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Friendly reminder: You're allowed to like good things the government does even if you dislike the current president. You're also allowed to dislike bad things the government does even if you like the current president.

Map showing the movement of people between states, 2024 (latest available data)

Elon’s advice to 20-year-olds on surviving the AI era: Get as broad-based an education as possible: arts, sciences, engineering, and wide general knowledge. Why? AI and robots will fulfill almost any request immediately.The edge won’t be doing the work. It will be knowing what to ask for. The broader your knowledge, the better your questions. (source: CGTN)

New newsletter: THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN HOST The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has declined by 70 percent in the last 50 years. derekthompson.org/p/the-deat…

We should just sandbox the agents by giving them Delta Wifi

❄️ BREAKING: IT’S SNOWING AT THE TOP OF SNOWBIRD! Snow levels have dropped to around 11,000 feet, bringing the first snowflakes of the season to the Wasatch! 🏔️❄️

First orbital flight of Starship successful!

This is AMAZING NEWS!! The Department of Education will start tying federal student loan eligibility to graduate earning outcomes. Under the rule: > undergrad programs must out-earn high school graduates and > graduate programs must out-earn undergraduate programs This is going dismantle many BS predatory college programs. A would be win for the future of American students!

Mike Krukow's children Tessa, Chase and Wes perform the national anthem at Oracle Park 👏

One final broadcast with Mike Krukow 🎙️ Tune in to @NBCSGiants at 12:05 p.m. to hear history 🧡

Dario Amodei is at the desk to assure that the future of humanity is safe from AI

modern keyboard for software developers

BREAKING: Google launching TPUs in space NEXT WEEK on SpaceX falcon 9 to test AI data centers orbit ITS HAPPENING

On this exact day in 1780, three ordinary militiamen stopped a stranger on a road, searched him, found treason hidden in his boot, turned down a small fortune to let him walk, and in doing so saved West Point and possibly the whole Revolution. Their names were John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart, and David Williams, and almost no one remembers them. They were not famous soldiers. They were young New York farmers, part of the informal patrols that watched the dangerous no-man's-land north of British-occupied New York City, a lawless strip crawling with raiders and spies from both sides. On the morning of September 23, near Tarrytown, they stopped a well-dressed rider who called himself John Anderson. Here is where luck and character collided. The rider, seeing rough men in mixed clothing, guessed wrong and assumed they were Loyalists like himself, and he let slip that he was a British officer. The instant he realized his mistake, he tried to backtrack, but it was too late. The three militiamen were suspicious now, and they decided to search him. They made him strip, and inside his stockings, tucked into his boot, David Williams found folded papers, detailed plans of the American fortress at West Point, its defenses, its garrison, its weaknesses. They had no idea, in that moment, that the man was Major John André, head of British intelligence, or that the papers had been handed to him by Benedict Arnold himself in a treason plot to sell West Point to the enemy. But they knew they had caught something enormous. And then came the test that made them heroes. André, desperate, tried to buy his freedom. He offered them his fine horse, his watch, and money, and by the account given at his trial, a bribe of a thousand guineas in gold, an almost unimaginable sum for three farmers of modest means, enough to change their lives forever. All they had to do was let him ride away. They said no. Three poor young men, offered a fortune to look the other way, refused it, and instead marched their prisoner to the nearest American officer. That single act of plain honesty unraveled the entire conspiracy. The papers exposed the plot to betray West Point. Arnold barely escaped to a British ship. André was tried and hanged. And the fortress that guarded the Hudson, the linchpin of the American position, was saved. The young nation understood what it owed them. Congress voted the three men the very first military decoration in American history, a silver medal called the Fidelity Medallion, its reverse inscribed with a Latin motto meaning "the love of country conquers." Each also received a lifetime pension and a farm. George Washington himself presented them their medals. Remember Paulding, Van Wart, and Williams. Not generals, not statesmen, just three farmers on patrol who happened to stop the right man on the right morning, and who then proved that they could not be bought at any price. The Revolution was saved that day not by a brilliant plan or a famous hero, but by ordinary men who were simply, stubbornly honest when a fortune said they should not be.

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity By Jeffrey Katzenberg A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe. Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.” I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both. In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious. There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love. People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft. Is History Repeating Itself? The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul." Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work. A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept. They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded. This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix. What I Learned From Walt Disney In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell. We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not. That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create. A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did. Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.” A Distinction With a Difference I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . . Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new. Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out. Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new. One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable. Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground. A Path Forward In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . . Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human. At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling. The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it. There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us. The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires. What I Learned From Steve Jobs Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities. What I See Coming Soon As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process. Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

On this day in 1779, an American captain stood on the deck of a ship that was literally sinking under his feet, on fire, riddled with holes, half his crew dead or wounded, and when the enemy shouted across the water asking if he surrendered, he roared back a line that the United States Navy has never forgotten: "I have not yet begun to fight!" His name was John Paul Jones, and what he did that night made him the founding legend of the American navy. Understand how insane the setting was. Jones was not defending American waters. He had taken the fight to the enemy's home, cruising in a small squadron right off the coast of England itself, terrorizing British shipping in their own front yard. His flagship was an old, worn-out French merchant vessel he had converted into a warship and renamed the Bonhomme Richard, in honor of Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard." It was slow, tired, and outgunned. Off Flamborough Head, Jones ran into a British convoy escorted by a brand-new, faster, more powerful Royal Navy frigate called the Serapis. By every rational measure, Jones should have run. The Serapis was a better ship with heavier guns. Instead, Jones attacked. The battle that followed, fought into the night under a rising moon, was one of the most savage ship-to-ship duels of the entire age of sail. Early on, disaster struck the Americans: two of the Bonhomme Richard's big old cannon burst when fired, blowing apart their own gun crews and leaving Jones dangerously short of firepower. The Serapis hammered the Richard mercilessly, its heavier guns tearing the American ship to splinters, opening holes below the waterline, setting fires. The Richard was being destroyed. So Jones did the only thing that could save him. If he could not win a gunnery duel, he would not fight one. He drove his ship straight into the Serapis and lashed the two vessels together, hull against hull, muzzle to muzzle, so close the gun crews were practically fighting through each other's ports. Now it was not a naval battle so much as a brawl, and Jones's American and French sailors and marines could rake the enemy's decks with musket fire and grenades from the rigging. It was in the middle of this hell, with his ship clearly sinking and afire, that the British captain called over, reasonably, to ask if the Americans had had enough and wished to strike their colors. And Jones, standing on a doomed deck, gave the answer that became immortal: he had not yet begun to fight. And he meant it. The turning point came from above. One of Jones's men climbed out on a yardarm over the enemy ship and dropped a grenade down through an open hatch into the Serapis, where it touched off a chain of gunpowder charges. The explosion ripped through the British gun deck, killing and maiming dozens of men in an instant. The fight went out of the Serapis. Its captain, his own ship now wrecked and burning, finally surrendered. And here is the almost unbelievable ending. John Paul Jones had won, but his own ship was beyond saving. The Bonhomme Richard was so shattered that it slowly sank over the next day, and Jones had to move his victorious crew onto the captured Serapis and sail away in the enemy's ship, because his own had gone to the bottom. He won the battle and lost his vessel, all at once. The victory made him a hero on both sides of the Atlantic, a symbol that the infant United States could carry the war to the mightiest navy on earth and win. To this day, the Navy calls John Paul Jones its father, and it teaches new sailors his answer from that burning deck. Remember September 23, 1779, and the man who was sinking, and on fire, and outgunned, and answered a demand for his surrender by saying he had not yet begun to fight, and then proved it.