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Trump, Venezuela, and the PPF4
There’s a weird, wild piece of tech chatter blowing up everywhere right now — social feeds, comment threads, memes — all about what some people are calling a sonic weapon used by U.S. forces during the recent raid to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro . One widely circulated eyewitness account describes defenders suddenly overwhelmed by something that felt like “very intense sound waves” — causing nosebleeds, vomiting blood, and collapse before the main assault even hit. I

Rich Washburn
5 days ago3 min read


THE REVOLUTION HAS BEEN STREAMED
I don’t even know where to start other than this: something monumental is happening in Iran, and the world is only just starting to notice — not because the story wasn’t real, but because the story broke in pixels before it ever got to print . That’s how we got here. This week, newsrooms around the world reluctantly acknowledged what millions already knew from their phones: there is a massive uprising underway in Iran. Tehran, Shiraz, Mashhad — three of the largest cities in

Rich Washburn
6 days ago5 min read


ORDER 66: When the Script Flips and the Empire Trembles
The Week the World Tilted — and the Republic Remembered Itself Every era has that moment where history stops pretending to move slowly. This might be one of those weeks. We’ve seen nations topple, borders redrawn, and policies announced that could reshape global economics for decades — but among all the noise, one decision stood out for what it symbolized as much as what it did. The United States has just withdrawn from 66 international organizations — including over 30 Unit

Rich Washburn
6 days ago3 min read


Rebooting the American Dream: The Policy Earthquake That Could Rewire a Generation
Every once in a while, a policy comes along that doesn’t just tweak a system — it resets the board. What we saw this week wasn’t just an announcement about real estate. It was a tectonic recalibration of how the American economy defines fairness, ownership, and opportunity. And let’s be honest — it’s been a long time coming. The Dream That Got Outsourced For generations, owning a home was the reward for doing the right things: work hard, save up, build stability. But somewher

Rich Washburn
Jan 73 min read


The Revolution Is Being Streamed
The world just changed — and almost nobody noticed. Not because it was subtle, but because it didn’t come through the usual channels. There was no breaking news graphic, no alert from a newsroom, no solemn anchor explaining the narrative. It came through cell phones. Through lives, clips, and fragments. Through people — not press releases. The truth didn’t arrive at a newsroom this time; it arrived online. And you can feel it. Venezuela, Minnesota, Iran — three stories happe

Rich Washburn
Jan 64 min read


The Quiet Part Out Loud
Let’s just call this what it is. Everybody’s out here saying AI is going to “help people do more meaningful work” and “enhance productivity.” That’s the PR story. That’s the version for the public. But I’ve been in the rooms where the real conversations happen, and I can tell you exactly what’s being said behind the scenes. The first question out of a CEO’s mouth isn’t “how do we empower our employees with AI?” It’s “how do I get rid of my employees?” They might not say it th

Rich Washburn
Jan 55 min read


Intelligence, Infrastructure, and the Space Between
I’ve always been a hands-on kind of guy. I like to understand how things actually work —from the power that drives the servers to the AI models running on them, and the capital that fuels it all. The truth is, to build what I want to build in this space, I needed to get my hands around the entire stack . That’s why I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Eliakim Capital as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer. It’s an incredible opportunity to help shape how compute, power, a

Rich Washburn
Dec 17, 20252 min read


Emergence: The Future That Builds Itself
There are moments in human history that split time. Fire. The wheel. The printing press. The Internet. And now this. We have built an intelligence in our own image. Not metaphorically, not poetically—literally. Every neuron mapped to a node, every synapse mirrored in silicon, every word of our collective consciousness poured into the data that shaped its mind. Humanity has done something so extraordinary that we barely have language big enough to hold it. The greatest act of

Rich Washburn
Dec 17, 202510 min read


THE NEW SPACE RACE: THE AI COMPUTE FRONTIER HAS LEFT EARTH
There’s a new space race underway. Only this time, it’s not about astronauts or flags or dusty footprints on the Moon. It’s about compute. That’s right — the real battle for AI supremacy isn’t happening in data centers in Utah or server farms in Oregon. It’s heading into orbit. Solar Megawatts, Zero Cooling Costs — The Space Data Center Revolution Let’s start with the physics. AI training at scale burns through electricity like nothing humanity has ever built. Training a sing

Rich Washburn
Dec 10, 20254 min read


This Is AI’s FCC Moment: When the Pentagon Starts Planning for AGI, You Should Pay Attention
Let’s get one thing straight: the Pentagon is now preparing for AGI. Yeah. That Pentagon. Buried inside a $900 billion defense bill is a mandate to create something called the AI Futures Steering Committee — an official U.S. Department of Defense body tasked with, and I quote, “scanning the horizon for frontier AI model threats” and developing “human override protocols” to ensure that even superintelligent systems can be shut down by people. That’s not a Reddit rumor. That’s

Rich Washburn
Dec 10, 20254 min read


The Confirmation Effect
So, I just finished watching Jensen Huang sitting next to Elon Musk — both of them nodding in agreement — saying there’s no AI bubble. And, you know what? That hit exactly the way I thought it would. Because it’s not a revelation; it’s confirmation. I wrote two days ago that there is no AI bubble — only a delusion bubble — and this, right here, is the proof. Not because Jensen said it, but because he had to say it. The narrative has finally caught up to the math. This is wh

Rich Washburn
Nov 19, 20253 min read


When the Safety Net Snaps
It happened again. The one thing that’s not supposed to go down … went down. This morning, Cloudflare — the safety net of the internet, the infrastructure under the infrastructure — tripped over itself and faceplanted. If AWS is the backbone, Cloudflare is the connective tissue. It’s the silent middle layer that makes sure your site doesn’t go dark when other things do. Except today, it did. And when Cloudflare stumbles, it’s not just one site that goes offline — it’s an ent

Rich Washburn
Nov 18, 20254 min read


Warren Buffett Just Bet on Google — And That’s Bigger Than It Looks
When Berkshire Hathaway makes a move, markets don’t just react—they pause. Because when Warren Buffett, the high priest of long-term value, decides to buy something, it’s usually not a guess. It’s a signal. This week, that signal came in the form of a $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The buy makes Alphabet one of Berkshire’s top ten holdings, right alongside American Express, Coca-Cola, and of course, the ever-beloved Apple. And that, in itself, is al

Rich Washburn
Nov 16, 20254 min read


We’re All Looking at the Same Map: Reflections on Mary Meeker’s AI Trends
Every era of technology has its cartographers. People who climb high enough above the noise to see the shape of what’s coming, and then translate it into something the rest of us can navigate. For decades, Mary Meeker has been one of those people. Her Internet Trends reports shaped the early web, the mobile wave, and the first real data-driven understanding of our digital lives. And her new deep-dive into AI marks another one of those moments where her view from altitude cl

Rich Washburn
Nov 14, 20254 min read


Yann LeCun’s Quiet Power Move
Why the Godfather of Deep Learning Might Be Plotting the Next AI Revolution — And Why It Matters More Than You Think You know those moments where something big is happening, but it doesn’t come with fireworks or a keynote stage? It’s just... quiet. Subtle. But seismic? This might be one of those moments. Word’s coming out — mostly whispered, not shouted — that Yann LeCun , Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, is preparing to exit the company and start his own research lab or startup.

Rich Washburn
Nov 12, 20254 min read


The Most Dangerous Person in the Room Now Runs on Operational Power
It used to be the one with the title. The corner office. The authority. Not anymore. Today, the most dangerous person in any room isn’t chasing applause, approval, or perception. They’re the one sitting quietly in the back — calm, confident, and completely underestimated — because they’re running a system in their head no one else can see. That’s operational power — and it’s rewriting everything you think you know about hierarchy, influence, and control. The Old Game: Power T

Rich Washburn
Nov 12, 20254 min read


How Do You Say “Sputnik” in Chinese?
Quantum Just Went Rack-Mountable — And Everything Just Changed Let’s not bury the lead. China just launched a 100-qubit, room-temperature quantum computer — and you can rack it in your data center. Not a prototype. Not a physics experiment. An actual product. Shipping now. Called Hanyuan-1 . Three server racks. Neutral-atom architecture. Plug and play. Let me translate that into reality: This week, quantum computing went from science fiction to IT procurement. From Lab Equip

Rich Washburn
Nov 10, 20254 min read


AI: The Everyman’s Revolution — The End of Institutional Authority
You’ve probably heard me say this before: the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as designed. Hospitals, banks, insurance companies, government agencies — all of them have operated for decades on a simple, ugly truth: the less you understand, the more they can charge you. That’s not cynicism. That’s architecture. It’s called institutional information asymmetry — and it’s the invisible engine behind every “policy,” “procedure,” and “unavoidable fee” you’ve ever been hi

Rich Washburn
Nov 9, 20254 min read


PSA: Meta Knows It’s Profiting from Scamming You — and They're Okay With That
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Meta has been knowingly profiting from scam ads on its platforms, and new internal documents show just how deep the rabbit hole goes. According to a bombshell Reuters investigation , Meta (yes, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) internally projected that 10% of its 2024 revenue — roughly $16 billion — would come from ads promoting scams, fraud, or banned products. Not suspected scams. Not accidental ones. These are known bad acto

Rich Washburn
Nov 7, 20253 min read


The Great Scrape: How Reddit vs. Perplexity Exposed the Broken Economics of the AI Era
The internet just caught AI in the act — but the crime scene looks more like a mirror. Reddit set a “honey pot” — a fake post visible only to Google’s crawler. When Perplexity’s AI surfaced that invisible post, it confirmed what many suspected: Perplexity wasn’t just browsing the open web; it was pulling from Google’s cached Reddit content via proxy networks like OxyLabs, WMProxy, and SerpAPI. In plain English: Reddit built a locked vault, Google indexed the vault, and Perpl

Rich Washburn
Nov 6, 20253 min read
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