its 400 refugee cult members created a tropical business empire: “Between 2015 and 2025 they set up six beauty salons, five True Mart supermarkets, a dental clinic, a construction firm, five patisseries, three Snowy House ice-cream parlors, a chain of eight Korean restaurants called Grace Kitchen, nine pizza parlors, two Italian trattorias and a fried-chicken restaurant called Fierce Chicken.” Don't drink the Flavor Aid.
(3) The Capital Asset Pricing Model: Risk, Reward, and Reasons
“To get a good [return], you need a good reason to expect it: some justified belief that there's a particular asset that is mispriced, and a good meta-reason to think nobody else has considered it. In a competitive market, you need not just a theory about the asset in question, but [also] a theory of why your competitors haven't spotted it. Yes, "I'm a better investor than they are" is a theory—but do any of your competitors pick stocks despite consciously thinking they're bad at it? […] You should assume that the average market participant is as self-confident as you are. […] The opportunity cost is the index. […] Investing ends up being like many other hobbies: it takes time and effort, and if you're very good and somewhat lucky, you might break even.”
(4) The Original Bourse at Bruges
The first stock exchange wasn’t in Amsterdam or Antwerp, but Bruges. This now-quaint tourist town in Flanders (Belgium) became the dominant trading hub for Hanseatic League merchants (from the North Sea) and Mediterranean merchants (mostly Florence and Genoa), with special focus on textiles, commodities, and FX. The first exchange was a plaza, the Beursplein, located in front of the hotel owned by the Van Der Beurse family, which gave the modern name to stock exchanges in many languages (bourse, bursa, etc.). The story of Bruges is interesting for various reasons: “For one, a prominent family became the etymological origin of the very word ‘bourse,’ but more significantly, [Bruges] marks a turning point in Europe’s economic history, the transition from Mediterranean trade to Atlantic trade dominated by the French, English, and Dutch [… and] the [creation of] practices [that were] the template for every exchange that followed.”
(5) How This Refugee Became Albania’s First Billionaire
Samir Mane is Albania’s first billionaire. But he’s not an oligarch! He fled communist Albania as a student in the early 1990s, then returned a few years later to start the country’s first electronics retailer (Neptune), selling western products like washing machines. Later, he built Albania’s first shopping mall and grocery store, while also expanding his retail investments and land holdings across the Balkans. Now, his company BALFIN Group is building luxury villas in advance of the coming Albanian tourism boom. Retail, real estate, and tourism. Skanderbeg would be proud.
(6) Capitalism, Socialism, and Social Desirability Bias
“Republicans’ critics often claim that they favor a world where “anyone who can’t afford health care dies.” Yet in reality, virtually zero Republicans favor such a world. At most, they oppose the expansion of medical programs that already spend over a trillion taxpayer dollars per year. The brutally honest argument against government-funded health care is that the cost of saving the marginal life is too damn high. Spending $100,000 each month to keep an 85-year-old on life support is a terrible use of taxpayer money; a faithful steward of the public interest would pull the plug. Yet flesh-and-blood Republicans don’t merely avoid this brutal truth. They make the opposite argument, accusing the [Democrats] of supporting “death panels” to deny taxpayer funding for cost-ineffective coverage.” But nobody will vote for pulling the plug on grandma.
(7) Asurion: The Early Days (‘95-‘01) with Kevin Taweel
Asurion started out as a Houston tow truck dispatch company, but found its way into cellphone insurance through a small insurance acquisition that let them cross-sell roadside assistance and phone protection through the same telecom carrier relationships. By 2001, cellphone insurance had completely overtaken the original roadside business, riding the wave of Americans buying increasingly expensive and fragile smartphones. The returns tell the story: “A dollar invested in the original purchase...has grown at a compound annual rate of over 61%...translating into an MOIC north of 5275x.” Among others, some lessons: (1) cross-selling into existing distribution channels is lucrative; (2) cross-selling niche insurance with a low yearly price and standardized underwriting is also lucrative; and (3) mobile phone adoption was a powerful secular tailwind.
(8) The Illusion of Self-Improvement: Why AI Can’t Think Its Way to Genius
LLMs have ingested a good portion of the corpus of written human knowledge, but they have not produced many knowledge breakthroughs (yet). Why? Because “thinking harder” mistakes the process of how we gather knowledge. Most breakthroughs and insights come from external and novel information—from interacting with the real world—rather than from endless reflection on existing knowledge. Columbus didn’t discover the New World just by thinking deep thoughts; Fleming didn't discover penicillin just by thinking deep thoughts; and so on. This is important for understanding both the current limits of LLMs, and how those limits could be overcome: (1) tool-augmented reasoning with access to fresh data; (2) multi-agent verification with cross-checking; (3) environment-grounded tasks with external inputs; (4) external feedback loops; and more.
(9) How a Tiny Middleman Could Access Two-Factor Login Codes From Tech Giants
When a company sends a 2FA code via SMS (e.g., Uber alerts), the SMS rarely goes directly from the company to the recipient. The SMS is passed into a chain of subcontractors that interconnect the telecoms. The telecoms lease their “global titles” (essentially their telecom address), allowing subcontractors to handle SMS routing. But SMS is rarely encrypted. Bad actors set up shop as subcontractors and step into the telecom chain to read the unencrypted messages, often with a goal of (what else?) stealing cryptocurrency: “About 20 Israeli cryptocurrency investors [had] their 2FA codes intercepted by manipulating telecom traffic. The investigation traced the manipulation to a Global Title registered to SMSRelay, [where a security breach] allowed an attacker to access the investors' email and crypto accounts by capturing the login codes sent via SMS.”
(10) August Belmont and the NYC Subway
The story of 1800s financier August Belmont and his role in the construction of the NYC subway: “The Rapid Transit Subway Construction Company was formed in 1900 to carry out the work. Another company, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company or IRT, which would actually operate the system, was established two years later. The company operated the subway free of [city] taxation and had the right to collect a five-cent fare from all passengers. [The] IRT was responsible for paying the interest charges on the [loan from the city], which amounted to 3.25% per year. [The] subway caused Belmont great financial trouble. Fares were fixed at five cents [but] inflation after WWI meant that the cost of inputs like coal and wages were rising. By 1921, Belmont’s Interborough Rapid Transit Company was bankrupt.”
(0) Miscellaneous
The continued success of Walmart. Backstory of the egg shortage. The financial post-mortem on Thrasio. Shenzhen’s stolen iPhone building. Inside scoop on the Builder.ai fraud. Another Duolingo interview. Obvious critique of stablecoins for FX. Predicting SCOTUS decisions with AI. Selling geckos online. Deepfake marketing in healthcare. Consensus was wrong about tariffs and inflation. The crackdown on NYC biking. The mess of addresses in India. Election results in Suriname. Underrated societal harm of noise. Continued decline of Germany’s work ethic. Interview with Applovin CEO. The history of the National Guard. Wild corporate espionage. France’s Catholic comeback. Wagner Group stabilized the Central African Republic. Underrated Buffett anecdote.