Beginning today, MTS will be monitoring the situation across technology, business, politics, and culture, interviewing the main characters of the moment all day long on X.

We’re seeding it alongside other angel investors such as Dan Romero, Packy McCormick, Soona Amhaz, Julia DeWahl, Austin Rief, Ryan Delk, Jonathan Swanson and more.

The founding team includes @ChrisJBakke @theojaffee @gbrl_dick , @netcapgirl, among others.

MTS’s initial hosts include the above as well as Mark Halperin, Jayden Clark, Jack Farley, Amit Kukreja, Steven Sinofsky, Jesse Genet, Nathan Labenz and more experts across tech, finance, politics, and culture. The guests will be the main characters of the moment.

MTS aims to be the best place in the world to make sense of what’s happening, *right now*, and it’ll be on X.

This was the original vision for CNN by the way. They called it “Randemonium”. The idea was, whatever the Current Thing happening in the world, put it on CNN full time, cover it from every possible angle, and keep it running until a more important Current Thing comes along.

The CNN model has to wait for something to happen IRL. But something is always happening on X. And of course, X is — and has always been, the real world. Or at the very least, it’s the place where the people who run the real world make sense of what’s happening.

Essentially, what the hell is happening and why? The world’s an incredibly complex and erratic place and trying to figure that out is a lifetime occupation.

Figuring that out is the occupation of MTS. To Monitor the Situation is to watch history in the making.

P.S. MTS is looking for hosts, guests, sponsors, teammates, and other monitors to help make sense of what’s happening. Reach out if this is you, and feel free to join the MTS discord.

A memorable scene in the 2023 best picture winner Oppenheimer involves a meeting between the eponymous scientist and President Truman in the wake of the atomic bombing of Japan. Following some cursory discussion of international nuclear policy (on which the two do not see eye to eye), Oppenheimer confesses to Truman, “I feel I have blood on my hands.” To this, Truman mockingly pulls out a handkerchief and waves it in Oppenheimer’s face. “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit about who built the bomb?” he asks. “They care who dropped it.” As Oppenheimer is escorted out of the Oval, Truman loudly instructs his Secretary of State not to let “that crybaby” back in.

As it turns out, this is one of the most historically grounded pieces of dialogue in the film. The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman actually took place, and American Prometheus (the biography that Oppenheimer was adapted from) indicates that it was just about as hostile as the scene suggests. Whether or not Truman called Oppenheimer a crybaby within earshot, he certainly did so–verbatim–in subsequent correspondence. At least one other line in the scene is lifted directly from firsthand accounts. When Truman asks what should be done with Los Alamos now that the Manhattan Project has fulfilled its mission, Oppenheimer responds “Give it back to the Indians.”

One thing we can observe here is that it is simply assumed that the American government (and others to follow) are going to be calling the shots on the use of nuclear weapons. Indeed, that piece of the story is so taken for granted that it probably sounds strange to even mention, as if it could have been otherwise. Part of the reason for this may be because the Manhattan Project (now known as the Department of Energy) was a government agency. But that’s really just a circumstantial point. There’s a deeper idea captured in Cillian Murphy’s glassy-eyed flashbacks and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s own gaunt-faced recitation from the Bhagavad Gita. Namely, that all of this became inevitable once the technology was built.

Yes, Truman was the one who ordered that The Bomb be dropped, yes the Soviets will quickly get to work developing nuclear capabilities of their own, but these events are just the clockwork universe ticking along after the wind-up. That’s why Oppenheimer feels he has blood on his hands and why, in the (less well-substantiated) final line of the film, he tells Einstein that he believes he has indeed set in motion a chain reaction that will destroy the entire world. Giving it back to the Indians isn’t a real option.

I can only speak for myself here, but as the orchestra swelled, and the visuals of Earth’s atmosphere on fire flashed across the screen, and the credit sequence began to play, my takeaway was not that the big tragedy in all of this had been giving Harry S. Truman access to the bomb once it was built.

***

Imagine for a moment that it’s mid-1945 and you’re President Truman. The United States has just lost 50,000 soldiers (not to mention 150,000 to 250,000 Japanese military and civilian dead) capturing Okinawa, which is itself just a staging ground for the planned amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands. That invasion–Operation Downfall–will exceed D-Day in scope. Casualty projections number in the millions. In fact, the United States has manufactured so many purple hearts in anticipation of the forthcoming campaign that they will still be being given to soldiers wounded in Afghanistan 75 years later.

But wait! Who’s that on the line? It’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the M…the McBombalds Corporation. The McBombalds Corporation is a privately-held, venture-backed Delaware PBC specializing in drive-thru fast food and weapons manufacturing. Oppenheimer and team are well integrated into bay-area culture, including ambiguous leftist associations that they have downplayed since becoming primo defense contractors. They are also brilliant, earnest, and among the best in the world at what they do.

Anyway, Oppenheimer is calling to inform you that McBombalds has just successfully tested a nuclear weapon at its corporate headquarters in Los Alamos, NM. It has two ready-for-use A-bombs on hand, and it will in short order be able to deliver several additional newer, sleeker, more powerful models on contract with the Department of War.

Great news, you think. With these weapons, the United States may be able to win the war without having to commit any troops to a costly ground invasion. That will save countless American and Japanese lives alike. It may also secure the American position against its emerging geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union, in the embryonic post-war order. You inform Oppenheimer of these plans, and announce your intention to purchase the two bombs that he has in stock…

There’s a moment of silence on the line. Then Oppenheimer tells you that, though he believes the A-bombs have great potential, he and the McBombalds board are not comfortable with their deployment against Japanese cities. It’s true that conventional bombing raids in both Asia and Europe have already claimed huge numbers of civilian lives, but nuclear weapons represent a new stage in technology that should not be treated lightly. There are major risks that McBombalds has spent a lot of time thinking about. Its team has produced an entire memo on the threat of igniting the Earth’s atmosphere, for instance (though it concluded prior to testing that the likelihood was not high enough to warrant shuttering the project).

While Oppenheimer agrees that the American government should eventually take charge of nuclear policy, McBombalds is currently willing to grant the United States government only conditional access. For instance: it is willing to conduct a public demonstration for Japanese observers in international waters, or some other uninhabited area, but it is not yet ready to authorize use of the A-bomb for all lawful military uses. McBombalds will ship an A-bomb, but with a built-in kill switch that disarms the weapon whenever it detects a population center. McBombalds of course maintains its own arsenal, with full ability to disable the kill-switch on its own, but Oppenheimer assures you he and the rest of the McBombalds C-suite can be trusted.

***

What do you do in the McBombalds timeline? If AI is in fact what Anthropic believes it is, then that’s the timeline in which we are currently living. AI in the context of geopolitics has been compared to a nuclear weapon. The government wants access and, as analogized in the above example, Anthropic is reluctant to provide it.

To be fair, how one should answer the McBombalds question is not obvious. In our timeline, nuclear weapons were not developed by a private corporation, the United States successfully used them to end the Second World War, and–despite their proliferation–they have not destroyed humanity in the 80 or so years since their invention. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we can successfully replicate the experiment with AI. Indeed, it doesn’t even mean that we’ve been successful with nuclear weapons.

It is perhaps apropos that the Anthropic dispute boiled over just a day before the onset of the ongoing American-Israeli war in Iran. That’s in part because the technological edge that has defined that war–as with the Venezuela raid earlier in the year–demonstrates what access to the latest AI tools may mean for American national security. More significant, though, is the reason for the war in the first place: preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. To accept the existential stakes of that prospect while simultaneously treating the next frontier of superweapon proliferation as an ordinary issue of private property betrays a deep confusion about the problem that this moment presents.

It seems entirely reasonable to have objections about nuclear proliferation and governments’ ability to wield them. The same could be said for superhuman AI. But whether we should accept a world in which Oppenheimer and his friends have greater access to these military capabilities than the United States government seems like quite a different concern. Anthropic has access to such capabilities right now. Others may as well, or may soon follow.

The question, then, is whether in moments of military decision making we will follow the US Constitution and the values expressed therein, or that of a private company. AI is already having a material impact in the military, which is why the stakes of this debate are so high. Our choice is therefore no longer whether to build such weapons, but only whom to entrust with their responsible use in military affairs. Any criticism that fails to acknowledge this question is pointless. There is no iron law of the universe that implies every new invention will be good for humanity, much less that the United States government will always be its most responsible steward. But those raising hue and cry about the government’s unsurprising attempt to wield a technology for military purposes that all parties agree will define humanity’s fate must at least attempt to justify why they believe someone else deserves that power.

Until then, America is all we have.

The a16z update: Almost a year in, I’m loving the work that I do and the people that I do it with. I never thought I’d enjoy being in a big company so much but I’ve always been interested in building the product that is a venture firm and this is the best place to do it. Looking back at my 2024 post, it feels obvious in retrospect.

We’re hiring for nearly everything, even roles not listed here (and including a CoS and EA/PA). We have an incredible team — Danco, Brent, Henry, David, Elena, Katie, Theo are just a sample of folks you might recognize from the internet, though we also work closely with most of the firm. We’re excited to launch more projects in 2026. The sky’s the limit in terms of ambition — Reach out if there’s something interesting that a16z should consider.

We recently launched a fellowship for new media talent — folks skilled in editorial, design, video, and new media and marketing/comms. We’re extending the deadline to at mid Jan.

We also launched a rolling dinner series for top talent looking to start or join their next company.

The podcast continues to be fulfilling. Here are some of my favorite interviews from the past year.

I want to be more intellectually rigorous this year, and use the podcast, the blog, and my X as vessels to do just that. I’m also excited to bring back Turpentine in a real way and also group chats.

Outside of work, I’ve started to prioritize my health more and am now getting more sophisticated about it after having some sleep issues.

I finally wrote about my Art of Accomplishment retreat earlier this year. I continue to be all in on AOA and Hoffman and programs like it and want to financially help one come into existence.

Last year I also did a matchmaking experiment and two long-term couples emerged from it. I don’t have time to do this but I’d like to invest in a matchmaker building a business here.

I haven’t continued the Modern Relationships podcast, but I’d like to once I come across more amazing couples who’d like to be interviewed.

My brother runs a great recreational basketball league called SF Hoops that I play in and highly recommend. I went to a great basketball event hosted by Terrain in NYC and I’d like to help host one on the west coast this year.

The best (and only) movies I saw this year were Friendship, The Materialist, and Marty Supreme. The best TV show was Nobody Wants This (I know, I know). The best fiction book was Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and I’m looking for more books like it. I welcome recommendations across the board.

Cheers to an epic 2026,

Erik

P.S. Some highlights from 2025:

I recently went on an Art of Accomplishment retreat, and like my Hoffman experience, it was transformative. Similar to Hoffman, the retreat was somatic and reflective, and was about behavior change. Also like Hoffman, the organizers also want the retreat to be private so I’ll stay high level – this is published with Joe and Tara’s blessing).

Coming back, I’m feeling great — I have more positive self-talk, I’m feeling more connected with others, and I’m feeling more secure and full of life. I’m on a high.

I felt all of this during Hoffman too, but it’s hard to maintain the same energy months afterwards, which makes sense in retrospect. Of course it’s going to go away after a retreat if you don’t keep up the practices, the same way gains from working out fade away if you don’t continue exercising. I think a gym/dojo is a good metaphor, change requires practice. Fortunately, AOA has courses year round to practice the various different exercises which I’m excited to get into here.

What is AOA exactly? It’s basically a series of exercises that make me feel more like myself/the person I want to be, and bring me closer to others and myself. By design, it’s not a protocol. It’s not a top down formula to follow, more of a bottoms up practice to respond to—it’s following my intuition and getting out of my own way.

One early exercise we did was a listening exercise. Most people never experience what it’s like to be with someone that allows them to speak without:

1. Judging

2. Trying to fix

3. Trying to help

4. Trying to defend

So we tried listening with judgment, listening with trying to fix, and then listening with love — a stark contrast.

One big thing we focused on throughout the retreat was the voice in our head, or our self-talk. AOA focuses a lot on the voice in the head, and now to rewire/change our negative self-talk, but they do it via feeling emotions — “moving them” — rather than blocking or repressing them. We have thousands of thoughts per day, and most of them are very negative. They’re about things that are wrong with us and ways we should be different.

Here are some personal example thoughts that came from my negative self-talk exercise that I’ve had historically (In general I am pretty happy go-lucky and have mostly positive self-talk).

• My life is almost over

• I’m too externally driven

• I have a hard time letting go of past

• I should have more patience with myself

• I should have achieved more by now

• I’ve messed up opportunities

• I use humor to avoid feelings

• I’m addicted to phone

• I don’t deserve my good fortune

We then did a series of exercises that meant to better understand the voice in the head so we can transform it.

The first one we did was an exercise where we looked at the traumas we had in our lives and how they led to our negative self talk/voice in our head. But what was fascinating about the exercise is we also looked at what could have been the *positive* lessons we took away from them.

The reason this is so fascinating is because the voice in the head is a self fulfilling prophecy. It’s like this Tony Robbins clip — if you are scared of something, you’ll look for it, which means you’re more likely to find it.

AOA calls this the golden algorithm: Whatever emotion you try to avoid, you end up inviting into our lives — in the exact way you try to avoid it. It seems obvious in retrospect: The man who is scared he is going to get abandoned, looks for signs he is getting abandoned, and then acts in ways that brings about his own abandonment.

You can sort of create this formula for other fears too:

- Avoiding feeling rejected → Never put yourself out there → End up feeling perpetually rejected

- Avoiding feeling like a failure → Play it safe → feel like a failure

Or even worse, how people push love away. Quoting Joe:

1. They decide which parts of themselves are lovable and unloveable.

2. They try to only present the ‘lovable’ parts.

3. They feel empty because they never feel fully loved.

What AOA gets us to believe is that the voice in the head is often incorrect. But also that we should think about it as separate from us, since what it says is more true about itself than you. For example, who’s more controlling, my true self or the voice in my head? The voice in my head.

Every time the voice in your head criticizes you, ask “Would you say the same thing to someone else in a similar situation?” You rarely would, so why would you say it to yourself? Asking that question about a belief is one among a series of techniques to discredit the voice in the head so we don’t take it seriously.

There was a broader exercise format which was a set of questions to interrogate the voice in the head so you can see how obviously false it is and can’t believe it anymore. What’s funny is that when you discard the belief you start laughing, like you immediately get lighter. They’d like to keep the exercise private to ensure it’s practiced well so you’ll have to go to the retreat to learn it.

Byron Katie has a version of this with her four questions:

1. Is it true?

2. Is it really true?

3. How do you react when you believe that thought?

4. Who would you be without this thought?

The answers are usually:

1. Yes

2. No, I guess it’s not 100% true, or I can’t prove it

3. Bad

4. I’d be much happier

I had a few breakthroughs on the retreat. One is around a story I’ve told myself that if people are mad at me, that means I must have done something wrong. That may be true, but not necessarily. There are also other interpretations I could take. One is that I don’t control how someone interprets my actions. Or that I was doing my best that I could at the time with the skills that I had. Another is that, even if I did hurt someone, this was a great growth opportunity for me to change and that doing so would honor that relationship.

What AOA tries to do is help us take our biggest fear and *own it* it. Invite the fear in, feel it fully, and let it move through you. If an emotion wasn’t allowed to be felt all the way through, we tend to try to recreate the circumstances that caused it, so that the emotion can move. Once the emotion can move all the way through you, the circumstances stop getting recreated.

If you’re feeling stuck, it’s usually an indicator that there’s an emotion you’re trying to avoid feeling. There’s a lot we do to avoid feeling the emotions. Quoting Joe again: “Every time you judge somebody or yourself, there’s an emotional experience you don’t want to have. Anytime you tell yourself “You can’t” or “It’s too hard,” there’s an emotional experience you’re avoiding. If you felt great during the experience, you wouldn’t avoid it . Every time you think you have to make a big decision, there’s an emotion you don’t want to feel. Every time you take something personally you have found a part of yourself you haven’t learned to love.”

We recreate the patterns because we aren’t allowed to experience the pain. The key is to feel it and move through it.

I can resonate with this. I’m constantly checking my phone. I know it’s partly a way to avoid feeling emotions. The reason I know this is because when I don’t have my phone, I feel so much more. And yet I keep doing it. So it must be serving me in some way, or must have served me in some way. Avoiding emotions must have made me feel safe at some point.

To that end, we also did a lot of emotional release as a way to move through the feelings, because you can’t move through something that dominates you. If you’re scared of feeling an emotion, you’re already in it.

Anger is one emotion we worked on. You can’t really get rid of anger, you only repress it towards yourself. After all, the voice in the head is anger turned inwards. Expressing it at a pillow is a way to avoid expressing it at a person or yourself.

Shame is another emotion we worked with. If you’re telling yourself you should change a habit, that’s a great way to keep the habit. We rebel against tyrants even if the voice in our own head is the tyrant.

Shame is a stagnating emotion — it keeps you stuck. It doesn’t help you move the emotion so you can’t process it. I can feel this with my desire to get off my phone. I’ve shamed myself so much for both of those, but I haven’t changed them. Another approach is to love myself for my flaws, not in a way to be complacent, but to let myself work through the shame so I then I *want* to do other things besides be on my phone. That’s how it’ll be durable. If I actually want it, rather than want to want it.

More generally, shame seems like a poor motivator to do something — maybe it helps to *avoid* doing something, but it’s not going to get me to do something new.

This was a hard idea for me to get on board with, because I’ve been obsessed with self-discipline. Given my sports upbringing, I’ve always found pushing myself to be part of my life. I had a sign in my room since I was a kid that said “earn my way everyday”.

But Joe helped me realize that willpower is needed if it’s a desire from the head, but willpower isn’t needed as much if it’s a desire from the heart. Even the basketball players I admired, they genuinely loved what they did. They weren’t always forcing themselves to train out of obligation, even if they did sometimes. They did it out of love not out of guilt or fear. The way for me to sustainably work hard over decades is to love what I’m doing, to believe in it, and to stop shaming myself. Shame is not going to get me out of bed excited to give my all to something for a long enough time. So I’m giving up shame as an individual motivator. It worked for a while, but it’s run its course. Maybe it works for you, if so, keep it. The best thing about AOA in general is that they recommend experimenting – and finding whatever works for you.

People often get confused when AOA tells them that all they need to do is “feel” in order to stop their bad habits. Quoting Joe, “Think of your bad habits as a hot frying pans. How do you drop a hot frying pan? You feel it. That’s all. Feel it fully, and you will let go.” It’s more of an “allowing” than a doing.

Another thing they’re big on is speaking your truth. Quoting Joe, “If you’re trying to manage other people’s feelings, you’re abandoning your own. If you think you have to act a certain way in order to be loved, you’re not actually being loved. You’re being loved for someone you’re pretending to be, and that’s not being loved. Unconditional love isn’t people-pleasing or caretaking. It’s the capacity to hold space for others’ choices while honoring your own truth.”

We learned about the three pillars of unconditional love:

“1. Welcome all parts of yourself so that you can welcome all the parts of others

2. Release attachment to specific outcomes so you are present enough to take loving action

3. Recognize your agency, so you stop making other people the bad guy”

We did one exercise where we called out the boundaries we failed to withhold for others and as a result got violated. And I learned that I didn’t have much respect for my own boundaries, which means I probably didn’t always sufficiently respect others boundaries too.

I now have new beliefs instead of the negative self-talk. Here are some examples:

• I have so much time

• I’ve loved and given so much to the people in my life

• I’ve done valuable work, and I’m the judge.

• I’ve been good, and my mistakes were because I was not ready or I was not able.

• I have so much more to give and contribute.

Lastly, the retreat was just so fun. I was so moved by everyone sharing and being so vulnerable. My goal is to have more of that community in my everyday life.

****

Art of Accomplishment is still run by its founders, and is a very live and agile organization. It does in-person retreats, online courses, and responds to its members interests in real time. Their podcast is also excellent.

AOA is about personal transformation but it’s done from a place of aspiration rather than weakness.

It’s interesting, I also have a broader idea — Professional athletes have the best coaches on call to help them. Imagine if you had that for your life — for your career, for your relationships, for your finances, just an all out team dedicated to your growth. Why doesn’t this exist? What’s the equivalent of getting professional athlete treatment across every area of your life?

OK, I’m excited now. I’ve got my light. I’m overflowing with it. I have no inner critic, I’m at peace.

***

LOVE SCARES US ALL

by Joe Hudson, the founder

Love scares us all

And it is everywhere

There’s no escaping it

At first when we were younger

We dreamt we were scared of

Concrete things like enemies and friends

And as we got older we realized

It was always uncomfortable feelings we were scared of

We cried when we saw that

we had spent years avoiding them

Only to find out each was a gift.

And not even shame had to be resisted any longer

And so the stark reality is

That love has scared

us all along.

Every anxiety

Every worry

Is love

It is the electrically dark night.

the unbearable pleasure

Of being alive

That animator of all things

That which breathes

Life into all

those enemies

And Friends

And Feelings

and shame

It is love we are avoiding

And my friend there is a good reason to be scared

Love wants to consume us whole

Love will lay us to waste and leave us with nothing

Love will destroy everything we prop ourselves up with

And when we are destroyed

Left without

our will

or ourselves

We will fall in love

For the first time.

And it will make a home in our chests

And shine from our eyes

And speak its words with our mouths

Saying over and over again

Thy will be done

Thy will be done.

1.⁠ ⁠I’m joining Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner.
2.⁠ ⁠a16z has acquired Turpentine.

Everything I’ve worked on over my career has been around investing and building products/networks/media for founders — a16z is the perfect place for me to do this work at the highest level.

I’ve long admired the firm’s endless ambition and startup mentality. When I was thinking about starting a firm and asked Ben for advice on how to build the next a16z, he told me “the next a16z is…a16z”. When I told Marc my plans to marry investing, media, and networks, he said “do it all here, but bigger” and crafted the right role to make it all work.

As for Turpentine, the shows will continue. I’m proud of what we built and excited to have more resources for supporting our hosts and growing the network.

Today I’m feeling deeply grateful for all the entrepreneurs I’ve backed and my incredible team members at each chapter — and fortunate to now work with all the brilliant people at a16z.I’m stoked to partner with the next generation of great entrepreneurs and also hire even more fantastic people into the firm. DMs are open and my email is et@a16z.com.

Also linking Marc Andreessen’s kind blog post here that has more information.

I’m stoked for what’s to come!

I was 20. Now I’m 35. And I’m sharing a list of 35 things I would have told/reminded my 20 year old self. Most of them are simple, but hard.

This list is focused on being happy. I’ve separately written pieces on career advice. This list is also a work in progress.

1. Take responsibility (the ability to respond)

This doesn’t mean that everything that has happened to you is a result of your actions. It means that you develop an ability to respond to whatever happens to you, even if you don’t control the consequences of your actions.

It means exerting maximal agency towards the things you can directly change (your behavior), and maximum acceptance towards things you can influence but not control (external circumstances, other people’s behavior).

No excuses. Don’t make some person, some event, or your parents the excuse for your actions going forward, even if they did influence your past, and even if they’re not changing at all. It only takes one person to transform a dysfunctional relationship or situation.

You can blame other people, but unless you change behavior, you might have similar reoccurring results with other people / in other situations, at which point you’ll realize a common denominator is you, and it’s worth rewiring certain patterns.

2. Rewire your patterns

The most empowering thing I’ve heard is that there is a gap between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use and expand that space.

Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update them. A pattern that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. Vision is bigger than baggage.

Sometimes those patterns are deeply rooted. A pattern like anxiety may have been helpful in a previous unsafe environment but is maladaptive for our current safe environment.

My friend Kanjun calls this “trauma as overfitting”, since we don’t generalize well from childhood to adulthood. Cognitive behavior therapy or Byron Katie’s work helps us get new training data by asking questions like: “are you absolutely sure that’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?“ This is great for updating limiting beliefs, of which we have many that are often mostly incorrect and holding us back.

3. Develop an abundance mindset

One pattern that’s worth rewiring is transforming from a scarcity mindset to an abundance, positive-sum mindset. This means loving people and wanting other people to flourish on their own terms, independent of what’s in it for you—even when it’s at your expense.

This is challenging because we’re not wired for abundance—when we lived in tribes, if someone took your food, or excluded you, you didn't have anywhere else to go. Which is why we instinctively feel someone else's gain as our loss. But the more you want others to succeed (and the more you help them), the more they’ll help you and want you to succeed. Genuinely see their success as your success.

What goes around comes around, less because of karma, but because of game theory. Life is an infinite game: If you cooperate, people will cooperate with you, and vice versa. To get long-term cooperators, you must suffer some defectors (“get taken advantage of”). Don’t defect. Embrace the paradoxical commandments.

4. Love is a verb

You attract what you project. Write down a list of what you want in your relationships and the types of people you want personal and professional relationships with and then make sure you are bringing those attributes to the table too. e.g. If you want loyal friends, *be* a loyal friend. Focus on “being” rather than “having”, because you can only control the former, and by doing so you can influence the latter.

5. Learn to differentiate between needs and strategies

A strategy is a way to meet a need. We want to get that job because we want respect, autonomy, recognition, connection. But there are thousands of ways to meet that need. Acknowledging this makes you more flexible to what life throws at you, and makes it more likely you’ll get what you actually want deep down. A lot of stress in my life came from being set on certain strategies when if I appreciated what need I was trying to meet, I could have been more flexible in switching strategies.

6. Happiness and security are skills that can be developed.

If you can’t be happy now, it’s unlikely you'll be happy later. “I’ll be happy once I hit X goal” may be motivating, but it won’t be true—you’ll just move the goalposts. If this is how you’re motivated now, it’s unlikely to last because at some point you’ll figure out that your pattern is unfulfilling and you’ll stop following it. Then you’ll need to find a new way to motivate yourself. A more durable motivation comes from genuinely enjoying the process and the contributions and the relationships that stem from it.

Similarly, get your security from liking yourself, not from external validation. If you get your happiness from other people’s approval, it’ll never be enough and you’ll be constantly chasing it. Whether it’s professionally or socially, learn to give yourself the validation, approval, forgiveness you crave from others. You can do this by acting in ways you’re proud of.

To that end, resist the urge to not do the right thing, even when doing the right thing is at your own expense. You will have so many opportunities to do the wrong thing: To gossip, to lie, to cut corners, to take short cuts. It’s never worth it, because then it makes it harder to like yourself. No amount of money or fame will make you feel good if you aren’t proud of how you’ve acted. If anything it heightens the contradictions, which is partly why famous people are often unhappy.

7. Learn to process emotions so you can move through them and they don’t negatively affect you

Much of our anxiety results from us being in our head too much. But you can’t think your way out of emotional problems. You need to express and feel the feelings to move them through your body. You can try to repress your feelings, but they’ll likely rear their heads in other ways. Ultimately, you can’t run from yourself.

You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain loop is through the body. If you feel feel the feelings it might take a few minutes or hours to pass them, whereas if you repress it it might take months or years.

I was always dubious of thinking like this until I tried somatic therapy and found it grounding in ways I couldn’t articulate.

8. Internalize the regrets of the dying: The biggest determinants of your happiness are likely the quality of your relationships & living true to yourself

If you knew that on your death bed, what mattered most would be the quality of relationships you formed in your life and to what extent you lived & expressed your true self, how would you live differently?

You’d likely optimize less for what other people want from you and more for pursuing what feels true to you and making memories with your people — you wouldn’t miss weddings, you’d call people just to check in, and you’d avoid a ton of arguments because at the end of the day what you care about is bonding with the other person, so why are you even arguing? (It’s not bringing you closer and you’re unlikely to change their mind.)

We need to constantly remind ourselves of what matters because we’re wired to survive and reproduce, not optimize for meaning and happiness. Religion or other meaning making structures help.

Go on planned trips with friends where you put your phone away. The anticipation is just as bonding as the actual trip. Keep in touch with old friends more broadly (I wish I did this better). Call them randomly, even if it’s been years. Keep track of what they care about.

Get a “life board” — meet with a crew of ~4 friends 3-4x a year to discuss big life, career, and finance decisions.

Accept all bids your people make from you. Affirm their intentions and what they mean to you, even when saying no.

9. The goal of social interaction is to strengthen relationships

In The Sims, every person you encounter has a score over the head meant to symbolize your relationship strength with them. Stephen Covey uses the term “emotional bank account” as a metaphor for relationship quality. Good interactions (e.g. deeply understanding someone) are deposits into the account, bad interactions (e.g. judging them, breaking trust) are withdrawals.

Thinking of the goal of social time as increasing the score makes intuitive sense. Why would you spend time with someone only to weaken the relationship? Look at the behaviors that are withdrawals on the emotional bank account — the ones that trigger and bother the people you care about — and unless you believe in them despite the cost, get rid of them, even if it seems irrational that they’d bother someone.

Reduce needless friction in engaging with you. Like in a negotiation where you ask for the thing you care most about and give in on the rest, you want to hold the line on what’s important/defining to you and be deferential on the rest. “Authenticity” can excuse a lot of behaviors that, if you changed, would bring you closer to other people, and wouldn’t cost you much. Being a default contrarian is not a personality, just to name one example.

10. Don’t engage with others when you’re not your best self

If you look back at your fights or negative interactions, they were probably when you were tired or otherwise moody. Don’t approach hard problems or get into arguments when you’re cranky or anxious and more likely to get triggered. Be able to acknowledge when you are not in a secure place, and be able to reset by working out, taking a walk, listening to music, talking with a friend, etc. Wait until the anger or trigger passes before acting. And never fight over text. And if you ever find yourself in a fight, realize you’re in one and calm down and ask yourself why you’re fighting.

Work on expanding your capacity to not get triggered by doing things like meditation, somatic therapy, nonviolent communication, etc. Develop the ability to distance your thought patterns and emotions from your actions.

If you’re having a bad experience or are in a bad mood, attribute it to a biological need (e.g. hunger, tiredness) rather than psychological one (some complex). The former provides more agency than the latter (e.g. "Oh, I just need to eat/sleep/exercise better", as opposed to "I have a deep issue that will take a long time to work through".)

Get in touch with your light, your best self. And once you are, share it with the world.

11. Self-confidence can’t be faked, it can only be earned

Just like you have a bank account with others, you have one with yourself too, and it affects your mood and resilience.

Deposits into your own bank account look like being proud of yourself — contributing to others, gaining competence at something that matters, doing the right thing, keeping promises to yourself and others, and taking good care of yourself.

12. Deliberately study yourself and iterate

Track what people and activities and habits make you feel better and which drain you. Track when you get triggered or or when you trigger others and see if you can identify patterns. The less you can get triggered or trigger, the less friction you'll have.

Pay attention to what you pay attention to. Journal at least weekly, and also ideally 5-10 minutes every morning. Do a weekly audit where you can look backwards and reflect on what brings you closer to yourself or and vice versa and readjust how you spend time accordingly. In the same way that athletes watch game tape of their performance and change behavior accordingly, do the same for your life. Take all the time you spend angry at other people for not changing your behavior and instead apply it to changing yours.

13. Optimize your environment (people, city, digital life etc) to help guide you towards who you want to become

Although rewiring is worth doing, it's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment & then let the new cues do the work.

Your environment is a one-time CapEx expense on your willpower. You fly to a new place, start working in a company or go to a campus or make this new friend. And then it just yields dividends.

If you want to, say, work out more, live near a gym and get friends who work out. Repeat for every new habit you want to start or stop.

14. Say less. Less is more

Most interpersonal mistakes are acts of commission rather than omission. Don’t hold back in speaking your truth, but stop saying what you don’t mean. If you’re going to offend someone, do it on something you care about. Not on an off hand remark or action that didn’t mean anting to you. If you’re unsure, wait a couple days to see if you still mean it. Usually you don’t.

People remember the negatives far more than the positives, so think about having a significantly higher percentage of positive experiences than negative ones.

There is a Buddhist saying that aptly describes this ability: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

Listen more than you speak. Make sure you understand them before trying to be understood. See people the way they want to be seen and affirm them. People are very sensitive. They don’t remember what you say as much as how you made them feel. This means you can both disproportionately make them happy by making them feel seen and special and disproportionately make them feel sad by making them feel judged or rejected.

15. Spend one day a week entirely off social media.

You are what you put into your body. If you eat crap, you’ll feel like crap. Similarly, if you spend your time watching other people’s highlight reels on Instagram or engrossed in drama on X, you’ll feel more anxious and less at peace.

Do a weekly digital sabbath where you get time in solitude more broadly. Actually, turn off as many notifications as you possibly can more generally. And certainly turn your phone off before sleeping and don’t turn it back on until you free-write or meditate in the AM. Delete Instagram, or at least the feed. Go on seven day retreats with no phone. Buy an old iPhone with barely any apps. Don’t get hooked on politics or entertainment unless it brings you closer to people you care about, because it often divides. If being alone without distractions is brutal, it means you’re not at peace with yourself, and this restlessness will seep into your relationships. Develop the ability to be okay by yourself. If you only took one actionable thing from this, make it be this paragraph. Like all good cliche advice, it’s simple, but hard.

16. Your parents will die sooner than you think.

By the time you’re in your 20s, you’ll have spent 90% of the time you’ll ever get to spend with them. By internalizing their eventual death, you’ll be able to appreciate your remaining time with them. Instead of focusing on the ways they fell short, focus on how you wouldn’t exist without them, and how they enabled (directly or indirectly) all the wonderful things in your life. Do this for everyone in your life actually.

The 90% line is true for all your longest friends, and certainly anyone you’ve ever dated. Don’t hold any grudges that you wouldn’t hold after someone is dead, because what’s the point. We’re basically almost there, and you don’t need to hold onto the grudge in order to protect yourself, it just adds more heaviness to your life. If you have anyone close to you who died, you know how important reconciliation is.

17. Forgive and remember.

Grudges are ankle weights on your soul. Resentment is drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. If you have extended anger with someone, even if they’re in the wrong, you’re both losing. Forgiving others is a gift to yourself because it frees you from the negative feelings and it gives you more agency over your emotional state.

Anytime you need someone to apologize to you or change their behavior before you can be happy, you’ve ceded your agency over your own happiness. Instead, let them and focus on what you can control.

Empathize with what needs they were trying to meet through their actions and then either reconcile with them or move on with the levity of being grudge-free. Sometimes they were acting out in an ill-attempted way to connect.

To be clear, by forgiving I just mean dropping the grudge and wishing them well; I don’t mean bringing them back into your life if you don’t want to. Hence forgive but remember (i.e. don’t forget).

If the conversation needs to be had (apologizing or forgiving), have the difficult conversation. If it doesn’t, let sleeping dogs lie.

Be okay with the idea that some people you want to like you just won’t like you as much as you’d like. Take solace in the fact that they’ve contributed to your growth, and you can be your own judge going forward so you don’t need absolution from them in order to be at peace. You can still honor them by living your best. And the same patterns will reincarnate in future relationships anyway.

18. Pain is information

Every setback is a lesson, sometimes it’s the only way to get that lesson, to get that growth, that increased resiliency and capacity. So every time you experience a setback, you should almost be excited for the corresponding growth.

The question to ask over any struggle is “What is this teaching”?

But make sure you don’t learn the wrong lesson. The lesson should be one that increases your capacity to love, not one that decreases it.

And make sure you listen when a lesson is being taught. Humble yourself before life humbles you.

19. Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about

Internalizing this is helpful not only because it encourages you to be easy on others, but also because it helps you be easy on yourself. After all, you’re not the only one struggling.

If something about other people triggers you, learn to accept it about them and see it as an emerging property of circumstances. Instead of saying that person's good or bad, look at what caused them to do X or Y.

Our judgments about other people are often reflections of our own insecurities. For example, maybe when you’re judging someone for showing off, you’re struggling with your own desire to be seen.

Try other tactics to get curious about other people instead of righteous. If you look at their childhood photos it’s hard to be mad at them. If you have your hands on your heart it’s hard to be angry at them. If you’re hugging your partner it’s harder to fight with them.

20. Develop a thick skin and a short memory

Don’t take slights or insults or rejections personally. Expand your capacity to not get offended. Just like you judging people has more to do with you than them, the converse is true as well.

Only listen to what people are needing, not what they’re judging. They have short memory too.

One self-connection exercise when triggered is:

• How do you feel? (vent)

• How does that feel on the inside? (connect with deeper feeling)

• What do you want? (suggest strategy, get action oriented)

• What would that give you? (connect with deeper need)

21. Your language influences your reality, adjust it

You want to maximize your ability to change your patterns, and minimize your ability to be negatively influenced by others. Have your language reflect this.

Use language that emphasizes the fact that people can change: Use verbs over adjectives and observations instead of judgments. For example, instead of saying, “X is always late”, say “X has been late the last three times.”

This dynamic, verb-based language, also known as nonviolent communication, will both avoid a ton of fights and also help create space for you and others to change.

The stories you tell about yourself become self-fulfilling prophecies. That’s another reason to use verbs instead of passive adjectives in your language — so that way you can change them.

22. You attract whatever you project, expect, and repress.

Your fears become self-fulfilling too. If you’re scared of being abandoned, for example, you will subconsciously look for signs that you could be abandoned and act in ways that make it more likely for someone to abandon you.

Conversely, the more you look for good in people (and yourself), the more good you will see, and the better you will last towards them, soliciting. It’s a positive flywheel.

It’s better to face/feel the fear and let it move through you rather than repress it and subconsciously will it into existence

Assume the best in good people. Whatever you anticipate, you’ll be more likely to find.

23. Choose being happy over being right/winning.

Don’t use language that implies badness. People are central characters in their own stories so they won’t respond well to insinuations that they’ve done wrong. If your goal is to connect with others or influence them, it’s better to see things from their side than try to overpower them with guilt.

Anytime you see yourself judging, lean into curiosity. Labels, comparisons, and diagnoses are all forms of judgment. Cultivate that sense of empathy and wonder about how people work, instead of moralizing.

If you are secure and full of love, you won’t do any of these things naturally, so cultivate practices that make you feel secure.

Don’t bring work mode to relationships and vice versa. For work, you want to be efficient, outcome oriented, and prioritize winning above all. With people, you want to be effective, process oriented, and prioritize connection above all. For work you want to be right (accurate), for relationships you want to be happy (connected).

24. Life isn’t fair, so don’t get hung up on fairness.

Don’t keep score, your patience will run out. And equality doesn’t matter. On your death bed you won’t wish things were more fair, but you’ll regret that your insistence on fairness prevented you from connecting with an open heart.

25. Before changing the world, try changing your world

The way to change the world is in your heart, head, and hands and work outwards from there.

For most people, it is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.

To be sure, these aren’t mutually exclusive and you can try to have micro and macro impact, but very few people will have meaningfully positive macro impact (and many people’s impact (e.g. activism) might be negative), whereas everyone has a micro impact on their families, friends, and local communities and we don’t pay enough attention to making it great.

Since all you can control is your own behavior, it doesn’t make sense to focus so much on what others are doing. Use things like politics, sports, social media etc as ways to meet or get closer to other people, but don’t use it as something to make you angry or further from others.

26. Be enjoyably useful

Get really good at something rare and valuable and start helping other people with it; give it away.

Worry less about finding your passion and more about following your contribution. Do what you’re meant to do. It usually looks easy for you but hard for others, or is something you can’t not do.

Cultivate what makes you unique. The more distinct your path is, the less competition you’ll have, and the less you’ll compare yourself to others because you’re running your own race.

Sometimes you don’t have to figure out *exactly* what you want to do, you just need to know what *not* to do. Many people wind up going against their instincts, and it makes them miserable.

27. Have close friends who’d love you just as much if you lost your job, and vice versa

Life’s too short to spend with people who you already know you don’t want to spend a lot of your life with.

You have all the answers inside you but only when you're in touch with yourself. Most of the time you have a million distractions, so have people you can share your whole self with and who appreciate you for who you are and who you want to be.

Commit to rituals with them — weekly dinners, annual trips, whatever. Introduce them to each other—bringing friends from different parts of your lives together will make you even happier than you think it will.

28. Don’t cap your ceiling

Be wildly ambitious: Envision the highest version of your own success and strive to get as close to it as possible while also being happy with wherever you land. You can just do things.

The big Silicon Valley cultural lesson is that, for whatever you're currently doing—your startup, your art, your personal growth—you can do it 10x bigger, an order of magnitude bigger than what you thought you could (should you want to).

The people you admire, the people doing things you wish you could do — you can get closer to them than you think. And if you’re ambitious and showing growth, some of them might want to meet and help you too.

Protect your dreams, and encourage others to protect theirs too. When I was younger, my dream was to be an NBA player. I still play a few times a week. Maybe I’ll be a part-owner some day instead.

Have high standards and work hard but don’t beat yourself up over the past or your future either. Your past was what you needed to get here (no regrets), and fretting about what will happen in the future bond what you need to prep for it won’t help either. Most ambitious people on their death beds wish they were less hard on themselves beyond what was needed to have high standards. The happiest people are best at focusing on what they can control and not letting past drama or future worries get in their way.

29. When decision-making, think in terms of asymmetric upside/downside, not pros and cons

Asymmetric upside opportunities could lead to new relationships or forms of growth. Asymmetric downside opportunities could lead to sacrificing your health or your relationship or your reputation.

In order to have time for asymmetric opportunities, you need to say no to most things. “Hell Yes or No” is a good framework for the biggest decisions in life, but maybe not the more frequent, smaller ones .

Spend time on exactly what you want to be doing, and say no to everything that doesn’t excite you or provide asymmetric upside.

You’re either doing it or you’re not. You’re either working on something you believe in and matters to you or not. You’re either spending time with people you want to be in your life or not. If you’re not, leave to make room to do it. Figure out what truly matters and run to those people, places, beliefs and activities as fast as your legs can possibly carry you to them. Don’t settle.

Be comfortable with what John Keats called negative capability. The point is not to find the answers but to live the questions. What often matters most is not what decision you make but how you act after you make it. There are a million ways to be happy.

30. Let people be who they are. Love them for it.

Ultimately, if you invalidate someone, they'll invalidate you back. If you try to control someone, they'll try to control you back. You win by letting go.

Let other people be who they are and love them for it. Don’t try to change them. It’ll backfire. Paradoxically, by giving them that safety, they’ll more likely move closer to you anyway.

31. Strive for wisdom and integrity and a thousand-year heart

Don’t pursue money and status at the expense of a character and virtue and being true to yourself. Or at least not for long. Ideally align them all. Do something your 10 year old self and 100 year old self would be proud of.

Live as though you’ll be 100 (in terms of wanting to have long-term relationships, doing things that compound) but also live as though everyday will be your last (in terms of prioritizing relationships and connection and memories).

Pray.

32. Be more discerning about what you care about.

Most people make the mistake of caring too much or too little indiscriminate about the stakes

Care about what the right people think of you, as a good feedback loop, but don’t care about what everyone else thinks about you.

Care about making good work, which means not caring about people seeing your shitty work along the way so you can receive feedback and get better.

Care about about loving the people who mean a lot to you, which means not caring about them seeing you vulnerable and all the other embarrassments of being known

Care about helping others by/and being true to yourself, which means not caring about people saying bad things about you.

33. Strive to being a light to the people in your life.

Other people should feel safely sharing their true selves to you knowing they won’t be judged and can trust you can keep a secret, they should be soliciting your opinions because you have good discernment. Love people not only for who they are but also for who they want to be. Let them grow.

34. Practice gratitude

“the more you become a connoisseur of gratitude, the less you are a victim of resentment, depression, and despair. Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego—your need to possess and control—and transform you into a generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous—large souled”

Cultivate a daily gratitude journal (or prayer) practice as a way to increase your emotional bank account with yourself and others. Share gratitude and appreciation with others like 50x more than you share feedback or criticism.

35. It’s never too late to change.

It’s never too late to start that passion project, to get more in touch with yourself, to learn from your mistakes. It’s never too late to pick up a habit. To rewire your patterns. To strengthen or repair an existing relationship. It’s never too late to apologize. It’s never too late to forgive (even if you don’t want that person in your life). It’s never too late to let go. To move on. It’s never too late to look back at your life and the people who’ve enabled and contributed to all the amazing things that have happened and tell them how much they meant to you. Even if someone is dead or you are dead to them, you can still send them love from afar. Maybe it will make its way there. It’s never too late to cultivate your light. Or develop your motivation and drive. Or your sense of peace. It’s never too late to find whatever you’ve been searching for, or what you wanted but didn’t even know. It’s never too late to change. Every day is a new chance.

The problem is that there is a strong leftist narrative here:

1. Global Warming is obviously out of control, we need to amp up all climate activities

2. The insurance industry is obviously evil, we need to regulate them so they have to pay and serve.

It's not hard to imagine a lot of people hard-lining the existing ideology here.

this just shows the need to end capitalism more quickly

and further catastrophes will make the urgency greater

Person B: I’m not getting that vibe out here. Too much incompetence and failure leading up to now. Too many wealthy/influential people who now see themselves as having skin in the game.

This does not appear to be benefitting the left and progressivism within the state

Opposing climate change is not going to save your house. Opposing Karen Bass might

Doesn’t provide water. But is affirming

2. Facebook board decision

It's almost like these people fled to Canada but then Canada became the 51st state 👨‍🍳 😘

3. A debate on DEI

Person A: DEI meant very different things 15 years ago vs today. I was in a bunch of those discussions at FB in the 2012 era and I suspect a lot of people here would be fine with the sorts of things we were doing back then. It really went off the rails post 2016 as TDS took hold in the organization.

My read is Zuck is actually pretty moderate on this stuff so I think it's quite possible this is a simple way to purge the organization of the hardcore Wokes and then bring back DEI in the original 2010 form (equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome) that he was aligned with, it'll just be called something else

Back then it was super reasonable stuff like - don't hire a director or VP level person without at least talking to one woman, aka the Rooney Rule. Which is very reasonable. Like just put in a modicum of effort to find at least one really awesome woman for a role and make sure you talk to them and try to get them to interview for the role.

No quotas, no organization level targets, no craziness around intersectionality and people yelling that their intersection of 3 minority traits is not fully represented in the leadership team

I'm in the ex-employee FB group and it's really interesting to see how many people are melting down over this but when you look at their profiles, it's all people who joined after 2016

almost all of the 2010 era people are super pro this change and supportive of Zuck

Person B: I don't think it's as simple as "CEOs were pressured so they went along with it"

Most CEOs just straight up agreed with the early premises about not allowing actual harassment of women in the office.

Addressing that gave a great hit of dopamine, respect, and feelings of being holier than thou. So they did a little more in that direction, also stuff they mostly agreed with.

But the slope was slippery as hell, and then they lost control. The regret came later, but the inciting action had enthusiastic consent lol

"the inciting action had enthusiastic consent lol"

So did the early days of the Cuban revolution....then the shootings started.

Person C: I would actually take the other side of the DEI debate.

I would claim that as soon as you institute policies that deviate from pure meritocracy 'hire the best wherever they come from' it will inevitably slide into a corrupt grievance-fest. Put another way, is there an existence proof of a company that started going down the 'let's tip the scales on the current hiring process in the direction of some ideal outcome' and didn't slippery-slope eventually into some disaster like DEI?

Yeah, I'm convinced the "Slippery Slope Fallacy" should be renamed "The Iron Law of Slippery Slopes"

Let me rephrase as Conquest's Second Law of Recruiting: Any hiring policy that's not explicitly meritocratic with no regard for outcomes whatsoever, will inevitably turn into some form of DEI.

Many centrist liberals struggle to admit that a “diversity” prerogative is institutional poison. They want to believe ill effects, if any, are on the margins. Sadly, the mandate just spreads and spreads internally and corrodes core mission

Alternatively, you can just say that any company that systematically overlooks talent in some niche will be beaten by companies who don't, and leave it at that.

Because the implicit claims of the DEI crowd is that companies are somehow always and everywhere doing irrational things like not hiring worthy talent.

The biggest struggle of our age is between the equality that liberal democracy promises, and the inequality of outcome that accelerated technocapitalism delivers. This whole drama is cognitive dissonance between those two.

Person A: If I had to guess what comes back is:

- a system that does not try to dictate outcome and hammers that the organization is meritocratic

- it pushes top of funnel sourcing to find the best people no matter where they are under the umbrella of "if we don't have the best people, we lose, so we should put in extra work at finding all of the best people"

- data that makes sure the top of funnel is actually identifying the best people and your organization is actually promoting the best people. It will look at race/gender stats but not assert an opinion about what they should be. It will benchmark them against the opportunity set, e.g. if you have way fewer Indians in VP level than your competitors and you are under-performing and somehow missed Satya, you should think about whether or not your recruiting and teams are indeed meritocratic

Person D: Hopefully that is how you run your companies but unfortunately that is not how most businesses do DEI in practice in 2025.

Even if the top down directive is to do that, the on the ground reality is that recruiting and HR will do subtle but very important things like only send over certain types of candidates, hold up a hiring pipeline, hold up your promotion because your team is not diverse enough, push hiring managers to "take a chance" on candidates they like and tip hiring in one direction, etc.

There is a lot of on the ground activism that happens deep inside an organization because people who pursue those roles in those functions tend to care about outcomes/equity and not meritocracy/equality of opportunity. These people have to be purged from many organizations as they have taken over.

4. Will Elon be defeated?

I don't agree with the thread, but it was an interesting description of how the powerful are fettered by managerialism. Clearly Elon is a singular figure restoring individual agency to a world where it seemed to have faded into abeyance. His ownership of Twitter and adjacency to the White House as the world's richest man is a new (probably unstable and temporary) configuration of power. Assange declared that WikiLeaks was "a new star in the firmament of man" shortly before being brought to heel by the Deep State -- Musk has chosen in the rape gangs an issue that in a world of any justice would bring down an entire regime (not just a political party or ruler.) What more comprehensive failure can a regime undertake than to become an accessory to the mass rape of its children?

Perhaps he'll be beaten like Assange

and it will be a coda for a certain kind of possiblity of personal sovereignty

but perhaps he won't be beaten

the way Martin Luther wasn't beaten

Person B: Musk has things that the powers greater than him want (rockets and space internet), things the masses want (electric cars and futuristic visions), the platform to disseminate his version of reality, and the courage to wield all three as weapons. He's such a unique case, it's hard to imagine him being beaten. Pretty amazing to witness.

5. Zuck’s evolution

Regardless of Zuck’s motives or authenticity, publicly coming out against censorship and DEI is huge. I doubt we’ll ever see anything like that from Google or Apple

X Day was like D Day. Meta’s liberation is like the liberation of France. It’s like cities changing hands during war.

6. Effects of Facebook Moderation on political climate

The funny thing is: I support this in the abstract, but I actually do think in practice this will lead to a lot of social fracturing

Wokism was a far left ideology that was both (a) insane and (b) actually keeping the lid on for the last 10+ years of social media

What we’re in the middle of is like the end of communism at the end of the Soviet Union. When the censorship went, all kinds of anger that had been pent up for years (or generations) just went vertical

We are going to slalom to a totally different extreme where the public is a warzone and everyone retreats to groupchats and digital tribes

bridge swung from left, to right, and then further to the left, and further to the right, until the bridge entirely collapsed

Clinton ->

Bush (neocon right) ->

Obama (left) ->

Obama 2 (far left) ->

Trump (right) ->

Biden (woke left) ->

Trump 2 (ultranationalist right)

Each one a stronger swing

The left pushed many things that were initially unpopular and then became popular. I believe that whipping up actual hatred will, unfortunately, become very popular.

We’re in a weird time where decades of radical leftism has actually conjured into existence the demon they feared.

By accusing everyone of being racist, they’ve created antibiotic resistant racism.

The left lashed anyone who wasn’t black trans lives matter for a decade. But of course very few checked every box. A white woman was first victim during MeToo, then oppressor as a Karen.

Now all of that is going to be run back in reverse. The straight white Anglo Saxon Protestant conservative man with no tattoos, an intact family, no drug habit, etc is maybe 10-20% of America max.

Even if this archetype no longer exists, rightists will attack people that do not conform to it (even if they themselves do not conform).

And so you are already seeing people running wokism in reverse, like the Hispanic guy blaming “gays” for the fires in LA.

Basically, even if 80-90% of society didn’t conform to black trans lives matter, everyone who didn’t conform was attacked. Now that playbook will be run against the photographic negative archetype.

It’s wokism in reverse.

They aren’t mirroring the behavior of a mid-century law-abiding conservative Christian family man with children, wife, etc.

It’s tattoos, MMA, drugs, guns, shouting at strangers online, etc

Now you can argue that family man option was taken from them. And you can further argue that the Wild West of the 1850s is a better fit to the era than the clean cut America of the 1950s.

But, the moderation, the self-discipline, the personal virtue, the humility, the trust, the cooperation — that is largely gone

I think we are actually going to see the third coalition by ~2030 or so.

2010s: Democrats + Tech vs Republicans

2020s: Republicans + Tech vs Democrats

2030: Democrats + Republicans vs Tech

The Luigi left is murderously anticapitalist, and the radicalized right is aggressively ultranationalist.

Over the last 10 weeks, the digital secession to Bluesky led to complementary internal radicalizations among left and right.

Now Jesse Singal is on the far right of the Democrats, and Elon/Vivek/Rufo and even Trump are on the left flank of the Republicans.

It’s not a stable state. The spectrum is going to keep moving further and further to the radical right (on X) and the Luigi left (on Bluesky).

Over four weeks in December, the political center completely disintegrated to the point that Trump is now on the *left* of the Republican Party.

Democrats can’t tax or regulate CEOs anymore, via implicit force, so they threaten direct action. Republicans are starting to do the same.

There is an irreconcilable difference between nationalist socialists and internationalist capitalists. Both are anti-left but that’s where the similarity ends. Trump tries to straddle the difference as a nationalist capitalist.

7. Prediction that MAGA will turn against tech

Person A: Does Bannon have any sway? My read was that the debate made Elon/Trump position stronger and crystallized their stance and bond . And that the pushback is niche / doesn’t matter

Person B: Strongly disagree. Elon/Trump have formal power but the mob has informal power. In a relatively short timeframe, the next coalition will be Republican + Democrat against Technologist.

The one thing this admin may succeed at doing is dismantling regulations. That coupled with the fact that there is no solution for the debt or the disastrous governance in blue states will mean AI zooms and crypto moons.

So, in 4 years, AI has taken all the jobs, crypto has taken all the money, and tech guys take all the blame.

https://x.com/ezraklein/status/1880343102092898455

Ezra Klein sees this coming as well, from another angle — but I don’t think people fully realize how murderously angry it will be.

Tech is a market-dominant minority.

We just exited phase 1, where techlash and Biden admin attacked us head on. We are entering phase 2, with tech allied with Trump. We will eventually hit phase 3, where the mob tries to kill tech and take its money

See also Turchin’s comments about elite overproduction — many MAGAs and wokes alike are angry at their downward mobility. They’ll blame us.

I think you’ll find this overcorrects and they will jump right over trans to gays soon enough.

Person C: Oh no not my gay identity 😭😭😭😭😭😭 I better be a globalist then I guess

Person B: Bannon just declared explicitly (both above and in NYT) that he hates Musk, Thiel, Sacks, Vivek, me, Andreessen, and many other people in tech. I don't think we ever did anything to him, but he hates us on principle.

We just went through woke race communism, and now we are going through white race communism. Cernovich for example was attacking me and others a few weeks ago, but is now himself being ganged up on by hordes of MAGAs because he said that hard work is good.

It's exactly a replay of wokeness, but everyone may just need to get mugged from the right to see that. To realize that there's a reason the center exists, or existed.

Person A: Isn’t Maga whatever Trump says? He owns the party. People fall in line? Sure some terminally online anons are mad. Who cares? Trump is pro choice. Trump is pro high skilled immigration. Trump is pro tech/pro innovation. Trump has kept the same views forever. Is the concern that he will change, or that he’ll be marginalized within his faction?

Person B: Trump has formal power but the base has informal power. So he can win the battle but the radicalized base will win the war.

Trump is basically the left of the Republican Party now, and in the middle of a disintegrating political center. The Luigi Left is on one side, and the Radical Right on the other.

Person A: Does Steve Bannon have any influence? Trump is doubling down on tech, Elon, high skilled immigration. It seems like gray might be running the White House

The difference between the left and right is that on the left the inmates ran the asylum bc moderates couldn’t push back , whereas on the right Trump ignores them or swats them like a fly

8. A journalist reached out should I talk to them?

Person A: Talk to them but spend the first half of the call lecturing them about how capitalism is the most reliable way to lift people from poverty.

Person B: If I ever talk to an NYT reporter again (which I won’t) my only answer will be “Sulzberger is a nepotist”

Like the captured soldier who repeats only his name, rank, and serial number

9. California Bailout

Person A: Arnold Kling says that CA is going to need a bailout, and that it should come with conditions: that CA cede management of public employees, water, and forests to the federal government https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/tough-love-for-california

Peson B: I would go further: demand that CA end ballot harvesting and NGO capture of elections.

End all discrimination and preferences in government hiring

For certain government jobs we might also demand future disclosure of statistics on applicants who are accepted or rejected, promoted or denied promotions

10. Trump meme coin

🧐 If I am reading this right, something like 80-90% of the Trump meme coin is going to “Creators and CIC Digital” which is him and his company.

Almost certainly this memecoin will decline substantially in value after the spike. It might even crash in days. When it does, many people who gambled and lost will be angry.

If the crash impedes the second term agenda, it could come at literally trillions in public opportunity cost in return for a few billion in short-term private gain.

Anyway, just wanted to say that it doesn’t seem like the best move at this time unless there is an immediate need for billions (perhaps to pay legal bills?). But we’ll see.

11. https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-physicist-decoding-the-nonbinary-nature-of-the-subatomic-world-20250110/

Do the properties of quarks and gluons resonate with you as a nonbinary person?Yes, I think the simple fact that gluons carry multiple color charges means they are fundamentally nonbinary creatures. And they are the cornerstone of everything around us.

I used to think I was a top quark. Only now do I realize I’m a bottom

12. Millennials vs Zoomers

The absolute nicest thing I can say about this memecoin stuff is that it's the big debut of Zoomer culture onto the American political scene and also that the Zoomers are deranged psychopaths who will destroy this country and eventually the world

You’re absolutely right that it’s Zoomer culture going mainstream.

Had dinner next to a CA dude who came in for the inaug. Didn’t understand crypto deeply, but only cared about coins. No stocks….felt ancient to him.

Many such cases. And this is from a group that still doesn’t have that much purchasing power (in our polls, ownership of crypto is higher among 30-39 than 20-29, but I think owning crypto is more normalized/the baseline among under 30s)

I feel grateful that I can sneer the generation after me with more analytical rigor than any generation before me.

Millenials have higher IQs than zoomers, dramatically better mental health, and are more patriotic. This is all just empirically true.

It’s the first generation to be dumber than the last probably since the Industrial Revolution.

Zoomer music is pretty decent though imo I will give them that

Alpha is coming out as not just internet native but social media native combined with the shock of covid. So Zoomers might not be the bottom for long.

Zoomers are practically speciating at this point. The 10-20% of them who are elite are terrifying

My biggest complaint against the boomers is now they now wear yoga pants and don’t seem to realize it. The Zoomer employee at my startup complained that Google Maps had labeled his favorite clothing store, Vuori, a “women’s clothing store.” Bruh, I got some bad news from the past for you.

He also wore “Lulus” and I could never keep a straight face around him.

That might explain why he left. Anyhow…

Also they seem to exist in this entangled state of whiny irony and complete emotional meltdown. You never quite knew which state he was in until you asked him to do something.

Schrodinger’s Zoomer. Ok, I’ll stop.

Zoomers are aged 6-24, I think meme coins are as much Millennial culture as Zoomers. It's completely rational imo. If you have no chance of breaking out, no assets, then why would you try to get 10%/yr on $1000?

Throw that $1000 into some meme coins and it either goes to 0 and you're basically where you are now, or you make $100k.

Also they seem to exist in this entangled state of whiny irony and complete emotional meltdown. You never quite knew which state he was in until you asked him to do something.

It's actually the inverse of the usual generational shift. They don't offend me, I offend them. They don't drink, have sex, or drive recklessly, which is about the only thing the youth have reliably done for generations.

It's not disdain, it's literal moral condemnation. I'm supposed to be outraged by the youth, and instead find them meek and conformist. The youth used to protest to get speakers heard, now they protest to get them silenced. It's not the same old, same old. It's the exact inverse.

Person B: how is it different than Hippies and WWII vets or Boomers and Gen X? Everyone thinks they're the pinnacle of civilization and the youth are morally decrepit

Though I agree about the financial nihilism point.

Person A: Completely different.

The hippies outraged the greatest generation, with their loose behavior and radical ideas.

I outrage the zoomers....it's the exact opposite.

New books used to outrage the older authors...now old books outrage the new authors. Again, it's a total flip.

Gen X/older millennials went from getting canceled and scolded by literal boomers, to getting canceled and scolded by zoomers.

This isn't a generational progression, it's a flip.

I'll note that the biggest flips to the right are coming from the young (at least among men), so I wouldn't claim this new politics will last, but it's not just the olds whining about the youngs....it's something very different.

Person B: I'm trying to understand why you think it's so unidirectional rather than perpetually bidirectional.

You're asserting that prior generations just went around not caring about what the older generations did and being unoffended by them, and being solely the objection of the offense? Like the Hippies or Gen X are just doing their thing, love their parents, love the way things are?

Like the olds whine about the youngs, the youngs whine about the olds

The nature of the whining is very different.

There's nothing a zoomer could say that would offend me. There's about a thousand things I could say that would offend them.

The arrow is supposed to go the other way.

Definitely went the other way in the example you cited of hippies and WWII generation.

This isn't just anecdata: looking at the drinking and sex stats.

I'm not saying "oh, these crazy kids are partying too hard and screwing around"

It's me saying: By god, do something and have a life already.

right isn't that you being offended at their behaviors and morals

It's not offended, it's disappointed.

Offense implies moral umbrage.

It's not disdain, it's literal moral condemnation.

Person C: I really want to ground this in the empirical fact that they seem to have much worse mental health, lower IQs (most of this is Covid, but 12 grade test scores peaked in like 2014), are spending way more time alone than similarly aged people 10 years ago did, and broadly seem to support a bunch of illiberal things like murdering CEOs on a bipartisan basis.

I’m kind of doing a bit but I do legitimately think this time is different and there’s a social crisis rolling out and we’re just ignoring it because people always complain about the young.

My big beef with meme coins and the general speculative side of crypto is that it just that it breaks the natural meritocracy of the world.

Like, something that really did deradicalize me in my 20's was meeting CEOs or billionaires or even like, the kids/spouses of super rich people who decided to do philanthropy or whatever, and finding them to actually be pretty smart and kind-hearted on average relative to the overall population.

But then you go to the crypto socials and it's not like that at all.

Memecoins are a byproduct of youth that no longer sees capitalism aligning with actual values...that it's all 'fake' somehow. Ergo, the nihilism. "Retire my bloodline"...."generational wealth"...everyone fundamentally trying to retire from a system that they see as morally arbitrary.

I am trying to distract myself from the grossness of the memes by just trying to quantify crypto owners - this is going through 204 psycometric traits and then doing [trait] ~ age/education/income/2024 vote + crypto and pulling out the crypto coefficient and pulling the biggest differences, ie, "How different are crypto owners on personality controlling for demographics".

Basically narcissistic wordcels who love chaos.

13. Israel

I am personally really annoyed about this because how how dickish pro-Israel Republicans were about this.

I legitimately had to avoid family functions the whole year because of the "How could you be working against your own people" bullshit only for everyone to just let themselves get cucked by a deal they clearly would have described as Nazi-esque if it had been pushed by Biden.

But annoying hypocrisy aside I guess it's good the war is over.

The Israeli right has been fairly consistent, they're pretty mad and now the center-left is giving Netanyahu votes for cover to make the deal go through.

The American Jewish pro-Israel right not so much - nobody wants to cross Trump right now I guess.

Person B:https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1881068317114519596

Bet on it, in exchange for letting Israel attack Iran (or something else).

Person C: Trump admin off to an interesting start

Israel gets a not great deal

Memecoin madness

Base wilding out on skilled visas

TikTok u-turn

The cabinet and advisors include some pretty competent people so hopefully there’ll be some good happening…

14. Trump Chaos

When I tweeted that despite being eager to punish Democrats for their derangements, I couldn't personally support Trump, it was in anticipation of conundrums like this, where he instantly puts his biggest supporters in impossible positions essentially every day by scamming the public, reneging on core promises (cucking on TikTok and possibly China generally) and being willing to throw any principle under the bus for personal gain at any moment. Don't get me wrong, electing Trump has achieved everything I could have asked for in terms of the general vibe shift and on the specific issue I'm invested in. But all of what was obtained by repudiating the Democrats is endangered by his others qualities

like he's going to let you regulate crypto the way you want --- but a few days before inauguration is going to blow a giant hole in the creidbility of the whole premise of crypto before the whole world by scamming the public for personal gain

I think this shows that some (maybe all) of Trump team launching this project doesn’t get crypto at its core beyond the entirely max speculative/casino elements.

15. Can Trump get all his people in?

Maybe premature, but I am cautiously optimistic that many/most/all of the nominees may get through.

There's been this long running question in political science about whether "political capital" is a form of capital that spends down -- you only have so much and you have to hoard it -- or whether spending it generates new capital -- it's generative, and momentum matters most?

I think it's increasingly clear the latter is true?

Are Senators actually willing to buck Trump.?

If you won't buck Trump on Hegseth, are you really going to buck him on any of the others.

Or, the causal version --

Are the things that Trump is doing to ensure Hegseth getting through also the same things that ensure the other three get through.

e.g. some combination of Trump and Elon threatening R Senators with primaries if they don't vote for all of the nominees

That's what I mean by, the strategy to get one through is the same as the strategy to get them all through

The conventional wisdom was that one would be a sacrificial lamb

On purpose

I think maybe that was wrong

The correct strategy is to demand and force them all to get confirmed

16. But actually

He defines wokeness as “An aggressively performative focus on social justice.” By doing this, he concedes that the woke are correct (implying that differences between groups are a problem worth solving), but just thinks the way they’re going about it is the problem.

I prefer a different definition of wokeness, one that gets at the heart of the substantive difference: Wokeness prioritizing the reduction of outcome-disparities (i.e. equity) ahead of equal treatment under the law (i.e. liberty) Put differently, wokeness is believing that inequality between groups of people is a problem that we should try to solve. Or that government should try to bring about equality of opportunity.

"The woke movement had some good points, they just took it too far" is a line of thinking which enabled wokeness in the first place. Because they just responded with something like the below:

"If you care about X, why can’t you care even more? Oh, you don’t care that much? Well then you must be a hypocrite.”

Or: "How can you say you care about equality if you don't have equal outcomes at all levels of the organization? How can you have equality of opportunity if parents have different wealth and thus opportunities to provide to their children….Do you care about equality of opportunity or not?" This is how people took a concept like equality of opportunity and turned it into a mutated form of communism.

Think about it. At what point would people say "we accomplished our goal, we don’t need more progress?”.

When racial/biological groups are equal economically.

But they’d reply “We won’t get equality of outcome, we’ll get fair, equality of opportunity capitalism, which we’ve never had”.

Motte and bailey. 'Equality' is of course 'equity' in practice.

They’d say they do *not* believe in equality of outcome, but they *do* believe in equality of opportunity. But if you think about it for five minutes, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome lead to the same exact thing. Meaning: when the goal is *equal* opportunity there's no morally acceptable line until you get to total equality of outcome. You don't just stop & say "OK, we have equal opportunity now". There’s always more work to be done. The work is only competed when everything is equal, otherwise there’s still more progress to make. That’s what progress *is* for them, otherwise they wouldn’t talk about reducing disparities in the first place. There is no acceptable disparity these people have given. Zero disparity is the goal.

Of course, you can’t have equality of opportunity without equality of outcome in every dimension. People don’t have the same parents, the same cultures, the same places of birth. If people have different outcomes, they have different opportunities. You can’t equalize opportunity without equalizing outcomes. You can give more opportunities by putting more resources on education, healthcare, poverty reduction etc, but that will never *equalize* opportunity. If people mean *sufficient opportunity*, not *equal*, use that term! But they don't, so the motte and bailey persists.

They deny the connection of course because equality of outcome is politically unfeasible. To be fair to them, they genuinely don't believe they are advocating for it in the first place. In practice it's: "I would never advocate for wokeness, I just advocate for all of the policies that would create and enforce wokeness."

Which is why there's no such thing as anti-woke, pro-equality of opportunity. Because the only way to equalize opportunity (aka outcomes) is a massive expansion of state power as well as a cultural movement around censorship and discrimination (DEI). Otherwise, you're not really prioritizing equality of opportunity.

In order to not be woke, you have to say, we're *not* striving for *equal* opportunity anymore, we're *not* trying to use the government to *reduce* inequality between biological groups. We're not using the government to address historical wrongs.

Equality under the law is the only true equality, and of course it leads to inequality in practice, since inequality is the natural state of the world. We can focus on raising the floor without reducing the ceiling — even if that means increasing inequality.

Wokeness isn't over when we stop having tampons in the bathroom or struggle sessions in companies. Wokeness is over when the government stops trying to socially engineer economic outcomes based on biological characteristics. Wokeness is over when we stop tracking those characteristics (and the differential outcomes between them) in the first place.

PG is so close to understanding this — he actually wrote a great essay years ago about how inequality is a necessary byproduct of societal flourishing and got a ton of flak for it but he was right. Now he just needs to abstract the same logic to inequality between groups. His original post on inequality significantly improved the discourse at the time and moved us all closer to truth. Hopefully the feedback to his post on wokeness returns the favor.

It’s similar to MAGA but does have some small amount of more insane far right, which to a Jew is scary given it’s Germany, but the Neo-Nazis et al clearly don’t seem to be in charge of it.

And Elon is right they are probably their only hope to save their broken country. If they win and the CDU is forced to finally take on more of their popular ideas and shift right to compete, that’s probably very good for Germany and the west.

2. What’s going on in LA?

1. Been a dry year

2. Very high winds all of a sudden

3. Govt terrible about brush management because of environmental concerns.

4. Lots of homeless encampments that run on open flames.

5. Above ground power lines aren’t maintained properly. They blow around in the wind and explode.

6. Once fires are burning, pyromaniacs get inspired to go start more fires (and it’s easier to get away with it)

7. Wind continues to literally fan the flames.

8. All firefighting services way over capacity, no option but to let areas burn.

Some of these have higher weighting than others, many are culture war lightning rods, narrative on both the left and the right still taking shape.

3. LA gov’t incompetence feels like it could introduce more accountability.

Feels like this could be a Oct 7th-level-moment in terms of political shifts in LA / CA.

A bunch of the most influential folks in LA / CA just experienced:

- A fire that, at a minimum, was significantly exacerbated by terrible forest management (and some probability traced back to homeless encampment or similar).

- A state-level insurer that will be completely wiped out after this (CA FAIR has $5.9b of exposure in the Palisades and $200m on the balance sheet + $2.5b in state-wide re-insurance), resulting in, at best, a protracted process for their claims to be settled and, at worse, claims going unpaid (and perhaps a state or federal bailout to avoid that).

- A local far-left gov response that will inevitably be ripe for valid criticism.

4. Trumps’ instincts (in referring to his Joe Rogan discussion about LA being unprepared for fires)

What's kind of amazing about Trump is despite the rambling and sometimes incoherent delivery, he's often very right about things, specifically about things the media itself gets foundationally wrong.

I recall he got so much flak about the electric catapults on aircraft carriers, and he was in fact right: the Navy was struggling to replace the old steam ones, a subtlety the MSM totally missed.

He seems to have this animal cleverness about him, probably due to all his NYC real estate skulduggery. He can see the EU/Russia relationship from the Putin side of the table in a way all the Ben Rhodes and Jake Sullivans can not.

Him sending his son-in-law with zero diplomatic experience to parachute in to Middle East and run rings around the entire diplomatic corps is both a surprise and not a surprise because they knew nothing but they also didn’t know any of the encrusted shibboleths that have become diplomatic conventional wisdom…Also, in hindsight, Kushner not so dumb after all.

Another thing he understands is that strong, vital societies grow and intuitively, when you look at maps old empires, you know they’ve peaked when their territorial expanse does. America getting bigger is almost inherently greater in some fundamental way

5. Follow up from intra-right struggles

Person A: Basically, the last week was a move about 20 points further right, to the point that Elon and Vivek are now on the *left* of the Republican party for being pro-merit.

2025 may turn out to be a lot like 2013. In 2012, tech helped Obama get re-elected. After a few weeks of congrats, repressed anti-tech sentiment suddenly surged on the left after the inauguration. Also, wokism went bananas in 2013 after Obama’s relatively moderate first term. In 2024, tech helped Trump get re-elected. After a few weeks of congrats, repressed anti-tech sentiment suddenly surged on the right after the election. (Things move faster on X these days so it didn’t even take till the inauguration to happen)

Basically, in the span of less than a year, tech went from getting congratulated in the Atlantic by the left to getting slammed by them in 2013. Of course, the left still hates tech, even more so than 2016 because they blame them for taking away their power in 2024. But now large swaths of the right also hate tech. Or have gotten memed into doing so.

Person B: The right had immense reason to hate tech from 2012-2020. Censorship was salient here. The tech/right coalition did not form on a premise of immigration maximalism, nor are the sane heads in tech demanding it, so I think we’ll be fine.

it's rational to want race and gender favoritism to end in the US while wanting citizen vs non-citizen favoritism to continue, because the latter is part of what constitutes a nation

One reason the MAGA nativists are winning the argument is that a lot of more middle class libs in tech (and other sectors) secretly agree with them. Also, post election, blanket diversity/immigration worship has fallen out of favor on the left as well

6. On decoupling from China

We're so far from cutting off Chinese parts that I don't think it's worth entertaining the hypo. There are innumerable pieces of essential infrastructure that have no path to decoupling. Even building one will take four years of careful, coordinated action that is very unlikely to happen…I had to go to the wall multiple times just to make the IoT cybersecurity certification potentially meaningful. There are very powerful interests that wanted it to be a rubber stamp, and if it wasn't for me personally, they would have won. I mean, tariffs are not going to move the needle on this stuff, they're not going to fundamentally change the incentives if you currently pay $9/hr to develop your firmware

Decoupling is not happening, it didn't happen under Trump 45, it didn't happen under Biden, the trend lines were monotonically anti-decoupling the whole time, the feds don't even really understand the issue yet and so struggle to frame a solution

Lots of Americans still mentally live in 2009, where the idea of a good Chinese $7k gas car or $10k EV would have seemed utterly risible, but the American auto manufacturers have utterly lost the export market and will leverage all their resources to maintain the protected American market that is the only one where they're competitive. This is a special case bc of the employment numbers, market size, and incumbent manufacturing capacity

7. H1B and AI

Person A: I’ve never really used H1B. I don’t think I’ve hired 5. But I have used off shore programmers. Not a lot. But I have for price conscious projects

All that said , I think the dynamics of H1Bs for the tech world should change considerably because of the impact of AI.

We can’t talk about H1Bs looking backwards. We have to consider that AI is the Sun and all things software revolve around it.

We need as many great AI engineers as we can get. If there is a way to prove their proficiency, hire them. All of them. H1B or something new. That’s a sovereign imperative.

But for run of the mill coders, nope. AI can generate 75 pct of the lines of code that need to be created by companies. We don’t need H1Bs for them

We need to train people , preferably Americans if possible, to manage the output of AI and how to use AI models.

I think we have enough people capable of being trained

We aren’t far from the time where we stop using AI to replicate what todays coders do, to using AI as the core code generators and agents , and training humans to do what AI can’t and to manage and leverage the evolving capabilities that AI has.

You can use all the data and examples of how H1Bs have been used in the past. But IMO, it’s shuffling deck chairs on the titanic.

If we want to stay ahead, we need to think ahead and modify the rules accordingly.

I don’t see why we would want any H1Bs approved for anyone who doesn’t move the needle on AI for the country

Person B: I appreciate this because I’m now seeing there is a large group of people who think (a) their country doesn’t need to import skilled talent anymore because (b) AI will take all the jobs.

I have the totally opposite view which is that (a) the global market for talent is heating up and (b) AI is right now amplified rather than truly artificial intelligence.

Person c: It would be silly suggest AI will supplant all "skilled talent," or serve unconditionally as a substitute rather than a complement for smart entry-level labor. But it would be equally silly for any sector that relies on a leveraged tier of lower-level knowledge workers to perform a semi-commoditized function -- basic coding, litigation document review, rudimentary financial analysis -- to ignore the likely impact of AI on its staffing structure. Certainly the legal profession isn't ignoring it.

All the more reason to calibrate our visas to truly attract the best, brightest talent, which Vivek, Sacks, and others have advocated for

8. Why was there a global shift to the right?

Elon's probably the #1 contender for "biggest factor," but I think "2020" is at least a contender. The "global elite" such as it is wagered a LOT of its credibility on a lockdown strategy for Covid + the whole global George Floyd reckoning thing. Both of those were big overreaches that alienated many people, and then the aftermath having a basically invalid Joe Biden at the helm intensified the sense the regime had "lost the mandate of heaven" or whatever.

2020 was the global elite venturing further and further on a limb. 2022 was Elon sawing off the limb

I'm a little skeptical of "inflation" as explanatory. Clearly a factor, but I don't think America's richest county (Loudoun) made a big shift towards Trump due to inflation

A lot of what happened is that liberals finally lost the culture war. They lost because a) They acted insane for years on race/gender issues and b) Elon bought the big agenda-setting machine

What's complicated is that the factors aren't compartmentalized. If your regime causes inflation, people are more skeptical of your cultural radicalism

***

Person B: To push back on the premise, one party had a candidate that was a POTUS and running as a candidate for 2 yrs.

The other had a candidate that ran for 120 days

Despite that enormous advantage, the winner couldn’t get 50 pct of the popular vote.

The definitive winner. But far far far from a mandate

Person C: (Sorry obligatory other opinion here: If you’d given her another few months and more exposure, I think we would have gotten well over 50% - but maybe D’s don’t realize this, and try her again…)

9. H1B and wages

That is not the issue. The issue is that the program was conceived at NSF to lower wages in aggregate by design.

For scientists and other STEM workers this is like being put under anasthesia for an appendectomy only to listen to the surgeons talk among themselves about who should get your spare kidney, blood plasma and portions of rib.

Let me try a different version.

Instead of a labor shortage let me suggest that there is a capital shortage. American workers need to be on the Cap Tables in a HUGE way to motivate them and make them aligned.

My solution is to use a printing press. Instead of Visas, we are going to print shares and maybe bonds too. For America. For the good of the Nation.

Our capitalists just don’t have the right level of drive. Too busy with F1, Art Basel, Burning man prep and McClaren owners meetups.

That is how it sounds. And has done so for 40 years.

If anyone talked like that I might call them a communist. I would defend my investor and founder friends.

Yet I hear no one in the H-1B discussion talking about Coasian rights, market solutions and separating harberger triangles from Borjas rectangles.

Which is what we would do if we were serious about efficiency merit and winning.

Person B: fwiw in the tech circles, the wages have not been lowered because there is a supply shortage of good engineers at the top end.

The way compensation works at tech companies is via structured bands based on levels and discretionary equity. This banding is a side effect of wanting to avoid racial and gender discrimination lawsuits. So most tech companies are not replacing US citizens with H1Bs and then paying those H1Bs less because the banding and leveling processes forces everyone to be paid formulaically. In practice, this means that H1Bs that most tech people are interacting with are making total comp of $200k and many are on a total comp package of $500k-$2m/yr once you factor in their equity packages.

H1B happens to be the solution to the talent problem in the software tech universe, regardless of how it was conceived by NSF. So people from that slice of the world have a very different lived experience with H1Bs (and O1s)

Person C: This is the lump of labor fallacy. Imagine a desert island with one person. Bringing a second person on the island doesn’t “take his job”, it increases total productive capacity if the new arrival is productive.

It doesn’t mean you bring just anyone onto the island — not a cannibal, not a layabout — but a hardworking new arrival increases the number of coconuts for both people.

Many skilled immigrants are tech founders and directly “create” jobs. But even those who are just net taxpayers are net beneficial for a country that’s $175.3T in debt, if they are culturally assimilated.

Person A: No. That would be the lump of labor strawman.

It *would* be super convenient if I was making an anti-economic argument. Or an anti-Indian argument. Or anti-tech. Or anti-market.

But I am not. We have brilliant foreign workers who create multi billion dollar companies. They also displace Americans who avoid flooded markets and who in their absence would create such companies as well. Same for scientific discoveries. Etc.

This is *not* that argument. This is the pro-market Coasian restrictionist position facing the pro-tech subsidy socialist appeal from VC/C-Suite socialism.

Person D: bring people in who raise the mean IQ of the island.

Person A: I don’t think todays scientific employers want high IQ/Brilliance at all. They want pliable and deferential competence.

High intelligence is too dangerous.

Did you Notice that no one is engaging the model of Coasian rights? We’ll, why is that?

High IQ people would do just that to solve this problem. And that is dangerous to those “capitalists” looking to capture labor’s massive Borjas Rectangle while complaining about the tiny Harberger triangle above it forming the trapezoid.

Let’s put it like this: it’s a Szilard problem.

Leo Szilard (a genius immigrant btw) is brilliant enough to get us a Manhattan project, but the Leslie Groves types don’t want him in the project. So they hire away. Too much independence. Szilard (while Hungarian by birth !) was too “American” if you will. Too headstrong and independent.

We want High IQ up to the point where these Smart people start talking about issues in public.

Like H-1B and the NSF / NAS / GUIRR conspiracy against American scientists led by Erich Bloch.

Person E: Yeah that’s the thing — you could theoretically recruit a mean-110 IQ population of law abiding immigrants who also poll in favor of panopticon state surveillance, a social credit system, and censorship

So emphases on culture and assimilation don’t become moot at higher IQ levels even though concerns about, eg, violent crime are greatly diminished

I don’t think we can afford to ignore the difference between a 2/10 censorship preference and 8/10

Some societies will demonetize charlie hebdoe and some societies will blow it up

These differences become less concerning if you are assimilating a gradual flow of immigrants vs. doing demographic replacement en masse

Person F: Per this discussion, I used to be all about IQ maxing, but Covid altered my perspective. The more conformist societies in the East were crippled by propaganda and rendered miserable with masking and rules. Florida, with its motley crew of Cubans, old white people and panhandle rednecks, bucked the trends and set a glorious example for everyone else. Civilization was saved not by the smartest necessarily, but by the most freedom loving

10. Why is Israel high-fertility?

The most convincing take I’ve seen on Israeli TFR is that religious jews (thus fertility) are high-status in israel

Working hard doesn’t mean less children. In fact people on farms in the 1800s probably worked harder

Well the current girlboss lifescript is something like: strive as an analyst/associate for a few years, then maybe go to business school if applicable, then have kids in 30s with more security and $. And anecdotally I’ve seen women ambivalent about kids become very kid-focused after coming into money. The U-shapes fertility curve is real; alleviating the sense of status-treadmill precarity that some junior professionals feel does seem to promote kidhaving. Obviously for subsistence farmers the 80h weeks have a different valence

Kids are a labor force on a farm, a cost in meritocratic meat grinder socieites

The very religious help, but it's not just them. They're only 10-15% of the population. Even seculars have a high birthrate. CEO of a company I invested in is on kid four. It's just cultural values...also, the military pushes people to become adults. If you live like a SF hipster Peter Pan until your 30s you're a loser in Israel. Also, contact with death and existential struggle...that's what modernity lacks. Israel has high GDP but also air raid sirens and constant battlefield deaths. Unique combo.

Notably in Israel things like childcare are still expensive, and of course real estate is as expensive as SF/NYC. While the Nordics offer everything and everyone's a Panda bear, fertility-wise.

***

In 2008, the head of the Orthodox Church offered to baptize every born born and become godfather to every 3rd child or beyond born in a family. He made it high status to have more kids.

I think this is also part of why the U-curve exists for wealthier people in my experience. It's a way to differentiate from the middle class so it's a status symbol for the wealthy. So many rich VCs and founders are rolling around with 3 or 4 kids while the middle managers at FAANG are having 1-2.

Average for left-wing secular Israeli families: 2.5

For traditional/semi-secular: 4

For religious living in settlements: 6

For Haredim: 8-10

Btw this isn’t just true in Israel. It’s true in literally every more religious community in the US.

Mormons: 3.4

American Orthodox Jews: 3.3

American Haredim: 6

American Christians are difficult to measure because it’s hard to identify who is more religious - but there is no question that higher church attendance correlates with higher fertility rate.

If the question is how do you raise societal fertility rates, the answer is get people to engage with religion. If the question is how do you get secular people to have more kids, the answer is still get everyone around them to engage in religion.

11. Meritocracy and open borders are not synonymous

Affirmative action quotas and jewish quotas seem inapposite to immigration quotas, because they aim to engineer (and kneecap) job and education prospects for target groups — not simply limit who can come into the country. Before the advent and after the sunset of these various racist quota systems, nearly every country has limited immigration. Meritocracy and open borders have never been synonymous.

And it’s interesting to conflate them more aggressively now, at a moment when the internet has made geography less of a labor-market rigidity than ever before.

***

The other question is: what % of the global elite are “organically” Chinese and Indian?

In 1950 it was like 0% because both countries were wrecked by communism and socialism respectively

And many in MAGA have an implicit belief that 1950 is the true state of the world and without outsourcing and offshoring it would still be like that

But it was actually a highly atypical time in world history

***

Person A: It's a great book (Albion’s Seed), but a lot of people take the wrong message from it to argue that there is no cohesive British culture that informed our nation's founding. If East Anglians, Scots Irish, and Cavaliers created significant cultural differences that can still be seen today hundreds of years later--then we can't say "Oh well, everyone from Pakistan, China, Mexico, Venezuela, etc." is going to assimilate perfectly so long as they learn english and pay taxes.

Person B: How is that not the right lesson to take from it? What exactly is this hypothetical mainline American culture to which people should be assimilating? If we're setting aside the procedural business of English-language skills, law-following, and tax-paying, what then should the Rahuls of the world adopt as their new identity?

I don't think anyone could realistically dispute that they change things.

The question, is from what exactly? We're so beyond having anything like a common cultural or social fabric, this all seems a bit of nostalgic RETVRN to me.

Or perhaps the statement is true in small rural communities, and there what few immigrants end up do change things for the worse. But the thought that there'll be cultural assimilation problems in the larger cities...again, seems a bit delusional. Matters are already a total circus.

Person A: We aren't going to Retvrn, but we can make things worse. We have the highest % of foreign born residents since 1910.

We are lacking a common culture, but I don't see that as a reason to make it even more diffuse.

Person B: Lomez is right that short of a WWII situation, hard to see how you gel this circus into a nation, and that conflict isn't likely to come anytime soon.

Person A: Tbh you can also basically meme a common culture into being

But it does require attempting to define it and old Anglo folkways are a good choice

That’s a solid point in favor of slowing down — The immigration pause of ~1920-1965 helped America digest a lot of cultural intake

The assimilationist position does not argue that most Americans are WASPs but that WASP cultural norms were beneficially hegemonic for awhile and other continental immigrants assimilated to them somewhat

“What is Person B’s point exactly? It’s so bad already that we have no choice but to make it worse?…Person B makes a big deal about how diverse Israel is when denying accusations that it is a white (evil) nation. But he apparently does not believe that that diversity (as well as the diversity added by converts like himself) is so significant as to mandate importing an arab majority. It’s just a fallacious point”

“America is less trusting, less honest, less clean, less peaceful than it used to be. Ergo we should engineer even worse outcomes on all of those metrics”

“The idea that there is no distinct culture to preserve here is also ridiculous. And it is incoherent for these guys to use it as a point in their favor when “superior culture” is their only explanation for group and national differences. Though I suppose Person A thinks it is a worse culture , and the third world is just terrible because it got exported”… Ironically, these guys have a much less flexible view of race than “race realists.” If you aren’t a mayflower wasp, you might as well be dravidian

It’s not that these conceptual challenges are wholly meritless, but they often involve selective demands for rigor.

““Culture” “religion” “race” are not so easily disentangled, but the demand that they be disentangled (and also rendered individually meaningless) is only made of western european peoples….Part of the freakout around the largely anonymous-driven

H1B response is that white people are increasingly conscious of themselves in those terms for reasons other than, e.g. allocating slots away from themselves at harvard”

“It’s not so much that clannishness of that sort is desirable as such, but it is a natural response to being forced into competition with others who think (and are permitted to think) in those terms. Israelis don’t really have a choice in the matter (even if they wanted to), but in the colorful diverse future of pakistani rape gangs and elite human capital indians getting into stanford by writing blacklivesmatter on their apps, it’s less of a choice here as well…But that’s also why it comes off as disingenuous when someone like Person A says there’s no such thing as an American. The best possible version of his argument still relies on the implicit threat that any honest response under one’s real name will be forwarded to one’s employer”

I could explain aspects of American culture, and Anglo-Saxon culture more broadly…. As I said above, honesty, cleanliness, respect for law in a certain sense, independence, many things…

But the tenor of the past week’s discussion has been to avoid and even condemn acknowledgment of a racial component, because doing so is treated as immoral.

I am interested in the Israeli/Jewish example because (1) it is clearly racial to *some* degree (religion cant account for atheists like Ben Gurion), but (2) it is not *entirely* so, as people like Person A demonstrate.

The question is why we have to continue to have this discussion in terms which assume the moral illegitimacy of comparable sense llegitimacy of comparable sense of race in understanding western nations, subject to high-barrier-to-entry conversion policy for small number of people with genuine affinity, rather than infinity indians….Israel doesn’t actually tolerate people like Person A saying “you know, the jewish law of return might be perceived as raycis by a graduate of bengaluru technical institute, you’d better change that…” But do people have an account for why this is? Maybe there is a good one, but nobody feels compelled to explain. Perhaps because even now you will get blacklisted for asking….Btw I am not even saying that racial primacy is good way for west to think of itself , at least not in simple sense, but it is increasingly unavoidable in presence of others who think same way about themselves. Which is actually good argument against engineering such a presence. But is also, in any case, why discussion on this topic more generally feels so dishonest.

Many of our supposedly assimilated immigrants actually still think of themselves primarily as members of the national or ethnic group they originate from, rather than as members of the nation they have immigrated to. Otherwise, restricting immigration from India wouldn’t be inherently alienating to Indians in America.

For instance, I assume Person A does not have a problem with the jewish law of return, which is in part lineage based (aka racial). That is because he has so thoroughly assimilated to jewish identity that he sees that law as benefiting and maintaining the integrity of *his* (new) group, rather than as unfairly excluding his cousin who’s just graduated from X technical institute. That’s what real assimilation means.

Person A: Just to add some more color on why Israel is different, it's not quite ethnonationalist in the traditional sense, and the reason it's hard to define is that Jewish identity doesn't really fit into our post-Enlightenment breakdowns of citizenship, ethnicity, and religion.

As Dara Horn, one of the best chroniclers of the modern Jewish experience put it, in a recent Atlantic piece:

Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature.

So it's not quite right to call the law of return a purely blood-and-soil mechanism. You can in fact convert and become Israeli...it just takes a while.

Person B: What a question-begging response from Person A. First he suggests it’s morally wrong to be aware of race in discussions of national identity (some suspect je ne sais quois). Then he suggests the entire concept of national identity is itself logically incoherent with his Nozick Ship of Theseus example. Then he pivots and says it is *both* morally acceptable *and* coherent for Israel because, tautologically, it just is. And finally, he says that Israel is actually some esoteric special thing…” a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a nonuniversalizing religion is but one feature.”

But that last line, funnily enough, sounds exactly like the concept of nationhood that many people have for america and other countries of the west (no, you cant rely on the universalizing vs. nonuniversalizing religion bit when huge portions of both societies are atheist). He makes no attempt to explain why such a definition suddenly ceases to be morally palatable or logically coherent when asserted by a non-israeli westerner.

I am glad to see that you’ve conceded the point on the morality and/or coherence of ethnicity in defining national identity. But the historical claim that America has always been a racially agnostic melting pot fares no better. Certainly the founders would be surprised to hear it. As, for that matter, would the proponents of the 1965 immigration act, who promised at the time that it would not “upset the ethnic mix of our society.” The phrase “diversity is our strength,” meanwhile, was apparently coined by Dan Quayle in 1992.

The idea that American immigration policy is simply a consequence of some unique and purely propositional identity is also belied by the fact that Europe is currently undergoing a comparable demographic shift, justified in much the same terms. The fact is that these are wealthy societies which people from all over the world want to live in, and that even european ethnostates have not been able to effectively respond because doing so is stigmatized as “racist,” much as it is here.

People are increasingly aware that the demographic shift is changing the character of these societies, however. And that awareness overlaps with a realization that, even if “whiteness is just a social construct,” it is a social construct that nobody seems to have trouble using when, e.g., discriminating against “white” people in hiring. These phenomena obviously produce a racialized political response, and it seems unfair to dismiss that response as immoral or logically incoherent.

White Americans, and white people more generally, are indeed the most open and least clannish people in the world. That is a strength in many ways. But the societies that they have produced as a result are sustainable only if that attitude is reciprocated by newcomers. And as of right now, immigration to the west involves no meaningful screening for that attitude (or other, distinctive cultural traits), nor does the weight of the evidence suggest that it is what we are getting anywhere the experiment has been run

Almost everyone would be happy to welcome Indians or others who shared these traits, in assimilable numbers. Something like the process that Person A went through to convert would be great for that. But instead we’re being told that white Americans are lazy, that they deserve to be discriminated against, that they’ll lose the support of newcomers if they don’t racially pander to them, and that they’re evil and stupid if they react negatively to any of the above

It doesn’t contradict the creedal view in principle. There are obviously all sorts of small-scale organizations that are purely creedal, though many things change once you scale up past the level of personal familiarity. My points are therefore that (1) racial concerns are coherent and morally legitimate under the present conditions that she notes, (2) the United States (and Europe) have not been *purely* creedal as a matter of historical fact, and (3) the facts of ingroup preference and the heritability of behavior (whether due to biology or ordinary processes of cultural transmission), even when they are not combined with a prevailing ideology that reifies such things, makes the process extraordinarily difficult.

Even France, with its color-blind civic ethos, is struggling to digest mass immigration of identifiable groups that behave differently and attain different social outcomes. How to avoid racial balkanization under those conditions while also preserving the existing culture is not something anyone has figured out. And because doing so seems to be almost impossible in practice, it is a necessary consideration in any honest discussion of immigration policy in the modern world

Person C: I am creedal for the most part, but I am a follower of the Huntington school of thought here: the creed is based on the culture of a uniquely American breed of Anglo-Protestantism ("the dissidence of dissent, the protestantism of the Protestant religion").

Huntington recognized that without the creed, assimilation becomes far more difficult (how do you push for “Americanizing” immigrants without anything to include them into? He notes that the concept itself came in being in the late 18th c alongside the concept and term “immigrant”.)

But unlike us, our forefathers took Americanizing seriously, openly and deliberately aiming to create not a “melting pot” but a “tomato soup” (as in, immigration adds flavor and enriches, celery, parsley, and so forth, but nevertheless, it remains tomato soup). The latter is fundamentally an “Anglo-Protestant conformity” model, and according to Huntington, was the implicit framework of immigration prior to the 60s.

IMO at least part of the European assimilation failure can be laid at their lack of creed. It is more antifragile than pure blood and soil precisely because it is both implicitly culturally conformist but also explicitly welcoming to outsiders (who are given both a carrot and stick to incentivize assimilation). Huntington believes that American catholicism began to distinguish itself from European version in part because while they would never accept “protestantizing” their faith, they would accept “Americanizing” it.

The question now is whether the people who hold this supra-ID now have the power to enforce cultural conformity in the immigrant pop, as their ancestors did.

And it is not unreasonable to presume that as the ethnic group that holds this belief system most strongly decreases in number--with no leavening of un/non-American sentiment elsewhere--we are going to see America become less "American".

Having said that, it is also true that American creed / national identity has been weakening for some time now. I am in the camp of resist/reverse this vs. exploit/accept.

My main, basic immigration take is that the melting pot needs time to simmer. You generally don’t cook by continuously adding ingredients without regard for proportion. There should be times of adding and times of pausing (1924-1964). Otherwise you won’t really have a unified people

Person B: I’m glad we’re having this convo because it feels like this is where the debate is going and where consensus needs to be reached. For those who missed it, here’s JD Vance saying that America is not just an idea, it’s also a people—which seems to be a split with past republicans even going back to Reagan, but might have legs in a post DEI world https://www.instagram.com/senatorvance/reel/C9Sk5wcOcv5/?hl=en

I am perfectly willing to accept that individual people of other races can join a society, become productive members of it, and be properly deemed members. Much as I am willing to accept that you became Jewish and that you could immigrate to Israel on that basis—even if many others could do so simply on the basis of blood. After all, I have accepted “a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which religion is but one feature” as a definition of nationhood. At a minimum, however, I would ask that newcomers to a society not immediately demand that the society accommodate them. Just as, I imagine, you did not immediately demand Israel repeal the jewish law of return.

I worry, however, that the immigrant in question feels more kinship with his own ethnic group than with the existing members of the society his parents immigrated to. That is presumably why he has joined a party that is now explicitly committed to undermining the rights, the history, and the demographics of the people who for a long time predominantly constituted that society. And it is why, despite presumably being an atheist for all practical purposes, he has chosen to conspicuously identify with a religious symbol that implicitly affirms continued identification with his ethnic heritage. If that process continues, at scale, then I worry America will become unrecognizable. And because I like America, I would like to resist that outcome.

Person D: There is nothing more obnoxious than being told over and over again we don’t have a culture while proponents of this view (explicitly on the right) acknowledge the introduction of enormous numbers of new people from a “very different” country will change our culture

If you were to force a spaniard or a german to describe their culture in detail they would not be able to rattle off a list of a kind we are forced, consistently here, to provide. because that is not a normal question to ask a person. culture is the oxygen we breathe.

forcing us to defend it in this way is insulting, and of a kind of insult americans feel consistently from elitist second generation immigrants in particular — like vivek

Just because you don’t care about our culture doesn’t mean we don’t have one

Person B: For a long time, arrest stats like the one X just posted were used to prove how evil and racist white societies are for locking the wrong people up (the same societies that everyone they’re supposedly racist against still wants to immigrate to). Unfortunately, given the nature of tribal identity, such narratives become politically salient. People from those tribes feel personally aggrieved by any suggestion that they’re not living up to the standards of the society they’ve immigrated to, while also chafing at expectations that they act in accordance with its norms. It was exactly that political salience that motivated Rotherham coverup for instance. The more diverse your society is, the more pressure there is for every institution to lie in a way that assuages the narcissism of this or that ethnic group

To only partly answer Person A’s question about how grooming occurs, the first step is to import a bunch of people into your society because people convinced you that you don’t actually have a society in the first place, and therefore that nothing would change. Then those people youve imported exercise political power as an ethnic bloc. Then , surprising things start happening in your society. Things that didn’t happen before. But because you forgot to ask everyone whether they’d become groomer gang rapists on your citizenship test, now there’s nothing you can do about it because they’re as british as you are. Whoops

Incidents like Rotherham demonstrate the emptiness of logic-chopping about culture. English people are now suffering in a way that they didn’t before. And that’s true whether or not we can write an exhaustive definition of what England was up until a couple decades ago.

12. Comparison of USA to USSR

We actually have the natural experiment of where a libertarian/nationalist coalition took down a far-left empire, made its way through the subsequent collapse and tribal shattering, regained their ethnic majority, rebuilt their churches, united under a strong leader, strengthened their military, and confronted the deep state. It’s called Russia.

At the end of the USSR, ethnic Russians were 50.8% of the Soviet Union. After the collapse and reboot, they are now 72% of Russia.

There are many things one can say about the process of giving up empire to become a country. It was mixed in outcome, but a better outcome than keeping the USSR around.

Nevertheless — even with 100M white people, even as a based far-right traditionalist Christian country etc, Russia would have lost in Ukraine without China, India, the UAE, and the Rest of World.

In other words — even the largest far-right ultranationalist white country in the whole world understood concepts like “allies” and “diplomacy.” And it learned it couldn’t fight everyone at once.

Put bluntly: Russia is only winning in Ukraine because it’s on good terms with the nonwhite world.

The reason Democrats just lost — by one point — is because they took on Russia, China, Tech, and Trump at once. They also alienated Israel, Saudi, and many smaller countries.

Republicans may be repeating this avoidable mistake by battling Democrats, Russia, China, Europe, Canada, Panama (?), and even Tech/Indians (!?!) — all at the same time.

Point being: if socialists don’t understand self-interest, nationalists often don’t understand other-interest. Does your coalition include enough capable people to attain your objectives? Explicitly hostile racialism isn’t even Russia’s strategy — and if it was, they would be in worse shape.

***

1) First, the entire US stock market is leveraged on the Magnificent 7 tech cos, which in turn are leveraged on growth in India. They want “infinity Indians” to buy and use their products. So, heaping racial abuse out of the blue on random Indians will collapse their financial empire and will lose them money on net.

2) Second, the US military has troops deployed in 159 countries, often against their will. This is not the posture of a people that just wants to quietly stay behind its borders.

The transition from empire to country is possible, maybe even inevitable (like the USSR to Russia) but it will have real costs and is not a free lunch.

13. Trump on Canada

Person A: I do really worry if Trump keeps doing these random dominance plays toward our allies it's going to backfire in some hard to predict way

Person B: Disagree. He has everybody on their back foot. His unpredictability and lack of orthodoxy in negotiating are his greatest advantages.

All part of the plan. Goad Canada into a pre-emptive strike across the Niagara Falls, and then we are greeted as liberators

Person A: This is aesthetically what I hate so much about Trump/Musk era - it just sends a big message to people that being an anti-social jackass who flaunts their ability to exert power on people weaker than them is the path to success.

My personal experience has been that the richest/most successful people that I've met have been trustworthy and kind and gracious.

In general income and education are quite correlated in my psychometric data with pro-social traits and quite anti-correlated with anti-social traits, and in social psychology experiments you see that high IQ people are much more cooperative than low IQ people.

This just reminds me a lot of the thuggish bullshit you see from elites in shithole developing countries.

Person B: I totally hear you on this; as a temperamentally mild-mannered Canadian I really have a hard time being a dick like this

But on the other hand, Canada and UK inter alia have had their cooperativeness weaponized against them by elites who may be personally mild but are quite comfy exerting harsh and unilateral control over their populations, whom they clearly loathe and despise

Person C: Here’s the thing: foreign policy is a playground ruled by bullies. Either the bully happens to be a person who makes the world better or it’s China and Russia and Iran and North Korea and their ilk walking all over Canada, Panama, and the UK. If those countries are going to pansy out against the world’s worst players, then they should bend the knee to us instead.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Don’t want to be treated like America’s bitch? Then don’t bend over for Chinese control of the Panama Canal or make way for Russian adventurism in the Arctic while we pay your defense bills or allow your country to be infiltrated by terrorist-friendly hordes.

All the same people whining about independence from America seem just fine with Chinese interference in their own affairs, for example.

I think it's just not straight forwardly obvious that dialing up aggression toward your neighbors/allies is a good idea.

Reasonable people can disagree on how aggressive to be about Iran or w/e but once you start threatening your neighbors things can spiral out of control and leave everybody poorer.

Person A: I just kind of get back to the idea that we want Europe's cooperation on tariffs with China and on chip controls, and so it just doesn't make a ton of sense to spark a trade war by threatening to tariff Denmark to force them to come to the negotiating table.

My biggest critique of Biden was that he refused to prioritize things and so we ended up doing an incoherent mess that didn't make anyone happy, and this just screams to me the same sort of pathology.

But I also get the sense that I am just more worried about China/AI than you all

Person C: I do think Trump, in his own unreflective animal instinct way, is grazing something deep by aspiring to more territory. Expansion is inspiring. It's growth. We've stigmatized the impulse after the horrors of world wars, but it's in us. We wouldn't think so much about ancient Rome if it was just confined to Italy

Person D: You know how Democrats went on this global campaign to expand the boundaries of “democracy” (meaning blue control) from 2013-2024, and overstretched by fighting everyone from Tech to Trump to Russia to China?

I think we are basically seeing the inverse red version, an even more explicitly imperialist project under the banner of “Red America”, which is in stark contradiction to closing the borders.

Eg if you do turn Canada into the 51st state, guess what — that means millions more Indians and Chinese people join the US.

Blue America at least preserved the optics of diplomacy, kind of, by branding all their expansionism in terms of “democracy.”

The Red American MAGA ultranationalist simply isn’t calibrated on their relative financial, institutional, and military strength. And they are starting from an even weaker base than the Blue American did.

The most charitable interpretation of their mental model is “if we throw everyone out and get back to an ethnically uniform core, we can return to 1800s expansionism and Manifest Destiny!”

But 2025 is the end state of that, not the beginning state. The US empire already extends over the entire world, it already has military bases everywhere.

The US multinationals are everywhere, the US passport gets you everywhere, the US dollar is accepted everywhere.

Formal annexation like renaming things “Gulf of America” or planting the flag in Greenland just arouses local resistance. The whole point of democratic capitalism was to build a global empire with *minimum* resistance.

It’s actually the right wing version of left wing retardation in 2020.

The journos thought being explicitly leftist would make them stronger, but it made them weaker. They decloaked and revealed themselves as far left, abandoning the pretense of covering both sides. But the whole *point* was the illusion of neutrality.

Similarly too many MAGAs think being explicitly nationalist will make them stronger on the world stage, but it will make them weaker. US military bases suddenly get reframed as “AMERICAN” rather than defenders of the rules-based order. But the whole *point* was the illusion of neutrality.

Saying FU to Pierre Poilevre (the Canadian conservative who would otherwise be a natural ally) means that literally no leader is safe.

Starting fights with everyone at once is the failure mode of the ultranationalist who just thinks their group is the strongest and “doesn’t need any partners.”

Democrats lost because they fought Russia, China, Tech, and Trump at once. Also internally divided over Israel.

Rich or not, I think a lot of people can relate to something in this piece. Grateful for Vinay for writing and sharing it publicly.

I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life

Life has been a haze this last year. After selling my company, I find myself in the totally un-relatable position of never having to work again. Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I don’t know what to do with it, and, honestly, I’m not the most optimistic about life.

I know. This is a completely zeroth-world position to be in. The point of this post isn’t to brag or gain sympathy. To be honest, I don’t exactly know what the point of this post is. I tried to manufacture one, but I just felt like a phony. Then I recognized the irony of creating purpose out of a blog post when I don’t currently have much conviction or purpose in life.

So I’ll just go ahead and explain my current situation for my own selfish purposes. To push myself to be completely (and awkwardly) vulnerable to a blob of nameless strangers over the internet. No expectations of what comes out of it.

Going to the redwoods and giving up $60m

Last March I had no idea what to do with my life. I knew that staying at the acquiring company was not it for me for the big company reasons you might suspect (lots of politics, things moved slowly, NPC coworkers, etc.), but I found it very hard to give up a $60m pay package. I had already made more money than I knew what to do with, but your mind does funny things when you start to consider numbers like this.

So I decided to go to the redwoods and figure it out.

Within 5 minutes of my first hike, the trees smiled at me and whispered their simple wisdom.

What is the point of money if it not for freedom?

What is your most scarce resource if not time?

I would leave to do something. Anything. To be alive again. I had no idea. But I was hell bent on making sure everyone knew I had it all figured out. Out of ego. Out of fear of wading into the unknown. When you work on something that consumes your life for a decade, it’s hard to let go of the certainty and purpose you’ve grown accustomed to.

Robotics, or my cringe “trying to be Elon” phase

The immediate 2 weeks after leaving an intense 10-year journey, I did what any healthy person does and met with over 70 investors and founders in robotics. I had been learning about robotics for quite some time and was positive I wanted to throw myself into giving computers arms and legs. I had come up with all the tag lines to delude myself into thinking this was my “life’s calling”. Everything had been “leading to this exact point”.

“The world is going through a major labor shortage!”

“We must stay competitive against China!”

“The market for highly repetitive labor is multiple trillions of dollars.”

At the end of the 2 weeks, I left feeling deflated and foolish. I didn’t want to start a robotics company. The only thing that seemed interesting to me was humanoids. It started to dawn on me that what I actually wanted was to look like Elon, and that is incredibly cringe. It hurts to even type this out.

Breaking up with my girlfriend and realizing I’m very insecure

After deciding to not start a robotics company, I found myself rudderless. No sense of direction. I traveled to many beautiful places with my loving and supportive (ex) girlfriend. This 6 month stretch could be several essays on its own, but the outcome of this period is that nothing seemed right.

We started getting into regular arguments, and I knew it wasn’t on her. It was me. I was starting to come to terms with all the mounting insecurities I had stuffed down over the past several years. I didn’t feel like I could work on them with her. So I broke things off after almost 2 years of unconditional love. It was extremely painful, but it was the right call. I needed to fully face myself.

I have only started to realize that, when Loom was in its early innings, I felt very secure with my position in life, and lots of this stemmed from an extreme gratitude for the journey I was on. I was happy with everything as it was. The growth trajectory of the company was more than I could ever dream for. I was happy. I felt secure. It could all turn to shit the next day, and that would be ok.

Then, as the company continued to skyrocket to new heights, I started to have growing expectations for myself, and others started to have growing expectations of me. When we went through our first round of layoffs, this company my ego was hitched to had suffered a massive blow, so I lost myself. This whole chapter of Loom has created a complex web of internalized insecurities I must now work hard to disentangle and free myself from.

(If my ex is reading this. Thank you for everything. I am sorry I couldn’t be what you needed me to be.)

Climbing mountains in the Himalayas, remembering to do hard things

After breaking up with my girlfriend, I did what any healthy person would do and decided to externalize my emotions by climbing a 6800m peak in the Himalayas with absolutely no mountaineering experience or training. In the earliest stages of trekking into the valley, before the altitude sickness, cold, and chronic bronchitis started to settle in, this seemed like the best idea in the world. It wasn’t until every person I met along the way asked how long I had been training for, that it started to settle in how insane what I was doing was.

Needless to say, there were some rough patches. I got very hypoxic on one of my summits and had to repel down cliff faces while tripping out of my mind. In the end, I pushed through, completed both my planned summits, and got reacquainted with how important doing hard things is to me. It is the heart beat of my life, and I don’t 100% understand why, but it probably has something to do with me having not the best childhood.

When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in. After 8 calls with people who all talked fast and sounded very autistic smart, I was added to a number of Signal groups and immediately put to work.

Working for DOGE for 4 weeks, remembering the power of urgency

Within 2 minutes of talking to the final interviewer for DOGE, he asked me if I wanted to join. I said “yes”. Then he said “cool” and I was in multiple Signal groups. I was immediately acquainted with the software, HR, and legal teams and went from 0 to 100 taking meetings and getting shit done. This was the day before Thanksgiving.

The next 4 weeks of my life consisted of 100s of calls recruiting the smartest people I’ve ever talked to, working on various projects I’m definitely not able to talk about, and learning how completely dysfunctional the government was. It was a blast.

I learned about the power of urgency and having an undeniable mission. Not by reading it somewhere. By experiencing it. I came to realize how laughable my robotics stint had been in comparison. And I started to realize that, although the mission of DOGE is extremely important, it wasn’t the most important thing I needed to focus on with urgency for myself. I needed to get back to ambiguity, focus on my insecurities, and be ok with that for a while. DOGE wasn’t going to fix that.

So, after 4 intense and intoxicating weeks, I called off my plans to move to DC and embark on a journey to save our government with some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. And I booked a 1-way ticket to Hawaii.

Studying physics in the jungle, focusing on my insecurities

So now I’m in Hawaii. I’m learning physics. Why? The reason I tell myself is to build up my first principles foundation so I can start a company that manufactures real world things. It seems plausible, but I’m learning to just accept that I am happy learning physics. That’s the goal in and of itself. If it leads to nothing, that’s ok. If this means I’ll never do something as spectacular as Loom, so be it. It’s been too long since I’ve been completely raw and real with myself, so I’m applying a healthy dose of humility to everything I say and do. It’s the only thing that feels authentic.

However, there are some questions left unanswered.

Why did I need to do the absolute most to reach this point?

Why couldn’t I just leave Loom and say “I don’t know what I want to do next”?

Why do I feel the need to only be on a journey if it’s grand?

What is wrong with being insignificant?

Why is letting people down so hard?

I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.

Big week this week from the group chats, especially for our friend Sriram. Quotes below:

1. Recapping the Twitter drama

Not exactly that, but directionally close.

2. A nuanced response

Racism" is a misreading. There's a lot of resentment politics for sure, but that can be stripped off to find the rational core of opposition to scab workers, hostile foreign cultures, immigration fraud, and systematic anti-white racism, which are legitimate concerns.

It's obvious we need immigration reform especially of the H1B. It's way too hard to bring in actually qualified high quality people, and way too easy to abuse. To simply remove the cap is going to make the abuse an order of magnitude worse.

Elon and broader pro-immigration people seem to be kneejerking against the loser resentment politics, ignoring the rational objections, and doubling down on something that's going to be a disaster. I hope they reach a more rational middle ground (like auctioning H1B's) soon.

…

Well, we have the first rift in our new governing coalition, between techno-libertarian meritocrats and populist Jacksonian America-firsters.

The real America-firsters don't just want to stop low-education criminal illegals...they also don't want the high-IQ immigrants from Asia and India and wherever.

They think the H1B visa system is a grift (which it kinda is for many employers), and just want to get rid of it, not reform it.

Now that this side has won, we'll see sub-divisions form. Someone like Vance is straddling this divide personally.

3. To back up for a second, it’s worth noting anyone can now support Trump without social disapproval anymore.

I personally was a bit skeptical about how deep this Trumpian revolution ran since it was only post-FU money people publicly backing him.

But...if even tech execs are hitching their wagon to the bucking Trump horse, and everyone is patting them on the back for it, well, then perhaps the revolution is real.

We're at the stage where the greengrocer no longer needs to have the communism poster in his window.

I wonder if the new elite will get to the point where the old elites now have to put up a new regime poster, so to speak.

Will the Google mid-tier people who once went along with objecting to working with the US military now have to grit their teeth and post a US flag emoji every once in a while.

(As people once had to post that BLM fist...)

4. All of this Twitter drama is just small potatoes

This is a marginal issue in the immigration debate which is overwhelmingly focused on “low skilled” illegals. And Trump doesn’t like caving anyway as it comes across as weak. As Sacks says, there is 90% agreement between tech and nationalist right

It’s Laura Loomer and some ethnonationalist Twitter anons vs a bunch of triggered Valley ethnics.

H1B is only 85,000 per year. O1 is under 20,000 per year. Probably there is a move to raise the bar for H1B and expand O1. Raise the pay minimum for H1B. Close the arb.

5. Of course there is downward pressure on wages.

Correct claim, incorrect visa attribution. Most of the “abuse” is via the L1 visa, not H1b. Scare quotes because I don’t buy the premises of the whole discourse. And of course there is downward pressure on wages. It’s basic economics and supply scarcity of relevant aptitudes. And would exist even with zero immigration and sharp restriction of L1 durations because software jobs are very portable and will get more so with AI. “Values/culture alignment” is very relevant of course, but nobody actually talks about it. They just cite it as a lofty abstraction to ally around and practice don’t-ask-don’t-tell about what it means. To some it means American business and innovation culture. To others it means buying into spirit of liberal pluralism and its mechanisms, viz separation of church and state, freedom of speech, respect for contracts etc. SV people usually mean some combination of these two. But to the majority who use the term it means some combination of: nativism, Christian dominionism, European cultural heritage, and race. That’s why it’s already a faultline in the SV-MAGA alliance. The two sides dont mean the same thing when the use terms like “values alignment” or “cultural assimilation.” The same is unfolding worldwide.

To be clear, there’s not ethnic favoritism in hiring. It’s economic exploitation closer in spirit to indentured servitude. The motive is not ethnic solidarity but pure profit.

6. Programming is supply constrained

From what I can tell high-end programming is severely supply constrained and anyone who can cut it at all should still be fielding multiple offers though it’s slowed a bit. Low-end is offshore and likely to stay there. I’m inclined to react to such anecdata with heavy skepticism. If they really wanted to make their case they’d share the rejected resumes for scrutiny. Highly doubt it’s A-players were talking about here who are losing out on jobs. Mid-level is actually kinda interesting since it’s where AI tools I think add most leverage at low end people don’t have enough experience to use the tools effectively).

7. Coding is no longer fun….but that may be changing

There’s actually a deeper, longer-term problem here than race labor wars… programming has gone from being fun 20 years ago to mostly not-fun grindwork. As a side effect, when things get to be non-fun grinds, usually it’s hungrier immigrants who are willing to do it at whatever level, kinda like Mexicans being the only ones willing to work in the worse corners of farming and meat processing. But AI might make it fun again. I used to enjoy programming back in the day but now it looks like endless tedious environment management, configuration, orchestration… if you’re not one of the geniuses who can breeze through it all and have motivation left over to work on the Olympiad grade stuff and go John Henry against the machines, you’ll never make it out of the salt mines levels. Unlike other kinds of engineering software evolves in the direction of least fun apparently. But I really do hope AI makes programming fun again. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2024/12/22/making-programming-more-fun-with-an-ai-generated-debugger.html

8. Eric Weinstein’s case against high skilled immigration.

Everyone should have a problem with the structuring of high skilled immigration.

It is structured as an involuntary transfer from a narrow base of native STEM workers to their employers and their investors.

But the fun part is that the VCs and C-Suite get to claim they don’t get or understand why *anyone* of quality fears the best and the brightest. It’s diabolical genius.

It’s totally anti-free market, where the socialists (VC, C-suite) get to call the pro market workers “Commies who can’t compete!”

We should be talking about restructuring immigration around Coasian market rights to keep the. Enormous ”Borjas rectangle” in labor’s pocket so that labor and capital can split the “Harberger triangle” effiency gain.

Instead we become assholes to each other.

9. America is a people, not just an idea.

Person A: “But America is not just an idea. America is a nation. It’s a group of people with a common history and a common future.” … what “people” does Vance have in mind? Do people who buy Vivek’s idea join the “history and future”? Vance got attacked for his wife being Indian at one point didn’t he? So his definition can’t be Loomer’s. But if it’s not Vivek’s either, it’s not actually clear to me what if anything he’s saying. It sounds like an uncritical turn of phrase that just rhetorically gestures at nativism but in a noncommittal way. I doubt there’s a serious debate there especially since it unfolded in public speechifying.

Person B: I think Vance means people with bones in the dirt. As the song goes “land where my fathers died” — I heard Vance mentioned his family’s ancestral cemetery plot to his wife when he was proposing because he had no money but that’s what he did have.

10. Anti-white racial resentment has been mainstreamed

Person A: Anti white racial resentment has been totally mainstreamed. This was all inevitable IMO. The next turn is the realization of the combination of DEI and H1B's. And the systematic disenfranchisement of white Americans from the hiring and promotion pipelines of big companies in the US for 60 years. Scott Adams talks about how, twice, at two different large American companies, he was told flat out in the 80's and 90's that he would never be promoted because he's a white male. But even he was only willing to say that out loud AFTER he was cancelled. I wonder how many people have that same story

Person B: Everyone can feel that white rule of the world is over, and that whites are dying out/being killed. It’s a history changing shift but because everyone’s so dishonest and constipated about race in this country, no one can say anything about it out loud and that makes everyone anxious and indirect and you wind up with hysterical debates about H1b. It’s crazy that we’ve been banned from saying that whites have been targeted because nothing is more obvious. You’d think people would feel sorry for the whites. So diminished. But no one does. Only hate. It’s weird.

11. DEI for Americans is a bad argument. Americans need to work harder.

I think it is both: 1) opportunities for Americans have waned and we teach them nothing useful in school, and 2) American work ethic and value around education is weaker than many immigrant groups, most notably Chinese and Indians. I am very fired up about opportunities to make the next generation of Americans stronger faster better, and to invest more heavily in them. I am less excited about the argument that they should do commodity shit and get paid more for it than low cost foreign labor today. If 100% of illegal immigrants were deported (which is to say we just…enforce the law) mulching will get more expensive. But I’m not sanguine on higher compensation for landscaping labor saving 22 y/os from video games, Mountain Dew, and opioids.

1) enforce all laws (including deporting those in violation of immigration law and enforcing civil rights laws and prosecuting companies for illegal affirmative action programs that have unfairly disadvantaged American candidates) 2) have a debate about what is “cream” and then go skim it. 3) tell our kids they need to work a lot harder and winning matters and we need to outcompete people who eat sleep and shit a desire to beat us. We do need to do all these things, but we should do them in this order The white welfare socialism thing is not the answer. But neither is telling American workers who’ve had to deal with illegal and unfair competition that they should suck it up.

An example here is that becoming a plumber or HVAC tech today actually pays really well, but it’s a bit of a status bridge people don’t want to cross. It’s also actually hard work and people perceive you’ll be viewed as less than a gender studies grad. I’m fine w the public position “kick them all out before we let anyone in!” But if we are being honest w ourselves we need to restore the value for work, work ethic, and candidly probably culturally devalue the college degree. If you looked at where the best and brightest were in the 60s they were studying aerospace and nuclear engineering. Now they do cs, banking, or yearn to be a nicotine pouch influencer. Space race, Cold War, etc were motivators. We need to stir the spirits of our young men to pursue bigger things. Rebuild the manufacturing base, push on the boundaries of physics, rebuild the American military, automate an awful lot of the things we import labor for today. We need people to do all these things.

I do believe we should have the very best talent around the world. I agree this doesn’t include a horde of mediocre SAAS employees. It seems like a worthwhile conversation of what is “best” and how to thoughtfully sap it.

12. Americans want their cake and to eat it too

The chud vote here is "fuck the entire outside world, we need to focus on us" as if there's even the internal appetite for the sort of America first policies this would really entail. At every turn, when an American had the choice between paying less for a thing (either a good or a service) or paying more for an American version, they've done the former.

Again, I'm in Europe so channeling that view, but everywhere you look here, you see endless preference for locally-made everything, down to the car industry protected by tariffs. It also means food and other goods are more expensive as a fraction of income, but even if it wanted to, the local oligarchy couldn't just sell the working classes down the river by outsourcing manufacturing to China and importing a slave class.

(And no, you can chide Europeans for the immigration policies, but whites are down to 30-40% in Texas and California, Europe isn't even remotely close to that.)

Again, I'm in Europe so channeling that view, but everywhere you look here, you see endless preference for locally-made everything, down to the car industry protected by tariffs. It also means food and other goods are more expensive as a fraction of income, but even if it wanted to, the local oligarchy couldn't just sell the working classes down the river by outsourcing manufacturing to China and importing a slave class.

Are Americans really going to make these tradeoffs? With Trump, maybe, we'll see. But I'm a bit skeptical.

It's a very hard trade to unwind, selling out your middle class for an Asian one.

Right wing commies. Rockefeller wasps are dead

long live enjoy work life balance trads. Oh, I want US GDP but with European work culture. Don't we all, dude. Don't we all.

13. We need immigrants to build

‘I don't care that my kid can't out-think or out-muscle some ruthless Indian kid, I'm an American, and we should make it so the middle American has a decent shot at life, no matter what, and if that mean less economic productivity so be it’

Which, well, OK. But it's not exactly "Valley values"

Which is (channeling Elon) "anything and everything to get a Mars colony"

So which is it, America? Because without the Jews and the Italians and the Indians and all the rest of it, this place would be Canada or Australia or whatever. Probably better run and lower crime, but also culturally irrelevant and far less wealthy.

The most important paper in AI in the past decade, potentially a human inflection point...and well, what do you know?

None of those surnames were on the Mayflower passenger registry.

The reality is the US is terrible at high culture and intellectualism, and was a scientific non-entity until WWII, and then had to bootstrap its great successes like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program off imported talent, because native talent wasn't good enough. And it's the same deal now with AI.

The H1B debate is but a side quest to that larger arc.

14. But Immigrants need to assimilate

The immigrant groups who’ve succeeded in America did so by becoming Americans. We have a bit of a melting pot problem. It’s clear the wave of immigrants we have is too high to absorb properly. This is in addition to the left actively fighting absorption. You used to get here and be told you fucking won the lottery, now you arrive and an NGO shows up and tells you all the ways you have been wronged.

This point isn’t made enough. One of the most evil things the left has done in the last 30 years (a long list) is to inculcate to Americans that the melting pot is evil and to immigrants that we owe them something. They were doing this at least as early as the early 90’s; it was part of the same fetid spring that gave us critical race theory and intersectionality.

In theory, the American experiment is the thought you can inoculate Anglo-Saxon mores into anyone, given enough education and social engineering.

The nativists in this picture (Sailer, the MAGA chuds, etc.) would claim otherwise.

Which to a certain part you did with Germans, Scandos, Irish, Italians and Jews

The US is such poor soil for real ethnonationalism though. There's so little 'there' there, in terms of an actual ethnos.

WW2 as the great reset on who is white

15. Vivek misses the point in his nerds vs jocks tweet

This isn’t correct.

In its glory days, NASA was all jocks.

Former (and active duty) fighter pilots, submariners, heavy drinkers, smokers, etc.

The American space program was so defined by jocks its *nerds* were jocks, too.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

Only someone whose parents and grandparents did not grow up here could believe that in the era of Apollo it was the class nerd who was venerated.

Vivek sounds like a leftist, believing that people like what they like because they’ve been socially conditioned. No, American people love the jock for deep, visceral reasons. Hollywood hasn’t been telling them to. They just are drawn to that. Vivek is representing a want to socially engineer Americans out of loving what they reflexively love. Horrible message!

The vVvek post accurately conveys the strain of contempt, within immigration maximalism, for american culture and western culture generally. The implication is basically “we should replace American culture with Asian grind culture”… So it was like a bill cosby cultural pathology “pull up your pants” speech, except instead of “stop listening to rap music” the injunction was “stop letting your kids go outside”

Good tweet response: https://x.com/realjeremycarl/status/1872348978798571710?s=46

16. What does Vivek tweet mean for Vivek?

Person A: He will be known from here on out as someone who wants America to get rid of sleepovers, hanging out with friends, and prom queens. Declaration of war on the American dream that, for better or worse, his potential voter base believes in

Maybe he can live it down eventually, I’m not sure. But it’s a gaffe on the level of “47%” or “you didn’t build that” and maybe worse. Linguistic suicide shot.

Person B: He’s fine. No one will care about this tweet in a week. [Broad agreement]

17. Problems with American Education

My take here is that American education system is super damaging because there’s a very low skillcap. It’s pretty easy to get all As and 2300+ on your SAT, so most very smart American high schoolers learn that effort doesn’t matter. And if you don’t have self esteem issues you won’t push yourself to win on competitive math/chess/etc.

In general, there’s a positive correlation in America between intelligence and laziness, which I think is a learned behavior

<- this combined with an incredibly low quality/lazy teacher base that is threatened by smart students AND DEI that tries to “dismantle colonial algebra” and lower the ceiling

If you are able to qualify for USAMO/MOP you are 100% smarter than the smartest math teacher in your school district in 2024.

Students benefitted from a powerful arbitrage in American education for a long time when most brilliant women who wanted to work could only aspire to careers in teaching

Now that those brilliant women are now litigators and corporate executives, students no longer have access to them

18. Well, Chinese talent is often better

Tbh I find Chinese entrepreneurs on average more creative than American ones, they are just repressed by a bad governmentSo we’re all stuck in this shitty catch 22. The Chinese immigrants are too good. Way too good

This is the problem with Chinese spy programs. If you say you won’t hire Chinese immigrants, your company will just be 30% worse

xAI, for a while, was 13 cracked Chinese immigrants and 100k GPUs

Maybe the term I’d use is ambitious.

PDD, Bytedance, and BYD are ridiculously ambitious companies. More ambitious than FAANG these days tbh. The only western ambition that matches it is Elon’s.

If Xi supported his entrepreneurs, US tech would feel way more heat

19. But we don’t want to become Asia

A huge issue that is going to hurt too many feelings in the other chat, is that white people don't like being surrounded by nerdy Asians. My sister was extremely talented at Math and Science. She attended X (the science high school, which is now about 70% asian at the time it was like 35%. She got into whatever the special super math program there was within it, and ended up dropping out of it because it was all nerdy asian guys and high school girls don't want to be surrounded by it. She ended up majoring in sociology at Harvard--and blames sexism for why she didn't do Math. Going back to X-which is now a major "anti-Asian" affirmative action case--When my sister attended in the late 1990s, people just took the test and they got in. Then sometime in the mid 2000s test prep for X exploded--almost entirely asians. I know people whose entire tutoring is test prep for X; and they say its entirely asians and some people start in the 3rd grade. There is nothing superior culturally or IQ in this.

The conventional wisdom among meritocracy Asian simps is: In response to Bakke, schools emphasized "soft factors" (e.g. community service, internships etc.) as a way to allow blacks and hispanics with lower test scores into elite schools without explicit quotas. This ironically (or perhaps intentionally) had the side effect of helping elite whites who know how to game system, while harming poor super genius Asians who get perfect test scores but aren't good at faking community service projects.

I hypothesize (with nothing other than anecdotal experience) that this ignores how schools have dumb downed almost all standardized tests to make them less g-loaded (e.g. removing analogies). This makes test prep/tiger parenting more valuable. This has benefitted Asians. I suspect if you look at the average IQ of a white vs. asian non-athlete at elite schools, whites score higher...So someone who studies a ton and has a 120IQ now has advantage over someone who has a 130 IQ and didn't do more prep--which helps a small number of Blacks and a lot of Asians. (Again, this is my hypothesis--I don't know of any studies on this)

20. Perils of Tiger-mom culture

Oh lord, second-generation “tiger mom” myth-making returns. I recall in round 1 CBS ran a breathless 60-minutes segment in 2003 about how the IITs produced hardened engineers by making us do hand-tool shop work in freshman year. Made us look like academic Genghis Khans. We were cracking up on alumni mailing lists about that. Asian test-prep culture is dumb and toxic and produces undermotivated and creativity-destroyed drones. While the US extreme of trying to get rid of testing entirely is bad, the Asian extreme is a whole different sort of bad. I don’t think Asian culture produces either academic excellence or career success at a disproportionate rate. It just produces zombie test-takers. It just has too few other options for a good life outside of STEM and that’s thankfully changing.

21. The merits of Whiplash as motivating

Person A: Niche gripe with Vivek’s tweet but Whiplash is *not* a good model for how to be a highly successful person, much less an artist

My mom is a professional musician and I know that it takes intense effort and practice to get there. But the idea that you should slavishly work away at your craft while worshipping a bully without a mind of your own is deeply dystopian

Person B: Kobe Bryant loved Whiplash, and it fit with his cultivated image as the artist who works obsessively. The image was incredibly resonant in American culture. One reason Vivek’s tweet is a bit off is that a love of the jock reflects a love of this pursuit. Americans are an ambitious people

Person C: Whiplash is deeper than obsession. It’s about the psychological torture that leads to greatness. You either see the professor as evil and toxic or Virgil, an artist who can guide you through the depths of hell. That’s why the ending hits so hard.

Person D: Taken literally, Whiplash is an insane model for society becuse it’s about a silly jazz band. We need some sectors to operate with its ethos, and also need less vital ventures to operate with perspective and sanity. In other words, we don’t need to be a place like Japan, where pursuit of perfection is totalizing

Person E: Doesn’t port. There’s a reason these cultures get so bad in stylized closed domains. If there are legible performance standards, hierarchies, and prizes, you get the potential for brutality. It’s a combination of Goodhart’s’s law, authoritarian high modernism, and a version of Sayre’s law (“"Competition in academia is so vicious because the stakes are so small.”) No disrespect to jazz drumming, chess, Olympic sports etc. but on a civilizational scale they’re low-stakes activities. Higher stakes domains are fundamentally more illegible. You can’t tiger-mom your way through or grind out the scales etc. You have to constantly reorient in an open world. This is also why I raise an eyebrow at people like Josh “Art of Learning” Waitzkin. Chess prodigy —> martial arts —> surfing or whatever hes up to now. The “art of learning” that type of performance domain is not the same as that of open-world creativity. It’s different in kind. Higher stakes is different stakes. It can be brutal in other ways, but the brutal legible performance standards and rationalized sadism ain’t it.

I think the main issue is that most tiger-style parents pursue an optimisation strategy based on winning the world of their own childhoods and the world has changed so much. The pianist/chess player to college and lawyer/doctor as career were a very good strategy 1960-1990 but the quality of life given by those professions has declined.

But not only do the optimal activities change but the ontology of those does. So to win in 1970 then one should be a tiger mom as the winning paths has low creativity and high returns to rote learning.

In say 2000 it was best to be high-standards (but not tiger mom) as the optimal strategy was to develop high agency people who could adapt to the high uncertainty environment of entrepreneurship. Going forward one needs to guess the winning skill set of 2040. Tricky question? Maybe intelligence struggles against AI and maybe leadership ; but not jock in person leadership of men; but more building tribes or creating world views becomes the winning strategy Historical take: in Rome create a General - we remember Caesar and Pompey.

In the dark ages create a priest. We remember no generals but Augustine and Aquinas.

22. Memes

***

I interviewed Marc Andreessen the other day and plan to release it tomorrow on Moment of Zen. I wanted to share our previous interview with Marc which is a prequel to it. This interview recounts his intellectual evolution and his quest to discover how the world works from 2016 onwards. The interview coming out tomorrow gets into what’s next, but it’s important to understand Marc’s evolution to fully appreciate it.

This has been edited for shortness and, at times, paraphrased. Any errors are mine! If you prefer to listen to the full interview—YouTube, Apple, Spotify.

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How 2016 Broke Marc’s Mental Model of Politics

Erik Torenberg: You tweeted about how 2016 shook your concept of how the world works, and you went on a reading journey to understand what had changed. What changed in 2016 that shook your understanding of how the world works?

Marc Andreessen: The hardest question is: How much does the world change versus how much do you change? We live in a specific kind of media environment today. I often wonder what it would have been like to live through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran Contra, or World War II with modern social media and the level of second-guessing that would have taken place. Would the United States have ever entered World War II in an era of social media? [If you read the history, a very large percentage of the country was opposed to entering World War II up through the late 30s and basically up until Pearl Harbor.]

My lived experience is that things started changing dramatically from how I understood the world, probably in 2012. A lot of people in authority started saying things that just didn't make any sense to me. And people started acting in ways that I didn't predict and didn't think would happen.

I think it was basically four or five big events—Trump winning the nomination in 2015, winning the general election in 2016, Charlottesville, the George Floyd moment, and January 6th—that caused both sides of the political spectrum to really start acting in fundamentally different ways than I was used to.

I basically lost all faith in my own ability to understand what was going on and realized that all of my assumptions about how people behave, at least in politics and current events and social dynamics, were basically just wrong. My approach to dealing with that soul-shattering moment was to try to go back and trace the ideas to figure out where I went wrong. I basically read my way back in time and tried to figure out when things actually started.

I realized that I didn't understand either the left or the right—I didn't understand how Democrats were acting, I didn't understand how Republicans were acting. So I decided to read my way out in both directions, all the way to Lenin and Marx and communism on the one hand, and then all the way out to the right on the other hand, to see if I could reconstruct a worldview for some sense of context for what's happening today.

It was really hard to reconstruct these things historically. You always kind of wonder: if I were the person I am today and I relived 1980 again, or 1996 again, or 2008 again, would I have a totally different view on things? I think that's an individual question, but it's also very interesting as a scientific question because we live in such a specific media environment today.

The result of this journey was trying to understand why these institutions and people in authority were behaving in ways that seemed increasingly disconnected from how I thought the world worked and to build a new framework for making sense of these radical changes in our social and political landscape.

How Much Do Ideas Matter?

Erik Torenberg: There’s this critique of the left, which is — you can read your way back, but actually, it's really just an excuse for “people want stuff.” We have this debate with Richard Hanania about how much ideas matter versus just group interests. What’s your take?

Marc Andreessen: Well, a couple of things there. There’s a big overall question of theory of mind: How well does the right ever understand the left? How well does the left ever understand the right? There’s some evidence that people on the right tend to understand people on the left better than vice versa because a lot of right-wing people used to be left-wing. People tend to move right as they go through their lives. Like a lot of neoconservatives were former Marxists, for example.

Then there’s this broader question around to what extent ideas influence the world. This is something I’ve been trying to figure out as it relates to Trump, which is you’ve got two things that seem to run in parallel and affect each other, but it's not clear which is the dog and which is the tail. I don't know if you've noticed this, but when broad-based popular opinion moves, it's usually not the result of some sort of detailed intellectual argument, right? It's not that you have 300 million people who read a journal article and then decided to change your mind about things. It's basically an emotional surge of some form—it's a primal thing, not particularly logical or rational, but very deeply felt and deeply believed.

Then there's this second channel: the intellectuals and the intellectual superstructure on top of the movement. For communism, that was Marx and Lenin and all their writings, and there's corresponding stuff on the right.

Then there's always a question: Is it the intellectual elite driving the popular change because the population is responding to ideas, or is it the other way around—the people move, and then intellectuals say, "Well, the people are moving, I am their leader, I must therefore get ahead of them?"

Eric Hoffer talks about this mass movement of crowds in his book "The True Believer." Hoffer's argument is that the driver is a mass popular sentiment. Mass popular sentiment moves kind of as a beast in and of itself. He uses the term "true believer" to refer to somebody who's become part of a crowd, part of a mob, part of a mass movement on either side. This is true of communism and fascism—it's not a political observation but a psychological one.

Hoffer says that whenever there's a big surge in the popular movement, there's always the evolution of a set of intellectual ideas on top that basically serve to describe what's happened and rationalize it. He said the reason you get those ideas is because the movement needs to recruit the intellectuals. To recruit the intellectuals, you need to have ideas. So you've got this thin layer of intellectual content on the top that serves to recruit the intellectuals to the movement.

Richard's general take, as I understand it, is that, basically, people respond to interests more than ideas. If people in the crowd think that they're going to be better off as a result of Action X, or if their enemies are going to suffer because of Action X, that's a direct incentive, and they respond to that. The ideas are these abstractions that intellectuals just chase their tails on.

Having said that, Marx wrote these things 150 years ago, and China still uses them today, and Xi Jinping still talks about them all the time. Xi Jinping presumably wouldn't have to talk about that stuff if it wasn't important. And yet he does. Those same materials are taught in universities today and seem to be having a pretty big impact on the world. That's a pretty strong argument that they're a driver. So, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

Understanding The Left and The Right

Erik Torenberg: Oppressor and oppressed language still lives on today for sure….

So you’ve read a few dozen books about understanding the left and the right - How do you understand the historical evolution of left and right political forces, and how might that help us understand their future directions?

Marc Andreessen: If you go far back enough in history, basically everybody was super right-wing compared to today. The long-run foundation of human civilization has been hierarchy and order. If you go back to the Greeks, the Romans, Florence in the 1500s, and even 2015—it was all super right-wing compared to today. Every previous society had some conception of natural order, rulers and ruled, aristocracy and proletariat. Hierarchy and order are inherently right-wing ideas.

The left basically emerged as a reaction to the right, starting with Judaism and Christianity and flowing forward into liberal democracy and, ultimately, socialism and communism. All these left-wing movements over the last 2000 years have this critique of hierarchy and unfairness—some people have more power than other people, some people have more money than other people, and there's an altruism instinct in the human spirit that doesn't like that.

Erik Torenberg: And there's a certain kind of person who says, “Hey, yes, this woke movement, you know, starting 2015, let's say it's gone too far, but it has good intentions, and there have been some good things that have come from it. And it's an important direction, and history has a direction, and you want to be on the right side of history.”

Is the counter to that that good intentions have led to some horrible things or that it doesn't even help the people it aims to help? Because the above is a very common position, even in tech, right?

Marc Andreessen: A couple of things…Everybody's really good at manufacturing an internal narrative for why they're doing the right thing for all of humanity. Then there are the unintended side effects, which are just really hard to establish cause and effect, like “I am going to change society in the following ways. I hope it will generate good outcomes. And it is not going to demonstrate the unintentional bad consequences that I would have been horrified about had I found out about them ahead of time”. And just in general, a big problem with social engineering, broadly, is that it's very easy to both blow it on the positive side and then also have a lot of negative consequences. And history is full of those.

And then to take your question all the way back….Nietzsche is pretty good on this. He says there are fundamentally two kinds of morality: master morality and slave morality. He means the morality of the masters as taken by people who aren't even literal slave masters and the morality of the slave carried forward by people who are no longer slaves. The original form of social order was masters and slaves—that's how everything was structured 4,000 years ago.

Master morality is very unnatural for those of us in a Judeo-Christian world because, according to Nietzsche, the Judeo-Christian world is the world of slave morality. Nietzsche asked us to imagine that we lived in the pre-Christian times, a much more difficult world in which basic survival was at stake.

He says that in the pre-Christian world, morality was “strong equals good.” And so if you were strong, if you were in charge, if you won, right? If you were the victor, that was good. And if you were weak, if you were the slave, if you lost, right? If your people got destroyed, that was bad. And so that's the master morality framework.

We moderns don’t accept that. We have a totally different view, which Nietzsche refers to as slave morality, which is the idea that most people in life are not masters. Most people historically were slaves. They were abused by their masters, and that’s basically the Judeo-Christian ethic: we should be on the side of the slaves, the weak, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized. You hear these exact same concepts playing out today.

You know, look, if you object to living in the world that we live in and you're like, wow, I wish I could go back to the Roman Empire, it’s like, well, boy, life really sucked for them too, right? You definitely did not want to be a slave in Roman times. Like, that was bad. And so it's hard to kind of say, like, go all the way back to Roman times.

At the same time, you have to ask the question of, like, okay, do you want to live in a world of, like, pure slave morality? Do you want to reach the point where basically all you're venerating is weakness? Where basically all you're doing is basically trying to achieve, full equality of outcome, full egalitarianism, and you're trying to rank the weak all the way up the totem pole and rank the strong all the way down on the other end. That leads to catastrophe. After all, slave morality fully realized as a political system is communism.

The truth is, it is probably somewhere in the middle, and you probably want some blend. You probably want respect for merit and achievement and success on the one hand. But you also want some sense of fairness and sharing. On the other hand, maybe the right way to have a society is to balance those two.

The key question becomes: Do these forces balance? Are they in thermostatic equilibrium, where they swing back and forth but come around to some middle ground? Or do they go pathological, and a society that tries to reclaim master morality ends up being the Nazis, and a society that goes all the way to slave morality ends up being the Soviet Union, and they aren't actually thermostatic, and you have to make a choice at the end of the day which one is worse, and you have to steer society in the other direction?

I don't know the answer. I think the question's a very live one because there are a lot of forces at work, at least in the West right now, that want to push us much harder in the direction of slave morality. And as I said, generally, that experiment ends poorly. We seem determined to repeat it.

Liberalism becomes Wokism?

Erik Torenberg: If we're trying to reconcile the two, it seems that we have strong break pedals or a strong immunity on the master morality side, whereas we have less immunity on people being manipulative on the slave morality side to get what they want. People have much stronger negative associations with fascism than communism, with Hitler than Stalin.

We’re sympathetic to communism because we care so much about compassion, kindness, and good intentions that perhaps we’re less likely to fight newer forms of it.

Maybe this is what Elon is referring to when he says that the woke mind virus is the world’s biggest threat. If I were to steelman the claim, I’d say that wokeness is a meta-problem by which you can't solve other problems—if you have excess slave morality making our institutions dysfunctional and you have no way to push back against excess victimhood.

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, it's like, can you ever be too fair? Can you ever be too nice to the downtrodden? Can you ever be too determined to address injustice? Like, is that possible? And a lot of people would say, no, you can't. You can always do more. You can always be more fair. You can always, you know, have more equality. The work is never done.

And then there’s this question of whether egalitarianism as an ethic, whether it’s religious in the form of Christianity or whether it's economical in the form of, let's call progressivism, does that always become pathological?

James Burnham makes a strong argument that it always becomes pathological in his book "Suicide of the West." He argues the left has a fatal flaw—there's no governor, no limiter on how much compassion you can have, no limiter to how much you can try to achieve equality or overthrow hierarchy to get to full egalitarianism.

He says liberalism will always become progressivism, progressivism will always become socialism, socialism will always become communism, and you will always end up basically in pursuit of utopia, creating hell on earth.

The steel-man counterargument would be that most European economies today are left-wing in a lot of ways, but they’re hardly the Soviet Union; it's not full communism. And so, at least over the last few years since he read the book, his claim hasn't literally played out in the West. However, some political leaders seem to have that vision. So, I would say the jury's still up.

How Billionaires Become Woke

Erik Torenberg: A common question we'd get over the past decade is, “Where have the billionaires been?” Why haven't they stepped up to stop it? And as it turns out, maybe some of them have been implicitly or explicitly supporting it. And it feels like there's this kind of monoculture for how billionaires are supposed to act and the views they're supposed to have and the work they're supposed to do and the way their organizations are supposed to set up and what they're supposed to do. This is your peer set. Talk a little bit, even in the abstract, about the pressures that this class faces and why Elon, or maybe something like Teal, is just so different from how this group all acts. Why isn't there more diversity in this class?

Marc Andreessen:

When high-tech founders become successful and rich, they get invited into the elite oligarchy. You start getting invitations to Davos, Aspen, and Nantucket. Before you know it, you're spending time with Prince Harry, Mike Bloomberg, movie stars, politicians. It's like, wow, I am in the in-crowd, I’ve made it, right? The dinners are great, and the parties are great, and it's all just so fantastic.

And then at some point, they're like, well, we have this project that we're raising funding for. And you're like, oh, wow, I would love to support your program. And then, all of a sudden, you find yourself writing the checks. And then it's like, well, you know, actually, I'm running for president next year, and you're like, wow, you're my friend. I'd love to support you.

Like, this is all great. And so what is it? It's a social circle. It's a political network. It's a patronage network. It's a fundraising network. It's a PR campaign. It's all of those things. It's a governance structure. These are the people who staff the senior positions at all the important institutions—university presidents, media executives, newspaper editors.

And if you're not paying attention, you realize you're not getting some broad representation of different political views. What you're getting is this abstracted elite oligarchic class where it turns out their politics are all just identical. They all believe exactly the same set of [progressive] things.

And primarily, it's an influence operation. There's a lot of what's called logrolling. I support you, and you support me. And by the way, it's distributed. There's no central node. There's nobody in charge. There's no wizard behind the curtain. There's no secret boss who's organizing the whole thing. These are literally conferences of 400 people where somehow they all end up thinking the same thing. If they have arguments about anything, it's only on the margins.

Anyway, what Burnham describes as this process is the circulation of elites. And then basically, it's like, okay, if you were a self-optimizing oligarchic elite collective, how would you make sure that no new elite gets formed? The way that you would do that is you would recruit all of the new high capacity, high merit, high achieving people who rise up in the system. You would make sure to recruit them into your elite, right? This is exactly the process you would use to invite them in, and then they become one of you. And so anyway, that's literally what happened.

And by the way, I've been to all these places, I've been to all these conferences, and I know all these people. And it's great—it's just like an incredibly exciting adventure. It's like the culmination of your life's work that you're in this network, as long as that's the political system you think should rule the country for the next hundred years. As long as these are the people who should be in charge. As long as you agree with all their policies, it's all absolutely fantastic.

The irony is that most people who become billionaires are super contrarian—that's why they succeeded as entrepreneurs. But they get pulled into this world and suddenly become incredibly conformist. They no longer have any unique opinions on anything involving politics or social policy. They just adopt this oligarchic elite view wholesale, with a few exceptions.

Every once in a while, you get an exception—somebody who says, "I could be part of that oligarchy, but I'm not going to do it." The guy who unlocked this in our era is actually not Elon, surprisingly, but I think it was Larry Page. There was all this pressure to give to the billionaire’s pledge and do the kind of giving that Gates and Buffet had done. Larry was like, “Look, I don't think that I should because who knows these nonprofits? Who knows what they do? I think my money should just go to Elon Musk, and he should build more companies.”

And the reporters were all just, like, completely horrified because, “Oh, my God, that's not on the program. How can you not be on the program? Like, everybody knows what to do. Why don't you know what to do? Right?” And Larry's like, “Well, I just think that Elon building companies is having a bigger impact on the world than the Ford Foundation, as contrarian as an idea as that was at the time [laughs].” And that opened the door for others like Elon and Peter Thiel and the next generation to chart different paths.

Erik Torenberg: Well, it’s interesting because it’s not entirely generational. Like SBF, who is 30 years old, yet he’s a Davos Elite. He’s as a Davos as they come.

Marc Andreessen: Full on. Sam went from a Stanford math kid to an MIT math kid to a full charter member of the oligarchic elite that rules the world in like three years. I mean, it was pretty incredible.

Marc’s Critique of Effective Altruism

Erik Torenberg: Let’s get into the ideology that inspired Sam, which now seems synergistic with this oligarchic elite, effective altruism. Your wife is in philanthropy, and you guys have promoted results-driven philanthropy—who wouldn't be supportive of results-driven philanthropy? What's the sort of blind spot of effective altruism?

Marc Andreessen: My wife has taught philanthropy at Stanford Business School and helped develop it as an academic field. Her critique is that most philanthropy is emotional—I go through a health scare and donate to that condition, or I see a TV commercial that tugs at my heartstrings. This leads to massive misallocation of resources. In medical research, certain conditions get dramatically overfunded, while more serious ones get underfunded just because of who happens to get what conditions. The age effect is a classic example—stuff that old people suffer from gets much more funding than what young people suffer from because young people who suffer don't have money to donate yet.

My wife says you should evaluate philanthropic gifts the same way you evaluate business investments—think hard about the actual effect things will have and try to quantify it. We've done that in our private philanthropy. With Stanford Hospital's ER department, I can sit in the waiting room any day and see patients come in and get treated. It's very tactical, tangible, practical.

Effective Altruism takes that idea and scales it way up, saying you should apply that methodology to all of humanity. You should fully implement utilitarianism—the greater good—and be able to mathematically model how if you do XYZ today, it will impact things not just next year but 50 or 100 years from now.

The critique of that has always been the same as the critique of utilitarianism—you get into a level of abstraction where you basically start to play God. You start to think you can put things in a spreadsheet that extrapolates 100 years in the future with huge numbers of variables. You start to think you can re-engineer society. But you're dealing at a level of abstraction and time horizon that's beyond any individual human's ability to verify or correct. It leads you down this ideological path that has shocking overlaps with other ideological paths that have ended very badly.

There's an interpretation of what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried that relates to this. In an interview with Tyler Cowen, they discussed a thought experiment: if you had a 51% chance of getting another Earth with 8 billion people versus a 49% chance of losing our current Earth, do you take that bet? Sam said yes, and you keep taking it if you win because if you get it right 10 times in a row, you've got 1,000 Earths. One theory is that he applied this philosophy to running FTX [laughs]—he kept rolling the dice, getting positive results and just kept going to optimize for the future of humanity. Though his later comments to Vox suggesting he was lying about all of it (“it’s a dumb game woke westerners play”) somewhat undermined this defense [laughs].

Globalization vs Nationalization

Erik Torenberg: This effective altruist utilitarian approach seems to lead to a lot of beliefs around centralization and thus seems synergistic with attempts to introduce global governance, whether on AI, nuclear, etc. You’re worried about these attempts, but you’re also excited about immigration, trade, and other aspects of globalization—how do you reconcile these tensions?

Marc Andreessen: There’s this philosophical idea that goes—the progress of human society is progress. Life used to be nasty, brutish, and short, and everybody used to die of disease, and everybody was hungry, and then basically, we had progressed.

And it’s what Hegel called the dialectic, which is this idea that you’ve got one theory for how things should work. Boy, they don’t seem like they're working very well. Then, you’ve got another theory on what to do about it. You argue about that, and then you come up with a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and you get to answer the right? And if it works, that’s great. If it doesn’t, you repeat the process until you figure out the answer. But you always figure out the answer. At some point, the right set of smart people, whether they're philosopher kings, democratic rulers, or scientific experts, are going to run experiments on how to optimize society such that they will ultimately figure out the right answers.

Now, imagine that you ran that process for hundreds of years. And that’s what many people think happened, leading to “The End of History”—Fukuyama's argument about liberal democracy being the final form of governance. And this is where you get the justification for global governance. If you really have all the answers, then you have the ultimate moral imperative to impose those answers on the entire world. Because, of course, you do because you have all the answers. You can solve all the problems if you have all the answers. Let's suppose you had all the answers to organize society. How could you not impose those answers on the entire world? It's the only morally correct thing to do because if you don't do it, all these poor people are going to be suffering in all these completely unnecessary ways.

And by the way, we just saw it playing out in Covid. “The answers are super obvious. We're going to have lockdowns. We’ve already figured out that there's no more reason to discuss this. Anybody opposing us is clearly opposing us in bad faith. To challenge me is to challenge science. I have the answers. Stop bothering me and just do what I say.”

Yoram Hazony makes this argument that no one ever buys, which is that this Hegelian global governance model is actually anti-diversity. The advantage of having many countries is you have many different systems of organizing society. Then you are actually able to have a diversity of forms of society. And so, therefore, you can actually have real-life experiments play out as to which things are better, and which ones aren't. If everything is just a global state, you will not achieve utopia, you will achieve dystopia, because you will no longer have a process of evolutionary involvement of thinking. And so he says, if you’re pro-diversity, you should be pro-nationalism. You should be pro the existence of many separate states. Of course, this argument does not work at all, which is just because the same people who want universal world government also say they want diversity, but that does not mean that they're going to buy his argument that you should, therefore, be nationalist.

So, I’m somewhere in the middle on this. I’m a prime beneficiary of globalization. Our field is specifically enriched by the enormous amounts of immigration that have happened in the US over the last 50 years. I would not want to live in a system that would somehow decide that was a bad idea. At the same time, do I think it's a good idea to have a single system of global governance where there's a set of experts that determine everything and like everything is equal and everything is the same? No, that sounds like hell.

Erik Torenberg: But what if they're experts and fact-checkers?

Marc Andreessen: [Laughs] Yes, the missing link is the fact checkers because they can make sure the experts are on the straight and narrow.

Building a New Elite

Erik Torenberg: Let's talk about this emerging counter-elite. Peter Thiel in 2016 was a pariah, and now there's more political diversity within tech. Elon has accelerated it massively. How can a true counter-elite form, and what might this counter-elite's new moral philosophy look like?

Marc Andreessen: To paraphrase Burnham, if you want to replace the elite you have today, you need to have a better elite. So then you're a thought experiment territory, which is, okay, what would be a superior elite to the elite we have today? Well, a bunch of things.

So, one is they would presumably have a set of ideas that would be better because that would presumably be the whole point of doing this. Then, they’d need a superior story, sometimes called a political myth. Then they’d need fashion, status, prestige, right? Hey, I would need legitimately to be able to do the project. If you belong to our elite, you are a higher status, higher prestige person than if you belong to that elite. Right? Then you’d need the perpetuation method, the recruitment method, funding, an education system, media organs, and the ability to get your message out.

The key question is: suppose you have an existing corrupt elite and a new, fresh, competent, meritocratic elite. Put yourself in the shoes of an aggressive, ambitious young person right out of school who wants to optimize their position in society. Your story has to be really good and you need critical mass to recruit those people, otherwise the existing elite just gets constantly reinforced. Because the existing elite isn’t going to let themselves simply be replaced easily.

Erik Torenberg: To some extent, Thiel has done this with the Thiel fellowship, which has a higher status than Stanford. That’s one example of an organ.

Let’s brainstorm others. What are examples of ideas or stories that a counter-elite could advocate for and win?

Marc Andreessen: One potential narrative is basic competence. Would you like your 8-year-old to be able to walk to school without getting mugged? How did you feel about being locked up for three years during COVID—and getting COVID anyway? It looks like these people have made you promises that they can't deliver. There's always this question of when do people finally get fed up. But you'd have to deliver real results because if you didn't, people would get very upset.

Another approach could be unifying people instead of dividing them. Our current oligarchic elite does an awful lot of demonization of the other side. You could have more of a Julius Caesar approach—"I'm not going to rule on behalf of 51% versus 49%. I'm going to rule on behalf of the entire country." You are denying people the ability to hate, which is a huge attraction of the current system, but you're replacing it with something that probably a lot of people would find more attractive.

You'd also have to challenge some sacred cows—maybe we should not be trying to do this level of social engineering. Maybe it's a bad idea to have differential standards for different groups. Maybe people are ready for that kind of message. Maybe they're not.

Reasons for Optimism ("White Pills")

Erik Torenberg: You tweeted a series of white pills and reasons to be excited. What's inspiring the recent optimism? Some people have described the pessimistic case as a very slow decay, 100 years of Brazilification. What's the optimistic case?

Marc Andreessen:

One of my white pills is that the current elite is actually really bad at being an elite. Who really wants to look up to some of these people? And this isn't even a partisan comment—you just look at a lot of the national level people and it's difficult to get excited about them.

The results are not great. You get in these situations like we've had repeatedly for the last 20 years—weird foreign policy situations, economic downturns, public health crises—and these people really don't seem competent. Look at the COVID policy: "Two weeks to crush the curve" became two years. Did they lie to us, or were they incompetent? The mask thing alone—the same people who in February 2020 were saying there was no reason for civilians to wear masks within two months had made it basically a holy requirement.

Look at Afghanistan—20 years of leadership, and we saw how it ended. Thousands of Americans dead, lots of other people dead, stranded interpreters, chaos and blood. And who got fired? Nobody. These people do not actually know what they're doing, they're not good at their jobs, and there seems to be zero accountability.

Even the Gates Foundation did this big report last year, where they studied 40 years of philanthropic attempts to improve education in the U.S., but nothing worked. The budget per student rose 3x in real dollars over 40 years, and results didn't budge. The data's in, the system doesn't work, and the people running it are terrible.

The Internet, despite becoming very fashionable to criticize, especially by our current elites who hate being challenged, is still allowing information to flow more freely than before. Even with eight years of constant censorship pressure at a level that would make Orwell blush, information is still flowing. It was not as free as I would have liked, but it was a lot freer than it used to be. But I never want to get myself in a frame of mind that says the situation is hopeless. There are at least cracks in the system that are encouraging.

We're seeing a lot of uncashed checks suddenly getting called—absurd pretensions, wistful fantasies, and pretty lies getting called by reality. Since the 1960s-70s, there were policies put in place that made very specific promises, and the results are in 50 years later. Not only did they not work, they were catastrophic in many ways.

You learn all of what we’ve been talking about and you come out the other end being like, oh my god, we’re ruled by people who have no idea what they're doing. At some point, the bill comes due.

But it’s like anything, people have to care about the results more than they care about the story. It's always a question of whether people are more enamored by their belief in the story and their social affiliations based on the story than they are in the actual tangible reality. But it does feel like an awful lot of bills are arriving, and a lot of people are trying to cash these checks that aren't clearing anymore.

Erik: Let’s wrap on that inspiring note. The bill is coming due. Marc, thank you so much for your time.

Marc: Good. Awesome. Erik, great to be with you.

“I had a long talk with someone close to Trump who said that Trump's superpower is saying things that get under his target's skin so deeply they're never the same after."

In 2016 I had breakfast with Steve Bannon just before he became campaign advisor. He said the thing people don't realize is Trump is a real student of Carl Junge psychology. Indeed DJT's skill is finding the Schwerpunkt. The weak point of inflection. That's why he generates mean nicknames to get under peoples skin... Very intentional strategy

2. Twitter is more important than flying cars

"It turned out Twitter was more important than flying cars.

“Or said another way, maybe it was what we needed in order to get them. 😂”

3. Trump vs Elon?

They're going to try to get under Trump's skin with "Elon is bigger" meme

They are terrified of the X / Elon eye of Sauron.

"president-elect is worth a *mere* $6.6 billion"

The NYT, America's hometown socialist newspaper, looking down it's nose at a mere single-digit billionaire

too good 😂

4. On Marc Benioff

“My impression is that Benioff lives the majority of his reality on these policy issues in “marketing world.”

The Q is what makes me look good, what will be lauded, what can I say that’s the socially acceptable thing to say here, what’s safe but “leader-like” and “generous”, etc.

As opposed to - how does the system actually work, what are the right incentives and accountability, what are the outcomes and how do we have to be tougher on the groups that are failing to redirect resources and effort towards the right outcomes, what’s the hidden corruption or power stopping us from doing that, etc. Literally unable to engage in risky topics of the underlying substance disconnected from marketing-speak or exposing themselves to the risk of attacking broken/corrupt orgs that might lash back or demonize him, vs just being universally praised for generosity.”

5. Random Matt Gaetz joke

“Maybe I smoked too tough. My swag was too different. My bitch was too bad. None of these things are crimes."

6. San Francisco

If you don’t believe in the second amendment, you can move to SF or NYC… where guns are banned, and only bad guys and cops have them

Now do abortion, immigration, and just about every other hot-button issue as an exercise in federalism.

SF is always and everywhere a glimpse at the American future: spectacular technology navigating itself around intractable social problems and over bad infra (the roads in SF are those of a developing world city).

But hey the bet might work. We're not going to solve the healthcare or government spending problem: we're just going to grow past them. Sorta worked so far.

7. DOGE

Person A: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/social-security-fairness-act-senate-republicans-unions-randi-weingarten-aeac9c0d?mod=hp_opin_pos_0

The WSJ is right that the GOP really doesn't care about keeping spending low

Neither party really cares

DOGE might save a few billion dollars per year, but it won't scratch the surface of the entitlements that GOP are just as quick to rubber stamp

Person B: There is no reason that DOGE can't identify and cut huge swaths of waste/fraud/abuse in Medicare/Medicaid as well

Person C: The waste, fraud, and abuse DOGE could cut is a drop in the bucket compared to simply slashing the number of workers in the government. Not because of their salaries, that is also a drop in the bucket, but because of the collective costs they impose on entrepreneurship and creativity. I am not stupid enough to think the federal government is comparable to running twitter, but most things get a lot better when fewer people are making decisions.

All over the government there are literally tens of thousands of people who get up in the morning and impose innumerable costs. Some see it as their mission and others just do it accidentally.

8. Which party is a bigger threat to Jews?

The bigger threat to Jews is clearly on the left right now (because global Islam is the bigger threat to Jews). It's a boring, non novel conclusion, but some remain in denial

Many liberal Jews would prefer their true enemy be American rednecks. It would be easier to fight that without losing social standing. Unfortunately the enemy is mostly people hailing from or in the 3rd world, and that's uncomfortable.

It's really hard to get even moderate Jews to admit that immigration policy is a serious issue for Western Jewry. But it's clearly the case. Even weirder, American rednecks are clearly their best allies! It reminds me of Louis CK's bit about getting #MeToo'd. The tragedy of finding out who your real friends are and how they aren't the "cool" friends.

I'm not even sure most Jews realize how weird the fandom can get: https://iamisraelfilm.com/products/i-am-israel-book

I have a copy of this book because it was sent to our office in bulk—and it's all evangelical fandom for Israel; they profile Tennessee evangelicals who go and volunteer to harvest some West Bank settler's vineyard as unpaid laborers

Democrats want to paint antisemitism as being driven by white conservative rednecks, Republicans want to paint it as the left working in concert with Muslims.

The actual reality is that it's non-white Trump voters is too weird to grapple with.

Person A: Obviously it's very easy to attack Democrats on antisemetism - the universities, DEI, tolerating people like Ilhan Omar, etc.

The flipside is that Republicans have cozied up to people like Kanye, have effectively landed on a strong "private companies should never take down or demonetize or shadowban hate speech for any reason" and are in the process of strong-arming tech companies into moving to the Elon standard of moderation, and have partnered with a bunch of antisemetic people to do minority outreach (Kanye's the funniest example, but all of the Muslim for Trump people always have terrible records).

Not trying to cast blame, I just want the percentage of people who say they dislike Jews to go down instead of up….

….I think if you wanted to take an engineering mindset to the problem, you'd want suppress antisemetic content on social media and do the workplace/university purge stuff.

Each party supports one but not the other. Hard to really know how important each one is relative to the other but I'd guess probably they're ~ equal in importance, if I had to tilt probably social media is a bigger deal.

Person B: Even if you are not a principled free speech person, it should be easy to understand why the right would have an allergy to content suppression. And should also be uncontroversial that the stakes of free speech on social media are broader than antisemitism. Like maybe it's the case that a widespread return to pre-woke, laissez-faire censorship levels increases nasty groyper replies by 20%, but it also makes the Bud Light boycott viable. It makes it possible/permissible to discuss lab leak or point out that the Canadian sex offender is male. Obviously, if we were to ban all hateful, deranged speech that encompasses group-level accusations of innate evil, we would ban most woke "antiracism", and maybe Dems would be better off if we had.

Person A: I think government/society should take a heavy-handed approach to trying to suppress negative-sum ethnic conflict.

Israel and Singapore did the extreme versions of this and were very successful, and one of my pet peeves is that the American left claims to care a lot about antiracism but isn't interested at all in learning lessons from their examples.

The leftist instinct to try to extend the special treatment we give race/ethnicity to other things like orientation or gender or other forms of marginalization was a mistake, because the point isn't about counteracting oppression, it's about social stability, which is the same reason why "whites are bad" is also bad.

Person B: If we agree this heavy-handed approach extends to all negative-sum ethnic animus though, what would it look like with respect to anti-white racism, a dominant ideology in sense-making institutions over the past 10 years? For example, when NYT publishes something like this, should there be a censorship response?

Person A: But with antisemitism specifically I think you have a situation where things really deteriorating fairly rapidly - 18 year olds are ~3x more likely to say they dislike Jews than 65 year olds and both parties have fairly strong ideological commitments and political interests that will prevent them from addressing the problem and so it'll probably get worse. Seems bad!

9. Democrats and Depression

^ for both men and women, mental illness = leftist

While I actually agree with the point you are making, there are alternate explanations to the data. E.g what if people on the right are just as mentally ill, they just don't go get help? Or coastal left wing doctors are quicker to diagnose?

I bet in reality the differences are probably not quite as exaggerated as this chart implies even if it is directionally correct.

Could be all of the above, but physiognomy is real. Leftists have lower testosterone, more mental illness, and lower fertility. This is arguably *why* they are in revolt against biology itself.

This is one of the reasons why a common media interpretation of men shifting right is largely incorrect

The narrative, from Scott Galloway and others, is that these men are angry bitter putty in the hands of an Andrew Tate style influencer. Maybe they're just normal? Maybe normal, healthy Zoomers don't see political expression as deeply connected to atoning for their own sins as whites/men?

I see Democrats using this narrative about incel males angrily voting Republican and think, "The popular SEC frat boys seem to hate you guys even more"

The sum total of the racial reckoning will in 15 years be educational and outcome gaps wider than ever before

Rich white people virtue signaling gave cover to malign social process that resulted in direct increases in dead black teenagers and the reversal of essentially all progress on a range of educational indices

10. Why are recent mega criminals effective altruists or EA-adjacent?

Person A: I do think the fact that we got two TPOT adjacent shooters in a week does honestly update me a bit toward the idea that the community might be criminogenic in some way - the odds ratio on that has to be crazy.

I dunno, maybe I could see the case for rationalist-style thinking/communication styles encouraging violence in the same way that effective altruism pretty clearly was criminogenic (SBF was the most famous one, but there were three super rich EA people convicted of financial crimes in the space of a year at the height).

It's just annoying because this doesn't actually cleanly fit into a left/right framework but both the left and right are eager to turn it into a left/right thing…..

Person B: I think many on the right are gunning for opportunities to flip this discourse because for about a decade, various policy arguments were met with accusations of "stochastic terrorism"….

Person C: ..2 main factors, imo:

1. Rationalists don’t trust intuitions and are good at decoupling emotional responses, so normal/common sense conscience pangs don’t have the usual prophylactic effect when they fall into the wrong framework. Add the capacity enhancing effects of high IQ/agency and we have something akin to the overrepresentation of engineers in violent jihadism.

2. Widespread encouragement of mentally taxing practices/regimens like lengthy meditation retreats and consumption of nootropics/psychedelics

….the "leverage research invented a bunch of social technologies that caused people to go insane and maybe kill themselves and others but also kinda lead to openai" is a pulitzer winning story one day

….If Brian Thompson was stabbed by a mentally ill homeless guy, sure, blame liberalism.

But if he gets shot by someone who was DMing Lindyman and was a ghost-gun printing enthusiast I don't really see what that has to do with blue state dysfunction.

...With Luigi, it seems clear he simply lost his mind. His former ideology may be culpable to the extent that it introduced him to mushrooms.

Leftists aren’t to blame for his behavior, they are to blame for the sanctification of his behavior.

11. Elon eyes Europe

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870488903452676105?s=46&t=mEM1_PStobz6VQ1yJPz6BQ

Person A: Elon keeps raising the stakes. He now has to win every election to keep Twitter from being wrested from his hands. He is going all in on global right populist insurrection

It will probably work because all those countries’ left wing parties are just funded by DC. Once Trump takes over, the State Department will stop propping up its Western European satellite states.

European leftists can only hold on because American leftists have helped their pawns retain control in overt and covert ways.

Now DC flips from supporter to opponent, and the domestic opposition to the European left is simultaneously unleashed. Things may move quickly.

Person B: It is hard to explain to Americans where things are at in Germany (and some other countries in Europe). The despair is palpable.

The social contract in some of these countries is completely broken. AfD is a last resort party for many voters to protest the establishment.

What is truly frightening is what lies ahead if any of these populist parties actually come to power and then fail to deliver what voters want. Which is simply to reinstate the social contract: citizens pay taxes and government keeps the order at home and protect the nation from external threats. That is it.

We split these issues into categories like immigration, Islam, climate, etc. But at its core it is this contract between those who govern and those who are governed.

It is the same here in the UK. The elections in the summer produced a worse government for voters than the party that was voted out. It is insane. And this pattern has been going on for the last 30 years at least.

12. Should we be afraid of AFD?

Yes and no. It’s probably the only way to save Germany. But there’s a part of that party that is not just tired of apologizing but thinks Hitler had lots of great views and has scary implications for us Jews.

You kind of need them to win and pull the CDU more towards a bunch of their not-insane views to change the conversation on immigration and nuclear etc to get Germany to a healthy place, but it’s a high vol move.

…the German mainstream insists on importing millions of Syrians and Turks and Afghans while abolishing electricity as immoral but we can't vote for an alternative because a member (later kicked off the party list) said something weird about the Holocaust in 2016?

…”What's interesting here (and of course ignored by the Left, which will always claim the mantle of ethnic tolerance) is that Europe's right-wing parties are actually the most (or perhaps only) Zionist parties in those countries.

Geert Wilders Israel-posts constantly. Vox (the Spanish AfD) is the only party supportive of Israel. And of course, the candidate for the party right of even FN in France was a, wait for it, North African Jew.

It's not a question of who's pro-Jewish: more like which type of Jews this or that party claims as its own. Which is a subtlety lost in the discourse.

…It was insane to hear Viktor Orban denounced as "anti-Semitic" because he attacks George Soros when Budapest is probably the safest city to be a devout Jew in Europe."

13. JP Morgan healthcare conference

…i cannot name a single exec i know planning to go to JPM this year, insane how chilling it has been

….Anarchist terrorism is already changing behavior. Who wants to attend a healthcare conference in a blue state where they’ve abolished the police?

…There are bad union protests there too, which increase the risk frankly.

…I'm in a chat with some health AI startups and they're all very disappointed because JPM and other conferences are such an efficient way for them to break through on partnerships

14. COVID stimulus effect

Person A: https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/2024-12/wp24-22.pdf

The claim here is basically that covid stimulus was unusually inflationary because it all went into tradable goods which were supply constrained because of the ports.

It does imply that the macroeconomic gains to crushing the longshoreman union and automating our ports would be very large. It's probably more important than like, tax policy.

Person B: A more accurate explanation is that after the GFC stimulus, a lot of economically illiterate politicians learned that you can inject a ton of money into the economy without causing CPI inflation.

Which is mostly true. If you inject enormous sums of money into the financial system, what you see is asset price inflation (which makes owners of financial assets happy and exacerbates inequality).

But the COVID era stimulus was given directly to consumers, which produces a radically different (and extremely predictable) effect on the economy –– it massive boosts consumption. And supply chains are extremely well understood to be deeply inelastic in the short term (though quite elastic in the long run).

The strategy would have worked if we ~mostly met the lost incomes with equivalent levels of stimulus. But a lot of low-income individuals found themselves making more money from the stimulus than they were making from working. And when low-income get more money, they spend it on stuff!

I'm glad we're learning the lesson, but gosh this was really obviously what was going to happen.”

15. The group chats rejoice at more members in the administration

Celebrating our very own Sriram Krishnan and Emil Michael

Also, submit at least 3 nominations if you want to get a list of which products, people, and companies top founders and investors think deserve more spotlight.

1. Open AI vs Elon

“I think I understand everyone’s point of view.

Elon feels (very reasonably) that he invested $100M+ at seed stage, took risk, and helped recruit Ilya, so he should be in control — and reap the lion’s share of the equity returns.

Sam thinks (probably correctly) that the company wouldn’t have been what it is if it had been a division of Tesla. He needed to CEO it.

If it was a normal company then there would be some kind of settlement where Elon gets like $XB or something, as consideration for his angel investment.

But it’s AI, and xAI is a competitor, and also Sam was trying to use the US government to ban *his* competition, so it’s extremely messy.

At the same time OpenAI is under assault from decentralized models, executive defections, and copyright lawsuits. Tough business.”

“It really is back to the future. The heads of network all slugging it out against each other and raw nature, sometimes in alliance with the old regime, sometimes in opposition to it, and in various combinations versus each other.

2. GM dropping Cruise

3. Brad Gerstner’s Invest America Proposal

“Idea is permanent and structural line of defense for free market capitalism by making every child capitalist from birth - 3.7 M private investment accts per year - tiny seed from treasury (total cost $3 B) and then 401k where parents and companies can contribute.

Looking ahead at AI displacement - the calls for UBI and other socialist creep will get louder - particularly if 70% feel left out and like the system is rigged against them - so make them all owners. Very very cheap out of the money insurance policy w hugely positive NPV.

Zero gov’t account - Treasury dep’t merely coordinates the private providers opening the private labeled “America First” accounts. 🇺🇸”

4. Elizabeth Warren vs Kamala Harris

“Harris team was planning to kick out a decent number of Warrenites. Doesn’t mean they’d be gone but their power would be have been reduced. Now those same Warrenites like Stoller are cozying up to Trump with possibly some success.

Warren democrats will have more purchase in this administration than a Kamala Harris one — they’re already bragging that Andrew Ferguson has made promises in private. It’s why Warren is attacking Trump less than in 17.

Warren thinks she can make deals with Trump and Vance that align the right and left against companies in tech. She is (hopefully) more wrong than right, but her team was very down about Harris and more upbeat now. It’s also why Rohit Chopra is saying he’s on side of right individuals not getting debanked (but eliding over debanking of companies).”

5. Why the Dockworkers have so much leverage

“The problem with the longshoreman situation is they are going to win almost no matter what. We don't have a BATNA. If they strike, it is unequivocally bad for everybody involved. Automation is obviously great, and important, and we should be doing it. But it can't happen quickly. This round of the game is already written. It's pretty distasteful that they have this much leverage, but they quite literally do and I haven't heard any viable way to break it from anybody.

The president could denounce it... but he can't actually *stop* it. You can't bring in scab labor to run those cranes. And the people competent enough to run them from elsewhere absolutely won't.”

6. Murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO

“It's a hypothetical, but deep down, I believe most of us know that the reaction to the CEO murder would be much the same if he was an oil executive, social media company founder, or defense contractor with links to Israel. There's a lot of media instruction to understand where this deeply felt pro-murder sentiment is coming from re: healthcare. But it's not about the healthcare. It's mostly about the outgroup murder

Social media is a big part of elevating once darkly personal feelings to broader discourse. If this murder happened in 2002, media would depict it as a local True Crime story of an ivy leaguer gone mad. There'd be no national conversation about how health industry sinfulness had inspired millions of celebrants

…[sarcastic]: Democrats anchoring in on pro socialism and pro murder is an interesting path for '26 and '28….The pro murder movement is ripping through the press, academia, D activist circles, "comedians", et al at precisely the moment the D party is in full civil war over their electoral path forward. It's the idea they need to really gel the party post the big loss. Watch Obama and Clinton give half hearted opposition speeches before wearily signing onboard.”

7. Follow-up debate about the murder

Person A: “Why wouldn’t it be okay to shoot bank executives for not granting loans? Or hedge fund managers for buying companies and relocating them? Or oil executives for carbon emissions?

There’s no limiting principle for these people and there isn’t meant to be. It’s just Baader-Meinhof evil radicalism.

Person B: “True, but to be fair at this point that’s a bipartisan impulse. I’m totally opposed to violence, including war, abortion and murdering health care executives, and I strongly agree with Ben that this is Baader-Meinhof shit. On the other hand, when your middle class withers and it starts to feel like billionaires control everything, people get radical. That should be obvious, and it’s hardly anti-market to point it out….It’s not just freaks and Antifa who are celebrating that guy’s murder. Sorry. As noted I’m obviously not endorsing it, only noting that American society is way more lopsided than it was in 1968 and that has some scary effects. Best not to lie about it.

Person C: “And although it's a boring explanation, I truly think this non-freak, non-antifa response arises in part from the movielike aesthetics of the whole thing. You get a cool competent handsome white assassin taking down a VIP in the middle of Manhattan, then making a getaway. You get a poetic gesture at some kind of populist vendetta. And you get all of this in a hyperreal media environment where people get to smirk at narratives and symbols, not the real death of a real guy.”

Person A: “The notion that America writ large is more unequal in 2024 than 1968 is wrong, I think. In 1968 black America was literally four years out from the Civil Rights Act. Our healthcare system is a massive clusterfuck, but life expectancy in 1968 was 66 for men and 74 for women. Today it is 75 and 80 respectively. The support for Baader-Meinhof violence today springs from boredom and post-religious nihilism - supplemented by the institutional failure, which is real - not some sort of justified opposition to inequality.

Institutional failure should justify institutional change. But the nihilistic use it to justify individual violence.”

Person B: “Trying to understand why people do ugly things is not the same as justifying those things, and I worry that dismissing evil behavior as the product of some mysterious mind virus blinds us to cause and effect. The revolutionary mindset isn’t something you catch from a toilet seat, or even from the internet. It’s usually the predictable result of circumstances. That’s why some societies are more stable than others, because they’re ordered in a way that produces stability. In our case, America has had pretty much the same system of government for 250 years because Americans generally believed they controlled it. We’ve had some form of market capitalism for just as long because most Americans thought they benefited from it. But what happens when all of a sudden huge numbers young people don’t believe that and for good reason: because they don’t own anything and don’t have any prospect of owning anything, and instead are deeply in debt at high interest rates to what seems like a tiny group of super rich people who appear to get richer every year even as they get more indebted? And then, to make it even more poisonously insulting and dark, at the very same time this is happening to them, the thwarted young aren’t afforded even the language to complain about it, but are instead encouraged by the same rich people in charge to hate each other along lines of race, sex and sexuality? At that point it seems obvious that some of them are apt to get pretty radical, if not nihilistic, and I fully understand why. The main goal of any society has to be to help young people to thrive sufficient to have their own thriving children. If a system isn’t doing that, it’s basically disgusting and needs to be reordered.”

…Anyone who’s content with the fact the next generation of Americans will likely rent rather than own homes is part of the problem as far as I’m concerned.”

Person A: “Inequality exists in all societies - ours far less than others. Obstacles to generational progress exist in all societies - ours far less than others. The theory that circumstance dictates the revolutionary mindset in the West is a materialist explanation of a spiritual phenomenon. The kids who are most radical are upper class white kids at top notch schools who cosplay the revolution because of the God-shaped, church-shaped hole in their hearts.”

.. ISIS radicalism isn’t driven by lack of theism or poverty. It’s driven by radical Islam. Rich Western kids shooting executives, by contrast, is driven by lack of purpose. Those who cheer them are often being misled by people who suggest that life’s large problems (like the healthcare system) are solved easily without tradeoffs, and that failure to solve them comes from a lack of empathy or willpower on the part of a conspiratorial coterie of evildoers. That’s nearly always a cheap demagogic parlor trick.

Person D: “Yes, and this is why home ownership has nothing to do with it. Just as it has nothing to do with population decline.

Buy a house in order to do what?

Worth noting that Israel, the only high-GDP country to escape the low birth-rate curse of modernity, also has a major housing problem due to spiraling real estate costs (Tel Aviv the most expensive city in the world these days, or close). While yes market realities and policy choices might impact this very important measure of societal health at the margin, there's some deeper malaise going on here. The Israeli counter-example being the dying Nordics who have a level of child-rearing support we could only dream of. But it doesn't change the trendline.

As a relevant footnote on this, the bulk of the 'settlers' in the 'West Bank' aren't religious zealots...it's people who need family housing. A slow-burning annexation is going on because Tel Aviv prices are too high (and Israelis are so hellbent on having families, they'll maintain a geopolitical conflagration in order to do so). But of course that's the hardest thing to fix: the 'why?' of kids and families rather than the 'how?'

8. Andrew Ferguson appointment to FTC

“He’s an A-list legal talent. And he’s good at finding impactful stuff at the margin, and he’s pro-growth without being reflexively deferential to corporations in the old “Chamber of Commerce” style.

The group chats also rejoice at having another member in the administration in Jacob Helberg.

9. Would BLM revolt in response to Daniel Penny verdict?

"I'm with Rufo. And it's my dead horse of, "Elon runs Twitter now, therefore no riots at scale". It's not that BLM is exhausted. It's that they've no Twitter support for ruining society. It's truly staggering how much damage the old Twitter regime did absent much retrospective anger/blame. Those of us who value free speech aren't quite sure how to approach a situation where speech was curated to harm public order.

Old Twitter was run by people who saw police as racist villains. They made a fist emoji out of the BLM hashtag to further promote it. End result was tens of thousands more murders over the baseline. A lot of people got killed because the indoor cats running journalism's favorite platform operated under a false sense of how society works.

10. Effective altruism critiques

    “It’s evil. It was not until my encounter with EA at Oxford that I really internalized how communism seemed to its aspirants before the Russian revolution..

    The combination of a sophisticated philosophical system that appeals to overeducated but spiritually adrift young people and tells them normal human society thinks about morality all wrong and a utopian vision of the future with romantic scope, that justifies great sacrifice”

11. More Luigi Memes

“It's been a couple hours and we suddenly know more about the CEO shooter than I know about my own cousins. How come this is possible and yet we know almost nothing about the Trump shooter?”

And what’s going on in New Jersey with the drones?

Housekeeping: We have over 100 nominations for Turpentine Lists from great founders and investors. Submit your nominations if you want access to the recommendations of breakout people, products, and companies and/or if you want to influence which people or companies get recognized.

David Sacks is a technology entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of PayPal. As an early member of the "PayPal Mafia," he has been a prominent voice in Silicon Valley for over two decades. In this wide-ranging conversation with Erik Torenberg, Sacks discusses the transformation of Silicon Valley's culture, the rise of tech censorship, and the future of institutional reform.

Note: this is an edited version of a podcast we recorded well before the election. In light of him joining the Trump admin, I thought it’d be interesting to share his thinking that justified his intellectual evolution as well as his prediction of how the Republican Party would evolve.

This is an experiment in posting edited versions of our best interviews, “like” this post if you want us to do more of it.

PayPal's Transformation and Big Tech Censorship

Erik Torenberg: David, let's start with PayPal. What's happened at PayPal has been a metaphor for what's happened in the Valley at large. It was started by free speech proponents like Thiel, Elon, and yourself—some of the biggest free speech activists in the tech world today. And it's become run by people who want to restrict free speech in the name of preventing harm. Could you have foreseen that as the tech industry matured?

David Sacks: No. If you look at polling from a decade ago, both Democrats and Republicans had a consensus in favor of free speech. Going back 20 years to the founding of Web 1.0 companies, there was a real sense that these companies were breaking down boundaries and borders, democratizing access to financial services, payment systems, and, eventually, speech. It seemed to be a consensus in Silicon Valley that this was a good thing. Even roughly a dozen years ago, the then-CEO of Twitter declared they were the free speech wing of the free speech party.

What PayPal's doing now is particularly nefarious. It's bad enough to take away someone's free speech rights, but they're trying to starve out political opposition by denying them the ability to transact, accept payments, pay people, and run businesses. They're encouraging other tech companies to follow suit. The collective effect, if implemented widely, would restrict not just free speech rights but people's ability to make a living.

Erik Torenberg: This was your baby. Elon’s baby. Thiel’s baby. Have you guys tried communicating with management about this?

David Sacks: It's too far removed at this point. They won't reverse course because one of us makes a phone call. I think the only thing they’ll respond to is public pressure, so us speaking publicly is probably as much as we can do.

If you look at the bios of PayPal's leadership, particularly the CEO, you'll see about one paragraph on professional credentials and five paragraphs on left-wing activism. The CEO's received every woke award possible. The company works with groups like the ADL and SPLC to define blacklists. These organizations historically did good work with noble missions fighting antisemitism and discrimination. But in recent years, they've been hijacked by a conventional left-wing agenda, straying far from their original purpose to become standard left-wing groups.

These advocacy groups can promote whatever cause they want, but they shouldn't be trusted to create platform blacklists because they're highly partisan. They can't make honest assessments of anyone from the other side of the political spectrum. Yet PayPal defers to them.

You have to wonder if this is part of the woke capitalism game where executives work with these groups, give them censorship power over political enemies, and receive awards advancing their careers up the woke corporate totem pole. It's a concerning quid pro quo, but it appears to be our current system.

Erik Torenberg: It’s ironic in many ways because there used to be this big libertarian streak in tech where there was concern that the government would enforce a kind of political monoculture but that corporations would keep each other in check and act rationally in terms of maximizing their profits, but in turns out corporates started doing activism all on their own.

David Sacks: They did do it on their own but also, as we’re learning, with the help of the government. The head of Twitter's "trust and safety"—their euphemistically named censorship department—had recurring meetings with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. Jen Psaki, as White House press secretary, admitted they worked with social networks to identify posts for removal. We're discovering extensive cooperation between security state agencies and big tech companies.

And so all these liberal apologists for big tech who are saying that, ‘well, they’re private companies’ – they’re making a very disingenuous argument because these very same people are supporting new bills in Congress that would regulate these companies in other ways.

On the one hand, they’re saying they’re private companies, they can do what they want, but on the other hand, these private companies are working hand in hand with the state, as we saw with the Twitter files.

There’s a really scary alliance right now between the largest tech companies, politicians, and the permanent Washington establishment. We're getting to the point where it looks more like a Big Brother social credit system.

Erik Torenberg: Well, they're just trying to hold you accountable, whereas when you’re doing the same thing, you’re putting them in harm’s way.

David Sacks: Right. They live in such a bubble where everybody agrees with them, and they have so much entitlement. And it's such a closed loop that if you subject them to any criticism or public debate whatsoever, that’s deemed to be harassment and jeopardizes their safety.

But of course that same argument doesn't apply when they engage in criticism of the other side. Then it’s not harassment, it’s public debate. And these are people who are seeking to control the public debate, so they can't be immune from criticism.

Silicon Valley's Political Evolution

Erik Torenberg: You’ve been in Silicon Valley for the last 25 years. When did this political monoculture start to take shape? What was the catalyst?

David Sacks: Silicon Valley's always been very liberal—if measured by party affiliation, it was 90+ percent Democrat. But the real change came with Trump's 2016 election, where all of a sudden liberal elites who thought connecting the world was a good thing, “We’re opening up the world” and “we’re inspiring populist social movements around the world (e.g., Arab Spring) – now all of a sudden the narrative completely flipped to “Oh my God, what have we done? Social networks helped elect Trump."

I now believe that story is largely nonsense. I think the idea that Facebook was the reason Trump got elected is ridiculous. It’s scapegoating. There are other explanations you could point to, like the fact that Hillary Clinton just ran a terrible campaign. But Silicon Valley, particularly social networks, became the scapegoat. After that, big tech leaders started questioning themselves. The media, which had been the champions of the First Amendment, bought into this censorship agenda and abandoned the principles on which the entire media industry was based.

Erik Torenberg: I think Trump was an accelerant, but I noticed changes earlier. At Product Hunt in 2013-2015, there was already tension between tech and media. Media became increasingly hostile, first mocking "silly apps" and then warning about platforms getting too powerful.

David Sacks: True. The big tech companies were growing larger, more valuable, and increasingly dominant. People began recognizing their power and wealth. There are legitimate concerns about these monopolies and how they should be reined in for the startup ecosystem's health.

But over the last six years, the party in power hasn't focused on limiting these companies' power—they want to co-opt it. They're working with these companies to censor political opponents and control narratives. You see this in Senate hearings where Judiciary Committee members tell tech leaders to "take down more content"—content they couldn't legally restrict through legislation due to First Amendment protections. Then in the next breath, they’re saying, ‘you guys have these monopolies we need to look at. We need to pass some legislation to rein you guys in. So they’re hanging these Damocles over their heads and effectively saying you need to do what I say.

And it’s been very effective. It’s created top-down pressure for companies to put their thumb on the scale of democracy and sensor opponents of the people in power. On the other hand, you have the problem of bottoms-up pressure, which comes from the activist employee base. Company leaders are caught in this pressure cooker and haven't shown courage in resisting it. They've consistently capitulated, which makes Elon's actions at Twitter so significant.

Erik Torenberg: Did you experience any of this activism as CEO or only later as a VC?

David Sacks: Not really. PayPal had a strong libertarian culture. At Yammer (2008-2012) and then Microsoft, we were creating tools for free company communication. We didn't have the problems of Slack channels being hijacked by activist employees to unionize and create problems for the company. This started happening later.

Erik Torenberg: Yeah, maybe it was a cascading effect where activists saw it happen in one company, and the rest just followed.

David Sacks: When was Matt Yglesias’s Great Awakening piece written?

Erik Torenberg: I’m not sure, but he was talking about this surge of activism happening on college campuses and the rest of the country. Wow, this is crazy. And then people on the left were saying, don’t exaggerate, it’s just a couple of campuses. And it turned out that activity spilled out to the rest of the corporate world.

What’s fascinating is that you wrote about this in the 90s with Peter Thiel when you guys were back at Stanford. It feels like your writings 30 years ago could have been written today. Talk about having that vantage point.

Institutional Capture and Elite Class Dynamics

David Sacks: Let’s back up. You're right. The interesting thing about this woke phenomenon is that it spans across corporate America. You have so-called woke capitalism. You've got ESG with boards of directors and all these global nonprofits and NGOs.. You've got the think tank world. You've got the media. You’ve got Hollywood. It’s a phenomenon that spans across virtually every major institution in our society. And so the question is how does something like that happen?

This can only happen through a shift in attitudes of an entire class—specifically the professional class with college degrees. The polling data is clear: the biggest socio-cultural divide isn't race or gender; it's educational attainment.

Political science research, particularly Roy Texeira’s work, shows roughly a 30-point gap in voting patterns and party affiliation between professional and working classes. Professional means at least one college degree, and working-class means a high school education or less. This educational divide is the largest electoral split we have seen.

How do you explain that? I think it’s downstream of the fact that universities got taken over a couple of generations ago by the far left. The societal bargain became: if you want economic and social advancement through a college degree, you submit to four years of ideological reeducation. This explains why graduates emerge with far-left views so different from the rest of the country. Andrew Sullivan has this line. We all live on campus now.

I see three distinct groups: About 10% are true believers, 1% rebel and become conservative journalists or founders—which explains how I survive with my views—and roughly 90% become the herd.

The herd populates professional elite ranks—McKinsey consultants, Goldman bankers. True believers take lower-paying jobs in think tanks, foundations, and HR departments, becoming the regime's enforcement arm.

This explains institutions going woke simultaneously—all college graduates have absorbed this ideology and either actively support it or know not to oppose it. And I do think this explains a huge amount of the conflict in our country because two thirds of the country is working class, only one third of the country's professional class. And the professional class holds beliefs and values that are at odds with the working class, which is a majority of the country, yet runs all the major institutions.

You can’t have a democracy where a majority of the country doesn’t agree with the agenda that’s being foisted upon them by their institutions.

Now, the elites running these institutions are always claiming that what they're doing is in the interest of democracy, but democracy is letting a majority of the population exercise its will and get its way. And that's not what’s happening here. Instead, we’re getting this Orwellian doublespeak where, in the name of democracy, they’re doing things like censoring the majority.

In the 2020 election, we had nearly a 50/50 election, but that’s 50/50 with our big tech companies engaged in shadow banning and broad-scale censorship and putting their thumb on the scale. You have to wonder if we had a completely fair and level playing field if the big tech wasn't engaging in censorship on behalf of the elite, and if the media wasn’t constantly covering for the elite, which they’re part, maybe these elections might have gone a little differently.

Erik Torenberg: Balaji likes to say that when people say they’re fighting for democracy, what they really mean is fighting for the Democrat party. It’s never fighting for the Republicans. So even if they’re doing things that seem at odds with actual democratic principles, as long as it’s in favor of the Democrat party, then it’s internally consistent.

David Sacks: Right. If you're in power, you obviously want to perpetuate that power, and you want to insulate yourself from accountability.

And so, like every ruling elite that's ever been in power, you're willing to use tactics of censorship. That's always the reason for censorship. Is that the people with the power wanna protect that power, and they wanna make themselves immune from criticism? And they do that with this Orwellian relabeling of terms where if you criticize them, that's harassment. They’re allowed to criticize and attack you, de-platform you, take away your speech rights, and starve you out. But that's just, you know, appropriate punishment for people who won't behave.

Foreign Policy

Erik Torenberg: One irony is that you yourself are a Stanford graduate, a successful entrepreneur, and yet you’ve gravitated to working-class views on trade, foreign policy, and big tech. How have your views evolved?

David Sacks: Some of it has been a change in my views, and some of it has been the world changing around me and relabeling what used to be liberal views to conservative views. I mean, being a free speech advocate was a liberal position in the 1970s.

I don't think I've changed that much, but I think that what's happened is that the elite in our country has kind of bought into these very illiberal ideas in terms of censorship and just fully embracing the collusion between big tech and our security state. Liberals who used to be quite skeptical of the power of the state and the power of monopolies are now fully bought into the collusion of both of them, provided they can use that power and align it with their agenda.

Erik Torenberg: Let’s do foreign policy. Have you always been a realist?

David Sacks: This is one of those issues where I've just evolved by watching what's been going on. I mean, like everybody else, when we got involved in the Iraq war, I supported it cause I thought they were telling us the truth. I mean, they told us that the Bush administration did that. Saddam Husain was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda, and they had WMD programs. And in fact, we knew where those programs were.

That's literally what the administration told us. It was all lies. Those lies got us into that war. The war did nothing to improve American security. We destabilized the Middle East. We turned Iraq into an Iranian proxy state. We created a huge destabilization, which created a huge refugee problem that spilled over into Syria.

We got involved in Afghanistan. I think the original motivation for going into Afghanistan was just because they actually did support Al-Qaeda, which attacked us on 9/11. But then we stayed there in an open-ended occupation for 20 years, and the entire time, we were told that we were winning and the country was being transformed into a democracy, and everything turned out to be just a lie.

All these foreign interventions in the Middle East cost us something like 8 trillion dollars and at least a million direct deaths. So I don't know how you live through that over the past 20 years and not rethink American Foreign Policy. I realized that American foreign policy has been overly activist and overly interventionist and that has totally backfired and blown up in our faces.

And the sad thing is that the same people who got us involved in that foreign policy are still there. It's the foreign policy establishment, the blob. There's been very little accountability for all those people. In fact, most of them have moved to the Democratic party. They're very comfortable with the idea of state power.

But there was a small circle of people in foreign policy who accurately predicted what would happen, and that’s basically the realist camp. And, of course, they're very out of favor with the elites in Washington because they wanted to restrain American involvement. So, I guess I've become more realistic over time by virtue of just seeing the results of our policies.

Erik Torenberg: With regards to Russia-Ukraine, is it possible that elites became so pro-Ukraine because they were so anti-Trump that once Trump was rumored to be friendly with Putin, it was inevitable that they’d take the other side? Is there another world where Trump tweeted out that we should support Ukraine, and then liberal elites would say ‘no, we shouldn’t’?

David Sacks: Well, I think one of the big things that happened during the Trump administration was you had the whole Russia collusion hoax where they basically invented it. It wasn't even one hoax, it was like a series of hoaxes. You had the Alfa Bank hoax, you had the whole Mueller investigation which went on for years. And what happened is that the left scapegoated not just social networking but also Vladamir Putin for Trump’s election. Presumably, they were working together somehow, and this is what caused Trump to win. That led to the whole Russia collusion hoax. By the way, the whole thing started with the Steele dossier, which, again, we know was a piece of phony opposition research that was commissioned by the Clinton campaign's law firm Perkins Coie, paying a British spy. And I think this backdrop has contributed to the way we perceive the Ukraine war.

Erik Torenberg: To be fair, on the right, there have been some factions glamorizing Russian culture or at least sympathizing with it.

David Sacks: I think that’s overblown. I follow a lot of people on the right, and I don’t see any people holding up Putin as a leader we want to emulate. That’s something the left accuses the right of doing — I mean, I’m accused of being pro-Putin because I don’t want us to get into World War III over Ukraine. I want us to pursue America's vital interests. I’m not pro-Russian. There's nothing about Putin or the Russian regime that I want to emulate. I just think America’s foreign policy should be guided by what’s in America’s best interest, and that’s the discussion we need to have. But that’s just not the conversation we have on Ukraine.

Big Tech Regulation and Monopolies

Erik Torenberg: Let’s get back to big tech. You've advocated for tech regulation because these companies have become too powerful. One challenge is that regulations often entrench existing power structures. Why couldn't innovation solve this as it did with Microsoft?

David Sacks: These monopolies are incredibly powerful, and as they mature, they dominate all downstream business opportunities. Look at Google search—less than 50% of searches now lead to non-Google properties. They keep advancing their own properties in search results and creating reasons never to leave Google's ecosystem.

VCs have little incentive to fund innovation on these platforms if the platform owner will just appropriate that value. You prove an idea and make it successful, and then the operating system copies it, cuts off your distribution, and pushes users to their version. You can't sustain a healthy tech ecosystem under these conditions.

The Microsoft antitrust intervention actually worked. Without it, Microsoft could have seamlessly extended from dominating desktop operating systems to browsers to search. The web would've been far less free. The Netscape lawsuit hamstrung Microsoft enough to allow other companies to innovate.

I'm not saying endless litigation is ideal, but we need mechanisms to restrain these monopolies, or Silicon Valley will become like Hollywood—where creativity is constrained, and studios control everything.

Erik Torenberg: What specific regulations would you propose? Blocking acquisitions like Facebook-Instagram? Reducing Apple's 30% rate?

David Sacks: Banning acquisitions isn't necessarily the answer. We need a healthy startup ecosystem, and there are already a few good outcomes. IPO windows are frozen, SPACs are gone, and M&A is difficult because Washington opposes it. You're foreclosing exit opportunities while most startups still fail. We need some good outcomes to justify front-end risk.

If you restrict M&A, it should be very targeted. Currently, acquirers don't know what's allowed. Facebook was blocked from acquiring a VR app, while Wall Street questions whether VR is viable at all. These interventions in nascent markets, where you can't claim dominant market share because the market barely exists, are misguided. Save restrictions for mature, well-defined markets where acquisitions would significantly increase market concentration.

Not all monopolies are equal. The most dominant are operating system monopolies—Google and Apple's mobile app stores. The principle should be that they cannot impose rules on startups that they themselves don't follow, and they cannot prefer their own apps over third-party apps. There are various enforcement mechanisms like sideloading, but that's the core issue.

The censorship problem is harder because you won't get 60 Senate votes for reform. Section 230 needs fixing—tech companies are having it both ways, claiming distributor immunity while exercising publisher-like editorial control. Twitter's activities proved this. Companies acting as true distributors should keep protection, but those acting as publishers should face publisher liability. However, Democrats want more censorship while Republicans want less, making bipartisan agreement unlikely until perhaps 2024.

Erik Torenberg: Is there a role for antitrust beyond just blocking mergers?

David Sacks: Yes, particularly in addressing platform favoritism. When platform owners can arbitrarily advantage their own services, it destroys incentives for third-party innovation. We've seen this pattern repeatedly—a platform allows innovation until competition threatens their interests, and then they clone successful products and bury competitors.

This requires structural reform beyond just merger review. We need clear rules preventing platforms from exploiting their gatekeeper position to exclude competition. However, reform must preserve legitimate platform innovation while preventing unfair leveraging of monopoly power. It's a difficult balance that pure antitrust tools struggle to achieve.

Preserving Democracy?

Erik Torenberg: Let’s zoom out for a thought experiment. What do you say to the person who says, over the last 30 years, we’ve had tremendous social progress? And free speech was a great tool for getting it. But now, censorship is actually a more helpful tool for producing social progress. Isn’t the goal of speech social progress anyway?

David Sacks: Well, who defines social progress? That’s up to democratic majorities to decide. That elitist view you've just described is the rationalization for a small number of elites who have the institutional power to suppress the will of the majority and interfere in elections.

And then, of course, those very same people will puff out their chests and say, we're the protectors and defenders of democracy. No. If you truly believe in democracy, you would allow the people to have a voice and then let the chips fall where they may in terms of how they vote. The reason why I've become more populist is because it aligns with civil liberties

The person who I've heard made the argument similar to what you've made is Erdogan in Turkey, who basically has said, look, the thing that you in America don't understand is that in the Middle East democracy is just the bus that people take to get where they're going. Once they have the power, they don’t need democracy anymore. They’ve just used it as a tool to get in power.

Erik Torenberg: What do you say to a more nuanced version of that argument, which is the idea that wokeness is just the logical conclusion of liberalism? That liberalism is fundamentally confused because it tries to optimize for freedom and equality, but those values are fundamentally at odds. And that people who are saying we need to get back to classical liberalism are like the communists who are saying, ‘real communism has never been tried’?

David Sacks: If you go back to the '90s, Fukuyama's "End of History" was popular—the idea that democratic capitalism was humanity's final destination and our biggest problem would be boredom. Part of that argument must be true: if we believe in democratic capitalism, it should be an ideal end state for everyone. But the timeframe was way off. Cultures and civilizations are stubborn things.

The bigger error was about boredom. As we approached Fukuyama's "End of History," our biggest problem wasn't boredom but hubris. This hubris in thinking we had all the answers led to a loss of tolerance.

When you think you have all the answers, there's no reason to allow debate or a free marketplace of ideas. This became the woke theology: we understand virtue, and anyone opposing our agenda is simply bad and must be silenced, deplatformed, unpersoned.

What we're living through isn't the free democratic capitalism we expected but something more repressive. It's managerial capitalism, as Burnham predicted—ruled by experts, technocrats, and mid-level managers who control everything. You have collusion between tech platforms, media, and the state, with closely prescribed limits on speech and behavior. It's a strange form of democratic capitalism that feels far more oppressive than we imagined 30 years ago.

The professional class has created a system where they're insulated from accountability while enforcing strict ideological compliance. They claim to defend democracy while actively subverting democratic will through censorship and social control. This isn't about protecting democracy—it's about protecting class interests and power.

Industrial recapture

Erik Torenberg: We’ve been talking about institutional capture -- but could these institutions be recaptured? If Balaji were here, he’d say you can’t recapture them. You have to start new ones. But Elon just captured Twitter. Has that made you rethink what’s possible with institutional capture?

David Sacks: I think we need a multifaceted solution to this problem. Part of it is gonna be creating new institutions and alternatives like we've seen in alternative media. Part of it, though, has to be revitalizing and reforming existing institutions because some of them are just too important and too powerful just to completely concede.

But I can’t understate what Elon is doing here. Elon's going over the heads of the elite and appealing directly to the people. That's what you must do to win this battle. The professional class is only one-third of the country but holds all institutional power, especially media control and narrative-shaping ability. The only way to fight that is by direct public appeal.

This explains the intense reaction to Elon opening Twitter as a true alternative to elite media. Social media's original promise 15 years ago was democratization—giving average people a voice to compete with elite media. Instead, content moderation machinery was captured by elites sharing mainstream media's viewpoints, turning social networks into enforcement arms of traditional media.

Look at the media's hysterical reactions: They called him a Thanos-like supervillain for snapping 50% of the employees out of existence. Then they said that he was starving the employees cause he was going to charge for lunch because no one was eating the food in the cafeteria. Then, they predicted the imminent collapse of the company and the site would go down because he gave a generous voluntary severance package.

He said that if you don't want to return to the office and work hard, you can take a three-month severance. And so all these liberal elites were tearfully saying their goodbyes on Twitter, predicting the site was gonna go down, saying I'll see you in the next life on Mastodon or whatever. And, of course, a month passes, and the site runs just fine.

This terrifies the elite laptop class because he's proving these people aren't necessary. Their previous formula was simple: hold approved opinions, support approved causes, and advancement follows. SBF explained this perfectly—it's the game "woke Westerners" play. Elon's changing the rules: now you must create actual economic value or face termination. It's threatening both ideologically and economically. The era of bloated tech companies serving as jobs programs for surplus elites is over.

What could a counter-elite look like?

Erik Torenberg: Is it fair to say polarization is only going to get worse? Will we see parallel economies with "blue platforms" and "red platforms"?

David Sacks: Well, again, I think the division is caused by the fact that the majority of the country holds more populist working-class views, whereas the elite who are running the institutions hold these far-left cultural views. And that's just the fundamental tension. And the question is, who wins that battle? I think in democracies, majorities end up winning.

Erik Torenberg: maybe there'll be an Elon-ification of the Republican Party at some point where there's just like a really credible tech operator or who tech can respect a peer. What could a counter-elite movement look like?

David Sacks: Our professional managerial class has insulated themselves from consequences. They don't want accountability for mistakes. During COVID, health bureaucrats claimed exclusive expertise, enforced through big tech, but faced no consequences for errors. They even asked for amnesty on all decisions related to COVID.

So you had all these ‘experts’ who were the only ones allowed to have opinions on COVID — and enforced by big tech — and when it turned out they were wrong, there was no accountability. No one got fired, they just moved onto the next thing.

I think the bigger question is whether the Republican Party could marshal this populist energy.

Ultimately, you need somebody who can build a majority coalition and then actually execute this program of accountability for elites. Because society is always going to have these mid-level managers, it’s always going to have these elites. It’s always going to have institutions. We’re not going to get rid of them. But if they want the power that elite status brings, they have to be accountable for the results.

Erik Torenberg: That’s a good note to wrap up on, David thanks for a great discussion.

David Sacks: Good to be with you Erik. Thank you.

Today the shooter was identified as Luigi Mangione, and the group chats had a field day sharing tweets and memes. I’m sharing them here to see if it would be of interest to a wider audience. Again, if you don’t like dark humor about tragic events, stop reading this post. This is also an experiment — I’m curious if my readership will find it entertaining. “Like” if it you want more humor posts like this, otherwise I won’t post them.

Also to be clear, the murder is utterly tragic and my heart goes out to Brian Thompson’s family. While I’m personally OK laughing at jokes about the murderer — though he may have gone crazy as a result of taking drugs following an operation and I feel bad for him too (even though I think he should go to prison regardless) — I don’t support anyone trying to suggest the murder was justified in any way or that it was tied to some societal problem we need to fix in order to avoid more murders, as others have done.

“Gratitude will act as an elixir that will gradually dissolve the hard shell of your ego–your need to possess and control–and transform you into generous being. The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy; makes us magnanimous, large-souled.”

Housekeeping: We launched “Turpentine Lists” yesterday: an effort to spotlight breakout founders, operators, investors/funds, products, and companies that the startup ecosystem should be paying more attention to.

If you want the (anonymized) data set of recommendations of people, products, or companies, or if you just want any of them to get more recognition, fill out the form here by next Thursday. Please do submit! There are over 100 responses already by great people, I’m excited to share the aggregated data with people who submit nominations (even just a couple nominations count, no need to fill out the whole thing).

More “housekeeping”: My team won the SF Hoops championship this year. Here is a clip of me getting amped after a block and my brother laughing in the background. Sound on.

This week I’m trying a new format: Dispatches from the Group Chats. For the last few years, the best conversations have happened in private group chats, not on public social networks, and I’m going to share some (anonymized) highlights. These chats include CEOs, investors, and political insiders.

1. Public company CEOs debate whether SF is truly back.

CEO A: “We just signed up for like 10 floors on market in a new building, I'm very bullish on SF.” [5 other similar stage CEOs express that they’re also buying more office space in SF].

CEO B: “I would very much like SF to be back - but i'm not seeing it yet. Still seems like a total war zone when you go through anything west of Van Ness, which of course you have to go through every time to get in/out of the city. It feels more dangerous than most most third world cities i've visited.

AI is doing well there - but what else are folks seeing that makes it seem back?”

CEO A: “I’m there every day, huge difference every day. Keep in mind that the tenderloinish areas were drugged out in 2019, 2018 etc too. I actually think it’s significantly better now compared to back then. The reason is that they’re having people from the city cleaning it up and moving people EVERY morning.

The tourists and activities are coming back too and getting better and better, but nowhere close to pre pandemic levels. But big difference from 2 years ago. But it’s not at all like say NYC which is 100% back.

Other areas like pac heights are MORE active than pre pandemic. Esp cafes and restaurants etc. basically, all the tech workers who work from home hang out in their neighborhood. So it’s actually the opposite over there. Just go to those places on a weekend.”

CEO B: SF is clearly on a trajectory to be back for tech. Young smart people are flowing in and energy / optimism are high. But retail is still dying, the big employers are gone, and the majority of the voters are still far left. The more “moderate” local government will help, the new federal government will help a lot. I would bet that the next four years will be quite a bit better than the last four. But nothing is guaranteed and it’ll be full of compromises.

I’m bullish on SF but I have one foot out the door.””

2. Debanking details under Biden/Warren

“So, as a [editor’s note: person working directly with related parties, redacted title to protect confidentiality], yes debanking happened and was celebrated internally at the time by some people in Biden admin.

But It’s important to separate much of the Biden team, who committed sins of omission or nonchalance about this, from the folks in the Warren aligned world at the FDIC, OCC, CFPB, and NEC that pushed for this.”

“Appreciate the candor. What was the internal talk over this like? "Those garbage people deserve it?" "It isn't really such a big deal?" Assuming it started as measures against extreme actors that gradually became normalized?

“Crypto will be gone in six months. It’s bad for people. Who cares if some rich tech founders can’t get bank accounts for once. We need more Old Testament justice. The folks [redacted] mentioned above were laughing about the SVB crisis as it unfolded and are angry SVB got rescued even now. Even the NEC wasn’t taking SVB (which in many ways arose out of Silvergate and the big debanking push in Jan-Feb) seriously the weekend the bank was teetering.

A big focus of the Warren crew is the idea that tech and finance have rotted the economy and pushed too many people out of “the real economy” that makes things, sapping our vitality. Per a ODNI staffer, to the WH “every crypto engineer is a policy failure” because it means one less person working on batteries, or semiconductors.

They want an economy where tech and finance are half or a quarter of the current size, so the economy is no longer “financialized” and warped/unequal. Matt Stoller is a great as someone to read because he spells out this view which the Warren camp doesn’t want to say.

The Biden team didn’t realize this was what was going on under them because they’re lazy and incurious.

As one Dem Senator put it ‘the problem is this WH has some staff who report not to the president but Sen. Warren’

X knows this: this was the first WH where a majority of the staff didn’t support the president during the primary that elected him.

“Is this just because there is really no constituency for Bidenism among the Dem staffer/adjacent class?”

So, I think it’s not that there isn’t but that there WASNT in 2019. 2016’s loss was shattering for a ton of people (me included) and the idea that we lost to Trump bc we didn’t go far enough to the left was like a siren song. The Pod Save guys basically bought into that too. And there was a ready made narrative for it from…Team Warren”

3. Prompt: If you were advising the department of Government Efficency (DOGE), what would you advise them?

   • Come up with a legal theory by which the executive branch can unilaterally term these employees (directly or indirectly) to move fast. Various theories exist. They will be challenged legally, so choose well.

   • Write a list of principles going forward that you want all federal employees to adhere to (ex: I will spend the governments money like it is my own and work to reduce cost dramatically to avoid bankrupting the nation, I will cease all DEI programs and be purely merit based, etc). Ask everyone to sign their name to these principles, everyone who doesn’t by Friday is fired. This drops maybe 30% or so headcount right away.

   • ⁠Stop paying all bills. Cut off 100% of outgoing funds and start to see what breaks, to help map territory of how these orgs work and what is important or not. Every outgoing request needs to be re-approved from first principles, and is denied by default unless re-justified. Extreme but very important. Triage them in what you turn back on.

   • Zero base budgeting: do a first principles analysis of what you want the government to do and how many people you’d estimate that should take. Deliver those budgets to them, and listen to the level of screaming to see where you might be off.

   • ⁠Root out snakes who are working against your interests and lied on #2 to stay in the org, set up a whistleblower hotline to find people working against the effort, and fire them

   • ⁠Also have a whistleblower form/hotline for egregious examples of waste people can report and post these online, to win hearts and minds to the cause (they are already doing this). These may be small dollar amounts but are concrete examples ordinary people can relate to. Use mockery to undermine the critics, with funny examples.

   • ⁠Once you’ve cut to health, put something in place to try and future proof it and limit the growth of government post this administration, for 100+ years. For ex: require a sunset provision in every law and agency, so they can’t keep accumulating where nothing gets deleted. Constitutional amendment capping growth in federal spending (10% of GDP max). Or align incentives to pass a balanced budget (any member of congress who votes for it is ineligible for re-election). The details here are nuanced (for example, allowing deficit spending during true emergencies like war) but some future proofing step is needed.

   • ⁠Ideally you’d find a way to get all unions out of government work also. People should be free  to organize (a basic freedom) but businesses and government should also be free to fire them if they choose for organizing (currently prohibited under law).

Some of this might need to be adapted for government vs private industry. Also you might need to go after Medicare and other major items through congress. The above is mostly executive branch focused.

***

There are (at least) four kinds of DC government "dumb":

• Dumb spending - like $500 hammers, too many bases, redundant programs, cost-plus, and on and on

• Dumb organization - layers of managers, why didn't you fix that—because it isn't my job; the "DC way" is everyone gets to hire someone to do their job, so there are too many vendors/contractors, etc.

• Dumb metrics - spend all the money, save all the wrong money, vanity metrics, etc. Tightly coupled to this and essentially the same is dumb transparency.

• Dump people - people in the wrong jobs, jobs with poorly defined skillsets, and the run-of-the-mill challenges with any large organization.

Today and in all past examples, a significant focus is on dumb spending.

The Reagan administration famously compiled massive lists of these things.

Great PR. Embarrassing for a short time. But fundamentally, the system is immune from this humiliation. Each attempt at this has struggled with this because it is death by 1000 cuts-"yes we need this one thing" or "what about the children". It is why a 20% budget cut across the board can't work, as you end up managing every exception, and in isolation, nothing is all bad. It is also why every discussion starts off with "you can't touch entitlements."

There's a huge difference between paying the SS someone was promised and is modeled and the massive cost to distribute it and the inefficiency and fraud in that process.

There is also a whole culture that either piles costs on services to justify budgets or hides all costs to execute a mission to show efficiency or hides regulatory costs. Weeding through this is super tough. For example, everything in the military is designed to make things expensive to the eye.

OTOH, there are 6,000 FTEs in Medicare, but that hides who knows how many people in the state and private sector are dealing with it and the hidden cost of regulation.

No restructuring/alignment/etc can get rid of dumb people all at once without spending eternity in HR litigation and discovery. Especially with AFSCME and unions. But there is so much that can be done to improve the management of people, starting with identifying who the actual delivery people are in the system and separating that from management, focusing on metrics that count and moving away from metrics that don't. A great example is the way the FBI can relabel everything as "terrorism," and that drives crazy behaviors in the org, huge budget shifts, and a decline in law enforcement. It is a huge management churn with a negative effect because the budget is a zero sum game and no one is round long enough to deal with the implications.

The problem is a functioning government bureaucracy would have 10% of the people making twice as much with no civil service protections, and there's no bloodless way to get there from here

4. On Syria

The problem is a functioning government bureaucracy would have 10% of the people making twice as much with no civil service protections, and there's no bloodless way to get there from here

We are witnessing the disintegration of Syria before our very eyes in these last days!

Syria is the fault line where the interests of Turkey, Russia, Iran and the West collide.

The incoming Trump administration will have to decide:

* Will the US take the lead in shaping the future of Syria?

* Or will we allow others—Turkey, Russia and China—to define the region?

Historic and biblical times!

5. The Group Chats are excited about David Sacks’ appointment.

The community congratulates David on the appointment, David responds generously and says his door is open for ideas.

In chats not including David, people express amazement at how David played his cards just right (and how Peter Thiel perhaps got involved too early on the Trump train to take full advantage, though of course his bet on JD Vance certainly makes up for any loss there.)

One founder says: ““What a parlay. Podcast with Jason because you’re bored during COVID…now basically in charge of two biggest technology policy issues in a decade.

Another founder chips in: “BRB, buying more BTC….This is incredible. Let’s just keep him away from Ukraine policy. [Wide disagreement in the chat on Ukraine]

6. Epstein speculations

“Kash is gonna disclose the Epstein list and it’ll be glorious.”

“The three words “Epstein client list” are a massively popular meme. But how do we know such a thing even exists? Did he even have “clients”?”

“I know the exact location where the document is held. It’s real.” (Editor’s note: lol)

7. Execs worried about a possible increase in assassinations, beef up private security

“Had a bunch of conversations with major payor executives over the last two days, all are universally terrified, many hiring security, many. Most believe this is new norm, most companies are asking execs to pull LinkedIn down, crazy to see a shift this quick”.

8. DEI sentiment

“In my industry (talent development / coaching) I will say that all this stuff seems to have massively reduced. In 20-22, there was a ton of demand for DEI stuff and now we see ~0 of these things getting funded by companies. I'm sure the internal agitating continues but it's not translating to budgets (at least amongst our customers). Now every company wants training on how to build high performance cultures”.

9. On Conservatives and Liberals not dating

“It’s interesting to reconcile this trend with knowing I’ve never met a man markedly more liberal than his wife. Apparently, many women are against marrying a conservative but especially against marrying someone more liberal than themselves. The out group might be more tolerable than a man who’s even more of the in group.”

“I am in such a marriage. It is rare when it comes to national politics, but in more private affairs I often find wives to be more socially conservative than their husbands.…. My entirely vibe-based, tinfoil hat feeling about women refusing to date conservative men is that it is mostly due to pressure by their friends, not an innately held preference. They apply the pressure to each other as a kind of psychological intrasexual competition tact, akin to encouraging each other to cut their hair short.

“There’s also a cohort of women who might not know their partner is something short of a liberal (I know a few husbands who just keep quiet about their politics). One reason this Harris ad flopped is that it’s the inverse of who in a marriage tends to keep their political preference hidden. The implication of the ad is that the husband is an abusive piece of shit, but also that she’s too chicken to do anything but smile and lie to his face. Goes to show the depth of the problem for the party—they have no idea what Americans outside of their bubbles are really like.

I find this anecdotally to be true. I used to be told by my wife not to rabble rouse or say anything about DEI at school functions. Over time, enough of the dads started putting out feelers and finding they were not alone that the vibe shifted a bit. A ~year ago my wife stopped worrying as much about what I said as she found out I was quite normal. During this year's election season the women started joining in too. I am guessing most still voted for Kamala, but the cracks in the wall have been widening rapidly.

***

If you want to see more of this format, like this post so I know to keep doing it.

8 years ago, I tried to launch this site called The Rise Awards — basically a way to surface/highlight top talent. I also did an experiment like this with Cosign, where I got 1,000 people to share people they thought had potential to start big companies or be influential in some way. Looking back at the selections, the picks were actually useful and predictive. I didn’t end up scaling either of those efforts because On Deck and Village Global started taking all my time, but in continuing my tradition of trying the same idea over and over, I’ll soon be launching The Turpentine Awards, which will highlight people, companies, and products that the tech ecosystem should pay more attention to.

If you’re in the tech industry, please fill this out by the end of next week. We need hundreds of people to do so, so your participation will be greatly appreciated.

In exchange for doing so, you’ll get an invite to a Turpentine event, as well as exclusive early access to both the complete results and the full anonymized nomination data—not just the public summary. Thank you in advance!

As for this piece, I’m starting an experiment where I share my favorite conversations and private exchanges from the Turpentine universe to see if they resonate and if I should do more. Samo Burja and I discussed a framework on how to think about Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman that I fleshed out a bit and wanted to share here.

Peter Thiel is extremely good at noticing when the common consensus has flawed logic. Even if people are directionally making the right bet for the wrong reasons, there's some financial alpha there.

He’ll take something people take as conventional wisdom and flip it on its head. For example, we hear the word ‘monopoly’ and think that’s something we should avoid, but Peter says it’s something every business should aspire to. And conversely, instead of competing to win, we should avoid competition altogether. Another example is when he says we shouldn’t live every day as if it’s our last, in contrast to the popular phrase. Instead he says we should live every day as though it's going to go on forever—we should treat people like we’re going to see them again in the future and start working on projects that may take a long time

To contrast Peter’s approach with Sam Altman or Elon’s approach, Sam might hear the common wisdom, and his response would be "yes, and..." whereas Thiel's response would be "no, but." And I don't think Elon would even be listening — his perspective is so first principles driven that while he recognizes what is popular or not and can work with it, his decisions about what to do next are not tied at all to the mainstream but are following a technology tree chart derived from basic physics or his favorite science fiction story.

Thiel's question is, "How is the mainstream wrong, and what can we do about it to correct it?" which makes him a great investor

Sam will see where the enthusiasm and energy lie and ask, "Can we harness this and develop it further?" He sees cryptocurrencies and thinks, "What about World Coin - a coin for the world that changes the economic system to prepare for the post-scarcity future?" He sees green energy and thinks, "Let's start a fusion company."

Meanwhile, Elon will look at the space industry when everyone thinks it's hopeless, mature, and hyper-regulated…and he’ll make SpaceX. He'll go into a crowded field of failed green companies and try to make the electric car work this time because the batteries keep getting better. So logically, eventually, a car company would work, but you would have to think of it not in terms of car companies but the raw energy potential of batteries.

It makes sense, then, that Sam would have employees petition to keep him as OpenAI CEO after his ouster given his penchant for generating momentum, that Thiel would do the opposite and find himself outcasted at some point (his Trump bet in 2016), and that Elon would be somewhere in the middle on the agreeability/contrarianism spectrum, alternating between the hero and anti-hero approach depending on what he thinks is true and right. There’s a reason why Jack Dorsey singularly trusted Elon to lead Twitter, both from a competence and a moral perspective.

This brings me to an ideological comparison of the three. All of them have some variant of making sense of and legitimizing their own activity in the economic sphere.

• Thiel's would probably be very closely related to preventing violence on a global scale and the abuse and scapegoating of individuals. 

• Elon's would be focused on species survival — let's expand through the universe, let's have AI not kill us, let's reach a new destiny. 

• Sam is sort of like, "Let's reach abundance," and the critics and advocates of capitalism are both right. Socialists are right and capitalists are right - let's make capitalism work so well that we can all have UBI.

This orientation cashes out in differences in priority — I would expect Peter would be the most willing to back just causes that are unpopular, and Sam would be the most happy with popular causes like UBI which Peter hates. 

Sam is able to identify trends that people are excited about, which makes him an amazing fundraiser and recruiter. Thiel is looking for where the mainstream is wrong, so he's willing to take big bets that make him very unlikable — betting on Trump in 2016, betting against higher education in early 2000s, and saying ‘freedom and democracy are no longer compatible’ in 2009. Elon makes his big bets after a bit more traction, evidenced by buying into Tesla after it was founded and plowing into politics in 2024. Their involvement in politics is actually a helpful case study in describing their proclivities: Sam and Thiel got involved in 2016, with Sam supporting Hillary (the elite-favored candidate and momentum bet) and Thiel supporting Trump (the disreputable candidate and contrarian bet), and Elon mostly stayed out of politics until this past election. Also notably, while Thiel made a ‘seed bet’ in Trump, he didn’t really maintain his involvement and somewhat disassociated himself, whereas Elon got involved in 2024 and bet big enough to receive the benefits.

Thiel is more of a seed investor in contrarian ideas, making a bet and then looking to make the next one, whereas Elon is more of a builder/scaler, often coming in when something has been slightly derisked but taking the project all the way to completion (e.g. politics, xAI, Tesla). And when Elon bets, even if he bets a bit later than Thiel does, he goes all in, whereas Thiel runs a more diversified portfolio and hedges a bit more. Peter famously sold his Facebook shares too early. When Elon and Thiel were working together at Paypal, Thiel wanted to invest the $100M Paypal raised and use it to short the public markets. Elon is more “long-only” and has even been personally offended when people short his companies.

Peter is less likely to start and run a company himself. He might seed an idea, invest, etc, but not be the CEO of an operating company that has to do things day to day. Similarly, Sam doesn’t seem to have ideas in the same way Elon does, but he can smell when something is exciting and super charge it. And he’s amazing at spotting talent, recruiting, fund-raising, etc. And Elon, regardless of whether he gets involved early or late, will will the project to success, and will take ultimate responsibility in doing so.

This broader framework is quite rough, but it’s directionally useful in understanding three of the most important live players in tech (and more recently, politics). To that end, it’ll be interesting to see how Elon does in politics, given he doesn’t have total control like he usually does.

• We just launched a community and dinner series for people looking to start their next company. More info here.

• We started a newsletter that tracks when talent people leave/start/join companies or otherwise do remarkable things. Anyone recruiting or investing or curious should check it out here.

• We’re starting a jobs newsletter to share with the people looking to join their next company. If you want to recruit them, fill this out.

• We’re launching a publication at Turpentine. We’ll feature writings on company building and company/market analysis, written by expert contributors and leveraging our podcasts and group chats for content inspiration and survey participation (the best products, investors, companies, etc). The goal is to make people in tech — founders, investors, employees — better at their jobs. We’re hiring an editor-in-chief and also accepting pitches for pieces we should publish.

• The Turpentine network has 800 venture backed CEOs in it with high engagement and also has groups for execs too. Application here.

It feels like the Turpentine universe is coming together. Stay tuned.

I wrote the below reflection on the day after I finished The Hoffman Process earlier this year. I’ve become more reticent to blankly recommend it since people should only go if they’re truly sold on going. If they’re skeptical, I don’t encourage it. People probably won’t get value from it if they don’t buy in and commit to the experience, and that requires intrinsic motivation. And to be sure, while most people seem to have a great experience, not everybody does.

I’m also reticent about recommending this type of work more generally. I think the internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber, and this work might similarly have positive impacts on people predisposed to benefit from it and negative effects on people predisposed to struggle with it. More broadly, I’m sympathetic to criticisms of therapy culture, as well as the book Bad Therapy, even if I’ve also gotten value from somatic therapy in particular.

As you can gather, I’m nervous to share this for a few reasons. This blog is normally for intellectual topics, and this feels way too personal. It also doesn’t feel like an accurate reflection of me. Consider this piece as something of a fictionalized journal entry, or at least exaggerated for effect. After all, I wrote it in 12 hours the day after my retreat, high off of the experience.  Furthermore, I think it’s somewhat trite, mediocrely-written, and heavily-redacted.

That said, I’m deciding to share a modified version of it publicly because I think the Hoffman process is a powerful experience and I haven’t seen many reflections on it. When I tweeted my endorsement, a few people went and said they loved it, so if this inspires a few people to attend who would get value from it, then it’ll be worth it.

I have just returned from the Hoffman process, and I am in awe. It was an amazing experience. It was, I hope, truly life-changing for me. Of course, the extent to which my life changes depends on how I act after the retreat.

In this essay, I’ll share my reflections from the week, and more importantly, how I hope to change going forward. I’ll keep it high-level because they don’t want people going in knowing the agenda.

First, some context on The Hoffman Process retreat. The organization is a non-profit started almost 60 years ago that has had 135,000 people attend its retreats. The retreat is based on the concept of negative love, the idea that we learn negative patterns from our childhood, and, since we were not born with them and instead adopted them, with enough reprogramming, we can change them. 

In order to facilitate such a change, the retreat uses a bunch of different modalities: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, etc. The retreat is non-stop activity from 8AM to 9PM with no phones or internet at all. The week felt like a month, in the best way. In some ways I was more open with my 30 fellow Hoffman attendees — all previously complete strangers — than I’ve been with friends I’ve had for decades. A group, might I add, that I would likely not have befriended in real life, since I have little in common with them, or so I thought. They work in different industries (e.g. doctors, lawyers, nutritionists), they’re different ages (mostly 40s and 50s) and different life stages than me (e.g. having kids, getting divorced, etc). 

OK, so what happens at the retreat to bring about this transformation and community? Well. Part of the thing about Hoffman is that confidentiality is critical so people can be(come) their true selves. You’re not supposed to go with anyone you know. No one is allowed to talk about work at all, not even mention their industry. As a result, everyone is on the same level, whether it’s a 9 time felon or a 9 figure entrepreneur. As someone who lives in a status-driven environment, this was a welcome change.

But you’re also not supposed to know what happens at Hoffman more broadly before you go. You don’t get to see the agenda; surrendering is part of the experience. This was annoying for me as you can imagine. I wanted to know what to expect in order to mentally prepare. But this is a pattern that they’re trying to challenge too. They want you to lead with the spirit and not just the intellect, and showing up and being open to the experience is one way to do that.

Why did I go to Hoffman then, without knowing much about it except that a few friends raved about it? 7 days is a big sacrifice after all. Well, I’d been meaning to go to a 7-day detox because I realized that I have a phone addiction that goes beyond your typical phone addiction. I check my phone the first second I wake up. I remain on my phone all day, checking it in every meeting, until I can’t stay awake. Like any addict who finally accepts his fate, I noticed that I couldn’t stop checking my phone/social media and that it was starting to affect my ability to be present in my relationships. Every second I wasn’t engaged in a conversation with someone, I was either listening to a podcast or reading Twitter or Substack. There were very few moments where I would be alone with my thoughts. I justified this to myself by saying I’m obsessed with learning (which is also true, and I love that about myself and will continue prioritizing it, but not above my happiness), but I also appreciated the benefits of disconnecting from technology. I had been an off and on practitioner of the sabbath, a digital detoxing, and I realized that I could no longer do it. I was an addict: I wasn’t just running *to* the phone. I was running *from* something too. And I wanted to find out what.

But I could have gone to a standard meditation retreat for a digital detox. Another explanation for why I went to Hoffman specifically is because I had also realized that there was something else missing from my life: embodiment. I lived too much in my brain, and not enough in my body. Close friends started to tell me that. I normally thought that was something to celebrate: Being an infovore has led to many good things. But I also started to appreciate the downsides of not being connected to my body, namely not being able to process grief and loss. There were things that I experienced that I was never able to process, and the pain had become too overwhelming to bear. My intellect couldn’t reason it away. The pain curdled to anger. But because I couldn’t process it, I couldn’t shake off the anger. I know I needed to do something. 

I had started seeing a somatic therapist for the first time. I was skeptical but I was desperate and willing to try anything. She helped me realize that I was truly disconnected from my body. She would hear me talk about the hard things that happened to me and then ask how the pain felt in my body. She asked me to describe the sensation. I couldn’t. I asked her for sample answers to that question because I was totally confused as to what a person should physically feel in their body. She suggested that I likely disconnected early on in my childhood as a trauma response. That was the first analysis of my childhood I’d heard that sounded plausible. I had very few memories about my childhood. I don’t know how people even have them and trust that they’re accurate. I have a ton of memories about the past 15 years, but very little about childhood. 

My therapist recommended nervous system regulation, so we tried it. She started pressing different parts of my body. At first I didn’t feel any effects from it. I was skeptical. And then after a bit, I don’t know how to describe it, but it made me calmer. More grounded. I could notice my breathing. I was less reactive. I was expanding my emotional capacity, literally. I didn’t know how to explain it, I didn’t even care if it was a placebo, I had finally found something that was making a difference, however incremental, and I wanted to double down.

So when someone told me that doing Hoffman was like undergoing 10 years of therapy in a week, and that the retreat explored all these different modalities including inspiring internal family systems, I knew I had to go.

***

The first few days of the retreat focused on our parents. Our first task was to identify the harmful patterns we adopted from our parents, and then reflect on how those patterns set us back in life.

And then I bashed a pillow with a wiffle ball bat meant to symbolize that I was destroying those patterns. That’s a big theme in Hoffman: using your body to physically release bad patterns and reinstall new ones. I’ll get back to the power of embodiment later. 

I listed all my bad patterns that cause friction or harm in relationships. In the computer game, “The Sims”, every person you encounter has a score over the head meant to symbolize your relationship strength with them. Good interactions increase the score, bad interactions decrease the score. This is sometimes referred to an emotional bank account. Of course that’s not exactly how it works, but it’s a helpful metaphor. The bad patterns I tried to eliminate were the actions that caused my score with loved ones to go down.

For example, here are the bad patterns I listed for myself that have recurred in my life, even if sparingly: judgment, gossip, sarcasm, paranoia, phone/internet addiction, being reactive, talking just to be heard, saying things I don’t mean, interrogating others, arguing/being provocative, being cranky, being late, taking things personally, holding grudges, feeling like I need to earn love so I work to prove my worth, disconnecting/detaching/numbing myself with distractions, keeping score, caring about status, punishing myself, overthinking, repressing emotions, not being present, etc etc etc.

We were encouraged to connect these bad patterns to our childhood and how we were raised. I was initially resistant to this idea. I love my parents; they’ve given me everything. I didn’t want to blame them for my bad patterns. I had arrived at a place in my life where I was grateful for my childhood. My parents only have so many years left on this planet, so I romanticized my childhood so I could better appreciate them in our remaining time together.

I also wanted to take radical responsibility for my circumstances. I didn’t want to be the person who blames their parents. I’m 34 years old. I’ve been free from my parents for too long for that. I am the author of my own life.

Hoffman teachers get this resistance a lot, so they explained to me that, by holding this attitude, I was unable to accept certain patterns I’ve adopted (at least partly) from my parents, either directly or in retaliation/rebellion, and thus I’ve been unable to expunge those patterns. Holding onto harmful patterns isn’t serving me, and this isn’t what my parents would want either. If they could free me from any negative influence they may have had on me — real or imagined — they would do it in a second. Plus, it’s less about blame and more about self-awareness. Blame is actually the wrong word. The classic Hoffman line is “everyone is guilty, but no one is to blame”.

After remembering our childhoods and what patterns we took from them, we then wrote about our parents’ childhoods and what patterns they learned from their parents. If we didn’t know their childhoods, we made it up. That exercise was fascinating because it reminded me how little I know about my own parents’ childhood. More importantly, it helped us get more appreciation for our parents’ positive and negative patterns and where they came from. Going through the exercises, I started to make other connections between my childhood and current patterns as well.

To be sure though, you don’t have to focus as much on parents to get the benefits of Hoffman. If you think most of the negative patterns are picked up by others, you can just focus on the patterns themselves. We spent the whole week focusing on excising the bad patterns from our lives. We wrote about how our bad patterns caused harm to people we care about. We ruminated on the cost of these patterns, and visualized what our lives would be like if we kept living these patterns out. 

Forgiveness was a big theme of the weekend. “Resentment is drinking poison, hoping they die.” I made a list of all the people who I held grudges against and I forgave them. I didn’t realize how long I’d been holding certain grudges. Some of them I’ve had for years. I would have these grudges but be not able to feel them. And not being able to feel them is what kept them. 

I also made a list of all the people I have wronged and apologized to them. I detailed how I would have done things differently if I could do them over. Some of them I reached out to. Others I don’t think want to hear from me so I’ll trust that the message will be sent to them telepathically. I also thanked them.

I also forgave myself for the pain my patterns have caused others and thus myself. In reflecting on how I developed these patterns, besides childhood, I appreciated how I’d been through some hard things in my adulthood, and had more sympathy for my past failures. Forgiveness is giving up a hope for a better past in service of a better future. 

I made a list of ways I have been vindictive towards myself and others in the past, and I vowed to not do it again. Beyond forgiving, I grieved. I grieved my friend’s death. I grieved the pain I’ve caused other people, the pain I don’t even know about. In addition to grieving the relationships and projects that didn’t work out, I also celebrated the great things I've contributed to my relationships. I celebrated the fact that though the path has been winding, there has been growth. I vowed to no longer hold grudges, since I am sick of using my beautiful creative energy on rehashing my past.

One related tool we learned was the concepts of “left road” and “right road” — basically the left road is your default pattern, your autopilot mode. You execute your bad patterns on autopilot. Acting out those patterns is comfortable, it feels good. That’s why you keep doing it, even if the patterns keep making your life worse. In order to change your patterns, you have to take the right road instead of the left road. 

A tool to get us on the right road instead of the left is “recycling”, or “pre-cycling”. This is when you imagine a situation that has happened in the past (recycling), or one that will happen in the future (pre-cycling), and visualize making a different decision. The way it works is first you imagine yourself in the situation, you feel the pain of the bad pattern, and then you do something visceral with your body to exorcise the pain away, like exorcising a demon. 

Transference is a related tool. It is basically identifying why you get triggered by certain people. And then recognizing that it is probably a reflection of some insecurity you have, or it reminds you of something your parents did in the past, but that you can recycle and visualize a new response.

This is the process in a nutshell by the way: Become aware of a bad pattern, then express sadness at having the pattern and the costs of it, then forgive yourself for having the pattern —  “I am a human, I make mistakes” — then visualize acting differently. 

Visualization more broadly is a very important part of the Hoffman process. They mention the study where three different control groups shoot free throws and then do three different things over 30 days and shoot free throws again. The first group does nothing for 30 days. The second group shoots free throws for 30 minutes a day for 30 days. The last group visualizes themselves shooting free throws for 30 minutes a day for 30 days, but doesn’t actually shoot them. The first group hits the same percentage 30 days later, which makes sense given they didn’t do anything over the 30 days. The second group that shot 30 free throws a day shot 24% better after 30 days. The last group that didn’t shoot any free throws, but visualized themselves doing so, shot 23% better! They shot nearly the same percentage as the second group even though they didn’t shoot any free throws over the 30 days. That’s the power of visualization. Hoffman tries to take that visualization approach to the most important interactions of our lives, by having us reprogram how we’ll act in the future when faced in the same situation. 

We spent a lot of time visualizing how great our life would be if we acted on the right road. I thought about the gifts that other people had given me, the acts of service, the moments where they had shared their life with me, and I imagined myself doing the same thing. 

The wiffle ball bashing portion of visualization did not come naturally to me, initially or by the end. The use of physical force or exertion was not something I was familiar with. I don’t really express anger, I've never learned how. Basketball is therapeutic to me, but it’s not exactly anger inducing (except watching the Knicks, of course). But despite my struggles, the bashing was still a very powerful exercise. I wasn’t a huge basher, but I did yell and express anger, and it was cathartic. I realized I had so much more range to express myself than I imagined I was capable of. I have been storing up so much I didn’t know how to express it, especially because anger is a scary thing to express in the wrong way. But Hoffman offered a productive way to express it: moving it through the body.

A Hoffman teacher said something that shocked me: If you truly feel a feeling, often it takes 60 seconds to feel it and process it. Notice how kids have temper tantrums and then move on instantly? We’re in some ways also kids, but older. We can process feelings quickly too, but only if we have the tantrum. But we don’t have the tantrum, so we instead repress the anger, pointing the anger towards ourselves. Instead of processing it for a minute, we hold it for years. Maybe decades. And all it might take to expunge it is a few minutes of releasing it. I can’t believe I said I didn’t have time for things like meditation or morning or evening practices. I clearly made time to have conflicts, so I’m sure I have time to work on trying to avoid them. On the contrary, I don’t have the time *not* to process my anger. Slowly repressing anger takes too long. What am I so busy for? Endless zoom calls, endless catch ups, endless scrolling the internet? For what?  

And this gets at the biggest thing I got from Hoffman: the ability to deeply feel the feelings. Having emotions feels so good. I was like a beach with no waves, and now I’m not. I have so much inside of me I didn’t know I was capable of. I used to shed a tear once every few months. At Hoffman I cried like five times a day. I used to think crying was a sign of weakness, or a sign I was depressed. Now I know that crying is pain leaving the body. 

The newfound surge of emotions I felt could be partly explained by the phone detox. That alone is a total game changer. I now process things in real time instead of repressing them. I realize that my phone is acting as a way for me to disconnect and repress. Even writing this piece, I’m struggling not to check any one of the endless enticing portals the internet has to offer.

Basically I realized I was incapable of paying attention for sustained periods of time. I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid, so I’d always had this to some degree, but I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, Ladybird, has a nun asking the main character: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing — love and attention?” If I can’t pay attention, how can I love? I can’t. 

I also realized I resist intimacy in other ways too. I send hundreds of texts a day, but I can’t remember the last time I called someone just to chat. I hide myself when I’m not my best self, and when I’m clogging my brain I’m not my best self. 

This extends more broadly. The reason I couldn’t cry or feel the feelings or connect is because I’ve been clogging my ears and eyes with information instead of paying attention to myself letting my brain and body process. To be clear, ingesting an insane amount of information has had its benefits. It’s what enables me to build my companies and befriend such interesting people. I’m proud of what it’s enabled me to achieve. I’m going to keep doing it, but I’m going to be more balanced.

While the screen-addicted life has had significant benefits, it has also had a deep cost. And that cost has been my spiritual self, a big part of my soul. I’m no longer willing to sacrifice this part of me. I will strive to have not only an active intellectual life, but also an active physical, emotional, and spiritual life too. 

I learned at Hoffman that the way to get from the left road to the right road was not through my head, but through my body. I used to think a lot of this somatic stuff was new age mumbo jumbo. But it actually works. Because of course it works. Because it’s not actually new; it’s as old as religion. The only thing “new” about it is the intellectual justification (the spirituality *without* the religion). But these traditions have existed forever (the sabbath, anyone?) And anything that people have been doing forever has deep wisdom in it, even if we don't know how to explain that wisdom, otherwise people wouldn’t keep doing it. I had made the same mistake the new atheists made with religion and thrown out the baby with the bathwater when dismissing spirituality.

The last decade, while my life has changed tremendously for the better — I am proud of my friendships, relationships, and my career accomplishments — I wasn’t always able to be fully present for them. I no longer journaled. I had lost my once active meditation practice. I stopped reading fiction altogether. I thought losing these gifts from childhood was a natural part of growing up. I no longer think this. 

To be clear, I am proud of the life I’ve lived to date. I’ve been mostly a happy-go-lucky guy, in touch with how lucky I’ve been. I’m simply looking at the things I’ve done that have brought me fulfillment and connectedness, and the things I’ve done that have contributed to hurt and alienation, and I’m looking to do more of the former and less of the latter.

While I feel I have lived a good life so far, if you look at how I spend my time, it’s not always in accordance with how I’ll imagine myself thinking about my life on my deathbed. They say the regrets of the dying are as follows:

“1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

I have a career that I love, so in some sense I’m doing #1, but I can’t say the same for the other 4.

I am on track to have some of the regrets of the dying. I’m not beating myself about this. I just know that I can change small things so my revealed preferences match my stated preferences. I am not my patterns, that’s what Hoffman drills into us every few hours via some other modality or exercise.  

I don’t want to feel numb anymore. This week, it felt so good to feel so much. I have my vitality back. Not only did it make me feel good, it made me be good. I was so much more secure, so much more present, so much more connected. 

And that’s when I realized that all my patterns stem from the same root: disconnection. So much of my struggle is when I am stuck in some loop in my brain, or I get triggered and react hastily. Which means I am not in my body. You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain is through the body. 

Disconnecting from my body and spirit is the source of my bad patterns. If you were to ask me a year ago what my spiritual life was, I would laugh and say that’s beta or part of a mind virus. I had a spiritual life as a young adult, but I dismissed it as just trendy. I thought being in touch with the body was often for the people who are not deeply in touch with their mind. After all, the people I learn the most from are not deeply embodied. Naturally, the people with the most knowledge specialize in knowledge-accumulation. Indeed: my heroes were super disconnected people. Just info-sucking machines. The truth is I’m not as good as them at that. But I do not have their gifts, and they do not have mine. Of course people who specialize will be deeper in an area, but people who are able to be well-rounded have unique gifts too. 

I was so out of touch with myself I basically doubted the idea of having an inner voice at all. I wrote essays about how being authentic was new age bullshit. While there’s some directional truth to what I was saying in the sense that one shouldn’t apply new age spirituality to politics, I think it was also a way of justifying silencing my spiritual self. I was on the external validation treadmill in so many ways: career focused, status inclined, and outsourcing big decisions in my life to friends because I felt I was an unreliable narrator. I was so disconnected from my body that I even distrusted my ability to perceive reality accurately. But I am not an unreliable narrator. I just wasn’t even listening to myself.

***

I keep coming back to the phone. The phone is simultaneously a triggering device and a numbing device. And here’s the crazy thing: I didn’t check it for one entire week after checking it hundreds of times a day. And basically nothing happened. Some people texted me, some people emailed me, but I didn’t really miss much. Like, I could check my phone 50% less a day and probably still do my job as effectively. 

When I wasn’t on my phone this week, I experienced the magic I once wrote about in my essay on solitude years ago when I used to celebrate the sabbath. 

It came out of nowhere. I was journaling, and suddenly, I came up with a nice thing to say to someone. Then another. And another. I couldn’t stop. One was an apology. Another was a note of gratitude, far overdue. I started fiercely writing letters, with a clarity of spirit that I hadn’t felt before. I also started to untangle the knots in my head and my heart. Overtime, you untie the mental knots that keep popping up. Tensions you have with people. Limiting beliefs you have about yourself. Other bottlenecks that are preventing you from connecting with yourself, and thus, other people. Then the feelings come. Regret at mistakes you made. Anger. Pain. Sadness. You haven’t felt actual feelings in so long. Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only solitude can help you find them again.

It’s the strangest thing: When I am alone for extended periods of time, I feel closer to others. When I am offline, away from devices, I feel like I am connected to something bigger than myself. 

The process takes time. The thoughts are sporadic and are surface level before going deeper. It’s as if you’re hacking at a tree, several trees at a time. Whack-a-mole. With enough hacks, you get at the root. Normally, an input blocks a deeper hack. But with silence, you hack away…

Your heart becomes like Wolverine’s body — the wounds heal themselves, if you let them. “Time heals all wounds”, they say, but they forget to say that it’s the right kind of time--solitude.”

As I learned the day after the process when I got my phone back, the phone is too addicting to stop checking compulsively without an intervention. So I’m ordering a flip phone. I’m celebrating the sabbath on weekends, like an Orthodox Jew. L’chaim, motherfuckers. Even in writing this essay, I checked Twitter like 20 times. Every time I do it saps my spiritual self.

Commitment

More broadly, I’m committed to continuing the practices I learned this week. 

There are so many ways I want to live differently after Hoffman. I wish I went years ago so I could have changed some patterns before they affected people. I’m glad I went now because it’s never too late. One of the most inspiring messages I ever learned in basketball camp was “I will be ready when my time will come”. I wasn’t always ready for every hiccup that occurred in the past decade, but I’ll be ready for my next one. 

Here are some things I want to do differently in my day-to-day life to help me stay in the light:

• Drop internet usage by 50% (still putting me at par with my peers), cutting out distractions like IG and others

• Instead of solely texting people, also call them.

• Adopt a morning and evening practice and stick to it.

• Find a weekly practice of Hoffman-style exercises (I still haven’t found this)

• Incubate or fund something that facilitates this work for others.

The other thing I was reminded of about Hoffman is the importance for me of doing this work in community. It’s not just accountability, it’s also for insight and connection. The more I connect with others the more I can connect with myself, and vice versa.

I’m committed to trying to facilitate something like it, first as a retreat series and maybe after as a social club. For the last 7 years, I’ve been doing my own type of retreat in Tahoe, and it’s given me great fulfillment. It’s been mostly around friend-making, but it has mixed some intellectual and emotional conversations, and I want to bring in more Hoffman-esque components to it. 

To be sure, not everything about Hoffman was ideal. It did feel too long. Some of it was annoying. It felt like school. They made us wake up early for no good reason. There were some exercises that made no sense. But I even took that as a challenge. I wanted to be open to all of it

While I will be a strong Hoffman advocate exactly as it is today, I also think there should be a ~3 day experience for people who aren’t yet ready to do the full thing. It would be a radically different experience of course, but it could introduce a new whole group of people to this type of work. If you’d like to come to something like this, apply here. Also there should be a more on-going experience. I’d go to something weekly if I could find the right container. I want it to be Hoffman style exercises with people who have no connection to my work (not a CEO group, though those are also valuable!)

This is how I’d pitch it to them if they’re skeptical of the childhood reflecting or therapy tools: Your life might be going great at the moment, but you may also believe that if you changed certain behaviors, your life would be a lot better. You could have better relationships with your family, your friends, your partner or future partner, and just a richer life. You’d do better in your career, be healthier, live longer, etc. So this weekend, we are going to evaluate your behaviors/patterns, evaluate how they are serving you and not serving you, and visualize different behaviors you could adopt, and then find a series of practices/tactics to help you adopt them. And then introduce some accountability going forward to make sure you're doing it. That’s the pitch.

I want to be a shepherd of the light. Not just intellectually, but emotional, physically and spiritually as well. I have a spiritual self. And I’m not going to numb it anymore. I have the emotional capacity. I have the light. I am the light. And I will never dim myself again. 

Nonviolent Communication caught a stray recently, so I wanted to publish a defense of NVC because, while I concede NVC can be misused, I think learning and using NVC leads to better conversations than not learning NVC. Note, I think NVC is productive is for friendships and relationships, or anything where connection is the main goal, not for any work or organizations that primarily serve another mission. Different scopes, etc.

This is a follow up to primers I wrote here and here.

What is NVC?

At the highest level, NVC is a communication framework that reduces friction in our conversations.

But it’s also bigger than that — it’s a completely different lens of seeing the world.

NVC involves the following:

1) how we express ourselves to other people,

2) how we interpret what people say to us, and most importantly,

3) how we communicate with ourselves.

Although it may not seem that way at first, NVC is fundamentally a different language — radically different from the language we use today — and as such, it has a radically different implication for how we perceive the world and interact with others.

Why The Term, “Nonviolent Communication”?

Marshall Rosenberg, the author of Nonviolent Communication, chose the provocative title in order to show how insidious and violent our day-to-day communication is (and how we don’t even realize it).

Most people refer to violence as physically trying to hurt others. NVC also considers violence to be any use of coercion or power over others — including any use of punishment, reward, guilt, shame, duty or obligation.

This would also include most of our communication today and how our societal institutions (schools, church, prison, the judicial system) reaffirm this language and philosophy.

The term “Nonviolent Communication” has thrown some people off, partially because most people do not consider themselves violent, but also because it describes only what NVC isn’t, and not what it is. Some have suggested alternatives such as Compassionate Communication, Authentic Communication, Connected Communication.

This piece will explore some of the key implications and principles underlying NVC. Future pieces will explore the NVC practice more deeply.

1) Language is a lens by which we look at the world.

In Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann was asked, “Was it difficult for you to send these tens of thousands of people to their death?” And Eichmann answered very candidly, “To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy.”

His interviewer asked what that language was, and Eichmann said, “My fellow officers and I coined our own name for our language. We called it amtssprache — ‘office talk.’” When asked for examples, Eichmann said, “It’s basically a language in which you deny responsibility for your actions. So if anybody says, ‘Why did you do it?’ you say, ‘I had to.’ ‘Why did you have to?’ ‘Superiors’ orders. Company policy. It’s the law.’”

Language shapes perception. Literally, the words we use determines how we view the world. If we don’t use certain words, we will simply not see certain things.

Isn’t that nuts?

For example, if you say “my boss makes me crazy”, you will indeed think your boss is “making” you crazy. If you instead say “I am frustrated because I am wanting stability and consistency in this relationship” you may then think you can control your level of frustration and clearly address what it is you want. If someone else is making you crazy, there’s nothing you can do. If you control your feelings, you can take actions to change how you respond to causes.

Words can be windows or they can be walls — they can open doors for compassion or they can do the opposite. NVC uses words as windows. Our language today uses them as walls. More on this later.

2) There is a difference between stimulus and response.

This is subtle but powerful: The first step to get into our consciousness is realizing that what other people do is never the cause of how we feel.

What’s the cause of how we feel? NVC posits that how we feel is a result of how we interpret the behavior of others at any given moment.

If I ask you to meet me at 6:00 and you pick me up at 6:30, how do I feel? It depends. I could be frustrated that you are late because I want to spend my time productively, or scared that you may not know where to find me, or hurt because I need reassurance that you care about me — or, conversely, happy that I get more time to myself.

When I’m feeling frustrated or hurt or scared, I want to figure out why I’m feeling that way. It’s not enough to blame the feeling on the person whose actions triggered the feeling. That very same action might have inspired completely different feelings in someone else — or even in me, under different circumstances!

This wide range shows us that we control our feelings — others can’t elicit the entire range of feelings in us. There must have been something going on inside me at that moment that made me react the way I did. Framing that in terms of unmet needs makes a lot of sense to me, and aids my introspection. What did I need in that moment that I was not getting?

Incidents like the friend coming late may stimulate or set the stage for feelings, but they do not *cause* the feelings.

NVC is a language that reflects this agency.

There is a gap between stimulus and cause — and our power lies in how we use that gap.

If we truly understood this — the separation between stimulus and cause — and the idea that we are responsible for our own emotions, we would speak very differently.

We wouldn’t say things like “It bugs me when …” or “It makes me angry when”. These phrases imply or actually state that responsibility for your feelings lie outside of yourself. A better statement would be “When I saw you come late, I started to feel scared”. Here, one may at least be taking some responsibility for the feeling of anger, and not simply blaming the latecomer for causing such feelings.

Similarly, we also wouldn’t take responsibility for other people’s feelings. If we came late we wouldn’t find it sufficient to say: “I’m sorry I scared you”. A much better statement is “When I see how scared you are, I feel sad because I value your safety“.

This might seem merely semantic, but it’s quite significant — NVC shows that the semantic is significant — the more we use our language to cede responsibility to others, the less agency we have over our circumstances, and the more we victimize ourselves.

3) All judgments are tragic expressions of unmet needs.

According to NVC, all that people express are their feelings and needs.

Indeed: The only things that people are saying, no matter how they are expressing it, are how they are and what they would like to make life even better.

Judgments don’t acknowledge this reality. Instead of going to our heart to connect to what we need and are not getting, we direct our attention to judging what is wrong with other people for not meeting our needs.

But why are judgments tragic expressions of unmet needs?

Because when we do this, our needs are even less likely to get met, because when we verbally judge other people as being wrong in some way, these judgments usually create more defensiveness than learning or connection. In other words, we’re in a worse place than when we started.

NVC believes that, as human beings, there are only two things that we are basically saying: Please and Thank You. Judgments are distorted attempts to say “Please.”

4) NVC is a dynamic rather than static language, and as such doesn’t use the verb “to be”

NVC is a process language. When we say anything about ourselves like, “I am a _____,” it’s static thinking; it puts us in a box and leads to self-fulfilling prophecies.

Tragically, when we think that we (or somebody else) is something, we usually act in a way that makes it happen.

As such, NVC strays away from using the verb “to be”. In NVC; you don’t say, “This person is lazy,” “This person is normal,” “This person is right.” In NVC, there’s no such thing as normal, abnormal, right, wrong, good, or bad.

NVC believes that this is a product of language that traditionally has trained people to live under a king. If you want to train people to be docile to a higher authority or to fit into hierarchical structures in a subservient way, it is very important to get people thinking what is “right,” what is “normal,” what is “appropriate,” and to give that power to an authority at the top who defines what those are.

When people are raised in that culture, they have this tragic trick played on them. When they are hurting the most and needing the most, they don’t know how to express it except by calling other people names.

From the book, Living Nonviolent Communication:

“With NVC, we want to break that cycle. We know that the basis of violence is when people are in pain and don’t know how to say that clearly. There is a book called Out of Weakness, by Andrew Schmookler. He writes that violence — whether we are talking about verbal, psychological, or physical violence between husband and wife, parents and children, or nations — at its base is people not knowing how to get in touch with what is inside.

Instead, they are taught a language that indicates that there are villains out there, bad guys out there, who are causing the problem. Then you have a country where even the leader will say of another country, “They’re the evil empire.” And then the leaders of the other country will say back, “These are imperialist oppressors,” instead of seeing and revealing the pain, fear, and unmet needs behind the other’s words.”

That’s why NVCers are committed to just hearing the pain and needs behind any name — not to take it in and not to respond in kind.

Similarly, we don’t label ourselves. As an NVCer, we don’t think of ourselves as a “worthwhile person.” If we do, we will spend a good amount of time questioning whether we are “worthless people.” NVCers don’t spend time thinking about what kind of person they are; they think moment by moment — not “What am I?” but “What is the life that is going on in me at this moment?”

Isn’t that weird, though? If a person is usually lazy, why not just say “He’s lazy”?

Because, as Marshall Rosenberg used to say, “when you label people you’re putting them in a box — and I’m talking about a coffin”. You’re treating them as unchangeable — not in the next hour nor the next year.

Also it’s too simplistic. Let me explain: Consider, for example, a couch. Every molecule in a couch was made inside a star, which exploded, shooting its guts across the universe. These molecules have lived on as different forms before this couch — forest, ground, etc., and will continue to do so after the couch is gone.

This is much more than the label “couch” suggests, but we call it a couch so we know we should sit on it. The identities we project onto others provide guide posts. This isn’t particularly harmful with couches, but it is with people.

Some people insist that, for example, Wall Street bankers are ignorant, arrogant, and doing it just for the money.

This frames us as being: knowledgeable, confident, and mission-driven. We judge/criticize in others that in which we most fear in ourselves.

Humans use concepts to help navigate the world. A couch is for sitting, so we will not try to plug our cell phones and expect it to charge. We project ‘concepts’ onto people so as to use them as well.

But concepts are static, and life is a process.

We’re missing what’s truly going on for people when we judge, and it leads us to act toward them in a certain way that usually provokes the very thing that we’re labeling.

5) Since judgments are tragic expressions of unmet needs, NVC doesn’t use the words “good” or “bad”, or “right” or “wrong”.

NVC isn’t saying these terms don’t exist or have substance, it’s just saying that those terms rarely get us what we want — long-term behavior change

That said, NVC isn’t some ethical relativism mumbo jumbo, or license to get away with anything. Indeed: NVC distinguishes between value judgments and moralistic judgments

Value judgments are beliefs about what meet your needs; moral judgments are static analyses of people.

All of us make value judgments as to the qualities we value in life. For example, we might value honesty, freedom, or peace. Value judgments reflect our beliefs of how life can best be served.

We make moralistic judgments of people and behaviors that fail to support our value judgments. For example, “Violence is bad. People who kill others are evil.”

NVC instead tries to articulate our needs and values directly, rather than to insinuate wrongness when they have not been met. For example, instead of “Violence is bad,” we might say instead, “I am fearful of the use of violence to resolve conflicts; I value the resolution of human conflicts through other means.”

Although NVC doesn’t use the terms good or bad, it does say that contrary to Hobbes’ state of nature, our natural inclination is to contribute to other’s well-beings.

This implies that our education is what causes violence, not our nature.

Indeed: Moralistic judgments are those built on a theology that implies the human beings are very lazy, evil and violent. Therefore the corrective process is penitence. Our legal and prison system is built on this. You have to make humans hate themselves for what they’ve done, to believe that they deserve to suffer for what they’ve done.

Again: NVC is a totally different kind of language.

NVC requires learning how to say what your needs are, what needs are alive in you at a given moment, which ones are getting fulfilled, and which ones are not.

And that’s very hard for people. They have been taught to identify connection to their own needs as selfish and weak. They’re taught to believe that being a strong man (or a caring woman) means you don’t have any needs. You sacrifice your needs to provide for and take care of your family. Needs are not important. What’s important is obedience to authority. That’s what’s important.

With that background and history we’ve been taught a language that doesn’t teach us how to say how we are. It teaches us to worry about what we are in the eyes of authority. What will they think of me? Will they think I’m stupid? Will they think I’m competent?

When our minds have been pre-occupied that way we have trouble answering what seems to be a simple question, which is asked in all cultures throughout the world, “How are you?” It is a way of asking what’s alive in you. It’s a critical question. Even though it’s asked in many cultures, people don’t know how to answer it because they haven’t been educated in a culture that cares about how you are.

The shift necessary requires being able to say, how do you feel at this moment, and what are the needs behind your feelings? And when we ask those question to highly educated people, they cannot answer it. Ask them how they feel, and they say “I feel that that’s wrong”. Wrong isn’t a feeling. Wrong is a thought.

So we ask them again, “How do you feel?” “Well, I feel that when somebody does something like that, it’s evidence of a personality disturbance.” That’s not a feeling. That’s a judgement. So we ask again: “But how do you feel?”

“Well I don’t have any feelings about it.”

And they’re not lying. When your mind has been shaped to worry about what people think about you, you lose connection with what’s alive in you.

We teach people to use the judgments they’ve been taught to have as a window to their soul, to their heart, and to look behind the judgments, to the needs that are behind the feelings. It’s a different language and lens.

6) NVC doesn’t use punishment or reward to incite behavior change

Because NVC believes humans are good, NVC also believes that punishment, guilt, shame, force, and all other punitive measures we use today to “keep people honest” are ineffective in the long-term.

Punishment assumes “badness” on the part of people who behave in certain ways, and it calls for punishment to make them repent and change their behavior.

NVC believes it is in everyone’s interest that people change, not in order to avoid punishment, but because they see the change as benefiting themselves.

You not only want behavior to change, you want their underlying motivations to change. Because you can control short term behavior, if they’re not doing it for the right reasons, then once the power is gone (power is rarely forever) then their behavior will be back to what it used to be.

As such, NVC prefers “power with” rather than “power over”, because “power with” is long-term, whereas “power over” is short-term.

But don’t you need to punish people who commit crimes, or use the threat punishment to deter people from doing so? Or don’t you need to reward and incentivize people in order for them to do what you want?

It’s interesting how deep rooted this belief is in our society. The underlying philosophy of punishment and reward is that if people are basically evil or selfish, then the correctional process if they are behaving in a way you don’t like is to make them hate themselves for what they have done.

If a parent, for example, doesn’t like what the child is doing, the parent says something like ”Say you’re sorry!! The child says, “I’m sorry.” The parent says “No! You’re not really sorry!” Then the child starts to cry “I’m sorry. . .” The parent says “Okay, I forgive you.”

You see, that approach is at the basis of our conflicts with children and with criminals — we’ve been educated to believe that you have to make a person suffer for what they have done, to hate themselves, to be penitent — we even call our prisons penitentiaries.

I think it works just the opposite — the more you get a person to hate themselves, the more they behave in the ways that we don’t like.

Data supports this: Prisons don’t work. They actually make things worse. 2/3 of prisoners go back to prison. They’re more likely to go back to prison than if they hadn’t been to prison in the first place.

NVC suggests that any time a person does what we want without their motive being to serve life (and in no way fearing punishment or feeling guilt, shame, duty or obligation) — we will pay for it. We may win the battle, but we’ll lose the war. If you see people as criminals, they’ll become criminals.

Unfortunately that’s how our judicial system is set up. It’s set up to punish people and make them suffer for what they’ve done.

That’s why NVC is very strongly supportive of restorative justice and is working with different groups around the world to transform our present system.

Those are some of the principles underlying NVC.

If you are interested in learning more, a friend and I will be hosting a NVC workshop in the near future with a teacher — click here to signup.

For those who want to go deeper, read Marshall Rosenberg’s book, Nonviolent Communication, and check out Newt Bailey’s Communication Dojo. Both Newt & Marshall inspired much of the above.