Paul Graham on why you go to the center — and why the point was never to stay. Every era has one center. Painting was Paris in 1870, math was Göttingen in 1900, movies were Hollywood in 1950. The ambitious always asked the same question — should I go? — and the answer
Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. The system Rockefeller designed never died — it just changed names. The most important fact about John D. Rockefeller isn't that he controlled 90% of American oil refining. It's that Standard Oil was shattered by the Supreme Court in 1911
The largest asset manager on earth controls $14 trillion — and most people have never heard its name. That's the design. Larry Fink got fired in a single day. 1986, star bond trader, one wrong bet on rates, ~$100M gone, out. Most people take that as an epitaph. Fink
The kind, generous, safe man keeps losing — and the reason is four words he never heard. Ask a woman what makes a man attractive and she tells the truth: kind, loving, safe, generous. Men hear this, look in the mirror, think I'm already kind — lean harder into it,
Anthropic exists to make AI safe. Its model was used to target a strike that hit a girls' school. Both of these are true. Here's the sentence that should stop you. Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI because they didn't trust it, built
Palantir's CTO on heretics, the industrial base, and why every real breakthrough happens despite the system, never because of it. Shyam Sankar says something at the end that reframes the whole conversation. Asked for the case for American optimism, he doesn't cite GDP or chips or
Peter Thiel on why Harvard stopped being elite — and where the real opportunities actually hide. Thiel says something quietly devastating about elite universities. Fifty years ago, getting into Harvard or Yale or Stanford meant something specific: you were being sorted into the elite that ran the country. High school had
Why the old media playbook is a trap, and what Karp figured out that the rest of us are still learning. For thirty years the rule was simple: don't be interesting. Get media trained, stay buttoned up, walk offstage proud that you didn't make any news.
Dario Amodei left OpenAI because he didn't trust them. Now he's running the most powerful AI lab in the world — and he's not sure anyone should trust him either. Dario Amodei grew up in San Francisco while the first internet revolution was happening around
Peter Thiel's most provocative idea — and why it's probably right. The airline industry has generated approximately zero cumulative profit in its entire 100-year history. Google, a fraction of its size by revenue, is worth four times as much. That gap is the whole lesson. Creating
Palantir's CEO said it in August 2024. Nobody listened. Then it happened. In August 2024, Palantir CEO Alex Karp gave an interview to the New York Times. He described simultaneous pressure on three fronts — Russia, China, Iran — and argued that America's real vulnerability wasn't
The org chart isn't bureaucracy. It's architecture. And most companies get it wrong. Jensen Huang has more than 60 direct reports. He doesn't do one-on-ones with any of them. Most people hear this and assume it's chaos. It's