Billions of dollars. Millions of followers. Thousands of attendees. Half a dozen governments. And one idea whose time has come.

Jetpacks are now real. nitter.app/mmm_machiavelli/status…

Jetpacks are becoming real. nitter.app/HiraethResists/status/…

More like this.

This is a fall of the Berlin Wall moment. An end of the USSR moment. A far left leader admits he’s been lying. That it was all by design. That it was happening. And that it’s bad that it is.

The net result of FTX is that billions of dollars was stolen from crypto investors to give to Democrat-aligned politicians, nonprofits, and journalists. This is why there may be no prosecution.

Hardware is hard. That’s why Elon is by far the greatest founder of all time. Remember — countless startups die just while trying to put stationary beige boxes on desktops. Very smart people get crushed by supply chain disruptions, or China tariffs, or lockdowns, or shipping interruptions, or regulatory delays. Not Elon. He didn’t just survive financial crisis and coronavirus. He managed to build physical things in America while fighting the state and the laws of nature at the same time. Somehow he managed to simultaneously build not just a car company but a rocket company. Those don’t just have “moving parts”, they are a moving whole. The difficulty level here is insane. Hardware is completely different from software. One recall, just one serious bug, can destroy your company. If you are charging $50 for something that costs $40, and you need to recall and replace a million units, you’re usually dead. So just one of these companies — just Tesla, or just SpaceX — would be an incredible accomplishment for anyone. Even a very intelligent and hardworking person would have to live an incredibly boring, disciplined, focused life to possibly maintain the extremely low error rate needed to profitably ship such complex products. Not Elon. He did SpaceX and Tesla while having N children by K women. While also cofounding OpenAI and Neuralink and Boring Company. While fighting and defeating countless journalists, politicians, haters, and short sellers. And of course while buying Twitter, posting all the time, and building a following larger than almost any politician. The better you are, the better you understand how much better Elon is. If you’re good at math you appreciate Ramanujan’s greatness. If you’re good at basketball you respect how amazing Michael Jordan was. Elon is like that, for tech. Everyone in tech understands the sport we’re playing, and he really is the greatest of all time.

The full scope of what is happening is completely unprecedented in our lifetimes. The Trump executive orders were clearly meticulously planned to strike every single source of blue power, simultaneously, both in the US and abroad. A fusillade of legal cruise missiles.

I cofounded a clinical genomics company that sold for $375M You work at Buzzfeed

Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

Grok is the best integrated ChatGPT is the fastest Claude is the smartest Perplexity is best for web search Gemini handles the largest files

A memecoin is a zero-sum* lottery. There is no wealth creation. Every buy order is simply matched by a sell order. And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything. * It’s actually negative sum if the platform takes a cut.

Satya wins. Reflexes of a startup CEO. Resources of a trillion dollar company. Pulls this together in 48 hours from a cold start. Gets it signed and over the line before markets open.

France has 67.4M people. India has 1.38B people. But France has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and India does not. So why do people claim the world order is "democratic"?

How likely are you to be married by 30? Boomers: ~90% Zoomers: ~30% This is civilizational.

I just burned a million to tell you they're printing trillions.

To be a Democrat one must believe Kamala is smart and Elon is dumb.

I don't think people realize that there is no normal to go back to anymore.

If the logic is that women must be 50% of boards, why shouldn’t Republicans also be 50% of boards? They sure are an underrepresented minority in tech.

Many founders aren’t hiring from Harvard. They’re hiring from Twitter.

If Republicans were smart, they would propose a bill to pay down student loans by seizing college endowments. The newly debt-free would be able to afford families, turning them Republican. And universities would pay for the debt they saddled students with, not taxpayers.

The first $100,000 is the hardest.

The dollar is losing reserve currency status. It’s down to 42% of global reserves, and gold is rapidly rising.

FRANCE IS FOR CRIME, AGAINST FREEDOM François asks a good question. My answer is: France doesn't care about crime, they care about control. 1) First, Macron hasn't wiped out crime among 70M Frenchmen with all the power of the French State. So it's completely unreasonable to expect Durov to wipe out crime among 1B+ Telegram users with his minimal power of content moderation. 2) Second, the deeper point is that the French state is deeply uninterested in public safety! They allow violent crime, fundamentalist terrorism, and drug dealing to run rampant in France. Just compare Paris to what it was a few generations ago. 3) Third, is Macron held personally responsible for every beheading, rape, and robbery that occurs on French soil? Is he jailed when traveling for violating the human rights of French citizens by not "moderating" his community hard enough? No, he is not. Even though the tools of the French state are vastly greater than those of Telegram, over a vastly smaller userbase. Again: Macron has ~70M citizens to deal with, while Telegram has almost 1B users. 4) Finally, we already know what a real anti-crime policy looks like. It looks like @nayibbukele. And President Bukele is for encryption, and has invited programmers to build on El Salvadoran soil — an offer they'd be well-advised to take up. 5) So: France is an anarcho-tyrannical regime. It doesn't need sophisticated surveillance to stop drug dealing — because it's all happening in public! They know exactly where the criminals are, and the victims too. They are literally setting up spaces for them to do drugs till they die. I mean, does France need to imprison the CEO of Telegram to stop this?

The state has far more money than anyone. But they are behind SpaceX, because tech isn’t capital-limited, it’s competence-limited. After all, who knows more about rocket science — politicians or Musk?

Vox is sending about 0 million masks to the front lines of the coronavirus crisis That sounds terrible until you remember that they helped cause the crisis by publishing just-the-flu misinformation, and still haven’t either apologized or retracted Then it sounds more terrible

FROM MAGA TO CHINA Here are four things MAGA is getting wrong, and why it's handing over the world to China. (1) First, MAGA correctly understands that America’s economic position is in decline but thinks this is due to economic competition itself, rather than lack of competitiveness. (2) Second, MAGA also understands that the US has wasted trillions abroad in foreign wars, but thinks the problem is global leadership itself rather than poor leadership. (3) Third, MAGA knows that their Blue American enemies have allies abroad, but has incorrectly overreacted to this by treating every non-Red-American as an enemy. (4) Fourth, MAGA sees the billions of dollars flowing from the US to foreign recipients, but isn't grasping that the US can only print those dollars in the first place so long as it's the hub of a global empire. When you put these together you can both understand MAGA's actions and understand why they will not lead to the intended result. Basically: MAGA is hyperfocused on cutting off any apparent flow of funds from Red Americans to Blue Americans and non-Americans. And they only have ~500 days in power. So they're trying to quickly shut off imports, close down institutions, and exit all wars. OK. Except the reason the imports exist in the first place is because US products aren't competitive relative to Chinese products (or Fed printing). The reason those institutions exist is because the US set them up to run the world. And the reason those wars are happening is not because of American leadership per se, but because of the absence of good leadership. If you shut all of that down at once — if you abandon global competition and global leadership — you shut down American Empire, and with it the ability to print money. And then everyone in that empire has a very bad time.

The BitSignal How do you ring the fire alarm on the internet? How do you show it’s not a false alarm? I am putting up the BitSignal. $1M in BTC to alert us to the stealth financial crisis. $1000 per tweet, for the best 1000. Reply with your charts, graphs, stats, memes! Bring attention to what is happening! Because the central bank, the banks, and the bank regulators have bankrupted all of us. They hid their insolvency from you, the depositors. And they're about to print $2T to hyperinflate the dollar. In the digital age this will happen very quickly. So buy Bitcoin *now* and get your coins off exchanges.

CHEVRON DOMINANCE Technology is about to accelerate. Because Chevron deference is over. And regulators can't just make up laws anymore. So, countless new startups just became feasible. This is often spoken about in the abstract, so let's do three examples and two visuals. THREE EXAMPLES 1) Genomics. Did Congress explicitly give FDA authority to regulate genetic tests in a bill like Kefauver-Harris (1962) or PDUFA (1992)? No, it did not. But in the early 2010s, FDA attacked 23andMe and forced them to take personal genomic tests offline. Implicitly, this was under Chevron. 2) Nuclear power. Did Congress explicitly give EPA and NRC the authority to implement ALARA? No, it did not. But these agencies came up with this "as low as reasonably achievable" standard, forcing nuclear energy to become as expensive as other energy sources by spending all the cost-savings on "safety." Implicitly, this was under Chevron too. 3) Cryptocurrency. You guessed it. Did Congress explicitly give the SEC authority to regulate crypto? No, it did not. Cryptocurrencies didn't exist when the 1933 and 1934 acts were written. However, the SEC says it has regulatory authority over crypto, even when Congress is deliberating on bills to the contrary. Implicitly, that claim of SEC authority too was under Chevron. In other words: if a regulator can't point to the law that gives them the power, they may not have the power. And you might be able to win in a court of law. So! For technology, the overruling of Chevron could literally reopen innovation in the physical world. This is on par with the 1991 opening of the Internet to commercial traffic. It deprecates the 20th century regulatory state. All the safety theater and security theater that they optimize for sounding good while actually being bad now has to face judicial scrutiny. TWO VISUALS How to visualize something as abstract as Chevron reversal? Well, Chevron is the company on which the 1984 Chevron deference case is actually based. And its logo had the arrows pointed down. But now that Chevron has been reversed, we're headed up. And that's one way to visualize what reversal means: from Chevron deference to Chevron dominance. Because rule-of-law now dominates the lawless regulatory state. If the regulator isn't specifically authorized by statute, they can't invent some regulation to stop your innovation. But there's a second way to visualize the reversal of Chevron: regulators just got disarmed, in the most literal sense. Because ultimately a regulation is a threat of state force. If you disobey one of a regulator's made up rules, they eventually get a cop to point a gun at you, implicitly or sometimes very explicitly. ^ The photo above is from the 2010 FDA raid on Rawesome Foods for selling raw milk to club members that consciously opted in to eating and drinking foods of their own choice. This may have also been done under Chevron deference because FDA only has the right to regulate interstate commerce, and not commerce within one state (which is all that Rawesome was apparently doing at that time). To be clear, I don't have a position on raw milk other than I do think people should be able to choose their own foods. In their lawsuit against the Farm To Consumer Legal Defense Fund, FDA strongly disagreed, contending that "there is no generalized right to bodily and physical health" and you "do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.” These are real quotes from the now-defanged regulators; see the PDF link below. Anyway — now you get a sense of how big a deal the Chevron reversal is, and how out of control regulators can get. The Chevron reversal strips regulators of the ability to make up random rules. It calls all their existing made-up rules into question. And it gives you the power to ask where in the law it says they can make up some new rule. You know that saying — the only way they can stop you is to shoot you? Well, now they can't shoot you as easily. So we're going from Chevron deference to Chevron dominance. I can already feel the T-levels across tech increasing.

China builds a train station in 9 hours. California can’t build a bus shelter with 8 departments.

Going viral What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years? It would accelerate many pre-existing trends. - border closures - nationalism - social isolation - preppers - remote work - face masks - distrust in governments

I will take that bet. You buy 1 BTC. I will send $1M USD. This is ~40:1 odds as 1 BTC is worth ~$26k. The term is 90 days. All we need is a mutually agreed custodian who will still be there to settle this in the event of digital dollar devaluation. If someone knows how to do this with a smart contract, we can do it on chain, so I can send USDC. If you won't do that, name a custodian. #BitSignal

Like everything else in Sulzberger’s paper, the NYT bestseller list is fake. They were forced to admit in court that it’s not a ranked list. It’s actually “editorial content” and they can exclude books they don’t like. killzoneblog.com/2019/01/cra…

JD Vance is a great choice for VP. - Marine Corps veteran - Bestselling author - Successful tech investor - US Senator Understands military, media, tech, finance, and politics. @JDVance1 is a brave man, and a Renaissance man.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested in France. His “crime” appears to be enabling free speech online. thesun.co.uk/news/30073899/t…

They want you fired for a tweet, while they clap for a fraud.

1942: Build up Russia to fight Germany 1972: Build up China to fight Russia 2022: Build up India to fight China

Low trust society. Tens of thousands of dollars in damage for tens of dollars in scrap metal profit. Everything becomes more expensive when you abolish the police.

Bitcoin has passed all-time highs in 30+ countries, including China and India.

Looks like @elonmusk is now the most popular political figure in the US. harvardharrispoll.com/wp-con…

My colleague @cdixon in 2014.

The US is broke. The real debt is $175T+. And @elonmusk is 100% correct on the numbers. But the difficult step is the logical conclusion. There is no fix. It's a writeoff. A national bankruptcy. And the default will be in the form of money printing.

For those of us who are old enough to remember it, I’m glad we had the 90s. It was an idyllic time.

This is the single best long run measure of food inflation. And it’s gone vertical.

China has a 4000 year old civilization. They had a terrible 20th century thanks to Maoism, but they really are capable. You don’t get to global #1 in manufacturing by accident. Even if (especially if!) you consider them a geopolitical rival, their engineers deserve respect.

Why do you hate the boat so much?

The UAE is closely following Durov's case. France may not be able to hold him prisoner for long.

Bitcoin has passed all-time highs in fourteen countries.

Tech guys don't use Google search anymore. It's not just censored. It just sucks. Perplexity is better. And you can set it as default. Here's how to fix your search in thirty seconds:

Here is what China built.

If possible, Marko Elez (@melez) should be reinstated at DOGE. If that is not possible, we should fund him to do his own startup. Let me explain my logic. 1) First, there can be no negotiation with terrorists — or journalists. Giving a single inch to a journo on anything DOGE-related would be like firing Michael Flynn at the beginning of Trump’s first term. Nothing should be done in response to anything they write. 2) Second, the entire practice of digging through people’s old posts to find some negative remark should be deprecated. Some out-of-context remarks almost never represent the whole human being. 3) Third, to my Indian-origin followers — apparently Marko made some anti-Indian comments. Of course, I don’t love that. But he’s only 25, will mature in time, and is clearly very competent. I believe in capitalism and dialogue as a way to bridge this kind of divide. Not summary cancellation. TLDR: if possible, Elon should consider restoring Marko to DOGE.

My mental model is that if you don’t win tech you don’t win. Because tech isn’t just electric cars and rocket ships, life extension and artificial intelligence. Tech is the money (crypto), the media (social), and especially the military (drones). China understands this.

Many countries that had a terrible 20th century are on track to have a great 21st century. And vice versa. Because history is running in reverse. Countries that fell to socialism and communism developed antibodies against ideology, and became nationalist and capitalist. After 1991 they were so poor, they needed to work hard. By contrast, countries that were capitalist and nationalist developed susceptibility to degeneracy, and have become weaker and woker. After 1991 they were so rich, they forgot the value of hard work.

Bitcoin is already the global reserve asset. Anyone can buy or sell virtually any amount of BTC at any time in any country on any device for a known price without any necessary intermediary. Nothing else is like this.

Capital is moving to Dubai, Singapore, and Australia. Talent will follow.

Singapore is worth emulating.

The folks who say billionaires should not exist are working hard on making everyone trillionaires.

Funny you mention that! Because Prafulla Dhariwal is an International Math Olympiad and International Physics Olympiad gold medalist with a 5.0 GPA from MIT. And he led the development of GPT-4o.

Just as in 2008, the bankers lied. This time, the central bankers, the banks, and the bank regulators have lied to all dollar holders and depositors. This isn't your typical fractional reserve situation. The problem is that there isn't enough in the banks on a mark-to-market basis to cover withdrawals. They knew this through all of last year, and communicated it internally in their coded language. It's obvious from the graphs (see below). The central banks, the banks, and the banking regulators all knew a huge crash was coming — the phrase is "unrealized losses" [1,2,3,4,5]. But they never notified you, the depositor. Instead the regulators allowed banks to hide their literal insolvency in footnotes[6], until one guy figured it out[7]. It's Uncle Sam Bankman Fried. Just like SBF used your deposits to buy shitcoins, using accounting tricks to fool himself and others into using the money, so too did the banks. They all used the deposits to buy the ultimate shitcoin: long-dated US Treasuries. And they all got rekt at the same time, in the same way, because they bought the same asset from the same vendor who devalued it at the same time: the Fed. Specifically, as NYT admitted, banks "binged" on enormous amounts of Treasuries and other long-term bonds in 2021 when the flood of printed money cut off their typical demand for loans, and because they thought the Fed would keep interest rates low forever.[8]. And they had good reason to believe this. Powell said he'd be "patient" on rate hikes as late as Nov 3 2021[9]. Then he got renominated on Nov 22 2021[10], and hiked rates much faster than anyone had expected — which even Yellen[11] and the FDIC[12] admit caused the current banking crisis. Why did Powell delay? Probably for political reasons. Presidents don't like rate hikes[13], especially running into the election year of 2022. And Powell thought he could wait and just be like Paul Volcker[14], who was "firm" and then defeated inflation. But the world isn't an 80s rerun. Hiking from ten years of near zero interest rates in the 2010s was a surprise attack on every dollar holder. Economics isn't politics - the kind of insane flipflops you see in politics don't work when there are actual contracts involved. So anyone who bet on long-term Treasuries got killed in 2021. And now, anyone who bets on short-term Treasuries is going to get killed in 2023. The absolute worse place you can be is to have large amounts of assets locked up in three month treasury bills. The ~5% interest rate offered by big banks (G-SIBs) is a trap. Most fiat bank accounts are now a trap, for those countries whose central bankers followed the Fed. Check my references, I've provided quite a few. If you trust US bankers and US media, ignore me. Otherwise buy Bitcoin and get your coins off exchanges. #Bitsignal [1]: Fed, Sept 22: archive.is/1QA4q [2]: FDIC Nov 22: archive.is/ZBvli [3]: FDIC Mar 6 23: archive.is/yxd1u#selection-2… [4]: Fed Feb 1 23: archive.is/nGpgk#selection-5… [5]: Bank CPAs, April 22: archive.is/MfcCs#selection-2… [6]: Insolvency in a footnote: archive.is/0Jww3#selection-8… [7]: Discovered online: archive.is/tfYIc [8]: Banks bingeing on bonds, but not because they want to Aug 25 2021: archive.is/CtW1B

"Pretty soon, 44 billion won't be worth that much anyway."

We’re getting closer to high-fidelity VR.

This is the China graph. It’s nothing, and then it’s everything.

I've been writing a book on how to start a new country. It's finally coming out. You can preorder it now. It arrives on July 4. amazon.com/dp/B09VPKZR3G

Bangladesh was a stable country. But it didn’t want to give up a military base or take sides on Ukraine. So in retaliation, psychopathic Democrats backed a coup. Then the White House lied about it, just like they lied about Hunter’s pardon. Now it’s going fundamentalist.

THE FIRST FAIR FIGHT Remember the "emerald mines"? Or the "pee tape"? Or "I can see Russia from my house"? Or the couch lie from just yesterday? For literally generations, Democrats controlled institutions like Hollywood and the New York Times. They could make up whatever fake story they wanted, print the lie on page A-1, disseminate it as a joke, maybe make an SNL skit about it, or even a movie...and then print a retraction on page C-19. But now Republicans have their own Hollywood, their own NYT, and even their own financial system too. Thanks to decentralized AI, social media, and crypto, the playing field is being leveled. So the information war is becoming a fair fight, for the first time in forever. And Democrats are not set up for a fair fight! They were jeering like hyenas with their fake attack on JD. And now, hear their sudden intake of breath, their gasp of shock as the tables are turned and Elon drops a 100m+ view nuke on the wokes just by sharing @MrReaganUSA's video...which is linked in his post and clearly labeled "PARODY." It's obviously a joke, kids! A parody, just like the JD thing. Which X didn't censor. So what's the problem? The problem is that Democrats are so used to having total cloud supremacy — total information control — that they've never actually had to make an argument. It is completely demoralizing for them to see high production value videos with Democrats as the butt of the joke. Like a bully getting punched in the nose, these vicious wokes are finally facing committed, capable resistance in the information war. It is their first fair fight.

Privacy won. Smart contracts won. Tornado Cash won. And OFAC lost. Here’s the decision. ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pu…

Programming isn't going away. Prompting is programming. And the better you are at articulating what you want in clear written English, the better your results.

Four civilizations have had linguistic and cultural continuity for thousands of years: 🇨🇳China 🇮🇳India 🇮🇱Israel 🇬🇷Greece In a sense, the West is the fusion of Athens (Greece) and Jerusalem (Israel). But now the Dharmic and Sinic spheres are returning.

Here’s the thing: Indians are rising. And that is actually why anti-Indian sentiment is rising. Not because Indians are so weak, but because Indians are once again becoming strong. CEOs of companies. Leaders of countries. Founders and investors. Doctors, writers, professors. Not just slumdogs. Millionaires. Now, I know what people will say. Not all Indians are doing well. More than a billion are still poor! And of course that’s true, and will be for a while. But Indians abroad have risen as individuals: And India is now rising as a country: Indeed, India is the fastest growing large economy in the world over the last decade: And I think Indians have a lot of headroom left. Where does it end up? We don’t know, but if even 5% of 1.4B Indian nationals are at the same level as the ~5M strong Indian American diaspora that currently produces ~6% of US tax revenue, that’s ~70M people capable of producing ~72% of current US tax revenue. So I think it’s at least possible that India returns to its historical level of relative prosperity: As a plausibility argument, recall that before America was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye, Marco Polo sought out China and Columbus risked his life to trade with India. So those civilizations were giant economic centers for thousands of years. And are becoming so again. This perspective demands a different approach. Not the victim mindset where Indians mimic Western wokes in whining piteously upon every slight. But a mature, tit-for-tat morality befitting a rising people where you cooperate with those that cooperate, ignore what is best ignored, and (proportionately) punish only when necessary. Because even from a purely realpolitik standpoint, constant cancellation doesn’t work. Recall that wokes tried that for the last decade, and all it got them was epic political defeat. They overused the penicillin called anti-racism, and now we have antibiotic-resistant actual racism. Indians will need different tactics. And that starts with moving from victim mentality to Vedic mentality, if you'll permit the poetic license. Because India isn't just a rising civilization, it's a returning civilization. And wokes are proven losers, but Indians can be winners.

All media became social media. All money becomes cryptocurrency.

AMERICA AND BITCOIN A historical speech. Here is Donald Trump's full speech at the Bitcoin Conference with timestamps and transcript. TIMESTAMPS 1:36 - Shoutouts to David Bailey, Winklevosses, Michael Saylor, Cathie Wood, Ron Paul and Rand Paul, Vivek, and the victims of the July 13 assassination attempt. 7:00 - How Bitcoin rose from an idea on an anonymous message board to the 9th most valuable asset in the world. 10:00 - America is a nation in decline, and we cannot let China dominate Bitcoin. The US must lead in tech, science, manufacturing, AI, space, and power generation. 14:50 - Bitcoin will be mined, minted, and made in the USA. If it goes to the moon, it'll get there from America. 16:20 - How the Biden/Harris administration has waged war on crypto for the last three and a half years, by choking off banking support. 22:00 - The Biden/Harris administration is against Bitcoin, because it stands for freedom, sovereignty, and independence from government coercion and control. 25:00 - The day Trump takes the oath of office, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren's anti-crypto crusade will be done. He will fire Gary Gensler on day one! 27:57 - Trump commits to immediately shutting down Operation Chokepoint 2.0, and creating a Bitcoin and Crypto Presidential Advisory Council. In 100 days, fair rules written by people who want crypto to thrive. 29:28 - There will never be a CBDC. And he will defend the right to self-custody, freedom of transaction, freedom of association, and freedom of speech. 30:25 - He'll support USD stablecoins and global savings in Bitcoin. And he recognizes that the behavior of the current US government is the threat to the dollar, not Bitcoin. 35:30 - Biden/Harris has presided over the biggest inflation in the history of America. 38:30 - Inflation destroyed Weimar Germany. Bitcoiners understood inflation better than anyone else. Inflation is stealth taxation, a national disgrace. 43:30 - Make the US the lowest cost energy producer in the world, given its natural resources, and turn it into a Bitcoin mining powerhouse. Americans will not need to move to China. 44:20 - The US government has violated the cardinal rule: never sell your Bitcoin. He will stop the US government from selling its Bitcoin. This will serve as the core of the strategic national Bitcoin stockpile. 46:00 - He will commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht to time served. 46:26 - He commits to becoming the pro-innovation, pro-Bitcoin, and pro-tech president that America deserves. And will make America and Bitcoin stronger, richer, freer, and greater than ever before. Full transcript in next post. 👇

A mistake people made early on was thinking of the internet as a new channel: radio, TV, and internet. In reality it was *all* channels: internet radio, internet TV… Same with crypto. It’s not an “asset class”. It will be all asset classes. Cryptocurrencies, crypto-equities…

Prime Minister Modi comprehensively defeated the far left in India. It can be done.

Sam Bankman-Fried was a Democrat. And not just any Democrat. The #2 donor after Soros. A vocal proponent of the regulatory state. Also a fraud — like the regulatory state. Which he legally bribed to target others but not him. That isn’t libertarianism. It’s the exact opposite.

Ironically, one symptom of deindustrialization is that many commenters have never actually managed a physical business. So. Suppose your US company imports $1M of high quality parts, and adds in its own components to produce finished goods sold for $1.2M per batch. Your gross profit is $200k per batch. But wait! Suddenly a new 30% tariff is imposed on that $1M of parts. You now have to fork over $300k to customs before you sell anything. That’s cash you probably don’t have. Oh, and even if you do sell everything, you’re now losing $100k per batch. With a sinking feeling, you realize your profitable business which you somehow managed to keep in America all these years has suddenly become unprofitable. You post online about how bad this is but get shouted down by an angry mob, convinced that capitalists like you should die. You can’t tell nowadays if they’re on left or right. Moreover, you don’t have the time, money, skills, or tools in house to build that $1M of parts yourself. You are being asked to do the equivalent of growing a maple tree when all you needed was a little maple syrup. So now you are faced with several tough choices. (1) First, you may need to go into debt or fire people to quickly come up with the $300k in cash to pay for these surprise tariffs at customs. Even if the tariff might go away, it might not, so you have to get the cash somehow or risk having your shipment impounded. (2) Next, you might need to reduce quality to stop losing $100k on each batch. You could order the lower quality $750k parts, grimace and pay 30% tariff at customs, and hope you can build and sell for the same price of $1.2M per batch despite the lower quality. (3) Alternatively, you could keep the quality parts at $1M and instead raise prices to $1.5M per batch to get back your original margins of $200k per batch, which you need to pay employees after all. But that’s a big hike that your customer will probably not welcome, given that he’s likely dealing with his own tariff shock. So: these tariffs don’t really give an incentive to build in the US. Because it’s far more expensive to build a screw factory than to pay even high tariffs on a foreign screw. Instead what they likely mean is debt, layoffs, lower quality, and higher prices for any US company that buys parts abroad. Just to understand how common that is:

Zuck should pull out of this conference. He has an audience of billions. He doesn't need to give an audience to a guy who stole billions.

No ID, no democracy. Because anyone or anything can vote, multiple times, without any verification. This is what’s called a Sybil attack in computer science.

Can’t wait for the billion dollar media corporation owned by millionaires to endorse the millionaire who tells us how bad millionaires, billionaires, and corporations are

The Soviets and Nazis were allied at the start of World War 2 and invaded Poland together.

The media tried to deplatform you. They ended up deplatforming themselves.

I admire Bezos. He is a jacked libertarian genius founder. Truly one of the greatest of all time. And he has the power to do something great. As great as Amazon, in fact. Because he’s not just going direct. He directly gets how bad the media is. And he directly owns the WaPo. So: he could actually take it over. Do to WaPo what Elon did to X. Keep the brand and replace the wokes. With AI and with creators. Then, turn WaPo upon the swamp. Investigate FDA, SEC, FAA — all of them. Seize the moment and play offense. Watergate, but for the regulatory state.

Here’s a reframe. AI doesn’t take your job. AI allows you to do any job. So a coder can now make films. And a filmmaker can now write code. It allows a non-specialist to get started. But a specialist will be needed for polish.

AI OVERPRODUCTION China seeks to commoditize their complements. So, over the following months, I expect a complete blitz of Chinese open-source AI models for everything from computer vision to robotics to image generation. Why? I’m just inferring this from public statements, but their apparent goal is to take the profit out of AI software since they make money on AI-enabled hardware. Basically, they want to do to US tech (the last stronghold) what they already did to US manufacturing. Namely: copy it, optimize it, scale it, then wreck the Western original with low prices. I don’t know if they’ll succeed. But here’s the logic: (1) First, China noticed that DeepSeek’s release temporarily knocked ~$1T off US tech market caps. (2) Second, China’s core competency is exporting physical widgets, more than it is software. (3) Third, China’s other core competency is exporting things at such massive scale that all foreign producers are bankrupted and they win the market. See what they’re doing to German and Japanese cars, for example. (4) Fourth, China is well aware that it lacks global prestige as it’s historically been a copycat. With DeepSeek, becoming #1 in AI is now something they actually consider possibly achievable, and a matter of national pride. (5) Fifth, DeepSeek has gone viral in China and its open source nature means that everyone can rapidly integrate it, down to the level of local officials and obscure companies. And they are doing so, and posting the results for praise on WeChat. (6) Finally, while DeepSeek was obscure before recent events, it’s now a household name, and the founder (Liang Wengfeng) has met both with Xi but also the #2 in China, Li Qiang. They likely have unlimited resources now. So, if you put all that together, China thinks it has an opportunity to hit US tech companies, boost its prestige, help its internal economy, and take the margins out of AI software globally (at least at the model level). They will instead make their money by selling inexpensive AI-enabled hardware of increasing quality, from smart homes and self-driving cars to consumer drones and robot dogs. Basically, China is trying to do to AI what they always do: study, copy, optimize, and then bankrupt everyone with low prices and enormous scale. I don’t know if they’ll succeed at the app layer. But it could be hard for closed-source AI model developers to recoup the high fixed costs associated with training state-of-the-art models when great open source models are available. Last, I agree it’s surprising that the country of the Great Firewall is suddenly the country of open source AI. But it is consistent in a different way, which is that China is just focused on doing whatever it takes to win — even to the point of copying partially-abandoned Western values like open source, which seemed like the hardest thing to adopt. On that point: they did build censorship into the released DeepSeek AI models, but in a manner that’s easily circumvented outside China. So, you might conclude they don’t really care what non-Chinese people are saying outside China in other languages, so long as this doesn’t “interfere with China’s internal affairs.” Anyway —this is an area I’ve been watching, and my reluctant conclusion is that China is getting better at software faster than the West is getting better at hardware.

From abolish the police to militarize the police. From denying crime is up to executing a military crackdown. From saying you don’t need a gun to sending in men with long guns. It’s always the same pattern. First they unleashed the anarchy. And now comes the tyranny.

India’s new parliament was built in under 2.5 years and cost less than $125M. An ancient civilization is ascending once again, returning to its rightful place on the world stage. India is back.

Gautam Adani is an Indian magnate. He’s built ports, roads — everything. One of the most prominent men in India. Now comes the Democrat DOJ. Indicting an Indian doing business in India. For some ostensible violation of US law! Why? Adani is perceived as center right. And Democrats are now far left. So it’s just lawfare across borders. Like their attacks on Elon. And on Israel’s right. And on European conservatives. But…I doubt the Trump admin continues it.

This is the week where decades happened. Crypto is now legal. AI is now free. The entire blue empire is being shut down by executive order. And after the postwar order, we enter the post-Internet order.

People forget just how completely non-obvious the entire digital revolution was every step of the way. 1995: WWW will fail 2002: Google will fail 2007: iPhone will fail 2013: Facebook will fail

OK. Here's the issue. There is a strong argument that Ukraine is THE climactic battle of the Thucydides Trap. That is: the big war between the US and China is actually between their proxies Ukraine and Russia. And this settlement — to this war — determines the next world order. Because there won’t be a fight in Taiwan if NATO is defeated in Ukraine. Taiwan will just surrender to China because they know they won't get reliable Western military support. And so will everyone else. So, this may be the decisive moment when terms get negotiated with the China/Russia group for the next however many years. That means that even if you think Ukraine was a disaster and Zelensky is a dummy, you don’t want NATO to be catastrophically defeated in Kiev like it was in Afghanistan. That would be bad for Democrats, Republicans, Europeans, Japanese — just about everyone under the US security umbrella. Instead you want the best possible outcome to this terrible war, under the circumstances. Because the West may already have fallen into the Thucydides Trap. And if so, it should very carefully think about whether it can get out.

This is nuking every single supply chain that passes through the US in any way, under the illusion that 45 years of deindustrialization can be fixed in one day of 45% tariffs. Countless low-margin businesses, including US exporters, will be pushed into unprofitability.

Everyone wants a piece of the reward, no one wants a piece of the risk.

Woke Capital incarnate.

The flag of ETH is raised over Wall Street. And the SEC surrenders to a more powerful regulator. Because it is Ethereum that now provides standardized market access to all Internet participants. The network defeats the state.

Introducing the Network State Podcast. The first episode features me and @VitalikButerin. We talk about starting new countries, upgrading Ethereum, and improving yourself!

THE LATIN AMERICAN LEE KUAN YEW President Bukele's recipe for success is simple: low crime, hard currency, great aesthetics, and top talent. He built his state capacity from scratch, and is now a role model for the ascending world. This is the American President I respect.🫡

X should implement a feature called "On This Day." It would rewind the timeline to any given day since Twitter's founding to let you feel the pulse of the moment. A crucial tool for modern historians.

First Bitcoin President. 🫡

media → AI money → crypto military → drones manufacturing → robots