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+---
+category: "Scientists & Researchers"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - CarlSchmitt
+  - PoliticalTheology
+  - Jurisprudence
+  - Nazism
+  - Katechon
+  - PeterThiel
+alias:
+  - Carl Schmitt
+  - Schmitt
+summary: "Carl Schmitt was the German jurist and Nazi-era 'crown jurist' who theorized the state of exception, the friend-enemy distinction, political theology, and the katechon, and whose work was revived on the contemporary right and woven through Peter Thiel's 'Straussian Moment' essay and 2025 Antichrist lectures."
+born: 1888-07-11
+died: 1985-04-07
+location: "Plettenberg, Germany"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 to April 7, 1985) was a German jurist and political theorist whose work on sovereignty, the state of exception, the friend-enemy distinction, and political theology made him one of the most influential and contested thinkers of the twentieth century. He joined the [[Nazi Party]] in 1933 and became known as the "crown jurist" of the Third Reich, providing legal justification for the regime before falling from official favor in 1936. His writings were rehabilitated in the postwar decades and underwent a marked revival on the contemporary right; [[Peter Thiel]] drew on Schmitt in his 2007 essay "[[Leo Strauss|The Straussian Moment]]" and on Schmitt's concept of the katechon in his 2025 lectures on the [[Antichrist]].[^1][^2]
+
+### Life and Career
+
+Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, in Westphalia, into a Catholic family, and studied law at Berlin, Munich, and Strasbourg, taking his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1910 and his habilitation in 1916. He held chairs at Greifswald, Bonn, the Handelshochschule in Berlin, Cologne, and from 1933 the University of Berlin, and he became one of the leading constitutional lawyers of the [[Weimar Republic]]. During the republic's final crisis he advised the presidential governments of Heinrich Bruning, Franz von Papen, and Kurt von Schleicher on the use of emergency powers under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, and in 1932 he argued the government's side in the Preussenschlag case, defending the Reich's removal of the elected Prussian state government.[^1][^3]
+
+After Adolf Hitler took power Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, was appointed a Prussian state councillor by Hermann Goring, and became president of the Union of National Socialist Jurists. He wrote in defense of the regime's lawless violence, most notoriously in the 1934 article "The Fuhrer Protects the Law," which justified the extrajudicial killings of the Night of the Long Knives, and he organized a 1936 conference on purging German law of Jewish influence. In December 1936 the SS journal Das Schwarze Korps attacked him as an opportunist whose Catholicism and earlier associations made his conversion suspect, and he lost his Party offices while retaining his Berlin chair and state councillorship. Interned by the Allies after the war and questioned at Nuremberg, he refused to undergo denazification and was barred from teaching, returning to Plettenberg, where he continued to write and receive visitors until his death in 1985.[^1][^4]
+
+### The State of Exception and Sovereignty
+
+Schmitt's *Political Theology* (1922) opens with the sentence "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception," locating the essence of sovereign power not in the normal operation of law but in the authority to suspend the legal order in an emergency, the Ausnahmezustand or state of exception. On this decisionist account the validity of law rests ultimately on a concrete decision rather than on an impersonal norm, and the genuine sovereign is whoever can determine that an exceptional situation exists and what is to be done about it. The argument was a frontal assault on the liberal and positivist legal theory, associated with Hans Kelsen, that sought to dissolve sovereignty into a self-sufficient hierarchy of norms.[^5][^6]
+
+The same book advanced his thesis of political theology, that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts," both in their historical origin, where the omnipotent lawgiver replaced the omnipotent God, and in their structure, where the exception stands to the legal order as the miracle stands to the laws of nature. In *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy* (1923) he attacked liberal parliamentarism as a system of endless discussion incapable of decision, and in *Legality and Legitimacy* (1932) he argued that the Weimar constitution's neutrality toward its own enemies left it unable to defend itself, an analysis later read as preparing the ground for the regime that followed.[^5][^7]
+
+### The Concept of the Political
+
+In *The Concept of the Political* (1927, expanded 1932) Schmitt held that the specifically political distinction, irreducible to the moral, aesthetic, or economic, is that between friend and enemy. The enemy, the hostis, is the public adversary, the other with whom conflict can in the extreme case mean physical killing, and the reality of this possibility is what gives political life its seriousness. Liberalism, he argued, tries to dissolve the political into the spheres of ethics and economics and so cannot grasp it, yet the friend-enemy grouping persists beneath the liberal surface. Strauss's 1932 "Notes" on the book pressed exactly this point, arguing that Schmitt's affirmation of the political remained dependent on the liberalism it opposed, and Schmitt revised passages of the third edition in response.[^8][^9]
+
+Schmitt's later *The Nomos of the Earth* (1950) developed a theory of international order grounded in the appropriation of land and the historical jus publicum Europaeum, the European law of nations that he argued had once "bracketed" war by treating the enemy as a legitimate equal rather than a criminal to be annihilated. He lamented the dissolution of this order into a moralized, total enmity, a theme that runs into his late reflections on partisan warfare in *Theory of the Partisan* (1963).[^10]
+
+### The Katechon
+
+Drawing on the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, in which the Apostle Paul writes of "the one who now restrains" the coming of the lawless one, Schmitt made the figure of the katechon, Greek for the restrainer, a recurring element of his thought. In the essay "Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History" (1950) and in *The Nomos of the Earth* he treated the katechon as the power that holds back the Antichrist and the end of history, identifying it variously with the Roman Empire, the medieval German emperors, and other concrete bearers of order, and he called it the only Christian conception that made historical action possible by giving a meaning to the interval before the end. The concept supplied a theology of the restraining state for a thinker who saw chaos as the alternative to order.[^11][^12]
+
+In his postwar notebooks, published as *Glossarium*, Schmitt returned repeatedly to the katechon and wrote that he believed in it as the only way a Christian could make sense of history, adding that for every age one must name its bearer. Later scholarship has read the idea as the theological core of his politics: an account of authority whose task is to delay catastrophe rather than to achieve perfection, and which therefore justifies the sovereign who maintains order against the forces of dissolution. [[Rene Girard]]'s late *Battling to the End* (2007) likewise turned to the Pauline drama of restraint and apocalypse.[^16]
+
+### The Postwar Revival
+
+Schmitt's reception broadened far beyond the right after the war, taken up by thinkers as varied as the Marxists Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, whose *State of Exception* (2003) made Schmitt central to debates over post-September 11 emergency powers, the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and, on the contemporary right, the editor [[Curtis Yarvin]] and writers associated with [[Neoreaction]] and with [[Nick Land]]. The German scholar [[Heinrich Meier]] reconstructed Schmitt's exchange with Strauss in *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue* (1995).[^13]
+
+Thiel's "The Straussian Moment" enlists Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction to argue that the West, after the [[September 11 attacks]], had to recognize a real enemy that the optimistic Enlightenment anthropology of Hobbes and Locke could not name. In the four-part Antichrist lectures Thiel delivered in [[San Francisco]] in September 2025, audio of which was reported by the *Washington Post* and *Reason*, he framed his argument through Schmitt's katechon, casting the American imperium as at once the natural candidate for the restrainer that holds back the Antichrist and a candidate for the one-world tyranny he equated with the Antichrist itself; he named [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]], [[Nick Bostrom]], and Greta Thunberg among those he called legionnaires of the Antichrist for advocating global governance to halt technology.[^14][^15]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Carl Schmitt," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the 1888 Plettenberg birth, the Weimar career, the 1933 Nazi Party membership, the "crown jurist" role, the 1936 fall, and the postwar refusal of denazification. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/
+[^2]: "Carl Schmitt," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* biography of the German jurist and theorist of political realism. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carl-Schmitt
+[^3]: Bendersky, Joseph W. *Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich.* Princeton University Press, 1983, on the Weimar advisory roles and the Preussenschlag case.
+[^4]: "The Nazi Jurist," *Claremont Review of Books,* on the 1934 defense of the Night of the Long Knives, the 1936 anti-Jewish law conference, and the Das Schwarze Korps attack. https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-nazi-jurist/
+[^5]: Schmitt, Carl. *Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty* (1922), trans. George Schwab, MIT Press, 1985.
+[^6]: "Carl Schmitt," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the decision, the exception, and the critique of Kelsen's normativism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schmitt/
+[^7]: Schmitt, Carl. *The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy* (1923); *Legality and Legitimacy* (1932).
+[^8]: Schmitt, Carl. *The Concept of the Political* (1927, expanded 1932), trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, 1996.
+[^9]: Strauss, Leo. "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political" (1932); on Schmitt's praise and the third-edition revisions, see Meier below. https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/notes-on-carl-schmitt-the-concept-of-the-political/
+[^10]: Schmitt, Carl. *The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum* (1950), trans. G. L. Ulmen, Telos Press, 2003; and *Theory of the Partisan* (1963).
+[^11]: Schmitt, Carl. "Three Possibilities for a Christian Conception of History" (1950); and *The Nomos of the Earth,* on the katechon as the restrainer of the Antichrist.
+[^12]: "It's Carl Schmitt's Moment," *Democracy Journal,* on the katechon, the state of exception, and the contemporary revival. https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/77/its-carl-schmitts-moment/
+[^13]: Meier, Heinrich. *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue,* trans. J. Harvey Lomax, University of Chicago Press, 1995; and Agamben, Giorgio. *State of Exception,* University of Chicago Press, 2005.
+[^14]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007.
+[^15]: "What billionaire Peter Thiel said in his private 'Antichrist lectures,'" *Washington Post,* October 10, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/10/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-leaked/; and "I Listened to Over 7 Hours of Peter Thiel's Leaked Antichrist Lectures," *Reason,* October 14, 2025, on Thiel's use of Schmitt's katechon. https://reason.com/2025/10/14/i-listened-to-over-7-hours-of-peter-thiels-leaked-antichrist-lectures-theyre-surprisingly-libertarian/
+[^16]: Schmitt, Carl. *Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947 bis 1951,* on the katechon and the demand to name its bearer in each age; and "The modern Epimetheus: Carl Schmitt's katechontism as reactionary chronopolitics," *Frontiers in Political Science,* 2022, on the katechon as the theological core of his politics. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpos.2022.957094/full
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Chamath
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Chamath
@ -0,0 +1,83 @@
+---
+category: "Technologists"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - ChamathPalihapitiya
+  - SocialCapital
+  - Facebook
+  - SPAC
+  - AllInPodcast
+  - VentureCapital
+alias:
+  - Chamath Palihapitiya
+summary: "Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian-American venture capitalist who ran Facebook's user-growth team, founded Social Capital, sponsored the Social Capital Hedosophia SPACs that took Virgin Galactic, Opendoor, Clover Health, and SoFi public, and cohosts the All-In Podcast."
+born: 1976-09-03
+location: "Sri Lanka (born); Ottawa, Canada (raised)"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Chamath Palihapitiya (born September 3, 1976) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian-American venture capitalist who ran the user-growth team at [[Facebook]] from 2007 to 2011, founded the firm [[Social Capital|Social Capital]] in 2011, sponsored the Social Capital Hedosophia series of blank-check companies that took [[Virgin Galactic|Virgin Galactic]], [[Opendoor|Opendoor]], [[Clover Health|Clover Health]], and [[SoFi|SoFi]] public in 2019 through 2021, and cohosts the [[All-In Podcast|All-In Podcast]] with [[David Sacks]], [[Jason Calacanis|Jason Calacanis]], and [[David Friedberg|David Friedberg]]. He was named among the confirmed 2026 registrants of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]], in the membership roster leaked to *WIRED* in June 2026.[^1]
+
+### From Ottawa to Facebook
+
+Palihapitiya was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Ottawa, Canada, after his family emigrated when he was a small child and remained in Canada following his father's posting to the Sri Lankan diplomatic mission. He has described a financially precarious childhood and work at a Burger King from the age of fourteen. He took a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1999 and began his career as an associate at the Canadian bank BMO Nesbitt Burns.[^2]
+
+He moved to Silicon Valley and held roles at the music-software maker Winamp and at AOL, where he ran the instant-messaging division, before joining Facebook in 2007. At Facebook he led the user-growth organization, the team credited with the data-driven acquisition and retention methods that carried the service toward one billion users. He left Facebook in 2011. His compensation at Facebook was paid substantially in equity, and the stake became the basis of the fortune he carried into venture investing, though no reputable source has published a specific figure for its size at his departure.[^2][^3]
+
+### The 2017 Stanford Remarks
+
+At a [[Stanford Graduate School of Business|Stanford Graduate School of Business]] event recorded on November 10, 2017, and widely reported the following month, Palihapitiya said he felt "tremendous guilt" about his work at Facebook and that "the short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth." He added that he does not allow his own children to use "this shit." Facebook responded that Palihapitiya had not worked at the company in more than six years and that it had changed substantially since his tenure.[^4]
+
+Palihapitiya softened the remarks after the coverage, describing Facebook as "an amazing company" and stating that social media's impact to that point had been "mostly overwhelmingly good," while maintaining that the advertising business model "allows us to conflate and confuse truth and popularity."[^4]
+
+### Social Capital and the Partner Exodus
+
+Palihapitiya founded the Palo Alto venture firm The Social+Capital Partnership in 2011, later renamed Social Capital, with early partners including Mamoon Hamid, Ted Maidenberg, and his then-wife Brigette Lau. The firm's portfolio included Slack, Box, and SoFi. Beginning in 2017 and accelerating through 2018, the firm lost most of its investing partners: Hamid left for [[Kleiner Perkins|Kleiner Perkins]], Marc Mezvinsky departed, and Maidenberg, Arjun Sethi, and Jonathan Hsu left in 2018 to cofound Tribe Capital.[^5][^6]
+
+In 2018 Social Capital stopped accepting outside capital and converted to a holding-company model that invests off its own balance sheet rather than from limited-partner funds. The shift removed the firm from the conventional venture structure of raising and deploying third-party money, and it positioned the SPAC vehicles Palihapitiya launched the following year as the firm's primary public-facing investment activity.[^5][^6]
+
+### The Social Capital Hedosophia SPACs
+
+Through Social Capital Hedosophia, a series of special-purpose acquisition companies cofounded with the financier Ian Osborne and tickered IPOA through IPOF, Palihapitiya became the most prominent sponsor of the 2020 to 2021 SPAC wave, drawing the "SPAC king" label. The first vehicle, IPOA, merged with Virgin Galactic in a deal announced July 9, 2019, at an enterprise value of roughly 1.5 billion dollars, with IPOA contributing about 800 million dollars and Palihapitiya adding roughly 100 million dollars personally; the transaction created the first publicly traded human-spaceflight company. IPOB merged with the home-flipping company Opendoor in a 4.8 billion dollar deal in 2020, IPOC with the [[Medicare Advantage|Medicare Advantage]] insurer Clover Health at a 3.7 billion dollar enterprise value, and IPOE with the consumer-finance company SoFi at 8.65 billion dollars. IPOD and IPOF found no targets and liquidated in October 2022, returning capital to investors.[^7][^8][^9]
+
+Most of the completed deals fell sharply from their post-merger highs. On March 5, 2021, Palihapitiya sold his entire remaining personal stake in Virgin Galactic, 6.2 million shares at an average of 34.32 dollars for roughly 213 million dollars, while retaining an indirect position through Social Capital Hedosophia; the sale drew criticism given his public promotion of the company. A second SPAC series under the Social Capital Suvretta name, tickered DNAA through DNAD, produced two completed mergers that also collapsed and two further liquidations.[^10]
+
+### Clover Health, Hindenburg, and the SEC Letter
+
+On February 4, 2021, the short-seller [[Hindenburg Research|Hindenburg Research]] published a report alleging that Clover Health had failed to disclose a Department of Justice investigation, stating it had obtained a civil investigative demand covering roughly twelve aspects of the company's business and its Clover Assistant software, and accusing Palihapitiya of misleading investors. Hindenburg disclosed that it held no position in the stock. Clover subsequently confirmed it had received a document-preservation request from the Securities and Exchange Commission covering the period from January 1, 2020, tied to the report's claims.[^11][^12]
+
+Palihapitiya posted a "you're welcome" reply on the platform then known as Twitter around February 3, 2021, shortly before the Hindenburg report drew wide attention. He was later named in shareholder suits within the broader 2021 to 2023 wave of SPAC litigation alleging that sponsors profited from discounted founder shares while promoting mergers to retail investors. No reputable source has reported a formal Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement action against Palihapitiya personally; the disclosed regulatory inquiry was directed at Clover Health.[^11][^13]
+
+### The Uyghur Remarks
+
+On a January 2022 episode of the All-In Podcast, Palihapitiya said, "Nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs," telling a cohost, "you bring it up because you really care, and I think it's nice that you care, the rest of us don't care," and placing the issue "below my line" of concerns relative to supply chains, climate, American health care, and a possible conflict over Taiwan. The remarks drew immediate backlash. The Golden State Warriors, in which Palihapitiya then held an ownership stake, publicly stated that he "does not speak on behalf of our franchise" and that "his views certainly don't reflect those of our organization."[^14][^15]
+
+Palihapitiya issued a clarification, writing that he came across "as lacking empathy," that he acknowledged that "entirely," and that as a refugee whose family fled a country "with its own human rights issues," he believed "human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere."[^14]
+
+### The All-In Podcast and the Political Turn
+
+The All-In Podcast launched on March 19, 2020, with Palihapitiya, Calacanis, Sacks, and Friedberg as the rotating cohosts known as "the besties." The program became a media channel for the cohort's positions on technology regulation, cryptocurrency, and defense procurement. Palihapitiya had been a Democratic donor in earlier election cycles before moving toward the technology-right alignment that the podcast came to represent.[^16]
+
+In 2024 Palihapitiya cohosted a San Francisco fundraiser for [[Donald Trump|Trump]] with Sacks that reporting described as raising roughly 12 million dollars, and the All-In cohosts interviewed Trump on the podcast on June 20, 2024. Federal Election Commission records show Palihapitiya contributed to the 2024 effort to elect Trump. He had earlier held a passive minority stake in the Golden State Warriors, acquired around 2010 to 2011 for roughly 25 million dollars and sold in tranches in December 2021 and July 2022.[^16][^17][^18]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
+[^2]: "How Canadian Facebook billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya plans to change the world." *The Globe and Mail,* 2017. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/how-canadian-facebook-billionaire-chamath-palihapitiya-plans-to-change-the-world/article34109864/
+[^3]: Levy, Steven. "The Untold History of Facebook's Most Controversial Growth Tool." *Marker,* 2020. https://marker.medium.com/the-untold-history-of-facebooks-most-controversial-growth-tool-2ea3bfeaaa66
+[^4]: "Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society." *Fortune,* December 12, 2017. https://fortune.com/2017/12/12/chamath-palihapitiya-facebook-society/
+[^5]: "Social Capital is no longer raising outside money." *Fortune,* June 19, 2018. https://fortune.com/2018/06/19/social-capital-departures/
+[^6]: "The mass exodus at Social Capital continues." *TechCrunch,* August 31, 2018. https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/31/the-mass-exodus-at-social-capital-continues/
+[^7]: "Palihapitiya finds next '10x idea' with 4.8 billion dollar SPAC deal for Opendoor." *CNBC,* September 15, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/15/palihapitiya-finds-next-10x-idea-with-4point8-billion-spac-deal-for-real-estate-start-up-opendoor.html
+[^8]: "Palihapitiya-backed Clover Health shares fall on critical report by short seller." *CNBC,* February 4, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/04/palihapitiya-backed-clover-health-shares-fall-on-critical-report-by-short-seller-.html
+[^9]: "Chamath Palihapitiya's 14 SPAC and PIPE deals, tracking lifetime performance." *Benzinga,* March 2021. https://www.benzinga.com/news/21/03/20045351/chamath-palihapitiyas-14-spac-pipe-deals-tracking-lifetime-performance-and-the-past-weeks
+[^10]: "Virgin Galactic drops 10% after chairman Chamath Palihapitiya dumps his 213 million dollar personal stake." *CNBC,* March 5, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/chamath-palihapitiya-sells-virgin-galactic-spce-stake.html
+[^11]: "Palihapitiya-backed Clover Health shares fall on critical report by short seller." *CNBC,* February 4, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/04/palihapitiya-backed-clover-health-shares-fall-on-critical-report-by-short-seller-.html
+[^12]: Clover Health Investments, Corp. Form 424B3 prospectus supplement, 2021. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001801170/000119312521029642/d120078d424b3.htm
+[^13]: "Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya joins SPAC leaders facing lawsuits." *Crain's New York Business* (Bloomberg), June 2, 2023. https://www.crainsnewyork.com/finance/billionaire-chamath-palihapitiya-joins-spac-leaders-facing-lawsuits
+[^14]: "Chamath Palihapitiya says 'nobody cares' about Uyghur genocide in China." *CNBC,* January 17, 2022. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/17/chamath-palihapitiya-says-nobody-cares-about-uyghur-genocide-in-china.html
+[^15]: "Chamath Palihapitiya: Golden State Warriors distance themselves from co-owner over Uyghur comments." *CNN,* January 18, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/18/sport/chamath-palihapitiya-golden-state-warriors-uyghurs-spt-intl
+[^16]: "All-In's bros explain how they got so rich and powerful." *Slate,* January 2023. https://slate.com/technology/2023/01/all-in-podcast-elon-musk-david-sacks-jason-calacanis-chamath-palihapitiya-david-friedberg.html
+[^17]: "Two tech investors to host Trump at June San Francisco fundraiser." Reuters, 2024. https://www.aol.com/news/two-tech-investors-host-trump-195355695.html
+[^18]: "Chamath Palihapitiya sells remaining Golden State Warriors stake." *Sportico,* July 2022. https://www.sportico.com/personalities/owners/2022/chamath-palihapitiya-sells-warriors-stake-1234680551/
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/David
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/David
@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+---
+category: "Technologists"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - DavidSacks
+  - PayPalMafia
+  - Yammer
+  - AllInPodcast
+  - Trump
+  - CryptoCzar
+alias:
+  - David O. Sacks
+summary: "David Sacks is a South African-born American entrepreneur and political figure who served as chief operating officer of PayPal, founded Yammer, cohosted the All-In Podcast, and was appointed White House AI and cryptocurrency czar under the second Trump administration."
+born: 1972-05-25
+location: "Cape Town, South Africa (born)"
+created: 2026-06-18
+updated: 2026-06-18
+---
+
+[[David Sacks|David Sacks]] (born May 25, 1972, in [[Cape Town|Cape Town]], [[South Africa|South Africa]]) is a [[PayPal Mafia|PayPal Mafia]] principal who served as chief operating officer of [[PayPal]], founded [[Yammer|Yammer]] (the enterprise social network, acquired by [[Microsoft|Microsoft]] in 2012 for 1.2 billion dollars), produced the film *[[Thank You for Smoking|Thank You for Smoking]]* (2005), and was appointed Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency (the "AI and crypto czar") under the second [[Donald Trump|Trump]] administration. Sacks cohosted the [[All-In Podcast|All-In Podcast]], which became a media channel for the PayPal Mafia cohort's political positions during the 2022-2025 period.[^1][^2]
+
+### The PayPal COO Role and the Post-PayPal Ventures
+
+Sacks served as chief operating officer at PayPal through the 2002 eBay acquisition, managing the company's operations alongside [[Peter Thiel|Thiel]] (chief executive) and [[Max Levchin|Levchin]] (chief technology officer). The COO role placed Sacks in operational control of the company's day-to-day execution during the period when the anti-fraud architecture was built and the PayPal Mafia cohort was formed. After the eBay sale, Sacks founded Yammer, the enterprise social network that applied consumer-social-networking patterns to corporate communications. Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012.[^1]
+
+Sacks subsequently founded [[Craft Ventures|Craft Ventures]], a venture capital firm whose portfolio overlaps with the PayPal Mafia and Thiel-network commercial ecosystem. Sacks also produced the film *Thank You for Smoking* (2005), an adaptation of the [[Christopher Buckley|Christopher Buckley]] satirical novel about tobacco-industry lobbying.[^1]
+
+### The All-In Podcast and the Trump AI/Crypto Role
+
+The All-In Podcast, cohosted by Sacks with [[Chamath Palihapitiya|Chamath Palihapitiya]], [[Jason Calacanis|Jason Calacanis]], and [[David Friedberg|David Friedberg]], became a media channel for the PayPal Mafia cohort's political positions during the 2022-2025 period. The podcast's audience overlaps with the [[Dialog]] invitation list and the [[Founders Fund|Founders Fund]] portfolio community. Sacks used the platform to advance the positions on AI regulation, cryptocurrency policy, and defense procurement that he subsequently entered the government to implement.[^2]
+
+In the second Trump administration, Sacks received the Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency appointment. The role covers federal AI policy, cryptocurrency regulation, and the broader technology-policy agenda. Sacks's appointment placed a PayPal Mafia principal in the executive branch with authority over the technology sectors that the Thiel-network commercial infrastructure operates in.[^2]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: For Sacks's PayPal COO role and the post-PayPal ventures, see the PayPal Mafia page and the contemporaneous Silicon Valley press.
+[^2]: For the All-In Podcast and the Trump AI/crypto czar role, see the contemporaneous press coverage of the second Trump administration appointments.
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Derek
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Derek
@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+category: "Scientists & Researchers"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - Utilitarianism
+  - Longtermism
+  - Oxford
+  - PopulationEthics
+  - PersonalIdentity
+alias:
+  - Derek Parfit
+  - Derek Antony Parfit
+summary: "Derek Parfit was an Oxford philosopher at All Souls College whose 1984 Reasons and Persons set out the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion, becoming a foundation of longtermism, and who lived with austere single-mindedness."
+born: 1942-12-11
+died: 2017-01-02
+location: "Oxford, England"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Derek Antony Parfit (December 11, 1942 to January 2, 2017) was a British moral philosopher and a fellow of All Souls College, [[University of Oxford|Oxford]], whose 1984 book *Reasons and Persons* reshaped the philosophy of personal identity and population ethics. His treatment of obligations to future generations, including the non-identity problem and the Repugnant Conclusion, became a load-bearing part of the case for [[Longtermism|longtermism]], and his work is cited as foundational by [[Nick Bostrom]], [[Toby Ord]], and [[William MacAskill]].[^1][^2]
+
+### All Souls and an Ascetic Life
+
+Parfit was born in Chengdu, China, to British medical missionaries, educated at Eton, and read modern history at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1964. He won a fellowship at All Souls College, the research-only Oxford college admitting a handful of fellows by examination, and it remained his academic home for the rest of his life, with visiting professorships at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers in his later decades. He married the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards in 2010, having met her in 1982.[^1][^3]
+
+His working life was famously austere. As Larissa MacFarquhar reported in a 2011 *New Yorker* profile, Parfit wore the same gray trousers and white shirt so as not to lose time choosing clothes, ate as little varied a diet as possible, and kept only one serious interest outside philosophy: photographing the same buildings in Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg year after year, then paying to have the images retouched toward an exacting ideal. He was a member of Giving What We Can and supported effective altruism, pledging to donate at least a tenth of his income. David Edmonds, whose 2023 biography *Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality* drew the fullest portrait of him, wrote that Parfit single-mindedly tried to rescue secular morality by arguing it has an objective rational basis, holding that if he could not show there are objective facts about right and wrong his life would be futile.[^4][^5]
+
+### Reasons and Persons
+
+*Reasons and Persons*, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, was organized in four parts addressing self-defeating ethical theories, rationality and time, personal identity, and future generations. Its third part advanced a reductionist or "bundle" account of personal identity, on which what matters in survival is psychological continuity and connectedness (Parfit's "Relation R") rather than a deep further fact of identity, a view he argued should loosen the grip of self-interest on practical reason. He drew on the work of [[Henry Sidgwick]], whose 1874 *The Methods of Ethics* he held to contain the largest number of true and important claims of any work in the history of ethics.[^2][^6]
+
+The fourth part, on future generations, introduced the non-identity problem: because policies and even the timing of a conception change which particular people come to exist, a choice that leaves future people worse off than others who might have existed harms no determinate person, since those worse-off people owe their very existence to the choice. Parfit's "depletion" example, in which present generations consume resources for a small near-term gain at the cost of distant welfare, showed that person-affecting moral views struggle to condemn outcomes most people find clearly wrong. He concluded that personal identity is in this respect irrelevant to ethics, pushing toward impersonal principles that weigh outcomes by their total value.[^7][^2]
+
+### The Repugnant Conclusion
+
+Within population ethics Parfit framed the Repugnant Conclusion, which he stated as the claim that "for any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living." Total utilitarianism, by valuing the sum of welfare, implies that a vast population with lives barely worth living can be better than a smaller flourishing one, and Parfit's "Mere Addition Paradox" traced a chain of individually plausible steps that lead there. He spent much of his later life searching, without final success, for a "Theory X" that would avoid the conclusion while preserving the impartial weighing of future lives.[^8][^2]
+
+Parfit's argument that future people count equally and could vastly outnumber the living, so that the value of the far future dominates moral calculation, was developed by Bostrom and Ord at the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and MacAskill's 2022 *What We Owe the Future* drew its title and its core argument from Parfit's question of what the living owe to those who will exist. Parfit's final work, the multi-volume *On What Matters* (Oxford University Press, 2011 and 2017), argued that Kantian, contractualist, and consequentialist ethics converge on the same moral truths, what he called the view that they are "climbing the same mountain."[^9][^2]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Derek Parfit," British Academy memoir, on the 1942 Chengdu birth, the 2017 death, Eton, Balliol, the All Souls fellowship, and the visiting posts. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/memoirs/19/derek-parfit-1942-2017/
+[^2]: Parfit, Derek. *Reasons and Persons.* Oxford University Press, 1984.
+[^3]: "Derek Parfit's quest for perfection," *New Statesman,* on the All Souls fellowship and the Venice and St. Petersburg photography. https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/06/derek-parfit-minds-eye-photographs-philosophy-narrative-projects
+[^4]: MacFarquhar, Larissa. "How to Be Good," *The New Yorker,* September 5, 2011, on the gray trousers and white shirt, the minimal diet, and the photography as his one outside interest. https://www.stafforini.com/docs/MacFarquhar%20-%20How%20to%20be%20good.pdf
+[^5]: Edmonds, David. *Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality.* Princeton University Press, 2023; "Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality," Uehiro Oxford Institute, on the attempt to rescue secular morality on a rational basis. https://www.uehiro.ox.ac.uk/parfit-a-philosopher-and-his-mission-to-save-morality
+[^6]: de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna, and Peter Singer. *The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.* Oxford University Press, 2014, on Parfit's estimate of *The Methods of Ethics.*
+[^7]: Parfit, Derek. "Future Generations: Further Problems," *Philosophy and Public Affairs,* on the depletion case and the non-identity problem. https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Parfit%20-%20Future%20generations.pdf
+[^8]: "The Repugnant Conclusion," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, quoting Parfit's formulation and the Mere Addition Paradox. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
+[^9]: Parfit, Derek. *On What Matters,* vols. 1 and 2. Oxford University Press, 2011; MacAskill, William. *What We Owe the Future.* Basic Books, 2022.
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Eric
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Eric
@ -0,0 +1,65 @@
+---
+category: "Technologists"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - EricSchmidt
+  - Google
+  - ArtificialIntelligence
+  - NationalSecurity
+  - Philanthropy
+summary: "Eric Schmidt is the former Google chief executive turned billionaire investor and architect of US national-security artificial-intelligence policy, who chaired two Pentagon advisory bodies while privately funding the AI and defense startups those bodies promoted."
+born: 1955-04-27
+location: "Atherton, California"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American engineer, billionaire investor, and former chief executive of [[Google]], whom he ran from 2001 to 2011 before serving as the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015 and executive chairman of its parent [[Alphabet]] from 2015 to 2017. After leaving Google's board in 2019 he reoriented his energy and fortune toward [[Artificial Intelligence]] investment and United States national-security technology policy, chairing the [[Defense Innovation Board]] and the [[National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence]] while building a network of investment vehicles, the philanthropy [[Schmidt Futures]], and the think tank [[Special Competitive Studies Project]]. He coauthored two books on AI with the former secretary of state [[Henry Kissinger]].[^1][^2]
+
+### Google and the Fortune
+
+Schmidt took a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a doctorate in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, worked at [[Sun Microsystems]] and ran the software firm Novell, then was recruited in 2001 by Google founders [[Larry Page]] and [[Sergey Brin]] to provide what their investors at [[Kleiner Perkins]] and [[Sequoia Capital]] called "adult supervision." He served as chief executive through the company's 2004 initial public offering and its growth into the dominant search and advertising company in the world, stepping into the executive chairman role in 2011 when Page resumed the chief-executive title.[^1]
+
+The bulk of Schmidt's wealth derives from his roughly one-percent economic interest in Alphabet. According to a February 2025 securities filing he held about 49 million Alphabet Class A and Class B shares, and an analysis of company filings found he had collected roughly 7.9 billion dollars from sales of Google stock over the years. His net worth has been reported in a wide range depending on method and timing, commonly cited near 30 to 40 billion dollars and placed higher by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as Alphabet's share price climbed through 2025 and 2026.[^2]
+
+### The Pentagon Advisory Boards
+
+In March 2016 Defense Secretary [[Ash Carter]] appointed Schmidt to chair the newly created Defense Innovation Board, an advisory body bringing Silicon Valley figures to the Pentagon; he led it until 2020. The board's recommendations preceded the creation of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the department's adoption of agile software practices, and a set of AI ethical principles for the military. Schmidt remained a major holder of Alphabet stock throughout, and the [[Tech Transparency Project]] reported that his suggesting of technologies and vendors to the Pentagon stirred the concern of at least one government ethics official.[^3]
+
+In 2018 Schmidt was named chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a congressionally chartered body cochaired with the former deputy defense secretary [[Robert Work]], which ran until 2021. Its March 2021 final report concluded that the United States was not prepared to defend against or compete with [[China]] in AI and urged that the Defense Department and intelligence community become "AI-ready" by 2025. CNBC reported in October 2022 that roughly five months after his appointment Schmidt made a seed investment in an AI logistics startup named Beacon, the first of several direct investments in AI companies he made during his commission tenure, while continuing to hold billions of dollars in Alphabet stock; government ethics advisers told the network the arrangement presented a significant conflict of interest, though there was no indication he broke any rule.[^4][^5]
+
+### The Investment Vehicles
+
+Schmidt invests through several entities: the venture firm Innovation Endeavors, the earlier Tomorrow Ventures, and his family office Hillspire LLC, which manages his fortune and from which his AI startup investments have been tracked. CNBC reported in January 2025 that his family-office apparatus had backed 22 private AI firms since 2019. Among his national-security holdings is [[Rebellion Defense]], an AI defense-software company launched in 2019 with backing that included Innovation Endeavors.[^2][^3]
+
+His firms also hold positions in companies that profit from the emerging technologies he advocated to the government, including 5G and quantum computing, and he is executive chairman of the AI investment firm Steel Perlot. In 2021 Schmidt's foundation money helped seed America's Frontier Fund, a public-private investment vehicle modeled on the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] arm [[In-Q-Tel]] of the kind his own commission had recommended, run by the former In-Q-Tel chief executive Gilman Louie and staffed partly by former Schmidt Futures personnel. His charitable money also flowed toward China: while chairing the AI commission, his private foundation put nearly 17 million dollars into a fund feeding the Chinese private-equity group Hillhouse Capital, which holds an extensive portfolio of Chinese AI companies.[^3][^4]
+
+### The Anthropic Investment
+
+Schmidt was an early backer of the AI company [[Anthropic]], founded in 2021 by former [[OpenAI]] researchers from the [[Effective Altruism]] milieu. His name appears among the participants in Anthropic's first outside round, the 124-million-dollar Series A announced in May 2021 and led by the Estonian programmer [[Jaan Tallinn]], alongside [[Dustin Moskovitz]], the investor James McClave, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. The investment placed Schmidt in the company before the strategic stakes later taken by Google and [[Amazon (company)|Amazon]] carried its valuation into the hundreds of billions of dollars.[^9]
+
+The Series A was a small fraction of Schmidt's broader AI footprint. Through Hillspire and Innovation Endeavors he accumulated positions across dozens of AI companies, and his backing of a safety-focused lab like Anthropic sat alongside investments in defense and logistics AI firms that sell to the government, several made while he chaired federal AI advisory bodies.[^2][^9]
+
+### The OSTP Salary Controversy
+
+A March 2022 Politico investigation by Alex Thompson reported that Schmidt Futures had quietly paid the salaries of staff working inside the White House [[Office of Science and Technology Policy]] under its director [[Eric Lander]], President [[Joe Biden]]'s science adviser. Schmidt Futures' chief innovation officer [[Tom Kalil]] remained on Schmidt's payroll for four months while serving ostensibly as an unpaid consultant at the office, and the philanthropy indirectly paid the salary of the office's chief of staff Marc Aidinoff for about six weeks. More than a dozen people in the roughly 140-person office had ties to Schmidt.[^6][^7]
+
+The arrangement alarmed the office's general counsel Rachel Wallace, who raised what reporting described as significant ethical concerns given Schmidt's financial interests in AI and other areas overlapping the office's work. Lander resigned in February 2022 after a separate Politico report found credible evidence he had bullied Wallace and violated workplace standards. Schmidt called the salary story "largely false," saying its thesis of undue influence over the office was "unsubstantiated."[^6][^7]
+
+### The Kissinger Books
+
+Schmidt coauthored two books with Kissinger framing AI as a force reshaping geopolitics and human self-understanding. *The Age of AI: And Our Human Future*, written with Kissinger and the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, was published in November 2021. Its central argument was that AI represents an epochal shift in human affairs comparable to the printing press and the Enlightenment.[^8]
+
+The sequel *Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit*, written with Kissinger and the former [[Microsoft]] research chief [[Craig Mundie]], was published by Little, Brown on November 19, 2024, nearly a year after Kissinger's death in November 2023 at age 100, making it the statesman's final book.[^8]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Eric Schmidt," Britannica, on his Princeton and Berkeley education, Sun Microsystems and Novell careers, recruitment to Google in 2001, the chief-executive tenure to 2011, and the executive-chairman roles at Google and Alphabet. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eric-Schmidt
+[^2]: "Eric Schmidt's family office invests in 22 AI startups," CNBC, January 21, 2025, on the Hillspire family office, the 22 AI investments since 2019, the roughly 49 million Alphabet shares per a February 2025 filing, and the approximately 7.9 billion dollars collected from Google stock sales. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-invests-ai-startups.html
+[^3]: "Eric Schmidt's Unseen Influence Over US Defense Spending," Tech Transparency Project, on the Defense Innovation Board chairmanship (2016-2020) under Ash Carter, the ethics-official concern over vendor suggestions, Innovation Endeavors, Tomorrow Ventures, Hillspire, the Rebellion Defense stake, and America's Frontier Fund. https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/articles/eric-schmidts-unseen-influence-over-us-defense-spending
+[^4]: "How Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt helped write A.I. laws in Washington without publicly disclosing investments in A.I. start-ups," CNBC, October 24, 2022, on the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the Beacon seed investment five months after appointment, the direct AI startup investments during his tenure, and the nearly 17 million dollars into a Hillhouse-feeding fund. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/24/how-googles-former-ceo-eric-schmidt-helped-write-ai-laws-in-washington-without-publicly-disclosing-investments-in-ai-start-ups.html
+[^5]: "National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence: 2021 Final Report," NSCAI, March 2021, on the commission's 2018-2021 run, the Schmidt and Work cochairs, and the finding that the US must be AI-ready by 2025 to compete with China. https://www.nscai.gov/2021-final-report/
+[^6]: "Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says story alleging his foundation indirectly paid White House science staffers is 'largely false,'" CNBC, March 29, 2022, on the Politico report, Tom Kalil's four months on the payroll as an unpaid consultant, the six weeks of Marc Aidinoff's salary, general counsel Rachel Wallace's concerns, and Schmidt's response. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/29/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-responds-to-white-house-related-allegations.html
+[^7]: "How Eric Schmidt built an expansive AI influence operation," Politico (Alex Thompson), March 28, 2022, on the OSTP salary arrangements, Eric Lander's resignation in February 2022, and the dozen-plus Schmidt-tied staff in the 140-person office. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/28/google-eric-schmidt-white-house-00020712
+[^8]: "Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit," PR Newswire, on the November 19, 2024 Little, Brown publication with Kissinger and Craig Mundie as Kissinger's last book following his November 2023 death, and *The Age of AI* (2021) with Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/genesis-artificial-intelligence-hope-and-the-human-spirit-by-henry-a-kissinger-eric-schmidt-and-craig-mundie-302221817.html
+[^9]: "Anthropic raises $124 million to build more reliable, general AI systems," Anthropic, May 2021, on the Series A led by Jaan Tallinn with participation from Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, James McClave, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-124-million-to-build-more-reliable-general-ai-systems
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Ilya
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Ilya
@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+---
+category: "Technologists"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - IlyaSutskever
+  - OpenAI
+  - SafeSuperintelligence
+  - ArtificialIntelligence
+  - DeepLearning
+  - AISafety
+alias:
+  - Ilya
+summary: "Ilya Sutskever is the deep-learning researcher who co-built AlexNet under Geoffrey Hinton, cofounded OpenAI as its chief scientist, voted to remove and then reinstate Sam Altman in the November 2023 board crisis, and left in May 2024 to cofound Safe Superintelligence."
+born: 1986-12-08
+location: "Palo Alto, California"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Ilya Sutskever (born December 8, 1986) is a machine-learning researcher who cofounded [[OpenAI]] and served as its chief scientist until 2024, and who cofounded the lab [[Safe Superintelligence]] in June 2024. Born in Nizhny Novgorod in the [[Soviet Union]], he emigrated to [[Israel]] as a child and later to Canada, and took his doctorate at the [[University of Toronto]] under [[Geoffrey Hinton]], with whom he built the 2012 neural network AlexNet that is widely credited with igniting the modern deep-learning era. He was one of the directors who voted to fire OpenAI chief executive [[Sam Altman]] on November 17, 2023, then publicly reversed himself days later, and he departed the company in May 2024.[^1][^2]
+
+### From Hinton's Lab to Google to OpenAI
+
+Sutskever completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto in 2012, advised by Hinton. That year he, Hinton, and fellow graduate student Alex Krizhevsky built AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network that won the ImageNet image-recognition competition by a wide margin and demonstrated that GPU-trained deep networks could outperform every competing approach. The three packaged the work into a company, DNNresearch, which [[Google]] acquired in 2013, bringing Sutskever to Google Brain, where he co-developed sequence-to-sequence learning, a method that applied deep networks to ordered data such as words and sentences and underpinned advances in machine translation.[^1][^2]
+
+In 2015 Sutskever left Google to become a cofounder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, recruited by Altman and [[Elon Musk]] into the nonprofit they launched that December with a billion-dollar funding pledge. Over the next several years he directed the research that produced the GPT family of large language models and, in late 2022, [[ChatGPT]]. In a 2023 MIT Technology Review interview he described his growing preoccupation with AI safety and alignment, saying that he had begun to spend much of his time on the problem of controlling systems far more capable than humans.[^2][^3]
+
+### The November 2023 Board Crisis
+
+On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's nonprofit board removed Altman as chief executive, saying he had not been "consistently candid" in his communications with the directors. Sutskever was one of the four voting directors who ousted him, alongside [[Adam D'Angelo]], [[Tasha McCauley]], and [[Helen Toner]], the latter two tied to the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, and he was reported to have delivered the news to Altman. The board's stated concern centered on the pace of commercialization relative to safety, and the episode was read across the industry as a clash between OpenAI's safety-focused governance and its commercial trajectory.[^4][^5]
+
+Within days the move collapsed. Roughly 700 OpenAI employees signed a letter threatening to resign and follow Altman to [[Microsoft]], and on November 20 Sutskever signed that letter and posted on the platform X that he "deeply regret[ted]" his participation in the board's actions and would do everything he could to reunite the company. Altman was reinstated under a reconstituted board, and Sutskever lost his board seat while remaining an employee. He largely vanished from public view in the months that followed before announcing his departure on May 14, 2024, thanking the company and saying he was confident OpenAI would build artificial general intelligence that is "safe and beneficial."[^4][^5]
+
+### Safe Superintelligence
+
+In June 2024 Sutskever announced Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), a lab he cofounded with the investor and former Apple AI executive [[Daniel Gross]] and the former OpenAI researcher [[Daniel Levy]], declaring in a launch statement that the company had "one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence" and that it would pursue that aim with no near-term commercial products to divert it. The company raised 1 billion dollars at a 5-billion-dollar valuation in September 2024, then a further 2 billion dollars at a 32-billion-dollar valuation reported in April 2025, with backers including [[Andreessen Horowitz]], Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Alphabet, and Nvidia.[^6][^7]
+
+In June 2024 Meta Platforms attempted to acquire SSI; Sutskever rebuffed the approach, and Meta instead hired Gross, who left SSI on June 29, 2025 to join Meta's superintelligence division. Sutskever, who had been a cofounder, then became chief executive of SSI, with Levy as president, writing that the company would remain independent: "We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence."[^8]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Ilya Sutskever: From Hinton's Lab to OpenAI," LinkedIn, on AlexNet, DNNresearch, the Google acquisition, and sequence-to-sequence learning. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/story-ilya-sutskever-before-during-after-co-founding-openai-joshi-xhc9f
+[^2]: "OpenAI's chief scientist thinks humans could one day merge with machines," *MIT Technology Review,* October 26, 2023, on Sutskever's biography, the AlexNet work with Hinton and Krizhevsky, and his focus on AI safety. https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/26/1082398/exclusive-ilya-sutskever-openais-chief-scientist-on-his-hopes-and-fears-for-the-future-of-ai/
+[^3]: "OpenAI launches as a nonprofit with a billion-dollar pledge," IEEE Spectrum, December 11, 2015, on the founding and Sutskever's role as chief scientist. https://spectrum.ieee.org/billiondollar-nonprofit-ai-research-lab-to-open-in-san-francisco
+[^4]: "Effective Altruism's Role in the OpenAI Chaos, Explained," *Bloomberg,* November 22, 2023, on the board vote, the four directors, and the "not consistently candid" statement. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/effective-altruism-s-role-in-the-openai-chaos-explained
+[^5]: "Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist, is leaving the company," reporting on the November 20, 2023 regret post, the employee letter, and the May 14, 2024 departure. *CNBC,* May 14, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/14/ilya-sutskever-openai-co-founder-and-chief-scientist-is-leaving.html
+[^6]: "Safe Superintelligence Inc.," company launch statement, June 2024, on the "one goal and one product" mission and the cofounders. https://ssi.inc/
+[^7]: "OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B," *TechCrunch,* April 12, 2025, on the 1-billion September 2024 round at a 5-billion valuation, the 2-billion round at a 32-billion valuation, and the investor roster. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/12/openai-co-founder-ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-reportedly-valued-at-32b
+[^8]: "Ilya Sutskever is CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta hired Gross," *CNBC,* July 3, 2025, on the failed Meta acquisition, Gross's June 29 departure, and Sutskever becoming CEO with Levy as president. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-is-ceo-of-safe-superintelligence-after-meta-hired-gross.html
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/J.
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/J.
@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+---
+category: "New Right"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - RaceScience
+  - PioneerFund
+  - Eugenics
+  - HumanBiodiversity
+  - Psychology
+alias:
+  - John Philippe Rushton
+  - Jean-Philippe Rushton
+summary: "J. Philippe Rushton was a British-Canadian psychologist at the University of Western Ontario and president of the Pioneer Fund whose book Race, Evolution, and Behavior applied r/K selection theory to claim a racial hierarchy of intelligence and behavior, work the scientific community condemned as racist and methodologically flawed."
+born: 1943-12-03
+died: 2012-10-02
+location: "London, Ontario, Canada"
+created: 2026-06-19
+updated: 2026-06-19
+---
+
+J. Philippe Rushton (December 3, 1943 to October 2, 2012) was a British-Canadian psychologist at the [[University of Western Ontario]] who became the most prominent academic exponent of a ranked racial hierarchy in intelligence, behavior, and reproduction, and who led the [[Pioneer Fund]] from 2002 until his death. His 1995 book *Race, Evolution, and Behavior* applied [[r/K selection theory]] from population biology to human races, claiming that Asians, whites, and blacks fall on a fixed evolutionary continuum. The scientific community rejected the work as racist and methodologically flawed, and the [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classified him as a promoter of scientific racism.[^1][^2]
+
+### Race, Evolution, and Behavior
+
+Rushton argued that the three groups he labeled "Mongoloid," "Caucasoid," and "Negroid" differ in a suite of traits including brain size, intelligence, sexual behavior, family stability, and reproductive rate, with Asians and blacks at opposite ends and whites in between. He cast blacks as the most "r-selected," presenting them as more fertile, more impulsive, and less intelligent, and Asians as the most "K-selected." To support these claims he ran a paid survey on sexual behavior at Toronto's [[Eaton Centre]] shopping mall, paying respondents to answer questions about genital size and sexual habits, work for which the University of Western Ontario censured him for proceeding without ethics-board approval.[^2][^3]
+
+[[Transaction Publishers]] issued the book in 1995 and a condensed "Special Abridged Edition" in 1999, and in 2000 the publisher mass-mailed thousands of free copies of the abridged version to academics, drawing organized protest from sociologists and a public reversal in which Transaction withdrew the book and apologized. Rushton thereafter published the abridged edition through the Pioneer Fund's own [[Charles Darwin Research Institute]] and distributed it widely to social scientists and journalists, and he promoted the racial-hierarchy thesis at the white-nationalist [[American Renaissance]] conferences run by [[Jared Taylor]].[^3][^7]
+
+### The 1989 Controversy
+
+Rushton presented his racial theories at a 1989 meeting of the [[American Association for the Advancement of Science]], whose officials publicly called his research "highly suspect." Ontario premier [[David Peterson]] denounced him, the Ontario Provincial Police investigated, the [[Ontario Human Rights Commission]] examined his conduct, and the geneticist [[David Suzuki]] challenged him to a public debate. The provincial attorney-general Ian Scott declined to prosecute, calling the theories "loony but not criminal." The university kept him on but reprimanded him over the unapproved research.[^2][^4]
+
+The Suzuki debate took place before a packed hall at the University of Western Ontario in 1989, with Suzuki declaring, "There will always be Rushtons in the world. We must be prepared to root them out." Ontario premier Peterson called for Rushton's dismissal, and the police investigated whether his lectures violated Canada's hate-speech provisions under the Criminal Code before Scott's office declined to proceed. The university defended his academic freedom while condemning the content of his work, and for a period after the furor disrupted his classes Rushton delivered his lectures by videotape.[^4][^8]
+
+### Pioneer Fund Presidency
+
+Rushton received more than a million dollars in Pioneer Fund grants over his career, money he used in part to buy out his teaching duties, and in 2002 he became president of the fund, the [[Wickliffe Draper|Draper]]-founded foundation that has financed race-and-intelligence research since 1937. He served until shortly before his death, when he nominated the psychologist [[Richard Lynn]] as his successor. His r/K framework and his collaborations with Lynn appeared in the journal [[Mankind Quarterly]], and his work supplied citations for [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and for the [[Human Biodiversity|human-biodiversity]] network associated with [[Steve Sailer]].[^1][^5]
+
+Born in Bournemouth, England in 1943, Rushton took a doctorate from the [[London School of Economics]] in 1973, taught at [[York University]] and the [[University of Toronto]], and moved to Western Ontario, where he was made full professor in 1985. After Harry Weyher's death he became Pioneer Fund president in 2002 and channeled much of the fund's money to his own Charles Darwin Research Institute in Port Huron, [[Michigan]]; tax records show that the institute received $473,835 in 2002, roughly 73 percent of the fund's grants that year. He died of cancer in London, Ontario, on October 2, 2012.[^1][^9]
+
+### Scientific Condemnation
+
+Reviewers across psychology and biology dismissed *Race, Evolution, and Behavior*. The University of Washington psychologist [[David Barash]] wrote that "bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page" of the book. In 2020 the psychology department at the University of Western Ontario issued a statement saying much of Rushton's research "was racist," was "deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint," and showed how "the impact of flawed science lingers on." By 2021 several of his articles had been retracted as scientifically flawed, unethical, and not replicable.[^2][^6]
+
+In June 2020 the journal *[[Personality and Individual Differences]]* retracted a 2012 paper Rushton coauthored with [[Donald Templer]] that linked skin pigmentation to aggression and sexuality, and in December 2020 the journal *Psychological Reports* retracted two further Rushton papers from 1990 and 1991 on race and brain size, with the notice citing a misunderstanding of human genetic variation, the inappropriate application of ecological theory to human populations, the misuse of heritability, and the failure to replicate his findings. The wave of retractions reflected a broader reckoning across psychology with hereditarian work funded by the Pioneer Fund.[^6][^10]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Philippe Rushton, professor who pushed limits with race studies, dead at 68," *The Globe and Mail,* October 2012, on his birth in Bournemouth, his Western Ontario career, the Pioneer Fund presidency, and his racial claims. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/philippe-rushton-professor-who-pushed-limits-with-race-studies-dead-at-68/article4901806/
+[^2]: "Jean-Philippe Rushton," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on his theories, the Pioneer Fund, and the scientific-racism classification. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/jean-philippe-rushton/
+[^3]: Rushton, J. Philippe. *Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective.* Transaction Publishers, 1995.
+[^4]: "Leading race 'scientist' dies in Canada," *Salon,* October 6, 2012, on the 1989 AAAS controversy, the Eaton Centre survey, and the Ontario investigations. https://www.salon.com/2012/10/06/leading_race_scientist_dies_in_canada/
+[^5]: "Key Race Scientist Takes Reins at Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002, on Rushton becoming Pioneer Fund president. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2002/key-race-scientist-takes-reins-pioneer-fund
+[^6]: "Psychology journal retracts two articles for being unethical, scientifically flawed, and based on racist ideas and agenda," Retraction Watch, December 29, 2020, on the *Psychological Reports* retractions of Rushton's 1990 and 1991 brain-size papers and the June 2020 *Personality and Individual Differences* retraction of the 2012 Rushton-Templer paper. https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/29/psychology-journal-retracts-two-articles-for-being-unethical-scientifically-flawed-and-based-on-racist-ideas-and-agenda
+[^7]: "Jean-Philippe Rushton," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on the abridged edition mailed in bulk to academics around 2000, his American Renaissance appearances, and the Charles Darwin Research Institute. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/jean-philippe-rushton/
+[^8]: "Leading race 'scientist' dies in Canada," *Salon,* October 6, 2012, on the 1989 Suzuki debate, the "root them out" quote, and Rushton teaching by videotape. https://www.salon.com/2012/10/06/leading_race_scientist_dies_in_canada/
+[^9]: "Key Race Scientist Takes Reins at Pioneer Fund," Southern Poverty Law Center, 2002, on Rushton's LSE doctorate, his Western Ontario career, the 2002 presidency, and the $473,835 routed to his Charles Darwin Research Institute. https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/key-race-scientist-takes-reins-pioneer-fund/
+[^10]: "Journal retracts paper linking skin color to aggression and sexuality," Retraction Watch, June 2020, on the retraction of the 2012 Rushton-Templer paper in *Personality and Individual Differences.* https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/29/psychology-journal-retracts-two-articles-for-being-unethical-scientifically-flawed-and-based-on-racist-ideas-and-agenda
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jared
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jared
@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+---
+category: "Political Figure"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - JaredPolis
+  - DemocraticParty
+  - Colorado
+  - Governor
+  - TechEntrepreneur
+  - Cryptocurrency
+  - Dialog
+alias:
+  - Jared Schutz Polis
+  - Governor Jared Polis
+summary: "Jared Polis is the governor of Colorado, the first openly gay person elected a U.S. governor, a technology entrepreneur who founded ProFlowers and cofounded Techstars, and a name on the leaked 2026 roster of Peter Thiel's Dialog society."
+born: 1975-05-12
+location: "Boulder, Colorado (born); Colorado (political base)"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Jared Schutz Polis (born May 12, 1975, in [[Boulder, Colorado|Boulder]], [[Colorado]]) is an American politician and technology entrepreneur who served in the [[United States House of Representatives]] from 2009 to 2019 and has been governor of Colorado since January 2019, the first openly gay man elected governor of a U.S. state. In June 2026 Polis was named by *WIRED* among the figures surfaced in the leak of [[Dialog]], the invitation-only society cofounded by [[Peter Thiel]] and [[Auren Hoffman]]. Polis built a fortune in internet commerce before entering politics and has used the governorship to position Colorado as a crypto-friendly jurisdiction.[^1][^2][^3]
+
+### Entrepreneurial Fortune
+
+Polis grew up partly in [[La Jolla]], California, and earned a degree in politics from [[Princeton University]]. His parents, Stephen Schutz and Susan Polis Schutz, founded the greeting-card company [[Blue Mountain Arts]]; Polis built its online arm, Blue Mountain Arts.com, which sold to [[Excite@Home]] in 1999 in a cash-and-stock deal reported at roughly 780 million dollars. He went on to found the online florist [[ProFlowers]], which went public and was later sold in a transaction valued at around 477 million dollars.[^2][^3]
+
+In 2006 Polis cofounded the startup accelerator [[Techstars]] in Boulder with [[David Cohen]], [[Brad Feld]], and David Brown, one of the earliest and most influential American accelerator programs. His commercial record placed him among the wealthiest members of Congress when he was elected, and he financed much of his own political activity, having earlier won a seat on the [[Colorado State Board of Education]].[^2][^3]
+
+### Congress and the Governorship
+
+Polis was elected to the U.S. House from Colorado's 2nd congressional district in 2008 and served from January 2009 to January 2019, aligning with the progressive wing of the [[Democratic Party]] on education and civil-rights issues while pursuing technology and internet-freedom causes. In 2018 he won the Colorado governorship, becoming the first openly gay man and the first [[Jewish people|Jewish]] person elected governor of the state, and he was reelected in 2022.[^2][^4]
+
+In office Polis pursued a self-styled libertarian-tinged Democratic agenda, including aggressive moves on income-tax reduction and a deregulatory posture on emerging technologies. His administration's embrace of digital and blockchain technology became a defining policy signature, building on positions he had taken in Congress.[^4][^5]
+
+### Cryptocurrency Policy
+
+Polis has a long record of cryptocurrency engagement. In 2014, as a member of Congress, he became the first federal lawmaker to accept campaign donations in [[Bitcoin]], and in 2016 he cofounded the Congressional Blockchain Caucus. As governor he announced that Colorado would accept cryptocurrency, either Bitcoin or [[Ethereum]], for state tax and fee payments beginning in the summer of 2022, the first U.S. state to do so, with plans to extend the option to services such as driver's license renewals and hunting and fishing licenses.[^5]
+
+Polis structured the program so the state would not hold crypto reserves: a payment processor converts the digital assets to U.S. dollars before they enter the state treasury, functioning like a credit-card layer. He characterized the move as practical rather than ideological, calling crypto acceptance "frankly not as exciting as it sounds. It's a basic convenience thing," and projected that only about one percent of residents would use it initially.[^5]
+
+### The 2026 Dialog Leak
+
+The June 16, 2026 *WIRED* report identified Polis on the Dialog roster as "Governor of Colorado," listing him among the political figures surfaced when the hacktivist [[maia arson crimew|crimew]] located a member directory in the source code of Dialog's website and a separate source provided the publication with the 222-name registration list for the society's retreat near [[Dublin]], scheduled for August 12 through 16, 2026. *WIRED* placed Polis alongside [[Cory Booker|Senator Cory Booker]] and [[Ted Cruz|Senator Ted Cruz]] among the elected officials on the list.[^1]
+
+A spokesperson for Polis disputed any membership, saying the governor "does not know why his name is associated with the organization in any way or appeared on their website." The denial did not address whether Polis had attended any Dialog event, and it left unexplained the presence of his name in the records crimew pulled from the site's code.[^1][^6]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
+[^2]: "Profile: Entrepreneur Jared Polis sees governor's race as a chance to turn good ideas into reality." *Colorado Springs Gazette,* September 30, 2018. https://gazette.com/2018/09/30/profile-entrepreneur-jared-polis-sees-governors-race-as-a-chance-to-turn-good-ideas-into-reality-af2d0222-c1b2-11e8-8b2b-afa916b3b182/
+[^3]: "Congressman Jared Polis: Before TechStars Were Stars." *Startup Grind.* https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/congressman-jared-polis-before-techstars-were-stars/
+[^4]: "Jared Polis: what to know about Colorado's Democratic governor." *Colorado Public Radio,* October 17, 2022. https://www.cpr.org/2022/10/17/vg-2022-colorado-governor-race-jared-polis-democrat/
+[^5]: "Colorado's governor wants to be a haven for crypto as a 'basic convenience thing.'" *Associated Press / AOL,* 2022. https://www.aol.com/colorados-governor-wants-haven-crypto-130752609.html
+[^6]: Statement of a spokesperson for Governor Jared Polis, quoted in "What is Peter Thiel's secret 'Dialog' society and how it got exposed after website leak." *The Express Tribune,* June 2026. https://tribune.com.pk/story/2614092/what-is-peter-thiels-secret-dialog-society-and-how-it-got-exposed-after-website-leak
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jes
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Jes
@ -0,0 +1,60 @@
+---
+category: "Organized Crime"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - JeffreyEpstein
+  - JPMorgan
+  - Barclays
+  - Banking
+  - JesStaley
+  - FinancialConductAuthority
+  - PrivateBanking
+alias:
+  - James Edward Staley
+  - James E. Staley
+summary: "Career JPMorgan banker who managed Jeffrey Epstein's private-banking relationship, later became Barclays chief executive, and was banned from senior UK finance roles in 2023 for misleading the regulator about the nature and timing of his Epstein relationship."
+born: 1956-12-27
+location: "Boston, Massachusetts"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+James Edward Staley is an American banker who spent more than three decades at [[JPMorgan Chase]], rose to run its asset management and then its investment bank, and served as group chief executive of [[Barclays]] from December 2015 until November 2021. During his JPMorgan years he was the senior executive who managed and advocated for the bank's relationship with [[Jeffrey Epstein]], a private-banking client from 1998 to 2013. In October 2023 the [[Financial Conduct Authority]] banned Staley from holding senior management functions in UK financial services and fined him for recklessly approving a letter that misled the regulator about his relationship with Epstein, a decision the [[Upper Tribunal]] upheld in June 2025.[^1][^2][^3]
+
+### JPMorgan Career
+
+Staley joined Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York in 1979 after graduating from Bowdoin College, and spent the 1980s in the bank's Latin America division, including as head of corporate finance for Brazil and as general manager of the firm's Brazilian brokerage.[^4] He led [[JPMorgan Asset Management]] from 2001 to 2009 and then ran the corporate and investment bank from 2009 to 2013.[^5] At the height of his JPMorgan career he was discussed as a potential successor to chief executive [[Jamie Dimon]].[^4]
+
+Staley managed the private-banking relationship between JPMorgan and Epstein, who became a client of the bank's private bank in 1998.[^6] In a July 2011 email, JPMorgan general counsel [[Stephen Cutler]] wrote to Staley and asset-and-wealth-management head [[Mary Erdoes]] that Epstein was "not an honorable person in any way" and "should not be a client," and Cutler later testified that Staley and Erdoes made the decision to keep Epstein.[^6] Epstein also functioned as a source of referrals and introductions for Staley and the bank, including to wealthy potential clients.[^7]
+
+In 2013 Staley left JPMorgan after more than 30 years to become a managing partner at the hedge fund [[BlueMountain Capital]].[^4] JPMorgan terminated its banking relationship with Epstein the same year.[^6] After BlueMountain, Staley was recruited to lead Barclays, joining as group chief executive on December 1, 2015.[^5]
+
+### Epstein Emails and the 2015 Island Visit
+
+Court filings in litigation brought against JPMorgan by the [[Government of the United States Virgin Islands]] disclosed that Staley exchanged roughly 1,200 emails with Epstein from his JPMorgan account between 2008 and 2012.[^7] In a message dated November 1, 2009, sent from Epstein while Epstein was serving his Florida sentence, Epstein wrote, "I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound."[^7] In a 2010 exchange Staley wrote "That was fun. Say hi to Snow White," and when Epstein asked "what character would you like next," Staley answered "Beauty and the Beast"; Staley later said he had no recollection of the messages.[^7]
+
+Staley and his family visited Epstein's private island, [[Little Saint James]] in the [[U.S. Virgin Islands]], on more than one occasion.[^7] After an April 2015 visit, which Staley described as his last in-person meeting with Epstein, Staley emailed Epstein, "Thanks for the flight and thanks for the lunch. Your place is crazy, and special ... I count u as a deep friend. The girls seemed to enjoy the sail. All the best Jes."[^8] The April 2015 trip occurred months before Staley was named Barclays chief executive in October 2015.[^8]
+
+JPMorgan filed a third-party complaint against Staley in the [[United States District Court for the Southern District of New York]] on March 9, 2023, within the Virgin Islands action.[^9] The complaint asserted indemnification, contribution, breach of fiduciary duty, and "faithless servant" claims, alleging Staley concealed his personal activities with Epstein, and sought to recover compensation paid to him from at least 2006 through 2013.[^9] Staley moved to dismiss, arguing JPMorgan was using him as a "shield" for the bank's own failures.[^10]
+
+### Barclays and the FCA Ban
+
+While Barclays chief executive, Staley was separately sanctioned for attempting to identify a whistleblower who had sent letters criticizing a senior Barclays hire; in 2018 the FCA and the [[Prudential Regulation Authority]] fined him 642,430 pounds and Barclays cut his pay.[^11] Staley remained chief executive until November 2021, when he resigned as the FCA and PRA conclusions about his Epstein relationship became known.[^2]
+
+The FCA's case centered on an October 2019 letter that Barclays sent to the regulator, which Staley approved, stating that he "did not have a close relationship" with Epstein and had "ceased contact" with Epstein before joining Barclays.[^1] The FCA found those statements misleading, citing emails in which Staley described Epstein as one of his "deepest" and "most cherished" friends, and evidence that Staley was in contact with Epstein in the days before his Barclays appointment was announced on October 28, 2015, and indirectly in 2016 and 2017.[^1] On October 12, 2023 the FCA issued a decision banning Staley from senior management functions and imposing a fine of about 1.8 million pounds, with the penalties suspended pending his appeal.[^1]
+
+The Upper Tribunal heard Staley's reference and, on June 26, 2025, dismissed it and upheld the prohibition, finding that he had acted recklessly and with a lack of integrity and that the evidence of his Epstein relationship was "overwhelming."[^3] The tribunal reduced the financial penalty from about 1.8 million pounds to 1.1 million pounds, reflecting deferred Barclays shares that he forfeited.[^3] During the proceedings Staley testified that he had a sexual encounter with a member of Epstein's staff years earlier, and he maintained that he had not been dishonest.[^12]
+
+### Footnotes
+[^1]: "FCA fines former Barclays CEO and bans him from senior roles," *Central Banking,* 2023. https://www.centralbanking.com/regulation/banking/7959957/fca-fines-former-barclays-ceo-and-bans-him-from-senior-roles
+[^2]: "FCA: Staley misled regulators about his relationship with Epstein," *Banking Dive,* 2023. https://www.bankingdive.com/news/fca-staley-misled-regulators-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/733373/
+[^3]: "Upper Tribunal upholds Jes Staley ban," Financial Conduct Authority, 2025. https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/upper-tribunal-upholds-jes-staley-ban
+[^4]: "Jes Staley," Bank Policy Institute, accessed 2026. https://bpi.com/people/jes-staley/
+[^5]: "James E. Staley appointed Group Chief Executive," Barclays PLC, October 28, 2015. https://home.barclays/content/dam/home-barclays/documents/news/2015/october/281015_RNS.pdf
+[^6]: "JPMorgan kept Epstein as client for years after warnings, deposition shows," *The Washington Post,* 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/26/epstein-jpmorgan-client-sex-offender-warnings/
+[^7]: "Lawsuit alleges Jeffrey Epstein sent JPMorgan Chase exec photos of young women," *CNN Business,* 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/business/epstein-jpmorgan-emails
+[^8]: "High flyer to pariah: the saga of Epstein-linked banker Jes Staley," *inkl / Agence France-Presse,* 2025. https://www.inkl.com/news/high-flyer-to-pariah-the-saga-of-epstein-linked-banker-jes-staley
+[^9]: "JPMorgan Sues Ex-Executive Associated With Jeffrey Epstein," *Time,* 2023. https://time.com/6261243/jpmorgan-lawsuit-jes-staley-epstein-trafficking/
+[^10]: "Jes Staley Says JPMorgan Using Him as 'Shield' for Epstein Failures," *U.S. News & World Report / Reuters,* 2023. https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2023-04-24/jes-staley-seeks-to-dismiss-jpmorgan-chase-lawsuit-over-jeffrey-epstein
+[^11]: "Ex-Barclays CEO Staley's lifetime FCA ban to remain," *Banking Dive,* 2025. https://www.bankingdive.com/news/jes-staley-fca-lifetime-ban-banking-epstein-barclays-uk/751754/
+[^12]: "Former Barclays CEO Jes Staley slept with Epstein assistant, court hears," *Yahoo / PA Media,* 2025. https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-barclays-ceo-jes-staley-181703399.html
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/John
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/John
@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+category: "Technologists"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - JohnSchulman
+  - OpenAI
+  - Anthropic
+  - ThinkingMachinesLab
+  - ArtificialIntelligence
+  - ReinforcementLearning
+summary: "John Schulman is an OpenAI cofounder and reinforcement-learning researcher who created the PPO algorithm, helped build ChatGPT and the RLHF alignment behind it, left OpenAI for Anthropic in August 2024, and then cofounded Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist."
+location: "San Francisco, California"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+John Schulman is a machine-learning researcher who cofounded [[OpenAI]] in 2015, where he helped develop reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and led the creation of [[ChatGPT]], and who is regarded as one of the principal architects of the alignment methods that made conversational language models usable. He left OpenAI for [[Anthropic]] in August 2024, departed Anthropic roughly six months later, and in February 2025 became a cofounder and chief scientist of [[Thinking Machines Lab]], the company founded by the former OpenAI chief technology officer [[Mira Murati]].[^1][^2]
+
+### Reinforcement Learning and the Road to OpenAI
+
+Schulman studied physics at Caltech, briefly pursued neuroscience, and took his doctorate in computer science at the [[University of California, Berkeley]], advised by Pieter Abbeel, working on robotics and reinforcement learning. During and shortly after his PhD he developed two foundational reinforcement-learning algorithms: Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), with coauthors including Sergey Levine and Michael Jordan, and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), published in 2017, which simplified TRPO while preserving its stability and became one of the most widely used and most cited methods in the field.[^3][^4]
+
+He joined OpenAI as a member of its founding team in 2015, immediately after finishing at Berkeley. PPO later became the workhorse algorithm of RLHF, the technique that fine-tunes a language model on human preference judgments to make its outputs more helpful and less harmful, and which OpenAI used to turn its raw GPT models into the aligned systems that culminated in ChatGPT. Schulman co-led OpenAI's post-training team and is widely credited as a leader of the effort that produced ChatGPT after its November 2022 release.[^4][^5]
+
+### Anthropic, Then Thinking Machines Lab
+
+On August 5, 2024 Schulman announced that he was leaving OpenAI to join Anthropic, the rival lab founded by former OpenAI researchers around AI safety. He wrote that the move "stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work," and he joined Anthropic's alignment-science team. His departure came amid a wave of exits from OpenAI's safety and research leadership, including the chief scientist [[Ilya Sutskever]] and Murati.[^1][^6]
+
+Schulman's time at Anthropic was brief. In February 2025 he left to cofound Thinking Machines Lab with Murati, taking the role of chief scientist, in a company assembled largely from former OpenAI researchers including Barret Zoph and Bob McGrew. The lab raised a roughly 2-billion-dollar seed round at a 12-billion-dollar valuation in July 2025, led by [[Andreessen Horowitz]], with Schulman among its named cofounders.[^2][^7]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "OpenAI Co-Founder John Schulman Departs for AI Rival Anthropic," *Bloomberg,* August 6, 2024, on the August 2024 move and the "deepen my focus on AI alignment" statement. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-06/openai-co-founder-john-schulman-departs-for-ai-rival-anthropic
+[^2]: "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup after brief stint at Anthropic," *Fortune,* February 6, 2025, on his Anthropic departure and joining Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist. https://www.fortune.com/2025/02/06/openai-john-schulman-mira-muratis-startup-anthropic
+[^3]: "Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms," Schulman et al., 2017, the PPO paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06347
+[^4]: "Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO): The Key to LLM Alignment," Cameron R. Wolfe, on Schulman's Caltech and Berkeley training under Abbeel, the TRPO and PPO work, and PPO's role in RLHF. https://cameronrwolfe.substack.com/p/proximal-policy-optimization-ppo
+[^5]: "How John Schulman Created OpenAI," KITRUM, on his joining the OpenAI founding team in 2015, leading the creation of ChatGPT, and co-leading the post-training team. https://kitrum.com/blog/the-inspiring-story-john-schulman-co-founder-of-openai/
+[^6]: "OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joins rival LLM developer Anthropic," SiliconANGLE, August 6, 2024, on the move and the broader departures from OpenAI. https://siliconangle.com/2024/08/06/openai-co-founder-john-schulman-joins-rival-llm-developer-anthropic/
+[^7]: "Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round," *TechCrunch,* July 15, 2025, on the seed round, valuation, and the cofounders including Schulman. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/mira-muratis-thinking-machines-lab-is-worth-12b-in-seed-round/
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Julian
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Julian
@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+---
+category: "Scientists & Researchers"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - Bioethics
+  - Transhumanism
+  - HumanEnhancement
+  - Oxford
+  - EffectiveAltruism
+alias:
+  - Julian Savulescu
+summary: "Julian Savulescu is an Oxford bioethicist who founded the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, edited the Journal of Medical Ethics, and advanced 'procreative beneficence' and the case for human genetic and moral enhancement."
+born: 1963
+location: "Oxford, England; Singapore"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Julian Savulescu (born 1963) is an Australian bioethicist who held the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the [[University of Oxford]] and founded its [[Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics|Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics]]. He is best known for the principle of "procreative beneficence," which holds that prospective parents have a moral reason to select the children expected to have the best lives, and for his advocacy, with Ingmar Persson, of biomedical moral enhancement. He trained under Peter Singer and then Derek Parfit before founding his own program in applied ethics at the [[Effective Altruism|effective-altruism]]-adjacent Oxford centers.[^1][^2]
+
+### From Singer and Parfit to the Uehiro Chair
+
+Savulescu studied medicine at Monash University in [[Melbourne]] before completing a doctorate under [[Peter Singer]] on ethical questions in end-of-life care. As a Sir Robert Menzies Medical Scholar he moved to Oxford between 1994 and 1997 to work under [[Derek Parfit]]. He thus passed directly through the two figures who carried classical utilitarianism into late-twentieth-century moral philosophy before establishing his own program in applied ethics.[^1][^3]
+
+In 2002 he was appointed to the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, endowed by the Japanese philanthropist Eiji Uehiro, and in 2003 he founded and directed the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, which was renamed the Uehiro Oxford Institute in 2024. He served as editor-in-chief of the *Journal of Medical Ethics*, the leading English-language bioethics journal, and from August 2022 also held the Chen Su Lan Centennial Professorship in Medical Ethics and directed the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore.[^1]
+
+### Procreative Beneficence
+
+In "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children," published in the journal *Bioethics* in 2001, Savulescu argued that when couples using in-vitro fertilization can choose among embryos, they have a moral obligation to select, on the available genetic information, the child expected to have the best prospects for a good life, including non-disease traits such as temperament or intelligence. He defended the principle as following from a general duty to do the most good and distinguished it from coercive state eugenics by locating the choice with parents.[^4]
+
+Critics charged that procreative beneficence revived eugenic reasoning by treating some lives as preferable to bring into existence than others and that the appeal to "best life prospects" smuggled contested social judgments into reproductive medicine. Savulescu extended the position across later work on embryo selection, gene editing, and what he termed liberal eugenics, arguing that enhancement technologies should be permitted where they improve expected welfare without coercion.[^4][^5]
+
+### Human and Moral Enhancement
+
+Savulescu was a leading academic proponent of human enhancement, the use of biotechnology to extend human physical, cognitive, and emotional capacities beyond the species norm. In 2009 he and [[Nick Bostrom]] co-edited the volume *Human Enhancement* (Oxford University Press), bringing the Uehiro Centre's bioethics together with the transhumanist program of Bostrom's [[Future of Humanity Institute]], the two Oxford centers that became the institutional base for radical-enhancement and existential-risk research.[^6]
+
+In *Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement* (Oxford University Press, 2012), written with the Swedish philosopher Ingmar Persson, Savulescu argued that human moral psychology evolved for small groups and is now mismatched against globalized technology capable of "ultimate harm," such as engineered pandemics, climate collapse, or weapons that could end the species. They concluded that traditional moral education would work too slowly and that researchers should investigate biomedical means of enhancing human moral motivation. The framing of technology-driven extinction risk overlapped with the existential-risk agenda that [[Toby Ord]] and [[William MacAskill]], who emerged from the same Oxford practical-ethics environment and co-founded [[Giving What We Can]] in 2009, later built into longtermism.[^7][^2]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Professor Julian Savulescu," Uehiro Oxford Institute, on the Uehiro Chair, the founding of the Oxford Uehiro Centre in 2003 and its 2024 renaming, the *Journal of Medical Ethics* editorship, and the National University of Singapore appointment. https://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-julian-savulescu
+[^2]: "Training Transhumanists at Oxford University," Europe in the World, University of Notre Dame, on the Future of Humanity Institute, the Uehiro Centre, procreative beneficence, and human enhancement. https://eitw.nd.edu/articles/training-transhumanists-at-oxford-university/
+[^3]: "Julian Savulescu," Centre for Biomedical Ethics, National University of Singapore, on the doctorate under Peter Singer and the Menzies scholarship at Oxford under Derek Parfit. https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/cbme/people_uri/julian-savulescu-bioethics/
+[^4]: Savulescu, Julian. "Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children." *Bioethics,* vol. 15, no. 5-6, 2001. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12058767/
+[^5]: "Interview with Julian Savulescu on Genetic Selection and Enhancement," Practical Ethics (University of Oxford blog), 2019. https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2019/11/interview-with-julian-savulescu-on-genetic-selection-and-enhancement/
+[^6]: Bostrom, Nick, and Julian Savulescu, eds. *Human Enhancement.* Oxford University Press, 2009.
+[^7]: Persson, Ingmar, and Julian Savulescu. *Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement.* Oxford University Press, 2012, on the mismatch between human moral nature and "ultimate harm." https://global.oup.com/academic/product/unfit-for-the-future-9780199653645
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Leo
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Leo
@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
+---
+category: "Scientists & Researchers"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - LeoStrauss
+  - PoliticalPhilosophy
+  - Esotericism
+  - Neoconservatism
+  - PeterThiel
+alias:
+  - Leo Strauss
+  - Strauss
+summary: "Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher at the University of Chicago whose doctrine of esoteric writing, critique of liberal modernity, and revival of the ancients shaped American neoconservatism and supplied one of the three pillars of Peter Thiel's 2007 essay 'The Straussian Moment.'"
+born: 1899-09-20
+died: 1973-10-18
+location: "Kirchhain, Germany; Chicago, Illinois"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 to October 18, 1973) was a German-born political philosopher who taught for nearly two decades at the [[University of Chicago]] and who founded the school of interpretation known as Straussianism. His central claims were that the great philosophers of the past practiced esoteric writing, concealing a dangerous teaching beneath a salutary surface; that modern liberal philosophy represents a decline from classical political philosophy; and that the conflict between reason and revelation, which he called the theological-political problem, is the permanent theme of Western thought. His students and their students became a recognizable presence in American conservatism, and his name attaches to the intellectual genealogy of [[Neoconservatism|neoconservatism]]. [[Peter Thiel]] titled his 2007 essay "The Straussian Moment" after him.[^1][^2]
+
+### Life and Career
+
+Strauss was born in Kirchhain, in Hesse, into an observant Jewish family, and studied at the [[University of Marburg]] and the University of Hamburg, taking his doctorate in 1921 with a dissertation on the epistemology of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi supervised by the neo-Kantian philosopher [[Ernst Cassirer]]. In the early 1920s he attended the Freiburg lectures of [[Edmund Husserl]] and encountered the early work of [[Martin Heidegger]], whom he regarded for the rest of his life as the most formidable thinker of the age. He worked at the Academy for Jewish Research in Berlin, where he edited part of the jubilee edition of [[Moses Mendelssohn]], and published his first book, *Spinoza's Critique of Religion*, in 1930.[^1][^3]
+
+In 1932 a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship took Strauss out of Germany to France and then England, and he never returned; the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 made his exile permanent. He completed *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* in England, emigrated to the United States in 1937, and from 1938 to 1948 taught at the [[New School for Social Research]] in New York. In 1949 he joined the University of Chicago, where he was Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor and taught until 1967, the period in which he trained the bulk of his students and produced his major interpretive works. He spent a year at Claremont Men's College in 1968 and then moved to [[St. John's College]] in Annapolis as scholar in residence, where he died in 1973.[^1][^3]
+
+### Esoteric Writing and Persecution
+
+Strauss's most distinctive doctrine, set out in *Persecution and the Art of Writing* (1952), holds that under conditions of persecution philosophers learned to write on two levels at once. The surface, or exoteric, teaching conformed to the moral and religious opinions of the city and protected the author from reprisal, while a hidden, or esoteric, teaching, addressed to careful readers and signaled by deliberate contradictions, omissions, and errors, communicated the philosopher's real and potentially subversive thought. Strauss developed the reading through studies of [[Maimonides]], Judah Halevi, and Spinoza, arguing that modern scholars had lost the very art of reading "between the lines" that earlier readers took for granted.[^4][^5]
+
+Behind the contingent fact of persecution Strauss placed a permanent tension between philosophy and the political community. Philosophy questions the authoritative opinions on which any society rests, and so the pursuit of truth is always potentially corrosive of the beliefs that hold a city together. The classical solution, in Strauss's account, was a politic reticence: the philosopher tempers the public expression of the truth and grants the city the salutary myths it requires, a posture connected to the Platonic notion of the noble lie, the gennaion pseudos of the *Republic*, the medicinal falsehood the rulers tell for the good of the whole. Critics, notably Shadia Drury in *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss* (1988), read this as an esoteric endorsement of rule by a deceiving elite, a reading Strauss's defenders dispute.[^4][^6]
+
+### The Critique of Modernity
+
+Strauss argued that classical political philosophy, oriented by an idea of the naturally best regime and the question of how one ought to live, was abandoned by modern thought in favor of lower but supposedly more solid foundations. In *Natural Right and History* (1953) he traced the collapse of the classical doctrine of natural right into modern natural rights and then into the historicism and value-relativism he regarded as the characteristic disease of the twentieth century, a relativism he thought left liberal democracy defenseless against its enemies. He described modernity as unfolding in "three waves," the first beginning with [[Niccolo Machiavelli|Machiavelli]] and [[Thomas Hobbes|Hobbes]], the second with [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau|Rousseau]], the third with [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], each lowering the horizon further until thought arrived at the nihilism he associated with Heidegger.[^2][^7]
+
+The recovery he proposed was a return to the ancients, achieved by reading Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and the medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers on their own terms rather than through the assumptions of progress. Works such as *On Tyranny* (1948), a commentary on Xenophon's *Hiero* that occasioned his published exchange with the Hegelian [[Alexandre Kojeve]], *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958), and *The City and Man* (1964) enacted this return. Underlying all of it was what Strauss called the theological-political problem, the unresolved quarrel between the claims of reason ("Athens") and the claims of revelation ("Jerusalem"), which he held no philosophy had ever refuted and which he treated as the animating tension of the Western tradition.[^7][^8]
+
+### The Schmitt Exchange
+
+In 1932 Strauss published "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political," a close and critical review of the jurist [[Carl Schmitt]]'s book. Strauss argued that Schmitt, in seeking to ground the political in the friend-enemy distinction and to escape the liberalism he attacked, in fact remained within the liberal horizon he wished to overcome, because he could give no positive account of why the political was worth affirming. Schmitt privately praised the review as the one penetrating response his book had received, revised passages of the third edition in light of it, and supplied a recommendation that supported Strauss's Rockefeller fellowship.[^9]
+
+The German scholar [[Heinrich Meier]] reconstructed this episode in *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue* (German 1988, English 1995), arguing that the exchange concerned, beneath its ostensible subject, the deeper quarrel between political philosophy and political theology. Thiel set the two thinkers' names side by side in "The Straussian Moment."[^9][^10]
+
+### Students, Neoconservatism, and the Straussian Moment
+
+Strauss trained a large cohort of students at Chicago, among them Allan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield (at Harvard), Harry Jaffa, and Walter Berns, and a later generation including the analyst [[Paul Wolfowitz]] and the journalist William Kristol moved into government and the policy press, which is why commentators traced a line from Strauss to the foreign policy of the [[George W. Bush]] administration, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Strauss's own writing addressed no policy questions. The "Straussian" reading also split into rival camps, an East Coast school around Mansfield and an interpretively bolder West Coast school around Jaffa and the [[Claremont Institute]], which became influential on the [[Trump]]-era right.[^2][^11]
+
+Thiel's "The Straussian Moment," published in *Politics and Apocalypse* (2007), takes Strauss as one of three twentieth-century thinkers, with Schmitt and [[Rene Girard]], who saw past the optimistic anthropology of Enlightenment liberalism. Thiel reads the [[September 11 attacks]] as evidence that the Hobbesian and Lockean account of human beings as fearful, economically motivated, and threatened only by recognized states had failed, and he invokes Strauss's distinction between the exoteric surface and the esoteric core to argue that the modern state conceals its hardest necessities, a logic he extends to covert intelligence and to the surveillance work of his company [[Palantir]]. The essay treats the Straussian recovery of the ancients as possibly the last and best resource of the West while voicing the suspicion, drawn from Girard, that even the Straussian moment of triumph may prove brief.[^12][^13]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* on the Kirchhain birth, the 1921 Hamburg doctorate under Ernst Cassirer, Husserl and Heidegger, the Berlin and New School years, and the Chicago career. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
+[^2]: "Leo Strauss," *Encyclopædia Britannica,* on Straussianism, the critique of modernity, and the disputed line to neoconservatism. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Strauss
+[^3]: Strauss, Leo. *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* (1930); *The Political Philosophy of Hobbes* (1936).
+[^4]: Strauss, Leo. *Persecution and the Art of Writing.* Free Press, 1952.
+[^5]: "Morality, Nature, and Esotericism in Leo Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing," *The Review of Politics,* Cambridge, on the strong and weak accounts of esotericism. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/morality-nature-and-esotericism-in-leo-strausss-persecution-and-the-art-of-writing/AE252D909A9FE588A1ADED672DFA6C0F
+[^6]: Drury, Shadia B. *The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss.* St. Martin's Press, 1988. See also Drury, "The Esoteric Philosophy of Leo Strauss," *Political Theory* 13, no. 3 (1985).
+[^7]: Strauss, Leo. *Natural Right and History.* University of Chicago Press, 1953; and "The Three Waves of Modernity," in *An Introduction to Political Philosophy* (1989).
+[^8]: Strauss, Leo. *On Tyranny* (1948, rev. ed. with the Kojève exchange 1963); *Thoughts on Machiavelli* (1958); *The City and Man* (1964).
+[^9]: Strauss, Leo. "Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political" (1932), reprinted in *Spinoza's Critique of Religion* and in Meier's volume below; on Schmitt's June 1932 praise and the third-edition revisions. https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/notes-on-carl-schmitt-the-concept-of-the-political/
+[^10]: Meier, Heinrich. *Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue,* trans. J. Harvey Lomax. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
+[^11]: "Leo Strauss," *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,* rejecting the claim that Strauss is responsible for Iraq-war policy and noting his work "does not concern policy issues of any sort." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/strauss-leo/
+[^12]: Thiel, Peter. "The Straussian Moment," in *Politics and Apocalypse,* ed. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Michigan State University Press, 2007, pp. 189 to 218.
+[^13]: "Peter Thiel's The Straussian Moment Explained," summary of the essay's use of Strauss, Schmitt, and Girard, the September 11 framing, and the esoteric concealment argument. https://vistasofinsight.substack.com/p/peter-thiels-the-straussian-moment
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Martin
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Martin
@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+---
+category: "Scientists & Researchers"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - JeffreyEpstein
+  - Harvard
+  - SciencePhilanthropy
+  - EvolutionaryDynamics
+  - MathematicalBiology
+alias:
+  - Martin Nowak
+  - Martin A. Nowak
+summary: "Martin Nowak is a Harvard mathematical biologist who directed the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which Jeffrey Epstein helped establish with a 2003 gift, and whom Harvard sanctioned in 2021 for hosting Epstein on campus after his 2008 conviction."
+born: 1965-04-07
+location: "Cambridge, Massachusetts"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Martin A. Nowak (born April 7, 1965) is an Austrian-born mathematical biologist at [[Harvard University]] who directed the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) from its founding in 2003. The program was established with help from a $6.5 million gift from [[Jeffrey Epstein]], the largest single donation Epstein made to Harvard, and a 2020 university report found that Nowak gave Epstein an office and campus access used for more than forty visits after Epstein's 2008 sex-crimes conviction. Harvard sanctioned Nowak in 2021.[^1][^2]
+
+### Mathematical Biology at Harvard
+
+Nowak trained in biochemistry and mathematics at the University of Vienna before working at the University of Oxford and the [[Institute for Advanced Study]] in Princeton. He joined Harvard in 2003 as professor of mathematics and biology and became the founding director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which applied mathematical models to evolution, cooperation, cancer, and the dynamics of infectious disease. His books include *Evolutionary Dynamics* (Harvard University Press, 2006) and *SuperCooperators* (Free Press, 2011).[^3][^1]
+
+Nowak's central research concerns the evolution of cooperation, set out in his 2006 *Science* paper "Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation," which catalogued kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection as the mechanisms by which natural selection can favor cooperative behavior. In a 2010 *Nature* paper, "The Evolution of Eusociality," Nowak with [[Corina Tarnita]] and the biologist [[E. O. Wilson]] challenged the dominance of inclusive-fitness theory, prompting a rebuttal signed by more than 130 biologists.[^8][^9]
+
+The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics was created in 2003 under Harvard President [[Lawrence Summers]] following a proposal that, according to Harvard's later review, originated with Epstein and the mathematician [[Benedict Gross]]. Epstein told *Vanity Fair* that he had been reluctant to attach his name to the program and that Summers persuaded him to fund it. The program operated out of an office suite at One Brattle Square in Harvard Square rather than on the main campus.[^2][^4]
+
+### Epstein's Donations and Campus Access
+
+A review of Harvard's ties to Epstein, commissioned by President [[Lawrence Bacow]] in September 2019 and released on May 1, 2020, found that Epstein gave Harvard $9,179,000 across 22 gifts between 1998 and 2008, of which the $6.5 million for the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics in 2003 was the largest. The review was conducted by the Office of the General Counsel under [[Diane Lopez]] with the law firm [[Foley Hoag]], drew on more than 250,000 pages of documents, and interviewed over forty people. It found that Harvard stopped accepting Epstein gifts after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, with the decision to halt gifts made under President [[Drew Faust]] between 2007 and 2008, though Epstein gave $736,000 after his 2006 arrest but before the conviction.[^2][^5]
+
+Epstein held a formal Harvard appointment as a visiting fellow in the psychology department for the 2005 to 2006 academic year, secured through department chair [[Stephen Kosslyn]] despite Epstein's lacking the doctoral degree the position normally required; Epstein reapplied for 2006 to 2007 but withdrew after his September 2006 arrest. The report found that Epstein retained a dedicated office at PED, identified as Office 610 and known internally as "Jeffrey's Office," to which he brought his own rug and hung his own photographs, with keycard and passcode access and a Harvard telephone line that remained until 2017.[^2][^5]
+
+The report found that Epstein visited the program more than forty times between 2010 and 2018, including six visits in 2018, often accompanied by young women in their twenties described as assistants. It found that Nowak approved posting on the PED website in 2014 a webpage featuring Epstein's photograph, biography, and charitable links under a tab labeled "Friends," on which Epstein was the only entry, and that the review described the program's account of Epstein's support as "flattering and false." Summers, former Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean [[Henry Rosovsky]], and law professor [[Alan Dershowitz]] were among those recorded as attending PED events.[^2][^6]
+
+### Sanctions and Aftermath
+
+On March 26, 2021, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences [[Claudine Gay]] announced that Nowak had violated several university policies and imposed sanctions: he was barred for two years from serving as principal investigator on new grants, prohibited for two years from taking on new undergraduate, graduate, or doctoral advisees, and allowed to continue teaching undergraduate courses. Harvard announced that the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics would be closed and that Nowak's research would move into the mathematics department. Nowak had been placed on paid administrative leave in May 2020.[^1][^6]
+
+Harvard reported that it had identified $200,937 in unspent Epstein funds, which it pledged to direct to organizations supporting victims of human trafficking, and stated it would not accept future gifts from Epstein or his estate. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences lifted the sanctions in 2023, restoring Nowak's research and advising privileges in March of that year.[^2][^7]
+
+### The 2026 Files and Renewed Leave
+
+In February 2026 the journal *Nature* reported, drawing on U.S. Department of Justice files, that Epstein's involvement with Nowak's work ran deeper than the 2020 review had described, including that Epstein reviewed page proofs of the 2010 eusociality paper and gave advice on responding to its critics. Nowak's name appears more than 8,000 times in the released files. *Nature* also reported that in 2009 Epstein routed scholarship money through Corina Tarnita, then Nowak's PhD student, to two young women studying mathematics at the University of Iași in Romania; Tarnita, by then at [[Princeton University]], told *Nature* the payments were legitimate scholarships and that she wished she had never known Epstein.[^10][^11]
+
+A March 10, 2014 email chain published from the files showed Nowak writing to Epstein that "our spy was captured after completing her mission," to which Epstein replied "did you torture her." Nowak later said on his website that the line came from the video game *Civilization II*, where the response signals a successful operation. The files also showed that an Epstein assistant arranged 2014 travel for Nowak and a female Harvard graduate student to Epstein's Caribbean island.[^12][^11]
+
+On February 25, 2026, Harvard placed Nowak on paid administrative leave a second time, with FAS Dean [[Hopi Hoekstra]] citing new information from the released Department of Justice documents. In April 2026 Nowak resigned from the [[Austrian Academy of Sciences]] amid the renewed scrutiny.[^7][^13]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Gay Levies Sanctions Against Prof. Nowak for Contacts With Jeffrey Epstein," *The Harvard Crimson,* March 26, 2021, on the $6.5 million PED gift, the 40-plus visits, the sanctions, the program closure, and the May 2020 leave. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/3/26/gay-sanctions-nowak-epstein/
+[^2]: "Harvard Asked Its Lawyers to Review the University's Ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Here's What They Found," *The Harvard Crimson,* May 2, 2020, on the $9,179,000 in 22 gifts from 1998 to 2008, Office 610 with keycard access, the telephone line to 2017, the visit count, the unspent $200,937, and the halt on gifts. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/5/2/harvard-concludes-epstein-review/
+[^3]: Nowak, Martin A. *Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life.* Harvard University Press, 2006.
+[^4]: "Why did Jeffrey Epstein cultivate famous scientists?," *Scientific American,* 2019, on the establishment of PED under Summers and Epstein's account to Vanity Fair. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-did-jeffrey-epstein-cultivate-famous-scientists/
+[^5]: "Report Concerning Jeffrey E. Epstein's Connections to Harvard University," Harvard University Office of the General Counsel, May 2020, on the donation totals, the establishment of PED, and the gift policy. https://ogc.harvard.edu/file_url/208
+[^6]: "Martin Nowak Sanctioned for Jeffrey Epstein Involvement," *Harvard Magazine,* March 2021, on the policy violations, the website descriptions, and the terms of the sanctions. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2021/03/martin-nowak-sanctioned-for-jeffrey-epstein-involvement
+[^7]: "Harvard Places Math Professor Martin Nowak on Paid Administrative Leave Over Epstein Ties," *The Harvard Crimson,* February 25, 2026, on the 2023 restoration and the renewed leave. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/2/25/nowak-leave-epstein/
+[^8]: Nowak, Martin A. "Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation," *Science* 314, no. 5805 (2006): 1560-1563, on kin selection, direct and indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1133755
+[^9]: Nowak, Martin A., Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson. "The Evolution of Eusociality," *Nature* 466 (2010): 1057-1062, the paper that drew a rebuttal signed by more than 130 biologists.
+[^10]: "Martin Nowak Placed on Leave a Second Time," *Harvard Magazine,* February 2026, on the Nature reporting, the page-proof advice on the eusociality paper, the 2014 island travel, and the second leave announced February 27, 2026. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/martin-nowak-harvard-administrative-leave-epstein
+[^11]: "Did you torture her?: Emails of Jeffrey Epstein and Martin Nowak reveal shocking details," *WION,* February 2026, on the Romanian scholarships routed through Tarnita, the Iasi students, and the island travel for Nowak and a graduate student. https://www.wionews.com/photos/-did-you-torture-her-emails-of-jeffrey-epstein-and-martin-nowak-reveal-shocking-details-all-about-6-5-million-to-harvard-and-private-travels-1770656438037
+[^12]: "Professor Corina Tarnita on the Epstein Files: 'I Wish I Had Never Known Him'," *Princeton Alumni Weekly,* 2026, on the March 10, 2014 "spy"/"torture" email exchange, Nowak's Civilization II explanation, and Tarnita's account of the scholarships. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/professor-corina-tarnita-epstein-files-i-wish-i-had-never-known-him
+[^13]: "Harvard Professor Martin Nowak Resigns From Austrian Academy Amid Epstein Scrutiny," *The Harvard Crimson,* April 2, 2026, on Nowak's resignation from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/2/nowak-austrian-academy-resignation/
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Maximilian
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Maximilian
@ -0,0 +1,38 @@
+---
+category: "Extremism & Violent Networks"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - Zizians
+  - Violence
+  - DeathPenalty
+  - Vallejo
+alias:
+  - Maximilian Bentley Snyder
+summary: "Maximilian Snyder is a former University of Oxford student connected to the Zizian group who was charged with the January 2025 capital murder of Vallejo landlord Curtis Lind, allegedly to prevent Lind from testifying against other members of the group."
+location: "Vallejo, California"
+created: 2026-06-19
+updated: 2026-06-19
+---
+
+Maximilian Bentley Snyder is a young man connected to the [[The Zizians|Zizian]] group who was charged with the January 17, 2025 murder of [[Curtis Lind]], an 82-year-old [[Vallejo]] landlord, in a killing that [[Solano County]] prosecutors allege was carried out to stop Lind from testifying against other members of the group. Snyder studied philosophy and computer science at the [[University of Oxford]] from 2020 to 2024.[^1][^2]
+
+### The Lind Killing and Prosecution
+
+Lind had survived a 2022 sword attack by Zizian-affiliated tenants and was scheduled to testify in April 2025 against [[Suri Dao]] and [[Alexander Leatham]], the two charged in that attack. On January 17, 2025, Lind was stabbed to death on his Lemon Street property; prosecutors charged Snyder with murder and alleged the killing was meant to prevent his testimony. Snyder pleaded not guilty to capital murder in March 2025 and was held without bail at the Solano County Jail in Fairfield, with prosecutors indicating he could face the death penalty under California law.[^1][^3]
+
+The complaint charged a special circumstance, alleging that "the victim, C.L., was a witness to a crime" who "was intentionally killed for the purpose of preventing his testimony in a criminal proceeding," the statutory basis for a capital case. Snyder was arrested on January 24, 2025 by Redding Police Department officers and transported to the Solano County Jail. He hummed and sang to himself during his arraignment, behavior reporters noted from the courtroom, and his case moved slowly through 2025 as he returned to court in June to set a date for a preliminary hearing.[^1][^3][^4]
+
+### The Youngblut Marriage License
+
+Snyder had applied for a marriage license with [[Teresa Youngblut]], the member charged in the January 20, 2025 killing of Border Patrol agent [[David Maland]] in [[Vermont]]. The application was made in Washington in November 2024, and Snyder and Youngblut had both attended Lakeside School, a private high school in [[Seattle]]. The marriage-license record was one of the first documented links investigators drew between the California and Vermont killings.[^4][^5]
+
+Federal prosecutors in Vermont said Youngblut had been in contact with Snyder, placing the two killings, Lind's on January 17 and Maland's on January 20, within a single network operating across the country in the same week. The Oxford background set Snyder among the highly educated recruits who populated the group; he had studied philosophy and computer science there from 2020 to 2024 before the Vallejo killing put him in custody. By early 2026 he was one of at least seven people associated with the group fighting charges across three states.[^5][^6]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "22-year-old University of Oxford grad charged with murder of elderly landlord," *The Tab,* March 7, 2025. https://thetab.com/2025/03/07/22-year-old-university-of-oxford-grad-charged-with-murder-of-elderly-landlord
+[^2]: "How a California math genius spiraled into Zizian ideology and violence," *Open Vallejo,* March 12, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/12/how-a-california-math-genius-spiraled-into-zizian-ideology-and-violence/
+[^3]: "Defendant linked to 'Zizians' pleads not guilty to capital murder," *Open Vallejo,* March 26, 2025. https://openvallejo.org/2025/03/26/defendant-linked-to-zizians-pleads-not-guilty-to-capital-murder/
+[^4]: "Suspects in killings of Vermont border patrol agent and California man connected by marriage license, extreme ideology," *VTDigger,* January 27, 2025. https://vtdigger.org/2025/01/27/suspects-in-killings-of-vermont-border-patrol-agent-and-california-man-connected-by-marriage-license-extreme-ideology/
+[^5]: "A timeline of cultlike 'Zizian' group tied to killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont," Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, 2025; on the November 2024 marriage-license application and the Youngblut contact. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/a-timeline-of-cultlike-zizian-group-tied-to-killing-of-a-border-patrol-agent-in-vermont
+[^6]: "A year after border agent's killing, 7 Zizians fight charges in 3 states," WHYY, 2026. https://whyy.org/articles/border-agent-killing-zizian-criminal-charges-california-pennsylvania-vermont/
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Mike
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Mike
@ -0,0 +1,52 @@
+---
+category: "New Right"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - MikeSolana
+  - FoundersFund
+  - PirateWires
+  - Hereticon
+  - PeterThiel
+  - Media
+summary: "Mike Solana is a Founders Fund executive and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Substack publication Pirate Wires, who has worked with Peter Thiel for more than ten years and serves as the organizer of the Hereticon 'conference for thoughtcrime' and the chief marketing officer of Founders Fund."
+location: "San Francisco, California"
+created: 2026-06-18
+updated: 2026-06-18
+---
+
+Mike Solana is a [[Founders Fund]] executive and the founder and editor-in-chief of the Substack publication [[Pirate Wires]], who has worked with [[Peter Thiel]] for more than ten years. Solana holds three documented positions within the Thiel network: chief marketing officer of Founders Fund (formerly vice president), founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires (the media arm), and organizer of [[Hereticon]] (the "conference for thoughtcrime"). Across the three roles he operates the media-and-propaganda layer of the Thiel Influence Network, distinct from the commercial layer (the Founders Fund portfolio) and the convening layer ([[Dialog]] and Hereticon).[^1][^2][^3]
+
+### The Founders Fund Role
+
+Solana's senior position at Founders Fund places him inside the operational core of the Thiel commercial network. His official title has evolved from vice president to chief marketing officer, and his tenure spans more than ten years of working directly with Peter Thiel. The *Founders Fund* team page lists him as CMO, and his role encompasses the firm's external communications, the *Anatomy of Next* podcast that Founders Fund produces, and the programming for Hereticon. The CMO role at a venture firm is structurally the position that controls the public framing of the firm's thesis, which in Founders Fund's case is the *[[Zero to One]]* monopoly-and-defense argument.[^1]
+
+The Founders Fund podcast *Anatomy of Next* has published Hereticon sessions including "Apocalypse Ball" by Solana and a session with Thiel revisiting his 1995 essay *The Diversity Myth* on its thirtieth anniversary. The podcast functions as the audio-distribution channel for the conference programming that Solana curates, and the cross-publication (the podcast releasing sessions from the private conference) carries the Hereticon content to a broader audience than the invitation-only attendees.[^1]
+
+### Pirate Wires and the Media Layer
+
+Pirate Wires is the media outlet Solana founded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, originally launched on Substack and later migrated to its own domain at piratewires.com. The publication covers the intersection of technology, politics, and culture from the Thiel-network perspective and has positioned itself as the in-house media voice of the Founders Fund network. Solana's own Substack bio describes him self-mockingly as "billionaire media tycoon and mayor of san francisco," a posture consistent with the publication's bombastic editorial register.[^3][^4]
+
+The launch mission statement, published as "Welcome to Pirate Wires," declared the outlet "an American media company writing at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture." *The Atlantic* profiled Solana in October 2024 as "The Most Opinionated Man in America," describing him as a "Peter Thiel protege" whose Pirate Wires newsletter had become required reading among what the magazine called the anti-woke investor class. The *Digg* coverage of the launch characterized Pirate Wires as a "Founders Fund-backed media franchise" intended to replace the traditional venture-capital communication model (the polite TechCrunch launch piece) with direct ideological combat.[^3][^4][^6]
+
+The media-layer function is distinct from the convening function. Pirate Wires produces the public framing of the Thiel-network positions on tech-policy questions (deplatforming, content moderation, AI regulation, defense procurement) and distributes that framing through a subscription model that reaches a broader audience than the Dialog or Hereticon invitation lists. The Solana *Reason* interview (May 2022) laid out the editorial posture directly: Solana argued that tech figures and journalists had become "natural enemies" over the question of who controls the boundary of acceptable discourse, and the framing has structured Pirate Wires' subsequent coverage. The publication has run pieces defending portfolio companies and network principals under media scrutiny, including the "Substack Billionaire" piece defending [[Coinbase]] against *New York Times* coverage, and the recurring editorial line tracks the Founders Fund commercial and political positions across defense tech, cryptocurrency, and the anti-regulation frame.[^2][^3]
+
+### Hereticon and the Convening Layer
+
+Solana is the organizer and public face of Hereticon, the Founders Fund conference self-described as "a conference for thoughtcrime." The conference was announced in October 2019 and held its inaugural event January 10 through 13, 2022, with programming spanning immortality research, UFO claims, doomsday prepping, defense-technology ethics, and ideological heterodoxy. The *Reason* interview with Solana around the inaugural event covered the deliberate privacy of the venue, the refusal of press access, and the framing of the conference as a venue for ideas excluded from mainstream forums.[^1][^5]
+
+Solana's role across the three positions (Founders Fund CMO, Pirate Wires editor, Hereticon organizer) places a single individual in control of the firm's public communications, the media outlet that frames its positions, and the private conference that convenes the principals. The *Anatomy of Next* podcast, which Solana also controls, distributes selected Hereticon sessions to a broader audience than the invitation-only attendees, including the "Apocalypse Ball" session and the Thiel session revisiting *The Diversity Myth* on its thirtieth anniversary. The cross-publication carries the private conference's content into the public layer that Pirate Wires serves, and the combination of the three properties constitutes an integrated media-and-convening operation under a single editor.[^1]
+
+### The Atlantic Profile and the Public Persona
+
+*The Atlantic* profile (October 2024) is the most detailed public record on Solana's role and worldview. The profile describes him as the public-facing voice of the Thiel network's positions on culture-war and tech-policy questions, positioned against what he frames as a captured mainstream institutional press. The profile documents the relationship between Pirate Wires' editorial line and the Founders Fund portfolio interests (defense tech, cryptocurrency, anti-regulation), and the recurring pattern in which the outlet's positions track the commercial and political positions of the network whose media arm it is.[^3]
+
+The profile's framing of Solana as "not an obvious fit for Founders Fund" when he joined documents the career trajectory: a humanities-and-media background figure who entered the venture firm and built the media infrastructure around it rather than building a portfolio of investments. The trajectory is the inverse of the [[Blake Masters]] or [[JD Vance]] pattern (operatives placed into electoral politics from inside the commercial orbit); Solana was placed into the commercial orbit to build its media arm, and the *Atlantic* profile is the document of that role.[^3]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Founders Fund. "Michael Solana" team page. https://foundersfund.com/team/michael-solana/ ; Founders Fund. "Anatomy of Next" podcast, Hereticon episodes. https://foundersfund.com/anatomy-of-next/
+[^2]: "Mike Solana Wants You To Commit Thoughtcrimes." *Reason,* May 15, 2022. https://reason.com/2022/05/15/mike-solana-wants-you-to-commit-thoughtcrimes/
+[^3]: "The Most Opinionated Man in America." *The Atlantic,* October 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/mike-solana-pirate-wires/680355/
+[^4]: "Mike Solana, Pirate Wires editor-in-chief, launches a Founders Fund-backed media franchise." *Digg,* 2022. https://digg.com/tech/r5s3pf8h
+[^5]: "Peter Thiel's VC Firm Founders Fund Announces Hereticon." *Business Insider,* October 2019. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-vc-firm-founders-fund-hereticon-conference-immortality-ufo-2019-10
+[^6]: Pirate Wires. "Welcome to Pirate Wires" launch post. https://www.piratewires.com/p/welcome-to-pirate-wires ; "Substack Billionaire." *Pirate Wires.* https://www.piratewires.com/p/substack-billionaire
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Nick
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Nick
@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+category: "Technologists"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - NickSzabo
+  - Cryptography
+  - Cypherpunks
+  - SmartContracts
+  - Bitcoin
+  - DigitalCash
+alias:
+  - Nicholas Szabo
+summary: "Nick Szabo is a computer scientist and legal scholar who proposed the digital-cash scheme bit gold, coined the concept of smart contracts, and is recurrently and consistently denied to be Satoshi Nakamoto."
+location: "United States"
+created: 2026-06-19
+updated: 2026-06-19
+---
+
+Nick Szabo is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and legal scholar associated with the [[Cypherpunks]] movement who designed several of the conceptual building blocks of cryptocurrency. He coined the term "smart contract" in the 1990s, proposed the digital-cash scheme "bit gold" that prefigured [[Bitcoin]], and wrote the essay "The God Protocols." He is among the most frequently named candidates for the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator [[Satoshi Nakamoto]], a claim he has consistently denied.[^1][^2]
+
+### Smart Contracts
+
+Szabo studied computer science at the [[University of Washington]] and later took a law degree from [[George Washington University]]. In the mid-1990s he introduced the idea of the smart contract, a self-executing agreement whose terms are written directly into code so that obligations are enforced automatically without a trusted intermediary, set out in his 1996 paper "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets." The concept later became foundational to blockchain platforms such as [[Ethereum]].[^1][^3]
+
+Szabo's canonical illustration was the vending machine, which he called "the primitive ancestor of smart contracts": a device that takes in coins and dispenses product and change through a mechanism that enforces the bargain within a loss limited to the cash in the till. He developed the idea formally in "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks," published in First Monday in September 1997, which set out four contractual objectives that cryptographic protocols could secure: observability, verifiability, privity, and enforceability. His skepticism toward trusted intermediaries was shaped by roughly six months consulting for [[David Chaum]]'s DigiCash in Amsterdam, where he concluded that the centralized design, which let the operator alter balances, was a fatal flaw and pushed him toward decentralized money.[^7][^8]
+
+### The God Protocols and Bit Gold
+
+In his 1997 essay "The God Protocols," Szabo imagined an ideal trusted third party, a hypothetical deity to whom parties could hand their inputs and receive correct outputs, and asked how far cryptography could approximate that ideal without an actual trusted party. He first described "bit gold" in the late 1990s and expanded it in a 2005 blog post, proposing a scarce digital asset produced through proof-of-work and chained cryptographically so that it could be created, transferred, and verified online with minimal trust, mirroring the properties of physical gold. Bit gold was a direct conceptual precursor to Bitcoin, alongside [[Hal Finney]]'s reusable proof-of-work and [[Wei Dai]]'s b-money.[^3][^4]
+
+In the bit gold design, set out on his Unenumerated blog in December 2005, a participant generated a proof-of-work string from a challenge, had it securely timestamped, and entered it in a distributed property title registry, with the last string created supplying the challenge bits for the next so that the records formed an unforgeable chain of title. Szabo grounded the scheme in the argument of his 2002 essay "Shelling Out: The Origins of Money," which held that money began with "collectibles" whose value rested on "unforgeably costly" production, the same property bit gold sought to recreate digitally. He flagged in advance the design's central weakness, that hidden advances in computer architecture could create undetected supply gluts, and located the title registry's security in the Byzantine quorum scheme of his 1998 essay "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority."[^9][^10]
+
+### Satoshi Speculation
+
+A 2014 linguistic study comparing eleven candidates against the Bitcoin white paper found Szabo's writing the closest match, with its lead researcher Jack Grieve calling the similarities "uncanny." In May 2015 the journalist [[Nathaniel Popper]] named Szabo as a leading Satoshi candidate in the *New York Times,* reporting that many Bitcoin insiders considered him the most likely author; Szabo replied "I'm not Satoshi." He has repeatedly rejected the attribution, writing in 2014 that "you got it wrong doxing me as Satoshi." Popper's book *Digital Gold* (2015) examined the case at length, and later documentary and press investigations through 2026 named various suspects without conclusive proof.[^2][^5][^6]
+
+The circumstantial case against Szabo rests on more than stylometry. He had spent more than a decade designing the exact components Bitcoin assembled, his April 2008 blog request for help coding bit gold came months before the white paper appeared in October 2008, and bit gold went undeployed even after Bitcoin proved the design worked, which some read as the behavior of a creator who had moved on under a pseudonym. Szabo has pointed to the absence of any documentary link, and the stylometric finding was never published in a peer-reviewed venue, leaving the attribution unproven. The 2024 HBO documentary "Money Electric" instead named the developer Peter Todd, who denied it, and no court filing or release through 2026 has resolved the question.[^11]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Notable Crypto Personalities: Nick Szabo," *The Block,* on his career, smart contracts, and bit gold. https://www.theblock.co/profile/350036/nick-szabo
+[^2]: "Satoshi Files: Nick Szabo," *CoinMarketCap,* on the Satoshi speculation, the linguistic study, and Szabo's denials. https://coinmarketcap.com/academy/article/satoshi-files-nick-szabo
+[^3]: Szabo, Nick. "Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets," 1996; "The God Protocols," 1997; "Bit Gold," 2005. http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
+[^4]: "The Extropian Roots of Bitcoin," *CCN,* on bit gold and the cypherpunk precursors of Bitcoin. https://www.ccn.com/extropian-roots-bitcoin/
+[^5]: "What's in a Name: Linguistic Study Identifies Nick Szabo as the Real Satoshi Nakamoto," *Cointelegraph,* on the Grieve study. https://cointelegraph.com/news/what_s_in_a_name_linguistic_study_identifies_nick_szabo_as_the_real_satoshi_nakamoto
+[^6]: Popper, Nathaniel. *Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money.* Harper, 2015; and "Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto," *New York Times,* 15 May 2015.
+[^7]: Szabo, Nick. "The Idea of Smart Contracts," 1997, on the vending machine as the primitive ancestor of smart contracts. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/the-idea-of-smart-contracts/
+[^8]: Szabo, Nick. "Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks," *First Monday,* vol. 2, no. 9, 1 September 1997. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548 Van Wirdum, Aaron. "The Genesis Files: With Bit Gold, Szabo Was Inches Away From Inventing Bitcoin," *Bitcoin Magazine,* July 12, 2018, on his DigiCash consulting. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-bit-gold-szabo-was-inches-away-inventing-bitcoin
+[^9]: Szabo, Nick. "Bit Gold," Unenumerated, December 29, 2005. http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
+[^10]: Szabo, Nick. "Shelling Out: The Origins of Money," 2002, https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/shelling-out/; and "Secure Property Titles with Owner Authority," 1998, on the Byzantine quorum title registry. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/secure-property-titles/
+[^11]: Van Wirdum, Aaron. "The Genesis Files: With Bit Gold, Szabo Was Inches Away From Inventing Bitcoin," *Bitcoin Magazine,* July 12, 2018, on the April 2008 coding request and the undeployed design; and "Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery," HBO, October 2024, naming Peter Todd, who denied it. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/genesis-files-bit-gold-szabo-was-inches-away-inventing-bitcoin
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Peter
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Peter
@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+---
+category: "Scientists & Researchers"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - Utilitarianism
+  - EffectiveAltruism
+  - AnimalRights
+  - Bioethics
+  - Princeton
+alias:
+  - Peter Singer
+  - Peter Albert David Singer
+summary: "Peter Singer is an Australian utilitarian philosopher at Princeton whose 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality' and its drowning-child argument became the founding text of effective altruism, and who wrote Animal Liberation in 1975."
+born: 1946-07-06
+location: "Princeton, New Jersey; Melbourne, Australia"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Peter Singer (born July 6, 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher, long the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at [[Princeton University]], whose utilitarian arguments for aiding the global poor and for the moral status of animals made him one of the most widely read and most protested philosophers of the late twentieth century. His 1972 essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and its drowning-child thought experiment are routinely cited as the founding text of the [[Effective Altruism]] movement, and he keynoted the movement's 2013 summit.[^1][^2]
+
+### Education and Career
+
+Singer was born in [[Melbourne]] to Austrian Jewish refugees who had fled Vienna after the 1938 Nazi annexation of [[Austria]]; three of his grandparents died in the Holocaust, and his maternal grandfather, the classicist David Ernst Oppenheim, was murdered at Theresienstadt. He took a BA in 1967 and an MA in 1969 at the [[University of Melbourne]], the latter on the thesis "Why Should I Be Moral?", then a BPhil at [[University of Oxford|Oxford]] in 1971 under R. M. Hare. He held a Radcliffe lectureship at University College, Oxford, and a visiting post at New York University before returning to Australia.[^3]
+
+At Monash University he twice chaired the philosophy department and founded the Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1999 he was appointed the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton's University Center for Human Values, a post he held until his final lecture in 2023. His applied work in *Practical Ethics* (1979) extended utilitarian reasoning to abortion, euthanasia, severe infant disability, and the treatment of animals, and his stated positions on infanticide in cases of severe disability drew organized protests in Germany and Switzerland in 1989 and 1990 and a public campaign against his Princeton appointment, with the publisher Steve Forbes withdrawing donations to the university.[^3][^4]
+
+### Famine, Affluence, and Morality
+
+"Famine, Affluence, and Morality," published in *Philosophy and Public Affairs* in 1972, argued from a single premise: "If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it." Singer illustrated it with a child drowning in a shallow pond: a passerby who could wade in and save the child at the cost only of muddy clothes is plainly obligated to do so, and Singer held that the geographic distance of a dying child abroad makes no moral difference to the same obligation. The essay concluded that affluent people are bound to give away income up to the point of marginal sacrifice toward famine relief.[^1][^5]
+
+The essay became one of the most reprinted pieces in modern moral philosophy and supplied effective altruism its motivating intuition; movement organizers and [[William MacAskill]] have described the drowning-child argument as the writing that did more than any other to launch the movement. Singer joined [[Giving What We Can]] in November 2009, pledging at least ten percent of his income, the year [[Toby Ord]] and MacAskill founded the society.[^2][^5]
+
+### Animal Liberation and the Expanding Circle
+
+*Animal Liberation*, published in 1975, argued that the interests of all sentient beings deserve equal consideration and that disregarding animal suffering on the basis of species, which Singer following Richard Ryder called "speciesism," is a prejudice structurally like racism. The book became the foundational text of the modern animal-rights movement and the intellectual basis for the farmed-animal-welfare cause that effective altruism later adopted as a priority; Singer has served on the board of Animal Charity Evaluators.[^3]
+
+*The Expanding Circle*, published in 1981, drew on sociobiology to argue that the scope of beings a person treats as morally considerable has widened over history from kin to tribe to nation to all humanity and, Singer urged, should widen further to all sentient life, with impartial reason as the engine of that expansion. Singer's normative position was for decades a preference utilitarianism, on which an act's rightness depends on how far it satisfies the preferences of those affected; in *The Point of View of the Universe* (2014), written with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, he returned to a hedonistic utilitarianism descended from [[Henry Sidgwick]].[^6]
+
+### The Life You Can Save and Effective Altruism
+
+Singer's 2009 book *The Life You Can Save* restated the case for effective giving against global poverty and gave its name to a charity Singer co-founded in 2013 with the psychologist Charlie Bresler, which evaluates and recommends high-impact poverty charities. His 2013 TED talk "The why and how of effective altruism" and his 2015 book *The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically* placed him at the public head of the movement.[^7][^8]
+
+In 2013 Singer delivered a keynote at the Effective Altruism Summit, a week-long gathering in the [[San Francisco Bay Area]] that brought together the Oxford philosophers, the charity evaluator [[GiveWell]], and the [[Rationalist Community]]. The 2013 summit was the same event that [[Peter Thiel]] keynoted, and the year before [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] adopted the earning-to-give strategy MacAskill had presented to him. Singer was awarded the inaugural Berggruen Prize in 2021, donating the one-million-dollar award.[^2][^8]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Singer, Peter. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." *Philosophy and Public Affairs,* vol. 1, no. 3, 1972, on the central principle and the drowning-child argument. Reprinted at Giving What We Can. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/videos-books-and-essays/famine-affluence-and-morality-peter-singer
+[^2]: "Peter Singer's Keynote, Effective Altruism Summit 2013," on the 2013 Bay Area summit address; "The drowning child," Princeton University Press, on the argument's role in launching the movement. https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-drowning-child
+[^3]: "Peter Singer," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Princeton University Center for Human Values, on the 1946 birth, the Melbourne and Oxford degrees, Monash, the 1999 Princeton appointment, *Animal Liberation,* and the disability protests. https://uchv.princeton.edu/people/peter-singer
+[^4]: Singer, Peter. *Practical Ethics.* Cambridge University Press, 1979.
+[^5]: "Death in a Shallow Pond," Princeton University Press (David Edmonds), on the reprinting history and the argument's foundational role in effective altruism. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691254029/death-in-a-shallow-pond
+[^6]: Singer, Peter. *The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology.* Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981; de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna, and Peter Singer. *The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics.* Oxford University Press, 2014.
+[^7]: "About Us," The Life You Can Save, on the 2009 book, the 2013 co-founding with Charlie Bresler, and the charity's mission. https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/about-us/
+[^8]: Singer, Peter. "The why and how of effective altruism," TED2013; Singer, Peter. *The Most Good You Can Do.* Yale University Press, 2015. https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_singer_the_why_and_how_of_effective_altruism
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Steve
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Steve
@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+---
+category: "New Right"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - SteveSailer
+  - HumanBiodiversity
+  - RaceScience
+  - AltRight
+  - Immigration
+summary: "Steve Sailer is an American journalist and blogger who popularized the term human biodiversity, founded its discussion network in the late 1990s, and originated the white-turnout 'Sailer Strategy,' becoming a connective figure between hereditarian race science and the alt-right."
+born: 1958-12-20
+location: "Los Angeles, California"
+created: 2026-06-19
+updated: 2026-06-19
+---
+
+Steve Sailer (born December 20, 1958) is an American journalist and blogger who became the leading popularizer of [[Human Biodiversity|human biodiversity]], the euphemism for hereditarian claims about race and intelligence, and a connective figure between academic race science and the [[Alt-Right|alt-right]]. He founded the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group in the late 1990s, wrote for paleoconservative and anti-immigration outlets, and originated an electoral theory that anticipated the racial politics of the [[Donald Trump|Trump]] era.[^1][^2]
+
+### Human Biodiversity and the Sailer Strategy
+
+Sailer organized an invitation-only Human Biodiversity Discussion Group around 1998 and built an audience for hereditarian arguments through his columns and blog. He drew on the race-and-IQ framework of [[Charles Murray]] and [[Richard Herrnstein]]'s *The Bell Curve* and presented average group differences in intelligence as genetically grounded, a position mainstream science rejects as scientific racism. In 2000 he advanced what became known as the "Sailer Strategy," the argument that the Republican Party should win national elections by maximizing turnout among white voters rather than courting minorities, a thesis later echoed in the [[Steve Bannon|Bannon]]-era nationalist politics.[^1][^3]
+
+Sailer created a "Roster of Human Biodiversity Discussion Group Members" dated March 3, 1999, and later styled the listserv the Human Biodiversity Institute. The invitation-only group drew academics in race-and-IQ and sex-difference research along with sympathetic journalists, among them the science writer [[Razib Khan]] and the anthropologist [[Gregory Cochran]]. After the 2016 election the columnist [[Michael Barone]] credited Sailer with having mapped in 2001 the white-turnout electoral route that Trump later followed, and the writer's racial-realignment thesis circulated in nationalist circles around Bannon.[^5][^6]
+
+### Outlets and Influence
+
+Sailer wrote film criticism and political commentary for [[United Press International]] and *[[National Review]]* before parting with the latter, and he became a regular contributor to the anti-immigration website [[VDARE]] and to *[[Taki's Magazine]]*. His framing of "noticing" group differences and his immigration-restrictionist "citizenism" circulated widely in the online right and were cited by alt-right and neoreactionary writers, placing his work in the same hereditarian substrate that runs through [[Curtis Yarvin]]'s [[Neoreaction|neoreaction]] and the race-science discourse that surfaced inside the [[Rationalist Community]]. The [[Southern Poverty Law Center]] classifies Sailer as a promoter of racist pseudoscience.[^2][^4]
+
+Born in 1958 and adopted by a Lockheed engineer, Sailer grew up in Studio City and took a degree from [[Rice University]] in 1980 and an MBA from the [[University of California, Los Angeles|UCLA]] in 1982. He wrote a *National Review* column from 1994 until he was pushed out in 1997 around the time [[Rich Lowry]] succeeded [[John O'Sullivan]] as editor. His "citizenism," coined in the mid-2000s, held that Americans should weigh the welfare of fellow citizens above that of foreigners, a frame later adopted by the columnist [[John Derbyshire]]; in February 2024 the new-right house [[Passage Publishing]] issued a collected volume of his work titled *Noticing: An Essential Reader, 1973-2023*.[^2][^7]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Human Biodiversity, Open Borders, IQ, and Western Civilization," CAIRCO, documenting Sailer's role in popularizing "human biodiversity" and the discussion group; recorded as the movement's self-description, not an endorsement. https://www.cairco.org/highlights/open-borders-iq-and-western-civilization
+[^2]: "Steve Sailer," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/steve-sailer
+[^3]: Sailer, Steve, columns on the "Sailer Strategy," 2000 onward; collected in *Noticing: An Essential Reader,* 2024.
+[^4]: Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray. *The Bell Curve.* Free Press, 1994, the hereditarian framework Sailer drew upon.
+[^5]: "Human Biodiversity Institute," documenting the March 3, 1999 roster of the Human Biodiversity Discussion Group and its membership; treated as a record of the group's self-description, not an endorsement.
+[^6]: "Steve Sailer," Southern Poverty Law Center extremist file, on the HBD group, the discussion list, and the Sailer Strategy. https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/steve-sailer
+[^7]: "Noticing: An Essential Reader (1973-2023)," Passage Publishing, 2024, on the collected volume; biographical details on the Rice and UCLA degrees and the 1994-1997 National Review column from contemporaneous reporting. https://passage.press/products/noticingpaperback
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Toby
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Toby
@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+category: "AI & Effective Altruism"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - EffectiveAltruism
+  - Longtermism
+  - Oxford
+  - ExistentialRisk
+  - FutureOfHumanityInstitute
+alias:
+  - Toby Ord
+  - Toby David Godfrey Ord
+summary: "Toby Ord is an Australian moral philosopher at Oxford who cofounded Giving What We Can and the effective altruism movement, was a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and wrote The Precipice, which argues there is a one-in-six chance humanity suffers an existential catastrophe this century."
+born: 1979
+location: "Oxford, England"
+created: 2026-06-19
+updated: 2026-06-19
+---
+
+Toby Ord (born July 1979) is an Australian moral philosopher at the [[University of Oxford]] who cofounded the [[Effective Altruism]] movement and became one of the leading academic theorists of existential risk. He founded [[Giving What We Can]], the pledge society that anchored the movement's early growth, was a senior research fellow at the [[Future of Humanity Institute]], and wrote *The Precipice*, a 2020 book arguing that humanity faces a roughly one-in-six chance of an existential catastrophe within the next hundred years.[^1][^2]
+
+### Giving What We Can
+
+Ord was born in [[Melbourne]] and studied computer science before switching to philosophy at the [[University of Melbourne]], then moved to Oxford for graduate work. There he calculated that he could earn roughly 1.5 million pounds over his career and give away about a million of it while keeping a graduate student's standard of living, and he pledged to donate everything above a fixed personal income. In 2009 he and the philosopher [[William MacAskill]] founded Giving What We Can, an international society whose members pledge at least ten percent of their income to the most cost-effective charities; its members have collectively pledged well over a billion dollars. The pledge model, paired with the charity-evaluation work of [[GiveWell]] and [[Holden Karnofsky]], formed the practical core of effective altruism.[^3][^4]
+
+Ord launched Giving What We Can in November 2009 alongside his wife, the physician Bernadette Young, with whom he committed to capping his own annual spending and donating the rest. He set his personal living allowance at about 18,000 pounds a year, giving away everything earned above it toward a lifetime target of one million pounds, with the bulk going to the SCI Foundation and Deworm the World (both deworming programs), the [[Against Malaria Foundation]], and the poverty-research lab J-PAL. The society grew from a handful of Oxford members to more than 9,000, and by March 2022 the pledges of its members totaled more than 2.5 billion dollars in expected lifetime giving.[^3][^7]
+
+### Future of Humanity Institute and Existential Risk
+
+Ord was a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, the Oxford center founded by [[Nick Bostrom]] in 2005 that became the academic headquarters of [[Longtermism|longtermism]]. His research moved from the ethics of global poverty toward existential risk, the danger of events that would permanently destroy humanity's long-term potential, the same focus that animated Bostrom's work and the AI-safety concerns of the [[Rationalist Community]]. Ord has advised the [[World Health Organization]], the [[World Bank]], the [[World Economic Forum]], the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and the UK Prime Minister's Office.[^1][^2]
+
+The Future of Humanity Institute closed on April 16, 2024 after nineteen years, with Oxford's Faculty of Philosophy declining to renew the remaining staff contracts following a 2020 freeze on its hiring and fundraising; Bostrom called it "death by bureaucracy." The shutdown followed a period of reputational damage, including the 2023 resurfacing of a 1996 email in which Bostrom had used a racial slur, for which he apologized and which prompted an Oxford inquiry. Ord had by then moved to the Oxford Martin School's AI Governance Initiative, continuing the existential-risk work the institute had housed.[^8][^9]
+
+### The Precipice
+
+*The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity*, published in 2020, surveyed the catastrophes that could end the human story, natural and anthropogenic, and assigned probabilities to each. Ord judged engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence the gravest near-term threats and estimated the combined chance of an existential catastrophe this century at about one in six. The book argued that reducing such risks should rank among the highest global priorities, the central claim of the longtermist program that MacAskill later developed in *What We Owe the Future* and that the [[FTX Future Fund]] of [[Sam Bankman-Fried]] funded before its 2022 collapse.[^5][^6]
+
+Ord's Table 6.1 gave per-century estimates that placed unaligned artificial intelligence at roughly one in ten, engineered pandemics at one in thirty, nuclear war and climate change at one in a thousand each, and all natural risks combined (asteroids, supervolcanoes, naturally arising pandemics) at only about one in ten thousand. He stressed that the anthropogenic figures were order-of-magnitude judgments that could "easily be a factor of 3 higher or lower," and that the era of human-made existential risk had begun only with the atomic bomb in 1945, which he called the start of the "Precipice." His framing of AI as the single largest source of extinction risk became a load-bearing premise for the AI-safety funding that flowed from [[Open Philanthropy]] and the FTX Future Fund into the labs and research centers.[^2][^10]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Toby Ord," Giving What We Can profile, on the Oxford position, the Future of Humanity Institute fellowship, and advisory roles. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/people/toby-ord
+[^2]: Ord, Toby. *The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.* Bloomsbury, 2020.
+[^3]: "Toby Ord: Why I'm giving £1m to charity," *BBC News,* 2010, on the career-earnings calculation and the pledge. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-11950843
+[^4]: "Our history," Giving What We Can, on the 2009 founding with William MacAskill and the cumulative pledge total. https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/history
+[^5]: "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity," Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, on the one-in-six estimate and the book's argument. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-precipice-existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity/
+[^6]: "Existential risk and the future of humanity (Toby Ord)," EA Forum, on the book's risk taxonomy and probability estimates. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BAfEgTaK5BsperQEc/existential-risk-and-the-future-of-humanity-toby-ord
+[^7]: "Toby Ord: Why I'm giving £1m to charity," *BBC News,* 2010, on the 18,000-pound living allowance and the named charities; "Oxford-based charity receives more than $2.5 billion in pledges," University of Oxford, March 1, 2022. https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-03-01-oxford-based-charity-receives-more-25-billion-pledges-community-effective-givers
+[^8]: "Oxford shuts down institute run by Elon Musk-backed philosopher," *The Guardian,* April 20, 2024, on the April 16, 2024 closure and "death by bureaucracy." https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2024/04/20/oxford-shuts-down-elon-musk-funded-future-of-humanity-institute/
+[^9]: "Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute," *Asterisk,* on the 2020 hiring freeze, the contract non-renewals, and the institute's nineteen-year run. https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/looking-back-at-the-future-of-humanity-institute
+[^10]: "Some thoughts on Toby Ord's existential risk estimates," EA Forum, reproducing Table 6.1 with the one-in-ten AI figure and the order-of-magnitude caveat. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z5KZ2cui8WDjyF6gJ/some-thoughts-on-toby-ord-s-existential-risk-estimates
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Tom
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Tom
@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+category: "Crime & Abuse Networks"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - TomPritzker
+  - Hyatt
+  - JeffreyEpstein
+  - SecretSociety
+  - Billionaire
+alias:
+  - Thomas J. Pritzker
+  - Thomas Pritzker
+summary: "Thomas J. Pritzker is the billionaire executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and chairman of the Pritzker family's business empire, whose 2011 correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein used the phrase 'secret society' (Epstein Files document EFTA02407727), establishing a parallel 'secret society' channel through Epstein independent of the Peter Thiel correspondence."
+born: 1950-06-06
+location: "Chicago, Illinois (family base)"
+created: 2026-06-18
+updated: 2026-06-18
+---
+
+Thomas J. Pritzker (born June 6, 1950) is an American billionaire businessman, the executive chairman of [[Hyatt Hotels Corporation]], and the chairman of the broader [[Pritzker Organization|Pritzker family]] business empire. The Pritzker family's holdings span hotels (Hyatt), industrial manufacturing ([[Marmon Group|Marmon Group/Trinity Industries]]), finance, and the philanthropic [[Pritzker Foundation|Pritzker Foundation]], and the family's cumulative wealth places it among the wealthiest American business dynasties. Pritzker's correspondence with [[Jeffrey Epstein]] in 2011, documented in the EFTA releases as document [[EFTA02407727|EFTA02407727]], used the phrase "secret society," establishing a second documented "secret society" channel through Epstein independent of the [[Peter Thiel]] correspondence.[^1][^2][^3]
+
+### The Pritzker Family and the Hyatt Empire
+
+The [[Pritzker family|Pritzker family]] built its wealth across the twentieth century through a diversified holding structure anchored by Hyatt (founded by Pritzker's father [[Donald Pritzker|Donald]] and uncle [[Jay Pritzker|Jay]] in 1957), the Marmon Group industrial conglomerate, the [[Superior Bank|Superior Bank]] (which failed in 2001 in an early instance of the securitization-driven banking collapses), and a range of venture and private-equity holdings. Thomas Pritzker succeeded his father and uncle as the principal executive of the family's business operations and took Hyatt public in 2009.[^1]
+
+The Pritzker family's philanthropic arm, the Pritzker Foundation, has funded the [[Pritzker School of Medicine|Pritzker School of Medicine]] at the [[University of Chicago]], the [[Pritzker Military Museum & Library|Pritzker Military Museum & Library]], and a range of cultural and educational institutions in [[Chicago]] and nationally. [[J.B. Pritzker|J.B. Pritzker]], Thomas's cousin, is the current [[Governor of Illinois|Governor of Illinois]] and a prominent [[Democratic Party|Democratic]] political figure. The family's political and philanthropic footprint spans both parties and multiple institutional sectors.[^1]
+
+### The Epstein Correspondence and the "Secret Society" Email
+
+The EFTA releases include document EFTA02407727, a 2011 correspondence between Pritzker and Jeffrey Epstein in which Pritzker used the phrase "secret society." Epstein's reply, per the document, was "Remind me next month." The document is indexed in the [[Epstein Files|Epstein file]] aggregators and cited in the secondary reporting on the Epstein-Pritzker relationship. The correspondence is dated 2011, three years after Epstein's 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement.[^2][^3]
+
+The Pritzker "secret society" email runs parallel to the Thiel-Epstein "secret society idea" correspondence (documented in [[EFTA01738574|EFTA01738574]], dated February 2016). The two are independent channels: the Thiel correspondence records Epstein reporting that Thiel "LOVED the secret socieity [sic] idea," and the Pritzker correspondence records Pritzker himself using the phrase. Whether the two channels refer to the same "secret society" concept or to separate projects is not established in the primary documents. The 2011 Pritzker email predates the 2016 Thiel email by five years.[^2][^4]
+
+### The Pritzker-Epstein Relationship
+
+The *Wall Street Journal* reported in 2023, on the basis of the Epstein calendars, that Pritzker was among the business figures who met with Epstein repeatedly in the post-2008-conviction period. Pritzker's meetings with Epstein occurred in the 2011-2014 window and included discussions that Pritzker's representatives framed as relating to philanthropic and business matters. The *Wall Street Journal* reporting placed Pritzker alongside [[William Burns]], [[Noam Chomsky]], and the former Goldman Sachs lawyer [[Kathryn Ruemmler|Kathryn Ruemmler]] in the group of establishment figures whose Epstein meetings were documented in the calendars.[^3]
+
+The Pritzker-Epstein relationship is the parallel establishment channel to the Thiel-Epstein relationship. Both channels run through Epstein in the post-2008-conviction period, both involve "secret society" language, and both connect Epstein to principals of major business and institutional networks (the Pritzker hotel-and-finance empire and the Thiel technology-and-defense empire respectively). The question of whether the two channels intersect, beyond the shared Epstein intermediary, is not documented in the primary sources currently available.[^2][^3][^4]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Hyatt Hotels Corporation, "Board of Directors: Thomas J. Pritzker," documenting his role as executive chairman (assumed 2004), the November 2009 IPO, and his Marmon Holdings chairmanship. https://investors.hyatt.com/governance/board-of-directors/
+[^2]: EFTA02407727, Epstein Files Transparency Act release. The 2011 Pritzker-Epstein correspondence using the phrase "secret society," with Epstein's reply "Remind me next month." Documented in the Epstein file aggregators.
+[^3]: "Jeffrey Epstein's Private Calendar" series, *Wall Street Journal,* 2023, documenting the Pritzker-Epstein meetings from the Epstein calendars.
+[^4]: For the parallel Thiel-Epstein "secret society idea" correspondence, see EFTA01738574 (February 6, 2016) and the Peter Thiel and [[Thiel Influence Network]] pages.
--- a/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Trae
+++ b/PEOPLE/(N-S)/Trae
@ -0,0 +1,67 @@
+---
+category: "Technologists"
+tags:
+  - Person
+  - TraeStephens
+  - Anduril
+  - FoundersFund
+  - Palantir
+  - DefenseTech
+  - Trump
+summary: "Trae Stephens is a Founders Fund partner and cofounder of Anduril Industries who began as an intelligence-community linguist and early Palantir employee, led the Department of Defense team on Donald Trump's 2016 transition, and whose ACTS 17 Collective hosted Peter Thiel's 2025 Antichrist lectures."
+born: 1983
+location: "San Francisco, California"
+created: 2026-06-20
+updated: 2026-06-20
+---
+
+Trae Stephens is an American investor and defense-technology executive who is a partner at [[Founders Fund]], the cofounder and executive chairman of [[Anduril Industries]], an early employee of [[Palantir Technologies]], and the official who led the Department of Defense team on [[Donald Trump]]'s 2016 presidential transition. He holds positions at [[Peter Thiel]]'s venture firm, Thiel's original government-data company, and the defense startup the firm bankrolled, and his ACTS 17 Collective hosted Thiel's 2025 lecture series on the [[Antichrist]].[^1][^2]
+
+### Intelligence Community Origins
+
+Stephens entered [[Georgetown University]]'s School of Foreign Service after the September 11 attacks, studying Arabic and security studies and graduating in 2006. He began his career in the office of then-Congressman [[Rob Portman]] and in the political-affairs office of the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, in the period following the installation of [[Hamid Karzai]]'s transitional government. He then worked as a computational linguist inside the United States intelligence community, building enterprise tools for Arabic and Persian name-matching and data enrichment.[^2][^3]
+
+While in that intelligence-community role Stephens saw a demonstration of Palantir's software and left to join the company in 2008. Palantir had been founded in 2003 with early backing from the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] venture arm [[In-Q-Tel]], and Stephens joined as one of its early employees while the company was still small.[^3]
+
+### Palantir
+
+At Palantir, Stephens led teams focused on the company's growth in the intelligence and defense market and on its international expansion, working with large government organizations on data-analysis deployments. He was described as a forward-deployed engineer, the Palantir job category that embeds technical staff directly inside client agencies, though his function centered on managing the company's sales pipeline. He also served as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown during the period.[^2][^3]
+
+His six years at Palantir, from 2008 to roughly 2014, overlapped with the company's expansion from a post-September 11 counterterrorism contractor into a fixture of the U.S. intelligence and defense procurement system. The relationships he built on the government side of that business carried into his subsequent venture-capital and defense-startup work.[^3]
+
+### Founders Fund
+
+Stephens joined Founders Fund in 2013 and became a partner in 2014, concentrating his investing on startups operating in the government and defense-technology space. His investing centered on the firm's defense and government portfolio, which grew into Founders Fund's distinguishing focus over the following decade.[^1][^4]
+
+From the Founders Fund position Stephens became one of the principal architects of the firm's defense-and-government portfolio, and he has argued publicly that the defense-technology sector faces a coming shakeout in which a small number of companies, Anduril among them, consolidate the market. He sits on the boards of several portfolio companies and is affiliated with the [[Federalist Society]].[^4][^5]
+
+### Anduril Industries
+
+Stephens cofounded Anduril Industries in 2017 with [[Palmer Luckey]] and a group of Palantir and Oculus alumni, taking the role of executive chairman while Founders Fund served as the first institutional backer. Anduril builds autonomous-surveillance and weapons systems, including the Lattice software platform, drones, and border-surveillance towers, for the U.S. military and border-security agencies.[^1][^6]
+
+Anduril closed a 2.5 billion dollar Series G round in 2025 led by Founders Fund, which wrote a single one-billion-dollar check, the largest in the firm's history. Stephens became a billionaire on the strength of the round in June 2025. The round routed Founders Fund capital into a company Stephens had cofounded while he remained a partner at the firm writing the check.[^6][^7]
+
+### The 2016 Pentagon Transition
+
+In late 2016 Stephens served on President-elect Trump's transition team, where he led the Department of Defense landing team responsible for reviewing the Pentagon and staffing its incoming leadership. The placement put a Founders Fund partner and former Palantir executive in charge of the defense-agency transition for an administration that Thiel had publicly endorsed and helped staff, during the same period Thiel placed associates including [[Kevin Harrington]] onto the National Security Council.[^2][^8]
+
+Anduril, which Stephens cofounded the following year, went on to win contracts across the Defense Department and the border-security agencies whose incoming leadership the transition he led had helped review and staff.[^6][^8]
+
+### Faith and the ACTS 17 Collective
+
+Stephens is an openly Christian investor who has spoken through the Faith Driven Investor network about integrating his religious convictions with venture capital and defense work. With his wife, [[Michelle Stephens]], he is associated with the [[ACTS 17 Collective]], a San Francisco group that convenes technology figures around Christianity.[^9]
+
+The ACTS 17 Collective, run by Michelle Stephens, hosted Peter Thiel's four-part lecture series on the Antichrist at the [[Commonwealth Club]] in September and October 2025. The lectures were off the record, and a recording later reached the *Washington Post*, which reported on them in October 2025.[^10]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: "Trae Stephens," Founders Fund team page, on his partner role, the Anduril cofounding, and the Palantir and intelligence-community background. https://foundersfund.com/team/trae-stephens/
+[^2]: "Trae Stephens (SFS'06)," Georgetown University School of Foreign Service alumni profile, on the Arabic and security-studies degree, the Portman and Afghan-embassy roles, and the Trump transition. https://sfs.georgetown.edu/alumni/trae-stephens-sfs06/
+[^3]: "Trae Stephens," Federalist Society biography, on the computational-linguist intelligence-community role, the 2008 move to Palantir, and the Georgetown adjunct appointment. https://fedsoc.org/bio/trae-stephens
+[^4]: "Anduril's Trae Stephens says defense tech is headed for a shakeout," *Fortune,* June 5, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/06/05/anduril-trae-stephens-founders-fund-defense-tech-ipo-palantir-venture-capital/
+[^5]: "The Investor Who Called Defense Tech's Big Moment," *Newcomer,* on Stephens's defense-investing thesis. https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-investor-who-called-defense-techs
+[^6]: "Trae Stephens," Anduril Industries leadership and the Series G round; company records and contemporaneous reporting, 2025.
+[^7]: "Anduril raises $2.5 billion Series G led by Founders Fund," reporting on the one-billion-dollar Founders Fund check and Stephens's billionaire status, June 2025.
+[^8]: "Trae Stephens to lead Trump's Department of Defense transition," contemporaneous reporting on the late-2016 Pentagon landing team. See also the Georgetown SFS profile.
+[^9]: "Trae Stephens," Faith Driven Investor biography, on his Christian investing identity. https://faithdriveninvestor.org/bios/trae-stephens/
+[^10]: "Peter Thiel is delivering 4 private sold-out lectures at a club in San Francisco about the Antichrist," *Fortune,* September 2, 2025, on the ACTS 17 Collective and Michelle Stephens hosting the series. https://fortune.com/2025/09/02/peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-commonwealth-club-san-francisco-acts-17-collective-rene-girard/