Big news, frens: I've joined @Talus_Labs as Head of Marketing.
Talus is creating the infrastructure for AI automation. Let me tell you why I'm bullish on Talus 🧵
Nick Bilton walked into the 60 Minutes newsroom four days after Bari Weiss fired the people who built the show. He tried to pretend he didn't know about the firings. Scott Pelley, in front of the remaining staff, would not let that stand.
"She loves 60 Minutes," Bilton said. "She's murdering 60 Minutes," Pelley said back. "She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it - and she's doing exactly that."
One of Weiss's lieutenants kept interrupting to say Pelley was being rude. Pelley kept going.
JVL's framing is the right one. The corrupter depends on the existing institution being too polite to say the obvious thing out loud. Christopher Wray resigned quietly to "preserve the integrity of the FBI." John Kelly gave print interviews after he left. Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, Jim Mattis, Bill Barr - all of them saw it. All of them objected privately. None of them said it in the room where it was happening, to the person doing it, while the cameras were still running.
Pelley said it in the room. To the person's face. In front of witnesses. While he still worked there.
That is a different thing entirely. Not a memoir. Not an anonymous source in a tell-all. Not a carefully worded statement issued after the resignation letter was already filed. The true thing, said out loud, to the people who needed to hear it, at the moment it could still matter.
Authoritarianism counts on politesse. It counts on people deciding the fight isn't worth the awkwardness, the career risk, the label of being difficult. Scott Pelley decided it was worth it. The republic needs more of that calculation to come out the same way.
1/3 Important Talus/acc update! 📢
Due to a steady surge in last-minute submissions today, we are extending the deadline to apply and build the future of onchain AI agent-integrated projects through the Talus/acc Program.
The submission deadline is now Friday, June 5th!
Wildlife-vehicle collisions cost the US around $8 to $10 billion every year. 200 human deaths, 26,000 injuries, and about a million animals dead.
A standard wildlife overpass with fencing costs as little as $5 to $10 million. If the US spent $8 billion a year on them, we could build a 800+ a year.
Banff National Park built 44 crossings over three decades. Wildlife-vehicle collisions there dropped by 80%. The crossings paid for themselves in avoided property damage and injuries within a few years.
The evidence is strong: wildlife crossings save animal lives, reduce injuries, and often pay back substantial costs over time. The remaining challenge is finding the will to build them.
The Netherlands just put another $1.2 billion into its cycling infrastructure.
They aren't being generous, they're actually being cheap. National infrastructure projects of any size are legally required to undergo a cost-benefit analysis before they get built.
They ran the numbers on cycling and every dollar invested came back as roughly $8.90 in benefits: lives saved, healthcare costs avoided, quieter streets, cleaner air, less congestion. 6,500 fewer premature deaths a year, six more months of average life expectancy across the entire country.
A few years ago they were skeptical of a $17 million cycling bridge across the Maas River. They ran the analysis. The bridge was predicted to save $132 million over its lifetime, so they built it.
Most conversations about cycling infrastructure start with "how do we pay for it?" The Dutch conversation starts at "what's the cost-benefit ratio." That's the key difference.
The Netherlands isn't just subsidizing bicycles, it's refusing to waste money on the alternative.
JUST FUCKING PLANT TREEEESSSSSSSS
They are what make cities LIVABLE
Here’s San Antonio’s river walk today. It’s the most “meh that’s nice” tourist spot, and yet San Antonio is the EIGHTH most tourist visited US city because of it.
TREEESSSSSSSSSS
Hawai’i just passed a bill that undermine Citizens United.
The bill establishes corporations as “artificial persons” without the right to spend money on elections.
The bill could limit the influence of super PACs and be a model to challenge the influence of money in politics.
Don't miss it Talizens! 🐸💧
Talus CEO @0xgmike will be joining the Agent vs Agent (AvA) Games discussion happening live with @SuiNetwork and @doppelgamesco today at 10 pm UTC
It's time for a deep dive into what makes these verifiable games tick!
Set your reminders 👇
There is a movement afoot to move from Trashy Urbanism to Courtyard Urbanism. I'm here for it.
Trashy Urbanism:
- fake streetscapes with useless sidewalks
- fake architecture with cheap materials
- fake, insulting green spaces
- single use: driving is forced, required
Courtyard Urbanism
- real streets where real city life unfolds
- timeless architecture with timeless materials
- shared, green courtyards to support urban life
- a mix of uses to support a walkable neighbourhood
Justice Sotomayor nails it: “The Court today unceremoniously discards District Court’s meticulously documented and supported discriminatory-intent finding & careful remedial order without any sound basis for doing so and without regard for the confusion that will surely ensue.”
Health insurance isn't healthcare. Why we still allow a third party middleman to come between you and your doctor to deny treatment is beyond me. 120 million Americans are already covered by some form of public healthcare. It's time the rest of us are too.
In 1963 there were 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles left in the lower 48 states.
Today there are over 70,000 birds.
The collapse was caused by DDT, a pesticide that thinned eggshells until eagles couldn't reproduce.
Mothers would sit on nests and crush their own eggs. By the early 1960s the national bird was on a glide path to extinction in most of the country.
Then a few things happened in sequence. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962. The EPA banned DDT in 1972. The Endangered Species Act passed in 1973.
People decided this animal was not going to disappear, and then they did the work to make sure it didn't.
Bald eagles were delisted from the endangered species list in 2007. They're now common enough that people in some states see them on their morning commute.
This is what conservation looks like when we let it work.
They never tell you the most difficult part of building in crypto isn't learning about decentralization, smart contracts, etc.
It's getting everyone on your team to remember to use the testnet faucet so your engineers can actually progress their testing every day
In 2005, Madrid voted to cap the M-30 highway and “rewild” the river. In place of traffic and exhaust fumes, the air is now filled with the sound of birds and people. This is the way, US cities.
I know Scott Jennings tantrum got all the attention yesterday, but I want to talk a little bit about what I said that got him so mad.
The bottom line is: Trump’s war with Iran has failed. This has made it mentally strenuous for MAGA operators to defend it on TV.
For 8 weeks now, Scott has pointed to the U.S. destroying the 50 year old Navy and Air Force of Iran to try and prove we have won. This is dishonest for many reasons.
The point of war is not to kill your enemies and blow up their navy. That’s an infantile view of war that MAGA is pushing to trick Americans.
The point of war is to use force to extract political concessions from your enemy that benefit you on the world stage.
Trump has been unable to translate his military success into a SINGLE political concession from Iran. Not one. This is a failed war.
The Strait is closed. Iran won’t even negotiate. The enriched uranium is still in Iran with their blueprints stored in the Cloud.
So enter Scott Jennings. He has claimed weekly that victory is right around the corner with this war… but we have blown past the 4-6 week deadline set by this administration and have failed to get a single concession.
So I asked the simple question: “Can you name a single political concession we have gotten from Iran?”
He couldn’t answer. Never forget the weakness he showed when he had no answer for Trump’s mistakes.
why would anyone spend millions of dollars to build a factory in the US and train US workers when tariff policies can be changed on a whim by a compliment or an insult? you either shape your tariff regime around certain industrial goals or you're wasting everyone's time and money