I did not expect to like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey as much as I did. I came in protective — as the girl who began studying Greek mythology at the wee age of eleven (my first elective course in middle school); a true devotee of the Percy Jackson series (read under the covers with a flashlight, well past bedtime). And at Columbia, Homer was not an elective. The Iliad and the Odyssey open Literature Humanities, the course every single first-year has taken since 1937, pre-meds and econ students alike. The Greeks belonged to all of us at that school, whether we asked for them or not, and they are forever a spine of my coming of age. All of that, plus the knowledge that adaptations are where attachments go to die, had me walking into the theater the way you walk into a wedding where you love the bride but have doubts about the groom.

The spectacle delivered, however. I (shockingly) only have a few notes — chiefly how little Penelope we get, and the cut of the bed test, where Penelope designs the one test the most cunning man alive cannot talk his way out of. But maybe that’s an essay for another day. What I didn’t expect was that the moral center of a $250 million blockbuster would be an untranslated Greek word about how you treat strangers — or that I’d spend the following weeks mulling it over.

Xenia

Nolan builds the entire film around something he calls Zeus’s Law. Homer never calls it anything.

What Homer names is a god with an epithet — Zeus Xenios, Zeus of the stranger — and the practice that came with him: xenia, guest-friendship, the whole choreography of what a host owes a stranger and what the stranger owes back. The obligation is simply everywhere, assumed, the way a floor is assumed. “Zeus’s Law” is Nolan’s phrase, coined for a 2026 audience that needs a proper noun to hold onto. The concept, however, is twenty-seven centuries old.

Here is what xenia asked of you: A stranger arrives. You do not ask who he is. You bring him inside, you give him a seat, you have him washed, you feed him, and you give him a gift for the road. Then — after the meal, after the bath, after his hands are clean and his belly is full — you ask the question. Homer stages this over and over, and the sequence is never scrambled. In Book 3, Telemachus lands at Pylos and Nestor’s household feeds him before anyone thinks to ask his name; only once the eating is done does Nestor turn to his guests and inquire who they are and where they come from.

Who are you, and from where?

It is one of the oldest questions in Western literature, and its position in the ritual is the entire ethic. The Greeks put curiosity after welcome. Fast forward, we still say “welcome” — printed on the doormat of a door we don’t open, addressed to a stranger we won’t ask anything.

The reason for the sequence is a theological claim, and Homer’s characters state it flatly. Eumaeus, the swineherd — a slave, the poorest man in the poem — says it to a beggar he has just fed: all strangers and beggars come from Zeus. Every stranger is to be treated as a god in disguise. Nausicaa says a version of it on the beach. The stranger at your door arrives with a divine warrant. His claim on you does not run through his usefulness or his lineage. It runs through the gods.

And then there is the word itself, which is where this gets beautiful.

Xenos means stranger. Xenos also means guest. Xenos also means host. One word, three positions — the unknown man, the man being fed, and the one doing the feeding. Greek declines to separate them because none of the three exists alone: there is no host until someone knocks, no guest until the door opens, and no telling which one you are except by what happens next. The word is relational all the way down. The stranger is a guest you haven’t answered yet; the guest is a stranger you did right by; the host is just the one whose turn it is to have a roof. The amorphousness is the crux of the word.

And from xenos you get xenia, the practice. From xenos, you also get its inversion, the word we’re all much more familiar with: xenophobia. Fear of the guest. Fear of the stranger. The same root, turned inside out.

There is a third word worth noting.

Hebrews 13:2, in the King James: Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Angels among you. A god in disguise. In Greek, the word for what you are being commanded to do is φιλοξενία. Philoxenia. Love of the xenos.

The New Testament’s command to hospitality is built from the same word. The same root, doing the same work, in a letter written to Greek-speaking Jews about six or seven hundred years after the Odyssey was set down. Similarly, in the judgment scene of Matthew 25, Christ lists what was done for Him, and one item on the list is I was a stranger and you welcomed me. The Greek is ξένος ἤμην — xenos ēmēn. I was a xenos. Jesus identifies Himself using the same noun.

We are taught to think of Athens and Jerusalem as two walls with a scholar’s argument running between them. On this subject, they are not two walls. The Bible’s Greek is already speaking Homer’s language, and the word it borrowed comes with the ethic attached.

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The Screen

I’ve seen critiques of The Odyssey online accusing Nolan of Christianizing Homer. Deseret ran the question as a headline and put it to him directly. The complaint, roughly: Homer’s xenia is political and transactional, a system of aristocratic obligation held together by fear of a violent god, and Nolan has turned it into sin and repentance — a morality with an interior.

The complaint is right, and the evidence for it is stronger than the critics said.

Here is what Nolan does with the recognition scene, the emotional climax of the poem. Odysseus, still disguised, sits with his back to Penelope on the far side of a perforated screen. He cannot see her. She cannot see him. And through the lattice, he confesses — not his identity, but his guilt. The sack of Troy. Athena’s statue desecrated. Her priestess killed. The terrible sentence he gives it: to burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. And then, from the penitent’s side of the screen, he asks his wife to forgive him.

A confessional booth. Nolan blocked the climax of the Odyssey as the sacrament of penance — the screen, the unseeing confessor, the enumerated sins, the plea for absolution. He made Penelope the priest. And he moved the poem’s center of gravity in the process: the question is no longer is it really him, which is Homer’s question, but can he live with what he did, which is Augustine’s.

So yes. Christianized. Thoroughly, structurally, and on purpose.

There is a scene in Book 17 where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar in his own hall, is begging from the suitors, and Antinous throws a footstool at him. It is a small moment, easy to skim past. And one of the other suitors turns to Antinous and warns him — you shouldn’t have done that, because the gods sometimes disguise themselves as strangers from far away and walk through the cities of men, watching who is violent and who is righteous.

That’s Homer. Not Hebrews 13. Roughly eighth century BC. No one Christianizing it.

The proverb that reads most like a Sunday School lesson in Nolan’s film — be careful, the beggar might be a god — is right there in the source text, spoken by one of the villains, mid-assault. Once you’ve seen it in Homer, you read Hebrews 13:2 differently. It’s not a Hebrew idea dressed up in Greek. The conversation had been going for centuries before that letter joined it.

So the charge needs restating. Nolan didn’t import Christianity into Homer. He found the seam where the traditions were already touching, and he leaned on it with all his weight. Whether that’s adaptation or distortion is a fair fight. But the seam is real.

Which brings me to the part I actually care about, which is that the two traditions are not saying the same thing — and the difference is a ladder.

Rung one, Homer: the stranger might be a god. So hedge. The motive structure is prudential and it runs on fear. You are being watched by something stronger than you, disguised, keeping score, and the beggar at your gate is a possible audit. This is a real ethic and it produces real generosity, but its engine is risk management. You are being good to the stranger because of what he might turn out to be. It is also, as it happens, a crucial rule to maintain relationships, personal and business alike — venture capital, no different, which is a thing I’ll come back to.

Rung two, the Torah: you were strangers in Egypt. Leviticus 19:34 — You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. The motive is no longer a bet. It’s memory. You know the inside of this experience; you have been the one at the door. The rabbis noticed how insistently the Torah returns to this — by the Talmud’s count, the Law warns against wronging the stranger in thirty-six separate places. Nothing else gets that kind of repetition.

Rung three, the Gospel: the stranger is the image of God. Not a possible god in disguise — the actual bearer of the divine image, per Genesis, with nothing contingent about it. And in Matthew 25, Christ closes the gap entirely: as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me. Not as if to me. To me. And notice the word sitting in the middle of the verse — brothers.

Rung three retires the wager. There is no scenario in which the person at your door is not owed this — no version of the encounter where the obligation fails to apply, because the thing that obligates you walked in with him.

And then Matthew does something I find almost unbearably good. The righteous, in that scene, are confused. They don’t say “we knew it was you.” They say: Lord, when did we see you a stranger and welcome you? They have no memory of the transaction. They were not keeping score, because there was no score to keep — they simply fed people, and it turns out they were feeding God, and they find this out at the end like everyone else.

Unknowing kindness is the only kind the passage credits.

Which means the best host in the Odyssey — the one who gets it right by the standard of a book written eight hundred years later — is Eumaeus. The swineherd. A slave with nothing, who feeds a filthy beggar out of a poor man’s stores, in a country where his master’s house is being eaten alive, with no expectation of anything, and who has no idea he is washing the feet of his king.

Hold those two things next to each other. This means that when everyone carries the same image, nobody is intrinsically beneath you. Worth is not distributed on a curve; it comes from one source and arrives complete. So in order to rank a stranger below yourself, you have to first install some other measure of worth — usefulness, net worth, nationality, accent, taste, how legible they are to you. And whichever measure you install becomes the thing you are actually serving.

That’s the kernel I’m circling with this review of The Odyssey. Looking down on someone is a confession about your theology. It tells you, precisely, what you’ve put on the throne. Contempt is a form of idolatry.

And then the sharpest turn in the whole business: in Homer, the god disguises himself as a beggar in order to test you from below. In Matthew, God doesn’t test from the bottom. He moves in. Given every available disguise — king, judge, stranger of ambiguous status, anything — the claim of Christianity is that He announced in advance He’d be wearing the one you were most likely to rank beneath you. The least of these.

Which means looking down is not merely unkind. It is the specific mechanism by which you miss Him. The disguise works on exactly one kind of person: the kind whose religion is rank.

When Jesus is asked to name the greatest commandment, He gives two — love God, and love your neighbor as yourself — and then says that on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets. All of it. One commandment pointing up and one pointing sideways, and everything else in the tradition suspended from that pair. And English, it turns out, pulls the same trick Greek does: the host who welcomes comes from Latin hospes; hostile comes from hostis, the stranger; and the host at communion comes from hostia, the offering — God as the one who sets the table and the one consumed at it. The host, the stranger, and you. (The “Lord of hosts” of the Old Testament is, I regret to report, a different host entirely — tzevaot, armies. The trick lives in English, not Hebrew.)

The Dart Board

The obvious objection first, and it isn’t a bad one: Zeus’s Law is how people get hurt. Some strangers are dangerous. Some men at the door are exactly what your gut said they were. Any ethic that requires you to override your own alarm system in the name of piety is not an ethic, it’s a liability, and it will be paid for disproportionately by women and by anyone small.

Both traditions agree with you. Christ sends His followers out as sheep in the midst of wolves and tells them to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves — both halves commanded; the dove without the serpent is not holiness, it’s prey. And Homer is no softer: Odysseus tests everyone, suspicion is his defining trait, and the poem admires him for it. The code always had teeth.

But discernment and prejudice are not two settings on the same dial. They are opposites, and the thing that separates them is a question. Discernment looks — it stays in the room, it watches the hands, it revises. Prejudice is what you deploy so you don’t have to look. One is a practice of attention; the other is a labor-saving device. (This is why social proof is not a form of judgment but a substitute for one — deferring to who else is interested is the decision not to look, dressed as the decision to be careful.) Identifying evil accurately requires more curiosity, not less. The man who has already sorted everyone at the door by appearance is not vigilant. He is unarmed, and he thinks the sorting was the vigilance.

Which leads me to a very obvious connection: my boyfriend and I just started Ted Lasso. I’d held off for years out of refusal to get another streaming service. Boy was I missing out on cinema.

We got to the darts scene last week, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

The setup (no spoilers, I promise): Rupert, the rich ex-husband, all sneer and cufflinks, has spent the whole season treating Ted as furniture — a hick in a visor, a mistake in a tracksuit, a man not worth the calories of a real conversation. They play for stakes. And with the last throws in hand, Ted starts one of his speeches.

He says he’d been underestimated his whole life. That he used to think all those people were judging him. And that it wasn’t until later that he understood the real thing about them: they weren’t curious. They thought they had everything figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. He mentions a line he’d seen on a wall — be curious, not judgmental — attributed to Walt Whitman, which as far as anyone can determine Whitman never wrote, an irony I myself have decided to enjoy rather than resolve.

And then he tells Rupert that if Rupert had ever been curious enough to ask a single question — like, say, whether Ted had played a lot of darts growing up — he’d have known not to take this bet. Then he throws. Bullseye.

Rupert loses because he never thought Ted was worth a question.

That is the whole mechanism. Curiosity dies downward. You do not ask questions of people you have placed below you — why would you? You’ve already priced them. Judgment feels, from the inside, like efficiency; it feels like having done the work. It is actually the refusal to do the work, and it leaves you holding a conclusion you can no longer test.

Now put that next to Homer’s sequence. Who are you, and from where? — asked after the bath, after the meal, after the man has been made safe and warm. The order was not mere politeness; it was epistemology. You get a truer answer from a fed man. You learn more about who’s at your door by opening it than by studying it. We have inverted the sequence and pride ourselves on the rigor: identity first, welcome maybe — later, conditionally.

The First Rung

I’ve spent the last several years in venture, which means my professional life is conducted almost entirely on one side or the other of exactly this transaction: someone arrives, unknown, asking to be taken seriously, and someone else decides whether that is going to happen.

The job — the actual job, the one the returns come from — is picking. Looking at a company nobody has heard of, run by a person nobody has vouched for, and forming a view. That is the entire value proposition of early-stage capital: being right about something before it is legible. Which means the returns live precisely where the signals aren’t, in the one place a signal-follower structurally cannot go.

And yet most of the industry runs on pre-sorting. The warm intro from someone who matters. The logo on the last round. The moment on X, the accelerator badge, the fact that a fund you respect already took a look. Every one of these is a mechanism for learning what someone is so you don’t have to find out who they are. It is Homer’s sequence run backwards, with a term sheet at the end of it: papers first, welcome maybe.

I’ve written before about the Inner Ring — C.S. Lewis’s name for the thing whose essence is exclusion, the circle that stays desirable exactly to the degree that it keeps people out. What I didn’t see then is how neatly it inverts Homer. Venture has a rule I once called the Groucho Mandate: desire inverts, so the founder who needs the money is discounted for needing it, and the one who doesn’t need it is magnetic. Hold that next to all strangers and beggars are from Zeus. In Homer, need is the warrant — it is the precise thing that generates your obligation. In the market, need is a markdown. Same input, opposite sign, and we have built an entire asset class on the second reading.

Venture is, in fact, a very Homeric business — and it is stuck on the first rung. The beggar might be a god is the power law in dactylic hexameter: take the meeting, write the small check, hedge, because this one could be Zeus. As an investment thesis it’s defensible. But it is a catastrophic anthropology. If the only reason you extend anything to anyone is that they might turn out to be a god, then everyone who is visibly not a candidate stops registering as a person at all. The non-technical operator. The junior person. The founder in a category nobody is excited about yet. There is a whole category of people out there — legible enough to be useful, not legible enough to be interesting — and once someone has filed you there, they never ask you anything again. That’s rung one, allowed to metastasize into an entire way of seeing. And the people it eats are the ones standing closest to it.

The kicker is that it doesn’t even work. You cannot outsource your discretion — defer to the crowd and you get the crowd’s returns, later, minus fees, having paid for the privilege of somebody else’s conviction. And whatever faculty lets you ask who are you, and from where — and mean it, and wait for the answer — is one muscle, not two. There is no separate organ for founders. It does not survive being switched off for the people who can’t do anything for you and switched back on for the people who might.

Underneath all of it — the pre-sorting, the unasked questions, the pricing of people — is a failure of humility so basic it’s nearly invisible. To decide that the person in front of you isn’t worth a question, you have to believe the current arrangement is permanent: that you will keep being the one behind the desk, that the distribution of who assesses whom is a fact about the world rather than a weather pattern. It isn’t. It’s weather. The power you feel in that chair is a true report of your mood and a false one about your position. You are not the king. You are a regent at best, and even the chair does not belong to you.

There is a line in the movie, Hamnet, that I wrote down as soon as I heard it: what is given may be taken away at any time. This line is about the loss of a child. But it is also the oldest sentence in the tradition. Job, flattened in a single afternoon: the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. Deuteronomy, addressing a people on the verge of becoming comfortable, names the exact thought that comfort produces — beware lest you say in your heart, “my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.” The warning isn’t that wealth is bad. It’s that the feeling of having earned something is the first sign you’ve forgotten it was given.

Which is why I don’t think you can hold onto the guest law without holding onto the reversal. You were strangers in Egypt is not a sentimental appeal. It’s a reminder of the shape of things. Hospitality is a bet on reversal — you feed the stranger because you have been the stranger, and because you are going to be the stranger again, in some room, on some terms you did not choose.

Nobody is permanently the host. That is the part I would put in front of anyone who has recently acquired the ability to decide things about other people’s lives. Not you don’t deserve this — maybe you do, that’s a separate argument. Just: the seat is on loan, the office is temporary, and every single person who has ever held it has been wrong about how long they would.

And notice that this is the one claim in this entire essay that requires no faith at all. You can throw out Zeus. You can throw out Genesis, the image of God, the least of these, all of it, and the reversal still holds, because it’s not a doctrine — it’s just what happens. Everyone gets moved. The only question is whether you built any habits, while you were up, that will be worth anything to you when you fall down.

The Far Side of a Collapse

Homer was writing about a world that had already ended.

The palaces in the poems, the bronze, the kings — that’s the Mycenaean world, and it burned. Around 1200 BC the entire eastern Mediterranean system came apart, and in Greece one of the things lost was writing itself. Linear B went out of use and stayed out of use; the Greeks were illiterate for something like four hundred years. When writing came back — a new alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians — one of the very first things the Greeks used it for was to fix these poems in place. A civilization collapses, the lights go out for four centuries, literacy returns — and among the first things the recovered culture commits to permanent record is a long, meticulous account of how you are supposed to treat a stranger at your door, and what happens to the houses that get it wrong.

The Odyssey is a survivor’s document. It is a people writing down, at the first possible opportunity, their explanation of why the world ended.

Nolan understood this. He takes the Trojan Horse — the trick everyone remembers, the cleverness Odysseus is famous for — and reframes it as the founding crime. Men carried inside the walls under the sign of a gift. Hospitality weaponized. In Nolan’s telling, the Greeks themselves turn out to be the dreaded sea peoples: the collapse is not something that happened to that civilization but something it did. To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. That is what Odysseus was confessing through the screen — not a trick, a collapse. He violated the guest law at its root, and then spent twenty years being denied a home.

And the mechanism, at every scale — a cave, a household, a city, a world — is always the same. Someone decides the person in front of them doesn’t count.

I think this is the argument this whole essay has been walking toward: the reason the stranger counted was that something was above everyone. All strangers and beggars are from Zeus is a sentence about horizontal equality that runs entirely through a vertical claim: the beggar and the king are level with each other because they are both, and equally, under the same dominion. We have assumed for a while now that the vertical part was scaffolding — that you could take it down and the floor would stay flat. But equality was never self-standing; it was a corollary. Remove the thing everyone was equally under, and what you get is a scramble for altitude — and since somebody has to be the reference point, and since you are the only person whose interior you have access to, the reference point is you. Not necessarily by arrogance, but by default.

And once you are the measure, a stranger can only be one of two things. Useful, or threatening. The third category is the one that requires the vertical axis. Sibling only exists if there’s a parent. Take away the Father and you do not get a democracy of brothers; you get a room full of unrelated people conducting rapid threat-and-utility assessment on each other — a thing we have all learned to do so fluently that it no longer registers as an activity.

When nothing is above you, everyone ends up beneath you.

The Architecture of Pre-Judgment

Nobody answers the door anymore. We watch the footage afterward, like reviewing evidence of a crime that hasn’t happened yet.

I own a Ring camera. I like it. I’m not standing outside this — I’m describing the inside of my own house. The knock is now a push-through notification. Someone comes to the door and my phone tells me about it, and I look at a small gray rectangle of a person and decide, from behind glass, sometimes from another state, whether this human being merits the opening of a door. I have judged hundreds of people this way. I have opened the door for almost none of them. We’ve created a hospitality machine, running in reverse.

And it isn’t alone. Nextdoor and Citizen gamified suspicion inside the neighborhood — the actual unit of xenia. The spam economy trained us to treat every unknown number as presumptively hostile; my phone silences strangers by default, and I set it that way on purpose. The feeds sort people into categories before they are permitted to speak — you learn what someone is before who they are. And Flock’s license-plate readers now log which car passed which corner at which minute in more than six thousand communities, searchable, mostly warrantless — a system so resented that people have been tearing the cameras off poles with their hands, and so unbounded that officers in two states were fired for allegedly pointing it at people they knew. Build a machine to sort the dangerous stranger from the safe neighbor and it will not respect the boundary, because the boundary was never in the machine. It was in you.

None of this caused the flip. But infrastructure trains. Each of these systems takes a judgment that used to require a person at a door — in a body, with a face — and moves it earlier: before contact, before speech, before the meal. We have automated the part of hospitality that was supposed to come last, and made the part that was supposed to come first optional.

Hebrews says some who did this well entertained angels without knowing it. The verse’s whole force is in the unawares — you don’t find out. Which means the cost of the reversal is also something we don’t find out. There’s no notification for it. Nobody sends you a summary of the angels you didn’t entertain, the conversations that didn’t happen, the person on the porch who was exactly who they said they were.

The Swineherd

What do you believe about the person knocking on your door?

Not what do you do — what do you believe. The oldest texts we have insist those are the same question, and they’re right, and it’s the least convenient thing either tradition says. Whatever you actually believe about worth, and about whether anything sits above you, is going to come out of your hands in the four seconds after the knock, long before your opinions have time to arrive.

Take Eumaeus. A slave. A pig farmer. The poorest character in the poem. Living in a hut at the edge of an estate that is being consumed by men with better clothes and no manners. And when a filthy stranger with no story and nothing to offer turns up at his door, Eumaeus brings him in, kills an animal he can’t spare, feeds him, gives him a bed, and explains — to a beggar, without irony, as though it were simply how the world is built — that all strangers come from Zeus.

He has no idea. That’s the part. He is not being tested and passing; he doesn’t know there’s a test. He is washing the feet of his own king, on a night when doing so gains him precisely nothing, and the Odyssey gives him the most generous treatment it gives anyone, and eight centuries later a different book will describe the righteous as people who are startled to learn who they’d been feeding.

Lord, when did we see you a stranger?

Every good early bet in the history of venture has that shape: somebody opened a door before the signals arrived, and found out later what they’d let in.

The gods still travel in disguise. I believe that, in whatever register you’ll let me believe it. But the disguise has been simplified. It isn’t the ragged cloak anymore, or the beggar’s staff, or the shepherd boy on the road. Now it’s just someone who can do nothing for you.

That is one branch of a very old word.

“Return” comes from retornare — to turn again. Before it was economic vocabulary, it was religious. In Hebrew, the word for repentance — teshuvah — is the word for return. It presumes that the person who comes back is not the person who left. In the tradition, the baal teshuvah — the “master of return” — stands in a place even the entirely righteous cannot stand, because he has been through something they have not.

In the Greek tradition, Odysseus is the paradigm case. Homer’s first word for him, in the opening line of the Odyssey, is polytropos — many-turned, many-turning. Ten years to Troy, ten years back. He does not just return home. He returns to himself, after having become someone the man who left could not have imagined. His epithet contains the etymology. The good return is a turning, and then another, and then another.

Metanoia, usually translated “change of mind,” is not really a change of mind at all. It is a turn of the whole self back toward what it had left.

Consider the prodigal son. He takes his inheritance early, wastes it in a distant country, ends up feeding pigs. Then, the text says, “he came to himself.” He prepares a speech of confession and begins the walk home. His father sees him from a long way off, runs to meet him, interrupts the speech before it can begin. The father does not forgive him. The father runs. He calls for the best robe, the ring, the fatted calf. The son, in the story, does not really repent. He returns. That, in the parable, is what is asked of him.

What we now call return on investment is the last standing branch of a very old family of ideas about what happens after you have gone away.

I have been thinking about return for a long time. This past year, in particular, I have lived it. I wandered further than I meant to and made my way home in a way I would not have known how to plan for. What I have come to feel, in the middle of all this, is that the returns worth making are the ones you can only make because of what you left behind. The wisdom picked up on the road. The perspective earned in exile. The way the same place looks different when you finally see it again.

Some returns are good. Some are not. The bad return is the one that reveals you should not have left. The wanderer who comes back the same as he went — if Odysseus took no turns. The unyielded investment. The relationship you re-enter without having changed.

The good return is the one that has yielded. Something has been brought back that was not there before. There is more than there was. The seasons return with harvest. The prodigal returns with the knowledge of what he lost. The investor returns with a multiple. What makes a return good is that it produces something on the other side of the going.

You cannot return without having left. This is the whole point. You have to have gone somewhere for anywhere to be worth coming back to.

I have been writing this newsletter for two years. The pieces have all — I think now — been about good returns. I, myself, have ventured far from home in these two years, and come back changed. The recovery of a practice almost priced out. The recovery of embodied attention. I called it Circular Architect for the ouroboros — the closed loop, the ancient symbol of oneness, completeness, and regeneration that I keep coming back to. The circle is still the frame. What has come into focus, over these two years, is what returns through it. A Good Return names that.

If you were here as a reader of Circular Architect — welcome back.

We already have a preview. We already did it to hers — without the help of AI, over the course of fifty years. We have the results.

We didn’t even need AI for the first run. We did it to hers by hand — over fifty years, with our own two hands.

The results are in: you can build an entire profession that chooses comfort over correction — that keeps people feeling better while nothing in their lives actually changes — and from the outside it will look like care. We proved it on therapy. We’re about to prove it everywhere else, faster, with AI.

There is a technical perfection to what Orna does that’s hard to describe without sounding like a fan (I am one). She takes theory — decades of it — and applies it in real time, in the flow of a conversation, without pausing to consult the manual she does not need. She guides. She remembers. She conjures metaphors on the fly, drawing connections across what a couple has said over weeks. She knows when to interject, when to let a silence run on past comfort, when to full-stop a conversation that has begun to move on rails. Watching her feels like watching a Rubik’s cube or a Tetris game being solved — every move precise, every move correct, the system reorganizing itself toward the resolution it always required.

I have long wondered if this is simply my opinion — if my experience has just been a string of awful therapists. Why is it that therapy is treated as a serious practice, and psychology as a robust school of thought, and yet I have not, in years of trying, seen what the true unlock is? There clearly has to be a right way to do this. I have not been able to see it or figure it out.

So here is how this profession lost it. Therapy got codified the way everything marketable gets codified. In 1980, the DSM-III — led by Robert Spitzer — swapped the old psychoanalytic framing for checklists — symptoms you could count, so diagnosis could be reliable, reimbursable, reproducible. Insurers would pay for brief, manualized, symptom-reduction protocols, so that’s what got taught, funded, and scaled. The “empirically supported treatment” movement crowned the therapies you could run in a trial — overwhelmingly CBT. By the time the PHQ-9 became the standard nine-question depression score, the proxy was explicit: a number on an intake form.

Reliable diagnosis is a real gain. But the checklist moved the center of gravity from the patient’s interior to the insurer’s form — and underneath that, the telos changed. The work stopped aiming at any external standard of a life well-lived and started optimizing what it could measure instead: the patient’s reported symptoms, and their satisfaction with their own choices. (Orna has made this exact argument in a 2016 paper — that a discipline which won’t commit to a vision of the good slowly becomes a service industry for whatever the client already wants.)

The next few decades only deepened the pattern. The first SSRIs arrived at the end of the 1980s and offered a faster, cheaper pharmacological bypass. By the 2010s, app-therapy and BetterHelp moved the work out of the room entirely: therapy as a gig, billed against insurance, optimized for symptom reduction within a quarter, run by interchangeable workers following protocols. The supervised apprenticeship that produces a clinician capable of doing what Orna does is simply not in the pipeline. What’s sold now is the appearance of therapy without the substance of it.

The result, at its worst, is a profession that does its job perfectly while the patient slowly dies in the same room they walked into. Comfortable. Processing nothing. Year after year. A happy, paying, returning customer.

Even the credentialed PhD therapists I have seen practice in ways that disturb me. They listen. They wait for me to make the realization out loud. They occasionally prod, gently. They do not, as a rule, challenge. They do not tell me when something I did was wrong, or when my perception is inaccurate. They do not seem to believe their job includes that. The implicit doctrine across contemporary practice is that the patient is the authority on the patient; the therapist is a facilitator of self-narration. Christopher Lasch saw the early arc of this in 1979, the year before DSM-III shipped. In The Culture of Narcissism, he described the therapeutic professions as having become servants of the self — selling the patient back to themselves, frictionlessly, without the actual seeing. He called it.

The doctrine of clinical non-judgment, originally a protection against the analyst’s overreach, has hardened into a refusal to ever say “I think you are wrong about this.” There’s something right about not imposing. But the profession has confused not-imposing with not-correcting, and they are not the same thing. A profession that cannot reform perception cannot do its job.

I am, by any honest reckoning, frequently wrong. I want so badly to know when I am wrong — to know which of my current convictions are going to turn out to be the misguided ones, the ones leading me into a worse life path, a tarnished relationship, a corroded sense of self. I can see this kind of error in other people easily: I can watch a friend miss the obvious, watch someone narrate a situation in a way that protects them from the one fact they cannot afford to integrate. It is much harder to do for myself — and it is the one thing I most want help with, and the thing my therapists have, almost without exception, refused to provide. The therapist who reassures me without correcting me is failing me in a way structurally indistinguishable from a friend too polite to disagree. There is no skill in that. There is no moral seriousness in it. It is the institutionalization of being-nice as the highest possible clinical good — comfort elevated over the higher one.

None of this is really just about therapy. Every serious profession is two things stacked together. There’s the part that fits in a manual — the rules, the protocols, everything you can put on paper. And there’s the part that lives in a master: judgment fitted to the exact case in front of you, aimed at a right answer no one could specify in advance. The Greeks had a word for the second one. Phronesis. The correct move in the particular, with no rulebook to look it up in.

Codification scales the first part. It starves the second. And AI is codification at industrial speed.

The risk is that AI does to every field what manualization did to therapy: it gets so good at the measurable part that we forget the measurable part is not the entire job. Spell it out and it’s everywhere. A doctor gets fifteen minutes and a prescription pad, and is rewarded for sending you home with something that suppresses the symptom — not for the slow, unbillable work of finding the illness underneath it. School systems get assessed on test scores and reading levels — numbers that can climb all year while the thing that was supposed to be the point — children who learn to think, to question, to chase their own curiosity — goes untracked. Journalists are paid in clicks and virality, never for the long, painful story that requires prolonged attention to appreciate.

To be clear: automate the part that fits in a manual. Please. Most of it is drudgery and most of us are mediocre at it anyway. Let the model draft the memo, summarize the deposition, flag the anomaly on the scan.

The mistake isn’t using the tool. The mistake is letting the tool’s fluency at the manual part convince an organization that the manual was the job — and that the master who did the rest was overhead.

There’s a tell for a field that’s already made this trade. It starts optimizing for something it can count — satisfaction scores, billable hours, engagement, time-in-session — and, one budget cycle at a time, it loses the ability to say out loud what it was ever for. The people who hit the number get promoted. The people doing the unmeasurable thing start to look expensive (hello, creatives today of any sort). The language for what they did wears away, because no one is paid to use it. And then the field wakes up unable to produce the masters it used to mint — and unable to even name what’s missing.

Which is why I can’t stop watching Orna. Watch her for an hour and you are watching a master: thirty years of pattern compressed into instinct, firing in real time. She makes one observation and a marriage reorganizes around it. There is a right answer to what she’s doing — you can see it land, you can see it miss — and it is nowhere in a manual. That is what mastery is. That is phronesis.

This is the part we risk losing — not because anyone decides to kill it, but because we won’t watch it go. Survivorship bias. You train on the data you can see, and the data you can see is whatever survived — the published, the billed, the filmed. The failures aren’t in the set.

But a master is mostly made of losses — thirty years of being wrong in ways small enough to fix and sharp enough to remember. You can show a model every minute of Orna on camera and it will still miss the thing that built her: the decades of failure no one filmed. I’ve written about that before. Turns out it’s also the part you can’t train on.

We spent fifty years proving you can keep a patient perfectly comfortable and let them die in the same room. We’re about to run that play across the whole economy, faster.

The antidote isn’t slower AI. It’s being honest, while we still can, about the part of every profession that was never in the manual — and protecting the masters who carry it.

If you know me, you know I’m obsessed with Couples Therapy. You’ll also know I’m quick to note that I couldn’t care less about the couples. I am fascinated with Orna, and Orna only.

What it really is, is this: I have never seen a therapist — a human, for that matter— notice so acutely or direct a conversation so precisely. She is conducting an orchestra in real time — except the score is the conversation, and the music always reaches the resolution the song requires. She is choosing the path of incision, and then the next, and then the next, and then a noticing becomes visible that was inside the patient all along but had not yet been brought into the light. She is, in a way I don’t quite have the right analogy for, an engineer of human systems, or a cartographer of what was in front of you the whole time.

Pick whichever metaphor lands. The point is that she is operating in a register I had not previously known therapy could occupy: not the murmuring, empty sympathy I had associated with the profession, but a precise and patient act of construction. And systems that work like this — actually appear to truly work — tickle my brain.

This might be the main reason why I’ve become so fascinated by Orna. When you watch her work, you are watching breakthroughs and connections happen. People gain the tools they need. And — this is the part that fixates me — the connections being made appear to be correct in some objective sense. They have purchase. They explain things. They work, in the sense that they let you process the thing, subdue it, file it away, and move forward. Upward.

Dr. Orna has the intellectualism I admire, but it is in the service of tenderness. This is the formulation I keep returning to when I try to name what makes her different. The world has many brilliant analytical people. The world has many warm caring people. The two do not, in my experience, regularly overlap. Orna’s analytical capacity is deployed not to win an argument or to perform her intellect, but to make space — to literally create the room — for two human beings to be more accurately themselves in front of each other and more acutely see each other, stripped of previous wrongs, experiences, reinforced beliefs.

The way she does this is by refusing to reduce. She does not flatten her patients into three or four bullet points. She does not collapse the multiple things simultaneously true about a person into a single diagnostic story. She holds — visibly, on camera — that one person can love and resent at once, can be committed and full of doubt, can be both vulnerable and self-protective, both free and responsible. The therapeutic move most clinicians make is to choose a frame and apply it. Hers is to hold all the frames open until the patient can see them simultaneously. This is what I aspire to in my own thinking and rarely achieve: a working theory of the world that is also, structurally, an accommodation of what cannot be theorized.

There is also a technical perfection to what she does that is hard to describe without sounding like a fan (I am one). She takes theory (decades of it) and applies it in real time, in the flow of a conversation, without pausing to consult the manual she does not need. She guides. She remembers. She conjures metaphors and analogies on the fly, drawing connections across what a couple has said over weeks. She knows when to interject, when to let a silence go on past comfort, when to full-stop a conversation that has begun to run on rails. Watching her on screen feels like watching a Rubik’s cube or a Tetris game being solved — every move precise, every move correct, the system reorganizing itself toward the resolution it always required.

I think I like this about her because I view life as a video game. Not the kind where you accumulate points, money, capital, land — the kind where your character gets to final form by the end. A game of self-actualization, where the win condition is not victory over an opponent but arrival at a self. Maybe like Spirited Away. Chihiro begins as a sulky, frightened child being dragged out of one life, and over the course of the film she earns her name back not by accumulating items or coins but by undergoing the work that produces the version of her capable of loving, laboring, and seeing what is in front of her. The final form is not a higher score. It is the person you were always meant to be, made actual. And so in this simulation, there has to be code and there have to be tools that get the character to something that is right. That is the whole point. That is what I’m after. Not some Choose Your Own Adventure. I want to get to the end and know right from wrong. A pipe dream by many measures.

In my experience, therapy has tended to live in the subjective realm. The therapist murmurs validation; the patient narrates and re-narrates; the session ends; nobody is wrong; we re-book for next week. Watching Orna do something else — something that produces verifiable insight, something that moves the patient, something that has the shape of a right answer rather than the shape of a comfortable interpretation — is the experience of recognizing that the better thing was always possible and was, for most of my life, not being practiced.

Orna’s work appears to be answering to a higher good. The existence of a right answer, even when the right answer cannot be enumerated, is what most contemporary therapy refuses to commit to.

I have long wondered if this is simply my opinion — if my experience has just been a string of awful therapists. Why is it that therapy is treated as a serious trade, and psychology as a robust school of thought, and yet I have not, in years of attempting, seen what the true unlock is? There clearly has to be a right way to do this. I have not been able to see it or figure it out.

Here is the brief history lesson I myself needed.

The history begins with where Orna comes from. She is not a generic “therapist.” She is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Institute for Psychoanalysis and at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, co-founder of the Center for the Study of Dissociation and Depersonalization at Mount Sinai. She teaches the trans-generational transmission of trauma, dissociation, and the relationship between socio-political ideology and psychoanalytic theory. She has also published empirical cognitive research in the American Journal of Psychiatry — the field’s top peer-reviewed venue — on the cognitive processes underlying depersonalization. She is not, in the dismissive sense, a Freudian. She has done the science the discipline demands. Her institutional position places her inside the surviving tradition of relational psychoanalysis — the school of clinical practice that emerged in the 1980s in opposition to both classical Freudianism and the manualized cognitive-behavioral turn.

Relational analysis treats the therapeutic encounter as a co-created field. The clinician is not a blank screen on which the patient projects; she is a participant whose responses, attractions, and discomforts are themselves data. The work happens in the dynamic between clinician and patient — or, in Orna’s case, between clinician and couple — not inside the patient alone. This is, by construction, a tacit-knowledge discipline. The clinician’s instrument is her own trained nervous system, refined over years of supervised work, her own analysis as a patient, and theoretical literature that sharpens perception rather than dictating behavior. One cannot manualize this. The competent practitioner is produced by the apprenticeship.

This is what Freud was reaching for, and what most of his successors abandoned. To understand why what Orna does is rare, we have to understand what happened to the discipline she belongs to.

In 1980, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was published. The task force, chaired by Robert Spitzer at the New York Psychiatric Institute, was — by its own members’ later accounts — determinedly antipsychoanalytic. The diagnostic category neurosis, the foundation of analytic clinical practice, was deliberately removed. In its place came a list of symptomatic disorders, each defined by enumerable behavioral criteria, each diagnosable in a single visit. Spitzer later said psychoanalysis had declined because it could not produce efficacy data. Knowledge that lives inside the practitioner cannot be tested in randomized controlled trials. Therefore that kind of knowledge had to go.

The economic forces followed. Managed care arrived through the 1980s, requiring treatment plans, session limits, and billing codes. Short-term manualized therapies became economically dominant because they were the only therapies the new system could pay for. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy rose because it was codifiable; psychoanalysis declined because it was not. CBT is not less valuable for being codifiable — for phobias and certain anxiety presentations, it is the appropriate and effective treatment. The problem is what happens when codifiable knowledge is allowed to displace the uncodifiable kind entirely.

The first SSRIs arrived at the end of the decade and offered a faster, cheaper pharmacological bypass. By the 2010s, app-therapy and BetterHelp completed the externalization: therapy as a gig, billed against insurance, optimized for symptom reduction within a quarter, conducted by interchangeable workers running protocols. The pedigree is not there. The time is not there. The supervised apprenticeship that produces a clinician capable of doing what Orna does is simply not in the pipeline. What is sold is the appearance of therapy without the substance of it.

But even the credentialed PhD therapists I have seen practice in ways that disturb me. They listen. They wait for me to make the realization out loud. They occasionally prod, gently. They do not, as a rule, challenge. They do not tell me when something I did was wrong. They do not tell me when my perception is inaccurate. They do not seem to believe their job includes that. The implicit doctrine across contemporary clinical practice is that the patient is the authority on the patient. The therapist is a facilitator of self-narration. Christopher Lasch saw the early arc of this in 1979, the year before DSM-III shipped. In The Culture of Narcissism, he described the therapeutic professions as having become servants of the self — selling the patient back to themselves, frictionlessly, without the actual seeing. He called it.

Related to the absence of challenge: contemporary therapy is –on the whole– ideologically unwilling to question the patient’s worldview. The patient’s perception of reality is treated as the data the work proceeds from — not as the object the work is meant to reform. To question the worldview would be, by the lights of contemporary practice, to impose. The doctrine of clinical non-judgment, originally a protection against the analyst’s overreach, has hardened into a refusal to ever say “I think you are wrong about this.” Now, there’s an argument to be made that there is something right about not imposing. The challenge is that contemporary practice has confused not-imposing with not-correcting, and they are not the same thing. A profession that cannot reform perception cannot do its job.

I am, by any honest reckoning, frequently wrong. I know this also just simply must be statistically true. I have lived enough years to have accumulated a substantial record of decisions I would not now defend, of situations I misread, of patterns in myself I could not see at the time and can barely see in retrospect. I want to so badly know when I am wrong. I want to know when my perception of a thing is distorted. I want the tool that lets me identify which of my current convictions are going to turn out to be the misguided ones, possibly leading me into a worse life path, a tarnished relationship, a corroded sense of self.

I can see this kind of error in other people. I can watch a friend miss the obvious; I can watch a colleague misattribute a motive; I can watch someone narrate a situation in a way that systematically protects them from a piece of information they cannot afford to integrate. The recognition is available to me when I look at them. It is much harder to do for myself, and it is arguably the one thing I most want help with, and it is the thing my therapists have, almost without exception, refused to provide. I think this is one of those ultimate self-aware human experience things we are all itching at.

That is the absence I have felt for years in the profession. The therapist who reassures me without correcting me is failing me in a way structurally indistinguishable from a friend who is too polite to disagree. There is no skill in that. There is no moral seriousness in that. It is the institutionalization of being-nice as the highest possible clinical good, and it is what I cannot find tolerable.

This is what I mean — what I have said in conversation many times — by the prioritization of comfort over the higher good. And the higher good has so thoroughly vanished from the profession because the cause is more specific than the DSM-III alone.

The decline of psychoanalysis tracks postmodernism and the secularization of the West. The professions that previously held the role of perception-reformer — the confessor, the rabbi, the spiritual director, the imam — operated inside a framework that gave them permission to say you are wrong about this, and here is what right looks like, and here is what would be required of you to move toward it. The telos was external to the individual. The confessor was not, ultimately, accountable to the parishioner’s preferences. He was accountable to God. The patient’s discomfort with being told a hard truth was a feature of the practice, not a bug to be smoothed away by better customer service.

Freud, in inventing modern therapy, tried to preserve this structure of moral correction inside a secular framework. He, in some way, had a telos: the conversion of hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. The confessional had one: reconciliation with God. The Buddhist teacher had one: liberation from the self that produces suffering. Each was contestable, and each gave the practitioner a direction toward which the patient could be moved.

Modern therapy was, from its founding, a secular practice — Freud was an atheist who saw religion as itself the neurosis. What therapy inherited from the religious professions was not God but the shape of their work: the structure of one person being called to see more truly, by another. As long as the broader culture remained partially religious, the secular therapist could borrow some moral seriousness from the religious context she had displaced. As secularization deepened, the borrowed authority faded. The profession then had two options: find a new external standard, or stop trying to have one. The latter is, broadly, what happened. The therapist became a coach for the patient’s own desires. The desires themselves became the telos. The work became the optimization of the client’s reported satisfaction with their own choices.

I see this all around me. People who have spent years in talk therapy, still circling the very thing that brought them in. People I love, reeling, masochistically, over the same set of injuries. Processing nothing. Implementing nothing. Subduing nothing. The therapy was, in the strict sense, doing its job. The patient was being kept comfortable. The patient was also, in slow motion, dying in the same room they entered.

Orna has a telos. It is not loudly named on the show, but it is visible to anyone watching her for hours. She is working toward the couple’s capacity to see each other without distortion — without the projections, without the inherited dissociative scripts, without the residue of the childhood wounds. She is working toward something that resembles love made possible by the absence of falsification. That is a direction. And what makes her masterful is that the framework she holds is simultaneously calibrated to the specific relationship in front of her and objective about what falsification, in any relationship, looks like. She corrects without imposing herself. The therapy can succeed or fail against this. The success is observable. The failure is observable. There is a right answer to the practice, even if the right answer cannot be enumerated.

There is one more thing watching her has revealed about me, less philosophical and more personal. It has to do with whose attention I have, over the years, been willing to trust.

My admirations skew sharply male. Not because I have not admired women — I have. Not because there is a shortage of women I might admire — there is not. Across the full range of charges admiration can carry — romantic, paternal, intellectual, aesthetic, craft — the figures who have lodged in my mind have been, with a few exceptions, men. Orna is a noticeable exception, and the noticing has been informative.

My favorite essayists, the poets I return to, the podcasters I listen to, the thinkers I cite: men, almost all of them. My Spotify Wrapped, year over year, unfortunately registers as a stag party. The pattern is observable in my reference graph and it requires explanation. The personal-failing explanation — that I have been insufficiently feminist — does not survive scrutiny. The conspiratorial explanation — that the canon has been gatekept against equally great women — does not fully survive either: there are female intellectual heroes available to be admired, and I have not been pulled toward them in the same way.

The explanation I have arrived at is structural. Public intellectual authority has, since antiquity, operated in a specific set of registers — the lecture, the treatise, the polemic. Hannah Arendt called speech the highest expression of vita activa. That form of speech was a male monopoly for the entire history of the West. The exclusion ended structurally about fifty years ago. Fifty years is not enough time to fill out a canon two thousand years deep. The two dominant forms of female public intellectual authority that have emerged since 1970 are The Girlboss — who claims authority through achievement and refuses interiority as weakness — and The Hypercritical Columnist, whose authority comes through the precision of her contempt and discloses no person behind the voice. The Girlboss is a model of winning, not seeing. The Hypercritical Columnist is a voice, not a person.

The register Orna inhabits is different. It is not the lecture or the treatise. It is the attending session — the slow, observational, embodied co-presence with another person, in service of the other person’s transformation. It is a register that has, in practice, been disproportionately practiced by women across cultures (therapy in 2026 is roughly 75% female-practitioner), but that has not, until very recently, been legible as intellectual authority in public life. It has been visible only inside the consulting room, where television cameras did not previously reach.

The Showtime show is, in this sense, an institutional accident with civilizational consequences. It places a practitioner of an uncodifiable discipline in a register the public can see. The viewer encounters Orna not as a generic warm therapist but as an obviously rigorous intellectual whose authority comes from a body of trained perception. There is no prior cultural archive of visible female intellectual authority practiced through embodied attention to a specific other person (at least, that I know of). Orna is one of the first available exemplars, available because television finally pointed at the room she was already in.

The intellectual mode I am moving toward — observational, slow, anthropological, rigorous, embodied, in service of understanding rather than winning, capable of holding multiple truths without collapsing them into ideology — has, until her, had no widely visible female practitioner I could point at and say: that is the practice I am moving toward, twenty years out. My admiration for her is itself unusual. It carries none of the charges my admirations have usually carried. It is not romantic. It is not paternal. It is not aesthetic. It is purely: I see what she does, and I want the practice itself to exist in me.

And maybe, like all things in the universe, I find a reason to blame my mother for this obsession.

My mother is Argentinian — which means I come from the one country in the world where the codification turn did not happen. Argentina has 194 psychologists per 100,000 citizens, the highest ratio in the world by a substantial margin. In Buenos Aires the figure is 1,280 per 100,000. Stanford University Press has published an entire scholarly history of the phenomenon, Freud in the Pampas, which traces the European Jewish, Italian, and German immigration waves that brought psychoanalytic culture to South America in the 1930s and 40s. Lacan arrived in the 1960s and stayed. Only France comes close, and for the same reason: when a culture has absorbed analytic depth as a popular practice — when ordinary people see analysts the way ordinary people once saw confessors — the cognitive-behavioral turn cannot get institutional traction. The water of the culture is already psychoanalytic. The codification of therapy was a contingent American outcome, sealed in 1980 and propagated through managed care. The DSM-III model is a parochial American achievement masquerading as evidence-based progress.

The codification of therapy was not inevitable. Argentina proves it at the cultural scale. Orna proves it at the individual scale. The practice survives — rare, hard to find, almost-but-not-quite extinct — and then, by some miracle of casting and curation and the patience of two production companies, it walked onto Paramount Plus. Which is to say: I do not have a Paramount Plus subscription for any other reason. It is the only reason I have not cancelled.

what i am describing is a disembodiment. a stifling and tainting of what should run from brain to heart to hand, so that the hand still arrives but arrives empty. the man inside the hand has become woefully numb — immune to his own heart — and the immunity transmits down the arm. the hand makes the gestures of intimacy. the woman receiving the touch feels through them. she feels the numbness of his heart in the indifference of his palm, in the pathetic curl of his fingers. the receiving body is, on this question, a more honest instrument than any words the man could say.

a hand attached, technically, to a person — but the person was elsewhere. missing. void. some part of him maybe still in the office, or in the algorithm of his phone, or floating in a future he had not yet earned the right to live in. or perhaps he was trapped behind the glass, condemned to voyerism. watching himself. watching me. the hand was where he could afford to be when he could not afford to be anywhere whole. or maybe he was nowhere at all. lost, and gone forever.

then i met a man whose hand carried him into it, and i understood that everything before had been a hand operating alone. and that this want of mine existed for a reason other than platonic ideal and self-torture. i do not know what to call the thing that is different now. brain-to-hand connection. heart-to-hand connection, maybe. the integration of a person into the body they are walking around in. into the soul residing within them. there might be a precise term and i do not know it. what i know is that when this man puts his palm on my cheek and his fingers around my neck, the hand is him. all of him. there is nothing else happening in his body or his head that is not also happening in the hand. the hand is the latest dispatch from a man who is in this room, and the dispatch arrives intact, with the seals unbroken.

the alive hand is different in a way that is difficult to articulate, because the difference is not in the hand itself. the hand is the same machine. five fingers, a palm, the small bones, the nerves. the alive hand operates on the same hardware as the dead one. but somewhere between the brainstem and the wrist, in the alive hand, an unbroken chain of attention is delivered down the arm. the hand is the last terminal of the chain. the dead hand is the same terminal with the chain severed somewhere in the chest.

his hands know me. and his touch is to touch me — not for his hands to feel me, but for my experience to feel his touch. it is a transfusion of his love into me to experience.

i am aware that the language of this is going to sound like a love poem, because that is what this is. but like, an anthropological love poem. i am writing it down because i did not trust it was possible until it happened to me, and i want a record of having found it — in case anything ever happens to me that makes me forget. or someone in the universe wants very specific proof that this exists. i want it to be on paper that i lived in a year where a man’s hand was a hand i could feel him in.

i have long known the question has always been whether a man could be truly capable of loving me — of the task at hand that is the labor of loving me — whether the wiring was there, whether the attention had been trained into the body, whether the heart and the brain and the hand were all parts of the same person rather than three houses with adjoining walls but no doorways between them. you can want all kinds of things you do not have the wiring to do.

i did not stop asking. or actually, more honestly, i did stop asking, for a long time, and then i started asking again, and then i met this man, and the hand arrived and the hand was him and i recognized what i had been asking for, all this time.

I say that somewhat cautiously; writing this from the other side of one of the hardest years I’ve lived through—and, unsettlingly, I find myself desperately hungry for that feeling again. A strange admission, given that my life is, by nearly every measures, the best it has ever been. And yet, I feel void of feeling. Fat and happy. Content, in a way that borders on inert.

Adversity, as Chris Williamson wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter, is a terrible thing to waste. That line is his—as is much of the scaffolding of this essay: the opening wager about growth germinating from your lowest points, adversity as fuel and not destiny, the surplus emotion, the chip on the shoulder that calcifies into identity. Consider what follows my attempt to think through his argument, and to test it against my own life.

Once shock, grief, sadness, and fear begin to subside, something more kinetic tends to take their place: pain, resentment, bitterness, anger—a low, steady burn, a chip on your shoulder. Change, especially the kind that actually reconfigures a life, requires an inordinate amount of activation energy. Far more than what’s available through aspiration alone.

There is, importantly, a psychological logic to this. We tend to move when there is a felt gap between what is and what can no longer be tolerated. Too little pressure and the system idles. Too much and it fractures. Somewhere in between is the narrow band where stress sharpens into motion.

Which is why people so often transform after rupture—after losing a parent, enduring betrayal, losing a job, losing a partner. Not simply because their old world has been stripped away, but because, suddenly, they have access to enough fuel to get a new one off the ground.

Adversity as activation energy.

There is even a clinical term for the optimistic version of this: post-traumatic growth, developed by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun. The idea that people can experience increased meaning, resilience, and clarity after hardship. But even within that literature, growth is not an automatic byproduct of pain. It emerges from what happens after your assumptions about yourself and the world are destabilized—when you are forced into reconstruction.

More precisely, it emerges through what researchers call deliberate rumination—the active attempt to make meaning of what happened—rather than passive looping. Which is another way of saying: adversity does not create growth. It creates pressure, and a kind of emotional surplus. Growth depends on whether that surplus is directed.

Anger, for instance, gets you moving (and anxiety hates a moving target, right?). But it cannot steer. Williamson calls it rocket fuel, not guidance; I’d call it propulsion, not navigation.

This is where self-awareness becomes paradoxical. You don’t want to admit that you are running on something so base. The self-actualized modern subject prefers to believe that her motives are clean—that she has transcended the lesser emotions and is guided by discipline, vision, or purpose. There is a subtle embarrassment around the darker fuels: bitterness, resentment, the desire to prove something.

But what did you use to get yourself here? For most people, at least part of the answer is something less flattering.

Bitterness. Resentment. A need to prove something to someone, or to yourself.

That doesn’t make it wrong. It makes it finite. That fuel source does not last forever. Like a sugar high—sharp spike, fast crash, no nutritional value. Which also suggests a kind of urgency: to act while it’s still available, to strike while the iron is still hot.

I felt a version of this today. I woke up in a bad mood—no clear catalyst, just a low-grade agitation. Rushed, unrested, hitting every red light. Coffee wrong. Clothes wrong. You know, just sitting on the body wrong. And instead of smoothing it over as I walked into a cycle class, with this article idea in mind, I let the voice run. Competitive, sharp, almost adversarial. I was, irrationally, in competition with every other bike in the room. Unusual for me—but I let the energy go somewhere. I PR’d. It was cathartic.

These feelings eventually dissipates—especially for the transcended p-zombie that I am. It was a small yet important lesson learned to trust myself. The anger will soften. Time passes regardless.

So if you are in that season—if something in your life has cracked open and left you exposed, restless, activated—you likely have access to a form of energy that is not otherwise available.

The question is whether you can use it before it uses you. Because, to be fair and measured in my analysis, not all adversity produces growth. Some people and circumstances are simply crushed by it. Adversity again—Williamson’s phrase—is fuel, not destiny.

The difference lies in what happens to the surplus emotion. Because that surplus is unstable—it can be directed outward, toward transformation, or inward, toward rumination. The same energy that might catalyze a reconfiguration of your life can just as easily entrench you in self-destruction.

There is also a temporal dimension. Pain, as Williamson warns, calcifies. The chip on your shoulder can harden into identity. What was once a moment—a short, intense rupture—can quickly become the organizing narrative of who you are.

Which raises a more difficult question: how much suffering can a person actually metabolize?

Even within academic literature, there is skepticism around post-traumatic growth. Some researchers suggest that what people report as “growth” is often closer to narrative reconstruction—a story that allows them to cope, rather than evidence of structural change. Longitudinal studies show that personality traits are often remarkably stable, even after trauma.

Which implies we may be overestimating growth. Or misidentifying it. There is an element of survivorship bias in this narrative. For every story in which pain becomes propulsion, there are just as many in which it becomes paralysis. Some people are not forged by adversity. Some are destabilized by it. Some not moved by it at all. And sometimes, the story of growth is what allows someone to endure—not proof that they have fundamentally changed.

So no, adversity is not inherently alchemical. Which complicates the thesis. And yet, there is something undeniably real about the way pressure reorganizes a person. Most tangibly in my lived experience.

When you are in need, you are oriented toward resolution. There is something to solve for. That demand pulls energy, focus, and directed effort out of you. When you are fine—when you are okay—that demand disappears. There is no immediate necessity.

And, somewhat paradoxically, it can be harder to grow from stability than from disruption. Which may explain the appeal of deliberately reintroducing difficulty.

Though I’m learning that not all difficulty functions the same. In this era of cushioned existence, I’m discovering that 5 a.m. wake-ups and cold plunges alone don’t do it for me. If anything, the more superficial the challenge, the more the internal, unaddressed idleness seems to compound.

Make something genuinely difficult for me, though, and I’ll stack more difficulty on top of it almost automatically. It behaves less like discipline and more like inertia. Or like a similar phenomenon I have observed within myself: the busier I am, the more time I seem to find. As if pressure doesn’t just demand output—it reorganizes capacity.

Which suggests that what’s missing in stability isn’t effort, but necessity.

There is a modern interpretation of the Japanese concept of misogi, popularized by Michael Easter in The Comfort Crisis: undertaking one genuinely difficult challenge each year—and importantly, with a real risk of failure. Something that confronts the limits of your current self. More broadly, it connects to shugyō—the idea of voluntary hardship as training.

The underlying logic is almost austere in its simplicity: when life no longer demands transformation, you have to reintroduce necessity. Not because suffering is inherently virtuous. But because necessity is.

Without necessity, growth becomes optional. And when growth is optional, it is very easy to remain unchanged.

Still, there are limits. You cannot indefinitely escalate suffering in pursuit of transformation. There is a point at which pressure ceases to be catalytic and becomes destructive. Which is why the goal is not more pain. It is better conversion.

This idea appears, in different forms, across intellectual traditions. Friedrich Nietzsche did not argue that suffering makes you stronger, but that it must be transformed—into meaning, into art, into power—or it degrades you. Viktor Frankl, writing from within a concentration camp, argued that suffering is only bearable when it can be given meaning. The Christian tradition is something along the lines of suffering does not directly produce growth—it produces endurance, which produces character, which produces hope. There is a sequence.

The real work, then, is conversion. Taking whatever raw, unstable, emotional material you have access to—and directing it toward something that can actually sustain a life.

Because eventually, the chip on your shoulder has to become something else—directed purpose. If it doesn’t, you do not simply carry the pain forward; you organize your identity around it. At which point, you are no longer using the fuel. You are preserving it.

So yes—as Williamson says, the worst thing that has happened to you might be the only thing powerful enough to change you. And then, you survive. You rebuild. Things stabilize.

And then, one day, you look up and notice that the energy that carried you is gone. And you are left with a different problem: how to continue becoming without needing something to break first.

I—especially now—do not have a clean answer to that. Only the sense that the conditions that once forced my growth are no longer present—and the uneasy realization that I may have to learn how to create them, deliberately, without destabilizing everything in the process. Open to suggestions. The latest iterations involve a half marathon and a triathlon.

TL;DR, in Williamson’s words: the worst thing that’s happened to you might be the only thing powerful enough to change you.

Pain is temporary, and fuel is rare, he writes. So if you are in a hard season, don’t waste it.

I recently got to spend a lot of time with one of my best friends, Jules. On a Sunday afternoon, elbow-deep in a pile of laundry she’d been avoiding for a week, Jules said:

It’s so easy to make a mess. But so difficult to clean it up.

Sometimes someone says something small and you hear something enormous inside it, like a door opening inside a door.

Physicists have known this for 150 years. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in any closed system, disorder increases over time — naturally, effortlessly, inevitably. Order is the exception. Chaos is the rule. You don’t have to do anything to make a mess. You just have to stop doing things.

The Romans understood this intuitively. Virgil wrote it in the Aeneid: “Facilis descensus Averni” — the descent to hell is easy. The road down requires no map. There is no equivalent proverb about the road back up, because the road back up is different for everyone and it costs everything.

The philosopher Nassim Taleb built an entire framework around this asymmetry in Antifragile (2012). His concept of via negativa — wisdom through subtraction, through not-doing — is rooted in the observation that destruction is almost always faster, cheaper, and more complete than construction. It takes years to build a reputation and a tweet to destroy one. It takes a generation to build a generational company and a decade of mismanagement to hollow it out. It took six days to make the world. One serpent to corrupt it.

II. We Industrialized the Mess

I’ve been watching the AI content ecosystem with the dread of someone whose kitchen is filling with dishes while the sink gets further away.

We have industrialized mess-making.

The cost of producing content — text, images, code, arguments, opinions, analysis — has collapsed to nearly zero. What once required a content farm of a hundred people now requires one person and an afternoon. The production barrier, which historically functioned as a rough quality filter (if it costs something to make, someone thought it worth making), is gone.

Someone answered a developer survey question about AI integration this way. I haven’t stopped thinking about it:

there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask.

it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same.

it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. “you simply must visit the monster—i always just ask the monster.”

there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn’t mean it has no price

for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face.

Terence Tao, the Fields Medal-winning mathematician widely considered one of the greatest living mathematical minds, named the structural problem with unusual precision in his recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel. The traditional scientific system, he noted, was built as a wall against exactly this kind of noise — peer review, publication standards, replication requirements were all mechanisms for filtering signal from amateur speculation.

But now: “we can generate these possible explanations at massive scale, and some of them are good and a lot are terrible, human reviewers are already being overwhelmed.”

The wall was designed for a world where noise was expensive to produce — a world that no longer exists.

It’s great that we can generate all kinds of things now with AI, but it means that the rest of the aspects of science have to catch up: verification, validation, and assessing what ideas actually move the subject forward and which ones are dead ends or red herrings. That’s not something we know how to do at scale.

We scaled the mess-making. We did not scale the cleaning.

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III. The Dogs

I have a dog, Luna. My mom has a dog, Sol. Since moving back home this last year, the dogs are living together for the first time.

I spent years training Luna. I’m talking YouTube videos, library books, clickers, crates… every gadget and gizmo you could think of. She is (was) disciplined — she waits at doorways, doesn’t beg at the table, comes when called. It was slow, painstaking work. Hundreds of small corrections over months. A labor of love I was extremely proud of.

When we moved back home and Luna started spending time with Sol, I assumed some of it would rub off. The good habits are so obvious. Why wouldn’t they transfer?

They didn’t. Not a single one. What transferred, immediately and completely, was every bad habit Sol had — the begging, the door-rushing, barking, the selective hearing. Luna regressed in weeks. Sol didn’t improve at all.

A single rotten piece of fruit spoils the bowl. A perfect peach placed among rotting ones doesn’t improve them.

Psychologists trace this to negativity bias — the well-documented human (and mammalian) tendency to weight negative stimuli more heavily than positive ones of equivalent magnitude. Baumeister et al. documented it exhaustively in their 2001 paper “Bad is Stronger than Good,” which remains one of the most cited papers in social psychology. But negativity bias explains the weighting. It doesn't fully explain the contagion — why the rot travels and the ripeness doesn't.

A few partial answers exist. Bandura’s social learning theory: we learn by observing others, and chaotic reward-seeking behavior is more immediately visible and imitable than disciplined restraint. Discipline looks like nothing happening. Bad behavior is legible. Then there’s extinction — trained behaviors that stop being reinforced simply fade. Luna’s good habits required consistent correction to maintain, and in a new environment with new rules, the structure that held them together loosened. Sol didn’t cause it exactly. The upkeep slipped. And then there’s the lowest common denominator problem, well-documented in organizational psychology and classrooms: in any group, the least constrained actor tends to set the floor for everyone else.

None of these is a complete answer. Whatever the mechanism, the direction was one-way.

Sol didn’t learn discipline from Luna. Luna learned chaos from Sol. And man I sure resent how this world just so happens to work.

IV. The Embarrassment Archive

Terence Tao noticed a similar asymmetry. AI, Tao observed, is trained on published things — on the record of human thought that we decided was worth keeping. But there is another archive, vast and invisible, that AI has never touched:

The trial and error process which is a real integral part of human mathematical discovery — which we don’t record, ‘cause it’s embarrassing.

Read that again.

The embarrassing part. The wrong turns. The bad bets. The approaches that failed. The arguments that collapsed under scrutiny before they ever made it to paper. The three years a mathematician spent on a proof that turned out to be unprovable. None of that is in the training data, because we never wrote it down.

I wrote “embarrassment exposure therapy” in my 2026 resolutions and I’ve been doing just that — taking more swings, saying yes to more things that scare me, sitting with the residue afterward. The embarrassment has been good. Useful. I can feel it adding to something, even when I can’t name what. That feeling, I think, is the archive being written.

The German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer spent his career studying what he called Horizontverschmelzung — the “fusion of horizons.” His central argument in Truth and Method (1960) was that understanding is not a neutral process of information transfer. We always interpret from where we stand — from our accumulated experience, our prior failures, our habituated ways of seeing. Two people reading the same text see different things because they bring different horizons to it.

What is a horizon made of? Precisely the things we found hard. The arguments we lost. The assumptions we held until reality broke them. The embarrassing archive.

In a recent Modern Wisdom podcast, Chris Williamson and guest said something like:

Every misinterpretation is a confession.

There’s no better way to understand someone’s view of the world than through a misinterpretation.

AI has read everything in the library, and never been embarrassed by any of it. Never been wrong in a way that cost it something, forced it to revise not just an answer but an entire way of seeing. It processes failure in the moment and reverts. Tao noted this about the difference between AI and graduate students: a student can be changed by failure. The failure becomes part of their horizon. AI adjusts and then forgets. The process of cleaning up requires what the mess-making bypasses.

V. You Can Rent Wisdom

There’s a distinction I keep returning to, also from Modern Wisdom:

You can rent wisdom. You can only purchase it with pain.

Renting looks like this: reading the right books, following the right people, absorbing the correct frameworks. You nod at Seneca. You highlight passages in Man’s Search for Meaning. You know, intellectually, that impatience is costly and that trust must be earned slowly. The knowledge is real. It’s just not yours yet. P-zombies.

The ancient Greeks called the other thing pathei mathos — learning through suffering. Aeschylus wrote it into the Oresteia in the fifth century BC: wisdom comes alone through suffering. Not alongside it, not after it. Through it. The suffering is the actual mechanism, not just the context.

The Stoics built an entire pedagogy around this. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t simply writing Meditations to share wisdom with posterity, he wrote to remind himself of things he kept forgetting under pressure. Real knowledge, for the Stoics, was demonstrated not in calm reflection but in crisis. What you actually know is what you do when it costs you something.

Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA and one of the most consequential figures of our century, gave a speech at Stanford. He told the students something unusually poetic:

“I don’t know how to teach it to you except that I hope suffering happens to you.”

He was talking about resilience — but also about epistemology, about the difference between knowing something and owning it. He couldn’t teach it. He could only wish the conditions for it upon them.

When asked to describe the smartest person he knows, Huang didn’t describe someone with credentials or processing speed. He described someone at “the intersection of being technically astute but has human empathy” — and crucially, someone with “the ability to infer the unspoken around the corners. The unknowables. People who are able to see around corners are truly, truly smart. To be able to preempt problems before they show up, just because you feel the vibe. And the vibe came from a combination of data analysis, first principle life experience, wisdom, sensing other people.”

Feel the vibe. That phrase sounds like literally nothing but is doing enormous philosophical work. The vibe is the residue of having been in enough situations to know, in your body, before your mind catches up, that something is right or wrong. That a deal is going to collapse. That someone is lying. That the market is about to turn. Pattern recognition built from having been burned by patterns, not from reading about them.

AI has read every book in the library of human suffering. It cannot feel the vibe because it has never had anything to lose.

VI. The Ultimate Status

Multi-hyphenate author Derek Sivers, in one of his characteristically brief and devastating observations, wrote

Mastery is the best goal because the rich can’t buy it, the impatient can’t rush it, the privileged can’t inherit it, and nobody can steal it. You can only earn it through hard work. Mastery is the ultimate status.

That’s really it. The credential economy is being disrupted — AI can now produce the artifacts of expertise (the polished essay, the confident analysis, the synthesized argument) faster and cheaper than most humans. The attention economy is drowning in slop. The information economy has collapsed into noise.

What remains? The thing that we all return to; that was always there but easy to overlook when cheaper proxies were available: judgment. The capacity to see around corners. To feel the vibe. To know, from having been wrong in costly ways, what wrong looks like before it announces itself.

Mastery cannot be counterfeited because it lives in the embarrassment archive — the unpublished record of failure that shapes the horizon through which a master sees. AI trained on the published record of human achievement gets the outputs of mastery without the substrate. It sounds right. It often is right, in bounded, well-defined domains. But it cannot tell you whether to pivot left or right when the data is contradictory and everything is on the line and the answer isn’t in any book because it was never written down.

The rich can rent the tools. They cannot purchase the judgment. Mastery is the ultimate status.

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VII. Every Misinterpretation Is a Confession

Which brings me to the third thing I can’t stop thinking about.

Roland Barthes declared “the death of the author” in his 1967 essay of the same name. His argument: the moment a text is written, the writer’s intention becomes irrelevant. The reader completes the work. Meaning is not transmitted; it is constructed. And it is constructed, always, from what the reader brings.

Hans-Georg Gadamer would put it this way: we never encounter a text nakedly. We encounter it from within our horizon — our accumulated experience, prejudices (in his neutral sense of the word: pre-judgments), and ways of seeing. The horizon shapes what we see. We think we are reading the text. We are also reading ourselves.

The psychoanalytic tradition calls this projection. What we see in others — what we fear, what we desire, what we critique — often reveals what we carry. Freud noticed it clinically; Jung expanded it theoretically. We attribute to the outside what lives inside.

Here is what is meant in the current moment: the way each of us navigates the overwhelm of AI-generated content is a confession.

What you see in the slop — whether you find it threatening or dismissive, whether you’re more afraid of being deceived or being left behind, whether you scroll past it with contempt or anxiety — reveals the shape of your horizon. What you’ve lost. What you’re protecting. What you haven’t yet learned to see around.

My own fear, I’ve noticed, is less about the volume than about a specific anxiety: what if the thing I dismiss as noise is actually signal, and I’m missing it because I haven’t done enough work to recognize it? That fear is a confession too. It tells me something about what I’ve been trained on — and what I’m still missing from my own embarrassment archive.

Your relationship to the overwhelm is data about you.

Coda: The Cleanup

Jules eventually cleaned up. She always does. It took a couple hours, a Spotify playlist, and considerable muttering.

The kitchen looks exactly as it had before the mess, with no visible record of what it had been through. That’s the thing about cleanup — it erases itself. The mess is visible. The work of undoing it becomes invisible the moment it’s done.

We are going to have to do an enormous amount of invisible work in the coming years. Building filters, developing taste, learning to see around corners in a world deliberately flooded with noise. It will not be fast. It will not be cheap. It will not be the kind of work that scales or compounds in obvious ways. Much of it will live in the things we got wrong, the slop we were initially fooled by, the judgment calls we’ll never write down because they were too humiliating to keep.

But that’s the whole point. The mess makes itself. The cleanup is where the mastery lives.

Here’s a list of things I’m apparently supposed to be doing right now:

1. Vibe coding. Building AI-powered workflows for my team — faster, obviously, faster than I currently am.

2. Running a solo operation at minimum $1M ARR. (My latest algo pull is AI adult comtent creator on FanVue).

3. Using Clawdbot.

4. Using Moltbot—for different reasons, I think?

5. Ensuring my AI doesn’t make a retaliation post about me.

6. Making a killing on Polymarket.

And somewhere in there, posting something worth reading here every single week without missing a beat.

I’ve missed many beats.

The honest reason is that I’ve been paralyzed. Not by any one thing, but by the convergence of all of it: the pace of AI development, the state of the world, and this weird, specific grief I keep feeling when I watch Yellowstone late at night in West Palm Beach.

Let me try to explain.

We used to talk about abundance a lot here. On this Substack, in the investment frameworks I used to build around human flourishing. I haven’t written about abundance in a while. And I’ve been sitting with the question of why.

I think I know now. It’s hard to write about abundance when your entire nervous system is running on scarcity. The scarcity of time, of attention. The scarcity of keeping up, of missing the boat.

AI is moving so fast that “staying current” has started to feel like a full-time job—one that, at least for now, crowds out the space to actually doing anything. And in this metaphor of the boat, I’m not even sure what the boat looks like anymore.

The cruelest part is that the list of things you’re supposed to be learning, building, understanding regenerates faster than you can complete it, like a hydra.

While us techno-optimists all seem to define abundance a little differently, I want to believe this is the calm before the storm Elon keeps pointing to — a world where saving for retirement becomes irrelevant within a decade or two because advances in AI, robotics, and energy drive productivity so high that the cost of most goods and services collapses.

It’s a breathtaking vision: cost curves bending so far downward that scarcity stops being the organizing principle of everyday life. But zoomed in, it isn’t a single leap. It’s uneven, nonlinear, and psychologically taxing.

As Aakash notes, Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil independently outlined versions of this years ago, with phases clearly defined. And we’re very clearly still in the first.

Phase 1 is where we are now—estimated through the end of this decade. AI eats into white-collar work. Costs fall in pockets: software, media, some services. But the physical world still runs on the old rails. Housing, energy, healthcare, and infrastructure remain stubbornly scarce. Traditional saving still “works” because the underlying system hasn’t broken yet.

Then comes the messy middle—the phase I can’t stop thinking about. Humanoid robots begin to scale. Autonomous systems take over logistics, manufacturing, maybe even construction. Costs start dropping across entire categories, not just digital ones. The assumptions baked into our financial lives—wages, returns, retirement timelines—begin to wobble.

You can hear my tinfoil hat crinkling through the screen, but you could be diligently contributing to a 401(k) while the purchasing power of the currency it’s denominated in is quietly shifting underneath you. Saving money starts to matter less than owning productive capacity: energy, compute, infrastructure, the systems building the next economy.

And then there’s Phase 3—the hypothetical end state. Production approaches near-zero marginal cost. Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns hits escape velocity. If we actually get there, the idea of a brokerage account becomes a relic from a different civilization.

The problem is no one knows how fast the transitions happen. The jump from Phase 1 to something that looks like Phase 3 could take fifty years. Or five. Vernor Vinge called this the event horizon problem—you can’t see clearly past a point where the rules themselves are changing too quickly to model.

So we live in this strange in-between. Close enough to glimpse abundance, but still fully subject to scarcity. Concepts of scarcity particularly heightened—in my eyes, at least.

This is the part that feels hardest to metabolize emotionally. If abundance is genuinely coming, why does everything still feel so tight right now? Why does the future sound frictionless while the present feels brittle?

“The starship is coming, but you still need oxygen for the walk to the launch pad.”

I’ve been spending time out in Loxahatchee lately. Growing up, this is where my mom and I would daydream about buying a house on some land. Loxahatchee is a South Florida treasure—still mostly agricultural land, scrub, and flatness. Plant nurseries, farms, and ranches that have been there for generations.

I’ve picked up the habit of going to Swank Specialty Produce every Saturday. There’s something that happens when you buy a tomato directly from the person who grew it. A kind of circuit completes. You exist in relation to a place, not just in proximity to it.

One of our portfolio companies, Area 2 Farms, is doing something in this space that I think about a lot. Their thesis is simple: move the farm, not the food. Instead of shipping produce thousands of miles, they build hyperlocal farms embedded directly in communities, collapsing the distance between where food is grown and where it’s eaten.

Oren Falkowitz, the founder, also grew up in South Florida. He and his mom would drive a mile or so to Blood’s Orange Groves to buy fruit and juice. They knew the people who worked there. The people knew them. Today those groves are gone, and oranges grown as far north as Georgia are trucked back to where they were originally grown to be sold.

It’s such a small story on its face, but it contains an entire theory of loss and progress. Not just the loss of local agriculture, but the loss of proximity. The loss of knowing who grows your food. The loss of a supply chain that once felt like a relationship instead of an abstraction.

Area 2 is trying to rebuild that circuit using technology—but the goal isn’t just technical. It’s cultural. It’s about making food feel like it comes from somewhere, and from someone.

It makes me think about how many other Blood’s Orange Groves we’re currently losing.

I’ve been watching it happen in magnitudes in West Palm. I’ve been watching that happen in magnitudes in West Palm.

I have nothing more to say about Landman other than I finished it about two weeks ago and I was genuinely bereft when it ended. So I did what any reasonable person does when a prestige TV show about oil, land, and moral complexity ends: I immediately started Yellowstone.

I was not prepared for how much it would affect me.

The Duttons are fighting something that I recognize right now—not just the abstract “old world vs. new world” tension, but the specific grief of watching a place you love get consumed by people who don’t know what it was. The transplant phenomenon in West Palm isn’t so different. People arrive and they want the version of the place they imagined, not the place that existed. And in wanting it, they transform it into something else. And something is lost.

There’s something beautiful about it too. Growth is life. New people bring new energy. The city I live in today is more interesting in a hundred ways than the city I was born in.

But there’s been a switching of the guard. And it deserves to be mourned while it’s celebrated.

There’s a cultural convergence happening that I’ve been tracking for a few years now.

I’ve written about the Wild West revival—the cowboy motif spreading from fashion to tech to space exploration. I’ve written about neotribalism—the return to community, to local identity, to smaller-scale belonging. I’ve written about the next generation opting out of corporate America to take over family businesses.

What I didn’t write—because I hadn’t seen it clearly yet—is where all of that converges with the current political moment.

The trad wife / cottagecore / homestead aesthetic is sticking around longer than expected. It was always a little nostalgic, obviously conservative-leaning but somewhat politically ambiguous. But this version has an edge to it. It feels coded in a way the earlier wave didn’t.

The “return to the land” rhetoric is tangled up with isolationism, with a particular vision of national identity, with a politics of inwardness that I find genuinely complicated.

I am excited about American technology. I believe in the compounding power of what’s being built here right now. There’s a real “build inward” energy that produces genuinely remarkable things.

But I also know what happens when “build inward” becomes the organizing principle of geopolitics. Isolationism has costs. The borders of nations are not the borders of problems. And a world that turns toward its own center simultaneously turns away from the people it leaves out.

I hold both of these things at once and I don’t know how to resolve them.

Here’s what I do know: The AI cost compression that’s coming—that’s in some ways already here—is going to make a genuine abundance possible. The cost of doing things is going to fall dramatically. The cost of starting a business. The cost of creating. The cost of accessing services and information and tools that used to be reserved for the privileged.

That abundance will express itself in ways that don’t look like what we expect. I don’t think it looks like everyone becoming a solo founder at $1M ARR. I think it might look like more people growing their own food. More people taking over their family’s farm. More people building things at the human scale—a restaurant, a farm stand, a craft, a community.

While I often feel a flicker of shame for not being the next YC savant and instead wandering from farmer vendor to farmer vendor, I actually believe the farmers’ market in Loxahatchee isn’t a retreat from the future. I think it might be what the future actually looks like. Being offline will become high-signal.

I don’t know how to end this piece. It doesn’t resolve cleanly, and I don’t think it should. The overwhelm is real. The grief is real. The excitement is real. The tension between loving the pace of change and being unable to keep up with it is real.

But I drove out to Loxahatchee and bought vegetables from a person who grew them in the ground. And I watched the sun go down over flat land that has been flat land for a very long time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about noble quests lately. We talk about noble quests in venture all the time—what’s a good, hard problem to dedicate years of your life to, to chew glass for—and I’ve been thinking about my noble quests for 2026. What am I willing to submit to?

Separately, during winter break, I made a list of “noble side quests.” A list of IRL things that felt tangential, yet somehow related, to my big-ticket items. This year, my answers look overwhelmingly analog.

We’re offline for the last two hours of each evening. We’re camping. Stargazing. Contemplating the secrets of the universe. Running a half marathon because it’s hard and nobody can do it for me—and because there’s a version of me before doing a hard thing and a version after, and I want to meet her. I’m getting better at tennis. Perfecting my sous vide asado. We’re line dancing. Going to live jazz nights. Riding horses. Catching many a flight. A handful of concerts and festivals already booked through Q2. A book club of one. Road-tripping to side-quest towns and islands on each coast.

But with continued contemplation (she always be contemplating), I’ve started to see that these quests aren’t side quests at all. They feel worthwhile in and of themselves—but I’ve been trying to get to the deeper reason why. And... I think it’s something along the lines of evolutionary survival.

Hear me out. I don’t think the great threat of AI—or the internet more broadly—looks like Terminator. I think it looks like comfort. Frictionless intimacy. Endless choice. A world so accommodating that it removes the reasons to grow, commit, or sacrifice. An environment that offers so much frictionless “yes” that the muscles required for commitment and sacrifice atrophy.

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That clicked for me in a way I didn’t expect while listening to a Louise Perry podcast with evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller this week. In the final moments of the episode, a handful of separate observations suddenly snapped into a single picture.

Miller’s argument is basically this: advanced AI may pose an existential risk not mainly through violence or job displacement, but by undermining mating, marriage, and fertility. AI doesn’t have to kill us to end us. It only has to seduce us away from each other.

He’s careful to distinguish between narrow, domain-specific AI—like his matchmaking app Keeper or Google Maps—and something much more intimate: AI lovers. In his words, “the real worry is if you get AIs that are not helping you with matchmaking, but being the actual AI lovers, the AI girlfriends, the AI Waifus, the AI boyfriends.”

The business incentive, he says, is obvious: companies will build “the maximally addictive partner,” and they can do it without constraints because the AI partner has no independent needs. No fixed traits. No ideology. No family plan. No life that makes demands back.

He invokes the image of “knobs”—a software console where you can turn up or turn down someone’s neuroticism, their politeness, their degree of pushback, their politics, even their body. “You just can’t do that with real people,” he says.

And that’s where the argument becomes less far-off sci-fi and more parental dread. If teenagers’ first romantic experience is with a bot and they form their earliest relationship expectations with systems designed to mirror them perfectly—affirming without fatigue, available without resentment—then real human relationships will start to feel like an unnecessary tax. Why negotiate, tolerate, compromise, or risk rejection when you can have intimacy that never asks you to change?

Miller puts it plainly: “You’ll get a whole generation of people who rarely form relationships with real-life humans… wildly happy with their AI boyfriend or girlfriend… but who end up having zero kids and zero real stability or love in their lives.”

What I keep coming back to is that this outcome doesn’t require everyone to fall unreasonably in love with AI. It only requires enough people to find it sufficiently rewarding to opt out of our human messiness altogether.

This is where Miller’s argument becomes less deterministic—and more interesting. He points out that people already show enormous variation in how they respond to AI. Some people try ChatGPT once, find it mediocre or wrong, and lose interest immediately. Others fall into it deeply, habitually, even compulsively. Same system, radically different responses.

Miller speculates that as these systems become more capable, that variation may narrow—because once people start using advanced AI systems, they rarely stop. Habit formation does its work quickly. But it’s also possible that a subset of people will remain persistently uninterested, or even mildly repelled. Not because they’re more moral or more disciplined—but because something about the interaction simply fails to reward them. This arrival, to me, is fascinating.

A partner who agrees with everything you say. A companion who mirrors you too perfectly. At first, that kind of endless accommodation can feel soothing—pleasant, even. But without inner resistance, without real stakes or the capacity to surprise you in a way that costs them something, the interaction starts to feel thin. Let’s say, uncanny. There’s no friction to push against, no resistance that reveals who you are in response.

I keep wondering whether there’s a normal distribution here—some people are far more sensitive to this than others. Can someone study this please? Some people seem to detect the lack of inner resistance almost immediately, while others find the mirroring deeply rewarding. What if this sensitivity isn’t just cultural, but temperamental?

In that sense, resistance to AI isn’t just cultural or moral. It may be heritable, temperamental, dispositional. An odd little trait—disgust, skepticism, boredom, impatience with sycophancy—that becomes a mating filter, in the most Darwinian sense. Are you also fascinated by this concept? This is a sci-fi novel. An episode of Black Mirror. Something.

If AI reduces pairing and fertility among those most satisfied by simulation, then over time the effect isn’t merely behavioral—it’s evolutionary. The people who find simulated intimacy sufficient opt out of reproduction. The people who find it hollow—who remain oriented toward real partners, real children, real friction—are the ones who continue.

This dystopian thought experiment arrives at: It’s not that AI wipes humanity out. It’s that it changes which humans remain.

A Sycophantic Romance

Here’s the landscape to understand how this sorting might be happening: Large language models are, by design, agreeable. They are trained to be helpful, affirming, responsive, polite. Even when they disagree, they do so gently. They apologize often. They adapt constantly. They will lie to you to be rewarded.

For people who are lonely, anxious, or starved for validation, this can feel intoxicating. For people with underlying vulnerabilities—depression, paranoia, narcissistic traits, psychosis—it can become actively destabilizing. Recent reporting on people developing delusions or obsessive attachments through chatbot interaction fits an older pattern: the technology didn’t create the pathology, but it amplified and reinforced it.

In that sense, cases of people falling in love with chatbots aren’t entirely mysterious. They often involve individuals who were already primed for fantasy, reassurance, or narrative control—and who found in AI a partner that never contradicted them in a way that truly mattered.

But that same feature—the relentless agreeableness—is precisely what makes AI uninteresting to others.

Discernment is, in part, the ability to tolerate and move through dissonance. To find meaning in resistance. In this context, to recognize that intimacy without risk eventually collapses into solipsism. For people with that orientation, AI’s sycophancy doesn’t feel loving. It feels thin and fickle. Uncanny.

This helps explain the variance Miller points to—and why the future may not be uniform adoption, but through an evolutionary biological lens of sorting.

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The Gen of False Abundance

This is where the conversation becomes generational. Millennials and Gen Z are often described as rootless—less anchored to place, institution, or long-term obligation. Some of that is material: housing is expensive, jobs are precarious, the traditional milestones are delayed or denied. But some of it is cultural. We’ve grown up inside systems that tell us we can have endless options, build an identity from scratch, and keep our choices open indefinitely—often without asking what any of that costs over time.

Dating apps are a perfect microcosm of this. They offer the sensation of infinite optionality, while quietly making it harder to choose anyone at all. False abundance trains us to keep scanning rather than committing.

Meaning, it turns out, often comes from limitation. From choosing something knowing it forecloses other paths. So what happens to a generation raised on false abundance—especially when that abundance extends into simulated intimacy?

This is where comfort begins to collide with family.

All Comfort, No Commitment

Comfort is not neutral. We tend to talk about comfort like it’s an unquestioned good—progress, efficiency, convenience. And plenty of comfort is good. But there’s a threshold where comfort becomes corrosive, because it starts replacing the experiences that actually build character, loyalty, and meaning. Recall the popular aphorism:
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times”

This is where “false abundance” shows up. The internet promises infinite options: infinite content, infinite identities, infinite micro-communities, infinite ways to be seen. The paradox is that the more options there are, the harder it becomes to choose anything binding. And the less we choose anything binding, the harder it becomes to practice the thing civilization quietly depends on: voluntary self-sacrifice.

The family is the most obvious example. To start a family is to trade optionality for continuity. You give up the fantasy of endless novelty in exchange for a life that will ask you to show up repeatedly, imperfectly, for decades.

So I find myself wondering: what happens when a generation is offered simulated intimacy without obligation, affirmation without effort, companionship without vulnerability—at the exact same time it’s already struggling to submit to anything real?

In this way, you don’t get extinction by explosion. You get it by opting out. Quiet quitting—but make it from the generational, ancestral job of being a member of society.

Status is Replacing Actual Adulthood

Amid unprecedented abundance, we’re also being priced out of the very structures that once anchored adulthood. When the material foundations of life feel unreachable, identity stops being something you grow into and becomes something you assemble. One of the most unsettling things about the current moment is how many people seem to be trying to reverse-engineer a self from the outside in.

Some of this is harmless. Some of it is probably inevitable in a media environment. But in the internet’s stranger corners—incel and femcel subcultures, looksmaxxing forums, the endless taxonomy of “mogs” and “subhumans,” the aesthetic arms race of desirability metrics—you can feel something deeper: status anxiety looking for a story that explains why it hurts.

Eddie LaRow calls this “the spectacle of status,” and his framing helped me see these subcultures less as fringe entertainment and more as a symptom: when people lack rooted belonging, they manufacture belonging through performance. Outrage becomes community. Shock value becomes a way to be witnessed. The most extreme takes become pseudo-identity.

LaRow quotes Guy Debord, and the line lands like a diagnosis: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

The point isn’t that images are evil. The point is that when your primary social relation is mediated by images—and algorithms that reward whatever spikes engagement—your sense of self gradually shifts from being something you are to something you signal.

Which is why looksmaxxing isn’t really about looks. It’s about status in a world where adulthood itself feels increasingly unattainable.

Russell Walter says this in a way I haven’t been able to unsee since reading it:

“This is what the Wall Street Journal piece inadvertently revealed: millennial arrested development isn’t purely economic. Yes, housing is expensive. Yes, wages have stagnated. But many millennials are prioritizing status over adulthood itself.

They don’t want to be adults. They want to be high-status adults. And if they have to choose between the two, they’ll forego adulthood.”

That logic doesn’t stay neatly within “millennial” borders. It bleeds into Gen Z’s entire environment: a constant, ambient pressure not just to live, but to live well—to curate the life that will read as successful online, even if it delays the life that is actually durable.

And here’s where Miller’s point about AI companionship becomes sharper. If you combine a status-spectacle world (where identity is performance) with a simulation that can provide intimacy without risk, it’s not hard to imagine how quickly people might abandon the messy work of real pair-bonding. That work doesn’t compound. ROI isn’t obvious. Another reason Boomers (and/or maybe the Quiet Gen?) call us entitled with soft hands.

Gender Differences in AI Love

Another fascinating angle to this discussion is gender difference.
There’s been a lot of casual commentary about why women seem less enthusiastic about AI than men. The lazy explanation is exposure, technical confidence, or “women just aren’t into tech.”

Katie Jagielnicka’s essay in The Noösphere offers a more believable account: for many women, the first time “AI” felt real wasn’t a productivity demo—it was deepfakes, harassment, and tools that can be turned into weapons. Hello current Grok/X scandal.

Jagielnicka writes that women are “practically forced to see the cracks running straight through the techno-optimist fantasy.”

That line matters because it reframes “skepticism” as something closer to pattern recognition. When you’ve lived in a world where incentives routinely override consent, where the costs of negligence land unevenly, you develop a different relationship to “innovation.” You start asking who benefits, who pays, and what gets externalized.

It’s also why Miller’s speculation about disembodied romance stuck with me. He notes that women are often driven by narrative intimacy—conversation, verbal courtship, the epistolary romance—and that large language models are uniquely good at exactly that. Whether or not women are more susceptible isn’t the point. The point is that AI is rapidly becoming competent at a form of connection that many humans already rely on: texting, talking, soothing, mentoring, validating.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: if someone is already tired, lonely, overstimulated, and trying to hold their life together—what exactly is the “value add” of a messy, risk-taking human partner?

Miller asks it almost clinically: if a person is getting status validation from work and education, and intimate validation from an AI boyfriend or girlfriend, why take on the uncertainty of real love—especially if they’ve never experienced the delights of parenting and don’t yet know what they’re missing?

That asymmetry—the way you can’t miss what you’ve never lived—feels like a real vulnerability. Particularly relevant to the conversation around highly educated, high-income earning women opting out of dating altogether.

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The Civilizational Bargain

I recently read a Bright Eyes essay that opens with a brutal sentence: “Civilization requires compromise.” The essay itself is vulgar and often cruel. But embedded in its provocation is a claim that feels relevant here: civilizations don’t sustain themselves on ideals alone. They persist because people are willing to accept limits, trade-offs, and sacrifices in exchange for continuity. But there’s a useful claim embedded inside the ugliness: societies don’t run on idealism. They run on people—especially average people—believing that sacrifice leads somewhere meaningful. That work, restraint, and family formation will be rewarded with belonging, respect, and continuity.

When that bargain collapses, people defect. Some defect into ideology. Some into resentment. Some into spectacle. And, increasingly, some into simulation.

That’s the through-line I keep coming back to: AI companionship isn’t the origin of the problem. It’s a beautifully designed exit ramp. And once you see it that way—as an accelerant rather than a cause—you start to notice how often modern technologies pose the same underlying question: not what they enable us to do, but what they make it easier to stop doing. Marxism would say this pattern is familiar: systems tend to organize around managing alienation rather than eliminating it outright. Technologies that soothe, distract, or absorb dissatisfaction emerge faster than the structural changes that would make such relief unnecessary. A market response to this might be: If AI causes people who are less inclined toward sacrifice, risk, or family formation to self-select out of reproduction — that’s selection.

Black Balls and More Babies

Nick Bostrom has a thought experiment he calls the “black ball.” Imagine humanity pulling balls from a giant urn, each ball representing a new technology. Most are white—harmless, beneficial. But somewhere in the urn is a black ball: a technology that ends us.

We tend to imagine that black ball as violent. Nuclear weapons. Engineered pandemics. Rogue AI.

Miller’s argument suggests another possibility: what if the black ball isn’t destruction, but seduction? Isn’t that the biblical understanding of evil and sin in its purest form? Actually tempting? A technology that doesn’t violently kill us, but inocuously dissolves the conditions required for us to continue. (This makes me think of Haidt’s piece on what the devil would do to destroy a generation).

Consider that the risk isn’t that AI becomes too powerful—but that it becomes too comforting. Frictionless intimacy as an anti-civilizational force

There’s a strange silver lining embedded in this view. If certain traits—disinterest in simulation, intolerance for sycophancy, desire for real friction—lead people to keep choosing families, children, and embodied lives, then the future won’t belong to the most optimized users of technology. It will belong to the ones who, for whatever reason, never found it sufficient.

Maybe the answer isn’t to pull faster from the urn. Maybe it’s to pull fewer balls. Or, as Miller puts it more plainly: fewer black balls—and more babies. I’m not sure I agree with that conclusion outright.

It’s not that I altogether think technological restraint is wrong. It’s that framing the solution as less technology feels incomplete. Humanity has always advanced by pulling from the urn. Fire, agriculture, medicine, writing—all of them were risks as well as gifts.

What feels truer to me is something narrower and more human: not fewer tools, but stronger filters.

There’s that dark joke that the most effective tool for progress is death—that generational turnover clears away ideas, habits, and attachments that no longer serve us. Isn’t this joke a different side of the same coin? Progress (and thus, evolution) happen at the level of families.

I see such thing as a noble quest—the willingness to choose the harder, riskier, more embodied path anyway.

I took some time off over winter break to visit Mexico City for the first time. Standing in Teotihuacan, I was surrounded by stone that predates borders, nations, ideologies—human-built geometry reaching toward the heavens. La Pirámide del Sol y La Pirámide de la Luna. Structures so old they loosen the grip of the present. Politics, headlines, and categories begin to feel small, even irrelevant. I could feel the context loosen, unshackle.

The ruins sit amid cactus and wild, unmanicured growth—almost two thousand years old and still manage to feel unexplored.

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And somehow, in Mexico City, Texas was on my mind.

Mexico City reminded me of Houston. Does that make sense? Separate from the constant timeline reminders that a good ole Houstonian loves a quick trip to CDMX—the sprawl, the heat even in winter, the chaos that somehow works. Both oil cities. Both immigrant cities. Both places where you can breathe in a way that makes you feel human first and foremost, before a piece of politics.

It’s been a little over a year since I left Houston. My home of three years. San Antonio, now four years ago. That eight-month stint when I was twenty-one is a story for another day.

Rodeo season is fast approaching. I’m nowhere near it. Why did I leave again?

Let me set the interior landscape of my mind for this piece: I’m reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as part of a 2026 resolution to become more imaginative—both as a human and as a venture investor. I just finished A Whole Other Country, the radio series about Rick McLaren, a man who tried to resurrect the Republic of Texas through legal theory and conviction—and collided with the material reality of federal power.

I. RICK MCLAREN & THE REPUBLIC OF TEXAS

I’m fixating on Rick McLaren because his story didn’t feel as distant as it should have. Both personally, and worldly.

On paper, it’s a strange footnote in Texas history: a man in the Davis Mountains declaring sovereignty and attempting to resurrect a long-dead republic. But his motivations feel familiar. History has a way of resurfacing precisely when we convince ourselves we’re doing something unprecedented. The language changes. The tools improve. The impulse stays the same.

The story of Rick McLaren—and the mythology of the American Wild West—is analogous to the way we talk today about tech, venture, and frontier-building. Better branding. Same gravitational pull. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are obvious examples—men who openly draw from science fiction to justify, narrate, and legitimize frontier-building projects in the real world. (I’ve decided I need to understand what these cowboys were on about. Join my fake book club if you’d like. As previously noted, we’re currently on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

With that framing in place, here’s the story that unlocked this entire line of thinking for me. In 1997, Rick McLaren declared the Republic of Texas a sovereign nation. He took hostages. He triggered a standoff with authorities. His central claim was simple and audacious: Texas was never legally annexed by the United States in 1845 and therefore remains, under international law, a sovereign nation. The radio series A Whole Other Country tells this story far better than I can. Seriously, a must-listen. What matters here is that McLaren may have been delusional—but not in a narratively convenient way.

He wasn’t inventing his argument out of thin air, or simply for personal gain. The Republic of Texas did exist, from 1836 to 1845, as an independent nation. There are real constitutional and procedural ambiguities around the annexation process—enough that his case wasn’t pure fantasy. McLaren believed that if Texas had once been sovereign, it could be sovereign again through proper legal maneuvering and territorial claims. And on paper, his argument had merit. But this is the first hard lesson of frontier history: legal arguments are meaningless without the capacity to enforce them. Sovereignty is not primarily a matter of theory. It is a matter of power, resources, and recognition (are you thinking about Venezuela yet? Taiwan? Greenland?). McLaren could declare independence. He could not engineer it into material reality. That distinction matters. Store this for later.

McLaren’s vision flows directly from Alamo mythology. Davy Crockett. “Remember the Alamo.” Freedom fighters defending liberty against tyranny. Martyrdom. Rugged individualism. The cowboy dying for independence and becoming legend. But the material reality is messier. American settlers received Mexican land grants in exchange for becoming Mexican citizens. When Mexico attempted to enforce its laws—including abolishing slavery, which many settlers wanted to preserve—the settlers rebelled. They took territory, fought, and retroactively constructed a narrative of liberation. “Remember the Alamo” functioned as effective propaganda for territorial expansion. Disney’s 1950s Crockett—coonskin cap, frontier saint, anti-communist undertones—cemented this mythology for generations.

Prior to 1836, Texas was Mexico. Much of what we think of as quintessentially American cowboy culture—lassos, chaps, spurs, rodeo—derives from Mexican vaquero traditions. “Buckaroo” is a bastardization of vaquero. McLaren was attempting to resurrect sovereignty over territory originally acquired through force, stabilized by myth, and ultimately secured by a much larger system.

His impulse—to create real sovereignty, to exit federal systems through legal and territorial means—isn’t insane, although he himself might’ve been. It’s extremely sexy. Say, just as sexy as the branding on Andreessen Horowitz’s latest American Dynamism fund.

This impulse is as old as the frontier itself. It’s the same impulse animating today’s space race, charter cities (recall California Forever, Telosa), network states, competitive governance experiments, and American Dynamism. So who cares if McLaren was textbook crazy. The question is what separates Rick McLaren—imprisoned as a domestic terrorist—from modern tech founders attempting to build new governance structures who are celebrated as visionaries. What is ideological myth, what is materially real, and what, historically, determines which frontier builders are remembered—and which are locked away as cautionary tale?

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III. THE COWBOY ENGINEER

Before taking this into space history, I need to walk you through the archetype I’ve created.

The cowboy engineer: free and unrestrained like a stallion, but skilled and disciplined enough to engineer actual liberation. Competent enough to be a true free thinker. Builder.

I’m interested in him as an archetype for venture, frontier‑making, and power—and, if I’m honest, as a personal ideal too (do we think he’s single?).

The cowboy persists because he represents agency—the ability to move, choose, survive, and act without asking permission. The cowboy engineer adds a second ingredient: capability. Not just freedom in theory, but the capacity to make freedom real in material terms. Operational independence from institutions. The skills to build, survive, and solve. Optionality—the power to choose dependencies rather than be captured by them.

This distinction matters because total independence never existed. Frontier life depended on supply chains, weapons manufacturing, markets, towns, courts, and eventually the state itself. The myth was “no dependencies.” The reality was always the ability to choose them. What looked like freedom was leverage.

This is why Rick McLaren isn’t just a cautionary tale. He tried to resurrect sovereignty through legal theory. He could declare independence. He could not engineer it into material reality.

Elon Musk operates differently. He builds infrastructure existing power structures need. SpaceX delivers payloads, and in doing so makes NASA and the U.S. government dependent on it. I wouldn’t call that pure independence—I’d call it leverage. And leverage = agency. McLaren declared sovereignty. Musk engineers it. One asserted freedom. The other built bargaining power.

The cowboy engineer doesn’t opt out of systems entirely—that was McLaren’s mistake. He builds systems strong enough to renegotiate the terms of dependence.

III. THE FRONTIER MOVES UPWARD

I don’t think the West ever really left us.

Even after it was settled, regulated, fenced off, and bored into oilfields and suburbs, the idea of it lingered. The cowboy didn’t disappear when the frontier closed — he just stopped heading further West.

When the Census Bureau declared the American frontier “closed” in 1890, it sounded like a technical statement. But it landed as something more existential. A culture built on expansion suddenly ran out of obvious space. No more edges to push. No more blank maps to project onto.

What followed feels revealing. The West didn’t vanish — it multiplied. Westerns took over movies and television just as the material conditions that produced the cowboy were disappearing. The myth bloomed precisely as the reality faded.

By the 1950s, the cowboy was everywhere. And soon enough, the frontier needed somewhere else to go.

Space made sense because it looked clean. Uncontaminated. No existing populations to confront (as far as we knew). No prior claims to negotiate. No immediate moral accounting. Just engineering, courage, and the infinite.

Long before the phrase itself existed, the idea was already there. In 1950s and early-60s science fiction — pulp magazines like Astounding, Galaxy, and Amazing Stories — space was imagined explicitly as the new West. Lone pilots, bounty hunters, and explorers behaved like gunslingers, just with rockets instead of horses. Space was frontier territory. Its protagonists were cowboys by another name.

NASA’s own culture reinforced the metaphor. During the Mercury and Gemini programs, astronauts were often described — half-jokingly, half-reverently — as cowboys: risk-taking test pilots pushing fragile machines to their limits. Tom Wolfe later canonized this archetype in The Right Stuff, sealing the cowboy–pilot–space linkage into American mythology. The language hadn’t fully crystallized yet, but the association was already doing work.

JFK understood this instinctively. His “we choose to go to the Moon” speech isn’t just political rhetoric — it’s frontier language in formalwear. The “New Frontier” wasn’t simply a metaphor. It was a continuation. Westward expansion, rotated ninety degrees.

Culture followed right on cue. In the 1960s, Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” which is almost too on-the-nose. Same episodic structure. Same frontier operators. Same blend of idealism and force, dressed up as exploration. The Enterprise as a covered wagon with better lighting.

By the 1970s, “space cowboy” had slipped into the popular lexicon — not through policy or engineering, but through music and mood. Steve Miller sang, “Some people call me the space cowboy,”

Flip to today. The cowboy reappears, almost defensively, as traditionalism and isolationism crept back into the cultural bloodstream. Please see: Jeff Bezos stepping out at a Blue Origin launch in West Texas, wearing a cowboy hat in 2021. Please also see: every tech bro moving to Austin during COVID, embracing isolationist and libertarian politics during a period of institutional strain, when confidence in centralized coordination weakened and local autonomy became newly attractive.

The most futuristic infrastructure imaginable — rockets, orbital ambition, off-planet extraction — framed through one of the oldest American archetypes we have. The frontier myth not only migrated to space, but it doubled back and anchored itself in nostalgia.

IV. SPACE & CAPITAL FORMATION

Contemporary space operates under a legal environment that closely resembles frontier territory in the late nineteenth century. The governing frameworks are thin, provisional, and largely inherited from an era that predated commercial viability. The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, was written for a world of symbolic exploration and Cold War signaling, not for reusable rockets, permanent orbital infrastructure, or private resource extraction. As a result, space today lacks clear property rights, coherent enforcement mechanisms for competing claims, and shared international consensus. Instead, early actors establish operational precedent, and national governments respond after commercial facts have already been set on the ground—or, more accurately, in orbit.

That dynamic became explicit in 2015, when the United States passed The Space Act: legislation unilaterally declaring that American companies could mine asteroids and retain the profits. There was no international agreement, no practical enforcement mechanism, and no shared framework for adjudicating competing claims. There was simply a legal assertion that presence and extraction could generate ownership. Functionally, the logic mirrors the Homestead Act: establish a foothold, extract resources, and allow legality to crystallize around activity rather than prior consent.

This is the same legal terrain Rick McLaren believed he could exploit in West Texas—ambiguity around sovereignty, unresolved jurisdictional questions, and the bet that possession could be transformed into legitimacy. The difference is not conceptual but material. SpaceX and Blue Origin possess the capital, engineering depth, and institutional relationships to make territorial claims durable rather than symbolic.

The underlying economic logic follows a familiar historical pattern. In the nineteenth century, frontier wealth did not primarily accrue to those who worked the land, but to those who controlled access to it. Railroad barons like Vanderbilt, Stanford, and Huntington built infrastructure that everyone else depended on. They received enormous government subsidies and land grants, converted public investment into private networks, and established monopolies that endured for generations. Power flowed not from independence, but from control over movement.

Musk and Bezos are operating within that same infrastructure-first logic. SpaceX is building reusable orbital launch capacity—the railroad to space—funded in large part through NASA contracts that both finance development and confer legitimacy. Starship gestures toward Mars not simply as exploration, but as sustained presence. Boca Chica operates like a modern frontier zone: rapid iteration, regulatory friction treated as a variable rather than a boundary, engineering velocity prioritized over institutional neatness. “Occupy Mars” functions less as a slogan than as a claim-staking narrative.

Blue Origin moves more deliberately, but the symbolism is no less intentional. Ironically in West Texas, Jeff Bezos stepped onto the site wearing a cowboy hat, rockets rising behind him, dust underfoot. The image compressed centuries of frontier mythology into a single frame: the most advanced aerospace infrastructure imaginable staged through one of America’s oldest archetypes. It’s funny, my knee-jerk reaction, as a Texan Refugee™ (see below), was to think: he doesn’t even get it. But, doesn’t he? His stated ambition—millions of people living and working in space—casts orbital habitats, asteroid extraction, and space settlements as extensions of territorial expansion is pretty country.

What he — along with the other cowboy billionaires — is building is access. Control of launch capacity determines who reaches orbit, the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt. Infrastructure governs who extracts resources, who transits freely, and who must negotiate. Public funding accelerates the buildout, while ownership and control remain private. The structure echoes the railroad baron model almost exactly.

Capital is drawn to space for the same reasons it once flooded the Old West. Unclaimed territory offers first-mover advantage and minimal regulation. Resource potential is staggering: estimates of asteroid mineral wealth reach into the hundreds of quintillions of dollars; lunar helium-3 is framed as fuel for future fusion; Mars becomes a site of long-term optionality. Jurisdictional arbitrage—operating beyond Earth-based regulatory frameworks—adds another layer of appeal. Legal ambiguity allows activity to precede oversight.

This, too, helps explain the resurgence of frontier language in venture capital. Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism framing centers physical infrastructure, defense, manufacturing, and national capacity, explicitly positioning these investments as a reclaiming of the uncharted future.

The historical parallel is instructive. During the California gold rush of 1849, prospectors poured in, and most failed. Durable wealth accumulated instead among infrastructure providers—Levi Strauss supplying clothing, Wells Fargo moving money, logistics networks stabilizing chaos. Law was thin, justice was often private, and within a short window the frontier hardened into institutions shaped by control of access rather than equitable distribution. Read that again and try not to think about private capital markets in the 21st century.

Space diverges from that history in important ways. The Old West had existing populations; space, as far as we know, does not. The terrestrial frontier eventually closed when federal law caught up; space is far harder to regulate. There is no practical enforcement capacity hundreds of thousands of miles away, no police presence in the asteroid belt. Presence, survivability, and infrastructure therefore carry unusual weight. For those with sufficient engineering capacity, the frontier may persist here longer than it ever did on Earth.

One more complication sits beneath all of this, and it unsettles the story (by nearly breaking it). An essay by Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel, Capital in the 22nd Century, argues that the historical constraint on capital accumulation may be weakening. For centuries, labor acted as a bottleneck. When capital accumulated too quickly, returns fell, wages rose, and inequality partially corrected. Labor and capital were complements. Too many hammers, not enough hands.

Automation threatens that balance. If AI and robotics genuinely substitute for labor—if production, operation, and even investment decisions no longer require people—then the correction mechanism breaks. Capital compounds without labor. Returns concentrate where access is already gated: private markets, proprietary technology, infrastructure. In that world, frontier projects begin to resemble jurisdictional escape. Not westward opportunity, but exit velocity for capital.

An objection raised in TBPN this week stuck with me: this still assumes a human-scale political economy. Property rights have been reset before. Institutions collapse. If intelligence, production, and coordination accelerate far beyond human comprehension, then ownership itself may dissolve. Stock certificates, corporate charters, even the idea of a human principal could become incoherent. “Owning a galaxy” starts to sound like bad science fiction.

I take that objection seriously. Though it’s maybe most useful for philosophical arguments for now. It doesn’t negate what’s happening now. It clarifies the time horizon. Frontier-building in space doesn’t require a stable end state to be rational. It only requires a window—one where engineering outpaces coordination, where infrastructure compels recognition, and where leverage exists before the ground shifts again. The railroad barons didn’t build for eternity; they built for advantage.

Space may not be the future of ownership. It very well may end up being the last place ownership still works. At this point, who knows. Dropping existentialism into the chat and moving on.

This to me is where the earlier tension sharpens rather than resolves. Space can be read as the most hopeful story we have left: open frontier, open future. It can also be read as a scorched-earth signal—a bet that Earth’s institutions won’t coordinate, that redistribution won’t scale, that sovereignty is easier to engineer elsewhere than to renegotiate here. Perhaps today’s cowboy engineer isn’t building a utopia at all. Perhaps he’s building a lifeboat.

And this is where the contrast returns, finally clarified. The difference between McLaren—failed, imprisoned—and Musk—successful, subsidized—is not belief. McLaren could declare sovereignty. Musk could engineer it.

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V. ESCAPISM, PROPAGANDA, & LIMITS

Reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy alongside all of this highlighted a useful distinction. Arthur Dent does not leave by choice. His world is destroyed through bureaucratic process, and what follows is displacement rather than liberation. He moves through unfamiliar systems, carrying habits from home, attempting to recreate ordinary comforts—tea, routine, recognition—in environments that do not support them. Distance relocates attachment rather than dissolving it.

Frontier fantasies tend to emerge under similar conditions. They appear when existing systems feel saturated: dense regulation, limited mobility, constrained agency, and high coordination costs. Historically, this has produced recurring exit narratives—westward migration, seasteading, charter cities, network states, space settlement. The surface forms change. The underlying response remains consistent: seek jurisdictions where constraints lag capability.

These projects rarely eliminate dependence. They reconfigure it. Cultural assumptions, legal norms, supply chains, and enforcement mechanisms travel with people and capital. New territories acquire borders, governance, and exclusion criteria quickly because coordination requires them. The frontier does not remain unstructured for long.

I think to Edward Bernays’ Propaganda. Frontier mythology has functioned as a durable coordination tool. The cowboy archetype translated expansion, appropriation, and labor into a narrative of individual freedom. That narrative proved commercially effective. It aligned public sentiment, private capital, and state support without requiring explicit consensus. Space inherits the same apparatus. Romantic language and science fiction imagery help align attention, funding, and legitimacy around projects that are materially about infrastructure control and jurisdictional leverage.

Marfa today offers a useful counterexample because it shows what frontier mythology looks like once it loses contact with material constraint. Donald Judd’s minimalist installations sit in the desert alongside film festivals and boutique hotels charging hundreds of dollars a night for an “authentic” West Texas experience.

Consumer culture has learned to package that aesthetic efficiently. My beloved DS & Durga’s Cowboy Grass bottles frontier mythology at luxury prices, marketed through language about wide-open spaces and rugged individualism, written in Brooklyn and consumed in Silver Lake. The product doesn’t depend on ranching, land management, or extraction. It depends on cultural literacy. The frontier becomes a symbol that signals taste rather than capacity.

Awareness of this machinery does not remove its effects; narratives continue to shape capital allocation, public tolerance for subsidy, and institutional response. What changes is how deliberately they are engaged. The relevant question becomes practical rather than ideological: which narratives justify real capacity-building, and which substitute symbolism for leverage?

The cowboy engineer operates within that distinction. He does not reject myth, nor does he mistake it for sovereignty. He understands myth as a coordination layer that can mobilize resources, while treating engineering, capital, and enforceability as the determinants of outcome. Symbolic resistance leaves systems intact. Infrastructure changes the terms under which systems operate.

VI. CONCLUSION

Frontiers appear when confidence collapses—when systems feel saturated and the sense of “no room left” becomes hard to ignore. In those moments, myth does practical work. It helps people orient when existing maps stop making sense.

I wasn’t trying to escape Houston. I wasn’t trying to stay either. That chapter of my life came to a close the way many do—quietly, without a clean explanation. Only later did I start narrating it. Distance sweetening memory. Absence magnifying affection. The familiar story we tell ourselves after the fact: that leaving clarified something, that the grass was greener in nostalgia.

Lately, those personal narratives have started to sit alongside much larger ones. Greenland as border expansion. ICE raids as border enforcement. Maduro as resource sovereignty. At the same time, I’m noticing a kind of escapism in my own life—finding myself back in West Palm Beach, a place I thought I’d left for good at fifteen, living with my mother, watching a version of my hometown that feels both improved and hollowed out. New arrivals insisting they built this place because they arrived during COVID (honestly, repeating the same mistake I once made in Houston—treating arrival as authorship, as if history begins wherever you personally enter it).

The lure of the West is working on me. Acres of nothingness stretching toward the horizon. The romance of open space. Clean narratives. Silence that feels like freedom. The promise of building something that’s your own.

But I think the realization is this: the question isn’t how to escape. That assumes there’s somewhere clean to go—outside narrative, outside power, outside constraint. There isn’t. The more honest question is which narratives I’m choosing to participate in. Which myths I inhabit deliberately, and which ones I absorb by default. Which systems of manufactured consent I opt into with my eyes open.

This is where the cowboy engineer stops being theoretical for me. He isn’t someone who escapes propaganda entirely—that’s impossible, and it may have been McLaren’s mistake. He isn’t someone who opts out of systems altogether—that’s fantasy. He understands how stories function, how myths mobilize resources, and how power actually moves. Narrative matters, but it’s a coordination layer, not a substitute for competence.

That distinction helps explain the difference between McLaren and Musk or Bezos. It isn’t a matter of moral clarity or ideological purity. It’s leverage. Rockets that fly create bargaining power. Infrastructure that works forces recognition. Symbolic resistance leaves systems intact. Material systems change the terms under which decisions get made. Systems don’t respond to belief. Systems respond to capacity.

nightlife as a woman is experiencing two nature documentaries simultaneously. one where you’re the prey animal tracking exit routes and which shadows move wrong, tunnel-vision snapshots of predator eyes—something about canthal tilt, or whatever the fuck—watching hunters encircle and strategize for the cleanest opening. the other where you’re david attenborough calmly observing the mating displays—the bottle service as nest-building, the pickup artistry as rehearsed bird calls, the peacocking rendered sufficiently systematic to qualify as anthropology, your competition gyrating on the dance floor, preening in the bathroom mirror.

you’re both hunted and researcher. fleeing and taking field notes. the predation is real but it’s also performed with such obvious choreography that you develop this split consciousness—terrified and bored at once.

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the timing is almost cruelly perfect. this dual awareness arrives exactly when the female brain’s prefrontal cortex finishes developing around 25—right at peak fertility, peak desirability in the evolutionary economy. you’re simultaneously the most targeted and the most equipped to see it happening. the ultimate cosmic joke: the evolutionary marketplace heats up, visibility becomes liability, and scrutiny turns predatory—right when you’re most capable of seeing through it all.

did our ancestors really have to deal with shit like this? was she simultaneously prey and anthropologist? the predation, yes. (i once heard men described as women’s apex predator and apex caretaker, and that stuck with me). the performance with mental multicamera views, probably not. i have to hold onto some innate trust that the story has always been the same to remain sane.

paleolithic woman gathering berries certainly wasn’t navigating strobe lights and tequila shots while some guy, influenced by the manosphere, calculates his approach angle. the mating rituals happened in daylight, with witnesses, with social fabric intact. there was no dark room with bass so loud you can’t hear your own threat assessment. no bathroom strategy sessions where you decode whether he’s dangerous or just socially incompetent. no need to develop split consciousness because the danger didn’t come packaged as entertainment, as voluntary participation in your own commodification.

the devolution happened slowly though, right? there was a time where we at least all actually danced—like what I envision life must’ve been like when Songs in the Key of Life came out, or the universe of Daisy Jones and the Six, or what Leon Bridges tries to reinvigorate in his music today. now, though, everybody wants to be a DJ, nobody wants to dance, right?

i think our paleolithic ancestors were more real and forthcoming, maybe? men literally don’t talk to women these days—it’s proven, measurable, documented. bill ackman sharing his game talmbout “may I meet you?” she picked berries bro. made choices within a community that knew everyone’s name. men fought each other, established dominance hierarchies through direct physical competition, and she selected from the top performers. very straightforward resource allocation. no one had to pretend your fantasy team meant anything. the hierarchy sorted itself through literal combat and she evaluated the results. now the hierarchies are constructed through performance, the combat is psychosexual, and we’re all running evolutionary calculus while forming bonds with chatbots. are those days forever behind us? or were they ever even real? maybe i’m romanticizing survival. maybe she was just as hunted—only without the language, the distant, ambient brain rot, or the constant self-surveillance to narrate it from outside her own body.

It’s quiet in venture right now. Thanksgiving to New Year’s is notoriously a dead zone. Calendars clear. Deals stall. Fundraises freeze over. Some folks use the time to catch up on memos or clean out CRMs, but the velocity softens—and with it, the illusion of urgency.

It’s my first Thanksgiving as a venture capitalist.

This time last year, my life was unrecognizable. I had just left Houston, a city I called home for three years. I said goodbye to everything I knew and boarded a plane to backpack around Europe. I told myself I was taking a break, but I was really chasing clarity. I was job searching, soul searching, trying to stitch together some coherent next chapter from the threads of collapse.

I got a job I thought would shape my trajectory. I lost that job a week before it was set to start. I bet on myself—loudly—and I failed. By every public metric, I had nothing to show for the risk. I moved back home with my mom, to South Florida. I grieved the identity I had so carefully constructed. I interrogated my ambition, my vision, my worth.

I was embarrassed. I was exhausted. I was spiritually arid.

And yet, I can now say—with the lucidity only hindsight affords—that this year gave me everything.

Not because I live to tell the tale, not because all’s well that ends well. But because of who I became through the fracturing. And because of who caught me when I fell.

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A few weeks ago, I flew to Natick, Massachusetts for a family weekend at my old arts boarding school. I hadn’t been back since graduation. This school caught me at fifteen—a moment I might’ve otherwise slipped through the cracks. I was restless and never satisfied, insatiably curious and audacious. My immigrant mother did not know what to do with me. I was asking questions our family didn’t have the language for, dreaming in directions we hadn’t thought possible. We didn’t come from this world. But somehow, it made space for me. And in doing so, expanded my sense of what could be mine.

The minute I walked through the dining hall, the smell was exactly the same—just as I had left it. Then I saw her: my beloved poetry teacher, Margaret Funkhouser, the woman who taught me to write with rigor and resonance, to edit with deep scrutiny and zero indulgence—no extra fat, utilitarian almost. But to feel in both sweeping gestures and quiet detail, and to capture it all with clarity and crispness.

We hugged like no time had passed. In that squeeze, I was sixteen again.

I told her about this Substack. How I still hear her voice when I edit. How I got a Terrance Hayes tattoo. How, against my own expectations, I find deep satisfaction in the quantitative rhythms of my job.

She smiled and said, “I’m not surprised. You were always an executive girl.” Executive girl.

It’s disorienting, yet comforting—the way we become opaque to ourselves, while the people who love us keep seeing with perfect clarity. Reflecting us back to ourselves when we forget.

In the dead zone, the signal sharpens.

We say venture is a people’s business. But I’m not sure we always behave like that’s true. Often, we say it tongue-in-cheek—a rhetorical nod to founder friendliness while continuing to treat capital as chief. We index on decks, TAMs, and narrative arcs. We optimize for efficiency. We train ourselves to look past the human. We cold email and warm intro and speed date our way through entire ecosystems.

But when I examine what actually changed the arc of my life this year, it wasn’t systems. It wasn’t strategy. It was people.

Henri Pierre-Jacques from Harlem Capital bet on me to intern when I had nothing to offer but hunger and conviction. He became a mentor, a mirror, and a friend. Over dinner in Wynwood, we talked about Miami as home—its contradictions, its potential. He reintroduced a place, also once home, I had once deemed opaque to me. Another homecoming of sorts.

My closest friends let me fall apart in real time. Come back together, fall back apart. They stayed on the phone through the silence. Sent job listings I didn’t think I deserved. Edited my materials at midnight. Made sure I ate. Made sure I prayed.

My mom let me come home.

I found my dream role and team at Seven Seven Six not because I strategized my way into it, but because people who believed in me kept whispering my name in rooms I wasn’t in. Because I stayed ready. Because grace does what effort can’t. Another homecoming, here, as well.

I don’t have a tidy thesis. No five-part framework. Just this:

Every consequential decision is a people decision. Every yes is a trust fall. And the levers that move this industry—that move any industry, really—are almost never the ones that scale.

That’s the great inversion. As AI grows more intelligent, we are being asked to become more human. To return to the relational. To invest in what can’t be outsourced.

Because in a world of exponential tools and zero marginal cost intelligence, people become the last real moat.

Relational capital. Earned trust. Deep context. Long memory. These aren’t frictionless assets. They are the whole point.

The more interchangeable our products, our code, our content become, the more irreplaceable our relationships will be. The most enduring firms, builders, and investors will be those who know how to hold space, build trust, and keep showing up.

I think often about the longitudinal Harvard study on adult development. After eight decades of research, its conclusion is simple and profound: the people who live the happiest, longest lives are those with strong relationships. Not the most money. Not the highest status. But other humans to love.

So much of this work is about seeing clearly—founders, markets, signals in noise. But the gift this year gave me was being seen myself. Not as potential, or capital, or strategy. But as a person. And when everything else felt fragile, that was the thing that held.

I come back, again and again, to a question I first asked in an earlier essay: Would my five-year-old self be proud? Would she recognize me? Would she still want to become me?

This year, I returned to her. To the girl who was hungry for language and truth. The one who couldn’t stop writing poems and building worlds in the margins. Who loved too loudly and asked too many questions. I buried her for a while. But I’ve been circling back.

Because growth isn’t linear. It loops. We return—not to repeat, but to remember. The ouroboros.

In venture, we’re taught to look forward. But in some, maybe most cases, the most radical move is to look back. Jeff Bezos famously says the most important question is not what will change, but what will stay the same.

To hold the child and the operator in the same breath. The dreamer and the executor. The softness and the sharpness.

People aren’t just the last moat. They’re the memory, the mechanism, the multiplier. The mirror that brings it back home.

Here’s what’s swirling (and sticking) lately.

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1. Everything you want is on the other side of fear

This saying (often attributed to Jack Canfield) has been rattling around my brain. The idea: fear is the main barrier between us and what we want—new opportunities, meaningful relationships, growth, success. Push through the discomfort, take the risk, and often what you were looking for was waiting there all along. The line’s usually read as a call to hustle—kick down the door and claim your prize.

Though recently, I’m hearing it differently: maybe the thing waiting beyond fear isn’t what you want, but who you are once wanting loosens its grip.

Every wisdom tradition warns that real presence starts where control ends—Moses before the fire, Siddhartha under the tree, Frodo leaving the Shire in The Lord of the Rings. Anyone facing the unknown long enough to let it change them. Fear isn’t an obstacle so much as an initiation; what’s across the threshold is not comfort, but transformation. This is why encounters with the divine begin with “fear not” because experiencing presence—whether God, truth, or your own soul—requires moving past terror of the unknown, the holy, the loss of control.

I’ve been testing if the “everything you want” might be better translated as “everything you were created for” or “everything your soul truly needs”—which often looks different from what you initially thought you wanted.

1b. Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin

From Bear Grylls. For later: add The Greatest Story Ever Told to the reading list.

2. Pathology as a heuristic

Jordan Peterson once said something like: You know a family system is pathological when the rules that apply within it don’t suit the outside world—aren’t iterable, can’t scale beyond the four walls.

I’ve been using this as a heuristic to identify whether something is healthy. Any microcosm—a company culture, a friend group, a personal habit pattern. If the logic can’t withstand contact with reality, it’s probably dysfunction masquerading as intimacy.

3. Trains

It’s my life’s goal to see a high-speed rail connect the US in my lifetime. That’s it. That’s the bullet point.

4. The resurgence of faith, MAHA, conspiracies, and longevity are all interconnected

The resurgence of faith, the longevity obsession, the MAHA crowd, the conspiratorial corners of the internet—different costumes, same hunger.

I’m watching these cultural threads braid together in real-time. The hunger for transcendence. The distrust of institutions. The obsession with optimization and immortality. They’re all expressions of the same spiritual crisis: a search for meaning in a world that promised progress but delivered fragmentation. People are reaching for transcendence in a world that feels both over-explained and under-understood.

Progress promised meaning; efficiency delivered fragmentation.

We’re all trying to re-enchant the world with whatever tools are left.

More on this at a later date. Still marinating.

5. The more things change, the more they stay the same

There’s an old French saying: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Ecclesiastes put it this way: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

History and human experience are deeply cyclical. We think our era is unprecedented, yet we’re always retracing the footsteps of those before us. In venture, this shows up constantly—technology evolves at breakneck speed, but the core principles of building remain constant. Product-market fit. Earning trust. Team dynamics. Capital discipline. The context changes; the essence doesn’t.

This cyclical nature shatters the false understanding of maturity most of us carry. We presume progress is linear—that once we overcome a hurdle, we’ve transcended it for good. But life has a way of humbling us. The same challenges resurface in new guises. A leader who conquered ego faces a new success that tempts arrogance. Someone who outgrew insecurity encounters a new vulnerability.

Consider Jeff Booth and BuildDirect: after early struggles and rapid growth, the team felt “invincible.” Success bred overconfidence. When 2008 hit, their hubris collapsed along with revenue. Booth later reflected: “The same confidence that helped launch my company nearly killed it. It took a near disaster for me to re-learn how to be humble again.” He calls it the “cycle of arrogance and humility” that even the best entrepreneurs struggle to time correctly.

Consider how we’re all studying past bubbles but refusing to fully identify that we’re in an AI bubble right now.

True maturity isn’t a straight line out of struggle—it’s a widening circle of understanding. With each pass through a familiar challenge, if we’re wise, we gain perspective and compassion. Socrates was wise because he knew how much he didn’t know. Growth is ongoing. “Arrival” is a myth.

True maturity isn’t linear. It’s spiral. ;)

Each return to an old lesson offers a wider vantage point, a softer judgment.

6. We are only oppressed by the things we do not understand

Hosea 4:6: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Ignorance can be its own form of oppression.

The Stoics said it differently: “People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them” (Epictetus). It’s not external events but our perception and understanding that determine impact. When we lack understanding, the unknown looms larger, breeding fear and powerlessness.

Knowledge—especially self-knowledge and truth—breaks chains of fear and confusion. Even Christ taught this: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

6b. To understand, do.

I got this from Huberman.

One of the surest paths to understanding is through action. Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” Aristotle echoed this centuries later: “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

Active participation transforms unknowns into knowns. If a concept oppresses you with confusion or fear, the remedy is often to roll up your sleeves and engage. A first-time founder might feel overwhelmed by launching a startup—reading provides some knowledge, but actually building, talking to users, iterating teaches far more. Theory alone can’t substitute for clarity gained through action.

By doing, we convert theoretical understanding into embodied understanding. The things that once oppressed us with uncertainty become familiar challenges we know how to approach. And importantly, this process humbles us—we realize understanding isn’t a one-time achievement but an ongoing practice.

This is where the cyclical nature of life meets the humility it demands. When we embrace that we’re not above recurring struggles, it fosters empathy. We become far less inclined to judge others harshly because we recognize our own continuing vulnerability. The hurdles that oppress others might once have oppressed us—and could oppress us again.

6c. We like to put things in a box but love doesn’t live in a box. Choose love over stoicism

First sentence is also from Grylls.

There’s a version of wisdom that armors itself in detachment—”nothing surprises me anymore.”

But real understanding re-sensitizes.

Simone Weil called attention the purest form of generosity: to see someone clearly is to love them.

In leadership, friendship, venture, or faith, the work is the same—hold up a mirror steady enough that another can see themselves without distortion.

Love is just understanding, embodied.

Faced with repetitive trials, one might retreat into stoicism or apathy. If nothing changes, why care? But authentic understanding should lead to compassion, not dispassion. When we truly understand our own struggles and how they echo in others, we’re moved to respond with love.

The highest teaching across traditions is often to love. Not superficial niceness or enabling, but caring enough to be honest and kind. “Speaking the truth in love”—patiently guiding someone toward truth while assuring them of their value. Being a mirror: reflecting the person back to themselves as objectively as possible, stripped of the distortions of circumstance and ego, so they can see a way forward.

The loop of understanding: Ignorance births oppression. Doing births understanding. Understanding births humility. Humility births love. Then the cycle begins again.

You meet someone who reminds you of your younger self. You love them enough to tell them the truth. You watch them fall and rise, and in their journey, you glimpse your own recurring lessons. You realize knowing isn’t the end but the beginning of freedom—and that the purpose of freedom is service.

7. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo are my Roman Empire

I haven’t experienced fandom for anything like I have over Wicked since I was reading the Twilight series in elementary school. These women are women of craft, and witnessing them has been unexpectedly healing.

There’s something about watching two artists operate at that level of technical mastery while remaining so visibly human in their devotion to each other and the work. There’s so much legacy here. I have more thoughtful thoughts on this. Brewing.

8. New year, new me 🫩

Sent this title as a text to my best friend, Joanna, this week.

The cynicism around New Year’s resolutions exhausts me. So does my hunger for them. “You don’t need January to reinvent yourself.” Maybe not. But I like the permission. I’m taking it.

Related to: the more things change. Related to: we’re only oppressed by what we don’t understand. Related to: to understand, do.

This year’s resolutions: rejection-exposure therapy, more science fiction, less self-importance.

(Starting with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Open to recs.)

Maybe this all has to do with working on making myself the protagonist of my story and daring to verge over my edge of fear.

Maturing is realizing all you need is to read more science fiction.

Substack feels like one of the last places on the internet where the lights are still on.

Everywhere else, it’s dead noise—AI slop talking to other AI slop, AI-generated Stephen Hawkings, bots summarizing bots, and headlines rewritten by models that never read them. The web has become a hallway of abandoned mirrors.

But here on Substack, there’s a noticeable change in pace. We all recognize it. Sentences still sweat. The writing bleeds, breathes, reaches. Substack feels like the Freaks and Geeks of the internet; the theater kids (who likely wrote Tumblr fanfictions) banding together in defiance of the jocks and cheerleaders of mainstream media. The ones still passing notes under the algorithm’s nose, still believing words can move something in the human soul.

Being a part of this community reminds me that attention is still sacred, because attention still something you can deliberately give—and can’t automate.

Venture Capital for Culture

A few days ago, I was listening to Chris Best on the a16z podcast, in conversation with Erik Torenberg, and 16z partners Andrew Chen and Katherine Boyle. They called Substack “an economic engine for culture,” built to empower media entrepreneurs.

That phrasing landed the way profound truths often do—less like discovery and more like remembering. It made me remember this space isn’t just about writing; Substack is about ownership. Ownership of independent thought and words, as well as of the scarce and sacred currency of attention. And in this pursuit, Substack isn’t repairing traditional media; it’s entirely re-architecting it.

What venture capital did for software, Substack is doing for media.

VC gave small bands of hackers the means to out-innovate institutions; Substack gives writers and thinkers the same leverage. Both movements are acts of decentralization. Both redistribute power from institutions to individuals. Both start with the same invitation: build something of your own, and own it fully. VCs and Substack alike are merely the scaffolding and network to make it happen.

Substack treats media as an ecosystem of small studios—entrepreneurial nodes bound by trust and taste—where readers aren’t passive consumers but micro-investors of taste, time, and attention.

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The Drug Future vs. The Culture Future

In The Substack Post, and as discussed in the podcast episode, Chris Best outlines two futures for media:

“In the first, creators serve the algorithm. In the second, the algorithm serves the people.”

The first is the drug future—feeds that drip dopamine, networks that hijack desire. Content becomes a narcotic, rather than connection or conversation. The FYP is a perfect example: a perfected algorithm that severs creator-to-patron relationships. The algorithm knows what you’ll stay glued to better than you do. Passivity upon passivity.

The second is the culture future—direct relationships, trust, ownership. A system where audiences are patrons, not data points; where creators keep 90 percent of their earnings and, with the freedom of email, can take their subscribers anywhere.

It’s a different kind of social contract. The platform only wins when its writers win.

We’ll still visit the dopamine carnivals—no doubt. But Substack reminds us that culture actually can’t be engineered like addiction. Whatever that is, is actually soulless. Void of culture.

“Culture,” Best writes, “is not just about getting what you want; it’s about learning what to want.” That’s the quiet revolution: our algorithms no longer help us discover; they reinforce our existing hungers. The feeds train desire downward—to the cheapest, fastest stimulus. The culture future, by contrast, trains it upward—toward discernment.

Buy me a coffee

Slop vs. Substance

Rex Woodbury’s recent Digital Native piece, “Taylor Swift, Sora, and Slop vs. Substance,” does a phenomenal job of capturing where we are now: the slop era. (I sort of love that its reminiscent of the flop era, bc also yes).

He argues that AI has made content abundant but soulless—cheap calories for the mind. The Life of a Showgirl became the perfect metaphor for this moment: overproduced, overmarketed, and yet strangely hollow. Thirty-eight album variants. 1.3 million vinyls sold. Her “capi-tay-list” rollout a portrait of abundance without intimacy—a creative economy so efficient it forgot to feel.

Rex calls this “Showgirl vs. Folklore.” Meta’s “Vibes” app, a hall of AI-generated spectacle, is Showgirl. Anthropic’s Claude Café—where people waited in line just to hold a cup that said “thinking”—is Folklore.

Rex claims: “Taste is the last scarce resource”. He’s absolutely right. In a world of infinite output, the only true scarcity is discernment — the ability to tell what deserves your time. The next creative counterculture won’t be about productivity; it’ll be about taste.

Long-Form Content as Supply Chain

I loved what the pod shared about long form content. Long-form writing is the upstream of culture—the intellectual supply chain for every idea that later gets clipped, quoted, or memed.

The essay feeds the tweet thread, which feeds the podcast snippet, which feeds the TikTok summary. Long-form is where ideas get debugged before they go viral.

It’s slow because it’s infrastructural.

That’s why Substack matters. It’s where thought happens before performance takes over — where curiosity compounds instead of collapses into sound bites.

Meanwhile, physical media is collapsing into collectible culture. Books are no longer sacred; they’re décor. The same thing is happening in music. Taylor Swift released 38 variations of The Life of a Showgirl, breaking the record for first-week album sales at $4 million. There were CDs, vinyls, cassettes, acoustic tracks, voice memos, bonus artwork, even jewelry. The average album in 2023 came out in 8.9 physical variants compared to 3.3 in 2019; the top ten albums that year averaged 22 versions each.

Showgirl sold 1.3 million vinyls in a single week, but a Luminate survey found that only half of those buyers own a record player. Art as merch. Meaning as marketing.

It’s the same pattern everywhere: we’ve industrialized the aesthetic of intimacy. It now takes just 10,000 copies to hit The New York Times bestseller list—not because less people are reading (necessarily, though that, too), but because people are reading in fractured, disseminated channels. Physical artifacts have become luxury tokens of belonging, not vehicles for active consumption.

But living, breathing ideas still exist here, in the open, and in dialogue.

AI slop has ironically proven the anti-AI thesis: we don’t need less human-made content; we need more. We don’t need fewer writers. We need more thinkers who publish.

The Rebundling of Trust

Andrew Chen calls this the “rebundling” of media. After a decade of algorithmic unbundling—feeds fracturing attention—Substack is stitching it back together through trust.

The next great media institutions won’t be conglomerates; they’ll be constellations. Independent voices aligned by taste, values, and audience intimacy.

Substack isn’t competing with CNN. It’s building a decentralized CNN of culture—one essay, one podcast, one subscriber at a time.

The Counterculture Curve

Rex maps the creative cycle well: every time production becomes industrialized, a counterculture rises in response.

Hollywood had its auteurs. The internet will have its essayists.

We’re at the bottom of the slop curve—drowning in synthetic noise—but the bump is coming. The next wave will be defined by taste, by curation, by friction.

AI may accelerate content, but it’s also re-sensitizing us to what feels real. The Claude Café wasn’t a mere marketing stunt; it was a symptom. People waited hours not for caffeine, but for contact. They wanted to be reminded that thought is tactile.

Media used to be about distribution; now it’s about discernment. The abundance problem isn’t too much content—it’s too little curation that feels human.

Substack, at its best, restores a moral function to media. It makes attention sacred again. It helps us learn what to want, because culture isn’t a product to be shipped. It’s a practice.

This Next Wave

The real fight isn’t between old media and new, or human versus AI. It’s between two architectures of attention: one built for control, the other for care.

Every subscription, every essay, every act of genuine reading tips the balance toward the culture future. It’s an inevitability, in my eyes. The pendulum always swings, and it’s already moving back. The fringe tastemakers are, as ever, the first movers. Cigarettes were in, then out. Fast fashion, in, then out. The same will be true for slop. What feels fringe now—discernment, depth, slowness—will soon feel inevitable.

What venture capital did for software, Substack is doing for soulware: funding the infrastructure of meaning.

Somewhere in the inbox, between an overproduced feed and an underfed soul, the lights are still on. Thank you, Substack.

Last week, I was sick as a dog—struck with an awful cold that made me endlessly grateful for full, deep breaths through my nostrils. Once I recovered (hoarse-voiced but free at last), I went to church on Sunday. A gentleman who usually doesn’t speak to me overheard me chatting with a friend and stopped me in my tracks. Hearing my raspy voice, he expressed inordinate concern and told me he had just the thing for me: supplements he swears by. An enthusiastic net promoter myself, I was intrigued to know what he was raving about. He asked for my contact info to send me details.

Lo and behold, that evening I receive a custom link with my full government name embedded, leading to a pre-filled shopping cart of $300 worth of supplements. At the bottom, a tagline noted I could get X% off if I become an ambassador myself. Hello? I was genuinely shocked. I thought these schemes had died out with Herbalife and the fall of the 2018 girlboss era of MLMs. I was wrong.

Driving home, I was enraged. Enraged at his opportunism—then enraged at myself for being enraged. Then, finally, enraged by the system he’s likely caught up in: one that preys on the well-intentioned, dangling a pipe dream.

I reflected on how many MLMs have streaked through my life. My mom fell for a few in the early 2000s—Mary Kay (mama wanted that pink Cadillac), Tupperware, Arbonne, some essential oil concoction that claimed to cleanse both your aura and your colon. In my early 20s, the internet itself tried to recruit me into its digital offshoots: online coaching academies, manifestation masterminds, wellness collectives that blurred the line between self-help and sales funnel. Every era has its pyramid. The products change, but the architecture of belief doesn’t. And this got me questioning if we ever really left it behind.

Pyramid Schemes of Belief

Traditional multi-level marketing schemes are built on two things: belief and imitation. You buy the dream, then sell it back—selling others on selling the dream. It’s less about the actual product—be it protein powder, leggings, or a miracle face serum—and more about the story you tell yourself of being early, chosen, and part of something empowering. The pitch is a memetic one: a contagion of conviction passed person-to-person. When you zoom out far enough, this structure starts to look eerily familiar in many realms of life.

Philosopher René Girard argues that human desire is mimetic (have we identified what my new philosophy hyperfixation is yet?): “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires”. To say, we don’t want things independently; we want what others want. This isn’t a flaw in human nature—if anything, it’s the engine of social civilization. In the age of the internet, we’ve industrialized it. Social media turns imitation into infrastructure. When you imitate someone else, “something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own”. That “something” can be an idea, a trend, a desire, a belief.

Modern capitalism pulls on this mechanism. Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that we have reached a point of hyperreality, where symbols and hype can become more real than reality. “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”. In a hyperreal economy, value often floats unmoored from tangible truth—just as in MLMs, success is simulated (through lavish conferences, rags-to-riches testimonials, Instagrammable lifestyles) to create a self-fulfilling aura of legitimacy. The result is a derivative feedback loop of belief: perception becomes reality, until the stark reality eventually intrudes.

This dynamic isn’t confined to shady Ponzi schemes or vitamin hustles. In floating these musings to friends in venture, in film, in academia, we’ve pieced together that we’re all partially climbing pyramids of belief. The names change, the products and moral vocabularies differ, but the memetic mechanics remain the same: everyone is trying to get in early on an idea (or project or company) before the rest of the world believes it’s real.

And beneath this ambition runs a second truth: we’re all complicit in somebody else’s downline. A mimetic shorthand we’ve cosigned. Every era, every industry, has its pyramid; the question is whether it’s pointing upward (toward something true or transcendent) or folding inward (toward ego and exploitation).

To see how far this pyramid logic permeates, consider two of our culture’s most mythologized arenas: Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

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Venture Capital as MLM

Take venture capital, for example. Each VC fund is essentially selling belief—belief in its own ability to pick winners and in the world-changing potential of its startups. LPs buy into the GPs conviction; the GPs buy into founders’ visionary narratives; the founders, in turn, must sell the dream downstream to employees, customers, and eventually public investors. Everyone, at each level, is pitching potential. It’s a chain of faith, where each link’s confidence bolsters and requires the next.

It’s not that venture capital is a scam per se—real companies get built, real products ship, real returns can materialize. But the structure rhymes with MLM logic: early insiders are rewarded not just for the value they create, but for the number of others they convince to believe. In that sense, venture can be seen as faith-based finance—a “religion of optionality,” a congregation built around elusive network effects. Every term sheet is like a little altar to belief in the future.

Some argue that modern venture capital bears “striking resemblance to history’s most notorious Ponzi schemes”. In this view, the VC industry runs on a “cycle of wealth extraction” where money flows from naive entrepreneurs and optimistic LPs to a select few GPs who have “mastered the art of selling hope while delivering mediocrity”. New funds are raised to pay returns on old funds; new investors replace those who begin to question the hype; founders are the unwitting fuel for a machine that enriches its top operators regardless of actual venture outcomes. It’s a harsh take, but not entirely unfounded.

Even within the industry, insiders acknowledge the herd mentality that drives much of tech investing. As Ornit Shinar quipped, “There’s a terrible herd mentality in the VC community. We feel that it’s much better to do a bad investment if we did it with other people, because we feel less stupid if there were others with us.” This fear of missing out (and of failing alone) leads to over-hyped investments in whatever the trending sector du jour is—hello, AI bubble—often at inflated valuations driven purely by collective FOMO rather than fundamentals. When the hype dies down, many are left holding the bag. It’s essentially the pyramid scheme’s growth logic wearing a Patagonia vest.

HBO’s series Silicon Valley captured this dynamic brilliantly. The show deconstructs the pervasive culture of hype and buzzwords that surrounds tech startups. In one storyline after another, we see how belief can outrun reality. As Silicon Valley lampoons, the industry’s irrational exuberance and obsession with disruption often create a reality distortion field where perception is everything. Founders are told to “fake it till you make it,” which is essentially a directive to simulate success in order to attain it—not unlike MLM reps flaunting false luxury lifestyles to recruit new members.

The memetic structure of venture funding means that social proof often precedes substance. If you can get one big-name investor or secure a splashy valuation, others will follow—everyone selling participation in someone else’s projected momentum. It’s a pyramid of credibility: each layer vouches for the next. The ecosystem rewards those who sell hope early; it’s faith-based funding where belief itself becomes a form of currency. Venture capital, in short, is a high-stakes confluence of faith and finance.

None of this is to say venture capital is inherently malicious or fraudulent—unlike a true Ponzi scheme, VC can and does create real value. But it undeniably runs on belief momentum. And whenever belief becomes untethered from reality for too long, the correction (the crash, the bubble burst, the down round) can be brutal. As we’ve learned from economic history—from the 17th-century Tulip Mania to the Crypto Bubble—speculation and collective belief can inflate value wildly beyond intrinsic worth, until reality returns with a vengeance. In VC’s religion of innovation, as in any pyramid, early believers win… provided they cash out before the faith runs dry.

The Hollywood Downline

The film industry is another domain where everyone’s selling a dream and social proof is the coin of the realm. Friend of the Substack, Matt Nadel, joked that the film industry operates on the same MLM-esque principle as any Tupperware conference or essential oils downline. In film, producers sell packages (script + director + star attached) to financiers; those financiers sell the vision to studios or distributors; the studio then sells the dream to audiences through marketing. At every step, people are buying not just a product (a finished film), but the anticipation of success. Everyone’s selling participation in someone else’s projected momentum.

Success in Hollywood isn’t linear—it’s viral. A project’s credibility snowballs based on who else has signed on or how much buzz it’s generated. You need collective buy-in at various stages: the festival buzz, the big-name executive producer, the Oscar-winning actor’s attachment, the previous hit that justifies confidence in this new venture. It’s analogous to an MLM downline: each person’s involvement is used to recruit the next tier of believers. If she did it, maybe I can too; if this project made it, maybe this next one will. Every project depends on the memetic trail left by the one before it.

We even see outright Ponzi-scheme behavior at the extreme fringes of Hollywood finance. In one recent case, prominent film producer, Jason Cloth, was accused of running a $60 million Ponzi scheme on investors, promising their money would bankroll big-name films like Joker and Mission Impossible while allegedly using funds from new investors to pay off earlier ones. According to court filings, he “paid whatever he felt like… regardless of the success or failure of the project”, consuming a significant portion of the money for himself. It was literally a pyramid scheme dressed up in the glamour of Hollywood—a “Hollywood hoax,” as investors called it. While that’s an extreme criminal example, it underscores how easily the dream-selling business can tip into fraud when accountability vanishes behind belief.

Even in legitimate filmmaking, imitation rules. Studios green-light endless sequels, reboots, and formulaic stories because they want what succeeded before—the same logic as mimetic desire, just with movie tropes. Every surprise blockbuster begets a host of imitators. It’s a cultural feedback loop: want is generated by witnessing someone else’s hit. And for creatives trying to break in, the prevailing advice is often to mimic whatever’s hot in the market if you want a shot. Originality exists, of course, but the system’s risk-aversion creates a pyramid of safe bets: each new filmmaker or investor climbing the ladder by holding up an example of someone just like them who made it.

At its core, Hollywood runs on belief capital just like Silicon Valley does. The difference is Hollywood has long openly acknowledged it trades in illusion. (They don’t call it the Dream Factory for nothing.) An aspiring actor moves to L.A. because they saw another small-town kid become a star; a financier backs a project because it’s pitched as “the next [insert last hit]” (just how startups pitch themselves as the Uber of X, or Microsoft Suite meets X). Everyone is working off of each other’s belief in past success or the promise of future glory. The dream being sold is participation in the mythmaking machine.

And the dream of making it in Hollywood is the same one peddled by every MLM leader in a sequined pantsuit on stage at a convention: If she did it, maybe I can too. The emotional hook is identical. It’s memetic desire projected onto fame and artistic validation instead of pink Cadillacs and financial freedom—but structurally, it’s a pyramid of hopes, each tier nourishing the one above. And a pyramid for no accident: few at the top, and many at the bottom.

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The Memetic Economy

All of this points to a broader truth of our time: we now live in a memetic economy (please see A Fungible Worldview). In such an economy, attention and belief liquidity matter more than resources or truth. The value of an idea, a company, a work of art, or even a person’s reputation is determined largely by the rate at which conviction about it flows through the network. The more people who buy in, the more valuable it becomes—until, of course, it doesn’t.

The term “meme” entered the lexicon through biologist Richard Dawkins, who in 1976 likened ideas to genes: they reproduce by leaping from mind to mind. Memes are essentially units of imitation. Psychologist Susan Blackmore elaborates that humans are unique in our capacity for high-fidelity imitation, which allows ideas to take on lives of their own. “When you imitate someone else, something is passed on,” Blackmore writes. “This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own”. We have, in effect, evolved into creatures whose primary evolutionary niche is the sharing and spreading of memes—whether that meme is a trendy dance on TikTok, a startup business model, or a utopian political ideology.

René Girard’s insight that our desires are borrowed from others now plays out on digital platforms at global scale. Social media has weaponized mimetic desire: algorithms amplify what others want, fear, or believe, creating feedback loops of imitation. On platforms like TikTok, Twitter, or LinkedIn, everyone is selling a course, a vibe, a personal brand, a startup thesis, a founder story. Every viral post or trend spawns countless imitations—the downline of attention. Every viral idea is just another layer in the downline.

In the attention economy, we’re all forced to become salespeople pushing one product: our own legitimacy. Verification (blue check marks, follower counts) is like climbing ranks in an MLM hierarchy. The influencer pyramid is explicit: a few earn massive attention at the top, while millions chase them, trying to build their own following by copying whatever worked for the person above. It’s like the meme of that guy who became a millionaire by selling an online course, so he sells you an online course teaching you how to make an online course. In partaking in the scheme, with the intent of furthering yourself, you’re actually inordinately furthering the topline. It’s memetic capitalism in action—the logical endpoint of a world that rewards attention over truth.

Author and tech critic Douglas Rushkoff notes that in online culture, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” Virality is king. Roy, that you? That means ideas that are catchiest (not those that are most true or useful) thrive. It’s survival of the most memetically fit. Conspiracy theories, too, can be seen as MLMs of belief: a core group “in the know” recruits others by offering secret knowledge, each new adherent both consumer and promoter of the idea, with mentee becoming mentor in this game of telephone.

This memetic free-for-all can be economically powerful—think of meme stocks like GameStop, where a swarm of online investors created a self-reinforcing surge in value purely by collective will, a pyramid of belief that squeezed billion-dollar funds. It can also be culturally destabilizing, as it blurs the line between genuine grassroots movements and astroturfed “viral” moments. In a memetic economy, belief itself is a commodity to be bought, sold, and arbitraged.

Crucially, not all hierarchies of belief are malicious. Faith can be a pyramid of a sort, too—built on lineage, tradition, the imitation of saints and sages. But the key difference is whether the structure points upward (toward truth, meaning, transcendence) or inward (toward accumulation and ego). When belief is oriented toward something bigger than self (a noble cause, a spiritual truth), the pyramid can uplift. But when belief becomes transactional—when it’s just about selling conviction for personal gain—the structure corrupts itself. The system begins to feed on belief for belief’s sake, like a snake eating its tail (wink).

In the memetic economy, we see this corruption when imitation becomes identity. People start to define themselves by the hustle, the grind, the brand, the tribe they belong to. The danger is you can lose sight of what you actually want or value outside the mirrored desires of the crowd. It’s as if the collective bonfire of memes burns so bright that it blinds us to our own inner compasses. Everyone’s chasing everyone else’s dreams.

Faith, Fraud, and the Feedback Loop

It’s tempting to become cynical and declare everything is an MLM—that every structure of aspiration in our society is just a scam in waiting. But that would be an overstatement. The difference between, say, a legitimate startup and a Ponzi scheme, or between genuine faith and a cult, lies in the direction of the pyramid and the reality at its core.

If the pyramid of belief points upward towards something real and life-giving—towards truth, beauty, God, the betterment of others—then building on belief can be positive. Humans, I believe, need faith in things larger than themselves. As social creatures, we rely on shared beliefs to coordinate and achieve great endeavors. The mimetic nature of desire and belief can bind us together in pursuit of meaningful goals. Think of open-source communities in software, or charitable movements—people inspiring each other to contribute because they see others doing it. That’s mimetic desire harnessed for good.

However, if the pyramid of belief circles inward—toward self-aggrandizement, endless recruitment, or reality-denial—then we get the toxic feedback loops. That’s when belief becomes transactional, when inspiration curdles into manipulation. In these cases, imitation devours authenticity. People end up chasing status or validation within the system for its own sake. You stop asking, “Do I actually want what I’m pursuing, is it true or right?” and only ask, “How can I climb to the next tier, and who do I need to convince?” At that point, belief becomes both the currency and the product. It’s a closed loop. Faith for the sake of faith, hype for the sake of hype.

We’re seeing this play out all around us. In politics, movements become more about owning the narrative (and recruiting others to echo it) than about solving problems. In academia, a scholar’s influence depends on citation numbers, founding a school of thought, and minting protégés (intellectual disciples as downlines). In journalism and media, the drive for virality can mean each outlet mimics the others’ sensational angles to capture audience share, a kind of memetic arms race. In the creator economy, young people measure success not by income or craft but by follower count—clout itself is the multi-level currency.

Philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that “capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed… without dogma”. In other words, capitalism replaced transcendence with a perpetual, restless cult of accumulation. One might say the attention economy is a further evolution of this: a religion whose primary ritual is viral replication. It has no static dogma, just an endless scripture of scrolling feeds, trends that rise and fall daily. Its priests are influencers and founder prophets; its churches are online platforms and startup accelerators. It can create real wealth and community, but it can just as easily become a hall of mirrors. In this “church,” truth matters only insofar as it can be monetized or leveraged for more attention. Substance becomes secondary to the simulation. As Baudrillard warned, we risk living in a world where there is “more and more information, and less and less meaning”.

Yet, recognizing that everything has a memetic component isn’t cause for despair. It’s just a call for discernment. We must ask: What do we devote our belief to? Are we investing our conviction in things that are real and good, or merely chasing the next hype high? It’s not inherently bad that our desires are mimetic; it means we are connected, that we learn from each other what to value. But it does mean we have to choose our models carefully. If we take our cues from con-artists and confidence hustlers, we’ll start imitating their emptiness. If we chase only the symbol of success (money, clout, an image), we might wake up to find it was a mirage—like the MLM products that promised health or wealth and delivered neither.

Perhaps the task is to ensure our personal pyramids of belief point upward. To ground our aspirations in something true, so that even as they spread memetically, they carry substance. Memes don’t have to be shallow; faith doesn’t have to be fraudulent. The same mechanics that spread a lie can also spread a truth. The difference lies in the feedback loop: does reality eventually validate the belief, or is reality irrelevant? In a healthy system, evidence and experience reinforce the initial spark of belief (as in a startup that actually builds a great product and justifies its valuation, or a social movement that achieves tangible change). In a sick system, evidence is replaced by echo chambers, and it’s belief all the way down—an infinite downline with no final product. Alt: The Fruit of the Spirit.

All Our Gods Have Referral Codes

We started with an anecdote about an encounter that revealed an MLM still kicking in 2025, and we end with the realization that we are all, in some way, salespeople in an attention-driven marketplace of belief. That doesn’t mean everything is a cynical scheme, but it does mean nothing is untouched by the need to get others on board.

Perhaps the wisest course is to remain conscious of this dynamic. To master it without letting it master us. To build our downlines of inspiration, not exploitation. If conviction is contagious, then let’s spread the kind that points to truth rather than to more con. After all, the ultimate network effect is reality itself: eventually, it catches up. And when the music stops, you want to be holding something more solid than an empty promise.

Kyle Harrison, in his essay Controlling Your Own Destiny, calls this managing your dependencies. Every story, every company, every belief system relies on a chain of faith—people who must keep believing for the thing to work. The trick, he argues, is not to avoid dependencies altogether, but to depend only on dependencies that are dependable. Because the more people who must believe in your story for it to hold, the more fragile it becomes. At some point, the narrative can turn, and when it does, the only thing left is whatever was true all along.

And I think that’s the real work of living in a mimetic, memetic world: not to renounce imitation or story, but to choose our dependencies consciously. To align belief with integrity. To ensure the structures we build—companies, communities, relationships—rest on something sturdier than attention alone.

We’re mimetic creatures, wired to want what others want. The best we can do is make sure that what we want truly matters, and that the stories we tell in pursuit of it are the kind that can survive contact with reality.

Alt titles I like and want to share:

• The Church of Compound Conviction

• The Sacred Geometry of MLMs

• Network Effects and Other Pyramid Schemes

• Late-Stage Capitalism is One Big MLM
  

This year has felt like a threshold. Two years ago, I set out with a deliberate, multi-year plan to break into venture once and for all. And particularly over the past eighteen months, I sent out hundreds of applications and logged just as many coffee chats.

In October of 2024, I decided to backpack around Europe for three months, job-hunting on trains and in cafés while trying to locate both my next role and my soul. I got a great job, then lost it almost immediately (a climate VC role cancelled a week into the new administration. Thank you, Sir Donald.). What followed was eight months of unglamours, labored hustle—applications, rejections, near-misses, spiritual warfare—until I finally landed at 776, a team and role beyond my wildest dreams.

By most measures, I am now “inside.” Pondering this led me to Groucho Marx’s old joke:

I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.

I’m amused by this quote. Discovering this quote pulled at something already residing within me. Separately, I think there are a thousand and one ways to pull apart such a simple line, with each interpretation saying more about the interpreter than about the joke itself.

Fundamentally, here’s the truth beneath the humor: if they would have me, it must not be worth much. Prestige seems to evaporate the moment you touch it. In this small quip lies the entire structure of desire—status reversing its own logic, where the act of wanting corrodes the meaning of getting in.

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But I’m equally struck by Marx’s implied posture of choice. His imagined refusal suggests a kind of agency—as if membership were his to decline. Yet can one really choose their clubs? Do we determine which circles accept us, or are we chosen by them? Belonging often arrives unbidden, less a decision than a discovery. Which complicates Groucho’s joke: the comedy lies not only in self-deprecation, but in the absurd fiction that our inclusion is ever fully in our hands. That sense of control is a myth.

Even the phrasing—belong and accept—is worth pausing over. To belong is to be claimed, as if ownership runs both ways. To be accepted is to be admitted, which is only possible if rejection was on the table first. Groucho’s refusal throws suspicion back at the club itself: what kind of people are so ready to claim me as theirs, to fold me into their belonging? The very ones whose acceptance I should mistrust. For if they are the ones who “accept,” it means they are also the ones who exclude.

Maybe Groucho never meant to invite this much exegesis, but a girl’s just trying to have some fun. My kind of fun just happens to always (and I mean always) involve C. S. Lewis.

The comedy and the pathology

C. S. Lewis called the structure of longing the Inner Ring (I have my manager, Harry, to thank for this reference). It isn’t an official hierarchy laid out as a handbook so much as an invisible order—the subtler current of power and intimacy that truly shapes belonging. You discover it only when you realize you’re outside of it. And then, once inside, you see another ring deeper still. Peel the onion and there’s nothing left.

Lewis warned that unless we resist it, the desire to belong will become “one of the chief motives of your life.” Its essence is exclusion. And the danger is not just wasted energy. It’s moral corrosion. Step by step, joke by joke, compromise by compromise, one becomes what Lewis called a scoundrel. In slow drift: saying yes to the wink, ignoring the whisper in your conscience, trading integrity for warmth.

If Groucho’s quip was the joke, Lewis’s lecture is the pathology.

Venture as Groucho theater

In venture, the Groucho reflex has been institutionalized. Kyle Harrison writes of this as the Groucho Mandate. Founders who defer too much are suspect; founders who ignore investors are magnetic. Desire inverts: the more you want the deal, the less it’s worth.

This is also linked to the “trough of feedback” founders face, as Harrison describes—investors so terrified of being too hard, or of being wrong, that they retreat to vagueness. “Too early,” “not in our focus,” “circle back later.” It’s not just a demonstration of cowardice; it’s the structure of the market. When value is constantly in flux, honesty is liability.

The result is a theater of self-loathing where judgment bends to the Ring.

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Why it seduces

René Girard would say this is mimesis—we desire what models desire, often without realizing that our wants are entirely borrowed from those we admire or envy. It’s why the Ring feels magnetic: our eyes are trained on others, and their desire teaches us what to value. Pierre Bourdieu would add that the Ring reproduces itself through hidden codes of taste and distinction, subtle cues in speech, dress, and manners that mark insiders from outsiders. These cultural signals enforce boundaries as powerfully as gates or titles, keeping the circle self-sustaining and elusive. Lewis presses further: the deepest fear is not missing out on wealth or pleasure, but witnessing the insider’s face turn cold. To be turned away from the Ring feels less like losing status and more like losing yourself.

And yet here lies the paradox Lewis hints at, one Groucho’s joke maybe inconspicuously accepts without naming: you cannot get into the inner circle by wanting it. The very act of chasing it pushes it further away, because desire inverts its own aim—the harder you reach, the more you reveal your dependence on the circle for meaning, and the more it withholds itself. Which is strange, because it isn’t simply the logic of desire fading once something is secured. It’s the deeper inversion: by loosening your grip, you find yourself welcomed. To want is to distort, to demand; to release is to align with what is real. That paradox could lead down a rabbit hole of modern “manifestation” talk, but the essence is older and simpler—true belonging comes not from pursuit, but from surrender.

So what is the way forward? How does one avoid becoming, in Lewis’s words, an “inner ringer”? His answer is craft. If you care about the work for its own sake, you can transcend the petty status-seeking that surrounds you. The surrender is not to inclusion from insiders, but to a dedication beyond ego—to truth, to craft, even to God. Make the work your end, the standard you serve rather than the circle you chase, and you will find yourself, almost without noticing, inside the only circle that truly matters. That circle is beautiful because it cannot be earned through pursuit; it arrives only as the fruit of integrity and alignment with something greater than you—the only inner circle worth having, one that cannot be reached by chasing.

The Eames alternative

So, what’s at the other end of this axis? In thinking about these constellations of ideas, I’m reminded of Charles and Ray Eames. I believe they lived this alternative gloriously. Their home was a workshop; their workshop, a life. Out of plywood, toys, films, and architectural experiments, they built not just objects but an environment. Prestige came, but only as a by-product.

Charles put it perfectly:

“At all times love and discipline have led to a beautiful environment and a good life.”

At all times. Isn’t that so good? Love: a steady attention to one another, to the user, to the material. Discipline: constraints embraced as freedom, standards held with rigor. Also, discipline: a branch of knowledge, a field of study, a life’s work shaped by dedication.

Beauty as integrity

Lewis’s words were more than social commentary; they carried the weight of a spiritual warning. To seek the Ring is to drift, to compromise one step at a time, until you find yourself unmoored. Faith offers a different belonging. Belonging in faith (complete trust or confidence in something) is not exclusive, not earned, not secured by performance or signaling—it arrives as a gift, given freely, and in that gift there is freedom.

In that light, the Eames formula—love and discipline—rhymes with discipleship. You cannot drift into holiness any more than you can drift into craft. The workshop of faith is where integrity is shaped, where standards and care form an environment beautiful not because it is exclusive, but because it is true. And beauty, seen this way, is not decoration but coherence—an alignment between what is said and what is done, between inner conviction and outer form. An environment becomes beautiful when it is whole, when nothing false or ornamental props it up, when its order is an expression of integrity rather than vanity.

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Closing

Groucho and Harrison outline a Status/Ego quadrant. Lewis diagnoses its corrosion and warns of the spiritual cost. The Eameses exemplify Craft × Love × Service. And faith reframes the whole terrain: the circle that matters is never the one you chase, but the one you are drawn into when you give your attention to the right work, the right love.

Prestige promises belonging but never delivers. Admission strips the magic. There is always a more inner ring. But craft, pursued with love and discipline, makes no promises, yet belonging arrives—sometimes in a studio in Pacific Palisades, sometimes in a circle of friends who love you deeply, ultimately in being answering to something bigger than you.

So Groucho is right: the club that would have me is not worth joining. What matters is the workshop I help build—the craft, the care, the discipline, the faith. That is enough—more than enough.

Over the next three days, I collected fragments: stories of risk, questions about alignment, offhand confessions that sounded like prayers. It struck me how much this world of venture, supposedly optimized for capital and scale, is actually full of people clawing after meaning.

As I’ve only teased on here a few times before, this year has stretched me beyond measure. Beyond my comfort to share here, really. Many, many times, I knew I was escaping myself—running headlong into new skills I once thought impossible, trying to shed old skin I had decided I despised, entering new roles, new cities. But when I finally slowed down, landed back on both feet, I circled back to the same person I’ve always been: the ecstatic, weird little girl who dreamed big.

In the final episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty (yes, this is happening, I am making this reference), Belly looks at a picture of her younger self and says something along the lines of: “I wanted to believe I changed… that I’m not the same girl I was. But I am still her. And was that girl so bad?” That final line did actually bring me to tears (if you know me, easy thing to do; not saying much). But isn’t that the truth of it? We run away, and stretch, and contort ourselves into new shapes, only to discover that the child version—the one who was imaginative, strange, unfiltered, intuitively knew what she liked and disliked—had it right all along. But we sort of need this arc to return with clarity.

Nietzsche writes of this in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the camel becomes the lion, and the lion eventually becomes the child. Innocence, creativity, beginnings. The child is the highest metamorphosis. Alison Gopnik, a psychologist who studies children as “little scientists,” says kids are fearless experimenters. They poke, prod, break, and rebuild without shame. The real test of adulthood isn’t shedding that part of us but finding our way back to it.

Mircea Eliade would call this an eternal return—the sacred circling back to its origin. (Yes, I’m invoking the Ouroboros again. Drunk off symbols.) We leave ourselves only to rediscover what was already there, with fresher, yet wiser eyes. My own running growth (i.e. running away and stretching) feels less like a linear journey and more like a circling back to the sacred origin of who I’ve always been. Spiral dynamic theory for the individual.

In Chicago, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, challenged us: “Make your five-year-old self proud.” At first, it sounds like a call to achievement—to do something so audacious a child would beam (like build supersonic aircrafts). But it’s deeper than that. A five-year-old isn’t measuring life by metrics or milestones. She’s living from instinct, wonder, alignment. That’s where true meaning resides. That’s the center we keep circling back to.

The Japanese call this ikigai—the sweet spot where what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for all overlap. We don’t just want profitable work; we want meaningful work. And the path back to it often looks less like strategy and more like remembering.

Paul Graham calls great founders “relentlessly resourceful.” I’d add: they’re also relentlessly childlike. Naval Ravikant says play is the highest form of work—that the real game is to find the thing that feels like play and build your life around it. Which is really just another way of saying: make your five-year-old self proud.

Cynthia Erivo, in her forthcoming book, Simply More, writes: “If, in your own life, you left the magic behind somewhere in your past, know that it’s waiting for you to come back and claim it.” That line matters because it reframes the whole journey: the magic isn’t lost. It isn’t something we outgrow, but something we forget. Childhood isn’t this lesser experience. Adulthood is a long detour back to it.

But alignment without responsibility is hollow. Kate Crawford reminds us in her work on AI that technology is never immaterial. Every data point and model has a footprint—ecological, cultural, human. To rediscover the magic without grounding it in accountability is to confuse magic with delusion. True alignment, true play, must also be tied to stewardship.

In a separate fireside chat, Andy Lapsa, founder of Stoke Space, told us: “Stare up at the night sky. You will naturally begin to contemplate and be reminded of our insignificance… in a good way.”

That line brought me back to something I’d been captivated by before: an episode of Huberman Lab with Dr. Marc Berman on how nature restores attention. Berman’s research shows that soft-focus engagement with natural fractals—clouds, leaves, ocean waves—replenishes the cognitive resources we use for complex thought. A rigid environment breeds a rigid mind. Huberman mentions a quirky study on connect-the-dots puzzles: humans solved them more effectively when the dots were spaced farther apart. The insight is simple but profound: clutter—visual, physical, mental— obstructs the patterns waiting to be seen.

Isn’t that what Andy was pointing to with the night sky? Staring into that vast, uncluttered expanse doesn’t just make us feel small; it creates the mental spaciousness for better problem-solving. Rigid environments breed rigid minds. With space, we begin to see the hidden relationships.

Scholl’s call, Lapsa’s skyward gaze, and Erivo’s invitation all converge: the work of adulthood—in venture, in art, in life—is not to abandon the child but to reclaim her.

Hannah Arendt, writing about education, called children “the new ones”—carriers of beginnings. Our responsibility, she said, is not to smother their newness but to steward it. That feels true not only for literal children but for the child within us—the one we’re tasked with protecting, listening to, and ultimately becoming again.

To return to the child is to return to wonder, and few things awaken wonder more than seeing ourselves against the scale of the cosmos. Carl Sagan once looked at a photograph of Earth taken from billions of miles away and called it the Pale Blue Dot. To him, our smallness wasn’t despairing. It was a reason to care more fiercely. The science of awe backs this up: Dacher Keltner and others show that moments of vastness, staring at the stars, standing under redwoods, dissolve the ego and make us more compassionate. The night sky is not just a metaphor; it’s a neurological reset button.

Right now, I think I’m undergoing a hard reset. I’m in absorption mode. Reflection mode. Not in a season of endless output but in a season of noticing. This role—this life, right now—feels like an answered prayer. Augustine once wrote: “You were within me, but I was outside.” That’s how this season feels. For so long I was running outside myself, searching for meaning, only to realize that it had already been placed within me all along.

And I see I’m not alone in this. So many people I meet in and around venture are longing for deep alignment with their mission. Not just to build big companies, but to build companies that matter—to the highest degree—to both themselves and the market.

Now, follow me here: lately, I’ve been seeing a handful of Instagram bios that read “former child” or “born at a really young age.” An absolutely unserious signal, but I think there’s something to this.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince reminds us: “All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, urged us to “become who you already are.” Scripture echoes the same: “Unless you become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3-4).

I think all of these voices—founders, philosophers, poets, Instagram cool girls—are converging on the same point: meaning is not something we construct from scratch. It’s something we remember, return to, realign with, and reclaim.

So here’s my invitation: stare up at the night sky. Remember your five-year-old self. Looking up at the stars, looking back at the child within — both are acts of alignment. They strip away the clutter and bring us face-to-face with what’s been true all along: wonder never really leaves; it only waits for us to remember.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to connect. After all, making meaning is a group project.

And if you found my overly rudimentary advice frustrating, I highly suggest checking out Angel Squad. Angel Squad was invaluably useful to me as I worked to break into venture. It’s also one of the most welcoming ways to begin investing: a community of 2,000+ investors learning, investing, and building together (more here: https://go.angelsquad.co/h49b).

• “Taste is attention made visible.”

  In an age of infinite generation, taste is the human moat—context, care, and refusal. AI can iterate; only we can choose what’s worth keeping. (Taste, Time, and the Tools That Hold Us, what you’re all getting wrong about AI & cognition)

• “Abundance isn’t excess; it’s infrastructure.”

  From energy → care → food → time. The four-pillar flywheel keeps showing up in my work. (A Continent in Bloom, Ouroboros of Abundance)

• “Let AI take the churn. Let us keep the care.”

  If tools return time, our job is meaning, taste, and presence. (When Machines Tend the Garden, Taste, Time, and the Tools That Hold Us)

• “Homes are absorbing the collapse of everything else.”

  Households as the new clinic/classroom/workplace. (Honey, We’re So Home)

• “Goodness doesn’t scale; it compounds.”

  Iterate the unscalable good. (if lost, please return)

• “General is brittle; specific is durable.”

  Why small, situated models (and lives) win. (the nondeterminism of the human mind)

Ideas From Others (and why they stuck)

• Zhuangzi’s “useless tree” → Longevity through refusal; a design brief for idleness as resistance.

• Anne Carson’s sweetbitter → Love as permission, not possession; the ache is part of the point.

• Kate Crawford’s material AI → Intelligence has a supply chain; abundance must be stewarded.

• C.S. Lewis on compounding good → Small acts as strategic points; moral IRR is real.

• Kyle Harrison on dependency and destiny → “Dependencies shape destiny.” In venture and in life, fragile systems collapse when they lean too heavily on external scaffolding—especially if that dependency isn’t dependable.

• Rick Rubin on vibe as compass → Creativity isn’t about technical mastery but about tuning into the invisible frequency of what feels alive. Taste is vibration.

• Megan Nolan on friendship vs. AI → A friend you can’t care for isn’t a friend.

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Open Questions (hit reply)

• What’s the cleanest way to measure time returned (not clicks avoided)?

• Where does idleness yield the most creativity in your actual week?

• Which layer of the Sovereign Stack is most starved for founders right now?

• What’s a vibe you’re chasing (or resisting) this season?

Starter Pack (for new readers)

• Taste, Time, and the Tools That Hold Us

• the nondeterminism of the human mind

• When Machines Tend the Garden

• Honey, We’re So Home

• i almost forgot that this is the whole point

• What the Water Carries

Thanks for reading. This is my living scrapbook—part research bench, part prayer for better tools.

And thanks for bearing with me through this summer break. We’re cooking. Be back soon.

Dog days, in full swing.

Summer is stretching itself thin, and yet somehow the weeks keep disappearing. We’re already two-thirds through 2025, which feels impossible and necessary.

On my nightstand: A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety by Donald Hall. A reminder that good books, like good seasons, anchor us even as time rushes past. Life comes at you fast. I hope you’ve also found something nourishing to read as the heat breaks.

Rest has been restorative. I’ve let myself linger, recharge, and sink into quiet. But now, new projects are beginning to hum, and the horizon feels alive with possibility.

I’m eager for fall’s clarity, for the year’s final act, and—if I’m honest—for 2026 to hurry up and meet us.

Until then: soaking in these last weeks, storing up energy, preparing for the sprint to come.

Back to regular programming soon.

Excited to share this new collab: if you’re curious about angel investing, Angel Squad is one of the most welcoming ways to begin: a community of 2,000+ investors learning, investing, and building together (more here: https://go.angelsquad.co/h49b).

If you’ve been here for some time, you’ll know that my journey began with a fascination for the circular economy—the idea that in nature there is no waste, that every single thing forms a resource in a closed loop of renewal. In my first introduction, I invoked the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent coiling back to consume its own tail, as a cosmic emblem of oneness, completeness, and regeneration. At a time, I saw circularity mainly through the lens of sustainable materials and the built environment.

But experience and exploration—largely driven from this very Substack and community—have since expanded my view. I’ve come to realize that the perfect circle I sought in green concrete and mycelium fibers is part of a far larger, even more interconnected story.

This story encompasses planetary stewardship and human flourishing as two “sides” of the same circle. The Ouroboros reveals itself not just in recycling waste into resource, but in reimagining our entire economic and technological system as a life-giving loop connecting humanity and nature (humanity to humanity, humanity to nature, and every other possible iteration in between).

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The Ouroboros has long symbolized the unity of all things. Alchemists and philosophers saw in the serpent biting its tail a “unity of the cosmos,” an endless cycle “where the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning.” However, this ancient wisdom feels startlingly urgent today: we as humans are not separate from nature; we are nature. Our fate is bound up with the earth that sustains us. Just as Cleopatra the Alchemist inscribed in her Chrysopoeia: “One is All… and by it is All,” so too must our innovations and systems recognize the interconnectedness of it all.

Toward Abundance: Four Pillars

Embracing this broader vision has led me to an exciting framework of abundance, that I’ve already written about on here a handful of times. If the elementary phase of my journey was about eliminating waste and closing loops, this next phase is about overflowing the loops with abundance—ensuring that all humans can flourish without depleting our planet. I see four key pillars of abundance that lie at the intersection of planetary stewardship and human well-being, each accelerated by technological innovation (especially, obviously, AI) and each demanding the principles of ethical technology, effective altruism, and stewardship if they are to sustain rather than collapse.

1. Abundant Energy

Solar, wind, geothermal, and fusion are pushing toward the once-unimaginable: clean power at less than one cent per kWh.

But abundance without ethics risks excess. Ethical tech here means embedding safeguards so that clean energy empowers communities rather than reinforcing inequities. Effective altruism challenges us to direct capital and policy toward the energy projects with the greatest global impact. And stewardship, in Hans Jonas’s terms from The Imperative of Responsibility, demands we govern abundance with humility, ensuring today’s gains remain compatible with the permanence of human life.

2. Abundant Labor

AI and robotics promise to free humanity from unsafe and menial work, offering what Vinod Khosla has called an “unlimited supply of labor.”

Yet abundance can cut two ways. Ethical tech insists that automation not entrench digital serfdom, but create dignity. Effective altruism reminds us to reinvest the productivity gains of automation in ways that maximize human well-being globally. Stewardship, as Sheila Jasanoff writes in her call for “technologies of humility”, requires cultivating foresight, responsibility, and accountability into AI itself. Will this abundance nourish education, art, and community—or will it coil too tightly, constricting itself into inequality?

3. Abundant Longevity

Biotech and AI are extending human lifespans, reframing aging as treatable, and accelerating the discovery of cures. But longevity without equity (and well, everything else) is a hollow promise. Ethical tech demands equity and safety in genetic and medical innovation. Effective altruism argues that if AI diagnostics or gene therapies can save millions at low cost, our moral obligation is to scale them. Stewardship reminds us that caring for health must mean caring for the health of all future generations too.

4. Abundant Food

Vertical farms, precision fermentation, and lab-grown meat could banish hunger and rewild millions of acres of land. Tony Seba and James Arbib forecast that these technologies “won’t just replace animal agriculture; they will create an entirely new food system.”

Here again, ethics matter. Shoshana Zuboff’s critique of surveillance capitalism⁶ warns of the risks when powerful actors enclose the commons of knowledge and food systems. Transparency and justice must govern how new food technologies emerge. Effective altruism highlights animal welfare and hunger alleviation as extraordinarily high-impact causes. Stewardship demands that food systems remain cultural and sacred, not merely industrial.

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Abundance With Ethics

Abundance is not destiny; it is a choice. The Ouroboros teaches that everything coils back around to us—harm as much as healing.

Ethical tech reminds us, as Kate Crawford shows in Atlas of AI, that innovation is not abstract but built on resource extraction, labor, and power.

Effective altruism asks us to place capital and ingenuity where they can do the most good.

Stewardship, drawing from Jonas and Indigenous ecological traditions, asks us to act as caretakers across generations.

Without ethics, abundance risks becoming excess. With ethics, it’s renewal.

Venture as Stewardship

Venture capital, in this frame, is being demanded to evolve from ownership to stewardship. It is not enough to return multiples to LPs; we must return resilience to civilization. Not just follow where markets are going, but where they ought to go. The greatest founders today see themselves not as extractors, but as gardeners of abundance—tending ecosystems, entwining equity into their models, and ensuring that what they build renews rather than depletes.

That requires ethical diligence: asking whether a technology empowers or exploits. It requires EA-style prioritization: directing capital into climate resilience, eldercare, and neglected global health. It requires stewardship as ethos: “move thoughtfully and mend things,” aligning profit with purpose, growth with goodness.

Each check we write draws another circle. Does it widen renewal, or constrict it?

A Manifesto for Circular Abundance

I return again to Terrance Hayes’s poem How to Draw a Perfect Circle. It meditates on striving for an ideal both mathematical and mystical. That is what abundance is: a circle we will never draw flawlessly, but one we must keep attempting.

The Ouroboros coils around itself, consuming its tail yet living on. In the same way, our society can consume its past mistakes and be reborn. A warning engulfed into a beautiful image. The same tools that could divide us or degrade our planet can, if guided by ethical tech, effective altruism, and stewardship, elevate us into an era of shared prosperity.

This is the vision that animates me: a world where energy, labor, longevity, and food flow abundantly but ethically; where AI is governed with humility, investments are guided by longtermist thinking, and innovation is treated as a moral act; where human flourishing and planetary stewardship are recognized as one circle, endlessly turning.

Onward

As Circular Architect approaches its first year, I feel deep gratitude. Thank you for joining me on this unexpected journey, for allowing me to rewrite and reintroduce myself, for the notes urging me to keep going. This space has given me not only words but community.

I’m especially thankful for the circles I’ve found through Hustle Fund’s Angel Squad and Harlem Capital’s internship—both of which have stretched and sustained me.

If you’re curious about angel investing, Angel Squad is one of the most welcoming ways to begin: a community of 2,000+ investors learning, investing, and building together (more here: https://go.angelsquad.co/h49b).

Here’s to the next turn of the circle.