Chris Bodden

Investor / Farmer / Jet Ski Racer “Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge. Let your learning lead to action.” Jim Rohn

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history.

The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet.

Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention.

He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette.

He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents.

A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

This country. A driveway. My neighbor Dale owns a truck, and I have discovered who actually defends this nation.

Monday, a family down the street moved. Dale's truck. Wednesday, a tree limb fell on Mrs. Carter's fence. Dale's truck. Friday it snowed, and an unspoken signal traveled the block, and Dale appeared with a plow blade like a one-man cavalry.

No one pays him. No one drafts him. He is summoned by need alone.

"Dale," I asked, "who do you serve?"

"What?"

"Who commands the truck?"

He thought about it. "Whoever's stuck, I guess."

WHOEVER IS STUCK. Eight hundred years of military philosophy in my bloodline, and this man in a hoodie has perfected it: a standing army of one, sworn to the realm of Whoever Is Stuck.

In my land, a lord keeps soldiers for his own gate. Dale keeps a truck for everyone's gate.

I offered him my loyalty. He offered me a beer. We were both confused by the other's gift and accepted anyway. That is diplomacy.

I asked what I could do to repay the block's debt to him. He said, "Help me load a couch Saturday."

I have never trained harder for anything.

The couch was heavy. I was not strong enough. I want to say I was. I was not. Dale carried his end and most of mine and said "good lift" anyway, which is the kindest lie in the language.

A man with a truck does not ask who needs him. He has already backed into the driveway.

I cannot buy a truck yet. So I have become the man who shows up when the truck does. Every truck needs a vanguard. Dale has not approved this title. Dale does not need to.

[Laurent @scion_x_]

L’IPO de SpaceX a eu lieu hier. Elon Musk est désormais le premier trillionaire de l’histoire. Et tout le monde ne parle que de ça. Des chiffres, des zéros, des classements. Ca fait bander les gens. Je trouve ça un peu pathétique.

Ce qui compte vraiment, c’est que cet argent débloque le financement massif dont SpaceX avait besoin pour passer à la vitesse supérieure. Des centaines de Starships, des vols plus fréquents, une infrastructure qui va nous propulser vers les étoiles.

Musk vit dans une maison modulaire/prefab très modeste d’environ 50 000 $ qu’il loue à SpaceX. Il n’a pas fait tout ça pour s’acheter des yachts ou des îles. Il l’a dit et répété : l’objectif, c’est de rendre l’humanité multiplanétaire. Pas pour la gloire, pas pour l’argent, mais pour assurer la survie et l’expansion de notre espèce.

Regardez les plans :
Premiers vols cargo Starship vers Mars dès fin 2026 / 2027
Robots Optimus pour préparer le terrain
Puis des vols habités, des bases, et à terme une ville autosuffisante sur Mars avec des milliers, puis des millions d’humains.

Imaginez : des humains naissant sur une autre planète. Des villes sous dôme, des fermes martiennes, l’exploration de la galaxie qui commence vraiment. Un nouvel âge d’or où la prochaine frontière n’est plus la Terre, mais l’espace infini.

L’argent n’est qu’un outil. Une fusée à essence pour faire décoller les vraies ambitions. Cette obsession maladive du fric est exactement ce qui nous empêche de produire plus d’Elon Musk et de visionnaires qui osent viser l’impossible.

Arrêtons de compter les milliards. Commençons à rêver grand.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

History will remember Elon Musk alongside DaVinci, Gutenberg, Fulton, Pasteur, Edison, Ford and Jobs.

History will have no recollection of any kind of Ro Khanna.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

German tourist World Cup fan Freddy is on one of the most generational runs in the history of generational runs

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@JohnStossel Only possible in America 🇺🇸

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

Let me explain why I think Freddy resonates.

Lots of Europeans visit the USA as tourists. They visit New York City, or Washington DC, or Hollywood, or Las Vegas, and if they visit natural beauty too, they go to really crowded places like the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone.

So while they see our cultural and natural icons, they are mostly in blue cities and they therefore also see the decline, the homeless, the drugs, the dirt and the rude, rude Americans.

But Freddy is not doing that. Freddy is driving, and he’s doing it through the heartland, where people are kind and polite, the skies are wide open, and the bounty of Buc-ees and Bass Pro Shops are overwhelming.

Freddy is not seeing fentanyl and decline.

He is seeing the real, hopeful, patriotic, kind America that European tourists rarely traverse.

And he loves it.

That’s why Freddy is a phenomenon.

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

It's impossible to understand the mindset of someone who is angry that Elon became a trillionaire. How is this not inspiring? Why is this met with seething hatred and vitriol? ~4500 new millionaires were just created from SpaceX employees alone. He just broke the financial 4 minute mile for others. The public now gets to participate in upside over the next decades. When you see something like this, why do some minds jump to wanting to tear this down? You should feel INSPIRED and believe that YOU TOO can be successful. Before everything became politicized, Elon Musk was a role model to every kid who had ambition and wanted to be more. It was either "I want to be Steve Jobs," or "I want to be Elon Musk." Why do you now not want to be more? You got hurt somewhere along the way. Why not see something and say "I am going to do that too!" The hateful destructive coping crying mindset will NEVER improve your life. At least the other mindset gives you a CHANCE at a better future. Why not choose inspiration? Why not try at life again?

[Milk Road AI @MilkRoadAI]

This is WILD!

The most important story coming out of the SpaceX IPO this morning is not the $1.77 trillion valuation but it is about Juan Hernandez (Save this).

Juan is a welder who got a phone call from a friend about a job at a company he had never heard of.

He said yes anyway, showed up, worked there for ten years, rose from the factory floor to supervisor, and held on to 6,500 shares the entire time.

When CBS asked him this morning how much he stands to make at opening, he said approximately $880,000.

Tom Mueller, Musk's very first SpaceX employee, tells a version of the same story.

He met Musk through an amateur rocket club, was convinced to do something exciting, and says it was one of the best decisions he ever made.

In those early days, he says, the team simply believed they were going to change the world and then went ahead and did it.

Juan and Tom are not alone.

SpaceX has approximately 13,000 employees who hold equity and analysts estimate today's IPO will create somewhere between 600 and 1,000 instant millionaires across the workforce from engineers and software developers to machinists, welders, and operations staff.

The engineers and executives at the top of the stack are looking at life changing numbers of a different order entirely.

Senior vice presidents and long tenured rocket engineers with large equity grants are expected to walk away with $10 million to $50 million or more depending on their vesting history.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's President and COO who has been building this company alongside Musk for over two decades, is expected to become a billionaire on her equity stake alone.

All of that wealth from Juan's $880,000 to Musk's trillion came from the same source.

A group of people who believed that if nobody built a truly reusable rocket, humanity would never leave Earth, and decided that was an unacceptable outcome.

Thank you, @elonmusk for building a company where a welder who didn't know your name in 2016 is worth nearly a million dollars this morning.

[Alps @alpaysh]

i still think about this

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Under capitalism, socialists are free to build socialism.

Under socialism, capitalists aren’t free to build anything.

Nothing stops a group of socialists pooling their money, forming a company, and splitting every wage and every pound of profit perfectly equally.... Or to donate all profit to the government.

It’s legal. It’s easy. Owning the means of production is as simple as setting up a company.

Marx wrote his manifesto before the invention of limited liability companies. Back then “seize the factory” meant seizing it from the handful of families who could afford one.

That argument expired the day anyone could start a company with limited liability, raise investment and hire who they want.

Socialists are free to lead by example and demonstrate their system works. They can out-recruit, out-motivate, out-build and out innovate based on their ideas if they like. It would prove the philosophy works. Capitalism will happily host their experiment.

The fact that nobody does this tells you a lot.

[The Fourth Musketeer @IV_Musketeer]

The 7-second cold wrist rinse was tested on 3,000 soldiers after combat simulations.

Cortisol dropped 52% within 90 seconds. Heart rate fell an average of 22 beats per minute. The Navy classified the protocol in 2009 and kept it secret until 2023.

The mechanism is radial artery cooling. Your inner wrists have the thinnest skin and the largest surface-to-volume ratio for blood vessels. 7 seconds of cold water cools the blood passing to your brain, which signals your hypothalamus to downregulate stress instantly

You've splashed cold water on your face. You've taken cold showers. Both work, but they're inconvenient.

The SEAL protocol takes 7 seconds, requires no undressing, and can be done at any sink. Soldiers used it before night missions to fall asleep fast.

The military classified this because a free 7-second stress fix would reduce demand for combat stress medication ($400M annually).

The 2023 declassification came after a FOIA lawsuit filed by a veteran.

The fix: run cold tap water over your inner wrists for 7 seconds. Both wrists. Do it when you feel a stress spike.

Within 90 seconds, your heart rate will drop. No shower, no ice.

Just 7 seconds.

[Team Visma | Lease a Bike @vismaleaseabike]

𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗝𝗼𝗻𝗮𝘀,

You joined us in 2019 as a young, modest rider full of dreams. Back then, even you could hardly have imagined those dreams would one day become reality.

You quickly proved your talent and not long after delivered the team’s greatest success by winning the Tour de France, followed by a second victory just a year later.

It seemed as if the future lay entirely at your feet until everything suddenly came to a standstill after a serious crash in the spring of 2024. Those moments must have felt endless, but you kept fighting.

A few months later you were back in the Tour, once again showing what an extraordinary fighter you are by finishing second behind perhaps the best rider in the world.

You never stopped chasing your dreams. Last summer you claimed your first La Vuelta victory and now, with the Giro d’Italia, you have completed the trilogy.

You have done yourself great honour in reaching this milestone. Achievements like these are reserved for the very best in the sport. But you have not only honoured yourself, you have also honoured the team. Your journey is now Woven Into History, marking a new chapter in our team’s history, and for that we will be forever grateful.

With heartfelt thanks from the whole team. 💌

[Dudes Posting Their W’s @DudespostingWs]

This is what the older generations should try and do more often

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Weekly reminder: Decline is a choice.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The Enhanced Games went public via SPAC at a $1.2 billion valuation. 40 athletes. 2,500 invite-only spectators. The math on that should stop you cold.

That's $30 million per athlete. $480,000 per spectator seat. No sports league in history has ever been valued at those ratios. The NFL, with 1,696 players and 18 million ticket holders annually, trades at roughly $5 million per player. The Enhanced Games trades at 6x that with 42x fewer athletes and zero broadcast deal.

Because it was never priced as a sports league.

Look at who funded this. Peter Thiel. Balaji Srinivasan. Christian Angermayer's Apeiron Investment Group. The Winklevoss twins. A Saudi prince. Trump Jr's 1789 Capital. Not a single traditional sports investor in the cap table. Every single one comes from biotech, crypto, or longevity science. Angermayer's entire thesis is the "Next Human Agenda," extending human lifespan through chemical and genetic intervention.

The founder, Aron D'Souza, was Thiel's proxy attorney in the Gawker lawsuit. His pitch deck doesn't talk about medal counts. It talks about "building superhumanity."

$25 million in total athlete compensation buys you a weekend of swimming and sprinting in a purpose-built pool at Resorts World. What it actually buys the investors is something the pharmaceutical and longevity industries have never been able to purchase at any price: cultural permission. A live, globally streamed spectacle where enhanced humans break world records on camera, and the audience cheers instead of filing complaints.

Kristian Gkolomeev already broke the 50m freestyle world record at 20.89 seconds during qualifying. He collected a $1 million bonus. The highlight reel from that swim will be watched by more people than any clinical trial result in history. That's the product.

The human enhancement market is projected to exceed $600 billion by 2030. The regulatory bottleneck has never been science. It's been public perception. The Enhanced Games is the most expensive marketing campaign in biotech history, and the athletes are the content.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

40 years ago today, Val Kilmer walked into his Top Gun audition wearing ugly green shorts. He didn't want the part. He thought the script was silly and tried to bomb the audition by reading his lines flat. They gave him the role anyway.

On his own, he invented a whole backstory: Iceman grew up with a father who ignored him, which made him desperate to be perfect at everything. He kept the rivalry with Tom Cruise going off-camera too. The cast took sides. The movie became the biggest film of 1986, made $350 million, and every pilot at every airport for the rest of Kilmer's life would call him Iceman.

Then in 2014, throat cancer. The surgery saved his life but took his speaking voice. By 2017 he could only get out a few broken words at a time.

Years later, when they started making Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise told the producers "We have to have Val." So the writers gave Iceman the same illness. In the new movie, Iceman is an admiral who's also dying. Most of their big final scene together is just Maverick reading Iceman's words off a computer screen.

But Iceman does speak one line out loud. "It's time to let go." That line was made by an AI. A small London company called Sonantic used audio from his old movies to build him a new voice. They had way less to work with than they normally need, so they made over 40 different versions and let Kilmer pick the one that sounded most like him. (Spotify bought Sonantic for around $95 million a few weeks after Maverick came out.)

Both Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer had tears in their eyes while filming the scene. The director said it looked like two old friends saying goodbye. Maverick made $1.4 billion.

Val Kilmer died of pneumonia on April 1, 2025. He was 65. That one AI-made line was the last thing he ever performed on screen. The actor who didn't want the part, telling Maverick it was okay to let go.

[BSAT Properties @BSAT_Properties]

I was on a train in Tokyo. We stopped between stations. Announcement in Japanese, then in English: "We apologize for the delay. We will resume shortly."

The delay was maybe 3 minutes. Not a big deal.

When the train started moving again, another announcement: "We sincerely apologize for the delay. We were stopped for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. This is unacceptable. Thank you for your patience."

Three minutes and twenty seconds. They measured it exactly. And called it unacceptable.

When I got off at my stop, there were station staff on the platform bowing and handing out delay certificates.

I took one out of curiosity. It was an official document stating that the train had been delayed by 3 minutes and 20 seconds, signed and stamped.

The staff member said in English "for your employer. So they know the delay was not your fault."

I said I'm a tourist, I don't need it. He looked confused. "But the delay affected you. You deserve an apology."

Three minutes. They were treating a three-minute delay like a major incident.

Later I mentioned this to a Japanese friend. They said "oh yes, delay certificates are normal. Trains are supposed to be exactly on time. If they are late, they must apologize."

I said three minutes isn't late, it's nothing. My friend said "in Japan, three minutes is late. On time means on time. Not approximately on time."

They said the train company probably investigated why there was a 3-minute delay. "They will find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again."

I kept the certificate. It's framed in my apartment now. A reminder that somewhere in the world, people care about three minutes.

© 6IX.

[GRITCULT @GRITCULT]

Dostoevsky was 28 when they stood him in front of a firing squad. Blindfolded. Hands tied. He could hear the rifles being loaded.

At the last second a messenger on horseback arrived. The Tsar had commuted the sentence. The entire execution was staged. Psychological torture designed to break him.

It worked. He had a seizure on the spot.

They sent him to a labour camp in Siberia. 4 years. Freezing. Starving. Sleeping on wooden planks next to murderers. His epilepsy got worse. He had no paper. No pen. Nothing.

When he got out he was broke. His first wife died. His brother died. He inherited his brothers debts. He was so desperate for money he signed a contract with a publisher that would have given away the rights to everything hed ever write if he missed the deadline.

He wrote The Gambler in 26 days to make it. Dictated it to a 20 year old stenographer named Anna. Married her three months later.

Then the real work started. Crime and Punishment. The Idiot. Demons. The Brothers Karamazov. The greatest novels in the history of the Russian language. Maybe any language.

The man who stood blindfolded before the firing squad, who convulsed on the ground while soldiers watched, who slept next to killers in Siberia for 4 years, who was buried in debt and grief.

That man wrote: "every minute can be an eternity of happiness."

He earned the right to say it.

its never over. never give up fren.