One person I’d like to have a drink with: Mark Carney . The OG. Skilled public servant. 🇬🇧 🇨🇦 In SV, we sometimes forget the critical role of ppl like Carney. Aside from his long list of accomplishments, he had this to say:

Started a long thread 5 years ago predicting why the Arctic was a new operational theater. President of🇫🇮 and PM of 🇳🇴 Op-Eds. Greenland. All would have happened independent of this American administration. Most don’t realize this is the “change” in climate change

Ukraine just absolutely hammered the Moscow region overnight. They hit multiple strategically important locations and tested new long-range weapons, including the Flamingo cruise missile.

I’ve been in Ukraine the last two weeks and didn’t have access to my X account Learned a ton Massive respect to the Ukrainian people, who are deeply misunderstood by many in the West Will write something up in a week or so

Late as usual, but still relevant: 25 years ago, 9/11 led NATO to invoke Article 5 for the first time in its history. Afghanistan would become NATO’s longest mission. Over the years, in one strand of my research, we studied how coalition warfare works... or didnt! 1/N

Either you die a system of record or you live long enough to become a domain-specific harness

Not sure I’ve ever seen an investor list this long

SECRETARY RUBIO: There was this fantasy, really, that the whole world would become a free enterprise democracy, and that everyone would look like us. That ran into reality.

This blew up and I got like 200 DMs from people who are interested in Corp Dev roles, and a lot of the questions were very similar so thinking I should share here

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

1/ The speed and conviction of most American automotive corporations (unfortunately) do not match those in China. We’re seeing a multi-decade vision gradually unfold. And it’s led by someone we should all get familiar with: Thread...