If you look at where the Democrats are right now, from those you would call the more moderate ones to the progressive ones, they still are extraordinarily centrist to the point that most of them are to the right of Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Republican, of course. And what I'm referring to especially there is with Eisenhower's upper tax bracket at 91 or 92% with his call for universal health care, with all these things that coming out of World War II were absolutely centrist positions.
You don't have to choose between billionaires and universal healthcare. You can have a society with both. You know, these societies have high tax rates and produce incredible companies that go on to make billions of dollars and trillion dollar market caps and they have billionaires. The two are not mutually exclusive in America.
Soundtrack for the apocalypse is silent. We felt the weight of that total absence of sound when we arrived in the devastated neighborhoods of Altadena and the Palisades after the January 2025 firestorm. There was no sound of cars or children or people or pool pumps or electricity across the lines. Even the birds were gone.
Most of us have had the experience of being in a new place and noticing things we'd never seen before — a gorgeous mural on the side of a building, a family of ducks in a pond, the way light filters through leaves. But over time, as a place becomes familiar, we stop seeing it. We go on autopilot. The same thing can happen with people.
the core idea is that no single company — or individual billionaire — can amass too much power and control over our social networks and the conversations that happen on them.
The thing that I find most interesting and surprising about the current moment is that I think most people would say that the most impactful thing that's ever happened to humanity is starting to happen, and yet most people don't really believe it. They know it, but they don't believe it in their gut.
Most of us go through life thinking of ourselves as ordinary. We assume that our experiences, our feelings, our struggles are common — that what happens to us happens to everyone. But this assumption, however comforting, may be costing us dearly.
You can also argue it's a real excuse to say, "I don't actually have to learn anything. I don't have to go to college. I don't have to learn to be a negotiator. I don't have to work my way up. I can just say that God favors me and therefore I can do it all without putting in any hard work, which is really antithetical to what America has stood for until pretty recently."
Trump is the equivalent of political Chernobyl. Name anybody from his first administration with the exception of Ambassador Haley, who I think will be a formidable uh formidable candidate to perhaps on the Republican side, no one survives Trump. Everyone gets political leukemia if they're around him long enough.
Most of us know that we're similar to others in many ways, and different from others in many ways. What psychologist Brian Little has found is that there is something that makes each of us truly unique — not just different from others in degree, but different from everyone else who has ever lived. That something is the particular combination of all our traits.
The last 100 years of scientific and technological progress have been incredible, but I think the next 20 years will be the most transformative in human history. I believe we are on the verge of creating AI systems that will compress decades of scientific progress into just a few years, potentially solving diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia, defeating mental health crises, and creating economic growth in a way that could lift billions out of poverty.
Most of us know, of course, that we are not actually the center of the universe. But we often act as if we are. We notice when we are the victim of rudeness, but we rarely think about all the times when other people were rude and we weren't around to experience it.
What's interesting here is that we're seeing a ban on a Chinese technology that is so nascent that you don't have a coalition of companies that are saying whoa whoa whoa I've deployed my business is built on top of unitry. I know there's geopolitical considerations, but I can't make the cars that I make without them. I can't run my business without them.
I think the thing I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two fundamental inputs to the universe, and if we have basically unlimited intelligence, we can hopefully also get to basically unlimited energy. And then, from those two things, you can just make so much.
I think we're at an inflection point where the economic growth of the next 15 years could be larger than all prior economic growth combined. And if that's true, and I believe it is, the question of how that wealth gets distributed really matters.
Pain is not just a signal of damage — it is also a prediction. The brain is constantly trying to figure out what is happening in the body, and sometimes it gets it wrong, generating pain even when there is no ongoing tissue damage.
This to me feels like we have the most expensive boomerang in history and that is we have essentially paid a ton of money and credibility in terms of US brand equity such that we could get a worse deal than we had with the JCPOA.
I think in this moment we have a cabal a group of people in power who no longer have any faith in democracy and are really actively trying to destroy it and to destroy the the uh post-World War II uh rules-based international order in part so they can carve up the globe again in a way that looks very much like that late 19th, early 20th 20th century period.
I think if we have a quest narrative, whether it's in a poem, a novel, or a movie, we need to have a protagonist with detailed, believable motivation. He needs to want something. So the fact that these desires seem to be stripped from Odysseus, he doesn't seem to want food, doesn't seem to want sex. What does he want?
If rules are an issue, we can change them for you. We can connect you with any relevant decision maker to break those rules. We will not be upset if you make mistakes, and we will support you on every winning bet you make.
The smart guys get in early, start buying, see the prices go up, buy some more. And then less smart guys take note and say, I want to do that. I want to be up 400% this year, too. And then but by the weakest hands are buying at the top. So they're also the first to sell. The first to panic. And it just creates this like, you know, every bubble's sort of the same. You have this euphoria, this peak, and then, you know, everyone sort of panics at once.
Trade touches virtually every part of or most of our lives. So, our mission is to fix globalization, but we're not retreating from globalization. We're leaning into it. But we believe that globalization needs to be fixed. It needs to be more trusted, more secure, more fair.
Written when he was nearly 90, the memoir reads like a lifelong diary of how to think about opportunity, courage, cost control, resourcefulness, and adaptation.
I think the thing that I've always believed most deeply is that intelligence is the meta-resource. If you have intelligence, you can figure out how to get all of the other resources. And if you can massively increase the amount of intelligence working on the world's problems, you can unlock solutions that we can't even currently imagine.
Most of us think of our brains as recorders of experience — cameras that capture life as it is. But the brain is less like a camera and more like an editor, constantly making choices about what to include and what to cut. It doesn't just record what happens to us; it constructs a version of reality shaped by our expectations, our desires, and our fears.
I went to the library and I looked everywhere and talked to the research librarians for books about families coming through cancer, and it just wasn't there. This is 1977. You didn't say the word cancer.
I think we're at the beginning of an era where we're going to be able to just have much more. And I think that the thing that I would most want people to understand is that technological progress is the main driver of that, and that we should think about how to accelerate it rather than slow it down, because the compounding effects of even slightly faster scientific progress are enormous.
We're in the middle of what you would call a moral inversion, where some of the worst people are getting the most attention and getting the furthest ahead. It almost looks like it's a bad strategy to be honest, to try to work hard, to try to do things at the the right pace, right? Everyone's looking for shortcuts. Everyone's seeing scams and sketchiness as as a success strategy, one that you can get away with.
Most of us can point to experiences that made us who we are — a teacher who believed in us, a parent who didn't, a move to a new city that forced us to reinvent ourselves. But psychologists have found that we dramatically underestimate how much we will change in the future, even as we readily acknowledge how much we've changed in the past.
It's not just being a con man, which is something else. It's I am cheating the system. And that to me, I think illuminates not only Trump, but also many of the people who follow him because they're like, "Yeah, he's just a smart businessman. This is the way you're supposed to do business." And in a way that's a real denigration and destruction of what the system is, which is the American people trying to make rules under which to govern themselves.
It's a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle like an elaborate 4th of July fireworks display with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.
Basketball is just universal. It's been a universal language for so long, you know, and it all started and a lot of people know this about me, you know, I'm big Kobe fan and I just wanted to meet Kobe, right? And I'm here.
Usually governments are a hurdle or they take time or they're bureaucratic. We are hearing from our leaders that we can actually do this. This is music to our ears.
When AI stocks draw down dramatically while AI technical business fundamentals are improving, you should expect our fund to be down a lot. We embrace volatility, but it should never jeopardize the fund.
The economic system of the world is roughly a zero-sum battle for existing resources, and the story of the next hundred years is making the transition to a world where there's enough for everyone and we're no longer fighting each other for pieces of a very slowly growing pie. I think there's a chance that AI and cheap energy together create a qualitatively different world where we have enough resources that it's not a zero-sum game anymore.
Most of us recognize that we were shaped by the circumstances of our births. But we rarely consider that all the people who matter to us were also shaped by their circumstances. We assume the people in our lives have freely chosen their values, beliefs, and behaviors, when in fact all of these were shaped by their experiences and the brains they happened to be born with.
To be your authentic self at work is um a level of like vulnerability and putting yourself forward when like you're sacrificing time with your family, with your community, mentally with yourself. And these jobs expect so much from you, but you are ultimately disposable.
But if we're all in this together for the good, we're definitely all in this together for the bad. Heat waves, wildfire smog, explosive diarrhea, political minations between the US and FIFA. I can't help but wonder, are we the drama?
Corruption begets corruption. When other people are lying, when other people are cheating, when you see it happening all around you, people shrug their shoulders. They they say, "What the hell?" Right? We join in because we see other people doing it.
I think we will look back on this moment as the single most important turning point in the history of human civilization. Truly, not hyperbole. The transition from a world where there was a fixed amount of intelligence and energy to a world where both of those are effectively unlimited is so profound that I don't think we are able to fully conceptualize what it will mean.
Most of us feel we have an ordinary life. We are not famous, we have not discovered a cure for cancer or written a great novel. But the psychologist Brian Little argues this view is mistaken. Our lives are filled with what he calls 'personal projects' — the goals and pursuits that animate us and give meaning to our existence.
When you're hiding a bigger number than what you're reporting, that's not accounting, it's concealment. And Meta's off-balance debt is $420 billion, which is 3x what they report. That's not a rounding error, that's a second company hiding liabilities inside of the first company.
I'm forced into the choice of having, you know, two actors who can probably half sing or two musicians who can half act. And he says, I'd rather, if it's a musical film, I'd rather have two musicians who can half act. And I'll get a performance out of you. And he says, as long as the music's convincing, I think people are going to believe it.
My father got sick with a metastasized melanoma in his brain when I was 23, and he was still the center of our family. My brothers and I just adored him. He was like our higher power.
The thing that I keep coming back to is that intelligence and energy are the two inputs to wealth creation. And for most of human history, we've had a very fixed amount of each. But if we can take the cap off of intelligence — if we can have, you know, billions of agents running around solving problems — the potential upside here is just staggering.
2d ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
