The Start Society

@yoursimmo11 I’ve been using fluoride toothpaste since I was a kid. I’ve lived the last 15 years in a place that fluoridates its water. And I’ve got no thyroid problems at all. I am, however, retarded. Highly retarded.

I used Colgate, a fluoride-based toothpaste, twice a day, every day since I was a child. Little did I realize that Fluoride competes with iodine at thyroid receptor sites. Same receptors and direct competition. Your thyroid needs iodine to produce T3 and T4. Fluoride blocks the door. You're delivering a thyroid-suppressing chemical through the most absorbent tissue in your body. Twice daily. And your dentist told you it was essential. Hydroxyapatite toothpaste remineralizes teeth without touching your endocrine system. Been around for decades. Japan uses it as standard.

Just wrapped The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiski. If you’re a founder, builder, creator, or anyone building the future, this book hits hard. Power, tech, belief systems, how they collide and where the West goes next. Highly recommend.

Every major platform in history has run the same play. You’re about to watch it happen again. Jason Calacanis just went on record. He wants it clipped. He wants it shared. Calacanis: “If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI.” This isn’t pessimism. It’s pattern recognition. And the pattern has a 40 year track record. Open. Invite. Reward. Study. Absorb. Eliminate. Microsoft let developers build Lotus 1-2-3. Then built Excel. Let them build WordPerfect. Then built Word. Flew them to conferences. Handed out awards. Studied everything. Then eliminated them. Zuckerberg ran the exact same play at Facebook. Zynga built billions in value on their platform. Then Zuckerberg shifted them without blinking. Calacanis: “Sam Altman comes from the Zuckerberg school of business. Give people access to your tools, study them, and like the Borg, steal every innovation they have.” This is how platforms grow. They don’t innovate at the edges. They let the ecosystem do it for them. Startups take the risk. Startups find the market. Startups prove the concept. Then the platform ships it natively and calls it a feature. Altman isn’t selling you compute. He’s selling you a front row seat to your own disruption. Calacanis: “This is a warning for anybody dumb enough to use Sam Altman’s OpenAI API. They are studying you.” OpenAI has the legal right to study how you use their API. You agreed to it. It’s in the terms. Every gap you find, you’re finding it for them first. Every dollar you make signals exactly where he should build next. We are at the exact same moment in AI that we were in the early internet. Developers flooded onto platforms. Built incredible things. Created real value. And handed the leverage to whoever owned the infrastructure beneath them. The AI gold rush feels different because the tools are more powerful. It isn’t different. You are not a founder. You are unpaid R&D. The builders who win the next decade won’t be the ones who used the best tools. They’ll be the ones who owned something the tools couldn’t absorb. Proprietary data. Distribution. A brand. A moat. History doesn’t warn you before it repeats. It just repeats. Thousands of developers are walking straight into this right now convinced they’re different. They’re not. Do not build your business on OpenAI. Build something he has to acquire or destroy.

A blog post just wiped $30 billion off IBM in a single afternoon. Not a product launch. Not an earnings miss. Not a competitor undercutting on price. A five-minute blog post explaining that Claude can read COBOL. IBM dropped 13%. Worst single-day loss since October 2000. Twenty-five years of stock resilience ended by one AI company publishing a capability update. Here’s what happened: 95% of ATM transactions in America run on COBOL. Hundreds of billions of lines power banking, airlines, and government systems. The developers who built them retired decades ago. The knowledge left with them. Finding engineers who can even read COBOL gets harder every quarter. IBM’s moat was never the technology. It was the fact that nobody else could understand it. Entire consulting empires existed because the code was too old, too tangled, and too critical to touch. Companies paid IBM billions because the alternative was catastrophic system failure. Then Anthropic published a blog post saying Claude Code can map dependencies across thousands of lines of COBOL, document workflows, identify migration risks, and translate legacy logic into modern languages. Modernization in quarters instead of years. The market heard: the priesthood just lost its monopoly on the sacred language. And this isn’t the first time. Last week Anthropic announced Claude Code Security for vulnerability scanning. CrowdStrike dropped. Okta dropped. Cloudflare dropped. One company is serially destroying legacy moats with blog posts. Now here’s where it gets surreal. This same company, on the same day, also published evidence that three Chinese AI labs ran 24,000 fake accounts and 16 million exchanges to steal Claude’s capabilities. DeepSeek used it to build censorship tools. MiniMax pivoted within 24 hours when a new model dropped, redirecting half its traffic to steal the latest version. And yesterday, the Pentagon summoned this same company’s CEO for what officials called a “sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting,” threatening to blacklist them like Huawei for refusing to let the military use Claude without safety restrictions. Three stories. One company. Twenty-four hours. The company destroying legacy moats faster than the market can reprice them is simultaneously being threatened by its own government and looted by foreign competitors. Anthropic is valued at $380 billion. Its CEO says a 12-month delay in AI would make him bankrupt. The Pentagon wants to designate it a supply chain risk. Chinese labs are running industrial espionage against it. And it just proved it can vaporize $30 billion in market cap with a Monday morning blog post. Whatever you think about AI disruption, IBM’s stock just settled the argument. Full institutional analysis on my Substack. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

🚨BREAKING: JPMorgan CEO Says “BLOCKCHAIN IS BETTER THAN CURRENT BANKING SYSTEM” — Reveals Bank Moved $16 TRILLION in a Day 🤯🔥 Speaking on @FoxBusiness, @JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon signaled that the bank is shifting from traditional banking rails to blockchain infrastructure. 👀 “Everything is MOVING OUT of the current banking system.” 😳🔥 Dimon revealed that @JPMorgan recently processed $16 TRILLION in a single day BY BLOCKCHAIN. “We moved $16 trillion the other day. In one day.” 🤯 @JPMorgan CEO REVEALED that bank is moving ALL-IN into tokenization — bringing real-world assets, deposits, and financial instruments FULLY ON-CHAIN. 👀📈 “If we can use things like that to do something better, faster, cheaper… we’re going to.” 🚀

Greece has announced that it will close 60 mosques across the country and deport those who continue to illegally build Islamic religious spaces. Greece is fighting against the Islamization of Europe. Do you support it? 🇬🇷

🚨 IT’S OFFICIAL! HUGE WIN FOR FREE SPEECH! Right-wing President of Poland Karol Nawrocki just VETOED the EU’s tyrannical Digital Services Act push that draconian censorship bill designed to silence dissent and control what you can say online. Nawrocki nailed it: “The state is supposed to GUARANTEE freedom, not RESTRICT it!” Poland standing tall against Brussels’ Big Brother nonsense. This is what real leadership looks like. No bowing to globalist overlords. Poland remains a STRONG ally of the USA and a fighter for liberty.

@chamath Or just move AI DCs to space and get the AI to make the AI more efficient and discover better forms of energy.

One very fast way to catch up to China on this chart is to create a massive tax equity fund that pays for every US homeowner to have their own solar + storage. 1. We would add back 2-3 TWh to the grid and the chart below would quickly look like the US and China were neck and neck. 2. Homeowners no longer have electricity bills. 3. The companies that pay into the tax equity fund are simply paying in a dollar they would otherwise pay in taxes - making it costless for them. The time has come for this top-down moonshot on domestic energy.

18 months ago, I started 8090 with the goal of replacing/rewriting all the legacy software in the world with modern, useful alternatives. We are making so much progress with many Enterprise customers that starting tomorrow, we will release our “Software Factory” into the wild so anyone can try it. Software Factory is exactly what it sounds like: (1) A collaborative, governed modular system that allows humans, agents and AI to work together to build highly reliable, well documented, zero-drift code for enterprises. (2) Whenever code changes, your PRDs and Eng Plans automatically get synched. (3) You can dump entire code bases into it so you can document/map exactly what that legacy code base does so you can more easily maintain and migrate it. (4) You can build “Assembly Lines” with our Software Factory to memorize and automate specific patterns so you can repeat them endlessly with increasing accuracy. All of this happens in a system that absorbs tribal knowledge and documents everything so that systems don’t take setbacks as people, strategy and roles change. One company is using Software Factory to create an Assembly Line that will deprecate a $15M/yr SaaS vendor for their own solution at a fraction of the cost. This is the future of Enterprise Software. Say good bye to long term lock-in, multi year migration projects, expensive maintenance budgets and more. It starts tomorrow!

BREAKING: Gold extends gains to a record $4,850/oz, now up +$260 in 48 hours. We are all witnessing history right now.

🚨 BREAKING: SATOSHI-ERA WHALE JUST SOLD ALL HIS BITCOIN AFTER 12 YEARS OF HOLDING HE JUST DUMPED OVER 10,000 $BTC WORTH $1.2 BILLION LOOKS LIKE A HUGE DUMP IS COMING...

If I look at the last 15 years of knowing people in startups, and then seeing who became successful and who didn't, I'm starting to see some general patterns The people I know who became successful (and very rich) regularly asked for help and feedback, and then applied that feedback very quickly (think minutes) and shipped fast while maintaining their own vision The people who didn't become successful are the ones who worked on stuff for months/years without asking for help or feedback, or when they did took weeks/months to apply it So I think the feedback -> implement loop and speed of it is possibly very important

There’s a fundamental problem with global wealth creation: - Capital markets overwhelming benefit the rich - Working income growth is massively outpaced by capital income - Most people are unable to or priced out from participating in the best financial markets Everyone should have the same opportunities. It shouldn’t be determined by where you're from or how much money you have. The solution: tokenization, to unlock truly global markets for everyone.

Globalization has FAILED. Secretary Lutnick at the World Economic Forum: “The Trump Administration and I are here to make a very clear point—globalization has failed the West and the United States of America. It’s a failed policy… and it has left America behind.” America is done exporting jobs and offshoring its future. We will no longer give in to globalization.

1/ Today @stripepress publishes one of my favorite books to date: Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by @stewartbrand, about the unglamorous yet civilizationally important work of maintenance and repair.  press.stripe.com/maintenance-pa…

visits to the @supabase troubleshooting guides last week: Humans = 10,370 Bots = 28,720

🚨 BREAKING: Gusto just added stablecoin payouts for international contractors via ZeroHash - 400,000+ SMBs. - Tens of billions in annual payroll. - Now gets Settlement in minutes, not days. Stablecoins as an instant payouts feature for international contracts is becoming table stakes. And that's a big market. --- This is labor market math, not crypto hype. Full-time independent contractors doubled in 4 years. 13.6M in 2020 → 27.7M in 2024. 11% of US small businesses now employ international contractors. Traditional cross-border payroll takes 3-7 days. That's a week of "payment in transit" while your contractor in Argentina waits to pay rent. --- Zerohash powers this integration. Same infrastructure behind Stripe's stablecoin flows, BlackRock's tokenized fund rails, and Morgan Stanley's upcoming E-Trade crypto trading. Mastercard is reportedly circling them at $1.5-2B. --- Tempo's docs nail why this matters for payroll: "Businesses must either rely on slow, expensive, unpredictable cross-border transfers to pay employees directly, or first move liquidity to local subsidiaries to access domestic payment rails. Each domestic rail comes with its own rules, banking holidays, cutoff times, formats, and fees." That's the patchwork stablecoins replace. One ledger. Sub-cent fees. Seconds to settle. --- Gusto serves mainstream small business America. When your accountant's payroll software starts settling on blockchain rails, the infrastructure debate is over. Stablecoins aren't replacing payroll. They're replacing the 3-7 day settlement window that banks built for a workforce that no longer exists. --- #Fintech #Stablecoins #Payments #FutureOfWork #GigEconomy

🇺🇸 ELON JUST STRIPPED X DOWN TO RUST AND PYTHON, DITCHED THE TECH JUNK X is now officially running only on Rust and Python after a full rewrite. Before this, the app was built on a bloated mix of Scala, Java, C++, and more; basically a Frankenstein of code from years of patchwork. Elon cleaned house so the team can move faster, break less, and actually ship updates without tripping over old junk. This is how you future-proof a platform: quiet move, big impact. Source: @xDaily, @elonmusk, @x

We know the algorithm is dumb and needs massive improvements, but at least you can see us struggle to make it better in real-time and with transparency. No other social media companies do this.