Left everything behind. Lived on the ground in Latin America. Built stablecoin rails for markets no one else touches. That's Arnold Lee (@0xdirichlet) of @sphere_labs. Full ep with @afkehaya on @theindexshow → youtu.be/2q65AQ5jcmI

Last November, Valar Atomics became the first startup to achieve criticality in our Nova Core. Now, we're using the experience we gained to take the next big leap: hot criticality and power operations in Ward250 by July 4th of this year. Here's why it matters:

We Were Never His Community. We Were His Fundraise. | Full Long Story Let's start with something most people get wrong. @armaniferrante didn't build Mad Lads alone. @tristan co-founded Coral with him, co-founded Backpack with him, and was the person who spent over a year curating the community before the mint even happened. The allowlist process, the culture, the "WAO — We Are One" identity — that was Tristan's work. Him and @monkdoesnt. They made Mad Lads a name that commanded genuine respect across the entire Solana ecosystem. There's something worth noting. FTX collapsed in November 2022. The Mad Lads mint happened in April 2023, months later, as Solana was still trying to find its footing. Looking back, that mint wasn't just a community launch. It was a lifeline. A way to rebuild and fund the exchange Armani actually wanted to build all along. We were the funding round. We just didn't know it at the time. After Tristan and Monkey left, everything that came after is Armani's legacy alone. The community started hollowing out slowly. The Mad Lads Twitter went quiet. Discord went cold. New Backpack employees had zero respect for Lads holders, some distanced themselves publicly, some talked openly about not caring. But Armani kept saying the right things. Community matters. Loyalty matters. So we stayed. Then the Backpack Exchange announcement dropped and we lost our minds, in the best way. We bought more Lads immediately. At that point Mad Lads was genuinely bigger than Backpack as a brand. The name carried more weight, more trust, more recognition. We thought: this is it. We are the face of something that could become the next Binance. Our patience is about to pay off. Then came the Seasons. Trading points, volume based rewards, the promise of a $BP airdrop. Mad Lads holders are not traders, we never were. We are believers, holders, community people. But we didn't want to be left behind. So we tried. We generated volume. Lost real money. And told ourselves: it's fine, TGE is coming, he won't forget us. Season 2. Season 3. Still no utility for Lads. Still no mention of Lads. The only thing we ever received was a fee reduction on the exchange, a benefit built for traders, given to a community of people who aren't traders. By that point, I don't think they thought about us much at all. The signals were everywhere. Mad Lads Twitter stopped posting. Armani became active on Backpack Discord and went silent on Lads Discord. His language shifted from "our community" to "Mad Lads are not our product." When KOLs posted hit pieces on Backpack, who was in the replies defending him every single time? Lads holders. Always. Someone slid into my DMs, an ex-Backpack employee. Said simply: "Lads will not get an airdrop." I dismissed it. We all did. We thought Armani was filtering out farmers. The real ones would be taken care of. He values loyalty, right? We chose to believe that. When people close to the team started posting about "all the airdrops Lads already received," we read between the lines. The message underneath was obvious: you already ate, stop asking. But we held on. When Armani posted "NFTs might be dead but Lads are just getting started" we took it as confirmation. He still sees us. He didn't. Then the snapshot. The tokenomics. The number that made the whole community go silent. One percent. Not for bots. Not for farmers. For the people who had been there from the beginning. Who defended him publicly. Who absorbed trading losses to generate volume for his exchange. One percent for the backbone. The response when the community asked why? Simple. Cold. You already ate. Then came yesterday, one day after the TGE. As community managers have now confirmed, newly traded Mad Lads will no longer receive VIP status on Backpack. If you held before, you are grandfathered in. But anyone buying today gets nothing. No utility. No benefit. No connection to the exchange we spent years supporting. He waited until after the airdrop to quietly close the door. No announcement. No explanation. Just policy. That is not an oversight. That is housekeeping. The community served its purpose, the token launched, and the last remaining thread was cut the very next day. Here is what I believe now. Armani got lucky. He got lucky that Tristan was brilliant at building community culture from the ground up. He inherited loyalty that most founders spend years trying to manufacture. And instead of stewarding it, he extracted it. Quietly, gradually, until there was nothing left to take. Mad Lads was never the goal. Backpack was always the goal. Mad Lads was the vehicle that got him there. Once it served its purpose, it got parked. And the tragic part? It didn't even work. The TGE underperformed. The trader community is fractured. Chinese holders are rising up over witch-hunt accusations. He distanced himself from the community that loved him unconditionally and couldn't hold the one he replaced us with. Mad Lads gave Armani everything. Capital, credibility, cover, and community. We were there when nobody else was. We made Backpack look legitimate before Backpack had earned that on its own. WAO. We Are One. We meant it. He never did.

Takes me back to December 2022 when we were first pitching a stablecoin payments company on @solana (@sphere_labs) and very serious people kept asking: Why the hell would you use Solana? And who tf outside of tiny emerging markets would want to use stablecoins for payments? 😭

Palantir CEO Alex Karp told you the most important thing about the Pentagon vs. Anthropic standoff. And nobody is connecting the dots. Watch and save this clip, then read this thread. Karp said something most tech CEOs would never say out loud: "A small island in Silicon Valley that would love to decide what you eat, how you eat, and monetize all your data should not also decide who lives in your country and under what conditions." He's talking about his own industry. And his argument is simple. There are elections, there are rules. There is a transfer of power from one president to another. Silicon Valley does not get to override that. "The view of Silicon Valley that we get to decide should not be the way these things are decided." This cost him everything. His house was protested for month, Palantir's offices were protested. Employees pushed back internally and some walked out. He didn't change course. Then the interviewer asked if he supports the Trump administration's approach. His answer might surprise you. "I've been a card-carrying progressive my whole life. My family is progressive. I have a degree in what amounts to progressive thought." He said he's never stopped being critical of this administration. He's not planning to vote for it. But then he said the thing that changes the entire Anthropic debate. "The core issue is: who decides?" Not whether the policy is right and not whether you agree with the mission. Who decides. He made it personal. "It's commonly known that our software is used in operational context at war." "Do you really think the warfighter is going to trust a software company that pulls the plug because something becomes controversial?" Let that sit for a second. "Currently, when you're a warfighter, your life depends on your software." "They will never trust you if you pull the plug just because you're unpopular." This is a man whose software powers classified military operations across the West. He's describing what happens when trust breaks. Now apply that to what's happening right now. Anthropic built Claude, the only AI running on the Pentagon's classified networks. It was used in the operation that captured Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro in January. The Pentagon loves it and it works. But Anthropic has two red lines: No mass surveillance of Americans and no autonomous weapons without a human pulling the trigger. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic a deadline: 5:01 PM Friday. Drop the red lines or face the Defense Production Act. Anthropic's CEO said no. "We cannot in good conscience accede to their request." But here's where it gets complicated. Anthropic isn't refusing to work with the military, Claude already does. It's refusing two specific things. Two. But here's the problem, congress hasn't passed a single law governing military AI. There are no elections on this and no rules. The Pentagon is using contract language and Cold War era emergency powers to decide the future of AI in warfare. That's not democracy either. Two private parties are fighting over rules that elected officials should have written years ago. The deadline is today. Friday. 5:01 PM Eastern. If the government forces these guardrails off, no AI safety commitment ever means anything again. If Anthropic wins, tech CEOs become the gatekeepers of American defense. Either way, the system is broken.

Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

Elon Musk just identified the next crisis in AI. It’s not a shortage. It’s an unusable surplus. Musk: “By the end of this year, chip production will outpace the ability to turn chips on.” For three years the world was starved for silicon. Every lab, every government, every company racing to secure the chips that determine who wins the AI era. That bottleneck is ending. A new one is replacing it. Musk: “The chips are going to be piling up and not be able to be turned on.” Billions of dollars of the most advanced AI hardware ever built. Sitting dark. Not because the chips don’t work. Because there isn’t enough electricity to run them. You can’t print a power plant the way you print a chip. The fabrication plants scaled. The grid didn’t. And now the most valuable hardware in history is about to hit a wall that no amount of capital can instantly solve. Compute is about to become abundant. Electricity is about to become the most valuable commodity on earth. Three years obsessing over silicon yields. Physics doesn’t care about your chip architecture if your data center can’t pull enough megawatts. The war isn’t about who can manufacture the most silicon anymore. It’s about who has the raw power to plug it in. Whoever solves energy first doesn’t just win. They own the infrastructure everyone else needs to compete. The losers stack useless chips in warehouses waiting for power that never arrives. We built a trillion dollar engine and forgot the fuel. That’s the AI race right now.

universities are about to realize that they had been selling the wrong product for the 150 years. they thought they sold knowledge, then information became free. they pivoted to selling credentials but now credentials are just proxies. in the post-ai era the universities who survive will realize they were always selling 3 things: network, status signaling, and a 4 years of protected time to become an adult.

A Final Message From Scott Adams