Cormac Leech

Elon Musk's first wife once described what it's like to watch him fail. She said he doesn't react the way normal people react. When a rocket explodes, most people in the room go silent. Some cry. Some start calculating the financial damage. Musk pulls out his phone and starts making calls. Not emotional calls. Engineering calls. "What failed. When can we fix it. When's the next launch." His voice doesn't change. His face doesn't change. The rocket that just cost $60 million is already in the past. The next one is all that exists. She said it was the most unsettling thing she'd ever witnessed. Not because he was cold. Because he genuinely wasn't affected. The failure didn't register as failure. It registered as data. An experiment that produced results. Results that inform the next experiment. This is why he wins. Not because he doesn't fail. He fails more spectacularly than anyone in history. He wins because failure occupies zero psychological space. It enters as data and exits as action. Most people lose not because they fail but because they spend weeks processing the failure before acting again. Musk spends zero seconds. The gap between failure and next attempt is a phone call. - @multiplanet1

In Brazil, prisoners can reduce their sentences through a remarkable rehabilitation program called Remissão pela Leitura (Remission by Reading). Under the initiative, inmates can shorten their prison term by 4 days for every book they read and write a report about, with a maximum of 12 books per year — allowing them to reduce their sentence by up to 48 days annually. Launched in 2012 as part of Brazil’s Criminal Enforcement Act, the program focuses on carefully selected works of literature, philosophy, science, and classics. Prisoners must submit written reports that are rigorously evaluated to confirm they have genuinely understood and engaged with the material. Beyond simply easing prison overcrowding, the program aims to foster literacy, critical thinking, and personal development. By encouraging constructive use of their time, Brazil is promoting meaningful rehabilitation and better preparing inmates for successful reintegration into society.

If a lobby can buy an election, it's not a democracy, period. And if an evil lobby can buy an election, it's far worse than any form of autocracy. Let that sink in.

Be Thomas Massie Grow up in dirt poor Appalachia Go to MIT Sell your first company Retire in your home town and build a house with your own hands hewn from locally harvested materials Get begged by locals to help them with government The solitary America Only Congressman

@aakashgupta great talk

Warren Buffett told a class of MBA students at Georgia in 2001 that character is not ordained. He gave them an exercise: pick the person in the room you'd most want to buy 10% of for the rest of their life. Write down every habit that made you pick them. Then ask, is there anything on that list I couldn't do myself? The answer is there won't be. Patience, candor, finishing what you start, giving credit you didn't take. None of it requires talent. All of it requires daily decisions. Then do the inverse. Pick the person you'd sell short. Write down every quality you'd bet against. Look for those traits in yourself. Egotism, claiming credit you didn't earn, cutting corners. Buffett's line: that is not ordained. Drop them. The exercise works because it forces market pricing on traits people usually treat as abstract. You don't say "I admire reliability." You say "I would pay money to own a share of this person because of their reliability." That shift closes the gap between what people say they value and what they're willing to pay for. Ben Graham invented the drill. The man who taught Buffett value investing ran it on himself as a young man, looked around, asked who he admired, asked why, then engineered himself into someone who behaved that way. Graham taught Buffett that price and value diverge in markets. The same gap exists in people. There's the person you are and the person you'd pay for. The exercise is the bridge. Berkshire hires for three things: intelligence, energy, integrity. Without the third, the first two will kill you. Smart and energetic with no integrity is the most dangerous combination on a team. Buffett's framing: if you're hiring someone with no integrity, you actively want them lazy and dumb. Integrity is the only one of the three that's a habit pattern. Intelligence mostly stops compounding in your 20s. Energy is biology. Integrity compounds across 30 years of small decisions about whether to keep your word. Buffett quoted a line in that lecture: the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they're too heavy to be broken. The exercise has a window. After 30, you're paying compound interest on what you wired in by 25. Buffett was 70 when he gave the lecture. He'd been running the exercise on himself since his 20s. Berkshire stock is just a share of the person he built.

NEW: Palantir’s revolving door. A new investigation by @thenerve_news has found Palantir has recruited more than 30 senior officials from UK govt, a strategy transparency experts say poses an ‘acute risk’ of corruption. 1/ Link ⬇️

As an astrophysicist, I was convinced of a Creator by the ingenuity of the observable universe; but I have to admit that biology is even more convincing. The incredible machinery of a living cell is far more complex than the structure of an entire galaxy of stars.

Potentially the most gangster interview response in the world of literature

Small objects can show that gravity is real. The Cavendish experiment proved that even tiny masses pull on each other, showing gravity works everywhere, not just between planets.

@WhyNotVeganism horrible

Absolutely fascinating:

@SamaHoole Great story - good to see the goats and the population can co-exist. I bet it's good for tourism.

The Great Orme is a limestone headland on the North Wales coast. It has a herd of approximately 200 feral Kashmir goats. They were given to Queen Victoria in 1837 by the Shah of Persia. She kept them at Windsor. At some point in the Victorian era they were moved to the Great Orme. They have lived there, unmanaged, entirely feral, for approximately 180 years. They are technically still the property of the Crown. The Crown does not appear to be particularly exercising this ownership. The goats, for their part, have no opinion on the constitutional question. They have opinions on gorse, on limestone scrub, on the timing of the tourist season, and on the structural integrity of garden fences in Llandudno. Because several times a year: usually when the weather on the headland becomes unacceptable even by Kashmir goat standards, they come down. Into the town. They eat the hedges. They occupy the gardens. They stand in the road. They have been photographed in chip shops, bus shelters, and outside estate agents with the calm assurance of animals that know they were here before the terrace housing and will probably be here after it. Llandudno has 20,000 residents and 200 goats and it is not always clear who is more inconvenienced by the arrangement. The goats have never once asked permission. They were here first. Technically the Queen gave them the place.

@PieterseMarc horrible

The scalding area of a hell house 👺 In high speed slaughterhouses it happens that pigs are still alive and conscious when they end up in the 70°C hot water being nearly boiled alive #StopYourKillings #LiveVegan don’t be part of this ✌️

THIS IS HUGE!!! Hope more nations folow suit.

@itsme_urstruly beautiful

Imagine waking up one morning, having a stretch, opening your bedroom curtains and there in your window plant box are three sleeping squirrels.

@herbivore_club horrible

This is what the dairy industry does to new mothers 🤬

Kevin Spacey’s speech at the Oxford Union Society on December 1, 2025, addressing his situation. Worth watching all the way to the end.

OK M&S just dropped something actually genius: their new 'Only… Ingredients' range 😍 Everyday staples like baked beans, sausages, burgers, ketchup, yoghurts, cereals... made with 3–8 recognisable ingredients MAX. No weird additives, no artificial colours, no preservatives, no ultra-processed nonsense. Just proper food, back to basics. 👏🏻

Did you know that in Romania, trucks loaded with beehives are rented out to flower growers? These massive rigs become mobile "bee hotels," buzzing with thousands of bees that pollinate fields of flowers and crops.