Odd Lots

Traders and market watchers around the world started talking about a crypto platform called Hyperliquid earlier this year, when speculators used markets built on top of it to trade crude oil after war broke out in Iran. What Hyperliquid allowed for was a 24/7 market on the blockchain. Then in August, President Trump said the CFTC was working on bringing “Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion.” Hyperliquid currently operates outside the US, but that hasn't stopped it from growing prodigiously in the last year. Jeff Yan, CEO and co-founder of Hyperliquid Labs, joins us today to explain how exactly the platform works: He walks us through the protocol he and his co-founders built, the ecology of actors and assets that are tied to Hyperliquid (like the platform's cryptocurrency HYPE), how perps are bought and sold on the platform, he explains what a blockchain oracle is, and he discusses what has to happen for Hyperliquid to start operating in the US.
Read more:Strategy’s Saylor Sees Bitcoin Moving Back Up Beyond $100,000 A $90 Million Spyware Hack Sparks Review of Crypto Wallet Sales
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Since the Hugging Face incident, concerns over AI doomsday scenarios has entered the mainstream. But of course, some people have been warning about this for years, long before LLMs or ChatGPT. In their 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky spelled out their vision of humanity's inevitable demise once superintelligent AI is built. In this episode, we speak with Soares, who serves as president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, about why he believes it's impossible to "align" superintelligent AI, and how exactly the technology can and will go rogue as it gets more and more advanced.
Read more:Anthropic IPO Investors Struggle to Put a Price on Rogue AI RiskAI Bubble Risks Worst S&P 500 Crash Since 2008, Strategist Says
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Last month, OpenAI announced that it had produced an AI-generated proof for the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the most famous unsolved questions in mathematics. LLMs used to be bad at counting, but now they are solving math problems that have stumped humans for decades. Meanwhile, at universities, the problem of AI in education continues: Now that LLMs can do a student's homework, teachers are struggling to keep up. It is clear that AI is very quickly changing how math is taught and how it is practiced by professionals. On this episode, Justin Solomon, who is the associate dean for engineering education at MIT, gives us a primer on how mathematicians (both pure and applied) are responding to all the advances in AI. He also explains what exactly the Navier-Stokes problem is and why the OpenAI proof is hard for even the pros to parse, what movies get wrong about how mathematicians do their jobs, and how he's changing his pedagogical approach in the age of AI.

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In so many conversations, there's a widespread view that Europe is falling behind. Or it's in trouble. It has been two years since the publication of the Draghi report and the problems the report identified about European competitiveness are far from solved: Demographic challenges, rising energy costs, and a lagging tech sector still cast a shadow over Europe. But according to the economist and policy analyst Dominik Leusder (who also writes the Leusder of Last Resort Substack) the Draghi report might have mismeasured the true scale of Europe's issues, and he asks if the popular narrative of European decline is an accurate one. We also speak about whether Europe needs a frontier AI model, why long, wine-soaked lunches are not a good way to measure productivity, and the state of Europe's vexed relationship with China as a trade partner and competitor.
Read more:
EU Plans Import Cap on Chinese Hybrid Cars to Protect Sector
Alibaba’s Joe Tsai Says Open Source Is Europe’s Best Shot at AI
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We all know that US Treasury yields have been surging, alongside bond yields all around the world. So what explains the selloff and does this mean that bonds are becoming fundamentally riskier? What happens if investors can no longer hedge stocks with government debt? And how do expectations of the Federal Reserve's "reaction function" fit in? In this episode, we speak with Carolin Pflueger, associate professor at the University of Chicago and a resident scholar at the Chicago Fed Bank, about her work on the bond market and central banks. We discuss why bonds have become more stock-like, what that means for yields, and the role of the Fed's credibility in making bonds “bond-like” again.
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