Jeff drank a bit too much of his own Kool-Aid in this recent Odd Lots clip. I think it's important to clear up a distinction that makes all the difference. Democratizing access to wealth creation is NOT the same as democratizing access to speculation. Many of us genuinely want broader participation in attractive investment opportunities. The growing wealth inequality produced by the current system is tearing at the seams of society, something I've spoken about many times. But let's be clear: listing pre-IPO perpetual futures does absolutely nothing to democratize the wealth being created in private markets. I've seen this misleading narrative pushed repeatedly by perp DEXs lately, and it needs to be called out. A pre-IPO perp creates ZERO underlying wealth. It's a zero-sum contract before costs, and negative-sum after them. No capital flows to the company. No ownership changes hands. No new economic opportunity is created. Every long has a short. There is no free lunch in simply going long something before its IPO, and funding costs can even determine the outcome more than any price moves. TRADING access is NOT INVESTING access. In fact, in many ways pre-IPO perps are almost the antithesis of democratized access: They create the illusion of participation in private-market wealth creation, while actually offering retail a speculative instrument whose mechanics they are often poorly equipped to understand. The result is a playground for the FEW sophisticated traders who understand funding, oracle design, and liquidation mechanics to extract value from the MANY who don't. To give credit where it's due, Robinhood's efforts toward sourcing actual employee shares, placing them into SPVs, and tokenizing genuine spot ownership are much closer to meaningful democratization. That can unlock real economic value by allowing employees to exchange some of their expected upside for liquidity, while giving new investors actual economic exposure. A legitimate financial trade-off, without the funding-rate and liquidation shenanigans. I'm strongly aligned with expanding access to investment opportunities. And I believe advances in AI and blockchain can dramatically lower the barriers to discovering, structuring, and distributing them. But let's not BS ourselves that launching another zero-sum casino contract is moving the needle on wealth inequality. What would actually move the needle is bringing real capital formation and ownership onchain. Giving investors access to productive, illiquid assets like data centers, GPUs, and select startup investing, where capital can actually finance growth and share in the resulting value creation. These opportunities are harder to structure, underwrite, and bring to market, and we haven't seen many compelling implementations onchain yet. Hopefully this will change soon and, as the industry matures, we can direct more of our energy toward actually expanding access to wealth creation. Clip below. Was glad to see @tracyalloway push back on this framing, and to Jeff's credit, after this he does seem to walk back his original position somewhat.

the "Hard Problem" in a nutshell: 1. atoms aren't conscious 2. humans are made of atoms 3. humans are conscious 4. so at least one of 1-3 must be false Panpsychists say #1 is false Dualists say #2 is false Illusionists say #3 is false Materialists say #4 is false

90%+ of the economy is trading below the value of its tokens

Last week the hydrogen electrolyzer team @terraformindies pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test site. WTAF? Most commercial electrolyzers need carefully conditioned power from expensive battery-meditated backup systems. Ours runs directly off the sun. Clouds pass, the day turns to night, and we maintain purity from a stack whose Bill of Materials cost is well below $100/kW. Terraform's single-minded focus on capex reduction has allowed us to convert sunlight to hydrogen in an unprecedented demo at a cost below $2/kg. If that wasn't enough, we have a crystal clear plan of steady execution to push that cost below $1/kg in the coming years. Rather than linger on this point in response to experts-with-spreadsheets who said this was not only beyond my team, it was forbidden by known laws of physics, let me tell you a bit about how we actually pulled this off. We started building this test site in March. Once the panels and electrics were in place the CO2 team were the first to demonstrate production on site. Close behind them the electrolyzer team planned the logistics necessary to project substantial operational ability into a hostile test site in the middle of nowhere. It's no good to find you're missing a wrench half way through the day! Much of the test prep was completed before dawn, when the panels go live. The sun came up and the stack immediately started splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. The team carefully monitored purity and flammability as the sun climbed through the sky. As designed, the stack warmed up and conducted even more power, maintaining solid production until late afternoon when the setting sun shaded the panels. Terraform's synthetic fuel system is uniquely designed to follow the sun and extract the maximum possible value from cheap solar panels. Hydrogen is a pernicious molecule. It leaks through and embrittles metals, burns almost invisibly at a wide range of mixtures in air, burns hot and fast and can easily undergo detonation transition, and has about half a dozen other spookily dangerous properties. My advice is to never work with it unless you absolutely have to. The Terraformer produces and consumes H2 in one compact discrete area with a minimum of complexity and fuss, and as expected this demo was completed in accordance with our rigorous safety standards and no unscheduled excitement! This successful demonstration was also a profound milestone for the team after a testing anomaly last December compelled us to finally rip off the bandaid and move decisively towards the "future design" with half the parts but considerable complexity in assembly. No-one else makes electrolyzers this way and we, more than anyone, know exactly why. And also how to do it anyway, translating directly into a unique cost advantage. A huge congratulation to Ken, Sherman, @ckalitin, Nikhil, Abdullah, and Aaron for their successful test campaign. Terraform's hydrogen and CO2 are the chemical precursors for synthetic methane and methanol, which we make in our own synthetic fuel reactor. Combined, we make oil and gas out of sunlight and air. We are breaking the geological and geographical monopolies on oil production. In the limit, Terraform will deploy these electrolyzers by the millions and they will all be plug-and-play with solar PV arrays. The Muroc smoke test campaign is far from over. We will win!

There’s been a lot of speculation about where we stand on open-weights models. We’ve outlined our views in full here: anthropic.com/news/position-…

my brothers and sisters and Christ, $9 million ain’t gonna do it