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“Before Santos, only five people in the history of the house had been expelled. Three of them were kicked out because they fought for the Confederacy against The United States, which was basically seen as an act of treason. And two of them had been convicted of felony charges, and their trials had gone through the whole process, and they had been convicted. When the house is pressed and when it feels like there's urgency, Santos' expulsion shows it will find a way to get rid of people who it thinks should not be in its midst.”

“Traditionally, ethics committee investigations move very slowly. It's kind of known by lawmakers that when something gets kicked over to the House Ethics Committee, it's gonna take a while for it to be resolved. And it's kind of a way for everyone to get some cover and say, well, we're investigating this, but we need to give this investigation time to play out. And there needs to be some due process, and then we'll deal with the issue.”

“In 2018, the house passed a rule that forbid its members, expressly from having affairs with their own staff. And Gonzalez violated that rule, and he admits to violating that rule. He comes out and says, I made a mistake, and I had a lapse in judgment, and there was a lack of faith. I'm gonna end my reelection campaign because I have lost the trust in my voters, so I can't run for office again.”

“At this point, Speaker Mike Johnson is looking at a very narrow majority in the House. If he wants to pass through major legislation, he can really only afford to lose one or two votes. And losing Gonzalez would make it even harder for him to push through major agenda items. And so there are a lot of questions about whether this is a question of due process, or is this about politics?”

“I've been thinking a lot about what's happening on the hill this week. And for me, this is a story about the way that congress chooses or doesn't choose to police itself. I think what we're seeing this week is extraordinary. Two members of the house resigning within an hour of each other after a lot of pressure. But it took us a while to get to this point, and I think the way that it happened really says a lot about kind of the intersection between our politics and the way we expect our politicians to behave.”

“I talked to Jess, my wife, about it, not just before I wrote it, but while I was writing it. And I would say, I don't think I'm giving me anything away by saying that there was a fair amount of negotiation going on during the process, on all ends, on the ends in terms of the New York Times magazine editors, wanting certain things from me, and then talking to Jess about what I wouldn't, you know, would and wouldn't reveal about our marriage, about myself, about her, and then other figures in the picture, I guess, are my parents.”

“I don't think you can talk about how screwed up you are as much as I do in that article without at a minimum being there's some, you know, there being some implication that some of that screwed up-ness came from my childhood. And so there's that just at a baseline. And then also, you know, if I want to say explicitly about what kind of context I grew up in and how that led to the complicated adult figure that I am.”

“I can get very angry. I'm very reactive. So if I feel like I'm being disrespected or not being treated thoughtfully or spoken to kindly, I can snap, I can scream, I can withdraw and get very cold and contemptuous. And on her side, she has her own mechanisms for dealing with distress and feeling rejected by me or abandoned by me. I'd say they're more of the variety of like withdrawing affection, not so much yelling or being aggressive, but withdrawing affection and being cold and retreating behind walls.”

“She was frustrated because she had been putting in a lot of time on the domestic front because I had had a big project of work. And so it kind of revealed a little bit that all the time I was spending at work wasn't all exclusively devoted to doing the work. I was also kind of messing around on social media. And so she made a kind of snide comment about, oh, good that you have so much time to be playing around on social media.”

“I think that we're haunted by the sort of cultural representations of marriage. I mean, there's no total escape from that probably in any culture in a sense. There's some production of like a narrative of what marriage should be, but we have this sort of hyper saturated culture, cultural representations of marriage. And it's complicated, right? I mean, one way to characterize it is just the romantic comedy that the ideal relationship is just, you know, not only are the people best friends and they're funny and silly together, but they have hot sex.”

“Paying a 100,000,000 for better PR, better corporate comms seems like the greatest trade of all time. It's not just about the TBBN brand and the audience and that. It's about John and Jordy because they are gonna be reporting to the head of PR essentially at OpenAI, and they want them to do something beyond just the show to somehow help OpenAI with their public relations or communication strategy that's not just doing the podcast.”

“I mean, that that's like it's kind of an acquihire in that sense. Like, John and Jordi were both on an individual level, they were both very successful entrepreneurs. So they they have management leadership chops. And with TBPN, they created something very quickly that was very high impact, and it's very impressive. But I also think they have they obviously have skills outside of just live streaming this show every day. I think that's probably where the value is.”

“One of the things about ads is OpenAI has completely shut down the ad business. So after they bought them, when they went on the show to announce it, there's no more ads. All of those dozens of sponsors that signed a year long contract, like Ramp are gone. OpenAI bought those out, so the most people got their money back. It is interesting how when a lot of tech companies buy media companies, they immediately shut down the ad business.”

“Sam Altman framed this thing as, like, a marketing problem. He said, these guys, John Geordi, are genius marketers. If AI were a political candidate, it would be one of the least popular in history. And given the amazing things AI can do, I think we need to be a lot better at marketing for AI. Maybe more of that will happen. Maybe there'll be more official spokespeople. I don't know. It's really tough to say.”

“John and Jordy become the public faces of AI and OpenAI, the company, while Sam Altman quietly fades from the spotlight because every appearance he does pretty much hurts him more than it helps him. Like, it gets clipped. He gets destroyed by the Internet. I don't what he says or his personality or how he looks, but people hate him. And so they're like the public faces of that company. They are the charismatic leaders that OpenAI needs.”

“People who have a lot of a status item that you crave, if they have a really a lot of it, they have the power to change your life with the word if they want to. We’ve been seeing this phenomenon since we had medieval kings. You know, like, if someone has power, status, or resources in abundance, the resources themselves exert a gravitational pull on everybody involved, including them and you.”

“And if you ask founders what they want, do you want to go on this slippery slide to mediocrity? Almost all founders are like, no. I’ve just told that was inevitable. But it’s like, no. Actually, and this is what the book is about, there is a blueprint for preventing this if you want to.”

“My theory is that we have basically become indoctrinated to a set of corporate governance best practices that are designed to produce this outcome. And because of that, they’re actually value destroying. We call them best practices, but really, they’re just like the popular or dominant practices. They’re not actually very good.”

“As a result, they don’t build into their organization what I call the, the architecture of institutional longevity. And that can’t just be about the founder or about individual people. It’s gotta be about something bigger, something that can last longer. And in the book, I give examples of companies that have been able to last forty, fifty, a hundred years even though the founder’s long dead.”

“The number one thing they always say is after the IPO, everyone looks at the stock ticker. Next thing you know, you're having a product management meeting, you're talking about product quality, whatever, and someone's like, the market might not like it. And the word might is doing a lot of work in these sentences. We’re imagining what might allow us to win their favor.”

“We want to reconnect fragmented rollups and unify liquidity through the EEZ.”

“Real-time proving gives specialized chains seamless access to Ethereum’s settlement and security.”

“The Ethereum Economic Zone reconnects fragmented rollups to recreate one economic zone.”

“A thin layer reconnects the ecosystem to provide a unified economic zone.”

“This new age for builders allows for a more stable network architecture.”

“Bitcoin keeps running into a wall of selling above $70K — roughly $20M/hour in profit-taking — and now that wall has geopolitical weight behind it after the Islamabad peace talks collapsed, Iran's Strait of Hormuz stays effectively closed, and Trump ordered a naval blockade of Iranian ports starting this morning. That's pushing oil toward $100/barrel and forcing tanker traffic into a full reroute away from the Gulf.”

“If those December contracts move over 100, the world is a very different place than it is right now. And that will cause revaluation of various assets. And that will cause, certainly in our administration, doing everything they can to print money. The truth is with AI and with everything going on in the economy and with oil prices going up, it actually cuts economic growth. It cuts the aggregate demand.”

“Our political system in the United States is broken. I mean, it's not just that people think Congress are a bunch of parasitic jackals, which is true, by the way... But it's actually worse than that. It's just completely dysfunctional. That is a large part of this. I mean, if we knew we were going to have a new Federal Reserve Chair in May, which you would think would be known, I think markets would be very different.”

“The dollar's long-term slide continues — now just 46% of global FX and gold reserves, a 26-year low — even as M2 keeps expanding at 4.8% YoY, and central bank gold holdings have officially eclipsed US Treasury holdings for the first time since '96. That's pushing oil toward $100/barrel and forcing tanker traffic into a full reroute away from the Gulf, which benefits US energy exports but hammers Japan, South Korea, and India hardest.”

“The WLFI vs. Justin Sun feud is turning into a full legal brawl over a $75M loan dispute, backdoor token blacklisting, and accusations flying both ways — exactly the kind of circus that undermines crypto's push for institutional credibility. This adds to the geopolitical weight already slowing markets after the Islamabad peace talks collapsed, and Iran's Strait of Hormuz stays effectively closed following the new naval blockade.”

“Silicon Valley didn't just predict the importance of defense in the 2020s. It largely took the exact wrong position, the opposite position. First of all, you have obvious examples like big technology companies explicitly refusing to do work with the Department of Defense. Google is one big example, but the worst examples are really in the startups that don't exist because people didn't want to even get into such a controversial space lest it ruin their careers.”

“The vast majority of conversations that we had were about whether or not it was even ethically okay to ever build a company that would build weapons. And the people who turned us down, the ones who decided not to invest in Anduril, actually believed that we had a good team and good people and good product market fit. The issue is that they thought that it was inherently wrong to build tools capable of being used for violence because they believed that the idea of deterring violence through having a strong arsenal was fundamentally obsolete and itself wrong.”

“The United States military and the prime contractors that dominate the military industrial complex have none of the right tools, talent or incentives to apply autonomy to the systems they do. There's no reason to save costs because they don't get paid for making things that work. They get paid for doing work. And in a world where you get more prestige and more money by having more people working on bigger things, there's no reason to use autonomy to reduce costs and increase capability.”

“The reality is that that's not where they're going to fight us. They're going to arm proxies or if they engage directly, they're going to use technologies that give them an asymmetrical advantage in the areas where we are the least competent. These are the areas where they are putting a lot of their resources. The reason that Vladimir Putin is saying that the ruler of the world is going to be the country that masters artificial intelligence is because he thinks that that is one of the only ways that they're going to be able to get the best of us.”

“The United States has the strongest commercial artificial intelligence industry in the world, followed closely by China. But at the same time, the United States military and the prime contractors that dominate the military industrial complex have none of the right tools, talent or incentives to apply autonomy to the systems they do. There's more better AI in John Deere tractors than there is in any US military vehicle. There's better computer vision in the Snapchat app on your phone than any system that the US Department of Defense has deployed.”

“The speech was so incredibly poorly constructed. And it was hackneyed. And God love Alba, I don't know what it was about Labour leaders, Shorten, Gillard and Alba over the past, you know, I think the past three leaders... they've been obviously so drilled about, don't say this, don't say that. Alba smiled like a kind of maniac because he was told to smile, obviously. And then the address was this really wooden delivery.”

“I mean, let's not go too far down this rabbit hole, but there is great convenience being on a single ecosystem, great platform. It is a little bit of a, I mean, it depends, right? It depends as always, but as sort of like, we're putting a lot of digital infrastructure in the hands of one private corporation. My point is always, well, it doesn't matter who the person is, they're a person and people are flawed.”

“What gets me is that we get, everything is dumbed down to the point where we, they only communicate to the lowest common denominator and just treats everyone like a moron. It's like, we're not that, I mean, you know, God bless us, we try as best as we can as a species, but we're not that, we're not that dumb, right? You can use more than two syllables in a word if you want, right?”

“Clearly smoking something bad, because here's the irony of it, right? I opened the papers this morning, wall to wall panning, like no one thinks this is a good, like this was an effective speech. I would have been better if it's like, Elbow, here's a six pack of beer, drink that and then just go for it, right? Like, just no speech, unprepared, just let loose. And I guarantee you, I'm not saying it would have been a roaring success, but it would have been better than what was actually delivered.”

“My favorite line, actually, of the whole thing was he talked about the shift workers and nurses. And it's just, it just, if there's anything about the, that shows how incredibly stupidly focused group this was, it's, so shift workers, what, if you work in... someone said, I would write a thing, and someone else has gone, that's good, do that, and the other has gone, fantastic, I'll read that. It's like, what were you people smoking? Like, what were you seriously doing?”