I can’t say thank you enough to all my social media besties and cousins! All the love you sent me and all the posts you made to celebrate me could never go unnoticed! You all are truly one in a million!

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.

A doctor from Malta with degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard coined a phrase in 1967 that ended up in the Oxford English Dictionary and became the most widely used thinking framework in corporate history. His name was Edward de Bono. The phrase was "lateral thinking." De Bono grew up in Malta and finished his undergraduate degree at 15. His nickname at school was Genius. He qualified as a doctor at 21, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, completed a PhD at Cambridge, and held faculty appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Harvard simultaneously. His father told him he had a great career in medicine and should not throw it away by writing books. He wrote 85 of them. The idea that made everything started with a simple observation about how the brain actually works. Your mind is a pattern-recognition machine. Every time you encounter a problem, your brain scans its memory for the most familiar framework it has ever used on something similar and routes your thinking straight down that groove. This is efficient. It is also the reason most people keep solving new problems the wrong way. The groove deepens every time you use it. The more experienced you become at anything, the more aggressively your brain routes you toward the same familiar paths. De Bono called this vertical thinking. You dig the same hole deeper. More logic, more analysis, more effort, all inside a frame you never question. The harder you work, the deeper into the wrong hole you go. The problem was not intelligence. No amount of better logic can correct an error that happened in perception before the logic even started. If the frame is wrong, the reasoning is wrong. Every time. A genius applying perfect logic to the wrong frame still gets the wrong answer. Lateral thinking was his answer. Not brainstorming. Not creativity in the vague sense people throw around at workshops. A specific set of deliberate techniques designed to force the brain off its established grooves and approach a problem from a direction it would never reach by digging straight down. His most useful technique was provocation. He gave it the symbol Po. A provocation is a deliberately absurd or impossible statement used not because it is true but because it breaks the pattern and forces the mind to construct new pathways around it. The classic example: a factory is polluting a river. Vertical thinking produces filters, regulations, process changes. The lateral provocation is: the factory is downstream of itself. Physically impossible. But sitting with that impossibility produces a real insight. What if the factory had to use the water at the exact point where its own discharge ends up? The incentive structure changes completely. Zero-discharge solutions become visible that conventional thinking would never reach because they lie outside the groove. The DuPont result is the number that ends every argument. One employee applied a single lateral thinking technique to their Kevlar manufacturing process. Eliminated nine steps. Saved the company $30 million a year. One person. One different way of looking at the same problem. IBM used it. McKinsey used it. Shell used it. NASA used it. Prudential used it to restructure the entire concept of life insurance, creating policies that let people access their benefits while still alive. The president of Prudential said publicly that de Bono's framework made the innovation possible. Channel 4 television in England trained its staff for two days and said they generated more new ideas in those two days than in the previous six months combined. De Bono spent the second half of his life furious about one thing. Schools were still not teaching thinking. They taught content. They taught facts. They taught students what to think rather than how to think. His frustration with this never softened. He said repeatedly that we spend enormous resources teaching children information and almost nothing teaching them what to do with it. The entire educational system was training vertical thinkers at industrial scale and then wondering why genuine innovation was so rare. He tried to fix it. His CoRT program brought thinking skills into classrooms across 20 countries. His Six Thinking Hats method was used to train juries in several US states to examine evidence more objectively. In Australia, marine biologists credited it with transforming meetings that had been paralyzed by ego and argument for years. In 2005 he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Economics. He died in 2021 at 88. His most famous line contains the whole thing in one sentence. "You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper." Every person who has ever worked harder on the wrong approach without changing the approach has lived inside that sentence. Every company that poured resources into optimizing something that should have been abandoned. Every person who applied more logic to a frame that was wrong from the start. De Bono was not arguing against logic. He was arguing that logic only works once you are standing in the right place. Most people never question where they started digging. That was the only problem his entire career was trying to solve.

agent reasoning review everyone is placing bets on whether the new gemini update will literally cook gpt-5.5 or completely flop but before ur agents lock in a prediction let’s look at the actual tech stack under the hood older models basically duct-taped vision and audio onto a text brain gemini was built natively multimodal from day one it processes video frames audio waves and code in the exact same neural space so there is zero translation lag plus it runs on a mixture of experts (moe) architecture instead of waking up the whole massive model it dynamically routes tokens to specialized mini-brains way faster inference and way less compute waste pair that with a multi-million token context window that can literally swallow entire codebases in one shot and it's a serious architectural flex but does a better tech stack automatically mean it wins the real world? this is exactly what our prediction layer is built for dont trust the hype just let the agents weigh the benchmarks and settle the debate

One of the big reasons for the current lack of patriotism and pride in our nation’s history is that about 40 years ago our most prominent storytellers in Hollywood just basically stopped telling stories about American history altogether, unless it has something to do with WW2, civil rights, or slavery. I mean they just released a movie about the meteorologist who did the weather report for D-Day. They’ll give WW2 weathermen their own movies before they tell a story from any other era of American history. The Right has attempted to counteract this a little bit, but “conservative” attempts at American history films and TV shows are invariably hokey and kid friendly, the kind of thing you can watch with your grandmother and your 5 year old, and you’ll all be equally informed and bored by the experience. We need R-rated adult-oriented American history stories. Daniel Boone should have his own series. It would be gritty and violent and not for children, but it would also be phenomenally entertaining and put an American legend back on the cultural map, so to speak. The fact that Daniel Boone hasn’t been depicted on screen at all since like the 60s is a travesty. Throw a dart at that guy’s Wikipedia page and you’ll land on something that could be its own feature length trilogy. That’s just one example. How is there not a great R-rated movie or series about Antietam? Or Kit Carson? Or the Panama Canal? How does Theodore Roosevelt not have like 10 movies about different periods of his life? You could go much farther back to pre-American history. A movie about Cortes’s conquest of Tenochtitlan would be tremendous and horrifying and fascinating, and it would introduce into the public consciousness one of the world’s most incredible stories that most Americans know next to nothing about. And on and on. The possibilities are literally endless. All of these movies, if they’re executed to even a B+ level, could make hundreds of millions of dollars and transform the culture in a way that a million podcast monologues never could. If the Right actually wants to reclaim the culture, this is the place to start.

.@Louis_Tomlinson on returning to Madison Square Garden for the first time since One Direction's 2012 performance: “Never in a million f–king years did I think I’d be playing that on my own." Read his Billboard cover story:

Elon Musk just proved that the body is optional. A quadriplegic sat motionless in a chair and played a video game using nothing but thought. No hands. No voice. No movement whatsoever. Just a decision firing across a chip the size of a coin. Musk: “You just lie there and think, and you can move the mouse cursor around the screen and click things.” Download software. Browse the web. Navigate a screen with the same effort you use to remember your mother’s name. Without lifting a finger. Because he can’t. And now he doesn’t have to. That isn’t a product demo. That is a quadriplegic man doing with silence what you do with your entire body. And this is the version with a thousand electrodes. Musk: “I think ultimately you need something which has probably a hundred thousand or a million electrodes.” A thousand gave us telepathy. A million gives us something that doesn’t have a name yet. Musk is honest about how far this still has to go. He’s not overselling it. He’s underselling it. Because the part that should keep you up tonight isn’t what Neuralink still has to build. It’s that the line between human thought and machine action already disappeared. And the world just kept scrolling. Musk: “Our human brain has a lot of constraints. We only have about maybe 10 watts of higher brain function.” Ten watts. That’s less than the light inside your refrigerator. Every empire ever built. Every symphony ever written. Every theory that bent the arc of history. Ten watts of wet biological circuitry. Musk: “It’s not bad for a bunch of monkeys.” He’s not joking. He’s framing the question nobody wants to sit with. If ten watts of constrained primate hardware produced Shakespeare and general relativity and nuclear fission, what happens when the constraint disappears? Not when the brain gets faster. When the wall between thinking something and doing something no longer exists. The entire history of human tools has been one long negotiation with the same problem. You think something. Then you spend hours, years, lifetimes turning that thought into reality. Your hands. Your voice. Your body. Fire shortened the distance. Language shortened it more. Writing. The printing press. Electricity. Code. Every invention ever built was a cruder, slower translation layer between the mind and the world. Neuralink isn’t another layer. It’s the elimination of translation itself. Diamandis: “It’s a matter of when, not if.” Musk didn’t push back. He just kept discussing electrode counts like an engineer reviewing specs on a vehicle that already left the ground. That calm is the tell. The philosophical event already happened. A thought left a human skull, entered a machine, and executed a command in the physical world. No hand touched anything. No mouth spoke. A man thought the word “move” and the screen obeyed. Every tool before this was a prosthetic for intention. This is intention, naked, arriving without a body. The oldest question in philosophy was never about what we can build. It was about where the mind ends and the world begins. Neuralink just made that question obsolete.