In that brief moment, the frog attained something like divinity as conceptualised by the Ancient Greeks. That frog was Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods. He lived more than 99.99% of all human beings have ever truly lived.
Running a company:
2020: can you survive a pandemic?
2021: still here? we’re going to give all of your competitors $100m series A rounds.
2022: wow, you made it? okay, all engineers cost $600,000/year now.
2023: nice job! okay, SVB failed and we’re going to take away your bank account.
2024: a survivor I see. but can you pivot from ai to crypto to defense tech back to ai-enabled defense tech in a 12 month period to stay relevant?
2025: unfortunately all of your competitors have raised $2b series B rounds. oh and only 500 engineers are relevant and they cost $100m/yr each.
2026: well, well, well. you’re still in business? let’s deploy the thunderclap of godlike LLMs from the heavens so all of your customers can rebuild your app in 2 hours. can you survive?
Tie Fighter (LucasArts, 1994) is the sequel to X-Wing which was released the year before. This time you join the Dark Side and blast away at rebel scum!
The prequel was great, Tie Fighter was even better. The iconic sound effects of the laser get me everytime. Joining the imperial forces gives it a whole new vibe. Epic cutscenes, digitized speech, great space combat scenes, ships and weapon systems to choose from, countless missions - and ultimately not being such a bad guy after all, since you serve under Thrawn and not Vader... your job being mainly to keep the galaxy in order, fight lawless rebels and pirates.
LucasArts was originally known for their adventure games, but with the release of the X-Wing and Tie Fighter series, they left an impressive mark on the 90s space combat genre.
⚡️This email is one of the most quietly revealing artifacts of the entire post-2008 era.
Peter Thiel isn’t predicting socialism here. He’s diagnosing the terminal logic of late capitalism: when ownership becomes inaccessible, belief in the system dissolves.
He’s mapping structural inevitability.
The key insight is in that last line:
“If one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”
Every economic order survives only as long as its participants believe they have a stake in its rewards. When that belief breaks, when capital accumulation is delayed beyond a generation, the feedback loop collapses.
In plain terms:
•Boomers owned.
•Gen X still managed to buy in.
•Millennials rent the world their parents own, and Gen Z is now locked out entirely.
The result isn’t ideological socialism. It’s resentful capitalism - a system where people still chase wealth but no longer trust the architecture that allocates it. That’s the precursor to all great systemic transitions - Rome, Weimar, post-Soviet Russia, even 18th-century France.
Thiel’s email is almost tragic in tone because he’s speaking to the very class - Zuckerberg, Andreessen, Sandberg - who became the gatekeepers of the new digital feudalism. They turned “ownership” into platform access, and “opportunity” into subscription. The economy was financialized, then digitized, then moralized - and in each step, capital got lighter, faster, and further removed from the people whose lives depend on it.
What he’s really saying is this:
Capitalism doesn’t fail when the rich get richer.
It fails when the poor stop believing they can join them.
That’s the pivot we’re living through right now. The “Millennial socialism” he mentions is the immune response of a generation whose time horizon was stolen.
The irony is that Thiel, the ultimate capitalist contrarian, saw it first.
And he was right.
The generation that couldn’t buy the system will end up rewriting it.
.@PalmerLuckey breaks down why AI fighter jets are such a big deal on the @joerogan podcast 🎙️
“You’ve seen Top Gun, right? They have this book of tactics that they need to learn to stay alive.”
“There’s another book of tactics that will allow you to destroy the enemy…but will probably get you killed in the process.”
“ALL of those tactics are on the table when it comes to AI”
“It’s not an incremental change in tactics — it’s a complete revolution”
I'm proud to share my favorite photo I got yesterday:
A shot from a remote camera as the ship & 33 Raptor engines roared through the frame. The cryogenic propellant condensing the humid Texas air amid the fiery plume is something to behold
See the uncropped photo in the reply