Ryan Orbuch

A weird property of the frontier: finding the edge forces a realization that there’s very few people there, the others who’ve found it are tightly clustered and therefore quite happy to see you, and you all can’t help but ask “where is everybody?” in escalating confusion

@davidu Lol, David. Was the $70m seed round into the tokenized carbon credits startup founded by the geniuses behind WeWork out of your video games fund or part of the crypto casino strategy? techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/flo…

Remarkable thing about Paul Ehrlich is not just how wrong he was but that we was totally unphased and unchastened by his wrongness, just a total epistemic disaster zone — a pattern of conduct that is unfortunately shared by many prominent people from different schools of thought.

We waste too much time worrying about short term hype. Hyper-fixating on the news cycle isn’t going to fix the biggest problems facing society in the coming decades. The world needs more long term thinking. So we are launching Forecast 2050: a series of conversations with the thinkers, founders, and investors shaping the next 25 years. Thank you to @tylercowen, Scott Aaronson, @noor_siddiqui_, @soundboy, @matthewclifford, @devonzuegel, @CJHandmer, @MalcolmRifkind, Yanai Yedvab, @viswacolluru, @pablolubroth, and @PhilipJohnston for joining us. First episode with Tyler drops tomorrow. Stay tuned.

It's actually 1.1 million now 🤭 But in all seriousness, I am so proud of the @stripepress team and our incredible stable of authors. It’s easy to be fatalistic about the state of publishing, but there *is* an audience for books—even ones that are challenging and technical.

New blog post: There should be ‘general managers’ for more of the world’s important problems There’s a surprisingly big category of problems that are ‘orphaned.’ By ‘orphaned’ I mean: you can’t point to a specific person or organization who thinks it’s their responsibility to deliver the outcome in its entirety. Lots of people talk about the problem, and often many work on slices of it. But if you asked: ‘is there a hyper-competent person waking up every day feeling accountable for making sure this gets solved?’—the answer is very often, ‘no.’ These problems exist across domains and at a variety of ‘altitudes.’ Indeed, some are perhaps better described as ‘things we want to be true’ rather than ‘problems.’ In any event, a few examples that have been on my mind recently: (1) Can we prevent infection from all respiratory pathogens (including the common cold)? (2) Can we make every new building in SF both serve its function and be beautiful? (3) Can we permanently fix the American west’s water problem? (4) Can we halve X risk? (5) Can we eliminate single-use plastic globally without making convenience trade-offs? (6) Can we make childcare costs so low that they’re a non-factor in deciding whether to have kids? In my opinion, there should be ‘general managers’—GMs—for problems like these. These are founder-types who feel personally responsible for delivering a specific outcome (vs field-building generally); hyper-competent leaders who will pull whatever levers necessary to achieve the defined outcome. Most companies wouldn’t let an important initiative go unmanned or without a ‘directly responsible individual’ — why are we OK not having GMs for even more wide-reaching problems? (Link to full post in reply)

This ended up being my favorite interview by a wide margin. Thanks for the great conversation @ti_morse One step closer to finally explaining we're an airplane company that just so happens to have invented a new kind of engine (and how we’re doing it)

THE OCEAN IS CALLING Since coming out of stealth one year ago, we haven’t shared many updates about @UlyssesInc_. Our Communications & Public Relations Division profoundly apologizes for this. But today, we break our silence and make five major announcements: - MAKO: We are sharing details on Mako, our first autonomous underwater vehicle, the “Model T for the ocean”. - LEVIATHAN: We are announcing Leviathan, our first autonomous surface vehicle, a mothership for other drones and maritime domain awareness platform. - MAJOR WINS: We are announcing our major accomplishments in 2025 - new customers, lots of missions, and manufacturing and plans for 2026 and beyond. - NEW WEBSITE & BRAND: We are launching a new website and an updated brand. - RODEO: A gift for our friends in San Francisco. (Read to the end.) Please watch this video below & read on for more details.

I’m hiring for two major roles on my team at Ulysses. There has not been a better time to join Ulysses. In the last few months, revenue & pipeline have gone vertical, and we've made significant technological breakthroughs that will forever change how subsea work is done. It's been the most successful period in our company's history, and we are just getting started. We will be announcing some of these breakthroughs soon. Stay tuned. The jobs: 1. GM, Commercial: Your job is to stand up and lead our commercial business unit. Take our early contracts and scale them to build a machine that reshapes how critical telecoms and energy infrastructure is inspected and repaired. 2. Director of Marketing and Brand. Your job is to make Ulysses impossible to ignore. World-build. Make Ulysses "the Ocean Company". Take the air out of the room. High taste. No slop. Tell the world what Ulysses does. Quit your boring desk job. The ocean is calling. Full job descriptions are @ ulysses.inc/jobs

@ThomasHochman jack?! nice get

9 months ago the FAI energy & infra team was just me. Now look at this crew! What a whirlwind.

What I love about this headline is—the Google people are the experts! The headliner “expert” is making a guess about data Google actually has! “Ignore experts” is the wrong framing. I love talking to experts! But mass media don’t have a monopoly on declaring people experts.

The real question isn't whether cloud seeding works (it does). It's whether we'll let fear-driven panic hand yet another technological advantage to China while fear and misinformation write the rules. @RainmakerCorp is working to keep that advantage here.

America is running dry, forcing farmers out of business. We need clever tech & policy to make water abundant again. I was skeptical of cloud seeding until the overwhelming evidence of its safety and ability to make more water convinced me to dedicate my life to it. Opinion 👇

Just learned that nobody ever commissioned the Wall Street bull sculpture? A guy just built it himself and dropped it there??

@dwarkesh_sp @vsiv !

Looking for an energy expert to interview on my podcast. I want to get in the weeds on what will happen the wild AI worlds. As AI actually becomes capable of substituting for human labor, your country's GDP will be denominated by your AI population size, which is downstream of energy. What does this mean for different countries? Given how fast the US falling behind China in electricity generation, what would it take for us to make up the ground? What are the most plausible sources (natural gas, nuclear, solar), what are their supply curves, the main physical or regulatory bottlenecks that would slow down a ramp up, etc. Who's the right guest to chat this through?

🚨 Mega CDR Deal Alert for 4.915 million tonnes! 🚨 🤝 @VaultedDeep has signed an offtake agreement with @Microsoft for 4.915 million tonnes, making it the second largest durable CDR deal to date. Vaulted recently opened a new facility in Hutchinson, Kansas, that is expected to deliver 50,000 tonnes of CDR annually once at full capacity. 🚚 The tonnes will be delivered over 12 years from 2026, as per the agreement. 📈 This makes Vaulted Deep only the 3rd CDR supplier to cross over 5M tonnes of CDR in sales. ⬆ Vaulted Deep moves up to 2nd on the CDR.fyi Suppliers Leaderboard with 5.08 million tonnes of CDR sold to date. 🔝 Microsoft continues stay at the top of the CDR.fyi Purchasers Leaderboard with over 30.58 million tonnes in purchases. 🔗 To learn more, read the full announcement: wsj.com/articles/micro…

A person read my dissertation, it’s a great day to be alive (this is an excellent piece, much better than my research).

@stephen_zerfas what do you use it for?

Anki habit is a power trip

Announcing @RainmakerCorp and @atmo_ai 's strategic alliance to transform weather modification with AI-powered precision cloud seeding. We're combining our radar-driven, drone-based cloud seeding with their ultra-precise AI meteorology to fight drought worldwide. 🧵

The Trump EPA is committed to total transparency. I tasked my team @EPA to compile everything we know about contrails and geoengineering to release to you now publicly. I want you to know EVERYTHING I know about these topics, and without ANY exception! epa.gov/newsreleases/e…