Packy McCormick

DOE has conditionally selected Standard Nuclear as the first U.S. company accepted into the recently announced fuel line pilot program, announced in July 2025

And while competence may be the ultimate competitive advantage to an individual, it is the property of the individual, not the company.

In an attempt to avoid an impasse during the negotiations, one of Cognition’s founders proposed a contest: either he would play Thiel in chess or Ta in poker. If he won, Founders Fund would cede to his demands, and vice versa.

It is not easy to remain original and successful. The world moves on around you. It takes your best ideas and digests them: The future has stagnated; startups are monarchies; democracy is disappointing; we need to build in the world of atoms, not bits; we do this thing called “scapegoating”; all, truly all, is mimetic desire, and not one of us esca... See more

If Thiel were pure bombast, he would not be nearly so interesting. Beyond rhetorical flair, he has a rare willingness to follow a thought no matter where it leads. This is not true for most people.

These are all displacement behaviors, ways of not sitting with the problem.