The tension is not whether it's shame or no shame. It's what is worthy of shame, what is not. And leadership is the ability to accept accountability, to accept the need for remediation. And we've gotten to the place where because we don't like the things that we get held accountable for, we just decide there's no accounting to be had.
You get to say what you want, he gets to say what he wants. The difference is when you're the president of the United States or the wealthiest man in the world and you have this cult-like following, I think you need to be a little bit more mindful of the potential knock-on effects of if you have a couple hundred million people that follow you religiously and have bought into your selfproclaimed views of yourself as a Jesus-like figure. You have to recognize that there's there's a non-zero probability that saying something like that about someone else might result in physical harm to them or their their family.
The companies building the most powerful models cannot be left to write their own safety rules, change those rules when they become inconvenient, and decide for themselves when a system is safe enough to release.
It tells the story of Sean Combs across the names he gave himself: Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy, Love, and the systems that allowed his alleged abuse to go on for decades.
I think the spectacle of P. Diddy Puff Daddy was bigger than these incidents that were popping up along the timeline with him, and he was able to overshadow any of these accusations, any of these lawsuits that came up, or police reports of minor infractions, and it just kind of kept getting bigger and bigger.
Rather than treating every AI failure as evidence of an alignment problem, he makes the case for familiar tools like cybersecurity, accountability, liability, market incentives, and stronger technical controls.
Impunity is the exercise of power without accountability or responsibility. And when we look at the death toll of civilians in conflict around the world, you can see that this is an age of impunity.
Although other people couldn't hold him to account, he could hold himself to account every day as he sat down and looked at the pages of his philosophy texts and the pages of his journal.
Are we proud of the way we show up? And is it financially attractive? If the answer is no to either, then we should either make the intervention to address the issue or get out.
The biggest thing I've learned is that in venture, your reputation is everything. You can't hide from your track record. Every investment you make, every founder you back, every check you write — it's all public information, and LPs are going to do their homework.
The internet doesn't have a speech problem. It has an accountability problem. And our fetishization for free speech and anonymity has resulted in a total lack of accountability.
It's not enough to say, "Well, I changed my mind." Or like, "Oh, this is bad. I'm out." It's like in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now.
You're going to take money out of my wallet and food off my family's plate in the middle of my job here when you don't know what you're talking about. You're going to blame me for something that is absolutely not true. And I think I was sick of being criticized by everyone because everyone wanted it to be something else.
I really wanted to answer this central question of like, is he good for Indian people? Is Mark Wayne Mullen's political career something that benefits Native Americans?
When you're handling a crisis, and this is a crisis, the death of civilians, especially children, is obviously pretty ugly. You acknowledge the issue, you take responsibility, and you try and overcorrect.
I know that any army private to general who did the same thing would have been held to account and I think it's very important as a leader that the leaders subject themselves to the same disciplines that they subject others to.
The only reason you do this is if you were putting somebody else's needs first. We see again and again doctors in these files bending or breaking the rules of their profession. And often they treated Epstein as if he was the real client.
8mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
