Brian Gehrke

[Jermaine Curtis @JermaineCurtis]

One of the biggest mistakes I made as a hitter...

I thought hitting was all about my swing.

- If I struggled, I'd fix my swing.
- If I hit a ground ball, I'd fix my swing.
- If I popped the ball up, I'd fix my swing.

Then I got to professional baseball.

After being around Major League hitters, I realized something.

The best hitters weren't obsessed with their swing.

They were obsessed with their operating system.

- They knew what pitch they were hunting.
- They knew what pitches they could drive.
- They knew what type of contact they wanted.
- They had a plan before they ever stepped into the box.

That completely changed how I practiced.

I stopped studying my swing.

I started studying myself as a hitter.

I did this by...

Going to Walmart, bought a notebook, and started tracking everything.

- Every pitch I saw.
- Every swing I took.
- Every ball I hit.
- What I was thinking.
- What I was feeling.

At the end of each week, I'd go back through my notes and look for patterns.

Then I'd build a plan to improve my operating system.

I wasn't trying to build a better swing anymore.

I was trying to build a better hitter.

Because here's one thing I learned from being around Major League hitters:

The swing wasn't the starting point.

It was the result of everything that came before it.

Thank you for reading,
Jermaine Curtis

P.S. - If you enjoyed this and thought it was helpful, please share it.

(This tells me you want more content like this.)

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

No. It’s letting Trump *use* the laws set by Congress. If you want those laws to say different things, or to decline to delegate the authority in the first instance, then change them. You are in Congress.

[Brian Gehrke @H0bb3s]

This take from the @PirateWires Daily 👇

[Seth Cohen @OverReactor1776]

Now that I’m out of government, I can finally respond for myself: Get bent, soyboy. We didn’t do this for “Silicon Valley . . . companies.” We did this for you, for your family, your community, your state, your nation, and your species.

Nuclear energy provides the safest, highest density, reliable power available on our planet. My career colleagues at DOE and NRC inspired me to think about nuclear as a way to forge American steel and electrolyze aluminum without releasing particulate matter, to desalinate water in the Middle East and save humanity from resource wars. By rejecting the false narratives and Cold War hysteria, we can secure the next American century while raising whole countries out of poverty.

Do you really think I left an incredible career at Kirkland, paid out of pocket for an apartment in DC and dozens of cross-country trips, and left my family on the west coast because I wanted to enrich people I never met before taking this job? I came to D.C. to do something that mattered, to satisfy a driving curiosity (more on that later), and, most importantly, to serve.

As I learned more about nuclear energy and its history, I developed a conviction that one nuclear’s biggest issues was a culture of cynicism: nothing new or exciting could happen because it would end in disappointment, and that militated against rocking the boat even a tiny bit. The career staff in government and their industry counterparts lived through dark winters before and stopped believing that warm springs could bloom into summers.

I have two core philosophies. First, I believe in ruthless optimism. Rational decision making requires detached risk analysis. But we also cannot win if we believe we can lose. Merging the two requires orienting teams around driving missions. That way, when a real opportunity presents itself, you can take a huge swing.

If I take credit for anything—honestly, almost all of the success belongs to the incredible and dedicated people at @ENERGY and @NRCgov—it’s countering the cultural rot and morass that risked forfeiting American excellence. My colleagues and I gave cover to the scientists and engineers, which freed them up to focus on delivering safe power. And, as success materialized, they started to dream again. That’s why the pilot program succeeded, and why I feel confident about the future of NLICs and NRC reform. Nobody needs me anymore because they can innovate on their own.

My second core philosophy is to assume positive intent. Avi, I know that you heard about my real motivations from multiple people you interviewed when preparing your hit piece on me. Rather than telling that story, one which could help inspire another generation of people to use their talents for the greater good, you ignored them. Instead, you implied that Peter Thiel recruited me for nefarious purposes. (I’ve never met him, but, @peterthiel, if you’re reading this, I’m a huge fan!)

Nuclear regulation starts and ends with safety. I promised everyone I worked with that I would resign before doing or pushing for anything that could compromise public safety. But I also distinguished between real safety and performative bullshit. That’s what the careers came to embrace, too. We love nuclear, why would we do anything that could risk threatening its future?

America faces a crossroads. We can either trod a road of cultural decay or hike our way back to the peak of global innovation. Join me on the latter path. Correct the fear mongering and conspiracies and tell the story of America’s great reindustrialization. Tell the story of our public servants, our great entrepreneurs, our scientific dominance. Tell the real story about how DOGE went nuclear.

[jay plemons @jayplemons]

David Sacks just delivered an economics masterclass on Elon becoming the world’s first trillionaire.

@davidsacks: “People see the headline and imagine Elon suddenly has a trillion dollars in the bank. That’s not how it works. His balance sheet didn’t change overnight.”

Why?

The real point is deeper. Wealth isn’t in the “stuff” we consume. Food, shelter, clothes. Things that depreciate and disappear. It’s in the machines that create stuff for decades: tools, workflows, and corporations.
These are the true engines of human progress.

“If you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there’s a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that machine might create. That’s where the wealth comes from.”

Elon started with nothing. An immigrant who slept on the floor building Zip2. He created these machines from vision and relentless effort. Thousands joined him, including a SpaceX welder who turned his labor into a million dollars in stock.

That’s the magic of tech and free markets: labor can become capital. It’s fluid.

The outrage misses this entirely. The people building machines that deliver medicines, energy, and abundance are creating lasting prosperity for everyone.

What do you think? Does viewing wealth as future productivity change how you see stories like this?

[Mike Solana @micsolana]

we could pay for childcare for three and four year olds tomorrow if the democrats would tackle fraud. but they won’t, because they don’t care about three and four year olds. they only care about power, and the fraud is how they buy their power.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

https://t.co/IO1s5PpMpw

[Chief Nerd @TheChiefNerd]

David Sacks on How Anthropic is Ironically Running Surveillance on Their Latest Models

“This is the company that said that it was against government surveillance. They are now retaining for 30 days every prompt and every output you send to one of these Mythos class models.”

[Brian Gehrke @H0bb3s]

@MichaelSLinden @mattxyzed No it isn’t.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent. Mais il repose sur trois erreurs factuelles, et ça vaut le coup de les regarder calmement.

Erreur 1 : la fortune d'Elon n'est pas un tas d'argent. C'est de la propriété d'usines, de fusées et de satellites. "Prendre la moitié de sa tune", concrètement, ça veut dire forcer la vente de la moitié de SpaceX et Tesla. L'argent ne sort pas d'un coffre, il sort des entreprises elles-mêmes, qui passent sous contrôle de fonds étrangers ou d'États. Tu ne redistribues pas du cash, tu démantèles un outil de production. C'est la différence entre récolter des pommes et découper le pommier.

Erreur 2 : "ça résout énormément de problèmes dans le monde". Cette expérience a déjà été tentée, en vrai. En 2021, le directeur du Programme Alimentaire Mondial de l'ONU a affirmé que 6 milliards de Musk pouvaient "résoudre la faim dans le monde". Réponse d'Elon : décrivez-moi exactement comment, comptabilité publique à l'appui, et je vends mes actions Tesla immédiatement. Le PAM a publié son plan. Verdict : ce n'était pas "résoudre la faim", c'était nourrir 42 millions de personnes pendant un an. Un an. Puis il faut re-payer, pour toujours. Le PAM avait d'ailleurs levé 8,4 milliards l'année précédente, et la faim était toujours là. Les ONG traitent les symptômes en boucle, jamais les causes, parce que leur financement dépend de l'existence du problème.

Erreur 3, la plus importante : tu cherches ce qui sort vraiment les gens de la pauvreté. Bonne nouvelle, on a la réponse, et elle est massive. En 1990, 36% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Plus d'un milliard de personnes sorties de la misère en 30 ans. Par quoi ? Pas par la charité ni par l'aide internationale (plus de 1 000 milliards versés à l'Afrique en 60 ans pour un résultat à peu près nul). Par l'ouverture des marchés, l'industrialisation, le commerce. La Chine seule a sorti 800 millions de personnes de la pauvreté en abandonnant le collectivisme, pas en taxant ses entrepreneurs.

Donc fais le calcul complet. Option A : tu confisques 500 milliards, tu finances quelques années de programmes, l'argent est consommé, et tu as détruit la machine qui produisait les fusées, les voitures électriques et l'internet des zones rurales. Option B : tu laisses le meilleur allocateur de capital de sa génération réinvestir 100% de sa fortune dans des industries qui baissent les coûts pour tout le monde et emploient des centaines de milliers de personnes. L'option A soulage ta morale pendant 18 mois. L'option B sort des populations entières de la pauvreté pour toujours.

La pauvreté ne se redistribue pas. Elle se résout par la création. C'est contre-intuitif, c'est frustrant, mais c'est ce que disent 200 ans de données.

[Bengal @BengalYouTube]

The most insane pitching performance I have ever seen.
Jacob Misiorowski allows 1 hit, faces the minimum and strikes out 15 on under 100 pitches

There are no comparable starts in MLB history

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

Worth reading.

[Brian Gehrke @H0bb3s]

This take from the @PirateWires Daily 👇

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The people whom you are targeting create more common good PER DAY than you have, @BernieSanders, in your entire miserable life. They may be very wealthy but they also create incalculable wealth for others. You scream, you rail, you spread your vile envy but what do you produce? What do you create? Why don't you return to the place of your honeymoon? Oh wait, the Soviet Union no longer exists.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Real-time video of Starship from Starlink

[Florian Roth ⚡️ @cyb3rops]

A friend told me something in a beer garden in Germany about 12 years ago:

“Florian, don’t overthink whether this specific service is exploitable. The stuff is broken. Plan accordingly.”

He meant software.

Most software looks stable because it runs under normal conditions. Look closer and you find memory leaks, parser bugs, unhandled input, bad defaults, forgotten modules, weird edge cases.

Now we have better fuzzing, better automation, AI-assisted auditing, variant hunting, more exploit dev, more eyes on everything.

So yes, patching matters.
But in a world where every kind of internet-facing software keeps producing fresh RCEs, you also need the boring stuff:

1. Reduce the attack surface
- expose fewer services
- disable unused modules, plugins and features
- don’t publish admin interfaces unless they really need to be reachable

2. Limit the blast radius
- run services with least privilege
- isolate internet-facing systems
- avoid shared accounts and credentials

3. Build visibility and control
- collect useful logs
- monitor weird errors, crashes and “should never happen” events
- keep enough data to investigate later
- run regular compromise assessments

Assume exposed software is brittle.
The stuff is broken. Plan accordingly.

[Brian Gehrke @H0bb3s]

@codek_tv Teacher is wrong for marking it wrong. Either answer is mathematically correct.

[Glenn Beck @glennbeck]

California gubernatorial candidate @SteveHiltonx exposes two MASSIVE tax fraud scandals connected to the Democratic Party:

“There’s a scheme that’s been operating for the last 10 years. This is from the gas tax money. One of the uses is the Climate Mitigation Fund, and it’s been $1 billion over the last 10 years that was supposedly spent on installing solar panels on low-income apartment buildings.

Well, we tracked it down. The actual amount of money spent on that? $72 million.

$928 million, nearly all of it, [was spent] on DEMOCRAT POLITICAL ORGANIZING.

This is what they do. This is their business model.

We just saw one over the weekend. Gavin Newsom’s diaper scheme: $20 millon to send diapers to 100,000 babies. 400 diapers each.

We did the math. That’s 50 cents per diaper.

We went into Target. You can get them for 16 cents a diaper.

In other words, Gavin Newsom’s government diapers are more than 3 times as expensive as in the store. Why? Because actually what it's doing is taking taxpayer money that's going into some nonprofit with his cronies, family members, and connections on there. They make the money, salaries raked off the top. And it builds their political machine. That's what's been going on in California."

[Tinashe Peter @TinashePeter_]

This will get Marco Rubio Elected in 2028…😮‍💨🇺🇸

Thank you Democrats!

[Milei in English - Official Account @jmilei_english]

Being a socialist in 2026 is something to be ashamed of. Long live freedom, damn it!