GEUST ANNOUNCEMENT: Extremely excited that @milkkarten will be joining us on stage at our Odd Lots LIVE LA event next month. Absolutely one of my favorite reads, on all things social media. Get your tickets here!

Lara Trump DISTURBED By Hasan Piker's ODD Statement Radical streamer, Hasan Piker made an odd statement recently and it left Lara Trump shocked. Want Your FREE Gold & Silver Kit? VISIT

Digital Foundry has criticized Activision’s new Call of Duty: Black Ops port for PS4 and PS5, saying it doesn’t make good use of the PS5’s hardware. The PS5 version runs at 1080p at 60 FPS, still has no anti-aliasing, and doesn’t include the visual improvements many players expected from a native PS5 release. “A 1080p60 presentation would be potentially acceptable for the PS4 version… but for a brand new PS5 conversion, it’s disappointingly poor and well below what the hardware is capable of.” The team also called the port “a deeply odd state of affairs,” saying it’s surprising that so few improvements were made for modern hardware.

Iran state TV celebrates Lindsey Graham’s passing: “Lindsey Graham is dead and in hell. We congratulate the Iranian nation on the death of the anti-Iran American senator” 5 days ago they threatened to kill him. Now he’s suddenly died. It’s all very odd.

Over the past decades since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran's economy has completely transformed to resemble what @yjtorbati and @bozorgmehr describe as a "mafia state." On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, they join @tracyalloway and @TheStalwart to discuss how the Iranian economy actually works and how startups and business owners have to navigate the network of various factions within political and religious leadership. Listen at or watch at

I recently spoke at the Sundance Film Festival on a panel about AI. Sundance is an annual gathering of filmmakers and movie buffs that serves as the premier showcase for independent films in the United States. Knowing that many people in Hollywood are extremely uncomfortable about AI, I decided to immerse myself for a day in this community to learn about their anxieties and build bridges. I’m grateful to Daniel Dae Kim @danieldaekim, an actor/producer/director I’ve come to respect deeply for his artistic and social work, for organizing the panel, which also included Daniel, Dan Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Janet Yang. I found myself surrounded by award-winning filmmakers and definitely felt like the odd person out! First, Hollywood has many reasons to be uncomfortable with AI. People from the entertainment industry come from a very different culture than many who work in tech, and this drives deep differences in what we focus on and what we value. A significant subset of Hollywood is concerned that: - AI companies are taking their work to learn from it without consent and compensation. Whereas the software industry is used to open source and the open internet, Hollywood focuses much more on intellectual property, which underlies the core economic engines of the entertainment industry. - Powerful unions like SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) are deeply concerned about protecting the jobs of their members. When AI technology (or any other force) threatens the livelihoods of their members — like voice actors — they will fight mightily against potential job losses. - This wave of technological change feels forced on them more than previous waves, where they felt more free to adopt or reject the technology. For example, celebrities felt like it was up to them whether to use social media. In contrast, negative messaging from some AI leaders who present the technology as unstoppable, perhaps even a dangerous force that will wipe out many jobs, has not encouraged enthusiastic adoption. Having said that, Hollywood is under no illusions that AI will change entertainment, and that if Hollywood does not adapt, perhaps some other place will become the new center for entertainment. The entertainment industry is no stranger to technology change. Radio, TV, computer graphics special effects, video streaming, and social media transformed the industry. But the path to navigating AI’s transformation is still unclear, and organizations like the new Creators Coalition on AI are trying to stake out positions. Unfortunately, Hollywood’s negative sentiment toward AI also means it will produce a lot more Terminator-like movies that portray AI as more dangerous than helpful, and this hurts beneficial AI adoption as well. The interests of AI and Hollywood are not always aligned. (Every time I speak in a group like this as the “AI representative,” I can count on being asked very hard questions.) Most of us in tech would prefer a more open internet and more permissive use of creative works. But there is also much common ground, for example in wanting guardrails against deepfakes and a smooth transition for those whose jobs are displaced, perhaps via upskilling. Storytelling is hard. I’m optimistic that AI tools like Veo, Sora, Runway, Kling, Ray, Hailuo, and many others can make video creation easier for millions of people. I hope Hollywood and AI developers will find more opportunities to collaborate, find more common ground, and also steer our projects toward outcomes that are win-win for as many parties as possible. [Original text: ]

🚨 UPDATE: JD Vance is OBLITERATING pro-Sharia Abdul El Sayed after he attacked Usha Vance "It made me angry — but I also find the guy a bit of a JOKE. He's always talking about my wife, my grandmother, various people in my family. It's like, dude, if you want to attack me, feel free to attack me I'm the vice president of the United States." "But I don't know who his wife is, I'm sure she's a lovely person!" "Just keep families out of this stuff." "And what I find so just odd about the guy is any time that El Sayed says something crazy or something debatable or something we push back on, he says, well, if you don't like this, you're a white supremacist." "If you don't like Sharia law in the United States, you're a white supremacist."

I'm a cardiologist. For most of my career, when a patient with atrial fibrillation asked about coffee, the reflex answer was: cut it out. The American Heart Association just published a scientific statement saying we were wrong. Released today in Circulation. The conclusion: up to 400mg of caffeine a day — about five 8-ounce cups of coffee — is safe for most adults, and is associated with lower risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, hypertension, and type 2 diabetes. Not neutral. Lower. Think about how strange that is. Caffeine is a stimulant. It transiently raises heart rate and blood pressure. Generations of cardiologists — myself included — told palpitation patients and AFib patients to quit. The acute effect felt so obviously bad that nobody questioned it. The long-term data says the opposite. Some details worth knowing: The strongest signal is metabolic. Coffee's association with lower type 2 diabetes risk is the most consistent finding in the entire literature, and it holds for decaf too — which tells you the benefit isn't only the caffeine. It's the chlorogenic acids and polyphenols in the bean. The blood pressure finding is genuinely odd. One to three cups a day was associated with a slightly higher risk of developing hypertension in people with optimal pressure — but more than three cups was associated with lower risk. That's the kind of non-linear result that should make everyone humble about simple stories. Energy drinks are not coffee. The statement draws a hard line. Energy shots can pack three to four times more caffeine per ounce than brewed coffee, and high doses are linked to arrhythmias even in healthy adults under 30. Same molecule, entirely different risk profile. Your additives can erase the benefit. The statement is explicit that this applies to coffee without added sugars and fillers. A 400-calorie sweetened coffee drink is a dessert wearing a lab coat. You cannot sugar your way to cardiovascular protection. And the honest caveat, which the AHA itself leads with: this evidence is overwhelmingly observational. Healthier people may simply drink more coffee. That's why the AHA didn't include caffeine in its 2026 dietary guidance at all — the data isn't rigorous enough for a formal recommendation. And individual response varies enormously based on genetics, habitual intake, and comorbidities. So here's my practical read. If you drink 2-5 cups of black coffee, feel fine, and sleep well — the evidence no longer supports telling you to stop. If it gives you palpitations, anxiety, insomnia, or reflux, your body is giving you better data than any cohort study. Twenty years of "cut back on the coffee" just quietly ended. Sometimes the best thing medicine can do is admit what it got wrong.

Buried Alive for Eight Years, In the World's Most Surveilled Nation, No One Came. She was a teenager when she vanished. She surfaced more than thirty years later with cigarette burns on her neck, no idea how old she was, and no record that the state had ever known she existed. Wang Xiaohong was abducted from Inner Mongolia and sold to an aging man in the mountains of Sichuan's Daliangshan. For eight and a half years he locked her in a basement and forced her to be his "wife." A single small window sat high on the wall. Her food came through an iron slot, like a prison cell. When she resisted, he pressed lit cigarettes into her arms and throat, scars she still carries. She freed herself. One night her captor came home drunk; she shoved him inside, bolted the door, and ran over one mountain after another. What followed was not rescue but more punishment, odd jobs in Xi'an, a marriage in Henan that turned violent, another escape, then more than a decade pasting shipping labels in a Guangdong workshop, "living one day at a time." She had no ID the entire time. The state that scans every face at every train station never once noticed she was gone. Her family found her in August 2026, not through police, but through a volunteer group and a delivery driver who recognized her from an online video. Her cousin drove more than 2,000 kilometers to bring her home. Beijing pours vast sums into "stability maintenance," by some estimates rivaling its defense budget. Cameras blanket every street; algorithms log every citizen. Yet the trafficking of women and children still flourishes, tearing thousands of families apart. In 2022, the "chained woman" of Xuzhou, shackled by the neck, mother of eight, forced the question this case revives: how does a regime that sees everything miss this? Many Chinese no longer believe it's an accident. A government funded by their taxes, they say, does not protect them, and too often, local officials profit from the very networks they are paid to destroy. She survived. The system that failed her never blinked. ACI — Aric Chen | Insights