Elon Musk was asked by a room full of Stanford students what single trait separates people who change the world from people who don't. Everyone expected him to say intelligence. Or work ethic. Or vision.
He said pain tolerance.
The room wasn't sure if he was joking. He wasn't. He explained that intelligence is common. Ambition is common. Even good ideas are relatively common. What is genuinely rare is the ability to absorb punishment day after day, year after year, and keep building anyway.
He said most people he's met who are smarter than him quit after the first real failure. Not because they weren't talented. Because the pain of failure exceeded their tolerance for it. They found something easier and redirected their intelligence there.
He said the entire history of SpaceX is just a story about absorbing explosions, literally and financially, and refusing to interpret them as signals to stop.
Nobody writes that on a motivational poster. Nobody puts "pain tolerance" on their LinkedIn profile. But it's the actual filter. Not who can dream the biggest. Who can bleed the longest.
After reflection, this new narrative by Palantir is probably much more consequential than people may assume.
Palantir is basically being the canary in the coal mine announcing the death of two major assumptions propping up the US economy right now:
1) that AI labs will be able to extract significant economic rent - as opposed to AI models being mere commodities
2) that other countries can accept structural dependency on US technology and services without pushing back on sovereignty concerns
Why are Palantir specifically starting to be vocal about this?
First off, major middle-powers, even US “allies”, are one by one showing them the door. In June, France announced that the DGSI - its domestic intelligence agency, which had relied on Palantir since the 2015 Paris attacks - would replace it with French firm ChapsVision, with Prime Minister Lecornu explaining (https://t.co/SLhEGprBZC) that France “cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital sphere” and shouldn't depend on the goodwill of companies “capable of turning off the tap.”
Germany moved even earlier: its domestic intelligence service, the BfV, also selected ChapsVision over Palantir (https://t.co/pDZVj4SYUY), and the German military has said it will no longer use Palantir at all. Then, just this week, Spain instructed state-controlled companies - including strategic firms like Telefónica, Indra and Navantia - to avoid signing any new contracts with Palantir (https://t.co/0ik4UAFrT7).
Even in the UK, Washington's most loyal vassal, the NHS's £330 million data contract with Palantir is under review following parliamentary pressure (https://t.co/uJl6g4BMsW), and London Mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50 million Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police.
Palantir making a lot of noise around them caring about sovereignty makes a lot of sense: it's damage control since they keep being told they're a sovereignty risk.
I doubt it will work - because it's true: they are a sovereignty risk - but the fact that they feel the need to be vocal around this tells you where the wind is blowing: they're not shaping the narrative, they're reacting to one they're losing.
What they're saying against closed-source AI (basically a broadside attack on OpenAI and Anthropic), is again highly self-serving. Palantir's sudden love of open-weight AI models conveniently coincides with them launching 2 days before a partnership with Nvidia to sell exactly that: open models models (NVIDIA's Nemotron) in sovereign environments.
So it's essentially a product launch.
It doesn't make what they're saying wrong: it is factual that the value proposition of closed-source AI labs looks increasingly unsustainable. I mean: you're paying 10X the price of Chinese open-source AI models for something that's not really better (or just marginally) and on top of that you have zero control over your data, or the models themselves.
When Palantir says that "the architecture that maximally preserves sovereignty is one that enables institutions to own their tribal knowledge, and to compound it as alpha," they're right. I'd add that this also means you shouldn't trust Palantir either with that "tribal knowledge"... they obviously left this part out 😉
When you take a step back, these two things have major implications on many other US companies.
SpaceX - which just went public at the largest IPO valuation in history - is one clear example as I describe in my latest article on the new space race with China (https://t.co/JK3ELAyEVO).
If countries like France concluded with Palantir that they couldn't depend on a company “capable of turning off the tap” when it’s merely analyzing their data, what should they conclude about a company that aims to literally control their entire connectivity - at one man's whim, from space?
What percentage of SpaceX's crazy market cap is based on the assumption that foreign governments will not do to Starlink what they're currently doing to Palantir?
And SpaceX - or Palantir - aren't alone: a significant proportion of the top US tech giants, who rose in a world where no one questioned American technological hegemony, now face an environment that's much less conducive to the kind of lock-in their business models - and valuations - depend on.
When you pair this with the fact that it increasingly looks like the US made a wrong bet with closed-source AI - an extremely expensive wrong bet - the picture that emerges is of a country that bet its economic future on two things - proprietary AI and captive allies - and is losing both at the same time.
And to compound the problem, it doesn't help that the official narrative of the US government - via the voice of Jacob Helberg, the Under-Secretary of State (https://t.co/Z1rotPl9Ee) - is to be vocally opposed to "AI Sovereignty": essentially telling everyone "you know what, your worst fears are real, our tech companies are really out to undermine your sovereignty."
Read Helberg's post (the one I linked) and put yourself in the shoes of - say - a European or Asian leader and ask yourself how you'd react to being told that building your own AI capabilities is "marching in perfect formation into the past," that your pursuit of sovereignty is really just "synchronized mediocrity," and that your only path to the future runs through American technology.
If it was me in a position of power, I'd read this as a massive wakeup call: when another country's official position is that your sovereignty is a problem, history says you're about to need it.
So yes, it looks like - unexpectedly - Palantir, of all companies, is being quite the canary in the big tech mine. Yes they obviously do this for self-serving and cynical purpose, and yes they're of course also very much part of the problem and not the solution. But it doesn't make them wrong: sometimes it takes a vulture to tell you something is dying.
You are sitting at your elite school pretending that because you watched TikTok twice and got an A+ on some crazy paper, because your professor couldn’t get a job anywhere else, that you actually understand the world.
- CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp
Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.
The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.
What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.
Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.
In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.
The average student graduates after 12 years of schooling and still cannot answer the most important questions in life.
What is a good man?
What is justice?
What is worth sacrificing for?
What is beauty?
What is truth?
What is the purpose of life?
Classical education begins with the assumption that any education failing to address these questions is not really education at all.
Harvard, apparently, is about to adopt a new policy to combat grade inflation. I devised my own anti–grade inflation policy 25 years ago. I’ve shared it with provosts and deans, to no avail. Here it is:
The Muñoz Plan Against Grade Inflation
The plan has three key components:
I am a managing editor at a national news organization you have heard of.
I have held this title for nine years, which means I have attended nine White House Correspondents' Dinners, killed four stories, and produced a newsroom that hasn't won a Pulitzer in six years but hasn't lost an advertiser in four.
Let me tell you how American journalism works. I am telling you because nobody told me. I had to learn it the way everyone learns it. Slowly. And then all at once.
Every morning I attend a 9 AM editorial meeting where eleven people decide what 340 million Americans should care about. Our combined household income is roughly $2.8 million. None of us has ever staffed a newsroom that covers a community where the median household income is under $45,000. We live in Washington. We live in New York. We live in the zip codes our readers were priced out of in 2019.
We decide what matters. That is the job.
I have killed four stories in nine years. Only four. My predecessor averaged eleven per year. We do not call it killing. We call it deprioritizing. Sometimes we call it revisiting the angle. Sometimes we call it timing. A story about an advertiser's supply chain practices gets revisited. A story about a senator's stock trades gets revisited. A story about a pharmaceutical company that spends $1.4 million a year with us gets revisited for fourteen months until the reporter who brought it stops bringing it.
That's editorial process.
A metro reporter brought that pharmaceutical story to the meeting once. Fourteen months of work. Solid sourcing. Three former employees on the record. The room went quiet. I said we needed to revisit the angle. She revised it. I said we needed to revisit the timing. She revised it again. I said the sourcing needed to be bulletproof. She added two more sources. I said we should circle back after the quarterly review.
She left the paper eight months later. She works in communications for a nonprofit in New Mexico now. Makes $38,000.
I did not raise my voice. I did not send a single email about that story. I did not have to. Silence is the editor's veto. It requires no memo. It leaves no evidence. And the reporter learns. They always learn.
That's editorial independence.
I have reassigned two reporters who pushed too hard. Nobody told me to reassign them. That is important. Nobody tells you. The architecture does the work. You learn which stories get praised in the morning meeting and which ones produce silence. The praised ones involve the people we had dinner with last month. The silent ones involve the people who pay for the dinner.
I keep the WHCD pins in a bowl on my desk. Nine of them. One from each year. When new hires visit my office they see the pins and they understand what a successful career in journalism looks like.
That is mentorship.
My editor taught me the same way. 2004. My first year at the paper. I had a story about a defense contractor billing the Pentagon $1,200 for a component that cost $35 to manufacture. Four sources. One on the record. My editor said the sourcing needed work. I revised. He said we should circle back after the appropriations vote. I waited. He said maybe the defense beat reporter should take the lead.
The defense beat reporter had a profile series running on the same contractor. He needed access. The profile ran three months later. It won a regional Murrow.
I did not bring my story back. My editor kept his WHCD pins framed above his desk. I remember counting them — fourteen — while he explained the timing wasn't right. Now I keep mine in a bowl. The bowl is bigger.
That's training.
In 2025, Gallup measured public trust in mass media at 28 percent. The lowest in the poll's fifty-year history. The first time it dropped below 30. When Gallup started asking in the 1970s, it was 72 percent. We have lost 44 points of public confidence in two generations.
I was on the task force. Seven editors. Two consultants billing $400 an hour. We met for four months. I brought the Gallup numbers to the first meeting. I did not bring the advertiser revenue spreadsheet. Nobody did.
We identified the problem in the second meeting. Misinformation. Social media algorithms. Media literacy. The problem was external. We were certain. The consultants were certain. We drafted a transparency initiative and proposed a series of op-eds explaining our editorial standards to the audience that no longer reads us.
I wrote one of the op-eds. It was about our commitment to fearless, independent journalism. I wrote it in the same office where I had deprioritized the pharmaceutical story six months earlier. The op-ed ran on a Tuesday. The pharmaceutical company renewed its contract the following quarter.
The other 72 percent have a media literacy problem.
Six corporations control 90 percent of American media. In 1983, it was fifty. I know this because I have worked for three of them. Each acquisition was announced with a town hall. Each town hall included the phrase "editorial independence." I have attended eleven town halls. The phrase has never not been said.
BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street hold top shareholder positions in all six. The same three asset managers that own my newsroom also own the defense contractor from my first story, the pharmaceutical company whose ad revenue holds up my floor, and the insurance conglomerate whose CEO sat two seats from me at last year's dinner.
I did not make this connection in the editorial meeting. I made it at 2 AM on a Saturday reading a ProPublica investigation written by someone who left our paper in 2019. She does not attend the dinner.
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Marc Benioff bought Time. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the LA Times. Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. I was at the dinner the year Bezos came for the first time. He was seated at the head table. The room applauded. I clapped. I remember clapping.
That's civic engagement.
I attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner every year. Have for nine years. I have the seating chart saved on my phone from the day the assignments come out. The theme is always about the First Amendment. The banners always say something about a free press for a free people. This year the WHCA replaced the comedian with a mentalist — a man who professionally performs what he describes as "embellishment and partial truths" — because the comedy slot had become unpredictable. The last comedian called the president what he is. They stopped inviting comedians. The mentalist is better. He deceives people in what he calls "an ethical way."
That's programming.
The WHCA president — a CBS White House correspondent — described the dinner as a chance for the press and the president to get together in a different context and recognize the important relationship, despite how complicated it might be.
I found this eloquent. It is exactly what I would have said.
We want to be around our subject. Not adversarial to it. Not above it. Around it. Close enough to be invited to the after-party at the French Ambassador's residence. Close enough that the press secretary knows your first name. Close enough that a rescinded dinner invitation would feel like a professional consequence rather than an editorial decision.
That's access. Access is how you build trust. Trust is how you get the story. Getting the story is the job.
250 journalists signed a letter asking for a "forceful defense of press freedom" from the podium at this year's dinner. The letter named the president. It listed his actions in detail. It was sent to the organization hosting the dinner where the president would be the guest of honor. The dinner is a celebration of the First Amendment held in the presence of the man who is arresting reporters, threatening to revoke broadcast licenses, and using the FCC to selectively enforce the equal time rule. The letter asked for a forceful defense. What it got was a mentalist.
That took courage. Two hundred and fifty signatures.
Meanwhile, 136 newspapers closed in 2025. Two per week. Since 2005, 3,500 newspapers have shut down or merged. Fifty million Americans now live in communities with limited or no local journalism. Newspaper employment has dropped 75 percent since 2005. Web traffic to the hundred largest newspapers fell 45 percent in four years.
A hedge fund called Alden Global Capital owns more than two hundred of those papers through a holding company. Their model is efficient. Buy the paper. Cut the newsroom. Extract the revenue. Let it close when the revenue stops. They have done this to the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News. My colleagues at other outlets call this vulture capitalism. I call it a different business model. Everyone has one.
That's portfolio management.
We did not cover this at the editorial meeting. We were discussing the seating chart. The seating chart matters. Proximity to the head table correlates with source quality. I have the data.
The pipeline runs one direction. A journalist's median salary is $60,280. A public relations specialist makes $69,780. Corporate communications exceeds $150,000. We train investigators for five years on $34,000 starting salaries and then export them to the companies they were supposed to investigate. That is not a pipeline problem. That is talent development. We contribute human capital to the broader communications ecosystem.
Google and Facebook take more than half of every digital advertising dollar. We compete for what remains. The pharmaceutical company's $1.4 million is not an advertiser. It is a load-bearing wall.
That's the business model.
Jen Psaki left the podium and went to MSNBC. Ari Fleischer left the podium and went to Fox. I have had drinks with both of them. Not at the same event. At the same event it would suggest the podium and the press table are interchangeable. They are not interchangeable. The career paths are simply adjacent.
That's networking. Networking is how you build a career. A career is how you serve the public interest.
I am writing a book. My agent says it could advance in the low six figures if the sourcing holds. The sourcing requires access. Access requires that my sources trust me. Trust requires that when I write about them, they recognize themselves.
I sent the first three chapters to a source last month. He returned them with two corrections. Both were accurate. One removed a detail about a policy decision that would have been embarrassing. I accepted both. The detail was not essential to the narrative. The source is essential to the next three chapters.
The sources get the manuscript before publication. The public gets the book fourteen months later for $28. The advance will pay for the renovation I have been putting off since the last round of layoffs made me nervous about spending.
That's the craft at its highest level.
Last month I saw her name. A newsletter published by the nonprofit in New Mexico. She was covering water contamination on tribal land. Nine thousand readers. Clean sourcing. The kind of work that wins the awards we give each other.
I typed three words into an email and deleted them. Then I pulled up next year's WHCD guest list.
That's priorities.
Yesterday, a satirist wrote a fictional piece about journalists at the correspondents' dinner. It reached 3 million people.
A Fox News White House correspondent with 188,000 followers called the satirist a "lunatic." She wrote: "No part of this is true — including the timing of events he couldn't even manage to get right in fabricating this BS." Her tweet reached 357,000 people. She used a platform built on the First Amendment to fact-check a fictional job title in a satire about journalists who prioritize the wrong thing. Someone added a Community Note. To fiction.
A New York Post columnist with 869,000 followers wrote a defense of the wine-taking. "What is this guy's problem?" she asked. "The wine was there for the guests to drink." She asked if the satirist wanted everyone to start screaming hysterically. She did not ask why 3 million people found the piece more credible than the institution it described.
Others called it AI. "AI" is what you call writing that makes you uncomfortable when you cannot argue with what it says. The institutional immune system activated exactly as designed: identify the threat, classify it, neutralize it, resume operations.
That's media literacy.
The satirist wrote that a woman checked the vintage during an evacuation. The profession reenacted it in the replies. The satirist said journalists would prioritize the wrong thing. The journalists responded by prioritizing the wrong thing. The correspondent checked the byline. The columnist defended the wine. The Community Note verified the fiction. Nobody verified the 28 percent.
That's editorial judgment.
I have been in this industry for twenty-two years. I have watched us go from 72 percent trust to 28 percent. In any other industry this would be a catastrophic product failure. In ours it is an audience problem. The audience does not understand us. We will fix this with a podcast.
I have been asked about all of it. The closures. The consolidation. The revolving door. The dinner. The trust numbers. I have answers for each one. Good answers. The business model changed. Scale creates efficiency. Government experience makes better journalists. Proximity to power is how you hold it accountable. Trust is a lagging indicator. I have given these answers at conferences. I have given them on panels. The foundation that funded the last panel on "Restoring Public Trust" is a subsidiary of the holding company that closed eleven of the newspapers.
These are separate issues. Unrelated. I have been doing this for twenty-two years and I can tell you with certainty that the declining trust, the consolidation, the proximity to power, the revolving door, the advertiser sensitivity, the dinner, the wine, and the silence in the editorial meeting are all separate issues.
I am one of the good ones. I track the trust numbers. I attend the dinner for the right reasons. I keep the pins because I believe in the mission. The proximity is incidental. The access is necessary. The silence in the editorial meeting is just how editorial meetings work.
Once a year, we put on black tie, sit next to the people we are supposed to hold accountable, toast to the First Amendment with wine we didn't pay for, and call it a free press.
The wine is $76 a bottle. It was included. I am already looking at next year's seating chart.
A MIT professor gave a 1-hour lecture in 2019 that has 18 million views.
He died 5 months after recording it.
It was his final gift to the world.
Patrick Winston taught at MIT for 50 years.
The smartest engineers on earth sat in his classroom.
And he spent his last lecture teaching them the one skill their degrees never covered.
How to speak.
15 lessons that will change how you communicate forever:
Never open with a joke. Your audience is not ready to laugh yet. Open with a promise of what they will know by the end.
Your ideas are like your children. You are too close to them. What is obvious to you is invisible to everyone else. Explain the obvious.
The 5-minute rule: the first 5 minutes of any talk determine whether people will listen for the next 55. Spend more time on your opening than anything else.
Repeat your most important idea 3 times in 3 different ways. Once is never enough.
Build a fence around your idea. Tell people what it is NOT before you tell them what it IS.
Verbal punctuation. Pause. Let the idea land before moving to the next one.
Ask questions nobody will answer. Then wait 7 seconds. The silence is not awkward. It is processing.
Never read your slides. Your audience can read. They cannot listen and read simultaneously.
Use the board not the slides. Writing forces you to slow down. Slowing down forces clarity.
Inspire before you inform. Nobody learns from someone they are not inspired by.
End with a contribution not a summary. Tell them what you gave them. Not what you said.
Never say thank you at the end. It is weak. End with something that lands.
Stories make ideas stick. Data makes ideas understood. You need both. In that order.
The quality of your communication determines the quality of your ideas in the eyes of the world. Not the ideas themselves.
Practice is not preparation. Practice IS the skill.
Patrick Winston understood something most people spend their entire careers missing.
Your ideas are only as powerful as your ability to transfer them into someone else's mind.
You can be the smartest person in the room and be completely invisible.
Or you can master communication and make average ideas feel like breakthroughs.
He chose to spend his last lecture teaching this.
Watch it tonight.
Bookmark this first.
Follow @cyrilXBT for more lessons from the people who built the future.
Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.
Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.
Here's what happened:
Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."
And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.
Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.
The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."
Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.
Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.
Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.
Same playbook with Hanes:
Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."
Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.
But it gets even worse...
Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.
Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.
They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.
The mechanism is simple but terrifying:
If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.
Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."
Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.
Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.
So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.
You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.
"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."
3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.
This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.
And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.
"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.
The UConn Huskies have more players in their starting lineup who started their college careers at Michigan than Michigan have… 🤯
Michigan:
🔹 Yaxel Lendeborg (UAB)
🔹 Morez Johnson Jr. (Illinois)
🔹 Aday Mara (UCLA)
🔹 Elliot Cadeau (UNC)
🔹 Nimari Burnett (Texas Tech)
UConn:
🔹 Tarris Reed Jr. (Michigan)
🔹 Alex Karaban (UConn)
🔹 Braylon Mullins (UConn)
🔹 Silas Demary Jr. (Georgia)
🔹 Solo Ball (UConn)
Is the transfer portal becoming a problem? 😬