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.

Caller: “My dad is 84 and his estate is worth just under $5 million. He has about $900K in an IRA and a stock position that turned roughly $22,000 into more than $1 million.” “We discovered he bought 1,000 shares at $22, and now the stock trades above $1,000 a share.” “My brother and I want to make sure his estate is protected. Do we sell some of it and diversify, or leave it alone because of the step-up in basis when he passes?” Dave Ramsey: “You’re weighing two things: taxes versus risk.” “If you sell it today, there’s a substantial capital gains tax bill. If he passes away holding it, there’s no tax because of the step-up in basis.” “But the risk is that you’ve got over a million dollars tied up in a single stock.” “If that company gets into trouble tomorrow, the stock could get cut in half and you lose $500,000.” Caller: “We talked about maybe selling 20% to 25% instead of the entire position.” Dave Ramsey: “That’s probably the direction I’d lean.” “Sell off a portion over time, reduce the concentration risk, and move the money into mutual funds.” “You’re basically balancing the odds of something happening to the company against the odds of your dad passing away first.” “A million-dollar position in one stock is a lot of risk, no matter how great the story has been.”

Enigma emerged from stealth today with a $71 million seed round to build robotic foundation models. In practice, that might look like: > Playing Pictionary with a robot painter > Controlling one robot in a sword fight against another > Asking a robot to do something and it responds in real time Co-founder and CEO @jonathanj says Enigma's core research is focused on robotic foundation models, but they also care deeply about studying how people interact with robots. Enigma is releasing a range of interactive robot experiences to test different ways people interact with robots. It will feed what it learns back into its research.

Rambling Random Ruminations of a Relic - a series Hey, Gen Z and younger Millennials—especially those of you who trade the markets. I get it. You’ve been screwed by the Boomers. Expensive education. No clear career path in your chosen field. Student loans. Another internship that leads nowhere. Close-to-minimum-wage work—not a living wage—waiting tables or doing something similar. And when you finally find a job, the owners expect you to work your butt off. What’s with these four-day, nine-hour-a-day jobs, anyway? Owning a home is not even imaginable. Marriage? Why would you want the lives your parents had? As an early-years Boomer, I fully acknowledge the disaster created for you by your parents’ and grandparents’ generations. You have every right to be angry. But I am seeing more and more of you come into equity and futures trading with expectations that are absolutely off-the-charts insane. You poo-poo this claim!!!! Many of you are chasing stories about turning $5,000 into $5 million in five years. The Market Wizards stories are incredibly compelling. One of the things I am most proud of during my 51-year career—supporting my family and building wealth—is having been featured in Market Wizards. I remain deeply honored. You might be a three-standard-deviation wonder. I am cheering for you—I truly am. Welcome to trading. It has been a thrill and an honor to trade my own money as my full-time occupation since I was in my 20s. I am now within spitting distance of 80, living in a body that betrays the fact that I once had a Division I university ice hockey scholarship. I strongly believe that the pursuit of becoming one of the three in 1,000 will ultimately reveal the full character and integrity of those three. Am I advising you not to invest in stocks? Nope. I am advising you to prepare for a career with a future, work hard and save as much as you can every month. Then I would advise putting 80% of those savings into SPY, 5% into Bitcoin and 15% into gold and silver. There is big money to be made in precious metals—but the move does not need to begin next week, Mr. and Ms. FOMO. There is a very strong chance that, 30 years from now, you will wish you had annualized 20% to 30%. You will recognize that your dream of doubling your money every year originated in Fantasyland. Please believe me: I am NOT, NOT, NOT trying to insult you. I believe in you. My grandchildren are Gen Z. Your generation has enormous potential for wealth and happiness. So, what is my advice to you???? You probably won’t accept it now, but print this X post and place it in an envelope marked, “Open in 2060.” Believe me—life goes by faster than you can possibly understand right now. If you want to learn trading—and I mean consistently profitable trading with your own money—it is possible. But you must get the idea of doubling your money every year out of your mind. Instead, think in terms of reaching 20% annually during years four and five, measured from the first year you begin trading. The best living investor/trader, in my opinion, is Stan “the Man” Druckenmiller. The best trading operation? That’s easy: Renaissance Technologies. Both have hovered in the 40%-plus zone over long periods. Let me square with you on this next statement: If you can learn to average even 30% annually over five years—with a Calmar ratio of 2.5 and without much variation across several hundred Monte Carlo simulations—you will have no trouble becoming a millionaire-plus, if money is your thing. More importantly, you will feel an enormous sense of accomplishment. Also, in my opinion, futures markets are far superior to equity markets for building an account and supporting any reasonable lifestyle. Why futures? Lots of reasons—more than enough to explore in another installment of “my story on X.” But I mean trading with real money. Not the pretend “prop shop” nonsense. If that is what you have in mind, unfollow me immediately. I have nothing to say to you. There are micro and even smaller contracts available these days, especially if you live outside the United States, where CFDs are permitted. Traders with access to CFDs have an advantage over those of us in the Stars and Stripes gang. I believe the CME even offers a one-ounce gold contract. And as more hard assets are tokenized, still more alternatives to traditional futures contracts will become available. I believe it is entirely possible to succeed in futures trading—if you enter the business with the right expectations. For your first three years, your primary goal should be simply not to lose money. If you accomplish that, you will already be way ahead of your peers. I mean WAAAY ahead. If you can survive three or four years in futures and still have your original money intact, then you may indeed have a very bright future in futures. One warning: DON’T EVER pay some service to provide you with signals, setups or whatever else the YouTube and X Wonder Kids of the Century want to sell you. You have to do this on your own. There is no other way. If there were, I would tell you. Please believe me. Perhaps I will wander deeper into this tunnel in the future. But that’s all the rambling for now.

The next ByteDance is a permissionless market Media didn't just change. Its objective function did. Distribution shifted from editorial curation to engagement maximization, and the two optimize for completely different things. More than half of Americans now get news from social platforms, and the feeds ranking that news are tuned to predict what holds attention, not what is true. LLMs make this worse: they personalize at near-zero marginal cost, so the diversity of inputs any one person sees collapses toward whatever their prior already rewards. The echo chamber isn't a failure. It's the equilibrium of any system that maximizes attention. Markets are the exception, because a price is the one signal in media that costs something to produce. A market weights each opinion by conviction, and punishes error in real time. That discipline is what turns dispersed, private, tacit knowledge into public. In a media of infinite mirrors, the market is the only output that has skin in the game. But demand for that signal is thin and lumpy. Activity follows a power law: a handful of elections and headline events absorb almost all volume, while the long tail of markets sits at near-zero open interest. Two distinct failures produce this. On the demand side, the right markets never reach the right users. Distribution can't match a question to the person who actually holds an edge on it. On the supply side, even when a market exists, no market maker can afford to price it. ByteDance didn't win on better content; it won by solving the matching problem for long-tail supply. An events market feed needs the same machinery. The asset being matched is different, but the economics are identical: a vast long tail of supply that is worthless until it finds its precise audience. The supply-side failure, though, is structural. The Conditional Token Framework is clean and composable, but it pushes price discovery onto external market makers and loss-bearing LPs. Unlike perps or spot tokens, where every participant shares one deep order book and liquidity nets across the whole venue, each prediction market is a bespoke, non-fungible risk that has to be subsidized on its own. So the marginal cost of opening a market doesn't fall as the platform grows; it stays roughly constant and high. That is the inverse of software economics, and it's the real reason liquidity bootstrapping never gets cheaper no matter how many markets launch. The long tail gets excluded precisely where its information value per dollar is highest. The future of media doesn't devolve into a glorified sportsbook for lack of interest; the cost structure selects for the sportsbook. Breaking that requires a core mechanism whose engagement is invariant to notional size, where a $100 market feels as alive as a $100 million one. Without innovation at the protocol layer, every new market pays the same toll. That's the problem we're solving at 42. We're building an events market protocol that's permissionless for all creators. Pairing a suite of liquidity-agnostic mechanisms with precise distribution so that consensus can form on any topic. Long-tail topics aren't niche. They're where most tacit, local knowledge lives, and they're where prediction markets have always been theoretically strongest and practically absent. Come build the next generation of media with us. Break free from the world of infinite mirrors.

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.