The current Joe Rogan pod is a must listen if you want to hear the inside scoop of corruption in the White House. @CalleyMeans bravely discloses how SuperPAC money has corrupted voter intent on health topics across the board, especially pesticides.

When a post by an American about American politics goes viral, we assume Americans made it popular. Often, accounts abroad did. This high-stakes election season, foreign reposters were: 63% on Tucker Carlson’s Iran nuclear warning 42% on Zohran Mamdani’s Michigan Senate post 30% on Abdul El-Sayed’s posts What's going on? Where is this engagement coming from? And is it equally distributed? Buckle up, let's dive in. 🧵👇

🌏 Planetary Intelligence Planet just opened up an AI interface to a decade of daily satellite images of the entire Earth. I have been playing with a pre-release and here are some samples of what you can do: 1) For the ag sector: “plot the crop performance of farms near Williams, California for the past 5 years seasons.” 2&3) Ski Season report: a couple samples from the prompt “make a report of the changing snow and ice conditions of the ski resorts in Tahoe for the past decade.” It also has pixel by pixel sliders of the snow levels over the years, part of a 30-page report. 4) My personal passion project: “find RGB signature of planes in flight near Paris airport.” High altitude objects in motion leave a very visible RGB parallax artifact. The push broom sensors in the imaging satellite use its steady motion to integrate a rectangular image from a line sensor sweeping forward in orbit like a push broom. With multiple lines of sensors for different colors, high altitude objects (planes, balloons, satellites) also cause misalignment from parallax shifts (unrelated to their lateral movement). This creates an easily detectable image artifact that can now serve as a search feature. Planet used this "bug" to search its daily planetary imaging database to find all of the high-altitude Chinese spy balloons and trace them back in time to their launch site in China. Explore our Earth:

🔜 🧠 “We are about to enter the era of interventional psychiatry, transforming the field of psychiatry.” — Tom Insel, former NIMH Director, at a recent psychedelic science conference. We have invested in many of these new modalities: transcranial focused ultrasound (Sanmai), minimally invasive deep brain stimulation and vagus nerve stimulation (Neurobionics), brain-computer-interfaces (Neuralink), auditory dream engineering (Dust), psychedelic-assisted therapy (atai/Lilly), and real-world-data collection for all (Osmind). Insel also co-authored a Nature paper with Osmind defining the field: + summary: Interventional psychiatry companies: •  tFUS: • Endovascular DBS: •  BCI: •  Dream engineering: •  Psychedelics: P.S. Underfunded: “From 2002-2013, the NIMH did not receive any funding applications for psychedelics. It was all funded and legitimized by philanthropy.” P.S.S. Needed: “The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that without significant changes, mental illness will cost the world economy $16t by 2030, making it the largest disease burden globally." — UBS: We need significant changes.

As in the brain, "ultra-long contexts may require subquadratic attention. Attend to everything, and the signal gets lost in noise. Too sparse, and we lose the signal. Hierarchical attention may be essential not just for efficiency, but for attention to work at all." — Zyphra

I was very wrong 26 years ago when I wrote "Amazon is an Anachronism" predicting their downfall to “personal-shopping-agents.” (below) So I was amused today: “An AI personal shopper could disrupt Amazon’s $70 billion advertising business by finding and buying products directly"

Having spent a long time watching Elon Musk, and having talked with him, I believe I understand what he understood before almost anyone else. And it's something every one of us needs to understand now. Western civilization is not one civilization among many. It is the one that gave the world freedom of thought, modern science and the dignity of the individual. And it is under attack. Not by peoples, but by ideologies that want it dead. If it dies, the world will not become more just. It will become poorer, more brutal and darker. For everyone, including those who hate it. Why? Because civilizations are not interchangeable. We were told that any culture could be blended with any other, like mixing colors, and that the result would always be harmonious. It isn't true. A society where women are equal to men cannot coexist without friction with a worldview in which a woman's testimony is worth half a man's. A society where you can criticize God, change your religion or have none cannot absorb, without fracturing, a worldview in which apostasy is paid for with your life. Every people has its own genius and moves at its own pace. But not all values are equal, and you cannot build a nation on laws that contradict each other. Saying so is not racist. Racism is about blood. I am talking about laws, customs and values. And those values belong to no race: a Japanese, a Senegalese or an Iranian can make them his own, and millions have. That is exactly why they are worth defending. Let's remember where they come from. It all begins in Greece. In Athens, for the first time, men decide that truth does not descend from a throne but is sought through reason, and that a city governs itself through debate. Socrates chooses death rather than give up thinking freely. At Salamis, a handful of free cities stops the greatest empire in the world. Then comes Rome. Rome invents law that binds everyone, the citizen who holds rights, the Republic. And one immense idea: you can become Roman without being born Roman. You become Roman by adopting its laws. Christianity adds the most revolutionary idea in history: every human being, slave and emperor alike, has infinite worth. Then France. The cathedrals, those ships of stone our ancestors built over centuries for descendants they would never see. Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire. The Declaration of the Rights of Man. And Napoleon, who gives France the Civil Code, the lycées, and one simple principle: careers open to talent. Murat, the son of an innkeeper, ends up a Marshal of the Empire and King of Naples. The Civil Code spreads across much of Europe and still shapes the law of dozens of countries today. And this civilization goes on to abolish slavery, which had been practiced on every continent since the dawn of time, to push back the plague, smallpox and the night itself, and to set foot on the Moon. Peoples of the West, be proud of this history. Proud does not mean blind. Every civilization has committed crimes: conquest, slavery, war. Ours is the one that went furthest in examining its own faults, to the point of abolishing what it had once practiced. This capacity to question itself is its greatest strength. And that is exactly the strength now being turned against it. Because for decades, this magnificent system has been getting hacked. Not by an army. By an alliance of two forces that have nothing in common except one enemy: us. The first is communism. It lost the economic war, lost the Cold War, lost history's verdict with its tens of millions of dead. But it never lost the universities. It survived by changing costumes: class struggle became the struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors, and the West was declared guilty of everything. It taught our children to be ashamed of their ancestors, their borders and their culture. It is the root cause, because before you can bring down a civilization, you have to take away its will to defend itself. The second is political Islam. I am not talking about Muslims, many of whom came here precisely to escape this ideology and are its first victims. I am talking about a political project that wants to place religious law above civil law. It has no doubts. It feels no shame. It rushes into the void the first one dug. One disarms. The other advances. And let no one on the left believe they will stay in control. History has already staged this play. In 1978, Michel Foucault was enthusing over the Iranian revolution. Iran's communist party, the Tudeh, backed Khomeini and called on Iranians to vote for his Islamic constitution. By 1983, its leaders had been arrested, the party banned, and its chiefs paraded on television to confess their “crimes.” In 1988, thousands of political prisoners were executed, communist activists among them. The second always ends up devouring the first. Useful idiots are only useful for a while. So here is my call to every Western people. To the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Germans, the Spanish, the Americans, to all of you. We are at a turning point. What we do in the next ten years will decide what our grandchildren are allowed to say, believe, write and love. I am not asking you to die for the West. I am asking you for something harder: to live for it. Learn its history and pass it on. Have children. Speak without fear, even when they call you every name in the book. Vote, get involved, run for office. Build companies, schools, factories, families. Refuse the shame they are trying to inject into you. And stop surrendering anything that makes us who we are: freedom of thought, equality before the law, the dignity of every person. The historian Arnold Toynbee understood it: civilizations are not murdered, they commit suicide. And those who think they can let the West fall without paying the price should remember the Iranian communists. They helped tear down what they despised, and then they were next. The Greeks at Salamis were outnumbered. They won because they knew what they were defending. We are the heirs of Athens, Rome, Notre-Dame and the Civil Code. It is no accident that the rockets that will carry humanity to Mars are being built in a free civilization. It is time to prove ourselves worthy of what we were given. The West is worth defending. And no one will defend it for us.

🤖 The march of RSI “A co-founder of Anthropic says it 'might be the most important technical trend in the world.' It’s a phenomenon known as 'recursive self-improvement,' or RSI, which roughly translates to AI building smarter AI.” — WSJ today

Steve Jurvetson once told Elon Musk a story he had never heard before. At a Google event, Larry Page turned to Jurvetson out of the blue and wondered aloud how much money he had. After mentioning a number, Page said that if he were hit by a bus that day, he should leave all of it to Elon Musk. Elon asked if he had really said that. Jurvetson confirmed it and joked that he immediately wanted to get it in writing. Elon said he loved that and called Page a good friend. He noted they had known each other since around 1997, before Page received venture funding. Jurvetson added that Page believed a corporation pursuing goals aligned with his own interests—such as moving away from oil and colonizing other planets—would accomplish far more than giving the money to a nonprofit. Page wished he could do more of that himself.

Nico is on a roll, so to speak, with new driving experiences. Now a FSD fan. * 75% of Tesla purchases have FSD now * Tesla gathers more driving data every week than Waymo has in its entire history. It is the greatest physical AI data flywheel the world has ever seen. News today:

Go, Gameto, go, go, go! A new chapter in women's health. Bloomberg: "The company has the potential to drive the biggest transformation in women’s health since the birth control pill." "Gameto aims to improve the egg-freezing experience. The technique, which uses stem cells that have been engineered into ovarian support cells, is intended to free patients from the grueling two weeks of injections that prompt ovaries to make enough eggs during fertility treatment. In a Phase 3 trial, patients are only given one or two injections, after which their eggs are extracted and matured by the engineered cells." "The treatment is already available to patients in Mexico, Peru and Australia, and has been cleared by regulators in nine more countries [and] may also be helpful in treating symptoms of menopause and maintaining ovarian health." — Today's news: "Ferring Pharmaceuticals has signed a $1.4 billion deal to buy Gameto Inc. Ferring is a Swiss maker of drugs used for in-vitro fertilization and reproductive medicine. It’s betting that with its global access to fertility clinics and pharmaceutical distribution, it will be able to popularize Gameto’s therapy" "Interest in women’s health, historically under studied and underfunded, has heated up among pharmaceutical companies, driven in part by the commercial success of GLP-1 weight loss drugs among women." —  Congratulations Dr. Dina Turner and the Gameto team!

Why Steve Jurvetson is my favorite investor meeting “I had a meeting with @FutureJurvetson, and I was nervous as hell because I had heard so many amazing things about this guy. We just started geeking out on numeric representations. I sent him a couple of papers, he marked them up and asked questions. I was like, ‘This is not what I expected from an investor ever.’ We were doing something so new that no one had pitched it yet, and he had been thinking about it himself. It was just like, ‘Boom, let’s go.’” @NaveenGRao Love to hear your thoughts @shaunmmaguire @lpolovets @DavidCahn6

🏎 Racing with F1 Champion Nico Rosberg this weekend. It was his first time driving a GT race car, and he still earned the top lap speed for our gathering of geeks. He signed the roof of the Ferrari 296, and I drove it faster than I have ever gone before. Thx Naveen for hosting!

🌾 Decibel Bio — Top 10 Startups to Watch, in Chemical & Engineering News today. Speaking of better food, Decibel is seeing 10-25% yield increases in corn and alfalfa by upgrading crops in the field, like an over-the-air software update. This decouples plant traits from the physical seed, something that has not been possible before. From C&EN: they "found a way to modify epigenetic markers on crops’ DNA in a way that could improve yield, decrease the need for pesticides, and enhance desirable traits." "Decibel applies nucleic acid coatings to seeds or to mature plants via a spray on leaves to alter their traits during the growing season. The nucleic acid treatment activates a crop’s RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) pathway, which many plants use to regulate gene expression in response to stress in nature. When an RdDM pathway is activated, small nucleic acid sequences guide the placement of methylation markers on a plant’s DNA. The markers suppress gene expression, which can alter the plant’s characteristics. This approach allows farmers to 'effectively download a new trait' to crops as seeds or young plants, CEO Travis Bayer says." "To date, Decibel has sequenced hundreds of individual plants across a wide variety of crop species to map the locations of epigenetic markers on their DNA. Using complex statistical methods and machine learning, the company can figure out which markers correspond to important crop traits. 'We’ve generated probably more epigenome data than anyone in the world,' Bayer says." "Decibel is aiming to alter all sorts of traits—pest resistance, shelf life, disease resistance, color. Perhaps most importantly, the company says it can improve yield. 'In corn, we’re seeing greater than 10% yield increases,' Bayer says. 'We also have some projects in alfalfa where we’ve seen 15–25% yield increases.'” • C&EN news today: • Company: