Desiderata: You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. 🌅 Make today a good one!

It turns out that asking a 16-month-old if they have a dirty diaper results in a 'No' 100% of the time, proving toddlers are both unreliable narrators and full of shit. 💩

.@a16z's @davidu says its easier to start an American Dynamism company today because of companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Palantir: "Two things are happening. One is: we're attracting more and more people that are very mission-driven and mission-oriented." "The second thing is: there's more and more successful American dynamism companies, especially if you include SpaceX, Tesla, and Palantir. The alumni coming out of these companies is growing and so extraordinary that there's now just more and more talent." "We're still in the early innings of American dynamism. But it's much, much easier to start an American dynamism company today."

250 years ago, America declared that the future would not be inherited. It would be built. Built by founders, farmers, soldiers, inventors, engineers, astronauts, entrepreneurs, and every generation willing to do the hard thing in service of something bigger than itself. The American project has never been passive. It is American Dynamism in action: risk, grit, faith, invention, industry, and the refusal to accept decline as destiny. Happy 4th of July. Happy 250th, America. I’ve never been more optimistic about the next 250 as I am today. 🇺🇸

Thank you @altcap @vladtenev @jgebbia @abhishekf96 and everyone involved in creating the opportunity to invest in our future and our children’s future. This is a phenomenal experience and reminds me of all the best elements of how Robinhood made finance approachable. Love this

Some celebrate with a party, some celebrate with fireworks, this pilot is celebrating America’s semiquincentennial with a very special flight. #America250

Flock helps catch another pedophile suspect. This is every day.

I think what you did is awesome and very impressive, and everything good is derivative of something before it.

We're proud to have helped arrest this serial arsonist, and glad that he was sentenced appropriately. This was simple. A single license plate alert from a Flock camera led Selah PD to the suspect's vehicle. The benefit: true justice and no more wildfires from this guy.

they did it. the mad lads actually did it. i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?) early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem. processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet. each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago. since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up. to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it. when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor. the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned. we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch. it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it. huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality. while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together. what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

Over 100 pounds of medium enriched uranium arrived for our first reactor! Our partner, @StandardNuclear manufactured this new fuel in America, and at a pace accelerated with direct @ENERGY support. This is the only microreactor tuned TRISO particle fuel. Radiant designed it with our customers in mind, to reduce cost of manufacture and to improve transportability!

Starting today, @ForeignPolicy is lifting its paywall on ALL content. From the Iran war to the World Cup, read up on the biggest global stories—for free! 1/9

This is being undersold!!! Designing HALEU/TRISO fuel transportation packages is not something that’s done on the fly Big win for @RadiantNuclear!!

Coming off my conversation with @pmarca, I feel stronger than ever that this is the moment for innovative and thoughtful policies to stay ahead of the AI tech race. It is time for an AI Homestead - see my essay on this topic. #AccelerationforAll

"We implemented license plate readers as part of a larger strategy to reduce gun violence in the city and it helped." That's from a Wisconsin law enforcement leader. And it's one of dozens of outcomes playing out across the state, from missing children located to hit-and-runs solved. Technology doesn't do the work. It helps the people doing the work do it better. Learn more about Flock: bit.ly/4uZH6eO

I thank @pmarca for joining me on the Betting on America podcast to push past the p(doom) vs. acceleration debate. The question isn’t whether AI will transform our economy and society—it already is. The question is how we can ensure that the gains from AI are broadly shared, the risks managed, and American leadership secured. I think of that as #AccelerationforAll Americans. #AccelerationForAll #AmericanAI #USChina Listen here: youtu.be/1CdOEVq5fz8?is=1r73…

Always energizing to talk with @SecretaryWright about what it actually takes to scale advanced nuclear in the U.S. At Radiant, this is exactly the work we're doing — building microreactors that can deployed anywhere power is needed. @RitaB66

David Ulevitch (@davidu), who leads a16z’s American Dynamism (which invested in ASI), pretty much summed up the benefits ASI (@AirSpaceIntel) provides to airlines for scheduling and routing flights. $JOBY will enjoy those same benefits internally. And externally, beyond helping controllers de-conflict, @SecDuffy even talked about how ASI’s platform can optimize scheduling to spread out the capacity in an airspace to further reduce delays/cancellations. ASI’s $875M award is a massive victory for startups competing against the big primes, massive victory for Joby Aviation and a victory for private capital taking the R&D risk in a really tough industry like civil aviation. The FAA is basically buying a the finished product with ASI.

Great discussions with Secretary Wright about Radiant's testing and commercial plans. He's so full of energy!! Also he knows his tech and wanted to know all the numbers for our unique fuel design, transportability, and above grade concrete shield(pictured)

I got to sit down with David Ulevitch (@davidu) for E31 of We The Builders (@WeThe_Builders). He is a General Partner at @a16z where he cofounded the $1.776 billion American Dynamism practice with @KTmBoyle about 4 years ago. Since then, it has taken over the timeline and become the language many use to describe frontier, deep or hard tech. Friend of the show @lochhead calls this Category Design, where you don’t necessarily have to be the first to become a category leader, you need to frame the problem and do it better than everyone else. We talk about investing strategy, founding story of American Dynamism and what made it a sticky brand, what he has learnt about how the world works from his anthropology background, surveillance concerns with public safety technologies, his best mentor who is not @pmarca and more. American Dynamism focuses on investing in areas such as public safety, aerospace, logistics, national security, defense, manufacturing, industrialization, logistics. Some of the companies in their portfolio include @anduriltech , Amca, @AppliedInt , Apex Space, @AstroMechanica , @Astranis , @basepowerco , @CAForever , @Castelion , @HadrianInc , @NorthwoodSpace , @RadiantNuclear and of course @SpaceX. Founders of many of these will be featured in upcoming episodes or are friends of the show. David was previously the founder and CEO of OpenDNS, a cloud-delivered security service that was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for $635 million. While at @Cisco , David was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Security — a $2.4 billion annual revenue business with more than 5,000 team members — where he oversaw the company’s global cybersecurity strategy, product portfolio, and business (via A16Z). Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:57 - Defining American Dynamism 05:43 - Project Maven and Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy 07:24 - Competing with General Catalyst for Anduril 08:49 - Category creation and defining the market 10:57 - The marketing engine of “The American Dream” 15:20 - Replicating Silicon Valley 18:22 - Robot Dogs and General Catalyst 19:47 - 1776 Million: Building the American Dynamism Practice 20:59 - Why Hardware Outperforms Software Over Time 22:38 - Coupling Defense, Energy, and Space 26:28 - Investing in Public Safety 33:01 - Investment Committees are “stupid” 35:39 - Long-term partners over short-term bets 39:23 - Policy, Regulations, and navigating relationships in DC 43:11 - How regulations are slowing us down 46:54 - The Industrial Supply Chain Divergence 51:29 - Global Maritime Dominance and Expanding TAM 53:39 - Venture-Backable Bets in Critical Industrial Infrastructure 1:00:24 - Applying Anthropology: Study of People, Culture, and Political Power 1:04:08 - What Drives Innovation Across Nations? 1:11:49 - Regional Talent and State Incentives 1:15:48 - Moving from Benevolent Dictator to Minority Investor 1:20:42 - Life is Checkers, Not Chess: Agency and Knowing When to Sell 1:26:57 - OpenDNS and the Pivot to Enterprise: Letting Markets Dictate Your Revenue 1:30:13 - The High Bar for Talent: Grittiness, Grind, and Magnetic Leadership 1:33:09 - Attracting Capital via Narrative: Storytelling vs. Lying 1:35:07 - Toastmasters and Single-Topic Debates: Sharpening Communication 1:37:20 - Modern Credentials: Domain Expertise and Sourcing True Signals 1:44:23 - Government Sales 101: Enterprise Sales on Steroids 1:46:34 - Closing

On June 22, at approximately 11:50 a.m., officers responded to a shoplifting call at Target in Redmond after a man was reported removing security tags and concealing merchandise in a stolen backpack. As soon as the 911 call came in, a Drone as First Responder (DFR) was launched and arrived on scene before officers on the ground. The DFR pilot quickly located the suspect leaving the store and maintained visuals as he fled to a nearby hotel, then boarded a bus at the park-and-ride. Throughout the incident, the drone provided real-time updates that helped responding officers locate the suspect and coordinate a safe apprehension. Officers coordinated with the bus driver and safely detained the suspect. The suspect reportedly stole approximately $330 in merchandise. Watch the video to see how drone technology helped officers locate, track, and safely apprehend the suspect.