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.
Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys. Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour takes a different approach, seeing the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning.
Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys... seeing the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trump came in and said you guys are amateurs. I'm going to make millions not thousands. And then just the brazeness of saying this is tantamount to — Republicans will always say and it's accurate that Speaker Pelosi up 600% in the past 10 years the S&P up 200% that clearly she had access to non to material non-public information but she didn't start a wire service selling her inside information.
I don't think a politician should be able to change their net worth a whole heck of a lot by getting into office. Like whatever your net worth is when you get into office, put in inflation, put in normal salary, and you should probably leave office with a similar.
A good nepo husband knows to like let his wife be a star, but so many men struggle with that and they like want a piece of the pie and then they they drown the whole pie.
This is the slow hollowing out of institutions. It happens gradually. And so I actually think even if to folks like us it was clear that there was a political crisis, it wasn't clear exactly what to do about it because the threat looks different now.
Authoritarianism doesn't look like what it used to look like. It's not your grandmother's authoritarianism. It doesn't ride into town on the back of a coup in the way that it used to, in the way that so many of us have in our imagination. This is the slow hollowing out of institutions. It happens gradually.
Any information being covered is in favor of whoever covers. What they afraid is did they do the right job or is their control legitimate? So, they have to cover up all the information.
You may think you don't do politics, but politics will do you. And so, choose to engage, use the power of your vote, the power of your voice, or you can step back, but that doesn't mean you may be opting out, but politics is not opting out of influencing your own life.
Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received some subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.
When morals are put aside where ideology doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is that you support the leader, you know, so there is a breakdown in society, and and then suddenly anything goes, and I think it's a very dangerous path to take.
My country elected a man who believes in nothing but loyalty. He doesn't care what you do as long as you don't cross him. So, why fight him? Who am I to tell people they're wrong for believing in a man who makes them feel seen?
The whole world runs on documents that no one reads. Every corporation, every government, every institution has stacks of documents that theoretically govern how things work, but in practice, the actual power comes from whoever controls the interpretation of those documents.
America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can't hold those two views together without contradiction. Without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the nation.
The best way to increase your stock price in America today isn't to improve your product or to sell more goods and services. It is to have your stock anointed by the high priest of American markets, aka the president. If you can do that, great things will occur.
Some people got in his ear and just said, "You know what you know you need to say to Donald Trump to persuade him," which is, "You will be the greatest leader since Napoleon." And painted a picture of Trump Towers being built in Shiraz and Tehran and that sort of thing.
It's not a conflict of interest. It's a business model. And essentially what you have in America is slowly but surely we're monetizing everything. We monetize healthcare. We monetize education. We monetize uh enragement online. And now the president is monetizing the full faith and credit and power of the White House.
2mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
