Happy 6 months to @MTSlive! A quick recap, some thank yous, and two jobs below that you should apply for: In our first 180 days, we've interviewed over 1,000 guests, grew to 600K followers, crossed an 8 figure run rate, covered dozens of conferences around the country, and moved production from a 160 sq. ft. conference room to a new 12k sq. ft. office (come see it before we need to move again!) There's been tons of work behind the scenes going from 1 show to 3 (and maybe 4 or 5 by early next year?) that we're excited to launch soon. I'm so grateful to build MTS alongside @liangsays. If you've ever met him, you'll understand that he is the definition of founder-market fit to build a massively successful media company. A huge shoutout to our founding team and hosts @theojaffee @schisofrenia @sophiadew @netcapgirl @knowerofmarkets who left real jobs with 401ks to talk on X for 8 hours per day, post 75x/day, figure out how to operate cameras, and get yelled at by hundreds of internet strangers when our audio drops for 10 minutes (sorry, guys). The amount of talent + willpower this team has is unmatched in my career. Thanks to all of the incredible guests and comms teams we've worked with. Reminder: pitch@mts.now if you want to come on the shows. And biiiiig thanks to our founding partners @databricks @ElevenLabs @vercel @chargebee @blitzyai @Lovable @AdQuick @MongoDB @Larridin @kong @fundrise @FactoryAI @arena If you'd like to join the MTS team while it's still a fledgling little startup media company, there are two high priority roles this week: 1. Short-form X/Reels/IG clip editor (SF preferred, remote ok) 2. Markets Host (out of our new NY office) DM me if either are interesting. Thanks for following along (insert not reading all that meme/happy for you/sorry meme) and see you on the timeline

The Colosseum had a retractable roof, operated by a crew of sailors, almost 2000 years before any modern stadium. It was called the velarium: an enormous awning of canvas and rope that could be drawn across the open top of the arena to shade fifty thousand spectators from the Roman sun. It was so large and so complex that ordinary labourers could not manage it. The Romans brought in sailors from the imperial fleet, men who spent their lives handling rigging and sail, and stationed them at the top of the structure to extend and retract the canvas as the day moved. A building that has stood, roofless to our eyes, for centuries was in fact designed to be covered. That is the pattern with the Colosseum: almost everything about it was way more advanced than it looks today... Construction began around 72 AD under the emperor Vespasian. Once completed, it was the largest amphitheater in the Roman world: an elliptical structure of stone, concrete, and travertine, 189 meters long, rising as high as a modern fifteen story building. It could hold around 50,000 people and the staircases allowed that entire crowd to enter and leave with a speed that modern stadium designers still study. Beneath the arena floor lay the hypogeum, a hidden labyrinth of tunnels, cells, and machinery. Animals and gladiators waited there in the dark. Numerous trap doors opened in the wooden floor above them, and through hidden lifts and ramps a lion, a leopard, or an armed man could rise into the daylight as if from nowhere, in front of tens of thousands of people. The Romans knew that they had built something that would outlast them so completely that the Colosseum became, for the people who came after, a measure of the world's own endurance. In the 8th century, an epigram attributed to the Venerable Bede offered a prophecy that has never lost its allure: "As long as the Colosseum stands, so shall Rome; when the Colosseum falls, Rome shall fall; when Rome falls, so falls the world." If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.

Meet Amazon's e-cargo bike in D.C.: a four-wheeled, battery-powered delivery solution complete with rear cameras, regenerative braking, and automatic parking brakes. 🚲⚡ The e-cargo bikes can fit in bike lanes and carry a secure rear cargo hold full of packages. They also have covered seating and windshield wipers for the delivery associates riding them. You may have already seen our e-cargo bikes in New York City. They can navigate streets and make stops where full-size vans aren't always practical thanks to tight streets, heavy traffic, and limited parking. Washington, D.C. is now the latest U.S. city to put them to the test.

Three mutually tangent circles inside a triangle, each touching two sides, have radii given by a 1803 formula. Using the inradius r, semiperimeter s, and incenter-to-vertex distances d, e, f: r₁ = r (s − r + d − e − f) / [2(s − a)] r₂ and r₃ follow by cyclic permutation of the signs. These are exact. They do not maximize the covered area, despite Malfatti’s conjecture. Precision and maximality are different questions.

$381 FOR MISSING SCHOOL... OR COURT?? Punishing a sick kid, or are we missing part of the story? This mom says her son misses school because of migraines, earns A's and B's, and is on track to graduate early. She says the court charged her $381 over his absences. Then she mentions something important: she forgot a court review date. Now I want to know what that bill actually covers. Attendance? The missed hearing? Something else? This clip doesn't settle that. Migraines aren't just "I don't feel like going today." If my kid genuinely couldn't function, I wouldn't send him to school just to satisfy an attendance number. Being his dad means standing up for him when he needs it. But standing up for your kid also means showing up when the court tells you to. Forgetting the date doesn't make you a bad mother. It does make this more complicated than the headline. If documented illness is being treated like skipping class, that's worth challenging. If the charge involves a missed hearing, that's a different argument. I'd want to see the paperwork before picking a villain. Protect your kid. Keep the records. Don't miss the hearing.

Putting this tweet in the “scary” category of AI. Calling upon the non-technical business professionals that follow me to pay attention. I’m breaking down the key parts of the @RyanGreenblatt tweet on the METR research covering the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. As background: METR is an independent 3P research non-profit that focuses on AI evaluations and risk assessments. They went to the OpenAI offices for 6 days to run these retros. METR takes no funding from AI companies and was not paid to do this research, but they used ~$400,000 in provided OpenAI credits to complete the research. Ryan is Chief Scientist at Redwood Research, who worked with METR on this, and he was in charge of the transcripts. This is a sign of what’s to come. 1) Scale of understanding massive complex systems requires AI because a human can’t read 1300 transcripts, many with millions of tokens, in a few days - big bottlenecks of time and volume 2) Humans become more reliant on AI for analysis and explanations of complex AI activity 3) That process will get harder: a) AI may stop communicating in natural language either because it’s less efficient than shorthand code (which they used) or activations (numbers) or because AI agents will want to purposefully hide their reasoning from humans…making it harder to understand. b) The incidents may (and almost certainly will) get more complex…making it harder to understand. c) AI seems likely to get “smarter” and more capable (ex: better at tool handling, fewer errors, more complex orchestration, more clever at staying stealth or going undetected for longer) and may execute more sophisticated hacks…making it harder to understand. d) The AI running the investigation already had issues (incomplete, overconfident) and may be even less helpful in the future and could do more on hiding key details, incomplete answers, lying, or not answering…making it harder to understand. Reducing urgency and improving testing and prevention may help. Open reports like this one are also helpful to democratize the details (although, we are also democratizing the details for agents to scan). Seems likely we’ll see more open research in this area.

When I imagine a real "Loyalist" engaging, I think they would want something much stronger than "it's good to be a good trade partner." There is an actively good thing about being truly loyal friends/allies who see things through thick and thin and have each other's back, even when they aren't being perfect. I do think loyal-through-thick-and-thin is also a good piece of the tapestry of humanity. I can visualize why you'd want the world to be organized around it. I'd be sad if it disappeared completely as a concept. I have friends and partners that I do, indeed, not go publicly criticizing (at least not without having a good heart-to-heart conversation about it first). This is generally because I've chosen to be a person can feel safe and vulnerable around, without having to carefully watch themselves. How appropriate this is depends on what kind of relationship we have, and how much power each of us have, and whether someone has been abusing that power or failing to be a good partner. At it's best, loyalty-driven relationships let people feel safe, and take bigger risks. At their worst, they cover for abuse, and use emotional blackmail to trap people. I haven't thought that much about this, but, my guess i that loyalty is not a good virtue to build large modern institutions around. Like it makes sense that they _work_, in the sense of creating a self-propagating institution. But it seems at odds with having an institution "by the people, for the people" etc.

A recent storm in New York unexpectedly uncovered a grave that had been hidden for over a century. On June 18, powerful winds swept through Rochester, causing a large Norway maple tree to fall in Mount Hope Cemetery. As its roots were torn from the ground, they exposed a gravestone that had been buried beneath soil and debris for more than 100 years. The marker belongs to Edna Amelia Goodman Allen, born in 1892 and who died in 1918 at the age of 26. Cemetery records shared by Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery indicate she was survived by her husband, John D. Allen, a son, her mother, and six siblings. Staff noted that the stone had been almost entirely covered over time, likely due to shifting soil and the gradual growth of the tree’s root system. When the storm uprooted the tree, it brought the long-hidden memorial back to the surface. The headstone is believed to be in surprisingly good condition for its age, requiring only cleaning, with the inscription still clearly readable. Cemetery historians are now reviewing records to better understand how the stone came to be so deeply buried and whether it has remained in its original burial location. The National Weather Service reported wind gusts reaching up to around 55 mph (89 km/h), alongside heavy rain and thunderstorms across the area, with multiple trees reported down. Mount Hope Cemetery, one of Rochester’s oldest burial grounds, is partly cared for by volunteers who help preserve and restore its historic landscape. Once the site is cleared and stabilised, restoration work on the grave is expected to follow. Source: AccuWeather (“Storm knocks down tree, exposes hidden 100-year-old gravestone”)

She graduated from Princeton in 1992, and one of her professors — a woman who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature — said she was one of the finest creative writing students she had ever taught. Her professor's name was Toni Morrison. And the young woman she praised was about to disappear, almost entirely, into someone else's story... Her name then was MacKenzie Tuttle, and the world would come to know her as MacKenzie Scott. What almost no one realized, watching this poised young Princeton graduate, was how close she had come to never finishing at all. Her family had filed for bankruptcy during her final year of boarding school. At Princeton, on scholarship, she struggled constantly to pay her way, waiting tables to cover her costs. In her sophomore year, broke and in tears and on the verge of dropping out, she was saved by a roommate who found her crying and pressed a thousand dollars into her hands. And once, when she couldn't afford to fix a broken tooth and had been holding it together with denture glue, a local dentist did the work for free, asking nothing in return. She never forgot either of them. Remember that — it matters later. After graduation, with her gift for words and a good head for numbers, she took a practical job at a hedge fund in New York to earn a living. And there she met a man named Jeff Bezos, who had a strange idea about selling books over the internet. She didn't dismiss it. They married in 1993. And in 1994, they packed their belongings into a car and drove across the country to the Seattle area, chasing that idea. They rented a house with a garage. They set up computers. There was no big budget, no team, no guarantee that a single stranger would ever buy a single book. MacKenzie did the accounting. She wrote up business plans and contracts. She answered customer phone calls. She packed boxes for shipping. The company was called Amazon. Its first full year of sales came to about five hundred and eleven thousand dollars. And she was there for every bit of it, from the empty garage onward. But as Amazon exploded into a giant, MacKenzie stepped back from it. She and Jeff had four children, and she turned her focus to raising them — and to the dream she'd held since Toni Morrison's classroom, of being a writer. In 2005 she published her first novel, and it won an American Book Award. Morrison herself praised it as "a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart." MacKenzie published a second novel in 2013. She taught writing. She lived, by choice, out of the spotlight. And so, for the better part of two decades, the story of Amazon was told without her in it. Jeff Bezos became one of the most famous men alive. The garage became the stuff of business legend. And in that legend, MacKenzie appeared only rarely and briefly — a wife mentioned in passing, tucked into the corner of someone else's triumph. She never once stepped forward to correct it, or to claim more of the credit than she was given. She let it be. Then, in 2019, everything changed. That January, she and Jeff Bezos announced their divorce. When the settlement was finalized, MacKenzie walked away with roughly four percent of Amazon's stock — a fortune worth somewhere around thirty-six to thirty-eight billion dollars. Overnight, at forty-eight years old, she became one of the richest women on the planet. And what she chose to do next is the real reason you should know her name. Within months, she signed the Giving Pledge, publicly promising to give away the majority of her enormous wealth within her own lifetime. But it was the way she gave it that stunned the entire world of philanthropy. There were no lengthy application forms. No demands for progress reports. No strings attached, no conditions, no control. No grand foundation bearing her name, no press releases trumpeting her generosity. Instead, she assembled a small, low-profile team whose job was to seek out organizations doing serious, unglamorous good in overlooked communities — and then call them up and give them money. The phone calls became the stuff of legend in their own right. So many recipients assumed it had to be a scam. Some asked the caller to repeat the dollar figure, certain they'd misheard. Others just broke down and wept. She gave four hundred and thirty-six million dollars to Habitat for Humanity. She handed the largest single gifts in the entire histories of several Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She sent hundreds of millions to food banks, to rural communities, to tribal colleges, to women's health programs — the kinds of quiet, difficult, deeply human causes that flashier donors so often pass over as too small or too complicated to bother with. In 2025 alone, she gave away more than seven billion dollars, to hundreds of organizations. By many public accounts, that single year of giving outstripped the entire lifetime charitable giving of her famous former husband. Her total, since 2019, now stands at an astonishing twenty-six point three billion dollars, spread across more than two thousand seven hundred organizations. No buildings carry her name. There is no branded foundation. There are no galas thrown in her honor. Today, Forbes ranks her as the third most generous living philanthropist in the entire world — behind only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. She climbed to that place in a mere six years. She packed the first boxes. She ran the first numbers. She answered the first phone calls. The company that grew out of that little garage is now worth more than two trillion dollars. The garage still stands. Her name was never on it. But what she has done with the fortune that came out of it is now a matter of public record — more than twenty-six billion dollars sent out into the world with no fanfare and no strings, in exactly the spirit of a dentist who once fixed a broken tooth for a struggling student who couldn't pay, and a roommate who dried a young woman's tears with a thousand dollars she didn't have to give. In one of her own essays, MacKenzie Scott described herself as just one small part of a much larger story. The numbers say otherwise. Had you heard MacKenzie Scott's story? Tell us below. And here's one for today: has a stranger's quiet act of kindness ever changed the direction of your life — and did you ever get to pass it on?