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dwarkesh.com
The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

Power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability. Trump is not powerful because his brain, considered in isolation, is the most effective optimization engine on Earth. He is powerful because the government which hundreds of millions of people consider legitimate gives him a lot of power.

— Dwarkesh Patel
2h ago
honest-broker.com
How to Tell If You're Living in a Binary Crisis

The key to effective teamwork is having a single enemy. Now here's something even uglier. The same team-building hostility is heating up over in the enemy's camp. That evil team is getting bigger and stronger because it hates you—and precisely because you're bonding with your own team.

5d ago
upstartsmedia.com
Meet The DJing a16z Alum Who Raised $30M For New VC Firm Worldbuild

There is so much noise in venture today, that actually leading with original thoughts can have a competitive advantage. We want other, larger platforms to view Worldbuild as a tastemaker for where they should be spending time six months, or 12 months from today.

1w ago
platformer.news
The Trump administration's AI doomer moment

Less than a year later, the administration's sneering dismissal of safety concerns has transformed into something that resembles a mild panic.

1w ago
longreads.com
All My Dad’s Sons

Dad heard about a team at a youth prison in West Virginia that was supposed to be better than us. He loaded us into the van one morning and we drove two hundred miles to play them. This was a maximum-security facility for juveniles, up in Salem. We had to be buzzed in through a thick steel door and then through another one and another, but they wouldn't let us into the gym. We could hear someone in there screaming. Then it was silent, and the door opened. On one end of the court, the other team was about to warm up, and on our end—where we were supposed to warm up—a kid was mopping a puddle of blood.

1w ago
3quarksdaily.com
Business Leaders Say Adapting to AI Is Essential to Survival

As AI tools become more widely used and increasingly specialized, many business leaders are trying to think quickly and creatively about how to best utilize this technology at nearly every level of their operations.

1w ago
noahpinion.blog
Scoring the Jensen-Dwarkesh debate

It's all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it's extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.

2w ago

The primary cause of failure in leadership is that men do not think enough. They trust to their memories and their passions, and act from them, when they ought to consult their understandings.

2w ago
stratechery.com
2026.17: He Came, He Saw, He Cooked

He was Apple's CEO longer than my son has been alive, and a year longer than Steve Jobs. That, needless to say, is worth reflection.

3w ago
stratechery.com
Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

3w ago

The best thing a company can do is to be a wonderful place to work and to create products and services that genuinely improve people's lives. Most companies optimize for the wrong thing—they optimize for quarterly earnings instead of for the long-term health of the business and the satisfaction of their customers.

4w ago
fs.blog
Mario Harik: Playing to Win

Mario shares how he uses real-time data and second-derivative thinking to make decisions, how he hires and develops A players (and the gut test that tells you who isn't one), how he runs meetings that surface the best thinking from the most junior person in the room, and why ego, complacency, and small goals quietly cap everything.

4w ago

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparent' ordinary people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

4w ago
noahpinion.blog
I told you this would end badly

I anticipated that Trump would be chaotic, dictatorial, and cruel, but I failed to anticipate how stupid he would be.

1mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
Scott Aaronson reviews the movie “The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist”

He tries to hear out every faction: first the AI existential risk people, then the AI optimists and accelerationists like "Beff Jezos," then the "stochastic parrot" / "current harms" people like Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru, and finally the AI company CEOs (Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis were the three who agreed to be interviewed), with Yuval Noah Harari showing up from time to time to insert deepities.

1mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
Upstarts Turns 1! Here's What's Next (With Your Help)

I'll be honest that building a new media brand, and continuing to work on high-quality journalism while growing a business, has been the most challenging, stressful and rewarding experience of my career so far.

1mo ago

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort over many years.

1mo ago

The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.

1mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for the outside world; a cult extracts value from insiders and gives it to the leader. Most startups fail not because the idea is bad, but because the founder confused the two.

2mo ago
jefftweedy
GEAR TALKIN'™ #23: White Amplifiers

There is an argument that without the organizational skills and production strategy Forrest brought to the table, Fender may have not been able to make the jump from a comparatively small builder to the mammoth industry leader it became.

2mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for people who are not going to work there. A cult is just a business where you worship the CEO.

2mo ago
longreads.com
Stay Classy

Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public service.

2mo ago

The one thing we ask is that the man who is not thinking should get out of the way of the man who is. The world wants to move forward, and if you're not moving with it, you're holding it back.

2mo ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #183

a small group of sufficiently talented and motivated people can change how the future plays out.

2mo ago
lennysnewsletter.com
How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model

After two decades of working inside companies like Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and supporting leaders at companies like Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Gamma, I've come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.

2mo ago
notboring.co
Weekly Dose of Optimism #183

If the people in that room succeed, America's next 250 years will be better than its first 250.

2mo ago
platformer.news
What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out?

It had taken Sutskever years to be able to put his finger on Altman's pattern of behavior — how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident. "Oh, I must have misspoken," Altman would say.

2mo ago
platformer.news
What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out?

how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident. "Oh, I must have misspoken," Altman would say. Sutskever felt that Altman was dishonest and causing chaos, which would be a problem for any CEO, but especially for one in charge of such potentially civilization-altering technology.

2mo ago
platformer.news
What is OpenAI going to do when the truth comes out?

It had taken Sutskever years to be able to put his finger on Altman's pattern of behavior — how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident.

2mo ago

The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.

2mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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