My neighbor carried mail for forty years. In his whole life, nobody ever wrote to him. Then he went to Nebraska. Mr. Sugawara is 71. Rain, snow, typhoons, forty years on the same route in our town. This summer, our town sent a small group to visit our sister city, a farm town of 1,800 people in Nebraska. He was chosen. It was the first time he had ever left Japan. His host was Ray, 74, a retired rural mail carrier. Thirty-six years on a gravel route. When Ray found out, he said, "Mailmen are a tribe. You're family." Mr. Sugawara came home and asked me to translate one letter into English. He said he wants every American to read it. Here it is. "To the people of Nebraska, I am a mailman. I am not good with words. I carried other people's words for forty years. Please forgive me. I want to tell you what I saw. I don't think you know. Every person I met asked where I was from. Then every person told me about a cousin who was stationed in Okinawa. I have now heard about 23 cousins in Okinawa. I think Okinawa must be very crowded. On the country roads, every truck lifted one finger off the steering wheel at us. Ray said it means, 'I see you, neighbor.' I counted 212 fingers in two weeks. I drove for forty years in Japan. Nobody ever lifted a finger. Ray taught me to look a man in the eye when I shake his hand. In Japan, we look down to be polite. I practiced on Ray for two days. He said I looked like I wanted to fight him. On the third day, he said, 'There it is.' I don't know what 'it' is. But I was very proud. Every morning, Ray took me to a diner. Eight old men sit at the same table and fix the whole country before 7 a.m. In fifty years, they have never agreed on anything. In fifty years, they have never stopped being friends. On my third morning, there was a coffee mug on the wall with my name on it. In Japan, a mug with your name on it takes twenty years. On the Fourth of July, there was a parade. Half the town was in the parade. The other half watched. Then they switched. When an old man in uniform rode by on a hay wagon, everyone stood up. The children too. Nobody told them to. I stood up too. I don't know his name. I will remember his face for the rest of my life. In Japan, we have a saying. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. In Nebraska, I stuck out very much. Short. Bad English. I bowed to a cow. Nobody hammered me down. They handed me a hammer and asked me to help fix the church roof. I think I understand now what it means to be American. It is not a passport. It is a habit. You notice who is alone. And you fix it before lunch. Now, the reason for this letter. I delivered about three million letters in my life. I never received one. Not once. Who writes to the mailman? When I left, Ray asked for my address. I thought it was just politeness. Two weeks after I came home, there was a letter in my mailbox. From the diner. Eight signatures. It said my mug is still on the wall, and nobody is allowed to use it. Then a letter from the boy who taught me to throw a football. Then Ray. Then the pastor. Then a woman I talked to for five minutes at the gas station. She wanted me to know her tomatoes came in. Since August, I have received 31 letters. I keep them in a box. I read them on my front step, where I sat every morning for forty years, waiting to start my route. I carried everyone's words. You are the first people who ever wrote back. Thank you, America. Sugawara Kenzo, mailman" He answers every single one. Every Monday, he walks his letters to the post office himself. He says it's the best route he ever had. America, you write back. You have no idea how rare that is.

5 SIGNS YOU SHOULD QUIT & 5 SIGNS YOU SHOULDNT I received an email that this video helped a trader decide to stick it out a few more months. That trader finally had his breakout and is so thankful he didn’t quit right before it clicked. 15 years ago I was in his same position, but I had a podmate that convinced me to stick it out another 6 months and doing so was the best decision of my life. Here are the signs to help you find the decision right for you: 5 signs you should consider quitting trading * Trading is seriously damaging your mental health or your relationships. * You want professional results but aren’t dedicating the time or building a structured process to improve. * You repeatedly break basic risk-management and trading rules without making tangible progress on your discipline. * You’ve lost your passion for the work and desire to improve for a sustained period. * You realize you wanted the money and lifestyle you were sold more than the actual work of trading. 5 signs you should keep persevering * You can identify tangible improvements in your discipline, execution, or emotional control, even before they show up in P&L. * Trading concepts are starting to click, even if you still need more practice to execute them in real time. * You enjoy the challenge, and pursuing trading is helping you build better habits and become a better person. * Setbacks motivate you to review what happened and take concrete steps to prevent the same mistakes. * You have a defined improvement process and consistently turn feedback into changes quickly.

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.

I serve as a print reporter with the White House travel pool, which means that my office is on Air Force One. Last Tuesday, while I was in that office, I stayed for four hours acting as a body double for a Boeing 747 and wrote a 600-word account of the event, dating it 'aboard Air Force One', the most desirable byline in American journalism, and on that particular journey, the piece was entirely fictional. After the NATO summit we boarded in Ankara, as is usual. There is a clear hierarchy when it comes to the seats. The AP is given the better one, the wires receive the ones after that, and I ended up with the seat next to the galley, something which I minded for the first 40 minutes of my life as a decoy, until I realised that the galley was empty and that its emptiness was going to become the one most interesting fact of my career. We were asked by the crew to draw the window blinds down for the takeoff, and they described it as a simple task. So we did it. A reporter is professionally unable to turn down a polite request from a man in uniform while at the same time thinking that he is speaking to those in power. I prepared the summary of the summit before we reached our cruising altitude. The President arrives at 11:04 with a cheerful mood, though I created that mood. You always have to invent the mood. That is the only creative freedom the pool allows us, and it was the first time I had entirely made up the President's mood. He wasn't on the plane. As we were finding our seats and discussing quietly about the armrest, the president had gone into an airport catering truck, driven it down to the tarmac just as if it were a very important room-service request, and got on to a smaller jet, a C-32A, taking him silently to Britain. Our 747 took off behind him as a decoy. Since there was a serious threat from Iran regarding the president's aircraft, the government kindly supplied one. It was fully fueled, fully staffed and fully press-pooled. I was inside it, pointing it at the sky like a duck at a shooting gallery, keeping track of my word count. It was a superb move. Having covered this administration for three years, I can say that the catering-truck exfiltration is the most skilled operation I have ever seen it carry out. It was flawless, straight out of a film, with not a single leak apart from the one you are now reading, and I only made that leak because I was the one who had the leftovers. The point that I can't accept is that the president got onto the catering truck. That therefore means the catering went with the president. We were flown for four hours as a live missile target with only ice and one lemon left in the galley, since our snacks had already been dropped in Ankara and had gone to Britain by first class before we did. The most important decoy in the Western alliance, and I was unable to get a second bag of pretzels because the pretzels ranked above me. The pretzels had somewhere else to be. I would like to make a formal complaint regarding the pretzels. I know that this is not the proper kind of complaint; the appropriate complaint is that I was used as bait. However, you can't take a photograph of bait, but you can take a photograph of an empty snack basket, and so a reporter goes with the picture he has. The term 'decoy' wasn't mentioned, since it wasn't necessary. An empty plane doesn't deceive anybody; but a plane carrying reporters who are giving real-time accounts of the president's fine mood can fool a satellite. We didn't cover the president that afternoon. We played a trick on him—off-Broadway, at 40,000 feet—before an audience of a single Iranian targeting officer, whom I imagine watched our transponder with great satisfaction, prepared and sent up his own confident report along his own chain of command, and who is now being asked this morning by his own editor why the target held a press conference in Britain. We refer to it as seat access. Access should imply that I am close enough to be able to see him. For four hours it meant that I was close enough to be mistaken for him by a warhead, a level of access which the AP has never achieved and which I intend entirely to improve in my performance review. I haven't altered the dateline because my desk prevents me from doing so. The value of the aircraft known as Air Force One exceeds that of my house, and I earned it on the one flight during which the only real words in the whole document were the timestamp and the spelling of my name. He safely arrived in Britain. We safely reached the story. The Iranians, I suppose, are going over the tape and are pretending that they intended to. The pool rotates Thursday. I have already asked for the seat back. It is still the best seat in American journalism. From it you can see absolutely everything the plane has been cleared to show you, and, if the timing is right, the snacks.

Notes like this are the best part about starting a company: Hello Brian & Dharmesh,  I joined HubSpot in March 2013 as one of the early DubSpot team and after 13 incredible years this is my last month. Many times I've heard Brian talk about building a company that your grandkids can be proud of. I am writing this email partly to give you an insight into the incredible impact you've had on my life and partly because I imagine it is difficult for your family to appreciate the impact HubSpot has had on so many like me. I hope you share this with your family.  I joined HubSpot at 26 yrs old as a Level 1 Sales Rep. I was early in my sales career, highly motivated and eager to learn. HubSpot gave me an opportunity I couldn't have imagined and I didn't fully appreciate until later. I worked hard, learnt fast and chased targets. I moved to Manager and later moved to Sales Director. In January 2014, Nisha Anand joined as a Level 1 Support Rep. We met, fell in love and got married. She also worked hard, learnt fast and chased promotions. She is now a Principal Solutions Engineer on UK Corp.  Financially HubSpot has transformed our lives but it is more than that. Our friends are HubSpotters. At our Wedding there were tables of HubSpotters. There are family and friends in Leitrim and Belfast that still cannot explain what HubSpot does but they follow it in the news, check the stock price and ask us "what's happening at the big American company?". HubSpot is part of our life story. At every step of our lives HubSpot has been there:  - We timed our Wedding so we could take our sabbaticals for our Honeymoon.  - We sold HUBS shares to buy our first home - When Covid hit we continued progressing our careers working from home - We used tuition reimbursement to up-skill and learn at Harvard, UCD and Oxford. - We used the Temporary Mobility policy to work from London for 1 month during fertility treatment. It worked and we got pregnant. - When our twins girls arrived 10 weeks early and spent a month in hospital, HubSpot supported us. I had 6 weeks for Paternity leave plus used my 2nd sabbatical to be there for my family - My wife took 12 months of maternity leave plus her 2nd sabbatical and returned to continue progressing her career and recently triggered another promotion. - We sold HUBS again to move into a bigger home. My father tells me that I have spent one third of my working career at HubSpot. It is almost impossible to explain the impact HubSpot has had on my life. What an amazing company. I hope you and your family are incredibly proud of what you have built. For the rest of my life I will be grateful to you and HubSpot. Wishing you and your family all the best in the future.

UNITED STATES IS THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. My grandma was the first to immigrate (legally) in the early 70s from Taiwan to USA. The first thing she did as a 40yo something woman with 6 adult children in Taiwan - was got a restaurant job. She washed dishes and served tables. She did that for many years, saved every penny - until late 70s and 80s she was able to immigrate all her 6 children and husband (one of them being my father) to the United States. I arrived to the this country in the late 80s as a toddler - and grew up in the Bay Area. Luckily, my uncles and my father had an entrepreneurial spirit. One started a restaurant, another dry cleaning, another in transportation, etc. So I grew up with business training most of my life, free. Let me tell you something about this country we call the USA - it is the best on Earth. It is really the land of opportunities. My family of immigrants (Legally) had nothing but the clothes on their backs arriving here and made something of themselves because this country offers opportunities if you're willing to work hard. You really CAN do anything and make something of yourself here. And it's not just that - look at what this land offers you today that 2/3 of the world DOES NOT: - FREE Public education for your children. And in some states, free 2 year Jr. College. - Access to CLEAN Drinking Water. Do you realize that most nations in Africa + Middle East people have to walk miles to get to a well? Shower? Toilet? Forget about it. - Every place in America has a public waste and sanitation system in place!! Just go to India, and you'll know the difference. - Access to fair wage and housing. If you have this, you're richer than 2/3 of the worlds population WHO can't afford the basic necessities we take for granted each day. - Public SAFETY? Do you realize in most countries of the world, if you call the police they don't show up for 5 hours? How about an ambulance in case you have a heart attack? You're more likely to die, than you would in the UNITED STATES. I had a AFIB in 2024, ambulance was 2 minutes away. Just think about that. - There are so many things this country offers that exists NO where in the world! And yet, today, I'm saddened by Extreme Left / Democratic Socialists complain about this country on Independence Day - publicly and with no shame. Oligarch this, capitalist this and that. Shame on you CA Governor Newsom, you're a scumbag. You complain about the very system you use to cheat with your wife. Shame on you NY MayorMamdani, for being born in Uganda where GDP is $73B which is approximately 1.5% of $NVDA Market Cap - you should be more GRATEFUL for holding a public position the state of NY offered you. Yet you complain of the very system that put you there. A FREE, democratic society. You are also a scumbag. Are there injustices? Yes. Is our criminal justice system perfect? No. Is our tax system perfect? No. Is our government perfect? No. But that's not the focus today. Is it? The focus today is that on this day, 250 years ago, this nation became the United States of America. And it was the foundation, the genesis, the birth, the inception, of becoming the Greatest Nation on Earth in the modern world and the advent of MOST technological advances we have seen in human history. The economy of this country is what gives all of us as individuals access to so many things we take for granted every day. Today, is not a day to whine about political grievances, it is a day to celebrate the core and fabric of this great nation - Independence and Prosperity, and Liberty.

12years with GOT7💚 us GOT7 & IGOT7 are really growing up together i saw alot of IGOT7 now getting married build a family , had kids some been with us from young age and now became a full adult some even had our music as a childhood through these time we've been sharing each other almost every steps in our life like me myself show you every single steps from 17 till now that i'm 29 i hope we all can continue sharing alot of moments & memories and always be there for each others like we always were till the last day we can sing & dance for you guys till the day we all build a family not just as a artist but as a human being i hope i can share with you all till the last day having IGOT7 for almost half of my life are truly a blessing and also having a 6 brothers for life are the best thing ever happened to me i'm truly thankful for everything that we built together God bless you all💚

after an exciting week of launches (muse wonder [full] & muse spark open), i want to write a note of appreciation to the amazing research teams at meta superintelligence labs on reaching such a special milestone ♥️ we started MSL and TBD a little more than a year ago and set a goal of producing a frontier model within a year or so. given where llama4 landed, that was an incredibly audacious goal, and we knew it wouldn't be easy. many people told us it would be impossible. we knew it was unlikely, but still worth doing. a remarkable group of researchers and engineers joined the effort from inside and outside meta. every single person came in, picked up a shovel, and got to work with earnestness and urgency. nobody asked whose job it was. we assembled a team of the most brilliant people i have ever had the opportunity to work with (and remember, i was an HRT intern 🙃). i am surrounded by ambitious, visionary, technically excellent, hard-working, pragmatic, thoughtful scientists, engineers, and product folks—people who will chase a weird loss spike past midnight just because they need to know why. these models are the product of their passion, hard work, and brilliance. somewhat paradoxically, when we started TBD, we set a principle of no deadlines. we knew we had an astronomical amount of work ahead of us—across pretraining, post-training, RL, multimodal, infrastructure, safety, data, AND frontier research. there was no use setting arbitrary timelines—we just had to get to work, be thoughtful, and build the foundations of a frontier research effort in record time. and run after run, this team did exactly that. our researchers are magicians. i can only describe building these models with this team as a wondrous journey of scientific discovery. i am constantly amazed by what we can accomplish with scaling. i will remember this past year for the rest of my life—the late nights, the broken runs, the evals that came back better than any of us dared to hope. watching this team create wonder after wonder has been a true and deep gift. more than just the models we released this week, we have built a machine that builds new models. it often sounds like a cop-out to say labs can just turn the crank to keep scaling, but now i have seen it first-hand. sure, it's a lot of work and a careful process, but we have built a scalable system to keep advancing at the frontier, and i am really proud of how fast this team keeps making these models better. lastly, i get to work with researchers who care deeply about how their work benefits humanity. it's easy to forget when everything is changing so fast, but the whole damn point is to make people's lives better. time and time again, i have seen our researchers, engineers, and product folks build our technology with care so it can truly be good for the world—whether that's building the best models for muse, thoughtfully open-sourcing strong models, or making sure the alignment and security of our systems are rock solid. this is a team of people who never forget there's a real person on the other side of every prompt. thank you to everyone at MSL for being part of this crazy journey over the past year. i'm so grateful for every one of you, and our work is not done!

i remember this random night in college, it was the middle of the winter and we all came home drunk turned on smash bros (on nintendo 64) and played 1v1s for some reason that night, me and my bro josh were debating who was the best player in the house, i obviously thought my fox could easily beat his yoshi so we put $10 on it, 5 lives, no items, just raw talent i lost okay, i easily saw where i misplayed, was a bit too aggro, so i said "double or nothing" lost the 2nd game "double or nothing" lost again, and now i owed josh $40 ($10, $20, $40) i stood up, took a quick lap around the room, inhale, exhale, "double or nothing" back then $80 was A LOT of money, but i was confident that i could beat him, i was the better player, no way i could lose 4 times in a row lol i ended up losing, but josh being the homie he was said that i didnt owe him money, IF i decided to never bet again because you see, i was quite the degen on campus, i just loved to put money behind my convictions even though i didnt have much it was just fun, and i loved being right a few days go by, and one day brother josh just comes home to a $100 bill sitting on his desk ($80 + interest) i had to return this promise because i knew the rest of my life i would be taking bets, risks, trades on myself, it was just a part of my identity so i kept taking risks at every stage of my life joining the start up vs the corp quitting the dope job to do my own thing asking my wife on a first date buying my first nft trying to make my first video a lot has changed since then one thing ive learned through these years, is the people that win the biggest are the ones that take the biggest and highest convicted bets on themselves not meaning certain "trades" or moves or whatever, but on constantly improve their craft and what they love to do take the risk take the right risks it'll always pay off you either win, or you lose random story i know, but i could still beat anyone with fox

Here is how I am using AI right now at work, at home, and for my finances... Every founder, executive or investor I talk with these days wants to know how others are using AI in their daily lives. I figured it would be helpful to pull back the curtain on what I am using and how I have implemented the various products. There are three areas where I have adopted AI in a material way: professionally, financially, and personally. Professional use of AI On the professional side, I am currently using Grok @bot extensively. I started with a Chief of Staff bot that I put in charge of the entire operation, followed by a number of more specialized bots for various bodies of work (talent recruiter, product designer, podcast researcher, book launch manager, email organizer, etc). Once I had the initial team of bots set up, I spent about an hour “onboarding” the Chief of Staff to my professional life. I treated this exactly how I would onboard a human Chief of Staff. I explained each business I am involved with, including their products, business model, personnel, metrics, and goals. I explicitly called out what the business is doing well and where we need to improve. I also gave the Chief of Staff access to relevant systems (email, calendar, Slack, analytics dashboards, etc). Once I had given as much context as I thought necessary, I asked the Chief of Staff to create an overview document to send me so I could double-check the accuracy and thoroughness of the bots understanding. I also asked the CoS bot to interview me for any other information that would be relevant to ensuring the bot could help me. This entire process was fairly quick and painless, but I believe it was the single most important thing I did to get value from Grok Bot. The more context that the AI system has, the more helpful it can be. That context can come from static, institutional knowledge or it can come from dynamic daily updates like email and Slack messages. After getting the bots set up and giving them context, I have done two other things that I think are worth sharing. The first is that my team of bots holds a daily standup meeting where they all come together and share what they did yesterday, what they are going to do today, and what they need my help or approval on (aka what they are blocked on). These “exec meeting” or daily standup allows for the bots to collaborate in a more seamless way, while also creating a very simple process for the Chief of Staff bot to put together a daily brief for me on what happened yesterday, what is going to happen today, and where I am needed to unblock productivity. The second thing I have done is treat the AI system as the brain of the company. Most people try to use AI as an augmentation to themselves, which can be helpful to a degree. I have flipped the relationship though. I look at my job as persistently giving the AI bots as much context as possible, so I can leverage their superhuman intelligence to make decisions and achieve our goals. For example, the recruiter bot recently surfaced a number of very high-quality candidates for an open role we have. After meeting with each candidate, I wrote a quick message to the recruiter bot to tell it what I liked about the person, what I thought were potential issues, improvements for future searches, and what the next steps were with each individual. All of that information and context is getting stored in the bot’s memory, which will compound over time and help us improve as an organization. Quick pro tip: If you are worried about putting all of the context into a single system’s memory, but unsure if that is the system you will use forever, you can have Grok Bot or another system dump their memory and context into a Notion document as well. This way you have a duplicate copy of the memory so it can be referenced by any AI system you use in the future. My takeaway from using Grok Bot to manage our companies is that we are having to hire less people, we are seeing a direct impact on revenue growth, and it appears to drive higher quality in our decision-making process. That is a win-win-win. I highly recommend going through these steps to setup your system correctly and it will pay off big time later on. Financial use of AI On the financial side, it was nearly impossible to find a good AI product to use for personal finance. Everything seemed to be a Chat-GPT wrapper that technically worked from an engineering standpoint, but didn’t solve any of the user problems I was facing. A big issue is that most of the fintech products are focused on budgeting and saving, rather than investing and growing your portfolio. This is why I eventually spent the time and money to build CFO Silvia. I went through a similar process of getting Silvia set up with the necessary context. I attached my bank accounts, brokerage accounts, crypto accounts, and credit cards, along with uploading real estate, cars, collectibles, and private investments. Silvia allows me to dynamically track the value of these assets (and my overall net worth) in real-time. But the real unlock for me has been talking to Silvia about two specific topics: tax and estate planning. As most of you know, I am not a frequent trader, so although you could use Silvia for stock analysis or trading activities, that is not my approach to investing. Instead, I have had great success in using Silvia to find creative and valuable tax mitigation strategies that are personalized to my situation, including ideas that had not previously been surfaced by my accountants, lawyers, or tax experts. Additionally, I have used Silvia for estate planning purposes. I am married and have four children, so there is a decent amount of complexity and opportunities to pursue. Having a dedicated resource with superhuman intelligence and the full context of my personal financial situation has been incredibly powerful. One funny thing I have noticed is that I am willing to tell Silvia certain things that I would hesitate to tell other humans (financial goals, areas of concern, etc) and I ask numerous “dumb” questions that I would probably shy away from asking a human. Regardless of why I feel more comfortable talking to the AI product, it has unlocked a few different ideas and strategies that I was previously unaware of, so that has been an added bonus to using the product. If you aren’t using AI to help manage your finances, I think it is a no brainer to start using the technology. I am biased towards Silvia since we built it, but you can give it a try for free here: Personal use of AI On the personal side, I use almost all of the traditional AI products (Chat-GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, Perplexity, etc). Those are well understood at this point, but one product that I started using recently that I am impressed with is Instinct AI. They have built a personal assistant AI bot that you communicate with through iMessage or SMS. The experience has been delightful, but I am most excited about the bot’s ability to anticipate the second or third-step in a process before I have to tell it anything. For example, Instinct got access to my calendar and immediately started identifying scheduling conflicts and asked me if I would like the bot to reach out to one of the parties to reschedule. I never told it to look for conflicts, nor did I tell it I wanted help rescheduling things. It’s “instincts” knew what the basic task would be and began executing. Another example is that Instinct was told my wife is Polina, so whenever it deems something important to the household or family, Instinct will add Polina to the calendar invite, communicate the information to her, or ask me if Polina should be aware of the information. This is very helpful for someone like me who has too many things floating around in my brain and should always do a better job of keeping Polina informed about various things. Lastly, Instinct is very helpful in scanning my personal email and understanding what is most important. It ignores things that are trivial, but somehow can parse out the high priority items, summarize them for me in a text message, draft a response to the email, and then ask me for permission to respond. As I said, it is the most impressive personal assistant AI product I have used so far. So those are the three big areas that I use AI today and the specific products I have incorporated into my life. Before I let you go, I figured I could share some best practices I have learned as well. I also make sure to tell AI bots they are not allowed to respond to any message or email without my explicit approval. This reduces the risk of having a bot go rogue with a message or commitment that I am not onboard with. I also ensure that each bot only has read access to our business systems like an analytics dashboard, etc. While I am a big proponent of using these products and believe they will fundamentally transform how we operate professionally, I am still not ready to let them loose without human oversight. I am sure that will change in the coming weeks and months, but I need more time to get comfortable with that level of delegation and trust. I hope this overview was helpful for each of you. It would be great if you could respond to this post with any products you are using or tips/tricks that you have learned to get more productivity and value in your life. I love writing these letters each day because I learn just as much from me as I learn from you all. Onwards!