Derek

[Derek @dburben]

@nic_amadio @grok All my hard work going to waste 😄

[Hoover Institution @HooverInst]

In December 2025, former US Senator @BenSasse announced that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. That's the primary topic for this @UncKnowledge conversation about mortality, faith, and what truly matters when time is short.

Talking to host @P_M_Robinson, Sasse reflects on "redeeming the time"—holding ambition lightly, loving family more deliberately, and resisting the urge to make politics or professional success the center of life.

The discussion also covers Sasse's thoughts on the failures of Congress; the dangers of a fragmented, attention-starved republic; the crisis of higher education; and the moral challenges of technological abundance.

He speaks candidly and movingly about regret, forgiveness, prayer, and suffering—arguing that while death is a real enemy, it does not get the final word. Watch the full conversation on X:

[Byrne Hobart @ByrneHobart]

Google's capex guide this year is higher than their cumulative capex from founding through the end of 2021.

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

https://t.co/qNAVuG3xsz

[Derek @dburben]

@FerroTV finally back on Surveillance :)

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

on becoming "legible to capital":

the most underrated factor in the success of firms is the degree to which they are legible to Capital.

defining this precisely is hard ("you know it when you see it"): but an idea, a firm, or a person is legible to Capital (cap-C) when by dint of their existence capital forms behind them in excess.

think of an idea being legible to Capital as being magnetically charged to the capital markets. dollars are just attracted to you: allocators discuss it at cocktail parties, funds market it at their AGMs, and twitter discusses novel financing schemes to get more dollars behind the idea.

becoming legible to Capital is the single greatest superpower for a fledgling firm. look at ramp, look at cognition, look at leopold, look at toni and dan at dany. these are all superhumans at being legible to Capital.

its worth noticing how ideas and people become legible to Capital:

first, there is no divide between the ceo/mgmt and the idea. the story is NOT that of an individually successful and impressive individual bringing their talents to a new platform. you can see these kind of puff piece stories in many companies that are illegible to Capital. the company is never about YOU.

for a founder to be legible to Capital there can be no air between them and the expression of the idea. their lives only matter insofar as they are building with intensity towards the pure form of the idea.

second, the company can be understood fundamentally as an equation/trade. in a best case, the most legible companies grow as a superlinear function of dollars in. the founders are highly verbal, and can clearly articulate and understand the inputs to this growth equation: talent, capital, mgmt, etc.

the companies that are most legible to Capital, and the mgmt that runs them, at their best: feel like clockwork toys in the hand. simply by looking at them the levers of progress and output become immediately clear.

they are immediate, smack you in the face, expressions of an idea that is both small enough that you can feel the thing click around in your hand, but cosmically large enough the idea feels True in some sense beyond literal.

when the trade is immensely clear, every capital provider across the stack can immediately understand their role today-- but more importantly their ability to scale to putting 10-100-100x the number of dollars into the thing as it reaches maturitiy.

finally, a company becomes legible to Capital when it is clear the entire firm (from Capital, to mgmt, to talent) is singing from the same song sheet, they are all living their lives in expression of the same exact idea.

an idea i've shamelessly stolen from @phineasb is the chocolate cake problem: many firms have great inputs (eggs, chocolate, flour, some beautiful icing) but mgmt thinks they're cooking a soufflé, investors think they're getting cup cakes, and talent thinks they're getting a pound cake.

the companies that are most legible to Capital are obsessive about chasing the tolerances between competing ideas of the firm to zero

by becoming legible to Capital a firm not only can achieve singularity in the private capital markets (ie unlimited free capital forever) but more importantly, it can unify the secret that ignites it internally with the world outside. when that secret is shared, there is truly no limit.

[Michael Green @profplum99]

This weekend, I took to the S*bstack soapbox in response to the coordinated mockery campaign on "In the 1950s, a single income..."

Lots of requests to unlock it, so I have

[Prue @prue_0]

A new essay on The Great Decoupling

a look at how society is splitting into an Agency Class that orchestrates the world and a Managed Class that medicates against it.

link to follow

[Derek @dburben]

@apralky

[Derek @dburben]

@apralky This is very well said

[Derek @dburben]

@GordonGekko420 Think we were on the same ORD to ZRH flight 😆

[Derek @dburben]

@lymanstoneky Do you have the raw data available? Interested to look through it.

[Derek @dburben]

@TheStalwart @IrvingSwisher @Chris_arnade The whole country is a fascinating place to visit, well worth the trip. Wrote an investment piece on it here: https://t.co/Aqre0jQQvd

[Derek @dburben]

@prue_0 This is really really good.

[Patrick Blumenthal @PatrickJBlum]

This decade will be full of crises. The solutions will not be found in consensus frameworks—but in the anomalies they fail to explain.

I started a frontier tech fund last year to continue investing in these anomalies.

@ByrneHobart & @TobiasAHuber are joining the next phase.

[Derek @dburben]

@dwarkesh_sp What is the one question you think people aren’t asking that they should be right now about AI?

[Story @storyandscience]

In 1954, Atomic Energy Chairman Lewis Strauss promised energy "too cheap to meter."

In 2025, we interviewed 15 pioneers working to shape the future of energy.

Our second frontier film is out now: 'TOO CHEAP TO METER' — their vision may finally deliver on that promise.

[Derek @dburben]

@Alex_Danco it happened!

[Derek @dburben]

@Alex_Danco are you going to write soon again on your blog? I miss the hot takes there and realized it's been almost 3 years since a great "Danco take" appeared on my timeline

[Derek @dburben]

@collision It has replaced all roles of research analysts in my job. It’s wildly impressive