It is quite possible that the Supreme Soviet uh the legislature of the Soviet communist system had a higher turnover in its legislature than the House of Representatives currently has in in among itself.
I've called him a menace, an addict, and a traitor to the west. And what triggers him is that I say one group of shareholders might be getting taken advantage of. That's that's what he decides.
The Republican party no longer exists. It has become a mega movement and it's tied itself to Donald Trump, which was always a bad idea. He was always mercurial. He was always uh really a salesman more than a politician.
My biggest fear is that people use the eventual regulation of AI at some level, which which is going to happen, as an excuse to go into, you know, what we call on on Substack the librarian function, the knowledge function of AI. Because if power can get its hands on the ability to tell everybody what is true, that is, you know, the kind of power that totalitarians would have dreamt of.
The biggest threat to social stability isn't immigration or aging. It's a system that rewards people for what they already have and punishes those who are just starting out.
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.
I think she had a real sense that um women particularly were subject to social forces that acted upon their lives in ways in which they couldn't control and often were quite dangerous.
So fascism is about the consolidation of state power and state authority and coercion and the minimizing of democracy. And when the state or a powerful institution or a powerful person is pushing fitness, it can seem harmless. It can seem anodine. It can seem maybe even like a positive good.
So you have an individual controlling a company and essentially he has supranational capabilities. And what we discovered is that when you outsource that capability to an individual, you're at the mercy of their whims.
Prince Charles saying to me, "We'll forget her soon enough," explains why I end my final sentences that Diana will never be extinguished from our minds. It's a direct counter to what I had heard on that phone call.
one stat that just floored me is that in 2025, SpaceX launched about 80% of the things in orbit, 80%. And its next closest competitor was not Jeff Bezos. It was the government of China. So you have an individual controlling a company. And essentially, he has supranational capabilities.
The persistence of that belief goes beyond a lot of conspiracy theories in part because the Epstein story has involved very real cover-ups. In many cases, what Epstein was actually doing and the records documenting it were deliberately hidden by powerful people and institutions that could have been ruined if the truth came out.
One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire.
Both Google and Facebook threatened to leave Australia over the proposed law, until Google cut a deal with Australia's biggest news organizations, and Facebook turned off their access to the news feed entirely. After a few days, the law was slightly changed, Facebook also paid the money, and access was restored.
Before you give the government new powers, try the Munger Test: cross out "government" and insert the name of the politician you trust least. Then see if you still like the idea.
"One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire."
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.
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.
What we saw was China received the full force of American economic coercion, and for the first time, could completely turn that force back against the U.S. and get the U.S. to back down. President Xi wasn't just playing his cards. He was playing the player, as we might say in poker, and he figured out Trump's number.
Roy loved just doing favors for influential people. And he told his good friend, the gossip columnist, Cindy Adams, that this young Donald Trump was going to go someplace and maybe even to the White House someday.
The NFL tried to send a very clear message that if you protest police killing Black folks, if you fight for a better society and better community, we're going to try to take your career from you. I don't accept that that is going to be the end outcome of this, and will do everything I can to make sure that I change that narrative.
And basically, what they said was, it doesn't really matter if he's taking a salary or he's taking a salary of a dollar a year or whatever, it doesn't matter. What matters is that he's acting as a government employee. He's acting as an agent of the United States government. And that in every conceivable way, Jared Kushner is a government employee, whether he's making money at it or not.
Bullying is not conflict. It's not a debate, it's not criticism, it's not humor that you're too sensitive to take well. It is a deliberately targeted, serial, escalating pattern of attacks carried out by multiple people, and it's intended to destroy a person's reputation and their ability to contribute.
I would only be into this if he was like, 'All the money that I've earned from crypto while I've been in the White House, I'm just going to give that to people for $5,000. I don't want to give him taxpayer money.'
The reason I don't want to be a judge is a principal judge stays out of politics and stays out of policy fights. And if I were a judge, I'd do that. I'd stay out of those fights. I don't want to stay out of those fights.
Walter lays out the five step playbook that carried the Dutch, then the British, then America to global leadership, and why the same pattern keeps beating centralized continental powers.
I think at the time when Trump and she met in May, I think I was saying that I thought China was now the senior partner in this relationship and uh you know that was somewhat controversial at the time. Some people contacted me to say that that was not the case. I think that's even more the case now than uh at that time.
A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it always is a product of planning and genius. Is it because they are lucky that [great men] become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck. What is luck? The ability to exploit accidents: The vulgar would call this luck, but in fact it is the characteristic of genius.
Money ultimately decides what gets built. Money decides what survives. Money decides what future becomes possible. So change where money goes and who controls it -- then you change what becomes possible.
And in the end, all it took was a spark, and then suddenly you had this enormous rebellion, almost overnight. It was extraordinary. And within days, a huge army mob gathering, whatever you want to call them, tens and tens of thousands of people marching on London.
The knowledge has now been democratized where whether it's a activist, an e-crime actor, a nation state, they're they're all now equivalent because of agentic technology. And we called it the rise of the agent state — meaning that now postnation state, the apex predator is now the agent state.
When the board coup happened in 2023, Brockman was so incensed that he quit immediately. He and Altman were going to start their own thing, or were potentially going to lead a department at Microsoft. Brockman said, 'Okay, if Sam goes, I go.' That's when he became Sam's right hand in a new way. Before that, he was just one of the many execs. They were close, but the board coup made them closer than ever. That's also what made Sam know that he could trust him in a new way and thereby later greenlight him getting more power.
While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI's most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession.
By stabbing himself, he's proven how brave he is and yet has uh not gone to the extreme of hurting somebody, which would have lead to trouble because he's the weakest member. He's the poor one. They are rich and if he had hurt them, there would have been severe repercussions. It's a very smart move.
Everything in Russia is a vertical of power leading up to Putin... Putin is scared of his own society. He's scared of that mobilization. In Ukraine, people had to step up because the state was... didn't have the capacity... and yet Ukraine keeps going. Yes, with support, because it's crowdsourced. It's networked. There's flattened hierarchies.
After he goes on about, you know, the need to decentralize power and checks and balances to all that, go look at how they built that data center in Louisiana. It was something like 50 non-disclosure agreements. The arrival of the data center came as a massive shock to that community, right? So when push comes to shove, they're doing what every other company does, which is building data as data centers as secretly as possible and then writing essays about how the future is for everyone.
Everything in Russia is a vertical of power leading up to Putin. And I think in the way that Ann has just laid out what's happening in Ukraine, in this case, strong society is beating out strong state. And there's a lesson in that.
It's almost like a child's idea of how power works. It's a you know a kind of elementary school vision of how you project power. You just bomb stuff and then you win. That is not how the United States became uh the world's most influential country and it's not how we achieve how we achieved good outcomes in the past.
Ideology doesn't matter. I mean the Chinese are communists and the Russians are nationalists and the Iranians have a theocracy. You know what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world. In other words, the language of rights, the language of rule of law, the language of separation of powers.
You know what binds all of them is rather their dislike of and fear of the language of the liberal world. In other words, the language of rights, the language of rule of law, the language of separation of powers. You know, all of these are states that are seeking to create a kind of total environment where the regime or the leader or the ruling party controls all media, all conversation, um makes all the decisions, uh controls the court system.
All you have to be is a charismatic fraud and uh be incapable of feeling shame no matter how many times you're proven wrong and uh you know, you our politics will will promote you to somewhere near the top of the heap.
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Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
