Doug Vos

Joe Biden surrounded himself with people who embraced modern monetary theory, a heterodox academic fad that taught you could write as many blank checks as you liked without the consequence of inflation. Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, warned Democrats not to go down that road. Conservative economists warned Democrats not to go down that road. Biden listened instead to the modern monetary theorists and their loud defenders online, ultimately signing a $1.9 trillion spending bill on top of everything else, and gave the country inflation that peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022. Democrats paid for it at the ballot box. Unfortunately, President Trump has made a similar mistake. He has surrounded himself with men who staked out heterodox views on the economy decades ago and now treat his administration as a laboratory. Peter Navarro has spent his career pushing trade theories that nearly the entire economics profession rejects, and he once propped up his own books by quoting an expert named Ron Vara, who turned out to be Peter Navarro. Outside the White House, Oren Cass, a lawyer and former management consultant with no formal training in economics, founded a think tank, gave himself the title of chief economist, and has become the most prominent defender of the tariffs on the right. Around them is a chorus of loud social media defenders who insist tariffs are a tax on foreigners. The MMT crowd promised that massive spending would not cause inflation. It did. The tariff crowd promised that tariffs would not raise prices or hurt wages. They did both. We no longer have to argue about it as a matter of theory. We have the data. The tariffs raised prices and held down wages. The administration now refuses to change course. That is arrogance. It is also bad politics. The tariff regime has turned into a favor generator, with exemptions going to whoever hires the right lobbyist. Voters now rank corruption as a top concern for the first time in a generation. Republicans are heading into a midterm with voters angry about prices, angry about corruption, and trusting Democrats more than Republicans on the economy. Much of that is self-inflicted, and the tariffs are the biggest self-inflicted wound of all. ewerickson.substack.com/i/21…

“The Miracle” Premieres Now: I gave this film everything I had. Pushed myself creatively and technically, experimented a ton with new tools + models and at times got stuck, started over and wondered if I could pull it off. Excited + nervous to finally share it with you. Enjoy!

IF YOU HAVE BEEN HOLDING OFF ON HERMES AGENT BECAUSE OF API COSTS, READ THIS FIRST. Four real ways to run it for free. Local, through Ollama, complete privacy and no rate limits. Cloud, through free tiers from Groq, OpenRouter, or NVIDIA NIM, no card required. A subscription you already have, GitHub Copilot connects natively. A fallback configuration so a rate limit on one provider does not stop your whole session. Hermes Agent is free and open source. Now there is no excuse on the model side either. Bookmark this. Follow @cyrilXBT

Best GitHub repos to scrape any site without getting blocked: 1. Crawl4AI github.com/unclecode/crawl4a… 2. Firecrawl github.com/firecrawl/firecra… 3. Scrapy github.com/scrapy/scrapy 4. Crawlee github.com/apify/crawlee 5. Playwright github.com/microsoft/playwri… 6. Scrapegraph AI github.com/ScrapeGraphAI/Scr… 7. Browser Use github.com/browser-use/brows… 8. Katana github.com/projectdiscovery/… 9. Maxun github.com/getmaxun/maxun

Claude Code cannot read 300 files at once. So someone built a system that lets it control NotebookLM from the terminal instead. The results are wild. Here is the full workflow nobody is talking about: The Setup → Claude Code connects to NotebookLM via a command line interface → Claude searches YouTube, finds relevant videos, uploads them as sources automatically → NotebookLM processes up to 300 sources simultaneously and returns cited, grounded answers → Everything syncs back into your Obsidian vault with passage-level citations you can click to verify Why This Changes Research Forever → No more 20 browser tabs you never close → No more copy-pasting outputs into random notes → No more hallucinated answers with no sources to back them up → 60% of citations verified as strong matches in accuracy audits - answers are grounded in real data What Claude Can Do From the Terminal → Search YouTube for relevant videos on any topic and rank by relevance → Create a new NotebookLM notebook and add 20 sources in parallel automatically → Ask questions and export cited answers directly into Obsidian with wikilinks → Set custom personas per notebook - concise, no filler, no preamble → Generate audio overviews and save them as MP3 files into your vault → Build mind maps, flashcard decks, and research dashboards from your sources → Search arXiv for academic papers and feed them directly into NotebookLM → Upload competitor blog posts, podcast episodes, PDFs, and your own vault notes The Obsidian Output → Every answer arrives with clickable citations that link to the exact passage in the source video or article → Graph view shows connections between all 20 sources and the topics they share → Q&A log tracks every question asked and the grounded response received → Source dashboard shows citation frequency, topics extracted, and which questions each source answered Use Cases Worth Building Today → Academic research with arXiv papers, full citation traceability → Competitor analysis from their YouTube channels and blog posts → Company knowledge base for onboarding, new employees ask NotebookLM instead of interrupting teammates → Podcast research, feed 4-hour Lex Fridman episodes and ask what's new in AI this week → Personal second brain, 300 daily notes uploaded and queryable in one notebook Before this system existed you needed 20 tabs, hours of manual reading, and no guarantee the answers were real. Now you type one prompt in the terminal and Claude does all of it for you. The research stack of 2026 is not a browser. It is a terminal connected to everything