JamesT @jamest8

Part 2, and my last post about my Shawn Ryan Show episode. Last I heard, it had been edited. Then Shawn went on Diary of a CEO and described a woman whose interview he’d never release. That woman wasn’t me, unless he was lying. But I never expected it to air, and here’s why: I spent weeks prepping with Shawn’s team. I was booked to follow the money on TPUSA and the surveillance state, and naming names is what I do. I’m meticulous, and I never say anything I can’t prove. Then, right before we started filming, I was told I couldn’t name names. When I brought up who funds Flock Safety, the license plate cameras now in thousands of American towns, I was told not to say Andreessen Horowitz or Peter Thiel. You can’t follow the money without showing where the money flows. That’s when I realized this episode would never air, before we had even started. So when I got home, I did what I do. I followed the money. And, turns out Shawn Ryan is invested in companies backed by the exact people I was told not to name, plus Israel. (1) Anduril Industries: Ryan has been an investor since October 2025. Anduril started with surveillance towers and now builds drones and autonomous weapons. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led its June 2025 round, and Andreessen Horowitz co-led its $5 billion round in May 2026. Those are the two names I was told to leave out. In February 2026, Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey, made an undisclosed trip to Israel and met with Netanyahu and senior defense officials. By June, Anduril was setting up an Israel operation to sell to Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Shawn had Palmer on his show in February 2025 and invested eight months later. (2) Shield AI: Ryan has been an investor since November 2025. It builds AI-piloted drones and fighter jets. Andreessen Horowitz led its first major round and has kept investing ever since. Shawn had its co-founder on the show the same season he invested. (3) Sesh: Ryan has been an investor since August 2025. Its $40 million round was led by 8VC, the venture firm of Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir with Peter Thiel. Lonsdale was a guest on Shawn’s show on May 7, 2026, less than three months before I taped. Palantir signed a strategic partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense in 2024. And Flock Safety, the company I came to talk about, is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, which led two of its rounds, and by Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s fund. So I was booked to expose who funds the surveillance state. I was told not to name Andreessen Horowitz or Peter Thiel. And the host has money in companies backed by Andreessen Horowitz, by Thiel’s fund, and by Thiel’s Palantir co-founder, including one that is building its business in Israel. Then there’s the rest of it. Sarah Adams, his former network host, was messaging his team to keep me off (see Part 1 if you missed it). An IDF settlement contractor tagged the two of them together. Pro-Israel groups passed around her clip from his show as proof that Israel didn’t drive the war. And after his Diary of a CEO interview, accounts from the same network that spent the summer smearing me told everyone his “CIA woman” was me, citing “sources.” It wasn’t me. I never discussed a polygraph with Shawn Ryan, and it was never why I went on. So either he was talking about someone else, or somebody turned his story into a weapon against me. Honestly, I don’t want the episode to air, and I told them so right after we taped, because it was a watered-down version of my work. How it all happened was a tough lesson learned for me in this industry. Now you know what was going on behind the scenes. If this episode doesn’t air, I can assure you it’s not because I’m a fraud. It’s because I won’t water down who funds the surveillance state, and I won’t sell out to protect anyone’s investments. So there you have it.

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.

I’ve spent a few days thinking about the Tesla Roadster reveal and landed somewhere I haven’t seen much discussion. I’m neither a Tesla fanboy nor a Tesla hater. And I couldn’t care less whether what we saw technically qualifies as a flying car. Three takeaways: (1) The risk of that live demonstration going horribly wrong was real. Almost no CEO would willingly expose their company to that kind of public humiliation for a product with so little financial upside. Elon did. (2) That willingness to attempt the seemingly impossible is what makes Tesla special. It’s also arguably Elon’s greatest contribution to America. He’s helped bring back something we’ve lost. The American spirit of chasing big scary ideas that most people think are impossible. That mindset is spreading across a new generation of founders and its long term impact on America’s future could dwarf anything Tesla ever sells. I think this is deeply underappreciated. (3) Can we just acknowledge how insanely cool that moment was? We’ve reached a strange place culturally where even extraordinary feats of human ingenuity immediately become arguments about why they don’t count. Not everything needs to be a debate. Sometimes we should just be able to stand back together and marvel at what humans are capable of. I’ve been both bullish and critical of Tesla’s ambitions over the years. But watching Elon and his team push the boundaries of what’s possible reminds me why I’m glad we have him. Whether the Roadster ever makes Tesla a dollar or impacts $TSLA stock price is almost beside the point. We need more people willing to risk failure in pursuit of things the rest of us think are impossible. Because when they succeed we all win.

Elon Musk flips a vehicle upside down and everyone claps and cheers. But when I do it, suddenly I'm "recklessly endangering children" and "unfit to be a school bus driver".

@elonmusk Amazon doesn’t seem to want my money! An alternative would be awesome.

Roadster x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent, We, the American Taxpayers, have reviewed the open letter from Everett Stern @everettstern1 and the recent $1.2 billion Bank of America fine. We have a simple, cost-saving proposal. Give Everett Stern a vital position in the Department of the Treasury, a fat salary, and a proper security detail. We would much rather pay for that than continue funding the endless cycle of “willful” Bank Secrecy Act violations, cartel money, sanctions dodging, and the associated body count that the current system of shareholder-paid fines has failed to stop for over a decade. One person who has already proven he will document the flow of money to the enemies of the United States - and who has already paid a personal price for it - is a better use of our money than another round of fines that change nothing. We are happy to underwrite the salary, the detail, and whatever clearances or tools he needs. Consider it a hedge against the next multi-billion-dollar “compliance failure.” Respectfully, American Taxpayers 🇺🇸

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent, My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov. The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison. I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return. I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something. Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged. Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working. A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats. This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried. There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go. Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him. I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them. This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one. Three things would change the math overnight. Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined. End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them. Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine. I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it. Respectfully, Everett A. Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

This will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy

Had Grok Bot create a calendar for me to keep up with important sports. It knows what’s up! #hookem

Very big deal

SpaceX @SpaceX

2 weeks ago

We announced an agreement to acquire a nationwide low-band spectrum license portfolio that will pave the way for @Starlink to become a major mobile carrier in the US. With this new spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can ensure Americans have access to

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Seriously

Paul Graham @paulg

3 weeks ago

Amazon banning agents is the first opportunity I've seen since Amazon was founded for a startup to create an Amazon competitor. People will want agents to buy stuff for them. It will be one of the main use cases. And they won't want to use some Amazon-supplied agent to do it.

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@paulg Walmart is doing it as well. I’m really upset about it and would jump to a competitor if there was one. I don’t understand why they would try to stop people from giving them money. Who gives a crap if the order is being placed by a bot or a person?

Sometimes reading Ayn Rand feels like getting kicked in the chest

I find it funny that some people got hung up on Starship not having gone orbital before Flight 14 when in the grand scheme of things it was completely arbitrary in terms of performance. The 19ish second burn only added about 91 m/s of velocity (a 1.2% increase in velocity) This capability has been physically capable since Flight 6 which demonstrated a single Raptor relight in space. Heck, Flight 13’s burn was about 14 seconds, but intentionally oriented to primarily do a plane change instead of a prograde insertion burn for continued safety. Any of the relights COULD have done the orbital insertion burn, the duration was not of any special technical capability. The reason Starship didn’t go orbital until Flight 14 is probably what we should applaud them for the most… SAFETY. Their methodical approach to getting good data and going one step at a time while hucking the single most massive object ever put into space proves they weren’t just doing things haphazardly, despite the occasional narrative from the outside. While it’s easy to compare Starship to vehicles like SLS or Vulcan or New Glenn, the reality is the focus hasn’t been on orbit, it’s been all on the “downhill” side of that. Safe and targeted de-orbit, clean reentry, targeted and soft splashdown. That’s the part that has (almost) never been done before. And here I do have to add a little Space Shuttle admiration for figuring out a lot of these things on its first flight in 1981 (although it came a bit close to not being successful). Pretty amazing there was a vehicle of similar scale capable of such precise deorbit and reentry that it landed on a runway with no go-around capabilities. Crazy. But Starship is well on a path to absolutely leap-frog the Space Shuttle in terms of performance (already over double and someday 6 fold) and hopefully in terms of full and rapid reuse. I hope we see the latter part speed up even more now that orbit has been demonstrated. Exciting times ahead!!! Keep going @spacex @elonmusk

Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours. F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start. The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them. Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.

Do you know what the most destructive force in human history is? It isn’t a weapon or an army. It’s young men with nothing to live for. And today's most "acceptably" maligned cohort happens to be young white men. Every civilization that forgot how to give its young men purpose eventually met them on the battlefield. Every single empire that scorned its sons ended the same way. When men are denied purpose, mocked for their instincts, priced out of homes, shut out of marriage, and treated as expendable, they eventually stop protecting the system that rejected them. These are the men who rally to strong voices. They march behind banners promising righteous belonging. And when they move, the world moves with them. A society that mocks masculinity is a society playing with fire. Young men are not inherently violent. They are VITAL. Whether they build cathedrals or burn cities depends entirely on whether the civilization that raised them still deserves their loyalty. TLDR. The lesson is to respect your sons. Or you’ll one day meet them as Soldiers. Don't take it up with me and get angry. Take it up with history.

Marcus Aurelius wrote this over 1800 years ago: “When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love.”

"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything" You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition. One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them. A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math? "Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up. My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes. "The social disruption will be enormous!" Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach. Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already? A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up. Accelerate.

This is the future we shall bring into being