Years ago, a plant I worked at shut down for about five minutes and one of the directors announced that we’d just lost $20,000. I asked where it went. This was apparently not the expected response.

The plant, he explained, produced something like $4,000 worth of value every minute when it was running at full production. Five minutes times $4,000 was $20,000. Therefore, while we’d been standing around waiting for the plant to start again, twenty grand had vanished into the ether.

Except it hadn’t. We were going to run five minutes longer. We had slack in the schedule. No customer had canceled an order. Nobody had thrown $20,000 worth of product into a dumpster. We hadn’t missed some magical freight train that departed at exactly 2:15 and would never return.

The plant stopped. Then the plant started. Accounting had confused unused theoretical capacity with a bag of money catching fire.

This became even more entertaining because we weren’t actually running the entire facility at anything resembling that mythical 100 percent anyway. We had five processing plants, if I remember correctly. During peak season, when there was enough incoming product, we might run all five. The rest of the time we ran whichever plants made the most sense. Some were easier to operate. Some were more efficient. Sometimes Plant X was physically closer to the incoming product, but Plant Y was enough better that we’d send the product to Y anyway.

This wasn’t controversial. Nobody stood in front of the idle plant screaming that every minute it remained off was costing us $4,000. There wasn’t enough product to justify running it, so we didn’t.

The theoretical production rate was also somewhat fictional because the product itself changed. Some incoming loads were clean. Some were dirty. A dirty load might require roughly twice as much processing time as a clean one. Early in the season there were generally more clean loads. Later in the season the product got dirtier, although by then there were also fewer total loads.

So what exactly was “100 percent production”? Was it the number of clean loads the plant could scream through on a perfect day? Was it the design rate for dirty loads? Was it some average product mix somebody had put into a spreadsheet six months earlier? Depending on what arrived, the same equipment could process radically different numbers of loads in an hour while working equally hard.

This was a physical system. Accounting wanted it to be a multiplication problem.

At one point the actual problem was that trucks weren’t getting unloaded fast enough to keep the processing plants fed. Parts of the floor were sitting idle because the material simply wasn’t there yet. I pointed out that if unused production capacity really cost us $4,000 every minute, we were apparently losing a breathtaking amount of money while half the operation waited for material.

So why not shut the processing plants down for a while, let the trucks keep unloading, build a giant reserve, and then restart production with enough inventory in front of us to run everything flat out? This was partly sarcasm.

Accounting eventually did it. They shut the plant down for half a day, sent people home, and let the trucks keep unloading. We built up a nice reserve. Then everyone came back and we started the plant, which takes somewhat more effort than pressing the button on a Keurig, and production began again.

For a while it was beautiful. Material was everywhere, the plants were fed, and the numbers were up. Everyone could gaze lovingly at the utilization rate.

Then we ate through the reserve. This will shock anyone who’s never interacted with physical reality, but we hadn’t actually changed the underlying system. We’d just stored up material while production was stopped, then processed it faster than it could be replenished.

Eventually somebody noticed that stopping and starting an industrial plant is a pain in the ass. People also fucking hate arriving at work only to be randomly sent home because Accounting has developed a theory. There were startup problems, scheduling problems, labor problems, and assorted other pieces of reality that hadn’t been invited to the original spreadsheet. We stopped doing that.

I later discovered another entertaining use for Accounting’s logic. I proposed a roughly $250,000 project on a production line that was scheduled to be ripped out in about three weeks. This was an objectively stupid project. We’d have needed engineers, purchasing, contractors, operations, safety people, and everybody else involved in installing industrial equipment. We’d rush the thing through, commission it, operate it for maybe a week or two, and then demolish the line it was attached to.

But using the official value of production time, the payback was something like eight days. People argued about it. Then the accounting director looked at the calculation and said, essentially, “But the payback is eight days. We should do it.”

I still treasure this memory. We didn’t do the project because the rest of us hadn’t yet achieved enlightenment. Apparently mobilizing an entire engineering organization to install a quarter-million-dollar improvement on equipment scheduled for demolition is bad for morale. Who knew.

The point isn’t that accountants are stupid. They aren’t. The point is that accounting answers the question you ask it, and sometimes the question is stupid. A number can be completely real inside an accounting system without meaning what a normal person thinks the English words around that number mean.

Which brings me to cows.

Tyson Foods says its Beef segment is losing a shitload of money. It is. Through the first nine months of fiscal 2026, Tyson reported $16.4 billion in Beef sales and a $701 million Beef segment operating loss. Meanwhile, Tyson as a whole reported $1.1 billion in operating income, and its Chicken segment made $1.34 billion.

Fine. I’m not accusing Tyson of inventing the $701 million. I am saying that if you hear “Tyson loses money slaughtering cattle” and interpret that to mean Tyson buys the next cow, kills it, sells all the resulting beef, and ends up with less cash than it started with, then we have a problem.

Because Tyson knows how to stop doing that. Stop buying cows. More specifically, if one Tyson plant genuinely loses money processing cattle and another one doesn’t, Tyson shuts the shitty plant down immediately and sends the cattle to the good one. Maybe the cow rides farther in a truck. Maybe it gets put on a train. Maybe somebody has to redo logistics. Who cares? If the extra transportation costs $80 and the more efficient plant saves $200, congratulations, the cow is going on a road trip.

We did this all the time. Plant X might be closer. Plant Y was more efficient. Go to Y.

And that’s, broadly, what the beef industry is doing. The United States has fewer cattle, so packers have more slaughter capacity than they need. Plants close. Shifts get cut. Volume gets consolidated into the facilities that make the most sense. Reuters notes that U.S. meatpackers have been shutting plants in response to the cattle shortage and high cattle costs.

Good. They should.

There were 86.2 million cattle and calves in the United States at the beginning of this year, including 27.6 million beef cows. That’s an extraordinarily small herd by modern American standards. So we don’t need all the slaughter capacity we built for a larger herd. Shut some of it down, run the good plants, and ship cattle farther when the economics work. Bring the marginal capacity back if cattle volume eventually justifies it. Nothing about this is strange.

Even Tyson’s ugly Beef numbers aren’t particularly mysterious. A giant processing network built for more cattle is going to look bad when fewer cattle pass through it, particularly when the cattle themselves are expensive.

If slaughtering the next cow genuinely costs Tyson more money than it produces, Tyson shouldn’t slaughter fewer cows. It should slaughter zero. Shut the plant. Put the remaining cattle on trucks and send them to whichever facility can process them profitably. If none of Tyson’s facilities can do that, stop buying cattle until the price changes.

There’s only one other explanation, which is that Tyson just really loves fucking killing cows. Maybe this is all a terrible misunderstanding and Tyson Foods is actually a $50 billion cattle-murder charity. Every morning an executive sees another steer, sighs, writes a check for the inevitable loss, and says, “Goddammit, get him in there. We have a mission.”

While I wish this were the case, it probably isn’t. Tyson keeps slaughtering cattle because slaughtering cattle still makes economic sense somewhere in its system. Its Beef segment losing money is an accounting statement about the entire business, covering its plants, overhead, utilization, cattle costs, and everything else piled into that bucket. It isn’t proof that Cow Number 4,782 walked through the gate carrying a negative twenty-dollar bill. If the marginal cow really lost money, Tyson wouldn’t kill it.

Unless, again, they just fucking love killing cows.

Obviously there are contracts. Packers have supply agreements with feedlots, labor agreements with unions, delivery commitments to grocery chains, and legal notice requirements before they can close a plant. Breaking any of those costs money. All of it is real, and all of it explains why a packing network can’t be rearranged in a week.

None of it changes the underlying economics. It explains the timing, not the decision. A contract that makes a bad plant expensive to close is a reason to close it later, not a reason to keep buying an animal you lose money on. And contracts expire. If the marginal cow were genuinely underwater everywhere in the network, the move would be to run the current agreement out and decline to sign the next one, which is a decision Tyson gets to make several times a year.

The recurring logic of this whole thing goes like this. Accounting says five idle minutes “lost” $20,000, so fine, build my stupid $250,000 project with its eight-day payback. Tyson says slaughtering cattle is losing money, so fine, slaughter zero cattle.

If neither party behaves as though the literal interpretation of its accounting number is true, maybe the accounting number means something more complicated than the sentence being built around it.

Tyson buys cattle because there is some price at which buying and processing cattle makes economic sense. Ranchers would prefer that price to be extremely high. Tyson would prefer it to be extremely low. Welcome to commerce.

The rancher currently has a useful advantage because cattle are scarce. Tyson hates this. I assume JBS hates it. Cargill presumably isn’t sending thank-you cards, and National Beef probably hasn’t launched a “Pay Ranchers More” initiative. All of this is normal.

The four largest beef packers handle about 85 percent of steer and heifer purchases in the United States. USDA calls the industry highly concentrated and has found recent evidence that reduced competition can translate into lower cattle prices. Ranchers have complained about packer power for years. Now the herd is tiny and the scarce thing is finally the cow, so the cow owner gets to be annoying for a while. This is how markets work.

High cattle prices aren’t an unfortunate side effect of the cattle shortage. They’re the mechanism that fixes it.

USDA explains the cattle cycle in almost embarrassingly straightforward terms. When cattle prices get high enough, producers have an incentive to expand. But cattle are spectacularly inconvenient animals for anyone accustomed to quarterly earnings reports. Ranchers have to retain females they could sell today, wait until those animals are old enough to produce calves, and then wait for those calves to grow. USDA says the cattle cycle generally lasts around ten years and can range from eight to twelve. A retained female may not produce her first calf until around age two, and that calf can take another eighteen months to reach slaughter.

So the current sequence is supposed to look something like this. There aren’t enough cattle. Cattle become expensive. Packers bitch. Some packing plants close. Ranchers look at extremely expensive cattle and think perhaps making additional cattle would be a good business to be in, so they retain heifers. Eventually there are more cows, and those cows make more cows. Supply increases, prices come down, and some slaughter capacity comes back because there are enough cattle to support it again.

Nothing is broken. It sucks if you want a cheap hamburger, but that’s different from being broken.

And I say this as somebody with absolutely no spiritual attachment to the American rancher. I’m not wearing a Stetson while typing this. I don’t believe God personally assigned Nebraska the sacred duty of producing my cheeseburger. If Argentina can raise a cow more cheaply and sell me a delicious steak for half the price, fantastic. Put it on a boat. Bring me two. I’ll eat Argentine beef with absolutely no concern for the emotional journey of a rancher in Montana.

Maybe we don’t give a fuck about American ranchers. That’s a policy option, and it isn’t even an insane one. Lots of countries import things that other countries produce more efficiently. Americans enjoy bananas despite our shameful lack of strategic banana independence.

None of what I have described so far is the problem. A shrinking herd, closing plants, consolidating volume, and a rancher who finally holds the good cards is a market doing precisely what it is supposed to do. The problem starts when somebody shows up with a giant pile of foreign beef and says, “Here, this should help the American cattle industry.”

What we can’t do is simultaneously decide that we don’t care who produces the beef and announce that our policy is designed to help American ranchers rebuild the herd. Those are different policies.

Trump announced on Friday, August 21, that the United States would temporarily expand by 300,000 metric tons the amount of ground beef that can enter under lower tariffs over a 90-day period. That’s roughly 661 million pounds. He also said he had a commitment for the imported meat to be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.

Trump says this will “reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again.”

No. Pick one.

If the imports are too small to affect cattle prices, then they don’t do much to reduce beef prices either. Several economists and traders quoted by Reuters think that may be the case. If the imports are large enough, cheap enough, and credible enough to reduce beef prices, then congratulations. You’ve reduced the price signal telling American ranchers to make more cattle. Maybe only a little. Maybe a lot. But you don’t get both effects in opposite directions from the same pile of hamburger.

The announcement alone was enough to send cattle futures tumbling to eight-month lows. Rancher groups immediately complained that the policy would discourage herd rebuilding. Of course they did. The federal government just told them something useful. It told them there’s a ceiling somewhere.

That ceiling isn’t formal, and it’s nothing as crude as a price control, which makes it considerably more interesting. If American cattle get sufficiently expensive that voters become angry about hamburger, Washington may go find cattle products somewhere else and dump additional supply into the domestic market.

Then someone asked Trump which countries were supplying the beef.

“I don’t want to say which countries, but there are a few countries.”

What? Sir, it’s hamburger. Nobody asked where we keep the nuclear submarines. You just announced that foreign countries are going to send Americans hundreds of millions of pounds of discounted meat. Which countries?

“I don’t want to say.”

This is how you get people online deciding we’re secretly buying the Argentine beef China rejected. There’s no evidence that’s what’s happening. But if you’d prefer that people not develop conspiracy theories about the provenance of the mystery meat, one surprisingly effective strategy would be to answer the question “Where is the meat coming from?”

And the source matters. Is this Argentina? Brazil? Australia? Uruguay? Several of them? Is this a one-time favor from countries with spare supply, or are we establishing a new source that American processors can expect to use whenever domestic cattle prices become politically inconvenient? Those aren’t trivial details if the stated purpose is simultaneously to lower beef prices and rebuild the American cattle herd.

The cattle market is trying to decide what a cow will be worth three years from now, and the federal government has just announced that if domestic beef gets too expensive, it may import a pile of cheaper beef from somewhere it declines to identify. That’s information. It’s just unusually shitty information.

“I don’t want to say” also makes the foreign-supply question much more important. We aren’t discussing abstract free trade anymore. The government is telling domestic producers that an outside supplier is waiting in the wings, that it can be used against domestic prices, and that they don’t get to know who it is.

Now imagine you own breeding cattle. You can sell a heifer today at an excellent price. Or you can keep her. Feed her. Carry the financing, the weather risk, and the disease risk. Breed her. Wait. Hope she calves. Raise the calf. Wait some more. Do this across enough animals to materially expand the herd.

And then hope that several years from now, when all those additional cattle finally exist, the government hasn’t decided beef prices are politically inconvenient again and gone shopping overseas.

What behavior does that encourage? I know what I’d do. Sell the fucking cow while the cow is expensive.

This is the part that gets hidden when everyone starts talking about “supporting ranchers” as though ranchers are a protected species. I don’t need to care about the rancher’s feelings. I care about the incentive. If you want domestic production, domestic producers need a reason to maintain and expand production. If every time scarcity finally makes the business lucrative you deliberately suppress the scarcity price with foreign supply, some producers will rationally conclude that expanding domestic capacity is for suckers.

We ran this exact experiment recently with a different crop. China stopped buying American soybeans during the trade fight and shifted to South American beans, including beans from the Argentina that Washington was spending billions of dollars to stabilize at the same time. Harvest opened with no orders from the largest buyer on earth. Prices fell to around $8.65 a bushel, below what it costs a lot of people to grow them. The government eventually announced $12 billion in payments to row-crop farmers, which is what it looks like when policy breaks a market and then pays the producer to be calm about it.

That was supposed to be the end of it. China is buying again and prices have recovered somewhat, and soybean farmers are still in their third consecutive year of asking how much money they will lose on the crop. University of Tennessee projections have soybeans at average yields not reaching break-even even now.

That is the same shape as the cattle story. A decision in Washington, a South American supplier, an American producer holding the bag. The difference is that the soybean version is already far enough along that nobody has to speculate about the first several consequences.

Suppressing the price can still be worth it. Cheap food is good. I can’t emphasize this enough, because somebody will inevitably read all of that and decide I’ve become the Lorax for cows. If foreign beef makes hamburgers materially cheaper, consumers get something valuable in exchange. Great. But there’s no free lunch, even if the lunch is literally lunch.

The long-term risk isn’t that Argentina sends us affordable beef and everybody dies. The risk is that cheap foreign supply gradually changes what gets built here. This is a distinction Americans repeatedly discover several decades late. There’s a difference between importing something because foreign production supplements a healthy domestic industry and importing something because the domestic industry no longer exists at sufficient scale.

In the first case, Argentina competes with American ranchers. Wonderful. Competition is supposed to be good.

In the second case, Argentina competes with Brazil, Uruguay, Australia, and whoever else for the privilege of supplying an America that now needs them. That’s a different negotiation.

Today we say, “Argentina, your beef is cheaper. We’ll take it.”

Someday Argentina gets to say, “China offered more.”

And we say, “But we need beef.”

And Argentina says, “Yes. We noticed.”

Or there’s a drought, an animal disease problem, an export restriction, a currency crisis, or a new government. Or China decides it would also like several billion pounds of beef. Or the international price simply goes up because the entire planet has discovered steak.

At that point we can always rebuild the American cattle industry. This should take roughly four fucking years to begin accomplishing anything useful. Cows are inconvenient that way. You can’t download them.

You need breeding stock to create breeding stock. You need ranchers who still know what they’re doing, and land that hasn’t been sold off or turned into something else. Somebody has to supply the feed, the veterinarians, the auction infrastructure, and the financing. The slaughter plants have to come back, including some of the ones you quite rationally closed when there weren’t enough domestic cattle to support them. Somebody has to staff them. All of it takes time. And you need cows to make cows.

Then we’ll stand around in 2034 asking how America became dependent on foreign beef, and someone will produce a forty-page report with several extremely serious charts. One of those charts will probably show the domestic cattle herd declining. Another will show imports increasing. A third will show slaughter capacity consolidating.

Congress will summon Tyson to explain itself. Tyson will say there weren’t enough cattle. Ranchers will say there wasn’t enough long-term incentive to expand. Some senator will look gravely into a camera and demand to know how this could have happened.

This is generally the point in an American industrial-policy story where I begin rooting for the asteroid.

There’s another reason Tyson is an especially funny company to use as our example. Remember that $1.34 billion its Chicken segment made while Beef was losing $701 million? Chicken is a very different business. The commercial broiler genetics business has consolidated until essentially two corporate groups, Tyson and Germany’s EW Group, account for more than 95 percent of global broiler breeding stock. Tyson owns Cobb. EW owns Aviagen and Hubbard.

So Tyson’s chicken supply chain includes a level at which the answer to “who controls the genetics for basically all the chickens?” is approximately “Tyson and one German family company.” That’s a somewhat more comfortable upstream relationship than negotiating with thousands of independent people who own cows.

Chicken also has the enormous advantage of being a chicken. USDA says a broiler can go from hatch to slaughter in seven or eight weeks. Parent stock can begin producing hatching eggs in four or five months. Cattle expansion takes years.

This doesn’t prove that chicken is profitable because Tyson is a cartoon villain twirling a mustache over a hatchery. It does help explain why the cattle business is uniquely irritating. Tyson doesn’t control the American breeding cow. Right now the person who does control her knows she’s scarce, and that person wants money. Tyson would very much like them to want less money. I would too if I were Tyson.

This is the part where I’m apparently supposed to become angry at Tyson, but I can’t. Tyson is behaving normally. It closes inefficient plants and moves the cattle to better ones. It negotiates prices down as hard as the market lets it, buys foreign beef when foreign beef is cheaper, and fills useful downstream capacity with whatever profitable product it can get its hands on.

When people brought outside product into our facility for us to process, we loved it. Of course we did. They provided the material. We already had the plant, the employees, the maintenance department, the utilities, and the fixed infrastructure. We processed their stuff, took our cut, and sent them a check for their share. They did basically fuck all and got paid, and it was wonderful. If somebody had shown up while half our good plants were hungry for product and said, “Hello, I have several hundred million pounds of discounted material. Would you like some?” we wouldn’t have called security.

So I’m not mad at Tyson for wanting cheaper foreign beef. I’m not even mad at Argentina for wanting to sell it. Argentina should sell us every cow it can profitably spare. I’m mad at the sentence that says we’re doing this while rebuilding the American herd, because no, we aren’t. We’re choosing short-term consumer prices over some portion of the domestic producer incentive.

Maybe that’s the correct choice. Say it.

“We don’t care if some American ranchers get squeezed because Americans need cheaper food.”

There. That’s a policy. It’s mean, perhaps, but it’s coherent.

“We believe global beef supply is reliable enough that America does not need to preserve as much domestic cattle capacity.”

That’s also a policy. I might disagree with the risk calculation, but at least the words form a thought.

“We need American ranchers to spend years creating more cattle, so when cattle prices get high enough to make that extremely attractive, we’re going to import below-market foreign beef to push the price down.”

That isn’t a policy. That’s something Accounting would put in a spreadsheet.

And I’ve seen what happens when you let the spreadsheet run the plant.

P.S.

Here’s what I suspect happened. I don’t think somebody in the White House woke up one morning, looked at the price of hamburger, and independently arrived at the conclusion that America urgently needed exactly 300,000 metric tons of foreign beef. I suspect there was already beef somebody wanted to sell us.

Argentina is the obvious place to look. I don’t know that Argentina is one of the countries involved, because the President was asked and declined to say, which is precisely why the question keeps getting asked.

The Trump administration has spent an extraordinary amount of effort supporting Javier Milei’s Argentina, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been particularly invested in Milei’s economic project. Treasury extended a $20 billion swap line to Argentina in September 2025. Then, on February 6 of this year, Trump signed a proclamation titled “Ensuring Affordable Beef for the American Consumer,” quadrupling Argentina’s low-tariff beef quota from 20,000 metric tons to 100,000, with the additional 80,000 restricted to lean trimmings and released in quarterly tranches. It was signed a day after the two countries signed a reciprocal trade agreement. Friday’s announcement is the second time in seven months that the answer to expensive American beef has been more Argentine access.

American farmers were already pissed about this relationship before anybody started talking about mystery hamburger. Argentina temporarily eliminated its soybean export taxes during the rescue, and Chinese buyers promptly booked enormous quantities of Argentine beans. Senator Chuck Grassley summarized the problem efficiently when he asked why the United States was helping Argentina while Argentina was taking American soybean farmers’ biggest market.

Then there’s Rob Citrone. He’s a billionaire hedge-fund manager, a longtime friend of Bessent’s and his former colleague at Soros Fund Management. His fund, Discovery Capital, bet heavily on Milei’s Argentina and returned 52 percent in 2024 on that thesis. Bloomberg reported that Citrone added to his Argentine bond positions in early September 2025, after Milei’s party lost a provincial election and investors dumped Argentine assets, and days before Bessent announced the American support package. Discovery still holds substantial positions in Argentine banks and energy companies. Bessent has denied that helping wealthy American investors had anything to do with the intervention.

None of that proves corruption. It does tell us that Bessent’s enthusiasm for stabilizing Argentina existed inside a financial universe populated by people he knew personally who had enormous amounts of money riding on Argentina staying stable.

And because this story apparently required one more coincidence, Discovery’s SEC filings show it also holds a large position in JBS, one of the biggest beef processors in the world, and added tens of millions of dollars to that position in a recent quarter. Plenty of hedge funds own JBS. This proves nothing whatsoever about the beef policy. But in a postscript whose entire point is that Argentina makes me suspicious, it’s a hell of a fact to leave out.

There’s also the China story, which is considerably smaller than the internet believes. On March 19, Chinese customs stopped a 22-ton shipment from ArreBeef’s Pérez Millán plant in Buenos Aires province after tests found chloramphenicol, an antibiotic banned in food animals since 1995 because it’s linked to aplastic anemia. China suspended imports from that facility, and Argentina’s food-safety agency opened an inquiry into whether the result was a false positive or an isolated contamination. Twenty-two tons is not 661 million pounds. The arithmetic doesn’t come within three orders of magnitude of supporting the theory.

But imagine being the administration and knowing all of this context exists. You’ve already intervened to stabilize Argentina. American soybean farmers already accused you of helping their foreign competitor. You’ve already expanded Argentina’s access to the American beef market once this year. One of the Treasury Secretary’s longtime hedge-fund friends has substantial Argentine investments, and that same fund holds a large stake in a major beef processor. China recently suspended an Argentine beef plant over a banned antibiotic.

Then you announce 661 million pounds of discounted foreign beef, a reporter asks where it’s coming from, and you say you don’t want to say.

My own suspicion is far less exciting than the internet’s. I suspect Argentina, and perhaps several other countries, had beef they wanted to move into the American market. I suspect facilitating those sales made sense for reasons involving trade, foreign policy, and the administration’s ongoing interest in keeping Milei successful. Somebody agreed to take the beef. Then somebody had to explain to Americans why we wanted it, and fortunately Americans think beef is too expensive, so now it’s a grocery-price policy.

Corporate America hears that hundreds of millions of pounds of discounted beef may be entering the country and responds exactly the way any processor with idle capacity would respond. Fuck yeah. Bring it.

Maybe consumers save a little money. Maybe JBS and Tyson book better margins. Maybe Argentina gets a useful export market. Maybe the quantity is too small to move retail prices and everyone forgets about it by Christmas. None of those outcomes would surprise me.

What I don’t believe, without considerably more explanation, is that this deal simultaneously exists because America desperately needed cheaper hamburger and somehow helps American ranchers rebuild the domestic herd.

Maybe I’m completely wrong about why it exists. There’s a very easy way to make me look stupid.

Tell us who’s selling us the fucking beef.

P.P.S.

The deeper problem here probably isn’t Tyson specifically. It’s scale.

There just aren’t that many large meat processors anymore, and once an industry consolidates into a handful of enormous companies, every decision starts getting evaluated against enormous-company economics. A smaller slaughterhouse might look at an opportunity that produces an extra $500,000 a year and think it’s a fantastic business. Tyson can look at exactly the same opportunity and conclude it isn’t worth assigning three people to think about it.

This happens everywhere. If I can make $10 million on a trade, I’ve had an extraordinary year. If Warren Buffett makes $10 million on a trade, he’s wasted his time. The return can be objectively excellent and still be economically irrelevant to an organization whose capital base is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.

That changes what survives. It isn’t enough for a meatpacking plant to be profitable. It has to be profitable enough for Tyson. It isn’t enough for a regional operation to earn a few million dollars processing local cattle. That may be a wonderful business for an independent owner, but if the same assets sit inside a corporation that needs billions of dollars of annual profit to move its earnings per share, management is going to ask why the capital isn’t deployed somewhere with a larger return.

Then the little plant closes and the cattle move to the giant efficient plant farther away. That makes perfect sense for Tyson. And after enough perfectly sensible decisions like that, we wake up in an industry where a handful of companies process most of the cattle, and everyone wonders why there aren’t more alternatives when those companies don’t like the price ranchers are asking.

This is one of the nastier consequences of concentration, and it doesn’t require anybody to collude, cheat, or even behave badly. Things that are good businesses stop being businesses because they aren’t big enough businesses. A guy who owns one slaughterhouse might be thrilled to clear $2 million a year. A company that earns billions looks at the same $2 million and says, why the fuck do we own this?

Then we act surprised when there’s nobody left who would have been perfectly happy making $2 million.

This entire thing started because I saw a reel by Austin von Letkemann, the Army officer behind MandatoryFunDay, talking about the music millennials grew up with. The reel was called “Our Music Broke Us,” which is a little dramatic, but this is a man who describes his own job as yelling at his phone and posting it on the internet, so allowances must be made.

Anyway, he got to “Lips of an Angel” by Hinder, and I had a realization.

There’s a problem with millennials, and for once it has nothing to do with avocado toast, participation trophies, or the fact that apparently none of us have killed enough industries lately.

We think “Lips of an Angel” is a love song.

Before anyone gets defensive, I’m aware of what happens in that song. I was always aware. Everyone was. The guy’s girlfriend is in the next room, his ex calls him, and he sneaks off to talk to her. They both still have feelings for each other. He has to keep his voice down so his girlfriend doesn’t hear him telling another woman that sometimes he wishes his girlfriend were her.

This is suspicious behavior. Even in 2006, when we were using Motorola Razrs to destroy the institution of marriage, I understood that.

And yet we filed it under love song. We didn’t hear a song about making bad decisions, or a cautionary tale, or “Man Discovers Emotional Affair, Film at Eleven.” We heard a slightly fucked-up love song, certainly, but still a love song, sitting in the same emotional cabinet as every other song about yearning for the person you were meant to be with.

The more I thought about why that seemed completely normal to us, the more the answer started swallowing the entire culture we grew up in. The interesting question isn’t why millennials failed to understand the lyrics. We understood them fine. The question is why we understood them perfectly and still classified the situation as romantic, which is a much stranger problem.

I once heard Austin Winkler, who fronted the band, talk about the song at a small house show. It wasn’t an interview, and it wasn’t a polished VH1 retrospective with a producer asking him to gaze thoughtfully toward a window. He was just talking.

The story, as I remember it, went roughly like this. His girlfriend was asleep in the house. An ex called. He went somewhere else so he could talk privately. They talked, and there were clearly still feelings there. When he got off the phone, his reaction was essentially that this couldn’t happen again or they were both fucked.

That’s an extraordinarily reasonable conclusion, and it’s also not how an entire generation heard the song he wrote about it. We heard a man describe a situation the man himself recognized as dangerous, and we thought, God, he really loves her.

That discrepancy interested me because the situation he was describing isn’t exotic. Most people have watched some version of it from close range. There’s a person somebody texts more than they should, and a call they take outside, and a running internal argument about why none of it counts yet. Nobody in the arrangement has to be a villain, and that’s most of how it works.

Hearing Winkler lay out the mechanics in plain language did something the song itself never managed. I already thought it was suspicious, and I didn’t suddenly learn that adultery was frowned upon. What disappeared was the layer of romantic abstraction. It wasn’t forbidden love. It was a guy leaving the room to take a call from a woman he had an inappropriate emotional connection with, and that hits differently.

So why did the song still scan as love? I think the answer begins with divorce.

A tremendous number of millennials grew up with divorced parents, and here’s something adults routinely forget about children. Children don’t care about your relationship analysis. You can explain that Mom and Dad were incompatible, fought too much, that one parent was irresponsible, and that everyone is happier now. You can produce pie charts.

The child’s position is generally much simpler.

Please put my family back.

My stepdad is an amazing guy, truly top notch. My biological dad was, particularly back then, kind of a fuckup, and my mother made the correct decision. I can see all of this now because I’m an adult and have developed such sophisticated analytical tools as looking at obvious facts. I still hated it as a kid, and those two positions aren’t contradictory.

Kid-me wasn’t interviewing candidates for the position of Mother’s Husband. I didn’t care whether the new guy had better credit, greater emotional stability, a more realistic five-year plan, and superior conflict-resolution skills. That wasn’t the job opening I wanted filled.

I wanted my dad back.

So if you take the exact premise of “Lips of an Angel” and show it to a child whose parents are divorced, the moral calculus gets funny fast. Dad has a new girlfriend, Mom has a new boyfriend, and Dad sneaks outside because Mom called. They’re whispering because they still clearly have feelings for each other. An adult says this is inappropriate. The child says GOOD, FINALLY, DUMP THOSE PEOPLE AND GET BACK TOGETHER.

And our movies spent years agreeing with the child.

Consider The Parent Trap. Two children discover that their divorced parents have each been keeping one twin like a souvenir from the marriage, which is objectively insane parenting, but never mind. Dad has a new woman. The children’s response isn’t that they should respect their father’s current relationship and explore the complicated reasons their parents separated. Their response is, roughly, destroy her and restore the original family. The movie agrees. This is the correct quest.

Or take almost every movie where the biological dad is a charismatic disaster and the stepdad is a perfectly competent adult. We know the hierarchy immediately. The stepdad can be wealthy and responsible. He can pay the mortgage, show up to school events, treat Mom well, provide stability, keep food in the refrigerator, and remember everyone’s birthday. Then Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, Liam Neeson, or some other rumpled biological father enters the frame and the soundtrack informs us that Dad has arrived. The replacement man may technically be raising the children, but emotionally he’s a substitute teacher.

Taken is especially clean about this. Mom has moved on, and there’s a wealthy, stable husband. Fine. Nobody cares. Liam Neeson is Dad, and once the daughter is taken, civilization itself recognizes the blood hierarchy and politely steps aside so he can murder Europe.

Or look at 2012. John Cusack is the biological father, and his ex-wife has a new man, Gordon, who is a doctor, useful, decent, and apparently capable of keeping the family alive during the actual end of the world. This presents the screenplay with a problem, because the original family can’t be restored while Gordon continues inconveniently existing. Fortunately, the apocalypse contains machinery. Problem solved.

Then there’s Serendipity, also John Cusack, because apparently for a while John Cusack’s primary profession was informing people that their current relationships were clerical errors. Two people meet once. Years pass. They build lives and become engaged to other people. Then fate says those people don’t count, and the audience agrees, because the person you’re currently planning to marry is merely your current partner. The person you almost hooked up with years ago and can’t stop mythologizing is love.

This idea was everywhere. Sweet Home Alabama, The Notebook, every story about the old flame, every story about the one who got away, every story where the sensible fiancé exists mostly so the protagonist can discover that stability is spiritually inferior to chemistry.

Television was making the same argument in a stranger register. People occasionally point out that we had wholesome family shows, which is true, except most of the famous ones they name were really from the cultural world immediately before ours, like The Cosby Show, Full House, and Family Matters. The iconic families sitting continuously in front of millennials were the Simpsons and the Bundys of Married... with Children, and both shows presented family life as an endless machine of aggravation. Dad is an idiot, Mom is exhausted, the children are awful, and marriage is what happens after the fun part of life ends.

Except neither show believed that all the way down. In “Life on the Fast Lane,” the ninth episode The Simpsons ever aired, Homer forgets Marge’s birthday, panics, and buys her a bowling ball he has had engraved with his own name. She takes up bowling to spite him and meets Jacques, a French instructor who is attentive, interested in her, and plainly offering an exit from the idiot waiting at home. When Jacques asks about the name on the ball, Marge tells him it’s the ball’s name and doesn’t mention that she’s married. She gets close enough to an affair that she’s already driving to his apartment, and then she reaches a fork in the road and turns toward the power plant instead.

Married... with Children built a whole episode on the identical move, and called it “So This Is How Sinatra Felt.” A woman Al calls a shoe groupie starts turning up at the store to flirt with him, and she eventually gets into the Bundy bedroom while Peggy is downstairs, telling him Peggy doesn’t deserve him and doing everything short of filing paperwork to get him into bed. The entire premise of that series is that Al regards his marriage as a sentence he’s serving. He turns her down and goes downstairs to Peggy.

So even when the lesson was that breaking up the family was the one line you weren’t supposed to cross, notice what neither show offers, which is a version of this where staying works out.

Marge goes home to the man who bought her a bowling ball with his own name on it. Al goes downstairs to a marriage the show has spent six seasons describing as a sentence.

There’s the road where you stay and grind, and the road where you break the family, and nobody is coming out of either one happy. That’s an extraordinary set of instructions to hand a generation already watching its parents choose between them.

And these weren’t dispatches from Gen X. Ron Leavitt was born in 1947 and Michael Moye in 1954, which makes the creators of Married... with Children Boomers, and they built the show as a direct shot at the sitcom family. Its working title was “Not the Cosbys.” The Simpsons came from the same side of the line, with James L. Brooks born in 1940 and Matt Groening and Sam Simon both born in the middle of the fifties.

So the people telling us that marriage was a prison were adults living through the divorce revolution while they wrote it. They weren’t rejecting the institution. They were rejecting the fantasy that the institution is pleasant. Al doesn’t leave, and he doesn’t get anything for it either.

At this point I assumed I was doing what people normally do when discussing generations, which is remembering twelve movies and television shows from childhood and constructing a theory of Western civilization around John Cusack. Then I found out that someone has actually researched this.

In January 2021, Olga Thierbach-McLean published an article in the Irish Journal of American Studies with the remarkably convenient title “The Product of a Spoiled America”: Divorce as Collective Crisis in U.S. Popular Culture of the 1990s. Her argument is that the explosion of divorce-themed art in the 1990s was a distinct cultural product of the latchkey generation, meaning primarily Gen X, working through what had happened to their families. She identifies a whole run of films built either on divorce itself or on children living with the consequences, including Man of the House, Bye Bye Love, One Fine Day, Stepmom, Hope Floats, The Parent Trap, and, naturally, Mrs. Doubtfire.

More importantly, she lays out the machinery underneath all of it. Her account runs roughly like this. When the Boomers reached adulthood, older ideas about duty to family and society gave way to what she calls expressive individualism, in which the point of a private life is maximum personal fulfillment rather than a stable home. Marriage stopped being understood as a practical cooperative arrangement and became the primary venue for self-realization, which meant it had to be a union of soulmates. And a marriage carrying that expectation is far more fragile once the routine of married life sets in, because routine is precisely the thing it promised to transcend.

That’s “Lips of an Angel” with footnotes.

She supplies the other half too. Gen X watched that shift from the child’s side of it, grew up inside the divorce wave it produced, and came to treat divorce as the proof of parental self-absorption. And she catches the contradiction I’ve been circling this whole time, which is that Gen X counterculture loudly despised white-picket-fence respectability while producing work that ached for the intact family the Boomers had taken apart.

She notices the moral structure as well. In a huge amount of 1990s popular culture, divorce isn’t two sensible adults carefully concluding that they’d function better apart. The adults are selfish, confused, absent, adulterous, career-obsessed, or otherwise behaving like people who shouldn’t have been issued children without completing a short written examination. The kids inherit the damage. Thierbach-McLean describes the decade’s output as crowded with reckless parents and suffering children, and notes how rarely those stories entertained the possibility that a split might be better for everyone than keeping incompatible or violent adults under one roof.

That last part matters, because as an adult I know perfectly well that divorce can be the correct choice, and that sometimes it’s the only sane choice on the table. My mother made the correct choice. But the culture wasn’t conducting that adult analysis. It was processing divorce from the perspective of the people who’d been children when it happened, and children are terrible marriage counselors.

The paper gets closer still when it turns to Singles and Reality Bites, both full of young adults trying to work out how to form a relationship after watching their parents wreck theirs. In Reality Bites, the characters say outright that they’ve inherited damage from their parents’ generation, and the valedictorian speech that opens the film asks how any of them are supposed to repair it. Thierbach-McLean argues that this determination to break the cycle became a defining theme of the decade, and she cites the writer Susan Gregory Thomas, who described her own childhood divorce as the reason she swore no marriage of hers would ever get bad enough to put her children through the same thing.

That’s my entire thesis, arrived at independently by an actual scholar and published in an actual journal years before I got around to it. Second research grant saved.

The generational wrinkle is useful too. Thierbach-McLean is writing primarily about Gen X, not millennials, which actually improves the timeline. Gen X was the first cohort old enough to turn the experience into adult art, and millennials were the children sitting behind them consuming it. By the time we were old enough to understand relationships, the cultural processing of the divorce boom was already everywhere, so we inherited both the original disruption and the first generation’s artistic response to it.

A millennial kid could watch The Parent Trap and absorb the fantasy that the original family ought to be restored, then watch Mrs. Doubtfire and sympathize with a biological father going to deranged lengths to stay in his children’s lives, then become a teenager and encounter a thousand songs and movies telling him that the person he never stopped wanting might be the person he was really meant to have.

None of this required anyone to sit us down and explain a theory, because that’s what culture is for. It takes a set of assumptions nobody bothers to state aloud, puts John Cusack in a trench coat, plays some music, and lets you work out who you’re supposed to root for.

The cleanest example I know of what all of this looks like from inside the kid is Eleanor & Park. Rainbow Rowell was born in 1973, which makes her Gen X, and she set the book in Omaha in 1986, when she was thirteen. She has said Eleanor’s dysfunctional home life was somewhat autobiographical, naming the bullying, the rough neighborhood, and the bad stepdad, and she has described the book as personal because “their 1986 is my 1986.” So this is the same phenomenon Thierbach-McLean is describing, just arriving twenty years late. A latchkey kid goes back to 1986 and writes down what the inside of it actually felt like.

By the time Eleanor & Park arrived, the oldest millennials were already adults and the youngest were teenagers, which means the book didn’t create this mythology for us. It felt familiar because we’d already spent our childhoods absorbing it.

Eleanor’s home life is fucking awful. Her mother has remarried a man named Richie, who drinks, who hits, and whose arrival changes the atmospheric pressure of a room. There’s no money. All the children sleep in one bedroom, and the bathroom door has been removed because Richie decided it should be. Everyone in that house spends every day managing his moods, and Eleanor has essentially no control over any of it.

Then she meets Park.

Park’s family isn’t some perfect television family. His parents have personalities and they argue, his father is a Vietnam veteran who spends a good portion of the book disappointed that his son isn’t a different kind of boy, and Park is regularly irritated with both of them, because he’s sixteen and this is one of the sacred duties of the sixteen-year-old. But his house is safe, and that difference is enormous. Park can be annoyed at his parents without wondering which version of the evening is about to walk through the door. There’s food. There’s predictability. There are adults behaving like adults.

So Park becomes something more to Eleanor than a boy she likes. He becomes the place where the world stops being terrible.

There’s a point where the relationship turns physical, and it matters enormously to her, because she’s spent most of her life absorbing the message that she’s strange, undesirable, inconvenient, or simply too much of the wrong thing. Park sees her and wants her anyway. That doesn’t land as ordinary teenage validation. It lands like evidence that she’s worth loving at all.

That’s a completely understandable thing for a girl in her situation to feel. It’s also a terrible foundation for an adult theory of romance.

Love stops being companionship. Love is rescue. Love is the person who makes the bad house disappear, whose wanting you disproves everything horrible you believe about yourself, and in whose presence you finally get to feel safe. Of course that feels overwhelming. It should.

The trouble starts when a generation absorbs that emotional structure over and over and begins treating the overwhelming part as proof that a relationship is uniquely true. A stable relationship doesn’t feel like that, and why would it?

Nobody writes a soaring power ballad called “My Wife and I Have Similar Long-Term Goals and I Enjoy Her Company.” There’s no third-act airport chase because both parties consulted the calendar and booked the same flight.

Park feels enormous partly because Eleanor’s ordinary life is so awful. And that’s the other half of the mythology, which is that the person who rescues you from your life must be the person you love most. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes you just really needed rescuing.

Rowell aside, almost nobody who built the culture we actually grew up inside was a millennial. Obviously not. We were nine. The adults producing our movies, television, music, and relationship mythology were Boomers upstream and Gen X downstream, which is a considerable amount of credit to hand a cohort that mostly exists so marketers have someplace to put people born between Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana.

This isn’t me saying Boomers were evil. Life in the 1980s was hard, and people have this bizarre habit of remembering the Reagan era as though everyone wore pastel sweaters and bought a house for seventeen dollars. The Cold War was real. Factories were disappearing. The postwar economic settlement was being dismantled and sold for parts, and leveraged buyouts and financialization were changing what employment meant. Drugs were an enormous problem, and prohibition often made the surrounding violence and instability worse. AIDS arrived. Crime was high. The culture wars were vicious. Bork happened. Everybody smoked indoors for some reason.

There were legitimate reasons for adults to become more focused on personal survival, autonomy, and fulfillment. I can understand why someone living through that world might say, “I get one life. I’m not staying miserable because some institution tells me I have to.” Fine. Maybe that was even the correct decision.

Again, the child doesn’t care. The child isn’t an economic historian, and he isn’t sitting in the back seat thinking that Mother’s decision to pursue self-actualization should be understood within the broader context of late-twentieth-century deindustrialization. He wants Dad to come home.

This is why I remember something a pastor said years ago about divorce. He said the first thing parents always tell you is that the kids are handling it really well, and of course they say that. Maybe the divorce was necessary. Maybe everyone truly is better off. But nobody wants to believe that the decision they needed to make might also be deeply painful for their children.

“The kids are handling it well” can mean the kids still go to school. They still get decent grades. They don’t cry where you can see them. They’ve correctly identified that Mom and Dad already have enough problems and have decided not to become an additional one. That isn’t the same thing as the kids enjoying having their family split in half.

I once read a story from a woman at a church that illustrates the opposite problem. She got pregnant at sixteen. She was religious, sheltered, barely understood sex, married the boy, and became a stay-at-home wife because that was what she was supposed to do. He was abusive. He screamed at her and beat her, but his family was important in the church, so people didn’t believe her. She’d dropped out of high school to be a wife and mom, had several small children, and no money and no real way to support herself.

Eventually she left, and life became catastrophically difficult. She was poor, and the community ostracized her. Her ex was so unreliable that she described trading sex with him to get him to pay a small electric bill or buy groceries for his own children. Anyone who thought she should have stayed married to him should have been struck gently but firmly with a shovel.

Eventually, she went back to school and became a teacher. She met a decent man, a dentist, and they built a stable, comfortable life. And when she returned home, people would still say, “Yeah, but he isn’t your kids’ dad.”

There it is. The original family myth in its purest form.

The biological father can be abusive, unreliable, and willing to let his children’s electricity get shut off. The new man can be decent, loving, stable, and actually help raise them. And some part of the culture still says the second family is counterfeit. That same mythology can be sweet in The Parent Trap and horrifying in real life.

It also helps explain why millennials eventually behaved differently from the adults who raised us. People sometimes act surprised that millennials divorce less, and I’m not. You don’t need an attachment-theory conference to understand this. My parents got divorced and I hated it, so I’m not fucking doing that. There. Another research grant saved.

This doesn’t mean millennials have discovered perfect relationships. We haven’t. Spend four minutes online. But it makes perfect sense that a generation could inherit the emotional mythology of unstable adult relationships while becoming extremely reluctant to reproduce the family outcome. We learned that the person you can’t get over is probably your true love, and we also learned that divorce fucking sucks when you’re the kid. Both lessons can exist in the same brain.

Then Facebook arrived, and suddenly every person who’d spent twenty years thinking about the one who got away was handed a search box. People reconnected with their high school sweethearts, messaged old girlfriends, and found college boyfriends. They started with “Wow, it’s been forever,” moved on to “Do you remember that night,” and then apparently somebody’s marriage exploded. The demographic bullseye wasn’t millennials, since we were still relatively young. It was Gen X and Boomers, people old enough to have spouses, mortgages, children, and a person from 1987 they’d spent decades turning into mythology.

Facebook took Serendipity and added broadband.

Of course some people blew up their marriages. The culture had spent decades telling them that if a person could still make them feel sixteen again, that feeling was evidence. Evidence of love, apparently. Maybe it was. Maybe it was also evidence that being sixteen was easier than refinancing the house and driving children to soccer.

Which brings us back to Boomers. I called them comparatively selfish earlier, and I mean that at the cohort-cultural level, not that every person born in 1953 is Satan. They were unusually focused on individual fulfillment, but they also lived through circumstances that made that focus understandable, and sometimes their marriages may have been genuinely good.

Gray divorce makes perfect sense to me for exactly that reason. Imagine two people who had a good marriage for forty years, not secretly miserable but genuinely good. They worked, they raised kids, they supported each other, they had dinner together, and they took vacations. They also had separate careers, separate friends, separate hobbies, and enormous portions of the day occupied by responsibilities.

Then they retire. The kids are gone, the job is gone, and the project called raising a family is complete. Now they discover that one wants to spend retirement traveling while the other wants to fish, and one wants constant companionship while the other wants six hours of silence. They don’t hate each other. They simply discover that the marriage that was excellent for the life they had isn’t necessarily the relationship either of them wants for the next twenty years. Fair enough.

Sometimes, my wife is the most irritating person on Earth, and I still vastly prefer when she’s around. That seems like a useful distinction. I’m not under the impression that a successful marriage means never wanting to launch your spouse into the sun. It means that after considering the launch, you’d still rather have them sitting there annoying you.

Maybe that’s the thing millennials quietly changed. We grew up with adults telling stories about passion, reinvention, old flames, second chances, finding yourself, leaving, and reconnecting, and we were the children sitting in the hallway thinking, can everyone please just stop doing this.

By the time we were old enough to date, we’d learned to identify love by intensity in three separate ways. Childhood divorce taught us to yearn for the original bond, and the movies told us that yearning was correct. The rom-coms taught us that the person you can’t get over is the real one. And Rowell eventually put words to the third version, which is that the person who makes an unbearable life bearable must be the real one.

So I return to Hinder, which manages to check two of those boxes at once. A man takes a call from his ex while his girlfriend sleeps nearby. He realizes the conversation is dangerous, he thinks it shouldn’t happen again, and he writes a song about it. We hear the song and call it a beautiful expression of love.

And maybe that’s the actual millennial problem. It isn’t that we’re uniquely terrible, or that we failed to understand relationships, or that we’re weak, spoiled, narcissistic, infantilized, or insufficiently enthusiastic about Applebee’s. We were raised inside one generation’s relationship revolution while consuming the romantic mythology the next generation made about it.

They taught us that the biological family is the real family, that unresolved feelings mean something, that passion is truth, and that the person who makes you feel alive may be more authentic than the person who reliably takes out the trash. Then we watched what happened when adults organized their lives around those ideas, and a lot of us quietly concluded that we were absolutely not doing that to our kids.

Which is how an entire generation ended up simultaneously believing that “Lips of an Angel” is a love song and dating someone for nine years before agreeing to get married.

We contain multitudes. Most of them need therapy.

P.S. Since I opened with it. When I was a kid in California, avocado toast was poor-people food. Avocados were cheap because they grew everywhere, bread was cheap because bread is cheap, and the whole thing took about ninety seconds and was accidentally sort of healthy. It was what you made when there wasn’t much else in the house.

Then somebody put it on a brunch menu for fourteen dollars, somebody else wrote a column about it, and a childhood struggle meal got converted into evidence that my entire generation is financially unserious. Nobody thought to ask the people who’d been eating it since 1993.

America has a management problem, and I think we should fix it. The problem is that the United States government owns some of the finest monopolies, compulsory revenue streams, captive customer bases, real estate, infrastructure, and irreplaceable assets on Earth, then operates them as though the purpose of ownership is to provide things to people.

I don’t understand this.

We already know how America works. Hospitals make money from sick people. Insurance companies make money from people who need insurance. Electric utilities make money from people who need electricity. Landlords make money from people who need somewhere to live. Banks make money from people who need money. Defense contractors make money from war.

Nobody considers the necessity of the product an argument against charging for it. Usually, necessity is what makes the business attractive.

Then the government gets involved and suddenly forgets which country it’s in. It owns schools and tries to educate children. It owns fire departments and sends trucks when buildings catch fire. It owns national parks and lets people walk around in them for almost nothing. It owns military commissaries and deliberately tries to make groceries cheaper. It owns the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps and has somehow operated them for centuries without paying a quarterly dividend.

This has gone on long enough.

The good news is that we don’t need a new theory. America has already demonstrated the model everywhere else. When somebody needs something badly enough, you charge him for it. If he has few alternatives, even better. If the law requires him to buy it, you’ve achieved something most businesses can only dream about.

Take health care.

A man doesn’t schedule appendicitis for a convenient weekend after comparing prices at twelve local hospitals. He develops appendicitis, discovers that his body has made a fairly aggressive purchasing decision on his behalf, and goes to the hospital.

The hospital treats him. Then somebody sends a bill.

This is considered normal.

Nobody stands in the billing department and says that since the man didn’t choose appendicitis, extracting money from the transaction would violate the purpose of medicine. Nobody announces that health care is important, therefore the hospital should abandon revenue.

The need is the demand.

Electricity works the same way. Most Americans aren’t selecting whether electricity would be a fun optional addition to the household this month. They need it, an electric company provides it, and the bill arrives.

Excellent system.

The oddity is that we’ve failed to apply this basic American principle to everything else.

Public education may be the most obvious example. The government already did the hard part. It requires children to be educated.

Do you understand how valuable that is?

Every ordinary company in America has to convince customers to buy something. Coca-Cola spends billions making sure people remember beverages exist. Automobile companies advertise during football games. Technology companies hire entire departments to persuade us that the phone we bought eighteen months ago has become an embarrassment.

The school system doesn’t have this problem. The government already said your kid has to receive an education.

That’s not a burden. That’s guaranteed demand.

Yet after creating one of the most attractive customer-acquisition systems imaginable, the government turns around and gives the product away through taxpayer-funded public schools.

Why? The correct next sentence after “your child is required to receive an education” is “here’s the tuition.”

If tuition is $22,000 per year, then tuition is $22,000 per year. If the market will bear $28,000, it should be $28,000. If families can’t afford it, America has another excellent product for them.

Loans.

We could have kindergarten financing before lunch. Banks could originate education loans. Insurance companies could insure them. Investment firms could package the receivables. The government could guarantee selected debt if that increases the value of the securities. A six-year-old could enter first grade already supporting three sectors of the financial economy.

Now we’re accomplishing something.

Someone will immediately ask whether this would improve education. That’s an odd question. Why would education be the metric?

A hospital company isn’t valued according to whether Americans have achieved perfect health. An electric utility doesn’t lose its right to earnings because somebody wishes his power bill were lower. A landlord isn’t prohibited from making money until every tenant reports complete satisfaction with his apartment.

If teaching children well increases the value of the school company, then management should teach them well. If reducing staffing, increasing class sizes, eliminating unprofitable programs, and selling excess real estate produce better returns, management should consider those things too.

If some children come out less educated, that’s unfortunate. Lots of customers are unhappy with products.

We have customer-service numbers for that.

The military commissary is so poorly aligned with American principles that I initially thought I was misunderstanding it.

The Defense Commissary Agency currently operates 235 commissaries worldwide and reports average patron savings of 24.9 percent compared with commercial grocery prices. Its own material describes saving military families money as a core part of the benefit. (Commissaries)

Twenty-four point nine percent. They’re bragging about this.

The government has grocery stores located around military installations. It has a defined customer population. It controls access. It possesses buying power and infrastructure. Many of its customers live or work nearby, and all of those customers continue requiring food regardless of the Defense Commissary Agency’s pricing philosophy.

Then the government looks at this beautiful arrangement and asks how it can leave more money in the customer’s pocket. That’s backwards.

Raise the prices.

You don’t need a blue-ribbon commission. Start raising them until the added margin begins reducing total earnings. Then you’ve found the price.

If military families complain, they can complain. Customers complain about prices every day.

Maybe they’ll shop somewhere else. Fine. Pricing models can account for that.

Maybe morale will decline. I’m not sure why grocery-store policy suddenly has to maximize employee morale merely because the employee works for the government.

Walmart employees have morale. Taco Bell employees have morale. Amazon warehouse workers have morale. Their employers care when morale affects turnover, productivity, recruiting costs, liability, or revenue.

The military can do the same thing. If replacing unhappy soldiers costs less than making them happy, replace them. If replacement gets expensive, improve conditions until the numbers work again.

This isn’t mysterious. It’s employment.

I should acknowledge that the Pentagon has had a version of this thought.

In April 2025, a memo directed that every function not inherently governmental be prioritized for privatization, naming retail sales specifically. That September, the Defense Commissary Agency issued a formal Request for Information asking commercial grocery operators and investment firms whether they were interested in and capable of assuming commissary operations, with no government subsidy or a materially reduced one, while preserving a 23.7 percent average savings for patrons. (Commissaries)

So they got halfway there and then lost their nerve twice in the same sentence.

First, they proposed handing the stores to somebody else. Why? The government owns the real estate, the customer base, and the front gate. When a company finds an underperforming division, selling it isn’t the only available move. Sometimes you fix the pricing and keep the earnings.

Second, they instructed the buyer to preserve the discount. They correctly identified the problem and then wrote it into the requirements.

Congress subsequently passed a law prohibiting the whole thing, which at least has the virtue of being a clear position.

The military itself is where the current arrangement becomes genuinely difficult to defend. America cares about money. America also cares about war.

We somehow combined these two great national interests and forgot to attach shareholders.

The federal government already owns the Army. It owns the Navy. It owns the Air Force and Marine Corps. It controls bases, ports, aircraft, ships, land, housing, hospitals, warehouses, training facilities, communications infrastructure, logistics networks, weapons systems, and a collection of assets so large that the ordinary human mind eventually gives up and starts saying “a lot.”

Yet there’s no Army common stock. BlackRock can’t own eight percent of it. A pension fund can’t add Navy preferred shares to its portfolio. The Marine Corps has no dividend yield.

Why?

I’m not arguing that outside investors should own the Army because they’d make the Army more efficient. I don’t care whether they’d make it more efficient.

Efficiency isn’t the point. Earnings are the point.

The government owns the military and should operate it so the military produces the maximum sustainable earnings its extraordinary asset base and monopoly position permit. Then it should structure ownership so those earnings can reach investors.

The government could retain control. Fine. Sell forty-nine percent. Sell twenty percent.

Create separate operating companies for logistics, housing, installations, training, procurement, and personnel. Spin off assets. Issue shares. Sell stakes. Recapitalize them.

I’m flexible on structure. I’m not flexible on the continued absence of dividends.

And I’ve only been discussing the balance sheet, which is half the problem. The Army is also a capability, and we’ve never once pointed it at revenue.

In the corporate world, when a firm identifies a target holding valuable assets, weak management, and cash sitting idle, it acquires the target. If the board objects, it acquires the target anyway. We call this a hostile takeover. The people who execute them are celebrated, and there are courses.

You buy the thing. You replace the board. You sell the divisions that don’t fit. You take the cash the previous management was sitting on and you distribute it.

Now consider what we’ve been doing instead. We’ve spent trillions of dollars on military operations over the past quarter century. We removed governments. We occupied territory. We rebuilt infrastructure. We trained replacement management.

Then we left.

What was the return? I’ve looked for it. There isn’t one. We conducted the largest acquisitions in modern history and never booked a single asset.

That isn’t war. That’s philanthropy with casualties.

I want to be careful here, because people get emotional, so let me point out that I’m not proposing anything novel. The East India Company was a corporation with an army. It took Bengal, took the treasury, administered the territory, and paid dividends to shareholders in London for roughly two centuries. Nobody involved considered this a category error. They considered it the business.

We have the same instrument and we operate it as a cost center.

So if an operation is worth conducting, it ought to be worth conducting profitably. Identify the target. Assess the assets. Value the reserves, the ports, the minerals, the currency holdings, the receivables. Determine whether the acquisition clears its cost of capital.

And if it doesn’t clear, don’t do it.

That’s the part I keep returning to. A rule requiring wars to produce a return would have prevented more wars than sentiment ever has. Every conflict of my adult life would have died in committee.

I can’t understand why nobody finds that appealing.

Fire departments are another exceptional business opportunity being operated with almost deliberate financial incompetence. The government already owns a territorial monopoly. Your house is here. The fire department is here. If the house catches fire, you need the fire department. This seems straightforward.

Charge for fire protection.

Every homeowner can receive an annual protection bill. Price can reflect property value, construction type, neighborhood risk, response requirements, and whatever else produces the most useful revenue model.

Maybe your fire-protection bill is $3,800 this year.

You think that’s too much? Okay.

Your mortgage company doesn’t become emotional when you dislike the mortgage payment. Your insurer doesn’t waive the premium because insurance is important. The electric utility doesn’t provide complimentary power after you explain that your refrigerator needs electricity.

The bill is the bill.

If somebody chooses not to maintain coverage and his garage catches fire, he can purchase emergency service at the emergency rate.

That rate should obviously be higher. Urgent demand generally supports strong pricing.

Again, hospitals have already demonstrated this principle. A person’s inability to delay treatment until prices become more convenient has never prevented America from attaching money to the transaction.

Why should fire be the one emergency where we lose our nerve?

Police departments have a product mix problem. Consider a homicide investigation. Detectives, overtime, canvassing, forensics, lab work, evidence storage, months of skilled labor, and at the end of it, a conviction.

Now tell me who pays. The victim is dead and has stopped buying things. The family isn’t invoiced. The neighborhood receives no bill. The convicted man has no money, and we then spend forty thousand a year housing him.

That’s the flagship product. Enormous input cost, zero revenue, negative margin at every stage.

Meanwhile there’s a man crossing Fourth Street against the light.

That transaction is instant. One officer, ninety seconds, no lab, no witnesses to locate, no chain of custody. The customer is standing right there and has already agreed to the terms by stepping off the curb.

The fine is forty dollars.

Why? Nobody arrived at forty dollars through analysis. A city council picked a number that sounded reasonable during an evening session in 1974 and it has been sitting there ever since, adjusted occasionally for inflation, which isn’t the same thing as pricing.

That’s a price. Prices get tested.

Raise it to four hundred and find out. If volume holds, raise it again. Somewhere there’s a number where total collections peak, and no city in America has ever gone looking for it, because they’re all under the impression that the fine expresses society’s disapproval of jaywalking.

The fine is revenue. The disapproval is a marketing position.

And once you understand that, the entire enforcement portfolio looks mismanaged. Speeding, parking, expired tags, rolling stops, noise, permits, licensing, code violations, towing, impound fees, and the administrative charge for contesting any of it. Every one is a high-margin, high-frequency product with an enormous addressable market and a customer base that can’t relocate. Some cities have noticed. Most treat it as an unfortunate necessity rather than the core business.

Then they spend the proceeds on murders.

I’m not saying stop solving murders. If clearance rates support premium pricing on the protection product, solve them. Somebody should run the numbers.

I’m saying that a company doesn’t fund its unprofitable division by accident and then decline to optimize the profitable one out of squeamishness. It prices what people will pay for, it measures what each line returns, and it allocates accordingly.

And before anybody tells me you can’t put a number on a human life, I’d like to point out that we do it constantly, in writing, with published methodology. An insurance company decides a prosthetic leg is not medically necessary. That’s a number. Somebody ran it.

Health economists price a year of life somewhere between fifty and a hundred fifty thousand dollars, and insurers and drug formularies use those thresholds to decide what gets covered and what doesn’t. Federal regulators carry a value of a statistical life around thirteen million dollars. They use it to decide whether a safety rule is worth issuing. If a proposed rule saves fewer lives than it costs at thirteen million apiece, the rule doesn’t happen. That isn’t a scandal. That’s a Tuesday.

So the number exists. Several agencies maintain it. It gets used every day to deny people wheelchairs and to kill regulations in the crib.

Then a man is murdered, and a homicide unit works the case for eight months, and at no point does anyone open the drawer where we keep the number.

I’m not saying that’s wrong. I’m saying it’s inconsistent.

Pick one. If a cleared homicide is worth thirteen million in avoided statistical death, fund it to thirteen million and not a dollar past. If it’s worth less, staff accordingly. If it’s worth more, hire.

What I can’t follow is a country that prices a living man’s leg at zero and then spends without limit on him once he’s dead.

The government owns something remarkable here. It writes the rules, it enforces the rules, it sets the penalty for breaking the rules, and it adjudicates the disputes. Every one of those is a lever on revenue, and it holds all four. And it uses them to express values.

We could be pricing.

I mentioned that the state spends forty thousand a year housing the man after conviction. That’s true, and it’s the part I have the hardest time explaining, because we already have proof the business works.

CoreCivic and GEO Group reported roughly $1.4 billion in combined revenue last quarter. CoreCivic separately sold four facilities to the Department of Homeland Security for net proceeds of about $1.6 billion, which its chief executive told investors comes out to around $307,000 per bed. CoreCivic will continue operating them.

Read that arrangement again, because it’s a lovely piece of work. The government bought the buildings. The company kept the contract. The company took the money.

Meanwhile there’s a state prison somewhere holding a man convicted of a similar crime, in a similar building, with similar staff, and that facility has never produced a dollar. It appears in the budget as a cost, and every year somebody argues about how large a cost it ought to be.

Same man. Same walls. Same food.

One of them is an expense and one of them is $307,000 a bed.

The difference isn’t the prisoner. It’s that one of them sends an invoice.

And this is where I lose the thread entirely, because who receives that invoice?

The state.

The state is the customer. The state pays the per diem. CoreCivic collected $811.9 million from state contracts last year, and that figure rose because states agreed to higher per diem rates.

Let me be clear that CoreCivic has done nothing wrong. CoreCivic found a customer, negotiated a price that includes a margin, and returns the proceeds to its owners. That’s exemplary. That’s the whole idea.

The state is the fool in this transaction.

The state arrests the man. The state convicts him. The state sets the length of his stay. The state holds the legal monopoly on incarcerating him. The state can own the land and the building. The state controls the money through taxation.

And then the state walks into the room and says, more or less, would you like us to pay you a profitable rate to monetize the captive population we produced for you?

CoreCivic says yes. Obviously it says yes.

We supply the prisoners. We supply the money. We created the monopoly. We control the sentences. We hold the enforcement authority. Then we pay somebody else so they can have the profit.

Why are we financing both sides of their business?

But the deeper error isn’t which company operates the facility. It’s the direction the money runs.

The prisoner should be the customer.

Right now the government arrests a man, convicts him, houses him, feeds him, guards him, treats him medically, supplies his utilities, transports him, supervises him, and then charges him approximately nothing for any of it. Meanwhile it enjoys total customer retention for the length of the sentence, which is a figure most subscription businesses will never see.

Invoice him.

Room and board. Security fee. Intake processing. Medical services. Transportation. Administrative charges. Court costs. Electronic communications. Whatever the market bears, and this market has unusual characteristics.

If he can’t pay today, accrue the balance. Garnish future earnings. Attach assets. Finance it at an appropriate rate for the credit risk. Package the receivables and sell them to people who buy receivables.

I’m then informed that most of this is already legal, which I find encouraging.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia permit at least one category of what’s called a pay-to-stay fee. Twenty-six states allow room and board plus medical charges, for adults and for juveniles both. Michigan counties may bill up to sixty dollars a day under a 1984 statute. Riverside County, California, ran a program at $142.42 a day, which is more than several hotels in Riverside. Medical co-pays run from fifty cents to $13.55 a visit. The first correctional fee law in this country was passed in Michigan in 1846, so the concept predates the light bulb.

The authority exists. The statutes exist. The billing systems exist.

Then I looked at collections. Eaton County, Michigan, assessed over a million dollars in these fees across two fiscal years and collected five percent of it. It bills thirty-two dollars a day under a statute permitting sixty.

Five percent.

Name another enterprise in America that issues a million dollars of invoices, collects fifty thousand, and holds nobody accountable for the difference. There isn’t one, because it wouldn’t survive the quarter.

They built the apparatus and then declined to operate it. That’s worse than never having built it, because the fixed cost was already incurred.

And while he’s there, he works.

The state holds an able-bodied labor pool that can’t resign, can’t organize an exit, and can’t fail to appear. Leaving that idle is the same error as the fire truck sitting in the bay. Sell the labor, or sell what the labor produces, and apply his wages against what he owes for his own incarceration.

Which, again, already happens. People working inside are typically paid under a dollar an hour, and the facility retains a portion of that against the cost of keeping them.

So the model is proven. The pricing is timid and the collections are a catastrophe, but the model is proven.

Hospitals charge the patient. Utilities charge the ratepayer. Landlords charge the tenant. Insurers charge the insured.

Prison is the only industry in America where the provider pays for the customer. Somebody explain that to me.

National parks may be the purest example of the government failing to understand what it owns. Yellowstone is scarce. There’s one.

You can’t start another Yellowstone in Nevada because you think the existing Yellowstone charges too much for parking. This is what pricing power looks like.

The government owns famous mountains, canyons, forests, wildlife, waterfalls, geothermal features, historic sites, beaches, and millions of acres of land that people travel across the planet to see. Then it charges relatively modest entrance fees and talks about preserving public access.

I’m sure public access is delightful. It’s not earnings.

Charge what Yellowstone will bear.

Charge more during peak periods. Charge more for the best access. Charge for premium viewing areas, trail reservations, parking, buses, commercial photography, guided access, concessions, lodging rights, and whatever else people are demonstrably willing to purchase.

If silence is desirable, sell quiet access. If Old Faithful has naming-rights value, name it.

I don’t have an emotional attachment to the words “Old Faithful.” I’m sure I could learn to appreciate the Berkshire Hathaway Old Faithful Experience if the check clears.

Then sell equity in the parks operation. Investors get exposure to irreplaceable American assets and global tourism demand. The government gets capital.

Everybody who matters wins.

Some people object that certain functions are inherently governmental. That argument became difficult to take seriously once we decided private arbitration was fine.

A dispute that might otherwise be resolved by a public judge can be moved into a private proceeding and decided by a private arbitrator. Arbitration agreements are common enough that most adults have agreed to several without reading them.

Good. We solved adjudication.

If one of the oldest functions of organized government can support a private revenue model, I’m not interested in hearing that a campground or school cafeteria possesses some unique sacred quality that prevents monetization.

We already crossed the philosophical bridge. The only remaining question is how much revenue is on the other side.

This brings me to taxes, where the United States government demonstrates a truly astonishing lack of ambition. People talk about tax rates as though the objective is to collect enough money to pay for government.

Why? No serious business asks how little revenue it can collect while still covering expenses.

The correct American tax policy is obvious. Tax until the government reaches maximum sustainable earnings.

That doesn’t mean setting every tax at one hundred percent. One hundred percent may reduce the revenue base. People could stop working, move money, change behavior, leave jurisdictions, restructure transactions, or otherwise become inconvenient.

Fine. Account for it.

The goal is to find the rate structure that extracts the maximum amount of money without reducing the total take. Maybe one kind of income bears forty percent. Maybe another bears seventy. Maybe property can bear more. Maybe consumption can bear more. Maybe some categories should bear less because the lower rate produces more total revenue.

Test it. We know how pricing works.

What we shouldn’t do is ask whether a tax rate feels fair to the taxpayer. The taxpayer is the customer. Customers generally prefer lower prices.

This information isn’t useful.

The government possesses a customer base with features that would cause most corporate executives to become lightheaded. Hundreds of millions of people live within its jurisdiction. It can impose charges by law. It can collect them through an enforcement apparatus it also owns. It controls the currency in which federal taxes are paid. It can establish rules affecting the ability of customers to avoid payment.

This is an extraordinary business.

Yet after collecting the money, government commits another strange error. It spends much of it providing services to the same people.

That’s almost a rebate.

Taxes should be taxes. School tuition should be school tuition. Fire protection should be fire protection. Park admission should be park admission. Court fees should be court fees.

Telling the school district that you already paid taxes should receive approximately the same response you’d get from Verizon if you told them you already paid your mortgage.

Good for you. Your bill is still due.

The government needs to start acting like the owner. That’s really the entire proposal. I don’t want government to get out of the way. Government is sitting in exactly the right place.

It owns the monopolies. It controls the mandates. It owns the assets. It has the enforcement power. It has the customers.

The problem is that government keeps looking at these advantages and thinking about citizens. It should be thinking about earnings.

The public school student isn’t the beneficiary. He’s a mandated customer.

The homeowner isn’t entitled to fire protection. He’s sitting inside a service territory.

The military family isn’t receiving a grocery benefit. It’s a retail customer with unusually predictable demand.

The Yellowstone visitor isn’t enjoying shared national heritage. He’s consuming a scarce asset.

The taxpayer isn’t a shareholder.

He’s revenue.

Once you understand that, the rest is administration.

Set prices where earnings are maximized. Control costs. Charge separately for separate services. Convert agencies into investable entities. Sell economic interests while retaining whatever government control is actually necessary. Distribute earnings. Let capital markets determine what the streams are worth.

That’s what we do with everything else. I don’t know why government should be permitted to remain un-American.

I’ve noticed that the objections all have the same shape. Readiness means keeping the aircraft in case there’s a war. Preservation means keeping the canyon in case somebody wants to look at it in 2140. Prudence means holding capital in case the system seizes up.

Every one of them asks me to leave money on the table today in exchange for a condition that might not arrive, and that I will probably not be present for if it does. That isn’t an argument. It’s a wager.

And nobody who makes it will put a number on the other side. Ask what readiness is worth and you get an adjective. Ask what preservation earns and you get a paragraph about heritage. When a thing can’t be priced, it gets carried at zero, which is the correct treatment of an asset nobody can value.

The distribution already cleared.

If the money comes out in year two and the company files in year nine, the money still came out in year two. Nobody drives to the house and asks for it back. The collapse doesn’t reach backward.

We tell children the story about the ant and the grasshopper as though it settles something. The ant works all summer. The grasshopper plays. Winter arrives and the grasshopper suffers.

Fine.

They both die.

One of them spent the summer storing grain against a season he had no guarantee of seeing, and the other one didn’t, and the ending is the same ending. I’m not proposing anything reckless. I’m observing that the prudent party and the imprudent party arrive at the same place, and only one of them enjoyed the interval.

So when somebody tells me a country needs slack, reserves, redundancy, spare capacity, and preserved land because of what might happen later, I’d like to know why I should be the only man in America pricing a future that has never once appeared on a quarterly report.

Show me the line item.

Maybe you think this sounds awful. Maybe you think schools should be judged by whether children learn. Maybe hospitals should be judged by whether people get healthy. Maybe the fire department should care primarily about fires, parks should be preserved for the public, soldiers should receive decent benefits, and taxes should be tied to some concept of democratic obligation instead of maximum extractable revenue.

Fine. Explain the scoreboard.

The Dow closed today at 53,791.85. (AP News)

Corporate profits from current production rose $246.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, and another $74.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026. (Bureau of Economic Analysis)

Corporations are making extraordinary amounts of money. Markets are above 50,000. The institutions organized around extracting money and returning value to capital are doing exactly that.

So if you think organizing more of America around the same objective would constitute failure, I’m curious what success is supposed to look like. By the measurements America actually celebrates, we’re winning.

We should finish the job.

P.S.

One more thing, because I think people assume I’m being clever.

I’m in my forties. I’ve lived in this country my entire life. Every arrangement I’ve described here was already in place when I got here. The hospital that bills you. The utility that bills you. The insurer that decides what your doctor is permitted to do. The arbitrator in the conference room near the airport. The landlord, the lender, the fee, the ticket. I’ve never lived in a different America, and neither has anyone I know under sixty.

And for all of that time I’ve been told, continuously and by everyone, that this is the greatest country on earth.

I believe both of those things. Nobody has ever explained to me how to hold them apart.

If this is the arrangement that made us the greatest country in the world, then more of it should make us greater. That isn’t a trick. That’s what the sentence means.

And if it isn’t, then the greatness came from something else. Something running alongside all this, something that never produced earnings and never showed up on the scoreboard. I’d like somebody to tell me what it was.

And whether we’re still doing it.

I wanted to see Flyleaf at the House of Blues in Anaheim. I live in Bakersfield, which made this inconvenient.

There was also a car involved. My wife and son were flying into LAX the next morning after a month of training taekwondo in Korea, and their car was parked at my mom’s house in Huntington Beach. The plan was for them to Uber from the airport, pick up the car, and drive home. My original plan was to drive down for the concert and drive back that night, which meant two vehicles making the same trip on the same weekend.

Driving had its own issues regardless. The concert was on a Friday, and driving through Los Angeles and Orange County on a Friday afternoon is less a method of transportation than a voluntary anger ritual. You sit behind the wheel for four hours while your lower back tightens and thousands of strangers demonstrate that turn signals are apparently a form of government surveillance.

I didn’t want to do that, so I took a bus. This sounds more dramatic than it was. I took an Amtrak bus from Bakersfield to Union Station, transferred to a train, and then took a city bus from the Anaheim station to the House of Blues. It was a completely reasonable plan assembled from several smaller plans that each required me to briefly have no idea where I was.

The bus left Bakersfield at 12:50. I arrived at 12:20, which was too early. The station is small, I had no luggage, and there’s a limit to how much preparation should be required to sit in a chair. Twelve thirty-five would’ve been correct. I didn’t know that yet, because I’d never done it before. I had my phone, my wallet, my keys, my earplugs, my headphones, a battery pack, and the shirt I was wearing. The shirt was excellent. It was the Machine Gun Kelly and Wiz Khalifa Lost Americana tour shirt, skeleton cowboys, a wrecked car, and a desert sunset under enormous distressed lettering. It had nothing to do with the band I was going to see. I wore it anyway.

For the trip I’d brought beef jerky, a red Powerade Zero, and a bag of Quest ranch chips. It was all gone before Union Station. I should’ve made a sandwich.

We left ten minutes late because the bus was waiting on a train. Once it was half full, they sent us anyway and put everyone else on a second bus, so nobody had to share a row.

The bus was much nicer than the word suggests. It was a full motorcoach, the kind that takes people on vacation tours, not the kind most people picture when you tell them you took a bus somewhere. The ride was easy. I sat down. Someone else drove. This remains one of civilization’s better arrangements.

The first real challenge arrived at Union Station, where I needed to find Track 13B. Union Station is a beautiful building with high ceilings and old tile, built back when public buildings were meant to make a person feel small. It’s also large enough that finding the correct train requires either experience or a willingness to wander around looking increasingly suspicious of signage. I had neither experience nor patience, but I eventually found Track 13B.

I’d paid eight extra dollars for Business Class on the train because it promised a guaranteed seat, more space, and snacks. Eight dollars is a reasonable amount to spend on the possibility of being slightly less annoyed.

Unfortunately, I was standing at the wrong end of the platform when the train arrived. By the time I walked all the way to Business Class, nearly every row had one person sitting in it. There were empty seats everywhere, but no empty rows. I ended up sharing with a woman who seemed disappointed that anyone had purchased the seat beside her. I wasn’t offended. I’d have preferred that neither of us be there.

The whole car was pairs of strangers engaged in a silent agreement not to acknowledge that they were sitting six inches apart. The bus had run a second vehicle rather than make anyone share a row. The train sold me an upgrade and sat me next to a stranger. I’d paid for Business Class and somehow still felt as though I’d imposed on a private residence.

Other people had snacks. I saw the snacks. Nobody gave me snacks. I’d eaten everything I brought two hours earlier and had nothing left.

The snacks did eventually arrive. Someone handed me a bag with pretzels, brownie bites, and fruit snacks, because apparently I’m six. I ate all of it.

A conductor came by and told me when Anaheim was coming up, which I appreciated because the train’s final destination was San Diego, and I had no desire to discover how long it would take me to notice that I’d missed Orange County. He told me Anaheim was after Fullerton. I set an alarm anyway because trust is good, but alarms are better.

The train reached Anaheim on time. The station’s called Anaheim, which gives the impression that you’ve reached the part of Anaheim anyone wants to visit. You haven’t. You’ve reached ARTIC, a large glass transportation building near Angel Stadium, several miles from Disneyland, Downtown Disney, GardenWalk, and almost everything a visitor means when he says Anaheim.

An Uber would’ve cost about fifteen dollars. There was also a two-dollar bus, so I took the bus.

There were two possible buses. Route 50 was the local bus and apparently stopped closer to the House of Blues. Route 553 was the limited-stop bus heading toward the resort area. I walked past Route 50 to get to Route 553, even though I nearly stopped and asked the Route 50 driver where I should go. Once I boarded the 553, its driver told me that I probably should’ve taken the 50. This was useful information provided at the only moment when it was no longer useful.

He said his bus would still get me close, and he promised to tell me where to get off. There was one other passenger on board, and the bus was clean, quiet, and completely ordinary. I had no real sense of where I was. I was sitting on a city bus in Anaheim watching my phone’s blue dot move through streets that meant nothing to me, trusting a man I’d known for thirty seconds to keep me from being carried into some industrial district. He remembered.

We reached the same stop as Route 50 anyway. The 50 was sitting there when we arrived and pulled away before I could’ve switched to it, so the 553 may actually have been faster despite being the wrong bus. Transportation is sometimes less about making the best decision than about being lucky regarding when the incorrect vehicle leaves. The ride cost two dollars. It left on time. The entire penalty for taking the wrong bus was a ten-minute walk, just under half a mile, in eighty-eight-degree heat. The bus was fine.

By the time I reached GardenWalk it was a little after five, I was hungry and tired, and the line outside the House of Blues had already become enormous. Doors were at six thirty. The line wrapped along the building with hundreds of people who’d apparently decided that standing on concrete for an hour and a half was an important part of seeing Flyleaf. I didn’t care about being first that much. I wanted to be on the floor and somewhere in the crowd, but I didn’t need to spend ninety minutes proving it.

I went into the House of Blues restaurant and sat at the bar to order a burger. A woman beside me started talking to me. Her friends had bailed, which meant she had an extra VIP ticket. She offered it to me, but the VIP area was upstairs, and I didn’t want to watch the show from above. I wanted to be on the rail if I could manage it, or at least down in the crowd where the concert was happening.

She told me that if I spent twenty-five dollars in the restaurant, I could get a pass that let me skip the line. This was extremely valuable information that House of Blues had apparently chosen to communicate through random women at the bar. I was already buying food. Twenty-five dollars at a concert venue isn’t a spending requirement. It’s a burger and the drink you were going to order anyway. I ended up ordering a burger, a beer, two vodka Red Bulls, and a water. Clearing twenty-five dollars wasn’t difficult. I’d accidentally found the best deal in the building by becoming hungry at the correct time.

The woman kept asking whether she’d see me on the floor. She asked enough times that it stopped sounding like a casual question. Then she hugged me. I’d joked that she was an excellent date because she’d offered to pay for everything. She ignored the joke and told me she was tired of people bailing on her. She just wanted someone to actually show up so she wouldn’t always have to attend concerts alone.

She wasn’t necessarily trying to pick me up. She might’ve been, but that wasn’t really the point. She was lonely and irritated and had decided, within the span of a burger, that I seemed like someone who might actually attend the event he said he was attending. I liked her. I also didn’t want to accidentally commit to spending the entire night with a stranger because she’d offered me a ticket. Both things could be true.

At some point, another woman asked whether anyone was using the seat next to me. I said no. She asked whether she could sit there, and I told her I didn’t give a fuck what she did. In my head, this meant she was free to sit down and didn’t need my permission. It was intended as relaxed and accommodating.

She left.

It occurred to me afterward that I may have accidentally communicated that her presence was beneath my concern. It’s also possible that I was eating my burger strangely. By then the burger had arrived and become my primary relationship. Still, two women had independently approached me within about half an hour, so I decided my shirt was performing at least half a degree better than normal.

The restaurant pass worked much better than I expected. I assumed it meant they’d let me join a shorter line shortly before the doors opened. Instead, they let me into a separate area inside the venue while the giant crowd remained outside, and the room was air-conditioned.

Outside, hundreds of people were standing in the Anaheim heat trying to preserve their places in line. Inside, I had air conditioning, a private bathroom, and a bar. I’d somehow converted the money I was already spending on dinner into admission to a small climate-controlled republic.

I was tired from the bus, the train, the second bus, the walking, and the continuous low-level process of figuring out where everything was. I ordered another vodka Red Bull, my third, because I needed to be more awake but also less responsible. The bartender made the drink and then handed me the rest of the Red Bull can. She could’ve thrown it away. Instead she recognized that I’d paid for the Red Bull and gave me the rest of the Red Bull. I drank my vodka Red Bull, kept the can, used a bathroom that didn’t contain several hundred concertgoers, and waited in air conditioning while the line outside continued to grow.

I felt a little bad. Not guilty, exactly. I hadn’t cheated. I’d bought food and received the benefit House of Blues offered. Still, I could see the line outside and knew that half those people would’ve happily bought a burger and two drinks if they’d known it meant they could wait indoors with a bar and a bathroom.

They didn’t know because nobody had told them. I knew because a stranger whose friends had abandoned her decided to adopt me for twenty minutes.

After a while in my climate-controlled republic, they let us onto the floor. I ended up three back from the rail, dead center. The crowd filled in behind us, and the room changed from an empty venue into a concert. People pressed toward the stage. The lights dropped. All the transportation questions and wrong entrances and strange social interactions stopped mattering because I’d made it there, and Flyleaf was good.

Not “good considering they’ve been doing this for twenty years.” They were just good.

Lacey Sturm sounded great. She also has the energy Helena Bonham Carter brings to every movie she appears in, where the audience is never entirely sure whether she’s about to bless them or bite them. The songs still had the same strange combination of heaviness, melody, fury, and sincerity that made people care about them in the first place. The crowd knew every word. A large percentage of the audience appeared to be women reopening emotional files from adolescence, many of which had apparently been created in church youth groups.

People crowd surfed, which I hadn’t expected. I don’t know what I thought this audience would do, but I hadn’t planned on bodies passing overhead.

Then the band’s kids came out. They stood onstage singing along and dancing while bubbles drifted out over the floor. Several of them started throwing things into the crowd, mostly drumsticks, picks, and paper airplanes. One of the airplanes hit me in the chest. I didn’t pick it up. The guy next to me did. It was a setlist folded into a plane, signed on the back by Lacey and the rest of the band, which was neat. I was still glad I hadn’t picked it up, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of the night holding a piece of paper.

I understood why. I keep discovering that the bands I want to see have large female audiences. Hole was furious women. Kesha was liberated women. Flyleaf was women who survived youth group. I was simply there because the songs were good.

There was something satisfying about having traveled alone for it. Nobody else had to care about Flyleaf. Nobody had to agree that the trip was worth taking. I’d wanted to go, so I found a way to go. The route was more complicated than driving, but once I was moving, it was easier. I sat on the bus. I sat on the train. I watched Southern California pass outside the windows. Other people worried about traffic.

I only had to worry about where Track 13B was, which bus I’d accidentally ignored, whether the annoyed woman beside me hated me, whether Business Class had been worth eight dollars, whether a stranger had appointed me her permanent concert companion, and whether telling a hot woman that I didn’t give a fuck what she did had perhaps been the wrong phrasing. These are manageable concerns.

When the show ended, I walked back into the same room, used the bathroom by myself again, and left while everyone else was still funneling toward the main doors. The twenty-five dollars was still working.

Finding my Uber at GardenWalk became the final complication. I was standing at the correct pickup point. The driver went somewhere else. GardenWalk has multiple levels and entrances arranged in a way that allows two people to occupy the same address while being nowhere near each other.

Eventually he found me and drove me to my mom’s house in Huntington Beach, where the car was waiting. That ride cost thirty dollars. The Amtrak bus and train had cost thirty-four dollars together, and the city bus added another two. Even before the eight-dollar upgrade, the entire trip down had cost only six dollars more than the final Uber.

The basic story is that I took a bus to see Flyleaf. Nothing terrible happened. I got there. I ate a burger. Two women talked to me. I accidentally rejected one and may have been emotionally adopted by the other. I discovered a twenty-five-dollar loophole that provided air conditioning, a bathroom, a bar, and early entry. A bartender gave me the rest of my Red Bull because she was a professional. Then Flyleaf played, and they were great.

It wasn’t an adventure. An adventure requires danger, hardship, or at least a meaningful chance of being eaten. This was just a day in which I kept moving toward something I wanted to do, occasionally without understanding where I was.

I’d absolutely do it again, which surprised me. I make that drive all the time. I either drive home the same night or stay at my mom’s and drive back the next day, and both versions are stressful and bad. This time, if I’d wanted to go home, there was a 12:30 Amtrak bus out of ARTIC that would’ve put me in Bakersfield around 4:40 in the morning. That sounds worse than it is. I’d have slept through all of it.

It also solved the car. Instead of two vehicles making the same trip, there was one, and I rode home in it with the two people I’d been waiting a month to see.

I told my wife that maybe we should do this instead of driving to LAX for flights. She said I wouldn’t like giving up my car and control of the schedule.

She might be right. I’m not sure she is.

Next time, I might even take Route 50.

At UFC 298, Mark Zuckerberg stood in Alexander Volkanovski’s corner wearing the team tracksuit. In a ten-second clip before the fight, one cornerman passed equipment to another while Zuckerberg repeatedly extended his hands and received nothing. He nodded, tried again, and continued hovering near the transaction like a child who had been allowed to help his father change the oil.

Zuckerberg didn’t need to be there.

He wasn’t Volkanovski’s coach, cutman, or trusted training partner. Nobody needed him to hold the shirt. He had simply accumulated enough wealth and importance to gain access to a place normally reserved for men who had spent months helping a champion prepare to be kicked in the skull.

He had the tracksuit. He had the credential. He had the place in the photograph.

He still couldn’t get anyone to hand him the towel.

That clip explains the modern American ruling class better than several thousand books written by professors who own scarves.

The problem isn’t merely that America is ruled by rich assholes. America has always been ruled by rich assholes. The country was assembled by men who looked at an untouched continent and immediately began discussing mineral rights.

The difference is psychological.

The old ruling class wanted money, control, obedience, and the largest office in a building everyone else had paid to construct. The new ruling class wants those things too, but it also wants something the old bastards rarely needed.

It wants to be liked.

Worse, it wants to be considered cool.

The word matters here.

A nerd is at peace with being a nerd. He likes what he likes, he understands it was never cool, and he stopped filing appeals a long time ago.

A dork wants out.

Same wardrobe. Same interests. Different relationship to the verdict.

This isn’t an article about nerds.

The easiest way to understand the old ruling class is to consider Fat Tony from The Simpsons.

Fat Tony wants money. He wants Springfield’s politicians to cooperate, its police to develop temporary blindness, and local businesses to remember which envelope belongs in which coat pocket. He conducts business with Louie and Legs at the Legitimate Businessman’s Social Club because Fat Tony already has a social club, friends, and somewhere to sit.

Fat Tony doesn’t care whether Homer Simpson finds him interesting.

He would prefer Homer to complete the assigned task without destroying the truck. Homer’s personal feelings on the matter don’t enter the calculation. Fat Tony has never purchased Moe’s Tavern, remodeled it, stood behind the bar, and waited for Lenny to invite him onto the bowling team.

This is a healthier form of corruption.

Fat Tony knows what he wants. He wants his percentage.

The railroad baron wanted the railroad. The oilman wanted the oil. The studio boss wanted the studio. The mob boss wanted his envelope. The corporate raider wanted to dismantle the company, sell the furniture, and finish lunch before the pension holders realized what had happened.

These were terrible men. Most of them would’ve sold a public school for copper wire if the numbers worked.

They simply didn’t mistake affection for an asset class.

The same distinction applies to Steve Jobs.

Jobs was arrogant, vindictive, frequently cruel, and completely convinced that he was the coolest person in every room. This belief required no support from the other people in the room.

He didn’t wear a black turtleneck because a consultant told him creative people might respect it. He wore it because he assumed his personal taste was so correct that the rest of civilization would eventually rearrange itself around him.

Frequently, it did.

Jobs didn’t make cool things because he wanted cool people to invite him backstage. He made cool things because he believed coolness originated inside Steve Jobs and could be transferred into glass and aluminum through sufficient yelling.

When Jobs met a musician, filmmaker, designer, or artist, he didn’t behave like a fan who had won a radio contest. He behaved like a man wondering whether the artist understood the privilege of speaking to Steve Jobs.

He didn’t want Bono to tell him he belonged.

He wanted to explain why Bono’s sunglasses were wrong.

That confidence could become monstrous. A man who believes his taste should govern the planet may eventually remove every useful port from a laptop. He may also produce objects people line up overnight to purchase.

The direction of travel was clear.

Steve Jobs projected his identity outward.

The modern centibillionaire works in reverse. He sees an identity he wants and attempts to purchase his way inward.

The athlete is admired, so he buys access to the athlete.

The actor commands attention, so he buys the studio.

The journalist influences the conversation, so he buys the newspaper.

The comedian owns the room, so he buys the room, changes the visibility settings, and waits for the laughter to arrive.

Steve Jobs walked onto a stage and assumed everyone would watch him.

Mark Zuckerberg stands in a fighter’s corner and waits for someone to give him a job.

The modern billionaire isn’t Fat Tony. He isn’t Steve Jobs. He’s Danny McGrath from Billy Madison after his technology investments performed extremely well.

Billy Madison spends most of the movie as a spoiled adult idiot attempting to repeat school. Before that, he was a spoiled teenage idiot who bullied Danny McGrath. Years later, Billy calls Danny and apologizes. Danny accepts the apology, hangs up, and crosses Billy’s name off a list of people he intends to kill.

It’s a fine scene. It teaches two valuable lessons.

The first is that a man should apologize to the people he tormented.

The second is that America is fortunate Danny McGrath didn’t invent social media.

For most of the twentieth century, the ruling class was Billy Madison. It was loud, spoiled, entitled, athletic, and absolutely certain it belonged in every room. Billy had a mansion, a swimming pool, an enormous inheritance, and several unemployed friends willing to celebrate when he set dog shit on fire.

He didn’t need anyone to tell him he was cool.

Today, the ruling class is Danny McGrath after the stock in his retirement account increased eight million percent.

Nobody called to apologize, so he bought the school.

Then he bought the hotel company, the television station, the yearbook, and the software used to decide who gets invited to the reunion.

He still has the list.

Zuckerberg’s origin story contains this entire problem in miniature.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra recruited Zuckerberg to work on HarvardConnection, the social network they were developing. They later accused him of delaying their project while he built Facebook. They sued, the parties settled, and an appeals court eventually enforced that settlement. The court’s opinion described their claim plainly. They said Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them.

A court never delivered the clean Hollywood verdict that Zuckerberg stole Facebook. The settlement ended the matter without giving history that satisfying sentence.

The emotional facts are more useful than the legal ones.

The Winklevoss twins were rich, tall, athletic Harvard rowers who later competed in the Olympics. They looked like two separate universities had ordered the same crew captain and neither was willing to return him.

They were the men Zuckerberg was supposed to work for.

Instead, Zuckerberg launched Facebook, became one of the richest and most powerful human beings alive, and reduced the Winklevoss twins to supporting characters in the Mark Zuckerberg story.

This wasn’t a narrow victory.

Zuckerberg took the future.

He became richer than they were, more famous than they were, and more historically important than they were. Their complaint against him became the first chapter of his legend. Even people who thought he had behaved badly still treated his behavior as further proof that he was ruthless enough to win.

He didn’t merely defeat the jocks.

He made the jocks spend the next twenty years explaining that they had technically possessed the idea first.

That should’ve been enough.

Twenty years later, he was wearing another athlete’s tracksuit and extending his empty hands toward a towel.

Zuckerberg’s interest in martial arts appears sincere. He trains, competes, and voluntarily permits other adults to choke him, which requires more physical courage than most executives display. None of that changes the clip.

He doesn’t merely want to practice the sport.

He wants the fighters to recognize him as one of them.

He wants the uniform. He wants the corner. He wants the casual physical ease of men who don’t need to explain why they belong there.

He won more completely than any bullied kid in American history.

The victory didn’t reach the wound.

Jeff Bezos encountered the same limitation at a 2021 art gala.

A short video showed Lauren Sánchez speaking with Leonardo DiCaprio while Bezos stood beside them. Sánchez leaned toward DiCaprio and smiled. DiCaprio remained Leonardo DiCaprio. Bezos looked as though he had requested the check and was beginning to suspect the waiter had gone home.

The clip went viral. Bezos responded well, posting a photograph of himself beside a warning sign for a fatal drop and inviting DiCaprio to visit.

It was a good joke. A man should be permitted one joke after the entire internet watches his date discover Leonardo DiCaprio.

The clip still demonstrated a physical law.

Jeff Bezos can buy the yacht, the gala, the newspaper covering the gala, and a rocket capable of leaving the planet after the gala becomes uncomfortable.

He can’t buy Leonardo DiCaprio’s gravity.

Money can purchase proximity to charisma. It can’t install charisma in the purchaser.

Most men eventually accept that another man is taller, funnier, stronger, better-looking, or able to play guitar without resembling an accountant being electrocuted. The centibillionaire didn’t accumulate one hundred billion dollars by accepting limits.

He sees every limit as an engineering failure.

The actor has attention. Buy the studio.

The athlete has admiration. Fund the sport and stand in the corner.

The journalist has influence. Buy the newspaper.

The comedian has an audience. Buy the platform.

The artist possesses something people love. Build a machine that produces a cheaper imitation and explain that the artist should be grateful for the efficiency.

Elon Musk spent roughly $44 billion to acquire Twitter in 2022. The deal closed on October 27, and Twitter became a company controlled by Musk.

There are many political, financial, and ideological explanations for this purchase. Some of them may even be true.

The simpler explanation is that Elon Musk bought the group chat.

He was already one of the most famous men alive. His companies built electric cars, rockets, satellites, and flamethrowers for men whose children had stopped answering their calls.

He could’ve spent every evening eating steak in silence, which is what success is for.

Instead, he purchased the website where people argued with him.

Then he continued arguing with them.

Musk didn’t merely buy the group chat. He maintained burner accounts inside it, including one where he pretended to be his own toddler.

At one point, the internet became convinced Musk had entered an X group chat under a fake name and a disguised voice to lecture people about why Elon Musk was brilliant.

The account appears to have belonged to a real, separate person.

This barely matters.

The story spread because nobody had to be persuaded that Elon Musk might enter his own website in disguise to defend Elon Musk. It sounded less like an accusation than a description of his normal behavior with one additional mustache.

Musk eventually addressed the theory himself. He posted that he was Adrian Dittman and that it was time the world knew.

This was a joke. It was also the only move available to a man who has never once encountered a rumor about his own loneliness and decided to leave it alone.

The reporter who established that Dittmann was a real man living in Fiji was then suspended from X for thirty days. The platform said she had posted private information. She denied it.

Consider that sequence. A journalist proved Elon Musk hadn’t been secretly impersonating one of his own fans, and Elon Musk’s website removed her for proving it.

That’s how completely he embodies the problem. He purchased the group chat, made himself its most visible participant, and still couldn’t trust the room to reach the correct conclusion about him without supervision.

Traditional powerful men hired employees to remove irritating strangers from their presence. Musk purchased the building, promoted himself to head moderator, and began sleeping near the complaint desk.

He didn’t merely want control of the conversation.

He wanted to win it.

That appetite can’t be satisfied. A man can acquire every share of a company, remove the board, fire the executives, change the name, and carry the office furniture into the street himself.

He can’t force strangers to think he’s funny.

He can’t make the people he admires admire him back.

He can’t purchase the feeling of entering a room and knowing everyone is pleased he came.

Every billion proves he has won.

Every performance proves he doesn’t believe it.

Larry Ellison represents the same effort at a larger and more dignified scale.

The Ellison family now controls Paramount. Larry Ellison also placed his personal fortune behind Paramount’s pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery, at one point personally guaranteeing more than $40 billion in equity financing.

There are legitimate business reasons to own Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery. There are also legitimate nutritional reasons to eat a thirty-two-ounce steak. Nobody selects that steak because his physician demanded moderation.

Hollywood isn’t merely an industry.

Hollywood is the factory where America manufactures cool.

It decides which faces become beautiful, which voices become important, which stories become national myths, and which people enter a restaurant through the front while everyone else pretends not to stare.

Larry Ellison already possesses more wealth than a person can use. He owns aircraft, estates, islands, and enough computing infrastructure to make God reconsider cloud storage. Another billion dollars won’t improve his breakfast.

Hollywood offers something the money hasn’t delivered.

It offers cultural legitimacy.

Steve Jobs made cool things because Steve Jobs believed he was cool.

Larry Ellison is buying the company that manufactures cool.

That distinction also explains the strange direction of artificial intelligence.

A useful machine should perform work human beings hate. It should clean sewers, lift concrete, detect tumors, sort recycling, and retrieve the television remote from beneath the furniture.

Instead, much of the public excitement surrounding AI has focused on replacing work human beings love.

Writing. Painting. Acting. Music. Design. Conversation.

A machine that cleans gutters frees a man from cleaning gutters.

A machine that writes his novel so he has more time to clean gutters has misunderstood the assignment.

The stated promise is that everyone will gain access to creativity. The practical obsession is making creative people economically unnecessary.

Artists have always irritated rich men because artists can become culturally important without first becoming rich. A singer can enter a room containing six hedge-fund managers and immediately become the person everyone watches. An actor can earn less during an entire career than a founder gains before lunch and still possess more social gravity.

A funny bartender can control a table better than a billionaire.

A beautiful idiot can receive more effortless affection than a technological genius.

A writer can produce a sentence people remember without asking a platform owner for permission.

This arrangement offends the modern billionaire’s understanding of merit.

He won capitalism. He possesses the highest score. Yet athletes, actors, musicians, comedians, writers, and attractive people continue receiving forms of admiration that don’t automatically transfer with net worth.

AI offers a solution.

Human talent can be scraped, copied, averaged, automated, and sold back as a subscription. The artist no longer owns the mysterious thing that makes people care. The platform owns the machinery that produces enough resemblance to weaken the artist’s bargaining power.

This is described as democratization because “revenge against the arts department” performs poorly in investor presentations.

The goal isn’t necessarily to destroy art.

The goal is to own the mechanism that creates it, distributes it, ranks it, and assigns the credit.

They don’t want beauty to disappear.

They want beauty to require their permission.

The problem with America isn’t that billionaires are greedy.

Greed is simple. A greedy man wants another dollar. A government can tax the dollar, regulate the market, or place the man in a modest federal institution where he will receive adequate protein.

The deeper problem is that the new ruling class uses economic power to settle social grievances.

Bill Gates ought to end this argument, and he doesn’t.

Gates spent two decades as the designated nerd of the United States. Comedians used him as shorthand for a man who had never touched a woman. A Belgian threw a pie in his face in Brussels and the footage ran on every network on earth. His Albuquerque mugshot has appeared on more T-shirts than most bands.

If public humiliation produced the wound, Gates would own six newspapers and a mixed martial arts promotion.

Instead he spent the money on malaria, polio, and toilets.

Not the opera house with his name over the door. Not the wing of the museum. Sanitation infrastructure for people who will never be asked whether they think Bill Gates is cool.

None of this makes him a good man. A federal judge found that Microsoft had preserved its monopoly through anticompetitive conduct. Gates sat for a deposition in that case so evasive that the courtroom laughed at the tape. He took meetings with Jeffrey Epstein years after Epstein’s conviction and later said it was a mistake.

That’s a terrible man. It’s simply the ordinary kind. He wanted the operating system, he took the operating system, and he behaved like an asshole when lawyers asked him about it under oath.

Fat Tony wanted his percentage. Gates wanted the platform.

Neither of them required your admiration to complete the transaction.

Warren Buffett is the better test, because Buffett was handed the wound and declined to use it.

Harvard Business School rejected him. He was so frightened of speaking in public that he paid for a Dale Carnegie course to get through it, and he has said that certificate is the only diploma he bothers to hang on the wall.

That’s the raw material. A rejection by the most prestigious institution in the field, plus a humiliation about not being able to hold a room.

He turned it into a bit.

He tells the Harvard story onstage, on purpose, to thirty thousand people who flew to Omaha to hear him say it. He still lives in the house he bought in 1958. He eats breakfast at McDonald’s and plays the ukulele in public with the confidence of a man who has never once wondered how it looks.

He’s also not a nice man, and the money says so. Berkshire owned Clayton Homes while reporters documented lending practices that put poor buyers into homes on terms that ended badly for them, which the company disputed. He was the largest shareholder in Wells Fargo while it opened accounts its customers never asked for. He has explained for forty years that his tax rate is indefensibly low and has never once resolved the problem by writing the check.

That’s normal terrible. Greedy, occasionally ruthless, entirely legible.

Gates and Buffett are nerds. Nobody has ever mistaken either man for cool, and the culture spent thirty years telling them so at volume.

They just never organized a fortune around getting the verdict overturned.

That’s the entire distinction. A nerd heard the verdict, disagreed with the taste of the people delivering it, and went back to work.

A dork is still appealing. The appeal now has a war chest.

The nerd isn’t the problem. The nerd built half of this. The problem is the dork with a hundred billion dollars and a list.

Old titans had enormous egos.

New centibillionaires have enormous wounds.

An ego wants a statue. A wound wants everyone who laughed to gather beneath the statue and admit they were wrong.

No amount of money can change what happened in the cafeteria. No acquisition can make the football captain extend an invitation twenty-five years ago. No algorithm can force the pretty girl to understand your brilliance before the stock options vested.

The fortune proves you won according to the scoreboard.

The wound remembers a different game.

The billionaire responds by purchasing new scoreboards.

He buys the newspaper because journalists are insufficiently respectful. He buys the social network because strangers keep laughing. He buys the movie studio because actors possess status he can’t manufacture. He funds the fighter because men admire courage. He builds the artificial artist because creativity remains stubbornly democratic.

Then he calls it innovation.

Fat Tony wanted the envelope.

Steve Jobs wanted to remake the world according to his taste.

The centibillionaire wants the world to confirm that the people who rejected him were stupid, ugly, doomed, and ultimately irrelevant.

The most dangerous man isn’t the bully who knows he’s powerful. Everyone can see him coming, usually because he’s driving a gold car and has named a building after himself.

The dangerous man is the wounded outsider who obtains unlimited power and continues thinking of himself as the victim.

He will destroy part of the fortune that supposedly proves he won because the fortune never gave him the prize he wanted. He will purchase institutions, communities, and entire cultural industries in pursuit of a verdict no institution can honestly provide.

You were always cool.

They were wrong not to invite you.

Everybody likes you now.

Money can’t make those sentences true.

The Simpsons explained this more efficiently more than thirty years ago.

Mr. Burns sells the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and discovers that, without his control over everyone’s employment, the people of Springfield are no longer afraid of him.

Homer finds Burns at Moe’s and asks whether his money hugs him when he comes home. Does it tell him it loves him? Burns admits that it doesn’t.

The entire bar mocks him.

Burns doesn’t purchase the bar. He doesn’t fund Homer’s bowling team, copy Lenny’s jokes, or commission an artificial intelligence trained on Carl’s personality.

He realizes exactly what has gone wrong.

“What good is money if you can’t inspire terror in your fellow man?”

Then he buys the nuclear power plant back.

This was a remarkably healthy decision.

Burns understood that his money couldn’t love him. It couldn’t make him young, handsome, charming, or welcome.

It could, however, buy a nuclear power plant and force several thousand people to tremble when he entered the room.

He accepted the available substitute.

Our centibillionaires haven’t.

They still believe the next company, platform, movie studio, fighter, yacht, algorithm, or artificial intelligence will finally produce the human response the previous hundred billion dollars failed to purchase.

The old bastards wanted to rule the world.

The new bastards want the world to apologize.

Mr. Burns had the dignity to settle for terror.

Mark Zuckerberg is still waiting for someone to hand him the towel.

I had all the usual convention anxiety, obviously. Would I know anyone? Would anyone know me? Would the panels be good? Would I say something stupid? Would I say something brilliant that sounded stupid because I said it too loudly? Would I spend the entire weekend hovering beside groups of people who were already friends, waiting for an opening that never came?

The badge the girl at check-in handed me was blank, and since my hand was in a cast, blank it stayed until a friendly romance author at the bar filled it in with Jason, Demigod class, level 13. I laughed, put it on, and walked around trying to look like a guy who deserved that badge instead of a guy hoping nobody asked him to prove it.

Then there was the darker stuff, the kind that doesn’t announce itself politely. It just follows you into the airport, gets on the plane, checks into the hotel, and sits in the corner of the room reminding you of every career disappointment you’ve ever had.

I’ve spent a lot of years in publishing, long enough to know how strange success can be, how temporary it can feel, and how quickly an industry can move on, and long enough to know that you can accomplish things that once seemed impossible and still walk into a room wondering whether you belong there. That’s a fun little trick the brain plays. You can look back at years of work and see evidence that you built something real, then look sideways at somebody who seems bigger, newer, hotter, or more visible and decide none of yours counts.

Publishing is particularly good at this because the scoreboard is always visible and almost never complete. Someone has a better launch, more followers, a bigger Patreon, a better rank, or an adaptation. Someone gets invited somewhere you didn’t. Someone has a line around the building. Meanwhile, you’re standing inside a career that thousands of people would commit minor crimes to have, feeling like the universe forgot to finish your order.

That contradiction had been living in my head for a while. I wanted to go to the convention, but I also had a part of me that expected it to hurt. I thought I might spend the weekend getting confronted with everything I’d lost, missed, failed to become, or stopped being, and maybe I’d be standing in a building filled with people who belonged to the current version of the industry while I felt like a leftover from a previous one.

It turns out my brain was being an asshole, because I had a fucking great time. I don’t mean that as a qualified great time, or a “there were some nice moments” great time. I had the kind of convention experience that reminded me why I love this business in the first place.

I met people, learned things, talked shop for hours, and sat on panels that went incredibly well. I had dinners, drinks, cigars, dumb jokes, serious conversations, and the kind of late-night industry talk that starts practical and eventually becomes philosophical because everyone is tired and slightly drunk and has stopped pretending to be normal.

I got to hang out with Rose and MSE. I bought Rose a mojito after we talked until two in the morning, and she threw it up. We’re best friends now. I met a Viking named Jason at the bar, which is exactly the kind of sentence you should be able to say after a fantasy convention.

I met Aaron Renfroe, who writes Apocalypse Breaker and, as Adam Lance, coauthors Trailer Park Elves. He was a fucking awesome guy, and I didn’t realize until we actually talked that he was a real person who was really fucking smart.

Sean Oswald was cool because he told everyone he did everything wrong, and that you can just write a book, put it up, and see how it does. A lot of his way was how I’d do it, and I appreciated it, because everyone acts like being an author means doing all this other shit that isn’t writing.

Bruce Sentar was fun because I asked him for a book and told him to give me his favorite one. He asked what I liked, and I told him I wouldn’t read it. He got confused, and when we talked it through, I explained I just wanted one of his books because it was his. Also, Seth Ring gave me a copy of his cultivation novel, and it looks fantastic.

I waited almost two hours for Shirtaloon to sign my book, and I was the last person in line. He didn’t seem mad or annoyed about it at all. He joked about my name, Jason, because of his series. Someone asked me why I waited in line instead of just pulling rank, and I told them that wasn’t fair to everyone else. I couldn’t imagine being that guy, for reasons that are probably obvious. Everyone else in that line had been standing there just as long as I had, wanting the exact same thirty seconds with him that I wanted. Knowing people, or having a badge that says something fancier, doesn’t make my thirty seconds worth more than theirs. It just makes me someone who thinks it does, and I’ve met plenty of those people. I didn’t want to be one of them, not even for a signature.

Will Wight was cool, and so was Travis Baldree. This may sound like I’m just compiling a list of people who didn’t throw rocks at me, but conventions are built out of these small encounters. A five-minute hallway conversation can change the emotional temperature of an entire weekend.

At one point, I walked up to Travis Baldree in the hall and asked him to sign my book, apologizing for bothering him because apparently my default assumption is that wanting an autograph makes me a public nuisance. He told me I wasn’t a dick for wanting an autograph, which was useful information.

There’s something weirdly vulnerable about being a fan when you also work in the industry. You can feel like you’re supposed to be too professional, too cool, or too detached to care. You aren’t supposed to stand there holding a book and hoping somebody signs it. You’re supposed to network strategically and discuss market conditions while never displaying a human emotion. That’s bullshit. It’s okay to like things, it’s okay to admire somebody’s work, and it’s okay to ask for an autograph without acting as though you’ve committed a social crime.

Later, I ran into Will Wight in the hall and we talked about my hand injury. He was relaxed, kind, and completely normal. He explained that he knew his signing lines had been long, so he had been wandering around because he wanted to make sure people still got a chance to see him. That struck me as incredibly thoughtful, because he didn’t have to do that. He could have finished his scheduled obligations and disappeared, but instead he was intentionally making himself available because he knew some people had waited a long time or missed their chance.

The interaction also corrected a story I’d been building in my head, which happens a lot. We experience one moment while tired, insecure, or overwhelmed, and then our brain begins writing an entire novel around it, usually called Everyone Hates Me and I Am Clearly Pathetic. Then you meet the person later, have a warm conversation in a hallway, and discover that reality is much less dramatic than the version your anxiety commissioned.

The panels were another major part of the weekend, and I had two, both of which were amazing. There are few things I enjoy more than talking about writing with people who actually care about writing, and I love the work, the mechanics of it, and the stupid, wonderful process of taking an idea that should probably not function and finding the version that does.

Panels can be awkward. Sometimes everyone agrees too much. Sometimes one person dominates. Sometimes the moderator asks questions that could be answered by a motivational poster hanging in a dentist’s office. These weren’t like that, and the conversations were alive. I got to be funny and useful, and I got to say what I actually think instead of sanding myself down into a safe professional shape.

Apparently, people liked that. I was told afterward that I was great on the panels, which mattered more than I expected it to, not because I need strangers to certify my value every few hours, although my brain would absolutely subscribe to that service if it existed. It mattered because I felt current.

I wasn’t there as a piece of publishing archaeology, telling stories about how things used to be. I was in the room, contributing now. That distinction hit me, because so much of insecurity is about imagining that your real life exists behind you, that the good part already happened, that the important part is over, and that everybody else is building forward while you’re studying the ruins of your own career. Then you sit on a panel, make people laugh, answer questions, and realize you’re still here, not symbolically, but actually here.

One of the best parts of the convention was the access to people who understood the work at a technical level. Jeanette from Shadow Alley Press was fantastic. I asked her detailed publishing questions, and she gave me detailed answers. There’s something special about asking somebody a complicated technical question and watching them understand exactly why you’re asking it. There was no throat clearing, no simplified explanation, and no vague inspirational talk about believing in your dreams. Just actual information. This works this way; that causes this problem; here’s what we’ve seen; here’s what I’d test.

That kind of conversation is addictive to me. I love talking shop because publishing isn’t one job. It’s fifty jobs standing on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat, writing, editing, packaging, positioning, metadata, ads, audio, production, pricing, launches, retention, direct sales, platform risk, audience psychology, and whatever fresh nightmare appeared while you were asleep. You can always learn something, and the convention gave me room to do that without having to explain why I cared.

Nobody looked at me like I was insane for wanting to discuss a technical publishing problem over dinner, and nobody’s eyes glazed over when the conversation shifted to narration, formats, launch strategy, or long-term catalog management. That was simply the language everyone spoke.

I had dinner with Jessica Threet one night and Blaise Corvin another, and I stayed up until four in the morning with MSE, Andrea Parsneau, Daniel Wisniewski, Corvin King, and others, smoking cigars and drinking whiskey. That was as fun as it sounds.

There’s something almost sacred about a late-night cigar conversation at a convention. By that point, the badges and panels and polished answers have fallen away, and everyone is exhausted. The stories get better, and the opinions get less diplomatic. People talk about money, failure, ambition, fear, weird industry history, and what they actually want from their lives.

The best conversation I had may have been with Blaise, and we talked about what we had made over the years and how absurdly easy it is to feel jealous of the person above you. There’s always a person above you, and that’s the trap. No matter how successful you become, you can find someone whose success makes yours feel embarrassingly small. You can climb ninety-nine floors and spend the entire day furious about the person on the hundredth.

That doesn’t mean ambition is bad, since ambition is useful. Jealousy can even be useful in small doses, showing you what you want, making you work harder, and pushing you out of complacency. But it can also make you stupid by making you look at an extraordinary life and describe it as a failure because another person’s extraordinary life came with a larger number attached.

Blaise and I were both able to say the other half out loud, too, and we were incredibly blessed, got to make things for a living, and got to build careers from imagination. We got paid to sit alone and invent people, worlds, monsters, systems, and problems, and then readers gave us their time, sometimes a lot of it. That’s insane.

It’s easy to normalize your own miracles, and the first time somebody pays you for your fiction, it feels impossible. Then you want ten sales, then a hundred, then a thousand, and then you look at someone with ten thousand and wonder why the universe singled you out for suffering. The goalpost is mounted on wheels.

Talking to Blaise helped me remember that gratitude and ambition can exist together, that you can want more without calling what you already have worthless, admire the person ahead of you without treating their success as evidence of your failure, and acknowledge disappointment without rewriting your entire life as a tragedy. That was probably the central resolution I brought home.

I don’t want to spend so much time staring upward that I forget where I’m standing, erase my own good fortune because somebody else had more, let one uncomfortable interaction consume a weekend full of generous ones, or let old damage narrate every new experience.

That last one is difficult, because dark thoughts are efficient, taking one fact and turning it into a complete worldview. A person didn’t recognize me, therefore nobody remembers me. A line was long, therefore I don’t belong. Someone else was doing better, therefore everything I’d accomplished was fake. A conversation felt awkward, therefore the whole weekend was humiliating. The brain is an incredible pattern-recognition machine, especially when the pattern is “you suck.”

But the convention gave me a mountain of contradictory evidence. People were welcoming, interesting, and generous with their time. They gave me books, answered my questions, invited me to dinner, and sat up with me until four in the morning drinking whiskey and smoking cigars. They listened when I spoke, laughed, and told me the panels were great. I learned things, made friends, and had fun.

You can’t honestly reduce that to one insecure moment unless you’re committed to being miserable, and I’ve been committed to worse projects, but I’m trying to drop this one.

My resolution isn’t to become relentlessly positive, which sounds exhausting and probably requires yoga. I’m not going to pretend painful things don’t hurt, stop noticing status, ambition, recognition, or the gaps between where I am and where I’d like to be, or let those gaps eat the entire landscape.

The landscape was pretty fucking good. I went to LitRPG Con, talked shop with smart people, and got technical answers from people who knew what they were doing. I met authors and narrators I respected and discovered that many of them weren’t just talented, but kind, funny, and easy to talk to. I got to be a fan, a professional, and the loud guy on a panel who says the thing everyone else might phrase more politely, and I got to sit with people who understood exactly how strange, lucky, difficult, and wonderful this career can be.

I drank whiskey, smoked cigars, stayed up far too late, and met a Viking. That’s a successful convention by any reasonable metric.

More importantly, I came home reminded that publishing is still fun, though not always, since sometimes it’s a pit filled with spreadsheets and emotional snakes. But the work is fun, the people can be fun, talking about it is fun, learning is fun, and being around others who love the same strange little corner of storytelling is fun.

I didn’t need the convention to restore some lost identity or issue a formal ruling that I belonged, since I went, participated, connected, and belonged by doing it.

Maybe that’s the real resolution. Stop waiting for the industry to hand you a certificate saying you’re allowed in the room. Walk into the room. Ask the question. Join the conversation. Sit on the panel. Request the autograph. Accept the dinner invitation. Stay up until four. Smoke the cigar. Drink the whiskey. Be grateful for what you built. Want more without despising what you have.

And when you have a great fucking time, let yourself admit that you had a great fucking time.

P.S.

Samer Rabadi, who wrote Eight, I looked you up after the convention, and apparently you’re fucking amazing. You’re accomplished, respected, and more than enough. So whatever modest nonsense made you act like I should be giving you advice was completely backward. You should have been giving me advice. I expect you to correct this next time.

I hate this. I hate every single part of it, and I want that on the record before I say one more word, because nothing that follows is going to feel good to type.

I hate that the correct answer came from Donald Trump. I hate that FIFA, an organization that usually behaves like a luxury hotel for bribes, somehow did the right thing anyway. I hate that Belgium won 4–1 and still found a way to look soft doing it. Most of all, I hate that soccer, a game already balanced on a trembling pile of theatrical cowardice, handed everyone one more excuse to point at it and ask why grown adults take this seriously.

But I don’t get to skip the facts just because I don’t like where they came from. So here they are, in order.

The red card was bullshit. Trump was right. FIFA was right to fix it. Belgium lacked honor. Also, soccer isn’t a sport. I didn’t enjoy writing any of those sentences except the one about how soccer isn’t a sport, and I’m not going to enjoy the next several thousand words defending them, but here we are.

Let’s start with the red card itself, because that’s where the whole thing goes wrong.

A red card should mean something. It shouldn’t be a decorative opinion, and it definitely shouldn’t be a vibes-based punishment handed down after a slow-motion séance where six grown men squint at a screen like it’s a Magic Eye poster. A red card should be obvious. It should be ugly. It should make everyone watching, even people who don’t care about the sport, go “yeah, okay, that guy has to leave.”

Studs into a knee. A two-footed lunge. A deliberate stomp. A punch. A tackle that looks like someone tried to remove a leg and take it home as a souvenir. That’s a red card.

A red card shouldn’t be for something the average hockey player would spend ten seconds in the penalty box for before returning to the ice and committing three worse crimes by accident.

“Maybe his foot landed badly while he was falling” is not a red card. That’s physics. That’s awkward human movement. That’s what happens when two people run near each other and gravity decides to get involved.

Soccer, of course, can’t handle this distinction, because soccer is a sport built on treating incidental contact like a war crime whenever the player sells it well enough. Somebody gets brushed on the sock, throws himself onto the grass, rolls six times, clutches the wrong body part entirely, and now everyone around him is begging the referee for state violence.

Even men’s basketball, a sport where seven-foot millionaires sometimes react to forearm contact like they’ve been shot by a jealous husband, has more dignity than this.

Then VAR gets involved, and somehow it gets worse.

VAR isn’t justice. VAR is a little courtroom for cowards, a system built to take a fast, ugly, human moment and freeze it in place until an accident starts to look like intent. Every frame becomes evidence, and every angle becomes theology. Some retired ref with the face of an unpaid parking ticket gets on a headset and starts explaining “serious foul play” while everyone quietly pretends the original moment wasn’t as obvious as it clearly was.

What’s obvious was that it wasn’t a World Cup red.

That part actually matters, because this wasn’t some beer league match behind a warehouse. This was the World Cup, the thing that apparently matters deeply to everyone on Earth except America, where we mostly notice it when something dumb happens or when someone tries to convince us a 0–0 draw is “beautiful.”

If the World Cup is supposed to be sacred, then act like it’s sacred. In a match that big, a red card should require more certainty, not less, because the stakes are enormous. A red changes the match and the next match. It can drag an entire team out of its best version because one official and a replay booth decided an awkward landing deserved to be treated like a felony.

That’s indefensible. So Trump stepped in.

I want to be honest about how much I hate typing that sentence. Nobody wants him to be the hero of a soccer fairness story. It feels like finding out the raccoon that’s been living in your trash was actually solving a murder the whole time. But he was right. Fully right. Not “technically.” Not “by accident.” Not “correct on the merits but wrong in spirit.”

He was right.

The red was bad. The suspension was worse. FIFA had one chance to stop a bad call from becoming two bad consequences, and for once, they took it.

People whining about the process can sit down, because process isn’t morality. Process is only useful when it produces justice. The second process starts protecting stupidity instead, it can go sit in the corner with the other decorative frauds and think about what it’s done.

Yes, it looked Trumpy. Of course it did. Everything he touches immediately starts looking like a casino lobby arguing with a cheeseburger. But ugly optics don’t make the underlying decision wrong. The question was never whether Trump made the right people uncomfortable. He did. The only question that actually matters is whether that player should’ve been suspended over a weak red card.

No. That’s the answer. No.

Which brings us to Belgium.

Belgium won 4–1. That should’ve been the end of the story. The United States got the supposedly controversial player back on the field, and Belgium got to face the full-strength US team, or at least a less-sabotaged version of one. Then they beat the brakes off the United States. Good for them. Genuinely, good for them. Now shut up.

Instead, Belgium and the usual crowd of European paperwork priests started acting like they’d been wronged, because FIFA took away an advantage they never should’ve had in the first place. That’s the part that reeks.

To be fair, Belgium didn’t create the bad call. Nobody’s saying they snuck into the VAR booth with a briefcase full of waffles. They didn’t cause the cheat. They just wanted to keep it, and that’s a different thing, but it isn’t a noble one.

If a bad call hands you an edge, and you fight to preserve that edge, don’t call it principle. Call it what it actually is. You wanted the free advantage. You wanted the opponent weakened by a garbage decision, and you wanted the gift to stand because winning matters to you.

Fine. Winning does matter. I understand that completely, and honestly, I respect ugly honesty a lot more than fake honor. But don’t wrap it in sacred language. Don’t stand there telling everyone you’re protecting the integrity of the sport when what you’re actually protecting is a coupon.

The honorable answer was sitting right there the whole time. “Let him play. We want to beat them straight.” That’s what men say when they have a spine. That’s what a team with real confidence says. That’s what you say if the World Cup is actually about greatness and not just litigation with flags on it.

Belgium didn’t say that. Belgium wanted the bad call to keep helping them. Then Belgium won anyway, which is exactly why the whining afterward is so pathetic. They didn’t lose because FIFA robbed them. They weren’t cheated out of anything. They lost a gift, played the actual game, and won by three goals regardless. There’s no wound there. There’s no injustice waiting to be avenged. There’s only the embarrassing discovery that a country can win comfortably and still manage to act like the hall monitor nobody asked for.

Which is, in its own roundabout way, why soccer isn’t a sport.

A sport has contact without immediate theater. It has pain without paperwork. It knows the difference between violence and clumsiness, and it doesn’t spend years training grown men to fall down, clutch their faces, and look up at the referee like a kid asking mom to go punish his brother.

Soccer has skill, sure. So does juggling. It has endurance. So does fleeing a bear. It has strategy. So does tax fraud. None of that, on its own, makes it a sport in the way I mean it. Soccer’s a game. A hugely popular one, a global one, a game people sing about, cry over, and use as a substitute for national therapy. But underneath all of that, it’s still built around running, falling, pointing, and begging a referee to validate your performance.

It’s theaterball. Shin-pad opera. Cardio pageantry for people who’ve convinced themselves a 0–0 match is hiding some deep wisdom instead of just ninety minutes of blue balls with flags.

And the red card is exactly why. Instead of looking at an awkward play and calling it awkward, the sport’s entire machinery tried to dress it up as a moral crime. Then, when that machinery got corrected, the people who’d benefited from the mistake turned around and cried about fairness.

No. Fairness was fixing it. Fairness was letting the player play. Fairness was making Belgium beat the team on the field instead of letting them hide behind a bad card and call it strategy.

They did beat them anyway. That’s the funniest part of the whole thing. Belgium got the exact outcome that should’ve made them look strong, and then they went and ruined it by acting small.

That’s the whole story. Trump was right. FIFA was right. The red card was bullshit. Belgium wanted to keep the benefit of that bullshit and dress it up as justice. And soccer remains a deeply unserious activity where elite runners in expensive shirts collapse like Victorian children because someone brushed their ankle on the way past.

Congratulations to Belgium on the win. Condolences on the dignity.

There’s a particular kind of collapse argument that drives me insane, not because it’s completely wrong, but because it’s wrong in the exact place where it needs to be smart.

It’ll spend four thousand words explaining why oil matters, why diesel matters, why fertilizer matters, why shipping lanes matter, why the Strait of Hormuz matters, why helium isn’t a party balloon joke, why refineries aren’t magical cauldrons where you pour in whatever oil you found behind the garage and get jet fuel out the other end.

Fine. Great. Correct. I’m with you. I’m sitting in the front row nodding like a youth pastor who just discovered protein powder.

Then it makes the stupidest possible turn.

It acts like everyone in power sees the same spreadsheet, shrugs, packs a bag, goes to the bunker, and starts a rewatch of The Office.

That’s where the argument loses me.

Not because the physical stress is fake. The physical stress is real. If the government’s drawing down strategic reserves, that means something. If China’s leaning on reserves, that means something. If shipping’s disrupted, insurance is weird, crude quality’s mismatched, refineries are constrained, diesel and jet fuel are tight, fertilizer inputs are stressed, and politicians are yelling at gas retailers like angry dads at a Little League umpire, that all means something.

But it doesn’t mean everyone calmly accepts collapse.

It means the people who own the table are trying very hard to keep the table from flipping.

And that distinction matters.

Because there are two kinds of limits in the world. There are hard limits, and there are soft limits.

Hard limits are atoms, machines, ships, pipes, refineries, wells, crops, ports, tankers, electricity, time, skilled workers, fertilizer, diesel, water, and physics.

Soft limits are sanctions, permits, boutique gasoline standards, shareholder discipline, corporate margins, environmental rules, patent portfolios, commercial viability, fuel standards, political messaging, normal procurement, and executives saying, “We’d rather not.”

People confuse these all the time.

They’ll say, “We can’t buy that oil because sanctions.”

No. You mean we currently choose not to buy that oil because sanctions.

That’s not physics. That’s a rule.

Rules matter in normal times. Rules matter a lot. They shape markets, they shape incentives, they shape who gets rich and who gets crushed. I’m not pretending rules are imaginary.

But rules aren’t steel beams.

Rules are what powerful people call principles right up until the rule threatens the thing that keeps powerful people powerful. Then the rule becomes a waiver, a temporary exception, a national-security carveout, a humanitarian corridor, a licensing adjustment, an emergency measure, or a “complex and evolving policy environment.”

Which is government for “we’re cheating now.”

And historically, we cheat all the time.

That’s the part these doom arguments miss. They act like the United States is going to politely obey its own peacetime rulebook all the way into starvation. Like the Department of Energy’s going to stand there watching fuel distribution collapse and say, “Well, unfortunately, Chevron’s quarterly guidance remains unchanged.”

Come on.

The United States will burn a rainforest, print two trillion dollars, waive fourteen laws, call three enemies “temporary strategic partners,” accuse six domestic companies of treason-adjacent profiteering, subsidize something stupid, poison three markets, enrich the worst people alive, and hold a press conference calling it resilience.

That’s not competence. That’s not morality. That’s not a happy ending.

But it’s not sitting in a bunker watching Netflix, either.

Look at oil companies.

In normal times, they get to say things like “capital discipline.” That’s a beautiful phrase. It sounds like a monk invented EBITDA. It means, roughly, “we could produce more, but we’d rather make more money.”

Fine. That’s capitalism. That’s what they do.

A shale executive can say he doesn’t want to drill. A refiner can say California’s special gasoline blend is operationally complex. A company can say it needs price certainty. An industry group can explain, very patiently, that forcing inventory buffers or allowing nonstandard fuel into a boutique market could create unintended consequences.

And they might even be right, technically.

But technical correctness isn’t the same as political authority.

If fuel gets expensive, they get blamed.

If fuel gets scarce, they get threatened.

If fuel scarcity starts threatening food, logistics, policing, hospitals, farms, ports, military readiness, and the basic belief that tomorrow’s grocery store will be open, then “capital discipline” stops sounding like business strategy and starts sounding like sabotage.

That’s when the conversation changes.

First, they get bribed. Guaranteed margins. Subsidies. Tax credits. Faster permits. Emergency offtake. Regulatory waivers. Liability shields. Strategic reserve purchases. The state usually tries money first because money is easier than bayonets and looks better on CNBC.

Then they get leaned on.

Hearings. Subpoenas. Antitrust threats. Price-gouging investigations. Export restrictions. Maintenance oversight. Allocation rules. Emergency production orders. “Voluntary” agreements made in rooms where everyone understands the word voluntary is wearing a fake mustache.

And if that still doesn’t work, the state remembers it’s the state.

That’s not because the state is noble. It’s because the state doesn’t want the table flipped.

This is the Alcoa lesson. When aluminum became a war input, the United States didn’t say, “Well, Alcoa has a monopoly, guess we can’t make planes.” It built capacity. It forced licensing. It created competitors. It turned a private bottleneck into a national production problem and solved it in the ugliest, most American way possible.

That’s what happens when a soft constraint meets a survival condition.

The soft constraint loses.

Now apply that to fuel.

People say, “We can’t use Russian supply.”

Sure. Under the current rulebook.

But Russian crude hasn’t vanished from Earth. It’s rerouted. It’s discounted. It’s politically dirty. It’s logistically annoying. Some buyers can’t touch it without laundering the transaction through six countries and a spreadsheet called “humanitarian stabilization framework final FINAL v7.”

But if the choice is “bend sanctions” or “watch diesel scarcity destabilize the country,” sanctions bend.

They won’t call it that. They’ll call it a temporary exemption. Or price-cap compliance. Or blended origin. Or third-country processing. Or a critical infrastructure waiver. Or maybe they’ll just stop looking too hard while someone else does the buying.

Again, not morality. Not honesty. Survival.

Same with Venezuela. If Venezuela has oil and the infrastructure’s mostly intact, then yesterday’s villain becomes tomorrow’s unfortunate but necessary partner. There’ll be speeches. There’ll be disgust. There’ll be some clause about democracy and monitored proceeds. Then the cargo moves.

Because cargo moving is the point.

And this is where the bunker fantasy gets especially dumb.

The people at the top don’t want the world to end.

I know that’s less fun than imagining every billionaire stroking a cat in a volcanic lair, but it’s true.

Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be bunker king. What’s he going to do down there? Moderate a Facebook group for twelve security contractors and a hydroponic lettuce guy named Trent?

His power requires electricity, phones, advertisers, app stores, courts, employees, regulators, bored people, angry people, lonely people, influencers, data centers, payment systems, and billions of humans with enough stability to waste their lives online.

Bezos doesn’t want to trade yachts, private jets, functioning ports, banking, restaurants, space launches, courts, contracts, and a civilization that treats him like a demigod for a concrete box where everyone’s one diesel shipment away from Lord of the Flies with better lighting.

Musk doesn’t want a world where launch pads, satellites, chips, batteries, engineers, rare earths, contracts, capital markets, and the power grid are gone. He may enjoy chaos more than a normal person should, but there’s a difference between chaos you can tweet through and chaos where the guy who fixes the generator becomes king.

The ultra-rich already won this game.

That’s the point.

They don’t need a reset. They don’t need the board flipped. They own the board. They own the hotels around the board. They own the app that tracks the board. They own the cloud service that hosts the app. They own the senator who regulates the board.

A real collapse doesn’t make them gods. It makes them loot.

Their wealth is institutional. It’s contracts, equity, platforms, courts, banks, property rights, security markets, supply chains, political access, enforceable ownership, and everyone agreeing that the number on the screen means something.

Take that away and what do they have?

A compound. Guards. Supplies. A famous face. A massive target.

In the post-apocalypse, the guards are the power. The mechanics are the power. The doctors are the power. The farmers are the power. The people who know where the diesel, antibiotics, radios, water, and ammo are become the power.

The billionaire becomes a liability with a nice watch.

So no, the smoke-filled room doesn’t want the table flipped.

That doesn’t mean the table can’t flip. Tables flip all the time. Empires fall. Systems miscalculate. People get greedy. Bureaucracies freeze. Wars escalate. Leaders lie to themselves. Everyone tries to save their own piece and accidentally breaks the machine.

But incentives matter.

And the people with the most power have overwhelming incentive to preserve continuity. Not because they love you. Not because they’re wise. Not because they’re reading Marcus Aurelius by candlelight and contemplating duty.

Because if continuity dies, their power dies with it.

That’s why “fifty percent of Americans starving” isn’t a policy option. Honestly, fifty percent is generous. You don’t need anything close to that. You need enough people to believe food isn’t reliably coming and that the people in charge caused it, profited from it, or lied about it.

In America, that gets dangerous fast.

This isn’t a disarmed island of polite subjects waiting for a ration card and a stern announcement. This is a huge, armed, low-trust country full of veterans, sheriffs, gangs, militias, preppers, desperate fathers, angry young men, political obsessives, local power centers, and guys who’ve spent the last fifteen years fantasizing about being important after the collapse.

A lot of people don’t fear the table flipping. They dream about it.

That’s the other half of the incentive map.

Elites don’t want a reset because they already have rank.

A broke guy with a rifle and a humiliation complex might want a reset because he thinks the broken world gives him rank.

That’s what makes food and fuel different from normal misery. People will tolerate debt, rent extraction, broken healthcare, bad jobs, scams, inflation, surveillance, and humiliation for a long time. Far longer than they should.

But “my kids might not eat” is a different category.

That’s not politics anymore. That’s legitimacy leaving the building.

So if fuel and food get tight, the response won’t be passive. It’ll be ugly management.

The government can buy crops nobody wants. Soybeans, corn, whatever. It can guarantee crush margins. It can subsidize biodiesel, renewable diesel, ethanol, sustainable aviation fuel, renewable natural gas, waste-to-fuel, all of it. It can take crops being plowed under because the commercial channel broke and turn them into emergency feedstock by writing checks large enough to make everyone suddenly patriotic.

Is that efficient? No.

Is it clean? No.

Does it replace every barrel of diesel? No.

But it doesn’t have to.

That’s another stupid binary in collapse arguments. They act like if soybean biodiesel can’t cheaply replace all diesel, then it doesn’t matter. That’s not how emergency systems work. You don’t need one perfect substitute. You need layers.

Biofuels cover some critical demand.

Electric vehicles cover some discretionary gasoline demand.

Remote work kills some commuting.

Rail takes some freight.

Coal and natural gas keep power plants running.

Nuclear keeps baseload electricity stable.

Solar and batteries reduce diesel generator use and some grid stress.

Export controls keep domestic supply home.

Military logistics prioritize ports, farms, hospitals, and food.

Sanctions waivers unlock dirty supply.

Refinery waivers increase flexibility.

Price controls, subsidies, rationing, and jawboning crush demand and hide panic.

None of this is utopia. It’s a garbage fire with a logistics plan.

But it’s still a plan.

The United States has enormous energy resources. Coal exists. Natural gas exists. Nuclear exists. Corn exists. Soy exists. Waste exists. Idle or underused technology exists. Patent-office science projects exist. Dumb expensive fuel pathways exist. Refineries exist. Engineers exist. Money printers exist.

Oil is used because it’s cheap, dense, liquid, and built into everything. That makes it special. It doesn’t make every other energy pathway imaginary.

The crisis isn’t “no energy.” The crisis is form factor, timing, logistics, and cost.

Diesel and jet fuel matter because they’re dense liquid fuels. You can’t plug a combine into a vibes-based renewable grid and harvest Iowa with a TED Talk. You need fuel.

But if the system knows that, it triages.

Stop wasting liquid fuel where electricity can work. Stop exporting critical inputs if domestic stability’s at risk. Stop pretending sanctions are scripture. Stop letting private firms treat emergency scarcity like a quarterly opportunity. Stop letting boutique standards become suicide pacts. Stop following peacetime rules when the problem has left peacetime.

That’s what a serious state does.

Or at least that’s what a self-preserving state tries to do.

And that’s the real point.

The scary version isn’t “we run out of oil in two months and everyone dies.”

The scary version is that the system survives by becoming worse.

More expensive. More coercive. More corrupt. More openly managed. More hypocritical. More willing to break rules. More willing to pick winners. More willing to blame enemies. More willing to subordinate private interests when those interests threaten the larger machine.

It’ll call that success.

And from the perspective of the people who own the table, it will be success.

The trucks moved. The grocery stores stayed stocked enough. The ports operated. The farms got diesel. The hospitals stayed on. The public stayed angry but not starving. The fuel companies got paid, threatened, or both. The sanctions got bent. The crops got redirected. The standards got waived. The emergency got normalized.

That’s not collapse.

That’s managed decline with a gun under the table.

So yes, the physical stress matters. The reserve drawdowns matter. The inventory accounting matters. The public price can absolutely be fake comfort. If you spend a hundred dollars on groceries because you ate out of the freezer all month, that doesn’t prove groceries are cheap. It proves you’re burning inventory.

That’s the good insight.

But don’t confuse burning inventory with being out of moves.

America has moves.

They’re just ugly.

And the smoke-filled room isn’t sitting in a bunker, chuckling while the world ends.

They’re arguing over who gets paid to stop it, who gets blamed for it, who gets sacrificed if necessary, and how much of the public can be squeezed before the public remembers the table isn’t bolted to the floor.

I’ve read all of Baki. I mean all of it. I’ve watched men condition their skulls against rock faces. I’ve watched a prehistoric caveman get dug out of a glacier and immediately start eating everything in a Tokyo facility like a golden retriever who got into a Costco. I’ve watched Yujiro Hanma flex hard enough to make an earthquake issue an apology. I accept all of this. I signed the contract. I know what I’m watching.

But I’m on Netflix now, finishing the Musashi arc because I’m a completionist, and I hate myself, and I need to explain to you why this arc isn’t just bad or out of order or structurally weak. It’s dumb. It’s predicated on something that is simply not true, and Itagaki, who absolutely knows better, decided to look the other way because he has a hardon for Miyamoto Musashi. We’ve all been there. We’ve all written something kind of embarrassing because we had a crush. This is Itagaki’s crush, and the rest of us have to sit with it.

Here’s the thing that the arc needs you to believe: that a guy who was very good at sword fighting four hundred years ago would still be terrifying to modern specialists today, not because of size or strength or some Baki-specific biological nonsense, but because of the purity of his killing intent, his ancientness, the authenticity of his violence, and the real smell of death that modern martial artists, despite being literal freaks who have broken their own bodies into weapons, have somehow lost.

I’d like to walk you through why that’s a cocaine-fueled fever dream.

Let me start somewhere that has nothing to do with swords. Let’s talk about Royce Gracie.

Royce Gracie won UFC 1, UFC 2, and UFC 4. He submitted grown men in front of a crowd of people who had no idea what a triangle choke was, because those grown men also had no idea what a triangle choke was. This was not a trick. Royce was genuinely good. He had a mature grappling system in a world where most of his opponents had fragments of grappling knowledge at best. The information gap was the weapon. He didn’t just win, he made people look like they’d never thought about what happens when you’re on your back and someone is sitting on your chest.

Now I want you to think about an average competitive purple belt at a serious BJJ gym today. Not a phenom. Not a guy with a documentary. Just someone who trains hard four or five times a week, competes, gets smashed by the brown and black belts, and keeps coming back. That guy would very likely beat 1993 Royce Gracie in a grappling match.

I’m not saying Royce is fake. I’m saying the world spent thirty years learning the trick, developing counters to the trick, developing counters to the counters, and then teaching all of it to people who started training at five. The competitive purple belt doesn’t know more than Royce in some absolute historical sense. He’s just downstream of thirty years of the entire planet trying to solve the same problem Royce introduced. He inherited the answer key and then spent years getting corrected by people who had also inherited it.

Thirty years was enough to do that to Royce Gracie. Thirty years.

And we are not even talking about phenoms like Gordon Ryan, who Royce has actually trained with and openly admitted would smash him, or Craig Jones, Victor Hugo, Xande Ribeiro, Mikey Musumeci, or the Ruotolo brothers. At that point we are not discussing historical development anymore. We are just bullying a museum exhibit.

And if the purple belt thing sounds exaggerated to you, go look up Cole Abate and then explain to me what 1993 Royce is supposed to do with that.

Now I want you to think about Miyamoto Musashi, who died in 1645. That’s three hundred and eighty one years ago. That’s not thirty years. That is twelve times thirty years. If thirty years is enough time for a competitive purple belt to represent a genuine challenge to the guy who essentially introduced the world to BJJ, what do you think three hundred and eighty one years of kendo development does to a samurai who, and I want to be precise here, was very good for his era?

Because that’s what Musashi was. He was very good for his era. He was a big guy, well-fed relative to the people around him, trained since childhood, psychologically weird in ways that gave him advantages in duels, willing to show up late and use psychological pressure, and experienced enough in real violence that he didn’t freeze. That’s a real package. In 1600s Japan, that makes you a legend.

But you know what your BJJ instructor probably remembers becoming “new” when he started training? Half guard.

Not trapping a leg in desperation. That part is ancient. I mean half guard as an actual offensive system with underhooks, entries, sweeps, back takes, counters, and whole chains built around the idea that bottom half wasn’t just “almost passed.”

That version came into BJJ’s mainstream in the 1990s, mostly through Gordo and the Gracie Barra guys. Which is insane, because now it’s baseline. Children know it. Orange belts know it. The meta took something that used to be a specialist innovation, ate it, digested it, and turned it into warmups.

If a single positional development in BJJ can go from new to baseline within one instructor’s career, what do you think three hundred and eighty one years of people doing sword exchanges at full speed without dying did to the meta that Musashi was working with?

A serious high school kendo kid from a competitive Japanese program has probably done more clean, high-speed, one-on-one sword exchanges than Miyamoto Musashi did in his entire life.

I don’t mean more lethal exchanges or duels to the death, to be clear. Musashi obviously lived in a world with stakes a modern kendo kid will never touch.

But in terms of clean reps, corrected entries, matched weapons, and real-time exchanges against another trained person, the kendo kid’s almost certainly done vastly more.

That matters because Musashi wasn’t just some average-sized guy with a sword. He was traditionally described as being extremely large for his time, possibly around six feet tall, in a country where the average man was much shorter at around five feet tall. So a lot of the picture changes. Musashi may have been walking into many of those encounters as the giant in the room. He may have had a reach advantage, a strength advantage, and an intimidation advantage before anyone even moved.

The modern kendo kid doesn’t get to be special that way. He has to fight people who are his own size or significantly bigger because he’s been fighting adults, using the same weapon, under the same rules, while being coached inside a mature competitive system. He’s had someone watch his footwork, tell him it was wrong, and make him do it again. He’s had thousands of moments where another trained kid tried to tag him, and he had to solve that problem at full speed.

That’s the part people miss. The kendo kid isn’t inheriting Musashi’s world. He’s inheriting everything that came after Musashi’s world. He’s inheriting centuries of people working on the same basic problem, cleaning it up, correcting it, pressure-testing it, and handing the useful parts to children.

That’s a completely different and vastly deeper accumulation of the same problem.

Let me give you another one. Do you think Ty Cobb makes a modern MLB roster?

Not Ty Cobb born today and raised in travel ball with modern nutrition and swing labs and video technology. That’s a different question. I’m asking about prime historical Ty Cobb, the guy who actually existed, stepping into a modern major league lineup.

The answer is no. He doesn’t make it. Not because Ty Cobb was bad. He was obviously a freak relative to his competition. He was probably the best baseball player anyone in his region had ever seen, which is how he got famous and how legends get made, but a modern MLB roster is not a collection of guys who are slightly better than the best player in your region. It’s a collection of guys who survived a global filtration process, who face relievers throwing ninety-eight miles an hour with optimized spin rates, who have been analyzed by video and biomechanics since they were teenagers. The bench guys on a modern MLB team are also incredible. The guys who never start for a Division I college program were probably the best player anyone in their hometown had ever seen. The ecosystem swallowed Ty Cobb’s level of excellence and made it the floor.

Jack Dempsey does not beat Floyd Mayweather. That sounds wrong because of the size difference, and you might be thinking that a heavyweight can just physically maul a welterweight, but think about what Mayweather actually does to pressure fighters. Dempsey needs entries. Mayweather is a genius at making entries not exist. Dempsey needs chaos and forward momentum and guys who don’t know how to use distance and framing to neutralize pressure. Mayweather has spent his entire career eating pressure fighters for breakfast. Dempsey’s style was built for a defensive environment that no longer exists, against opponents who didn’t have a hundred years of additional development in answering exactly what Dempsey does.

You know who probably beats Dempsey? Jake Paul. I know how that sentence sounds. I don’t care. Jake Paul is a large modern cruiserweight with modern coaches, modern strength and conditioning, modern sparring, and modern mechanics. He’s not better than Dempsey in any historical or sentimental sense. He’s just later.

Hear me out, Jake Paul smoked Tyron Woodley, and that’s annoying because it proves the point better than a respectable example would.

Paul isn’t a greater fighter than Woodley. He’s not a greater combat athlete or historical figure. He’s not even in the same universe as Woodley in a real fight.

But he’s a big modern athlete who trained one narrow combat skill with modern coaches, modern film study, modern strength and conditioning, modern sparring, and modern money. Then he beat an aging former UFC champion inside that narrow ruleset.

That’s the whole argument. Time is brutal. Systems are brutal. Specialization is brutal. You don’t have to be greater than the old legend in some cosmic sense. You only have to inherit enough solved problems to make the old legend deal with questions his world never asked him.

That’s why “Jake Paul might beat Jack Dempsey in a boxing match” sounds like trolling, but it’s not empty trolling. It’s ugly, disrespectful, and spiritually wrong, but it’s also pointing at the thing everyone wants to avoid.

The meta doesn’t care who deserves reverence.

The 2024 U.S. Olympic basketball team would beat the 1992 Dream Team.

That sentence should sound insane.

The Dream Team had Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, John Stockton, Clyde Drexler, and Chris Mullin. They had eleven future Hall of Famers and beat other Olympic teams by almost forty points a game. They didn’t just win. They made the rest of the world look like it had misunderstood the sport.

And only thirty-two years later, we can have a serious argument about whether they’d beat the modern team.

That’s the point.

The 2024 team has things the Dream Team never had to solve. It has Steph Curry, whose entire existence bends a defense in ways 1992 basketball wasn’t built to handle. It has LeBron James running offense at six-nine. It has Kevin Durant as a seven-foot wing scorer. It has bigs who can pass, switch, space, and defend in coverages that barely existed when the Dream Team played.

And it’s not just the players. It’s the accumulated knowledge. Thirty more years of spacing. Thirty more years of pick-and-roll reads. Thirty more years of shooting development, defensive switching, skill training, international influence, and analytics stripping the game down to what actually works.

The Dream Team wasn’t primitive. They were unbelievable. That’s what makes this so impressive.

They were the greatest basketball team anyone had ever seen, and in one generation, the sport advanced to the point where a team of modern players could make the matchup debatable.

That is how fast the meta moves.

Now, back to Baki.

Here’s what makes the Musashi arc specifically frustrating rather than just generically bad. Itagaki knows how this works. He’s demonstrated that he knows. Look at Pickle.

Pickle is a prehistoric hominin dug out of a glacier who fought dinosaurs. Pickle works. Pickle makes sense within Baki’s logic because Pickle’s advantage is biological, not historical. Pickle isn’t scary because he had great sword training four hundred years ago. Pickle is scary because he’s from a different ecological context entirely, built by selection pressure from megafauna violence, with a body that doesn’t respond to normal human damage assumptions the way a human body does. When Retsu fights Pickle and loses, it feels like data. “Oh,” you think. “So this doesn’t work on him.” That’s a coherent thing for Baki to say. Pickle is a stat mismatch, not a resume mismatch.

Musashi is a resume mismatch, and his resume, while legitimately impressive for 1645, is not impressive in the context of a universe where Retsu exists. Retsu isn’t a guy who does kung fu. Retsu is four thousand years of Chinese martial arts distilled into a person who has been operating at Baki-world violence levels for his entire career. When Musashi beats Retsu, the show wants you to feel the weight of ancient, authentic killing intent overwhelming modern martial perfection. What you actually feel is the author shrugging.

There’s also the Retsu with weapons problem, which I would like to talk about because it’s where the arc loses me entirely. Retsu doesn’t walk into that fight empty-handed. He brings hidden knives. He uses a nine-section whip chain. He’s not confused by the concept of a sharp object being wielded by someone who wants to kill him. He is, if anything, one of the worst possible matchups for someone whose advantage is supposed to be that he uses a sword in a context where everyone else is unarmed. Chinese martial arts has weapon systems specifically designed to address the sword problem. Retsu should be the guy who looks at Musashi and says, approximately, “yes, we solved several versions of this during the Tang dynasty.” Instead, he loses because Musashi has a sword, and the author wanted him to win.

Then Motobe wins, which is thematically interesting and structurally absurd. The idea behind Motobe is good: he’s the only person in the cast who doesn’t approach the situation as a martial arts duel. He approaches it as a weapons problem. He uses traps, hidden tools, armor logic, ambush timing, and the general principle that a fair fight is something you only have when you’ve failed at everything else. That’s a real idea. It would actually make Musashi interesting if it were developed properly. If Musashi’s whole deal were that he drags everyone out of the duel mindset and into the assassination mindset, and then Motobe beats him because Motobe is already in the assassination mindset, that’s a coherent arc. But the execution requires Motobe, who is a known jobber, to get a prestige win that Retsu, with weapons, couldn’t get. And your brain just asks: if the solution to Musashi is tactics and weapons, why did the guy with four thousand years of weapons training and the explicit tactical adjustment of bringing a nine-section whip chain lose?

The answer is that Itagaki thought Musashi was cool. That’s the whole answer. It’s an honest answer in its way. A lot of Baki is “this would be cool” and it works out fine because most of the cool things Itagaki invents are fictional and don’t have to compete with historical reality. Pickle doesn’t have to compete with historical reality. Yujiro doesn’t have to compete with historical reality. But Musashi is the actual Miyamoto Musashi, a real historical person, and the moment you import a real historical person into a universe where fictional characters have already exceeded real historical scale by a wide margin, you’ve created a problem for yourself. You can’t just give Musashi Baki-scaling. He comes with a real-world reference point.

The real-world reference point says: very good for 1645, audited by teenagers in 2026.

Here’s how a coherent Baki story would have gone. After the prisoner arc and Alai, the arc should have gone Sumo, then Musashi, then Pickle, then Yujiro. The Sumo arc establishes that traditional combat forms still have hidden depth that modern martial artists haven’t fully accounted for. Musashi, coming second, escalates from sport tradition to historical lethality, but the key reframe is that Musashi should be written like Motobe, not like an aura monster. He should be terrifying because he refuses the duel. He uses terrain, deception, dirty entries, psychological pressure, the scabbard as a weapon, whatever it takes. He wins not because his killing intent is purer but because everyone else is still thinking inside a framework that he never agreed to. Then Pickle comes and makes Musashi’s historical human violence look small, because Pickle is from a world where the enemies were not humans with swords. They were things with skulls the size of furniture. And then Yujiro, who is the one human being who somehow makes prehistoric biological violence look underleveled, ends it.

That’s a real thesis. That’s clean escalation. That’s Baki being Baki in a way that makes sense.

Instead, we got the arc where a man who was very good at sword fighting in a world that has long since surpassed him, but also hasn’t?

One last point. Think about Eddie Van Halen.

Eddie Van Halen was born in 1955. Miyamoto Musashi died in 1645. That’s more than three hundred years between Musashi’s death and Eddie’s birth. Then Eddie comes along, changes how people understand the electric guitar, does things that look impossible, and becomes one of the great freak geniuses of the instrument.

And now there are four year old children on YouTube playing his solos.

Not because they are Eddie Van Halen. Not because they would have invented what he invented. They can do it because they were born into a world where his genius had already been absorbed, slowed down, filmed, explained, tabbed out, practiced, copied, corrected, and turned into lessons.

That’s the point. Time does that. Training does that. Culture does that. A once-impossible thing becomes a thing a child can learn after school.

So when Baki brings Musashi into the present, the interesting question should be what happens when a real historical genius collides with four hundred years of accumulated refinement. Not just weapons. Not just sport. Everything. Coaching, drilling, biomechanics, timing, psychology, nutrition, talent pools, pressure testing, and the basic fact that modern people inherit solved problems the dead had to discover from scratch.

Itagaki is one of the most visually inventive manga artists alive. He can draw one insane image better than almost anyone. He can give you one disgusting anatomical detail that lodges in your brain forever. He can write one mythic hype paragraph that makes a man standing in a hallway feel like a natural disaster. He can land one fight beat so hard that your only response is, “Okay, that ruled.”

But arcs are not panels. Arcs need internal logic. They need the world to keep obeying its own rules after the cool guy enters the room.

The Musashi arc just doesn’t survive that. It asks me to accept that a legendary swordsman from the 1600s arrives in modern Baki and somehow everyone forgets the entire point of modern combat sports, which is that people get better because generations of freaks train, test, copy, improve, and discard what doesn’t work.

Musashi should be terrifying. Of course he should. He should be weird, violent, brilliant, and psychologically impossible to deal with. He should have instincts nobody alive has had to develop. He should understand lethal intent in a way modern fighters mostly don’t.

But he shouldn’t make the setting forget that training exists.

That’s why the arc breaks for me. It doesn’t feel like Musashi beats the modern world. It feels like the modern world politely agrees to become stupid so Musashi can be cool.

P.S.

I didn’t even make the full A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court argument, which is maybe the funniest part of this whole thing.

Mark Twain understood this in 1889, and that book’s a satire. The joke is that a man from later drops into an earlier world and immediately has an advantage because he’s carrying centuries of accumulated knowledge with him. He isn’t better because he’s nobler. He isn’t better because his spirit’s purer. He’s better because he comes from later, and later knows things earlier didn’t know yet.

Baki somehow runs that joke backward and plays it straight.

It drops Musashi into the future and then acts like the future’s the one that should be overwhelmed. But Musashi isn’t Hank Morgan. Musashi’s the knight staring at the light bulb.

Thomas Massie lost his primary, and I want you to really sit with that for a moment. Not because it’s surprising. Not because anyone with functioning eyes didn’t see it coming from the moment thirty-five million dollars started flowing into a single congressional district in Kentucky. I want you to sit with it because of what it means, and because most of you are going to let someone on television explain it away, and then you’re going to go back to your lives, and that’s exactly what they’re counting on.

Let me walk you through what actually happened, because apparently that’s something I have to do now.

Thomas Massie was a Republican congressman from Kentucky’s 4th District. He’d been there since 2012. He voted against his own party’s spending bills. He voted against foreign aid. He voted against the war in Iran. He pushed to release the Epstein files. He did all of this regardless of who was in the White House, which is the kind of consistency that should be considered a basic professional standard for a lawmaker but is apparently now considered a personality disorder. He didn’t care if Trump liked him. He didn’t care if AIPAC liked him. He just kept voting the way he said he’d vote, and that made him the most dangerous kind of politician there is: one who actually means it.

So they destroyed him.

And I don’t mean they beat him in a fair fight.

I mean, they spent thirty-five million dollars in one congressional district to make sure that man never votes in the House of Representatives again.

Now here’s where I need you to pay attention, because this is the part where someone’s going to try to bother me with a “but both sides” argument, and I want to preemptively address that so we can move on with our lives.

Yes, Massie had outside donors too. He raised about five and a half million dollars, and the majority of his donors weren’t from Kentucky. I know. I’ve seen the FEC filings. Here’s the difference, and it’s not a subtle one: there’s a distinction between a congressman who’s built a national reputation for principled independence attracting small donors from around the country, and AIPAC, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and a super PAC run by Trump’s own campaign operatives coordinating to drown a single district in attack ads. One of those is grassroots. The other is a professional hit. If you can’t tell the difference, I genuinely cannot help you.

The Republican Jewish Coalition spent four million dollars. AIPAC’s super PAC spent another two point six million. MAGA KY Inc., which was founded by Trump’s former campaign manager Chris LaCivita and his pollster Tony Fabrizio, spent five point six million opposing Massie. The RJC Victory Fund spent another two and a half million supporting Gallrein directly. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, physically traveled to Kentucky to campaign against a sitting congressman, which is almost certainly illegal under federal law, but who’s counting anymore.

They ran ads with AI-generated images of Massie hanging out with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. They accused him of being in a throuple. A throuple. With two Democratic congresswomen. They spent what amounts to the GDP of a small nation producing content that would embarrass a high school student council election, and it worked, because when you flood a district with enough sewage, eventually people start to wonder if something smells.

Now I want to talk about Ed Gallrein, because someone’s going to tell you he’s a good man, and maybe he is, in the way that most people are good in their private lives while doing bad things professionally. He’s a Navy SEAL. He’s a farmer. He seems perfectly pleasant. He’s also a man who let AIPAC and Trump’s political machine spend sixteen million dollars to put him in office, and he’s going to spend the next two years being very, very grateful for that. Gratitude in Washington doesn’t look like a thank you note. It looks like votes, and those votes are already spoken for.

That’s the transaction. That’s how it works. You don’t get thirty-five million dollars in a House primary because people believe in you. You get it because people have already calculated what they’re going to get back. The pro-Israel groups aren’t running around Kentucky out of civic duty. They’re making an investment. And investments expect returns.

So what’s the lesson here? What does every Republican congressman take away from watching Thomas Massie get buried under an avalanche of PAC money and presidential rage?

Don’t vote against Israel aid, don’t cross Trump, and don’t do both if you want to keep your job. Don’t be the guy who asks inconvenient questions about where the Epstein files are. Don’t be the guy who votes against the big beautiful spending bill because you actually read it. Don’t be independent. Don’t be principled. Don’t be Massie.

Be useful. Be quiet. Be grateful.

That’s it. That’s the whole lesson. Thirty-five million dollars to teach two hundred and thirty-four Republicans what happens when you forget your place. It’s cheaper than cocaine and more effective than a threat, and unlike a threat, it’s completely legal, and everyone involved will go on television tomorrow and talk about democracy.

I want to address one more thing before I’m done, which is the idea that this is somehow what the voters wanted. The voters of Kentucky’s 4th District wanted this, we’re told. They made their choice. Democracy in action.

Okay. Sure. The voters of a district that had re-elected the same man six times in a row, in a primary where one side had sixteen million dollars in outside PAC support versus ten million on the other, after months of wall-to-wall attack ads, after the President of the United States personally showed up to call their congressman a disaster, after the Secretary of Defense violated federal norms to campaign against him, after AI-generated ads suggested their congressman was sleeping with Democratic socialists, after all of that, the voters made a choice.

That’s not a choice. That’s a conclusion that was purchased in advance and then handed to voters to ratify. There’s a word for that, and it’s not democracy, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise because it makes people uncomfortable.

Thomas Massie stood in front of his supporters and said, “we’re just getting started,” and honestly I respect the commitment to the bit. But the actual takeaway from last night isn’t about Massie’s future. It’s about what was demonstrated, clearly and expensively, to every other Republican currently serving in Congress.

The machine works. The money wins. Get in line or get buried.

The truly depressing part is that it only cost thirty-five million dollars. In the context of what these groups spend annually, that’s a rounding error. That’s what they spend on appetizers at fundraisers. They spent thirty-five million dollars to send a message to two hundred and thirty-four people, which works out to about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars per congressman, and I promise you every single one of them got the message.

Massie was the last Republican who genuinely didn’t care. He’d survived primaries before. He thought his constituents knew him well enough to see through it. Maybe they did, but it turns out knowing someone and being able to hear them over thirty-five million dollars worth of noise are two very different things.

So that’s where we are. The seat’s been purchased. Gallrein will win in November because it’s a deep red district, and a Democrat hasn’t won there in decades. The groups that bought it will collect. The lesson will be absorbed.

And the next Republican who thinks about voting against Israel aid or asking uncomfortable questions about the Epstein files will think about Kentucky’s 4th District, and they’ll think about it quietly, and then they’ll vote the right way.

That’s what thirty-five million dollars buys you. Not just a seat. The silence of everyone who’s watching.

You’re welcome to go back to your lives now.

P.S.

I want to talk about the voters now, because somewhere along the way, I let them off the hook, and I shouldn’t have.

Here’s what actually happened after the votes got counted. Gallrein won fifty-four point eight percent to forty-five point two. It wasn’t a landslide or a coronation. It was a real, contestable margin in a race where over ninety-four percent of the money came from outside Kentucky. So let’s sit with that number for a second.

Ninety-four percent.

The people who actually live in that district, who actually have to look their congressman in the eye at the Dairy Queen, accounted for less than six percent of the financial conversation about who’d represent them. And they still showed up and ratified it.

I went looking for the shame. I genuinely did. I wanted to find a district full of people waking up the morning after, looking at the national headlines calling them the most expensive primary in House history, and feeling something like embarrassment. I wanted a town hall full of red-faced Kentuckians demanding to know why their election got treated like a hostile corporate takeover.

You know what I found instead?

Almost nothing.

There was a scattering of furious Massie loyalists calling it bought and corrupt, which it was. A bunch of Gallrein voters who weren’t embarrassed in the slightest, who in fact seemed pretty proud of themselves, because as far as they were concerned, Trump said jump, and they asked how high.

Then, underneath both of those groups, just a wide, flat plain of nothing. There was no reckoning or discomfort. Just people moving on with their week like they hadn’t just become the national punchline for sale.

That’s the actual lesson, and it’s worse than the one about the money. The money is just a tool, and tools don’t have intentions. Thirty-five million dollars doesn’t show up to your district uninvited. Somebody has to open the door.

In this case, the door got opened by voters who watched a candidate dodge forums, watched the Secretary of Defense break the law to come yell at their incumbent, watched their congressman get accused of running a throuple with two Democratic congresswomen in an ad so stupid it should have ended the campaign on dignity grounds alone, and concluded, calmly, without any apparent crisis of conscience, that this was all fine.

Not fine in the sense of resigned. Fine in the sense of correct. Mission accomplished. Our guy won.

So here’s where I land, and I want to be specific instead of polite about it, because politeness is exactly what got us into the habit of blaming the structure and never the people standing inside it.

Yes, the system is rotten.

Yes, a campaign finance structure that lets a handful of national interest groups carpet bomb a single House district with ninety four percent of the spending is broken in a way that should embarrass everyone who defends it with a straight face.

That part is true, and it matters, and somebody should fix it.

But the system didn’t vote. People did.

The system can build the bomb, but somebody still has to walk into a booth, pull the lever, and decide that an ad accusing a man of a throuple with AOC is a legitimate basis for removing him from Congress. Nobody held a gun to anyone’s head at the polling station. The money bought the airtime. The voters bought the message. Those are two different transactions, and only one of them required a conscience.

So no, I don’t think it’s complicated. I think a lot of people in that district looked at an obviously purchased outcome, recognized it as purchased, and decided they were fine being the ones who got paid for. That’s not a structural failure. That’s a character one. The machine only works because the people on the other end of it keep agreeing to be moved.

The seat got bought. But somebody had to sign for the delivery.

Let me tell you what prison actually is, because apparently nobody wants to say it out loud.

Prison is a building where we put people, feed them, clothe them, guard them, give them medical care, maintain the facilities around them, process their paperwork, and then watch them sit there for years doing absolutely nothing of value to anyone. We pay an extraordinary amount of money to do this. In California, we spend roughly $133,000 per inmate per year.

We spend this per year, per person, to house them in a building where they watch television, navigate gang politics, and come out the other side more broken than when they went in.

Now here’s the question I want you to sit with for a moment. What exactly did we accomplish?

I’m not asking what we intended to accomplish. I know what we intended. We intended to punish them, keep them away from people they might hurt, and theoretically rehabilitate them. That’s fine as a list of goals. What I’m asking is whether the thing we actually built does any of those things well.

The honest answer, if you’re willing to be honest, is that it mostly doesn’t. Recidivism rates are brutal. Prison culture rewards predatory behavior. People come out without job skills, without discipline, and with a criminal record that follows them everywhere they try to go. We spent over a hundred thousand dollars a year per person to achieve that outcome.

I’d like to propose something different, and I want you to notice when you start arguing against me, because I’d like you to pay attention to what you’re actually arguing against.

Here’s the proposal: any sentence longer than three months should be served in a military-run custodial service system instead of a jail or prison.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Notice what I did not say. I did not say “let criminals join the Army.” I did not say “hand them weapons and drop them into an infantry unit.” I did not say “trust them, release them, or pretend they didn’t do what they did.” The sentence still exists. The conviction still happened. The person is still in custody. We’re just talking about what that custody looks like.

Now, here’s where most people’s brains short-circuit, because they immediately picture some guy who sold heroin or beat someone up getting handed a rifle and a beret and saluting a flag. That’s not what this is. That image is a failure of imagination, not a counterargument.

Let me walk you through who’s actually in prison. We’ve got people in there for drug trafficking, aggravated assault, fraud, embezzlement, armed robbery, DUI manslaughter, soliciting prostitution, and yes, plenty of people who were caught with a hooker and a bag of cocaine and got a sentence that turned into eighteen months because of prior offenses. We’ve got white collar guys in there who manipulated financial systems and stole from thousands of people. We’ve got violent offenders who genuinely scared their communities. We have all of these people, and we’re handling all of them the same way: stick them in a building and wait.

The military custodial model handles them differently, and it handles them in a way that’s actually calibrated to who they are.

First, everyone goes through something like boot camp. Let’s talk about what boot camp actually does, because it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting in this argument. Boot camp takes undisciplined, impulsive, chaotic, unprepared human beings from all kinds of backgrounds and converts them into people who can follow orders, maintain a schedule, complete physical tasks, operate inside a hierarchy, and be held accountable for their behavior in real time. The military has been doing this for a very long time and has gotten quite good at it. Army basic training is ten weeks. Marine Corps boot camp is thirteen. Even the Air Force can do it in seven and a half.

So when someone says, “but these people aren’t ready for that kind of structure,” I want you to hear what you’re actually saying. You’re saying that the military, which has spent decades figuring out how to impose structure on people who don’t have any, can’t handle the population that jail already handles every single day. Jail already manages violent offenders and people with substance abuse histories. It already sorts people by risk level, puts them in units, assigns them labor, and handles their misconduct. The only difference is that jail does all of that inside a system whose entire purpose is passive confinement, while the military does it inside a system whose entire purpose is disciplined productivity.

After boot camp, people get sorted. This is the part where the “but what about dangerous people” objection collapses entirely, because sorting is already something we do. A maximum-security prison has different protocols than a minimum-security facility. People get assessed, classified, and housed accordingly. The military custodial version does the same thing, except the outcomes of that sorting are actually useful.

The person who’s low-risk does logistics work, grounds maintenance, food service, laundry, supply chain, construction support, or warehouse operations. The person who’s medium-risk does the same things in a more controlled environment with more supervision. The person who’s genuinely dangerous, who can’t be trusted in any capacity beyond basic compliance, is still in a controlled custodial environment. They’re just in a controlled custodial environment that looks like a military facility instead of a prison block.

And before you say “but that’s basically still prison,” yes, in the sense that they’re still in custody. That’s the point. We’re not releasing anyone. We’re just replacing what the custody looks like on the inside.

Now let’s talk about the white collar guy, because I think this is actually one of the cleaner cases for this idea.

Your average corporate fraud conviction, your embezzlement case, your procurement scammer, your inside trader, these people are typically housed in what are politely called “minimum security facilities.” They have relative comfort. They have their social status somewhat intact. Their crime was, from their perspective, a sophisticated game they played with money and systems, and prison mostly just makes them wait in a nicer cage until they can go back to being themselves.

Boot camp fixes that.

Boot camp doesn’t care that you had a corner office. It doesn’t care about your MBA. It doesn’t care that your crime involved spreadsheets instead of a weapon. You’re doing push-ups in the dirt with everyone else at five in the morning, and your status from the outside world has no purchasing power inside that gate. After boot camp, that person gets sorted into work that reflects what they can actually do. Supervised auditing. Procurement review. Compliance documentation. Records management. Systems cleanup. Fraud detection support. They’re using the skills they actually have, except now they’re under command and producing something for the public instead of skimming from it.

That is genuinely better than watching them sit in a comfortable facility for three years.

Now, for the violent offenders, because that’s where most people get nervous, and I’d like to make a specific point that tends to get overlooked.

A lot of people in the military come from exactly the same backgrounds as a lot of people in prison. They come from violent neighborhoods, unstable homes, poverty, schools that failed them, and from communities where the social options were pretty limited. The difference between “guy who joined the Marines at eighteen” and “guy who caught a felony at eighteen” is often not a difference in character or background. It’s a difference in which institution got to them first, and whether that institution was capable of converting their energy into something useful.

The military has always known how to take aggressive, impulsive people and turn that into disciplined, controlled aggression under command. That’s not an accident. That’s the point. So the argument that violent offenders can’t function in a military custodial environment fails on the merits, because the military is specifically built to handle exactly that kind of person, and jail is mostly just hoping the violence stays contained inside the building.

Military custody also attacks something that ordinary jails tend to make worse, which is the informal power structure. In prison, violence earns you status. Predatory behavior is socially rewarded. Gangs fill the vacuum left by the absence of a legitimate hierarchy. The institution has to manage that parallel government constantly and doesn’t really win. Military custody is built around the principle that there is one chain of command and no alternative authority structure is permitted to exist. You don’t get to be the shot caller. There is no tier boss. There is rank, there is command, and there is consequence. That’s actually a more hostile environment for the behaviors that make prison such a reliable factory for producing worse criminals.

Let me get to the money, because this is where the argument gets embarrassingly clear.

The state is already spending the money. The person is already convicted. The sentence already exists. We’re not having a conversation about whether to spend resources on these people, because we’re already spending them, and we have no choice but to keep spending them for the duration of the sentence. The only question is what we’re buying with that money.

Right now, we’re buying confinement. That’s all we’re getting back. We put money in, we get custody out, and at the end of the sentence, we release someone who has spent years in an environment that optimized for exactly nothing useful.

Under a military custodial system, we’re buying confinement plus labor plus discipline plus training plus skill development plus physical conditioning plus hierarchy plus consequence plus a better release profile. For someone serving twenty years, we’re potentially buying two decades of useful public work. For someone serving life, we’re converting what would otherwise be a lifetime of pure maintenance cost into a lifetime of supervised contribution.

The person serving three months comes out of the custodial system having been through something that reset their daily structure. The person serving two years comes out with a trade skill and the experience of operating inside a functional hierarchy. The person serving ten years has had a decade of productive labor and institutional accountability. And yes, the people who prove capable of it might actually end up as soldiers. That’s a fine outcome. That’s taking someone the system had written off and producing someone the country can use.

There are no meaningful downsides to this if you stay inside the frame of what we’re actually comparing. We are comparing a convicted person sitting in prison to a convicted person serving the same sentence in a different institution. We are not talking about changing who gets convicted or changing how long sentences are. We are not inviting debate about wrongful convictions, because that problem exists identically in both systems. We are simply asking whether the place they serve the sentence should be a passive cage or a structured, useful, disciplined environment.

The answer is obvious, and I think you already know it.

You just haven’t had anyone hold the frame long enough to make you admit it.

Let me begin by explaining something that apparently needs explaining, because the year is whatever it’s and people are still out here acting like this is a controversial position. Using a tool to help you make something doesn’t mean you didn’t make the thing. I realize this seems obvious. I realize that most functional adults who have ever used a hammer, a blender, a camera, a word processor, a printing press, or a set of scaffolding bolted to the side of the Vatican should already understand this.

And yet.

Here we are.

Again.

Going over this.

Because some people have decided that the only authentic version of creation is a lone genius weeping in a candlelit room, personally responsible for every atom of the finished product, otherwise it doesn’t count.

It counts.

It has always counted.

Anyone arguing otherwise is, with the greatest possible respect, arguing that we should all go back to the icebox because refrigerators are cheating.

let’s start at the beginning. Not the philosophical beginning, because we don’t have that kind of time, but the practical beginning: Michelangelo. You know him. Ceiling guy. One of the people who supposedly proved that a single human being, working alone in conditions that would make an OSHA inspector have a breakdown, could produce something so transcendent that five centuries later, people still stand underneath it with their mouths open.

This is true.

Mostly.

Michelangelo personally painted the overwhelming majority of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He was, by all historical accounts, a nightmare to work with, largely because he didn’t want to work with anyone. He fired most of his assistants. He did an enormous amount of it with his own hands, which were probably ruined for years afterward, painting wet plaster overhead in a position that would destroy a person.

He still had assistants. They mixed plaster, prepared pigments, and maintained the scaffolding. They did the prep work that made it possible for him to even pick up a brush.

Nobody looks at the Sistine Chapel and says, “Well, sure, but Michelangelo had someone else grind his lapis lazuli, so technically this is not really his work.”

Nobody is out here demanding we torch the ceiling because he didn’t personally quarry the pigments from the earth with his bare hands.

That would be insane.

The point was never that he did every single mechanical task involved in producing the work. The point was that the vision, the decisions, and the execution of what actually mattered were his. He directed it. He controlled it. The ceiling is his.

Now, let’s talk about Raphael, who operated very differently and produced work that’s equally in museums and equally regarded as among the greatest achievements in the history of painting.

Raphael ran a workshop. A large one. He had assistants, apprentices, and collaborators who handled significant portions of the execution in his major fresco projects. Backgrounds. Secondary figures. Architectural elements. In some of the later Vatican rooms, the assistants were carrying enormous amounts of the load. Giulio Romano. Gianfrancesco Penni. People who were skilled in their own right, working under Raphael’s direction and according to his designs and cartoons.

Does this mean Raphael didn’t paint his frescoes? Does this mean The School of Athens is a fraud? Does this mean we should go to Rome and chip it off the wall in protest?

No. Obviously not.

Because Raphael created everything that made the work what it’s. He solved the compositional problems. He designed the figures. He set the visual program. He painted the parts that needed to look the most like Raphael.

The workshop executed under his supervision, and the result is something with a completely coherent vision and a recognizable artistic identity that belongs entirely to him. that’s what being a master painter meant in the Renaissance. That was the job. Nobody in the fifteenth or sixteenth century thought Raphael was cheating. They thought he was doing his job at the highest possible level.

The idea that real art requires a single person to physically produce every component is neither ancient nor noble. It’s a relatively modern and frankly quite strange notion that has somehow calcified into conventional wisdom despite being contradicted by most of the art that people actually consider great. It’s not how the Renaissance worked. It’s not how architecture works. It’s not how film works. It’s not how music production works. It’s not how most of the things we consider serious creative endeavors work. A director doesn’t operate every camera. An architect doesn’t lay every brick. A composer doesn’t personally play every instrument on the recording. We don’t consider any of these people frauds. We understand that there is a version of authorship that’s about vision, control, and the choices that make the work what it’s. And then there are the people or tools that help execute it.

This brings us to James Patterson, who is extremely successful and who makes some people very upset, and I suspect those two facts are not unrelated. James Patterson doesn’t write every word of most of his books. He’s quite open about this. He creates the concept and builds a detailed chapter by chapter outline. A co-author writes the manuscript. Patterson edits, shapes, revises, and makes sure the final product sounds and feels like a James Patterson book. The co-author’s name is on the cover. Nobody is hiding anything. The result is that James Patterson has sold something like four hundred million books, which is a number that I personally find both impressive and slightly horrifying, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that his process is structurally identical to the way Renaissance workshops operated. He is the master. The co-author is the skilled assistant executing according to the vision. The books are his in the same meaningful sense that the Raphael frescoes are Raphael’s. He brought the creative intelligence that made the work possible, controlled the final version, and is responsible for what the work ultimately is. People can dislike this or prefer solo-authored novels. That’s a perfectly reasonable preference, and you can have it without being wrong. What you cannot do, with intellectual honesty, is say the work is invalid. The readers don’t think it’s invalid. The readers are buying the books, finishing them, and coming back for the next one, which is ultimately the only verdict that means anything.

Now let’s talk about music, because the music industry has been doing this forever, and somehow nobody declared a crisis about it until recently. Sinatra didn’t write his songs. Elvis didn’t write his songs. Whitney Houston didn’t write I Will Always Love You. Dolly Parton wrote it, which is why Dolly Parton gets the royalties and also gets to watch Whitney’s version make her a rich and beloved icon twice over, but that’s a different point. The point is that the performer brings interpretation, delivery, emotional truth in the vocal, and the identity that makes a song mean something to a specific audience. That’s not nothing. That’s often the entire thing.

Then there is Umbrella. You know this story. Umbrella was written and offered to Britney Spears before Rihanna ever heard it. Britney passed. Rihanna took it. Rihanna made it one of the defining songs of her career and one of the most recognizable pop songs of the last twenty years. The song is the same song it always was. The songwriters wrote it the same way regardless of who sang it. But Rihanna made it Rihanna, and that transformation, that specific combination of voice and delivery and moment, is authorship. It’s just a different layer of it. Nobody looks at Rihanna’s catalog and says, “Well, technically she didn’t write Umbrella, so we should throw it out.” Nobody says her performance doesn’t count because someone else had the original idea. The song is hers in every way that matters to the people listening to it.

Taylor Swift is supposedly legitimate because she writes her own songs, but the second Jack Antonoff’s name shows up too often, that legitimacy gets treated as suspicious again. That’s the part that gives the game away. The objection was never really about authorship. It was about finding a reason to downgrade the artist. Solo writing proves she’s real until collaboration proves she’s manufactured. Every major artist has collaborators, producers, editors, arrangers, engineers, and trusted creative partners. Antonoff isn’t some cheat code hiding behind the curtain. He’s part of the process, the same way producers have always been part of the process.

Now we have arrived at the part of this conversation that’s actually about today.

Why am I writing this?

Writers, musicians, artists, and creators of all kinds are using artificial intelligence tools as part of their process. Some people are doing this badly. They are pressing a button, taking whatever comes out, and publishing it without thinking about it or caring whether it’s good. That’s a real thing that happens, and it produces terrible work, and nobody is defending it here. Nobody in this essay argues that using any tool automatically makes anything legitimate.

But some people are doing it the way a master uses a workshop. They are bringing the vision. They are directing the execution. They are doing the work that makes the work actually be something. They are outlining, drafting, prompting, editing, rewriting, and shaping until what comes out is the thing they were trying to make. The intent is theirs. The decisions are theirs. The final version is theirs because they kept working on it until it matched what was in their head. That’s authorship and craft. That’s the actual thing we are supposed to be talking about when we talk about whether something is legitimate.

The people who object to this are not, in most cases, making a nuanced argument about craft and authenticity. They are making an argument about which tools are allowed. They have decided, based on nothing particularly coherent, that a word processor is fine, and a thesaurus is fine, and having a developmental editor rewrite significant chunks of your manuscript is fine, and dictating your book to a transcription service is fine, but this specific category of tool is not fine, and anyone using it is a fraud, and their work should be dismissed. This is not a principled position. This is just people deciding which tools they are comfortable with and then wrapping that discomfort in the language of artistic integrity.

These people are extremely mad in a way that I suspect has more to do with their own insecurities than with any genuine philosophical principle.

We went through this with photography. When cameras were invented, painters insisted that photography was not real art because a machine was doing the work. Then photography became one of the most significant art forms in human history and everyone moved on. We went through this with recorded music, when people argued that records were not real because you were not actually hearing a live performance. We went through this with digital art, with sampling in music, with computer-assisted design, with Auto-Tune, with drum machines, with synthesizers, with every single tool that made some part of the process easier, different, or collaborative in a new way. Every single time, the people who insisted the tool made it fake were eventually standing in a museum, a concert hall, or a bookstore, surrounded by the work produced using that tool, and they either updated their position or continued being miserable about it.

The icebox people lost. They always lose. Not because the new technology is always better in every way, but because the question of whether something is good is not the same question as whether the tool used to make it was sufficiently old or sufficiently human. Those are different questions. The first one matters. The second one, in the context of evaluating the actual work, doesn’t.

Now we get to the part that nobody seems to want to talk about, which is the part that actually matters the most.

Not everyone is going to be Raphael. Not everyone is going to be Taylor Swift. Not everyone is going to spend a decade learning to paint, or five years learning music theory, or however many thousands of hours it takes to develop the technical skills required to fully realize a creative vision without any assistance. Most people are not going to do that. Most people have jobs, families, and finite amounts of time and energy, and the idea that they should either commit to mastery or forfeit any right to make things is one of the more quietly cruel positions that gets dressed up as respect for craft.

Here is what actually happens when someone has a creative idea and no technical means to realize it. They carry it around. It lives in their head as a kind of permanent almost, a thing that existed in intention but never in reality. They might describe it to someone and watch the other person not quite see it. They might attempt it badly and feel embarrassed. They might just let it go because the gap between what they imagined and what they can produce is too discouraging to keep crossing.

That gap is not a moral failing. It’s just a gap. It has always existed. And for most of human history, the only way across it was either years of practice or access to someone with the technical skills to help you, which usually meant money, connections, or luck.

What’s different now is that the gap can be crossed differently. Someone who cannot play an instrument can write lyrics, real lyrics with real hooks and real emotional architecture, put them into a tool, and hear their song sung back to them. Not a professional recording or a finished product necessarily. But the thing. The actual shape of what they had in their head, finally existing outside of it. Someone who cannot paint can describe a visual concept and see something close to what they imagined rendered in light and color. Someone who cannot write prose at a publishable level can tell their story and read it back as a story instead of a pile of notes and intentions.

And the question I would like someone to answer for me, slowly and carefully, is this: what exactly is wrong with that?

Not the professional version. Not the person making money or claiming credentials they don’t have. Just the person who had an idea and wanted to see it, hear it, read it. The person who wrote the song and wanted to know if the chorus actually lands the way they thought it did. The person who had an album’s worth of emotional architecture in their head, a whole coherent artistic vision with a title and a tracklist and a cover concept, and used the tools available to find out if it was as real as it felt.

That person is not defrauding anyone. They are not stealing anything. They are not claiming to be Raphael. They are doing the most fundamental thing a creative person can do, which is trying to make the thing that’s in their head exist in the world.

The tool didn’t have the idea. The tool didn’t write the lyrics or structure the emotional arc or decide that one song should be slow piano and devastating, while another should be a pop release valve, and another should be the one where the language itself starts breaking down to show you what is happening underneath it. The tool cannot do any of that. The tool just finally made it possible for the person who did all of that to hear what they made.

Telling that person they should have learned to play piano first is not a defense of artistic integrity. It’s gatekeeping dressed up as principle. It’s saying that ideas only count if they come packaged with the correct technical credentials, and that people without those credentials should stay quiet and keep their imaginations to themselves.

That’s not a position anyone should be proud of holding.

What matters is the output. What matters is whether the song works. What matters is whether the image captures what the person saw in their head. What matters is whether the story lands. Not which tools were involved or whether the process conforms to someone else’s idea of what making things is supposed to look like or whether the person could have done it without help.

Nobody does it without help. Nobody ever did. They just used whatever help was available to them at the time.

The tools will keep changing. The arguments will stay exactly the same. And the people who spend their energy policing other people’s processes instead of making their own things will keep losing the only argument that actually matters, which is the one that happens when someone encounters the work and feels something real.

Make the thing. Use what you have. Hear your song. See your painting. Read your story. The idea was yours. that’s enough.

That has always been enough.

There is one more argument worth addressing because it’s the one that gets borrowed to attack individual creators who have nothing to do with it. The fear is that corporate entity A will use AI to replace all authors, all musicians, all artists, with cheaper automated output and pocket the difference. That fear is legitimate. That’s a real thing that’s actually happening in some places, and it’s worth being angry about and organizing against and fighting with everything available.

But that argument has nothing to do with the person making a song on Suno. Those are completely different things wearing the same accusation, and people keep acting like they are the same thing, and they are not.

The corporate stooge doesn’t want to create anything. He wants the revenue stream that creation produces. He will use whatever is cheapest to approximate it. He was already doing this before AI existed. He was doing it with content farms and ghostwriters paid pennies and algorithm-optimized slop assembled by underpaid contractors. AI just gave him a new tool for the same old motivation, which was never about making something real in the first place. You cannot blame the tool for the stooge. The stooge was always going to be the stooge.

The person who actually wants to make something is a completely different animal. They will use every tool available not to avoid the work but to get closer to the thing in their head. That drive doesn’t go away because the tools change. It’s the whole point. It has always been the whole point.

Grok, the original actual Grok, not the one named after him by people who clearly never read the book, didn’t carve handprints into cave walls because he was doing it the hard way on principle. He did it because he had something to put on a wall and the rock and the pigment were what he had. If he had had Suno he would have used Suno. The instinct to make things is the whole story. The tool is just the tool.

While we are here, let’s talk about the Kindle because we have already watched this exact argument resolve itself once, and somehow people forgot. When Amazon released the Kindle and self publishing became accessible overnight, the argument was identical to the one happening now. Word for word. Anyone can publish now. The gatekeepers are gone. The market will be flooded with garbage. Real authors who went through real publishers with real editors will be devalued by the tsunami of slop from people who have no business publishing anything.

Yes, the slop came. Absolutely, it did. There was a tidal wave of terrible self-published books with bad covers, no editing, and plots that went nowhere. Nobody is pretending otherwise.

Also, Andy Weir wrote The Martian, self-published it, and it became a film starring Matt Damon.

Also, an entire generation of romance, fantasy, and science fiction readers found authors they loved who would never have survived the traditional gatekeeping system because the gatekeepers had very specific ideas about what was commercial, and a lot of genuinely good work didn’t fit those ideas.

The slop didn’t kill the good stuff. The good stuff found its audience anyway because readers are not stupid. They can tell the difference between something that has nothing in it and something that does. They always could.

The Kindle argument died not because someone won the debate, but because enough good work came out of self-publishing that the debate became embarrassing to keep having. Nobody talks about indie authors as less than anymore. Nobody demands to know if a book was traditionally published before deciding whether to feel something while reading it. That conversation is over.

This one will end the same way. The slop is real, and it’s also not the whole story, and it never was.

P.S.

Very smart people are using AI right now to solve cancer. The kind of smart that makes the rest of us feel like we have been doing arithmetic with crayons. They are running models, simulations, and compound analyses at a scale no human brain could manage alone, and they are getting closer to answers that have been out of reach for decades.

If they find a cure, nobody is going to be in the oncology ward asking whether the discovery process was sufficiently human. Nobody is going to tell a person in remission that their cure doesn’t count because a machine helped find it. Nobody is going to say we should give the cancer back on principle.

The cure is the cure.

The song is the song.

You danced, or you didn’t.

Tell me again what was invalid about that.

P.P.S.

Yes, I am naïve.

There’s a simple way to stop ticket scalpers. I’m going to tell you what it is. But first, I’m going to walk you through some things, because if I just lead with the answer, you won’t believe me, and then I will have to explain it anyway, and I’d rather do it once.

Scalping is not complicated.

A scalper buys tickets he doesn’t want so that you can’t have them, and then he sells them back to you at whatever price your desperation will support. That’s the entire business model. There’s no craft to it. There’s no skill. A guy with a credit card and a bot did something any idiot could do, and now he’s going to charge you four hundred dollars over face value to see a band you have liked since you were seventeen. He didn’t earn that money. He extracted it from you because he got there first and the rules let him.

I want to be clear about something before we go further. The scalper isn’t the villain of this story. He’s doing something legal. He’s doing something the system was built to allow him to do. You don’t have to like him, but he’s a symptom. The people who designed the system and keep it running exactly as it is, those are the people we’re going to talk about.

Everyone who says they want to stop scalping is lying to you.

Ticketmaster says it wants to stop scalping. Ticketmaster also owns the dominant verified resale platform and takes a cut of every secondary transaction that runs through it. Live Nation says it wants to stop scalping. Live Nation also profits enormously from the premium resale market that scalping creates and inflates. They are the same company and just lost an antitrust monopoly case by the way.

The venues say they want to stop scalping. The venues also sell platinum tickets at market rate, which is just institutional scalping with a cleaner website and a better excuse.

These aren’t organizations that want to solve the problem. These are organizations that have correctly identified the problem as a revenue stream and have spent considerable money making sure you believe they’re working on it. The blockchain ticket solution, the non-transferable NFT ticket, the dynamic pricing model, and the verified fan presale, all of it is performance. Some of it is well-intentioned performance by people inside those organizations who genuinely hate scalping. Most of it is theater designed to make you feel like progress is happening while the machine keeps running exactly as designed.

I’m not saying this to be cynical. I’m saying it because it’s true, and it’s the only useful frame for understanding why a solvable problem hasn’t been solved.

When someone wants to look smart about ticket scalping, they propose one of about six things. I’ll go through them quickly because they all have the same problem, and I want to get to the actual solution before either of us dies.

Non-transferable tickets. You tie the ticket to your ID, you show up, you prove you’re you, scalpers can’t transfer what they buy. This sounds good until you realize it requires massive venue infrastructure, constant enforcement, and would destroy the legitimate secondary market for people who genuinely can’t attend anymore. Also, the platforms that would implement it profit from the resale market they would be destroying, so they’re not going to do it. The Foo Fighters and other bands actually do this for small shows, by the way.

Face value only resale exchanges. You can resell, but only through the official platform and only at face value. Same problem. The official platform makes significantly more money on uncapped resale. They won’t do this voluntarily, and there’s no law making them.

Lottery systems. Instead of first come first served, you enter a lottery and tickets are distributed randomly at face value. This is actually pretty reasonable. It doesn’t stop scalpers from entering the lottery though, and it doesn’t solve the fundamental issue that once someone has a ticket they can do whatever they want with it.

In-person only sales. You have to show up physically to buy a ticket. This is nostalgic and completely insane.

Do not announce the sale time. Surprise drop so scalpers can’t prep their bots. Scalpers have people watching for this specifically. This lasts about forty-eight hours before it stops working.

All of these solutions are trying to solve the problem at the point of sale. Get the right people the tickets in the first place, and you have won. That’s a reasonable instinct. It’s also where every smart person has been putting their energy for twenty years, and scalping is still happening, so I’m going to suggest we look somewhere else.

Scalping requires two things to work. It requires the scalper to be able to buy tickets, and it requires the tickets to stay valuable once he has them.

Everyone focuses on the first part. Stop the scalper from buying the tickets. Bots, lotteries, ID verification, all of it is trying to solve part one.

Nobody talks about part two.

If the tickets don’t stay valuable, the scalper doesn’t have a business. He has a pile of tickets he can’t sell at a profit. Which means he either sells them at face value or he eats the loss. The end.

So here is the solution.

Allow returns.

That’s it. That’s the whole article.

You allow returns. Ticketmaster or whoever relists the ticket at face value. They keep the processing fee because they did process it. The seat gets filled. The artist gets paid. The fan gets a ticket at a normal price. The scalper has no leverage.

I know you want me to keep going so I will, but I need you to actually sit with that for a second. The entire solution is just a standard consumer protection that applies to literally every other product you can buy. You can return shoes. You can return a blender. You can return a couch. You can’t return a concert ticket, and that one carveout from basic consumer norms is what the entire scalper economy is built on. That’s not an accident. That’s a choice.

Let’s start with the regular person. Right now, when you buy tickets, you buy them in a panic because you know they will be gone in minutes, and if you don’t act immediately, you won’t get them at all. So you overbuy. You buy four when you need two because you’re not sure your friends are actually coming. You buy for a show three months out when you have no idea what your life looks like in three months. You do all of this because the ticket is a one way door. Once you’re through it, the only way out is the secondary market, which means becoming a small-time scalper yourself just to recoup your money when your plans change.

With returns, you don’t have to do any of that. Buy the tickets. If your friend bails, return one. If the show conflicts with something in September, return them. Get your money back minus a reasonable processing fee. Normal consumer behavior. Normal consumer expectations.

Now let’s talk about the scalper. He buys six hundred tickets to a major show because he knows the demand is there and none of them are coming back. That’s the bet. With no returns, it’s a pretty safe bet. The worst case is he sells them all at face value and breaks even. The realistic case is he sells most of them at two to five times face value and funds his cocaine and boat payments for the quarter.

With returns, the bet gets a lot shakier. Because now the buyers know they can return. Which means the buyers aren’t panicking the same way. Which means some of them are going to wait and see if tickets reappear in the official pool at face value before they pay his markup. And some of them are going to pay the markup as insurance, get home, see that face value tickets have popped back up, return his ticket, and buy the cheaper one. He can’t stop this. He sold the ticket. The buyer owns it. The buyer can return it if the platform allows returns.

So now he’s sitting on six hundred tickets and the demand he was counting on is softer than he expected, because the panic he was feeding off of isn’t as acute when people have an escape hatch. He has to decide: sell closer to face value, return them himself, or hold and hope. If he returns them, the tickets go back into the pool, and fans get them at face value. If he holds on and the show is next week and he still has four hundred tickets, he’s going to be selling at or below face value just to move them. Either way, the premium that was funding his lifestyle is gone.

And here is the part that I find genuinely elegant. You don’t need to catch the scalper. You don’t need to prove he’s a scalper. You don’t need a law, an investigator, or a special task force. You just need a return policy. The market does the rest on its own.

Someone is going to say that artists and venues would lose money if people could return tickets, because some sales that are currently locked in would get refunded.

I’d like you to think carefully about which concerts have scalping problems. It’s not the shows that are struggling to sell. Scalping happens at shows where demand dramatically outpaces supply. Beyonce. Taylor Swift. The Rolling Stones on what is apparently a never-ending farewell tour. A rapper who hasn’t put out an album in three years but has decided this is a good time to do an arena run. These aren’t shows worried about empty seats.

If someone returns a ticket to a show like that, Ticketmaster relists it, and it sells again, probably within minutes, because there are ten thousand people on a waitlist who couldn’t get tickets in the first place. The seat doesn’t go empty. The artist doesn’t lose money. Ticketmaster might actually make more money because they collect the processing fee twice, once on the original sale and once on the relist.

The argument that returns would hurt revenue only applies to shows where demand is soft, and those shows don’t have scalping problems. So the objection is answering a question nobody asked.

The problem is that the people who could implement returns profit from the current system.

Ticketmaster’s resale platform charges fees that make the original service charges look modest. The entire platinum ticket and market pricing system is just Ticketmaster doing institutionally what the scalper does individually, buying low and selling high on the backs of demand they didn’t create. If you implement returns at face value and relist inventory through official channels, you’re directly competing with your own premium resale product. You’re taking revenue that was going to be large and making it small.

It’s not that nobody has thought of this. It’s that the people who run this industry looked at it, understood it completely, and said, no thank you. They prefer the version where they make more money. Then they hired a communications team to make sure you stay focused on the scalper standing outside the venue with a fistful of tickets, rather than the corporation that built the system he’s standing inside of.

That’s the whole story. Everything else is details.

The scalper isn’t a criminal mastermind. He’s a guy who noticed that tickets are non-refundable, and that panicked buyers will pay a premium to avoid missing something they care about. That’s a reasonable observation. He’s exploiting a policy choice that the platforms made, not some fundamental law of nature.

The platforms aren’t trying to solve the problem. They’re managing public relations around a problem they have decided is more profitable to maintain than to fix.

The solution is a return policy. A normal, boring, standard return policy that would be completely unremarkable if it applied to literally any other product you can buy. You return the ticket. They relist it. The scalper’s inventory becomes worthless as a speculation vehicle. Prices compress toward face value because buyers don’t have to panic buy anymore.

Nobody in a position of power is going to do this without being forced to, because it would cost them money. That’s the part that’s exhausting. Not that the problem is hard. That the problem is easy, and the people who could fix it have looked at it carefully and decided they would rather not.

You’re welcome.

P.S.

Scalpers are subhuman and should be in jail. Not a nice jail. One of those jails in Nicaragua where the walls are damp, and nobody comes to check on you.

And while we’re here, every financial parasite who has built a career around withholding something people need until the desperation is high enough to monetize deserves a cell right next to them. The guys who run pharmacy benefit managers. The guys who run platforms. The middlemen who insert themselves between a human being and a thing that human being wants, and have decided that their presence in that gap entitles them to a cut. They didn’t make anything. They didn’t improve anything. They just got there first and held it hostage.

You know what else operates that way. A virus. A virus finds something your body needs, occupies it, and extracts resources from the host until there’s nothing left. It doesn’t produce value. It intercepts it. It doesn’t have a skill. It has a position, and it will defend that position with everything it has because without it, it’s nothing.

I’m not saying scalpers are literally viruses. I’m saying the mentality is identical, and I think that’s worth sitting with.

Let’s start with a simple question.

Can you buy anything you want?

Mostly yes. You can buy status, access, attention, labor, silence, comfort, and expertise. You can buy the appearance of virtue, which outsells actual virtue considerably. You can buy security, credibility, distribution, and a room full of people who will call you impressive without blinking. The marketplace is large and open, and you’re welcome to it.

But there are things you can’t buy. I think you already know what they are.

You can’t buy cocaine. Not legally, and certainly not seven hundred tons of it. You can’t buy sex from Taylor Swift. You can’t buy consent from a specific unwilling person. These aren’t philosophical edge cases. These are just things that aren’t for sale, either because they’re illegal or because another person gets to say no regardless of what you’re offering.

So we agree on that. Some things can be bought. Some things can’t. Good.

Now, the government restricts things all the time. It restricts how fast you can drive because unlimited speed on public roads produces outcomes that are bad for everyone. It restricts what drugs you can buy because unrestricted access to certain substances produces bad outcomes for individuals and communities. It restricts who can sell you a firearm and under what conditions. It restricts what you can build on your own property. These aren’t controversial in principle. We might argue about where exactly to draw the line in any specific case, but we don’t seriously argue that the government has no authority to draw lines at all.

And the lines it draws make sense, mostly. You can’t buy cocaine because cocaine causes serious harm, and society has decided the costs outweigh the benefits of a free market in cocaine. You can’t buy sex from Taylor Swift because she’s a person with her own will and not a commodity, and even if she were in a jurisdiction where sex work is legal, she’d still get to say no to you specifically. You can’t buy a public official’s vote because that corrodes the institutions that everyone depends on.

These restrictions are just the government doing what governments do, which is regulate conduct in markets for the collective good.

Are you still with me? I hope so, because none of that was controversial.

Now here’s where it gets interesting, and I want you to notice that you’ve already agreed to quite a lot before we get here.

Someone always says, at about this point, that restricting what you can buy restricts your speech. That money is speech. That the Supreme Court said so, and therefore the whole previous conversation doesn’t apply when we’re talking about political spending.

And I want to ask one question before we go any further.

Is money actually speech?

Not can money be used for speech. Not can spending money sometimes relate to expressive activity. The actual question is whether money itself is speech in the same categorical sense that words are speech. Because gravity is either real or it isn’t. A law either applies or it doesn’t. If money is speech, then it’s speech everywhere and always, and every restriction on spending is a restriction on speech.

So let’s follow that all the way out.

If money is speech, then buying cocaine is speech. The government’s ban on cocaine purchases is a restriction on your expressive rights. If money is speech, then paying for hookers is speech, and laws against prostitution are speech restrictions. If money is speech, then bribing a public official is speech, and bribery laws are unconstitutional. Paying a hitman is protected expression. Buying stolen goods is protected expression. Fraud, which is conducted entirely through words and money, would be a constitutional right.

Do you believe that?

I don’t think you do. I think you believe what you believed five minutes ago, which is that buying cocaine is not the same thing as giving a speech, and that the government can make cocaine illegal without it being a First Amendment issue. I think you believe bribery can be a crime. I think you believe paying for hookers can be regulated. You believed all of that before the word “speech” entered the conversation, and nothing has changed except that someone introduced a slogan.

So money isn’t speech. Money is money. It’s a tool, the same way a printing press is a tool, or a microphone is a tool, or a server is a tool. The printing press can be used to produce speech. The microphone can amplify speech. The server can distribute speech. But none of them are speech itself, and neither is money.

What’s actually true is that money can be an instrument of speech, which means restricting money can sometimes burden speech when the restriction genuinely targets expressive activity. That’s a real and narrower claim. If the government banned you from buying paper and ink, that would meaningfully restrict your ability to publish and we’d have something serious to talk about. But that’s completely different from saying money and speech are the same thing.

The government regulates advertising. Not the opinions in the ads, but the conduct of running them. You can’t make false claims in a commercial. You can’t advertise certain products to children. You can’t run a pharmaceutical ad without disclosures. You can’t advertise cigarettes on television. Alcohol ads have to follow strict rules about who they can target and what they can claim. Gambling ads are restricted in most states. Strip clubs can be zoned out of neighborhoods and restricted from advertising in certain contexts. Escorts and prostitutes, in the places where that’s legal, can’t advertise freely wherever they want. The FTC exists entirely to regulate advertising as marketplace conduct, and nobody calls any of that a First Amendment crisis. The speech in the ad is free. The act of placing the ad in a market is regulable. We’ve accepted this forever without much fuss.

So political advertising is advertising. It runs in the same markets, on the same channels, purchased the same way. If advertising is regulable conduct, and it is, then the burden is on whoever’s arguing that political advertising uniquely escapes that framework. And that burden is a heavy one, because we’ve now agreed that cocaine is regulable, hookers are regulable, bribery is regulable, speed is regulable, and advertising is regulable, all without any of it being a speech issue.

And here’s what that means for Citizens United.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission held that limiting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions violates the First Amendment. The Court’s reasoning was that spending money on political communication is itself protected speech, and the government can’t restrict it just because the speaker is a corporation.

But everyone already agreed to every premise that makes that reasoning impossible.

We agreed that buying cocaine is regulable conduct, not speech. We agreed that paying for hookers and bribery are also regulable conduct, not speech.

And we agreed that advertising cigarettes on television is regulable conduct, that alcohol ads can be restricted, that gambling ads can be restricted, that strip clubs can be zoned and restricted from advertising wherever they want.

In every single one of those cases, money changed hands, an ad ran, or a transaction occurred, and the law regulated it. Nobody called it a speech restriction. Nobody invoked the First Amendment. It was just the government doing what it does: regulating conduct in markets.

Political advertising is advertising. It runs on the same channels, purchased the same way, through the same markets. The Court in Citizens United didn’t apply a consistent principle to that fact. It applied a selective one. When the money is going toward cocaine, hookers, or cigarette ads during cartoons, it’s just money, and the government can regulate it. When money is going toward political advertising by a large corporation in the final weeks of an election, it suddenly becomes speech, and the First Amendment rides in to protect it.

That isn’t logic. That’s a preference dressed up as a principle, applied in ways that happen to protect the people who were already winning.

The speech itself, the actual political opinion, the actual message about who should win an election, remains completely free under campaign finance regulation. Nobody is telling corporations they can’t say “vote for this candidate.” Nobody is making political opinions illegal. What’s being regulated is how much money a corporation can spend to flood the airwaves with paid media. The opinion is free.

The advertising market is what’s being regulated, and we just spent several paragraphs agreeing that advertising markets get regulated all the time.

You didn’t need me to convince you of anything new. You just needed someone to follow what you already believed all the way to the end.

You’re welcome.

P.S.

One more thing, since I can already hear the objection forming. Someone will say that political speech deserves uniquely maximum protection, and that the government’s interest in regulating political advertising just isn’t compelling the way its interest in regulating cocaine is. Political speech is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to protect most fiercely, they’ll say.

Ask them about Miller v. California.

Miller was decided in 1973, thirty-seven years before Citizens United. It established that obscene expression gets virtually no First Amendment protection at all, because the Court decided sexually explicit content that lacks serious artistic, literary, political, or scientific value simply doesn’t qualify. That’s a content judgment. The Court looked at what was being expressed, decided it didn’t like it, and withheld protection.

So when Citizens United arrived in 2010, and the Court declared that political spending deserves maximum First Amendment protection because speech, that maximum protection principle was already living inside a framework that had never actually applied maximum protection consistently. Miller isn’t a complication or an asterisk. Miller is evidence that speech equaling absolute protection was never the actual rule.

Which means the Court isn’t running a consistent speech protection principle. It never was. It’s running a content preference. It likes political institutional spending and protects it. It doesn’t like obscenity and strips it of protection. Both involve expression. The deciding factor has never been whether speech is involved. The deciding factor is whether the Court approves of what’s being said and who’s saying it.

Citizens United isn’t a departure from principle. It’s just another instance of the same thing the Court has always done, which is protect what it likes and call it law.

Now, imagine a car. Not a nice car, just any car, your car, a normal car that you own and paid for and expect to function. You don’t drive it for a week because you’re busy. You come back, and it has quietly jettisoned the catalytic converter, three cylinders, and both sets of brakes, because it detected reduced usage and made some decisions about what was still necessary. You’d lose your mind. You’d call someone. There would be consequences for the people who designed that car.

Now imagine a Lamborghini. A car that costs more than most people’s houses, engineered by people who consider it a personal failure if a component underperforms. You drive it once a year for five minutes. You come back eleven months later, turn the key, and it does zero to whatever the fuck, immediately, completely, without complaint, without a warmup period, without telling you it needs six to eight weeks of progressive overload before it can get back to highway speeds. It does not forget how to be a Lamborghini. It doesn’t redistribute its horsepower into storage because you weren’t using it. It doesn’t report that it’s sore. It just goes, because it was built correctly, because the people who built it understood that a machine should do its job when asked, regardless of how recently it was asked, and because if it didn’t, it would be a very expensive and very embarrassing piece of Italian sculpture and nothing more.

Your body is the first car. The one that ate its own brakes. We’ve been pretending this is fine for two hundred thousand years because it’s the only car we’ve got, and the alternative to pretending it’s fine is a kind of despair that isn’t useful, so we call the bad design a feature, and we make content about it, and we sell supplements, and we talk about muscle memory, which is the fitness industry’s way of telling you that the car actually remembered where it put the cylinders and is getting them back faster than you think, and I went and looked at the studies that claim is built on, and it isn’t, and I want to talk about that, but first I want to finish establishing that the fundamental problem is not the gym and not the diet and not the discipline and not the content and not the program.

The fundamental problem is that the machine is badly built and has been from the start, and nobody in the fitness content space has any financial incentive to say that plainly, so I’m going to say it here, for free, to an audience of one bulldog and five cats who could not care less.

Your car holds its doors when you don’t drive it. Your computer holds its files when you don’t open them. Your refrigerator does not quietly consume its own shelving during a long weekend to reduce its energy footprint. Every machine you own maintains its own components as a basic default condition of existing, because that’s what machines do, because a machine that randomly discards its most expensive parts during periods of low activity would get returned.

This is how every machine works except the one you actually live in, which sees three weeks of reduced activity and immediately begins liquidating muscle like a panicking accountant trying to hit a quarterly number that nobody asked for, while carefully, methodically, lovingly retaining every single fat cell it has ever accumulated because fat is cheap to store and muscle is expensive to maintain and the body is optimizing for a famine that is not coming and is not a reasonable concern for the overwhelming majority of humans alive today.

This is not intelligent design. This is not an elegant system that’s merely mismatched to modern life. This is a bad design. This is a design that would have been caught in review if evolution had a review process, which it does not, because evolution is just a series of accidents that didn’t kill anyone yet, and we have been making excuses for the results of those accidents for so long that we’ve started calling them features.

And if you’re the kind of person who believes a conscious, omnipotent being designed this system on purpose, I’m sorry, but that’s actually worse. That means someone who had access to every possible design, who could have built the Lamborghini, who had unlimited time and unlimited resources and zero constraints, looked at all the options and said you know what, I’m going to make one that eats its own muscle when it sits idle, retains fat with the devotion of a hoarder, gets hungry every three hours, breaks down constantly, requires decades of maintenance just to stay functional, and completely falls apart after about seventy years if it even makes it that far, and I’m going to call it good. An omnipotent being designed the knee. An omnipotent being looked at the tendon that slips out of place in my calf and signed off on it. An omnipotent being is responsible for the fact that I have to tape my hand to grip things, and my body’s response to that situation was to gain fifteen pounds. I’m not saying there’s no god. I’m saying if there is one, the engineering department has some serious explaining to do.

Let’s be clear about something that the evolutionary excuse crowd and the intelligent design crowd both conveniently skip over. My body was not starving. Not for a second. Not even close. It had adequate calories and protein and everything coming in every single day, consistently, reliably, the whole time. There was no famine. There was no scarcity signal. There was no rational basis for the panic sale on muscle tissue because the books were balanced and had been balanced the entire time. The body looked at a fully funded operation, all bills paid, nothing overdue, and decided to lay off the most expensive employees anyway, just in case, just to be safe, just because it couldn’t imagine a world where the famine wasn’t coming eventually because it has been waiting for that famine for two hundred thousand years and it’s not going to stop now just because the refrigerator is full and has always been full and will continue to be full because I have a Costco membership and a functioning debit card. The system didn’t respond to reality. The system responded to a threat that did not exist, has not existed, and will not exist, and billed me fifteen pounds and a year of lost conditioning for the privilege of its catastrophizing. I didn’t ask for this assessment. I didn’t authorize these decisions. Nobody consulted me.

I know this personally and in significant clinical detail because I spent 2025 getting taken apart one piece at a time and watching my body respond to each injury by immediately doing the dumbest possible thing with the parts that still worked. January, my right calf tendon started slipping, physically moving in and out of position like it had somewhere else to be. March, I tore my left hamstring, specifically the semimembranosus tendon, 1.7 centimeters of retraction, which became a chronic partial tear with tendinosis and scar tissue, eventually treated with a PRP injection in December. October 29th, both flexor tendons in my right pinkie were completely severed and the ring finger tendon partially lacerated, surgically repaired a week later. Second surgery. Third surgery on December 31st, during which they placed a hunter rod in my hand as part of a staged reconstruction process, because apparently my tendons needed a placeholder while they figured out their next move. February 13th of this year I sprained my left knee, because the system needed a fucking epilogue.

Three surgeries. A hamstring with 1.7 centimeters of retraction. A hand that requires tape and external stabilization to grip anything reliably. A calf that still qualifies as a risk area. And through all of this, through every single one of these individually stupid injuries that had nothing to do with each other and everything to do with bad luck compounding on itself, my body’s response was consistent and clear and completely idiotic. Dump the muscle. Keep the fat. Report hunger.

Here’s the thing about the knee, and the hamstring, and the calf, and the hand. A car blows a tire. You fix the tire. While the car is in the shop, you do not worry about the doors falling off, or the windshield wipers being quietly sold for scrap because it hasn’t rained this year, or the engine deciding that since the car isn’t driving, it might as well redistribute three cylinders to somewhere they’ll get more use. The rest of the car sits there, intact, holding its components, waiting, because that’s what components do when they aren’t being used, they wait, they don’t leave or get auctioned off in the middle of the night to cover an energy bill that nobody asked them to pay. You fix the tire, and the car is the same car it was before the tire blew, with the same doors and the same wipers and the same engine, because the tire blowing had nothing to do with any of those things, and a sensibly designed system understands that one failed component is not an invitation to cannibalize everything adjacent to it. My knee failed. My knee got fixed. My body responded by treating the whole situation as an extinction level event and conducting a fire sale on everything it had built over six years, and then had the audacity to be hungry about it. A tire blew. The body sold the doors.

I’ve been training twice a day since 2018. Muay Thai and boxing to start, TKD from 2020, BJJ from 2021, both since. I’m a BJJ brown belt and a second dan in TKD. This is not a casual relationship with exercise. Twice a day since 2018 is a structural commitment, the kind that becomes part of how you understand what your body is and what it can do. And my body looked at six years of that, looked at the injuries that interrupted it, concluded that the correct response was to gain fifteen pounds and lose the cardio, and is now hungry and sore and tired about being asked to reverse the damage it caused.

My body caused this. My body does not get to have opinions about fixing it.

Now into this situation walks the fitness content industry, with its soothing thumbnails and its peer-reviewed citations and its deeply felt need to tell you that actually, don’t worry, muscle memory is real, it all comes back faster than you think. And I want to talk about that claim specifically because I went and looked at the actual studies it’s built on, and the actual studies do not say what the thumbnails claim they say, and I want you to know that, not because the science is the point but because the science is the receipts, and the receipts are damning.

The most cited evidence comes from Ogasawara and colleagues, two studies, 2011 and 2013, both involving untrained young men doing bench press, both held up as proof that muscle returns faster than it left. The 2011 study ran six weeks of training, three weeks off, six more weeks of training. Subjects lost about 2.6 to 2.9% of muscle size over three weeks and spent six weeks getting it back. That is not faster. That is the same, or slower, and claiming regain is faster when the timelines are identical requires a definition of faster that I’m not willing to endorse.

The 2013 study is more interesting. Twenty-four weeks total, one group training continuously, another doing three cycles of six weeks on and three weeks off, both ending up at roughly the same place despite the periodic group doing 25% fewer sessions. Researchers called this evidence that breaks don’t cost anything. The actual explanation has nothing to do with memory. Gains are front-loaded. The first weeks of any training block produce the most growth per week, and that rate drops off as the body adapts and the stimulus stops being novel. Every time the periodic group took a break they lost 2 to 3% of muscle size, and every time they came back that small regression put them back in the fast zone where the body responds aggressively again. They were harvesting beginner gains on a loop. The continuous group was doing the harder work of grinding past that point. Both groups ended up in the same place because the periodic group’s repeated fast phases added up to the same total as the continuous group’s longer, increasingly inefficient grind. The body wasn’t remembering anything. It was just responding to novelty, and a small regression is novel enough to trigger that response every single time. This is not memory. This is just the body being too stupid to recognize it already did this part.

The other big study is Blocquiaux et al., 2020, older men, 12 weeks training, 12 weeks off, up to 12 weeks retraining. Training increased knee extension strength 10 to 36%. Detraining lost 5 to 15%. Retraining got them back to prior one-rep max in less than 8 weeks, which gets presented as proof that regain is faster than initial gain. Here’s what the math actually says. They recovered a smaller amount of strength in less time. When you calculate percentage gained per week in the initial phase versus percentage regained per week in the retraining phase, the ranges overlap substantially. There is no clean proof that anything happened faster. There’s proof that something happened in less time, which is not the same thing when the thing that happened was also smaller. If I bake 12 cookies and it takes an hour, and then I bake 8 cookies and it takes 45 minutes, the second batch finished faster, but nobody who passed third grade math is going to conclude I’ve discovered a more efficient baking process.

And none of these studies are looking at anyone like me. Untrained young men. Older men between 55 and 77. Nobody with six years of twice-daily training, three surgeries, a hamstring tear, and a hand held together with a hunter rod and athletic tape trying to figure out what comes next. That study does not exist. Everything being said about what happens to a person in that situation is extrapolation from populations that bear no resemblance to the actual situation, delivered with complete confidence, because confidence performs and nuance doesn’t.

There’s also a specific way that six years of serious training makes all of this worse that nobody in the fitness content space is going to bring up because it requires admitting something genuinely inconvenient. All that training didn’t just build my body, it optimized my nervous system to do more with less. In BJJ and TKD you learn to conserve, to wait, to be precise instead of explosive, to use exactly as much energy as the situation requires and not one joule more. That’s what a brown belt is. The problem is that gains require waste. Gains require the full panicking demand of a system that doesn’t know what it’s doing yet and is throwing everything at the problem. The beginner who completely gasses out in round one is getting a better training stimulus than the brown belt controlling the match from half guard while barely elevating his heart rate, because the beginner’s body is in crisis and a body in crisis adapts and an optimized efficient body does not. I got good enough at the thing I’ve been doing for six years that my body stopped being surprised by it, which means I have to work harder than a beginner to get a worse result, which is an absolutely deranged reward for six years of twice-daily commitment, and yet here we are.

The body is stupid. It’s a badly built machine that we have been anthropomorphizing and making excuses for because it is the only one we have and the alternative is despair, which is understandable but not accurate. It doesn’t maintain what it has when maintenance is the obvious correct move. It doesn’t rebuild quickly when asked. It is hungry and sore and tired about being asked to do both, and it will fight you at every step with the full commitment of a system that has absolutely no idea what it’s doing and never has. We have been calling this a feature. It is not a feature. It is a bug. It is a bug that has been in production for two hundred thousand years and nobody has shipped a patch because the development team is also running on the same broken system and keeps getting distracted by hunger and soreness and the bone-deep conviction that the famine is just around the corner, it’s definitely coming, we should probably store more fat just in case.

You’re welcome. I’m going to go do whatever I can do today with the hand I currently have, which is taped, and the knee I currently have, which is improving, and I’m going to do it without expecting it to feel like it used to, because it won’t, and pretending otherwise is a lie that makes coming back harder rather than easier.

P.S.

You know what actually produces faster and more reliable strength regain with a clear and well-documented biological mechanism? Steroids. Decades of controlled human research, understood mechanism, consistent numbers, not a controversial claim among anyone who has read the literature carefully. I’m not recommending steroids. I’m just noting that if the fitness content industry wanted to tell you about a real proven shortcut with actual science behind it, they had one available the whole time and chose instead to spend thirty years overselling the magic of taking three weeks off. Make of that what you will.

I also thought, naively, that an institution of higher learning might operate on the basic premise that if you put a class on a schedule, the class would occur on that schedule, in that room, at that time, with the instructor who agreed to teach it.

I was wrong about that, and I was wrong about it in a way that left me standing outside a locked classroom for fifteen minutes like a golden retriever waiting for an owner who had already left through a different door, and I want to tell you about it.

Let me set the scene, because the context is load-bearing here. It’s a Monday morning, which is already its own particular punishment, and I’m injured, which means the things I would normally do with my body and with whatever is running through my chest on any given morning are not available to me. I train. That’s the shortest version of it. I do BJJ, and what I mean when I say I train is not just that I exercise, but that training is the thing I use to process the world, to convert stress and frustration and the general friction of being a person into something that comes out the other side as exhaustion, clarity, and something close to peace. It’s a specific mechanism, and it works, and when it’s unavailable, everything that would’ve gone through it just stays where it is.

Right now, I’m injured in a way that makes it unavailable, which means I have been carrying around a low-grade pressure for weeks with no reliable outlet for it, and before you suggest other options, I want you to know that I have considered them and none of them work the same way. I’m not interested in being told to go for a walk. So what I have instead is guitar class, twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday, and I want to be honest about what that means to me in the context of everything else being closed off. It’s not enough. It was never going to be enough. But it’s what exists, and so I treat it like it matters, because it does matter, and I’m not the kind of person who is casual about things he has decided to care about.

I got ready. I did all the things you do when you’re going somewhere at a specific time because a specific thing is supposed to happen there. I was running a little late, which I’ll own, and so there was that particular flavor of low-grade stress that comes from knowing you might be two minutes behind schedule for something you were actually looking forward to. That specific stress is only possible because you care. If I were indifferent, I would’ve been perfectly on time, which is one of life’s more irritating ironies, but I’m not indifferent, so I was slightly rushed and slightly anxious about it in that small, buzzy way that only means something when the destination is somewhere you genuinely want to be.

I got to campus. I walked to the building.

I want to describe the emotional texture of the moment when I arrived, because it matters and because it’s the last moment in this story when everything is still fine. There’s a specific kind of relief that comes when you show up somewhere slightly late, and nothing has started yet, when you see other students standing outside looking relaxed, when your nervous system does this small exhale and tells you that you’re okay, you made it, the thing is still happening, and you’re still part of it.

I had that feeling.

I stood there in it for a moment and let it settle.

Then I stood there for another ten minutes, making small talk with half the class, and I want you to sit with that for a second, because there’s something uniquely hollow about the experience of making small talk outside a room you’re waiting to enter, where the small talk is just the sound of people killing time before the real thing starts, except the real thing is never going to start, but nobody knows that yet, and you’re all just standing there being cheerful and patient and a little bit late and completely, catastrophically in the dark. The door was just a door with no information attached to it, no note, no sign, nothing to indicate that what was behind it was the total absence of the thing you came for. It just sat there doing nothing, which turned out to be the most accurate possible representation of the situation.

Eventually someone said, “Did anyone check their email?” and we all looked at each other with the particular expression of people who have already been ambushed by a question they know the answer to. Someone checked. There it was: sent at seven thirty in the morning, for a nine thirty class, the professor informing us that he was sick, that he was sorry, and that class was not happening. That was the whole email. That was the whole morning.

I want to be precise about what happened inside me when I read it, because the sequence matters. First, there was the hot, stupid ember of having rushed, having stressed about being late to something that wasn’t even occurring. Then there was the reflexive impulse to blame myself for not checking my email at seven thirty, which I rejected immediately, because I don’t operate on the assumption that the calendar is lying to me. I operate on the assumption that if something is scheduled, it’s scheduled, and that the obligation to communicate a change belongs to the person making the change, not to the people affected by it, who don’t need to conduct a daily audit of their commitments to see which ones have quietly dissolved overnight. That’s not how trust works. That’s not how scheduling works. That’s not how anything works in a system that’s supposed to function.

I want to say something directly about the door, because the door is important and because its blankness still bothers me in a way I’m not willing to let go of. If you cancel a class that meets in a specific room, the absolute minimum of professional courtesy, the thing so basic that its absence is almost a statement, is a note on the door. A piece of paper. The words “class canceled” in whatever handwriting, whatever font, whatever language you like, just something physical on the door that the students will be standing in front of for the next several minutes of their lives that tells them what’s on the other side of it, which is nothing, which is the total absence of the thing they came for.

There was no note.

There was just a door, sealed, blank, indifferent in a way that starts to feel almost deliberate once you understand what it represents, which is that nobody thought about us enough to tape a piece of paper to a door.

Now I understand that the class meets twice a week and is at a community college. I understand I’m a hobbyist and not a serious student. I’ve already had the version of this conversation where someone explains all of that to me patiently, as if the context changes the arithmetic.

It doesn’t.

Twice a week is already a thin schedule for anything you actually want to get better at, it’s maintenance-level contact at best, and that’s the deal you accept when you sign up for the course. You know the constraints going in.

When the schedule is already sparse, every session carries more weight than it would in a denser program, and losing one of two sessions in a week isn’t a rounding error. It’s fifty percent of the week’s contact with the thing you’re trying to learn, and it won’t be made up, because my wife, who is also a professor at the same school, confirmed what I already knew, which is that they won’t schedule a makeup class. She also mentioned, almost as an aside, that the professor apparently hadn’t followed standard cancellation procedure, which is the kind of information that arrives in my life the way it always does, which is just slightly after the moment when it would’ve been useful.

I sent an email asking about a makeup session, which is not an outrageous request. It’s symmetry. It’s the thing that happens when your doctor cancels an appointment: they schedule you another one, because when you don’t receive a thing you were scheduled to receive, the entity that failed to provide it reschedules it. They don’t calculate the aggregate number of medical minutes you’ve had this quarter and tell you the total is still within acceptable range. When a commitment doesn’t happen, the response from the party that broke it is to make a new commitment. That’s how commitments work. The professor didn’t respond to my email, which is consistent with the general theme of this experience, which is that I showed up and nothing else did.

I also, during this period, spent a significant amount of time talking to a chatbot about it, which I mention not as a digression but because the chatbot accidentally became the most honest character in this story. It explained institutional contact hour requirements and regional accreditation policy. It told me, repeatedly, in at least fourteen different phrasings, that I should send a calm and measured email that didn’t convey how strongly I felt about the matter. What it kept doing, without meaning to, was explaining the logic of the system back to me in a neutral, helpful voice, as if understanding why the system works this way was a form of comfort, as if the architecture of indifference becomes more tolerable once you can see all its load-bearing walls.

It doesn’t.

But the chatbot’s explanation did clarify something I already suspected, which is that the system isn’t indifferent by accident. It’s indifferent by design, because indifference is cheaper than accountability, and nobody with the power to change that is being asked to absorb the cost of keeping it the way it is.

Here’s the asymmetry that I keep returning to, because I think it’s the actual center of this whole situation. If I don’t show up, there are consequences. The syllabus says so. My grade reflects my presence because the institution has decided that my presence is something worth caring about, worth encoding in policy, and worth attaching a number to. When the institution doesn’t show up, the syllabus has nothing to say about it. The policy absorbs it. The students absorb it.

The thing that I find genuinely difficult to sit with is not that it happened, because people get sick and things get canceled. I understand that, but the structure of the whole arrangement is designed so that the cost of it happening always travels in one direction.

Downward.

Toward the people with the least leverage in the system, who paid for the course, who drove there, who parked, who walked across campus, who waited, who found out, who went home and figured out what to do with a morning that was supposed to have a shape to it and now didn’t.

All of that cost landed on us, and none of it landed on the system that scheduled the thing and then didn’t do the thing, and everyone I’ve spoken to about this has arrived at the same conclusion, which is that the correct and mature response on my part is to send a calm email and accept that this is how things go. The asymmetry is so complete and so normalized that pointing it out reads as entitlement, as if the expectation of reciprocal obligation is somehow naive, as if I’m the unreasonable one for noticing that the arrangement only runs one way.

I keep thinking about what it would take for someone to have been at that door. If I were the kind of person whose displeasure produced consequences, someone would have made a call and someone else would have shown up, not the following week, not distributed in installments across the remaining sessions, but that morning, because the cost of not showing up would have been too high for someone who mattered enough to make the math work differently. I know this is how it works because that’s how everything works when people are paying attention, and people pay attention when they have a reason to, and the reason just isn’t me. So the door stayed empty, and the email went unanswered, and the system continued functioning exactly the way it was designed to function, which is to say in a way that costs the students something and costs the institution nothing.

I actually like this class. That’s the thing I need you to understand before I get to the end of this, because I think it changes the shape of what I’m describing. I’m not the student who treats a cancellation as a gift, who pumps a fist quietly and thinks about what to do with a surprise free morning.

I’m the opposite of that student.

I’m the person who was stressed about being two minutes late because he wanted to be in the room, specifically, doing the thing, with the other people who also signed up for it, because that’s genuinely one of the nicer things you can do with a Monday morning when everything else is unavailable to you, and you’re injured and the options are limited.

I like being in a room full of people who are also beginners. I like that nobody is performing competence. I like that the instructor is patient and slightly odd in the specific way that people who have spent decades caring deeply about one thing tend to be. I like showing up somewhere, sitting down, and being a student at something, which is an experience that becomes rarer and stranger the older you get, and which I was looking forward to in a way that felt almost disproportionate to the thing itself.

Except it wasn’t disproportionate at all, because when most of your outlets are closed, and this is the one that’s open, you pour into it. I drove there because I wanted to be there. I stood outside because I wanted to go in. I went home with a loose, unstructured morning that was supposed to have a shape to it and now didn’t, and there was nowhere to put any of it.

I just wanted to play guitar.

PS

Here’s the thing that nobody in this situation wants to acknowledge, not the institution, not my wife, not the chatbot: time is the only thing that’s actually gone forever. You can lose money and make it back. You can miss a meal and eat later. You can skip a session and train tomorrow. But that Monday morning is a fixed point in history now. I was there, and the class wasn’t, and no policy document or contact-hour calculation changes that arithmetic. It happened once, and then it was over, and the people responsible for it being empty are going about their lives with complete continuity, no friction, no weight, nothing sitting on their chest about it at all.

That’s the part that’s actually unbearable, and I want to name it precisely because I think it gets blurred in conversations like this one. The unbearable part isn’t the lost session. It’s the ease of it. The way my morning got treated as an acceptable casualty of someone else’s circumstances, as if absorbable and acceptable are the same word. They’re not. I absorbed it because I had no other option, and absorbing something involuntarily is not the same as agreeing that it was fine.

What I want, and what I’m never going to get, is for someone in that building to feel the specific gravity of having taken something from a person that cannot be given back, not in a general institutional liability sense, not as a line item in a risk assessment, but actually. To sit with the fact that time is finite and irreplaceable and they were cavalier with mine, and that cavalier is a choice, even when it’s an unconscious one, and choices have weight, and that weight should land somewhere, and right now it’s landing entirely on the person who showed up and not at all on the people who didn’t.

They’ll never feel it. That’s the real ending, not the guitar class, not the locked door, not the email that nobody answered. The system exists specifically so that they don’t have to.

“It’s not that much money.”

They say it about Detroit. They say it about Arkansas. They say it about steel towns, shipyards, machine shops, refineries, anything that used to exist in physical space instead of a spreadsheet cell. It’s a comforting phrase because it shrinks the problem until it fits neatly inside a quarterly report. You can nod, write it down, move on. Nothing feels broken if you keep the camera zoomed out far enough.

Here’s the problem. “Not that much money” is only true if you pretend the thing being destroyed was isolated, static, and disposable. Which is impressive, considering none of those things were true.

If I buy a brand new Ford F150 for sixty thousand dollars, put five thousand down, and drive it directly into a warehouse, I can make this look very smart very quickly. I pull the engine and sell it for eight grand. The transmission goes for four. Electronics, wheels, interior, catalytic converter, scrap steel. By the time I’m done, I’ve cleared fifteen to eighteen thousand dollars in parts sales. I book a tidy gain against the cash I actually put in. On paper, I look like a genius.

What I have not done is create a truck.

I’ve taken a sixty thousand dollar productive asset with a fifteen year service life and converted it into a one time cash event. The system lost a working vehicle. I gained a short term profit. If you squint at the right spreadsheet, this looks efficient. If you need to move lumber tomorrow, it looks insane.

That is not an analogy for American industrial policy. That is the policy.

We didn’t lose industries because they stopped working. We dismantled them because dismantling them paid faster than maintaining them, and the bill didn’t come due on the same balance sheet. The profits went to shareholders and executives who could liquidate their positions and walk away. The costs went to cities that couldn’t move, workers who couldn’t retrain fast enough, and a national industrial base that turned out to matter more than the models predicted. What looked like optimization at the firm level was destruction at the systems level, but we had built an entire regulatory and financial apparatus that couldn’t see the difference because it had been designed not to.

Detroit wasn’t a product line. It was a wage engine. And wage engines don’t just pay people. They hold entire systems in place.

When you hear that automotive manufacturing was only a small percentage of national GDP, you’re being handed a number that has been carefully constructed to sound dispositive while actually being meaningless. GDP measures annual flow. It tells you how much value moved through the economy this year. It does not tell you what holds the floor up. A dozen industries might each represent two or three percent of GDP and still be the only things preventing entire regions from collapsing, because those regions were built on the assumption that those wages would continue. Housing prices are not vibes or sentiment or animal spirits. They’re the present value of expected future income. Commercial real estate works the same way. Municipal budgets are just that logic with more paperwork and fewer illusions. When the income disappears, the asset values don’t politely decline. They collapse. Schools don’t get funded. Infrastructure doesn’t get maintained. The tax base doesn’t erode gradually. It evaporates. The city doesn’t struggle. It enters a math problem it cannot solve.

Between 2000 and 2010, the United States lost roughly 5.7 million manufacturing jobs. Not all of that was autos and not all of it was offshoring, but trade exposure studies consistently land in the range of two to five million job equivalents once you count suppliers and induced employment. Take the middle and stay conservative. Call it 3.5 million workers whose jobs disappeared not because they were unproductive but because their productivity could be relocated to a jurisdiction with lower wages and fewer regulations while the profits flowed back to corporate headquarters and shareholders who never had to see the communities they had just destroyed.

Average all in compensation for those jobs, wages plus benefits, sits around eighty five thousand dollars in today’s money. Of that, about sixty five percent circulates locally through housing, services, retail, and taxes. That’s not ideology. That’s how regional economies function. People earn money. They spend it where they live. That spending becomes someone else’s income. That income supports property values, which support borrowing capacity, which supports investment. The whole structure is built on the expectation of continued wage flow. Remove the wages and you don’t get a recession. You get a liquidation.

Do the multiplication and you get about one hundred ninety billion dollars a year removed from local economies. Not shifted. Not transformed. Removed. That’s the annual flow, the river of income that used to circulate through these places and now doesn’t. But the river was never the only thing that mattered. What mattered more was everything that had been built in the expectation that the river would keep flowing.

Now comes the part that never survives the GDP conversation. That income stream didn’t just disappear annually. It was capitalized. It supported land values, small businesses, commercial districts, municipal bonds, pension funds, every balance sheet in every institution that had made decisions based on the reasonable assumption that people in Flint and Youngstown and Gary would continue to have jobs. Capitalize one hundred ninety billion dollars at a boring, conservative six percent discount rate and you’re looking at roughly three trillion dollars in regional balance sheet destruction nationwide.

That’s land. That’s buildings. That’s tax base. That’s the collateral behind every loan that’s now underwater, every pension that’s now underfunded, every bond that’s now junk. That’s why cities didn’t just lose jobs. They lost the ability to function. They couldn’t borrow. They couldn’t invest. They couldn’t maintain what they had. The schools that had been built for a city of two hundred thousand people were now trying to serve a city of seventy thousand with half the budget and a tenth of the commercial tax base. The water system that had been financed with bonds backed by a stable revenue stream was now trying to survive on a tax base that had cratered while the infrastructure kept aging and the maintenance costs kept rising.

GDP didn’t scream because GDP measures flow. This was a stock destruction event. We didn’t slow the river. We drained the reservoir and then acted confused about why everything downstream died.

Detroit makes this visible because Detroit was large enough and symbolic enough that people had to pay attention even when they didn’t want to. The city’s population peaked at 1.8 million in 1950. By 2010 it had fallen to 713,000. That’s not demographic shift. That’s collapse. The tax base imploded. Property values went to zero in entire neighborhoods not because the houses were poorly built but because there was no plausible future income stream to justify any price at all. The city couldn’t maintain streetlights. It couldn’t maintain fire coverage. Entire blocks burned and nobody came. Emergency response times in some areas exceeded an hour. Not because the firefighters were lazy or incompetent but because there weren’t enough firefighters and there weren’t enough working trucks and there wasn’t enough tax base to pay for either.

The schools were even worse. Detroit Public Schools was educating 167,000 students in 2000. By 2016 that number had fallen to 46,000. The system was still carrying the debt and pension obligations and physical infrastructure from when it had served three times as many students, but it was trying to do so with a third of the revenue. Teachers were leaving. Buildings were crumbling. The state had to step in repeatedly, not because Detroit was uniquely corrupt or incompetent but because the math no longer worked. You cannot run a school system designed for 167,000 students on the tax base generated by 46,000 families, most of whom are poorer than the families who left. The numbers don’t close. The budget doesn’t balance. You can fire every administrator, cut every program, defer every repair, and you still end up in the hole because the problem is structural. The city was built for a wage base that no longer exists.

And every time this comes up, someone wants to talk about how automotive manufacturing was inevitable decline, how we couldn’t compete, how trying to preserve those jobs would have been expensive and futile. Maybe. But what actually happened wasn’t a managed transition. It was liquidation. We didn’t build new industries to replace the old ones. We didn’t retrain workers or invest in new infrastructure or create new tax bases. We just let the old system collapse and called it creative destruction, as if destruction were the same thing as creation and as if the people living through it were abstractions in a model rather than human beings with mortgages and children and no other options.

Arkansas makes this clearer precisely because it’s smaller and because nobody talks about it. Arkansas bauxite doesn’t loom large in national mythology. There are no songs about aluminum smelters. The industry doesn’t get documentaries or think pieces or presidential speeches. At its peak, the aluminum chain there supported a few thousand well paid jobs. Three thousand is a fair number. Ninety thousand dollars a year is fair too. These were not romantic jobs. They were hot, loud, dangerous, and necessary. They were also the foundation of a regional economy that had been built in the expectation that those wages would continue.

That’s about one hundred seventy five million dollars a year circulating through a local economy that was built to expect it. Capitalize that income loss at the same six percent and you get just under three billion dollars in regional wealth that quietly vanished. Not moved. Not transformed. Vanished. The smelters closed. The wages stopped. The property values collapsed. The school budgets collapsed. The small businesses that had depended on workers with disposable income collapsed. The tax base collapsed. The whole structure came down because the foundation had been removed and nothing had been built to replace it.

And here’s where someone always says it.

Three billion isn’t that much money.

Correct. Individually, it isn’t. That’s the trick. Each liquidation was small enough to approve. Each justification sounded reasonable. Each one was waved through because the harm didn’t look large from thirty thousand feet and because the people making the decisions had built careers on the principle that local harm was always acceptable if aggregate efficiency improved. But aggregate efficiency is a measure that hides more than it reveals. It tells you that total output went up. It doesn’t tell you that the output is now concentrated in fewer hands while entire regions have been zeroed out. It doesn’t tell you that the efficiency was purchased by transferring costs from corporate balance sheets to municipal budgets and family savings accounts. It doesn’t tell you who won and who lost because it was designed not to.

Now stack them. Steel towns. Shipyards. Machine tools. Electronics. Chemicals. Textiles. Paper mills. Glass factories. Tire plants. Each one defensible. Each one small enough to justify. Each one approved by regulators who sincerely believed they were making the right call because the models they had been trained to use said that aggregate welfare would improve. All of them together catastrophic.

This is where we need to stop pretending the problem is some kind of tragic misunderstanding or unfortunate byproduct of inevitable economic forces. The problem is that we have systematically chosen to measure efficiency in ways that make extraction look like optimization. When people say offshoring improved efficiency, what they mean is that it improved return on capital over a short enough time horizon that the people making the decision could extract their compensation and leave before the second order costs became visible. That’s not the same thing as improving national welfare or system resilience or long term productivity. It’s just not. But we’ve built an entire policy apparatus that treats those things as equivalent because doing so serves the interests of the people who run the apparatus.

Efficiency is not a property of a system. It’s a ratio. Output over input. And the moment you choose what counts as output and what counts as input, you’ve made a political decision you’re pretending is technical.

When we offshored Detroit, we counted the savings to corporate balance sheets as output. We did not count the destroyed municipal tax base as input. We counted cheaper consumer goods as output. We did not count the liquidation of regional wealth as input. We counted the quarterly earnings bump as output. We did not count the unemployable forty seven year old machinist as input. We counted the return to shareholders as output. We did not count the pension fund that went insolvent or the school that closed or the fire station that couldn’t afford to stay open as input.

This wasn’t an oversight. This was the method. This was the entire point. You construct your efficiency metric to include everything that benefits capital and exclude everything that harms labor or communities or the future, and then you optimize for the metric, and then you call the result efficient and act surprised when everything outside the metric collapses.

The person who got efficient wasn’t the country. It was the executive who signed the offshoring contract, booked the margin expansion, collected the bonus, exercised the stock options, and left for the next job before the city’s credit rating collapsed. The country got a bill that came due over twenty years in the form of destroyed communities, radicalized politics, a collapsed industrial base, and a supply chain so fragile that a single factory fire in Asia can shut down production across an entire sector.

That’s not efficiency. That’s looting with a consultant deck.

At this point someone always tries to save the argument by pointing at consumers. Fine. Let’s count that too. Let’s pretend for a moment that consumer welfare is the thing we actually care about and that lower prices justify any amount of community destruction. Let’s do the math their way and see if it closes.

Be generous. Say offshoring knocked three thousand dollars off the price of a vehicle. That’s probably high, but we’ll give them the best case. The US buys about fifteen million cars a year. That’s forty five billion dollars in consumer savings annually. Real money. Meaningful. The kind of number that sounds like it justifies a lot of harm if you don’t think too carefully about what’s on the other side of the ledger.

Now look at what we gave up. One hundred ninety billion dollars a year in lost local wage circulation. Three trillion dollars in destroyed regional balance sheets. A domestic industrial base that we now know we need for national security and can’t rebuild quickly. A supply chain so concentrated and fragile that we spent two years during the pandemic unable to get basic goods because we had no redundancy and no domestic capacity. A political system that has radicalized because entire regions feel like they’ve been abandoned, which they have, and they voted accordingly, which they did.

This is not a close trade. It just feels like one if you’re only counting the part that shows up at checkout and ignoring everything else. And even that understates the problem, because the consumer savings were one time and widely distributed while the wage losses were permanent and geographically concentrated. If you save three thousand dollars on a car but your brother in law loses his seventy thousand dollar a year job and your town loses its tax base and your school has to cut programs and your property value drops forty percent, you did not come out ahead. You got a cheaper car and a worse life. But the efficiency metric says you won because it only counts the car.

The reason this keeps happening is not because we don’t know better. It’s because the people making the decisions don’t live with the consequences. When a regulator at the FTC or the SEC or the CFIUS approves an offshoring plan or a merger or a plant closure, they are making a prediction about net national welfare. They are betting that the gains will exceed the losses when you add everything up. Sometimes they’re right. Often they’re not. And when they’re not, nothing happens to them. They don’t lose their jobs. They don’t lose their licenses. They don’t even lose their reputations, because by the time the harm is visible they’ve moved on to the next job and the causal chain is too long for anyone to bother tracing.

We already know how to handle this kind of risk. We just refuse to apply the rules where the damage is delayed and diffuse.

When I did OSHA inspections, I told people the truth. Whatever you did was fine until something happened. Then whatever you did wasn’t enough. That wasn’t cruelty. That was how responsibility works in safety critical systems. You don’t get credit for trying. You don’t get credit for following best practices. You get judged on outcomes. If someone gets hurt, you failed. If the failure was preventable, you pay. You fix it. You might never do that job again.

Notice the pattern. We accept strict, outcome sensitive responsibility when the harm is physical and immediate. We abandon it when the harm is economic and delayed. An engineer who designs a bridge that collapses loses their license. A doctor who misdiagnoses a patient and causes harm loses their license. A regulator who approves a decision that destroys three trillion dollars in regional wealth and radicalized an entire generation of workers gets promoted.

This isn’t an accident. This is a design choice. We have chosen to structure regulatory responsibility so that the people making large scale economic decisions face no meaningful downside risk. They optimize for the things they’re measured on, which is mostly whether they followed procedure and whether the decision looked reasonable at the time to other people in the same system. They do not optimize for actual outcomes because they do not face consequences for bad outcomes. The result is exactly what you’d predict. A regulatory apparatus that consistently approves decisions that look good on paper and turn out badly in reality, and then expresses surprise and confusion when the bad outcomes materialize.

Which brings us to the rule we refuse to write.

If a company wants to offshore core capacity or merge into permanent market power or shut down a plant that represents a substantial portion of a regional economy, it should have to prove that the net national value over time is positive. Not promises. Not vibes. Not consultant projections. Math. Real modeling with realistic assumptions about second order effects and regional impacts and long term costs. And the modeling should be public. And it should be subject to challenge. And if the company can’t make the case, the answer should be no.

And if regulators approve it anyway, they should carry associated liability, backed by insurance, just like doctors and engineers. If the modeled harms show up, the approval was wrong. Authority revoked. Insurability gone. Career over. Not prison. Not criminal penalties. Just the same professional responsibility we expect from anyone else whose decisions can destroy lives. You want the authority to make decisions that can wipe out entire cities? Fine. You get the responsibility too. You don’t get to approve the liquidation of Detroit and then retire to a think tank and spend the rest of your career writing papers about how nobody could have predicted what happened.

This will make people uncomfortable. It should. It means regulators will be more cautious. It means some deals won’t get approved that would have been waved through under the current system. It means companies will have to work harder to prove that offshoring or consolidation actually serves the national interest rather than just their own. That’s the point. The current system is biased toward approval because the people doing the approving face no consequences for being wrong. Tilt the incentives the other way and you get different outcomes.

Will this slow things down? Yes. Will it reduce measured economic efficiency? Probably. Will it mean we pay more for some things? Definitely. And all of that is fine, because what we’re buying with those costs is resilience and continuity and the preservation of communities that would otherwise get liquidated for parts. We already accept this tradeoff everywhere else. We don’t shut down rural hospitals just because they’re less efficient than urban ones. We don’t close small schools just because the per student cost is higher. We don’t eliminate fire departments in places where fires are rare. We accept that redundancy and resilience and local capacity have value even when they cost more, because we understand that some systems shouldn’t be optimized purely for efficiency.

We just somehow forgot that rule when it came to the industrial base that built the country and provided the wages that held entire regions together.

Resilience costs more. Domestic production costs more. Redundancy costs more. Idle capacity costs more. Stockpiles cost more. That’s not a flaw. That’s what insurance looks like when you’re talking about real systems instead of abstract portfolios. You don’t cancel fire insurance because your house hasn’t burned down yet. You don’t part out your truck because gas prices are low. At least not if you want to keep using the truck.

We didn’t lose Detroit. We didn’t forget Arkansas. We didn’t fail to build resilience. We sold durable national capacity for short term private gain and congratulated ourselves for being efficient because the people signing the paperwork never had to live with the consequences, and the people who did live with the consequences didn’t have enough political power to stop it.

That’s not ideology. That’s arithmetic plus incentives. And until we change who pays when the math is wrong, we’re going to keep parting out the truck, admiring the quarterly returns, and acting surprised when there’s nothing left to drive.

That is not an allegation. That is a finding of fact. You can put it on a plaque.

The company’s defense, delivered with the confidence of someone who has never faced consequences, was essentially: “We are big. Being big is not illegal.” Live Nation’s attorney stood before the court and said, with a straight face, that success is not against the antitrust laws of the United States. Which is true, technically. Success is not illegal. Running a vertical monopoly that controls artists, venues, promotion, and ticketing simultaneously, and then using that control to threaten competitors and squeeze out rivals, is a different matter entirely. The jury understood this distinction. The rest of us have understood it for years. We paid the $1.72. We paid it millions of times.

So: they cheated. The jury agreed. Now we get to talk about what happens to them.

The Department of Justice, in what critics have charitably described as a wet handshake, settled its case with Live Nation in March 2026 for $280 million. That sounds like a lot of money. It is not a lot of money. Live Nation generated roughly $25 billion in revenue in the prior year. The $280 million settlement represented approximately four days of revenue. Four days. If you are trying to deter a company from illegal behavior, a fine that amounts to a long weekend of earnings is not a deterrent. It is a rounding error. It is a parking ticket for a hedge fund.

The states that refused to accept that settlement and kept fighting, all 34 of them plus the District of Columbia, have now won a liability finding that opens the door to real damages.

Here is how real damages work under federal antitrust law. When a jury finds antitrust violations, plaintiffs are entitled to treble damages. That means the actual harm gets multiplied by three. This is not punitive excess. This is the law. Congress wrote it this way on purpose, because the whole point of antitrust enforcement is to make cheating more expensive than competing fairly. If the penalty is smaller than the profit, the rational actor keeps cheating.

The jury found $1.72 per ticket in overcharges at major concert venues in the plaintiff states. That is the starting number. Now apply it to the actual volume. Live Nation distributed 646 million tickets through its systems in 2025 alone. Not all of those fall under the specific venue category the jury was evaluating, and not all markets were covered by the plaintiff states, so the defense will spend considerable time arguing about the precise universe of affected tickets. But even a conservative slice of that volume, applied nationally across the relevant period, produces a number in the tens of billions before you touch the treble multiplier. After trebling, credible estimates land in the range of $40 billion to $60 billion.

That is not a symbolic gesture. That is a number that actually affects a company’s ability to function. That is the fine done correctly. That is the fine that reflects the actual scope of harm to actual people who paid actual money for tickets to concerts and got charged $1.72 more per ticket than they should have, at minimum, for years, because one company controlled the entire system and decided competition was inconvenient.

The $280 million the DOJ accepted was not a fine. It was a formality. The states that kept fighting are the ones who get to set the real number, and they should set it at the top of what the math supports.

Before discussing what to break up, it is worth being precise about what actually exists, because people tend to think of Live Nation as a ticketing company. It is not a ticketing company. It is a vertically integrated entertainment conglomerate that happens to sell tickets, in the same way that a landlord who also owns the grocery store, the employer, and the local government is technically “a landlord.”

Here is the actual structure of what the jury just found guilty of antitrust violations.

On the festival side: Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits Music Festival, Governors Ball, Electric Daisy Carnival through Insomniac Events, HARD Summer through HARD Events, Creamfields, Beyond Wonderland, Nocturnal Wonderland, Escape Halloween, and a stake in Rolling Loud. These are not fringe properties. These are the flagship cultural events of American music. If you have been to a major festival in the last decade, there is a reasonable chance Live Nation owned it.

On the venue side: the entire House of Blues chain, the entire Fillmore chain across multiple cities, and a roster of amphitheaters that reads like a tour itinerary. Shoreline Amphitheatre. Dos Equis Pavilion. Jiffy Lube Live. Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater. PNC Music Pavilion. Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. Xfinity Centers in multiple markets. Hollywood Casino Amphitheatres in multiple locations. Lakewood Amphitheatre. Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater. These are not obscure properties. These are the venues where you saw your favorite band.

On the promotion side: Live Nation Concerts, C3 Presents, Insomniac Events, and HARD Events. These are the companies that book the tours, negotiate with artists, and decide which acts play which markets on which dates.

On the ticketing side: Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster Resale, and Ticketmaster Verified Fan. The system that sits on top of all of the above and processes the transaction.

On the artist side: Artist Nation, the management arm. The company that can, in theory, advise an artist on their career while simultaneously owning the festival they headline, the venue they play, the promoter booking their tour, and the platform selling their tickets.

On the sponsorship and premium experience side: VIP Nation and Live Nation Media and Sponsorship.

And for flavor, equity stakes and distribution arrangements with Liquid Death, CVT Soft Serve, and Owen’s Craft Mixers, ensuring that even the canned water you drink at the show has a Live Nation angle to it.

This is not a company that got big by being good. This is a company that got big by acquiring every adjacent piece of an industry until the industry and the company became the same thing. The 2010 merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster was approved with a consent decree that was supposed to prevent exactly this outcome. In 2019, the Justice Department found the company had already violated that decree. They extended it and moved on. The company kept building. The jury just told us what that built.

The DOJ settlement required Ticketmaster to divest up to 13 amphitheaters, stop threatening venues that pursue competing ticketing deals, reserve half of tickets for nonexclusive venues, and cap certain service fees at 15%. Experts from Northeastern and elsewhere were blunt: ticket prices are not going to drop meaningfully from these changes. The structural problem is not the fee cap. The structural problem is that the same company owns the whole chain.

The states’ verdict opens the door to a remedies trial. That is where the real argument happens. Here is what the remedy should look like.

The core principle is simple: no single company should control more than one layer of the live entertainment supply chain. Artist management, promotion, venues, ticketing, and ancillary services should all be independently owned, independently operated, and negotiated with each other at arm’s length. That is what a competitive market looks like. That is what this industry looked like before the flywheel was assembled. That is what it needs to look like again.

What this means in practice:

Spin off Ticketmaster entirely. Not “reform Ticketmaster.” Not “require Ticketmaster to allow competitors.” Spin it off as a standalone company with no ownership connection to any venue operator, any promoter, or any festival company. Ticketmaster is a technology and transaction platform. It doesn’t need to own concert venues to function. It owned concert venues because ownership gave it exclusive contracts, and exclusive contracts were the mechanism of its monopoly. Remove the ownership connection, and the exclusivity rationale disappears. An independent Ticketmaster has to compete on price and service. That’s the entire point.

Sell the venues. All of them. House of Blues, the Fillmores, every amphitheater on the list. Not to each other, not to a holding company controlled by the same investors. Sell them to independent operators. Regional concert venue operators exist. The venues have value and will find buyers. Once venues are independently owned, they can choose whatever ticketing platform offers the best terms. They’ll have an actual reason to care about that choice because they won’t have a parent company nudging them toward the affiliated platform.

Divest the festivals. Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, Governors Ball, and the rest. These are cultural institutions with established brands and loyal audiences. They are also, under current ownership, captive traffic generators for the Live Nation ecosystem. An independent Lollapalooza buys its ticketing on the open market. An independent Bonnaroo books its talent based on what is best for the festival rather than what is convenient for the parent company’s promotion arm. Divestiture here restores the festival as a cultural entity rather than a product within a corporate funnel.

Spin off Artist Nation. Artist management existing within the same corporate structure as venue ownership and promotion is the most quietly coercive part of this whole arrangement. An artist managed by Artist Nation is being advised on their career by a company that also owns the venues they play and promotes their tours. The advice is not neutral. It cannot be neutral. Spin it off, sell it, or shut it down. Artists need managers who work for them. Not for the venue company.

Separate the promotion arms. Live Nation Concerts, C3 Presents, Insomniac, HARD Events. These need to be independently operated entities competing against each other and against other promoters for talent. When the promoter and the venue and the ticketing company are all the same entity, the promoter has no incentive to negotiate aggressively on the artist’s behalf. Artists have suffered for this. Promoters operating independently have a reason to compete for the best acts, offer better deals, and build reputations that attract talent. That competitive dynamic has been absent for years.

Remove the ancillary stakes. The Liquid Death equity, the soft serve investment, the mixer stake. These are not core to the antitrust violation, but they are part of a pattern of colonizing every revenue-generating surface within an event. Strip them out and let the company selling canned water sell it to whoever offers the best contract.

The end state is an industry where an artist can hire a manager who has no stake in which venues they play, sign with a promoter who has no ownership in the ticket platform, play at a venue that chooses its ticketing service based on competitive bids, and have their tickets sold by a platform that wins business by being good at its job rather than by being owned by the same company that owns the venue and the festival and the promotion company and the manager.

That is not a radical vision. That is what most industries look like. That is what this industry looked like before 2010. It can look like that again.

The argument against a full structural breakup is usually some version of: it’s too complex, it’ll take too long, the pieces may not be viable independently, and behavioral remedies like fee caps and nondiscrimination requirements can achieve the same result with less disruption.

Each of these arguments is wrong, and they have been wrong in every major antitrust case where they were made.

Behavioral remedies require ongoing monitoring. They require the regulated company to comply honestly with consent decrees. We already know how Live Nation does with consent decrees. They violated the 2010 decree within nine years, were caught, agreed to an extension, and used the intervening time to build a larger, more entrenched empire. Behavioral remedies for companies like this are not remedies. They are a grace period.

The complexity argument mistakes “difficult to execute” for “wrong.” Unwinding a vertical monopoly is administratively complicated. So is building one. The people who built this structure understood that complexity makes unwinding it politically harder. Accepting that logic means accepting that the more thoroughly a company cheats, the safer it is from consequences.

The viability argument deserves the most scrutiny because it contains a grain of truth. Some smaller festival properties or regional promotion operations may not command high sale prices as independent entities. This is a real implementation consideration. It’s not a reason to keep the structure intact. If a piece of this empire only has value because it feeds traffic to the affiliated ticketing and venue companies, then its market value as a standalone entity is actually an honest assessment of what it contributes to the competitive landscape. Let the market decide what these pieces are worth when they have to stand alone.

The DOJ’s settlement proved that modest remedies satisfy no one and change nothing. The judge said it showed “absolute disrespect for the court, the jury, and this entire process.” The antitrust experts said ticket prices will not drop. The states said it wasn’t enough and went back to trial.

Then the states won.

The case for half measures has now been made in full and found wanting. The verdict exists. The liability is established. The remedies trial is coming. The question is not whether Live Nation should face consequences. The question is whether the consequences will be real.

Real means the fine hurts. Real means the structure is dismantled. Real means that in ten years, when someone books a concert, the venue, the promoter, and the ticketing platform are three separate companies making independent decisions and competing for business on the merits.

Anything less is another consent decree. Another grace period. Another decade of $1.72 per ticket, compounding.

Some will find this position extreme. They’ll say that breaking up a company of this scale is unprecedented, will create chaos in the live entertainment industry, and that artists and fans will suffer through the transition.

To those people: the artists have been suffering through the arrangement. The fans have been paying the $1.72, plus the processing fee, plus the service charge, plus the facility fee, plus the order fee, plus the fee for printing the ticket at home, plus the fee for not printing the ticket at home. The chaos is already here. It just flows upward.

A jury of twelve people sat through five weeks of testimony about contracts, emails, and market data. They came back with a verdict. The emails showed Ticketmaster employees admitting they turned a blind eye to broker abuse as a matter of company policy. The market data showed overcharges at every affected venue. The verdict said: illegal.

The company had fifteen years after the merger to compete fairly. They chose not to. They chose the flywheel. They chose the exclusive contracts and the venue threats and the broker arrangements and the fee structures that a captive market could not escape.

They made their choice. Now comes the remedy.

Break it up. Pay the fine. All of it.

Modern life has become so aggressively good at removing friction that we’ve accidentally created a species-wide crisis of meaning, and nobody wants to talk about it because complaining about abundance makes you sound like an asshole. But here we are anyway, because someone has to say it, and apparently that someone is me, a person who has climbed multiple mountains, trained his capsaicin receptors into submission, and still feels like I’m waiting for the game to actually start.

Let me back up. In 1943, Abraham Maslow published his hierarchy of needs, that pyramid you saw in every psychology class where you start with food and shelter at the bottom and work your way up to self-actualization at the top. The idea was simple and it made sense. Once you handled survival, you could worry about safety. Once you had safety, you could pursue belonging. Once you belonged somewhere, you could chase esteem. And if you were really lucky and really diligent, you’d eventually reach the peak where you became fully realized as a human being, whatever that means.

The thing nobody told Maslow, because it hadn’t happened yet, was what would occur when an entire generation of people in wealthy countries reached the upper levels of that pyramid while still in their twenties or thirties. What happens when you solve the survival layers so efficiently that you arrive at self-actualization with forty or fifty years of life remaining and no clear instructions for what comes next? Maslow died in 1970, so he missed the punchline. Lucky him.

Here’s what happens. You stand there at the top of the pyramid looking around for the next pyramid, and there isn’t one. There’s just a gift shop selling t-shirts that say “I climbed Maslow’s hierarchy and all I got was this lousy existential crisis.” Except there isn’t even a gift shop because that would at least give you something to do. There’s just you, standing on a plateau, fully fed and sheltered and loved and esteemed, looking at your phone and thinking “okay, now what?”

And before you say it, yes, I know there are billions of people who would gladly trade places with anyone experiencing this particular problem. I’m not pretending this is the world’s most pressing issue. But it is a real issue, and it’s spreading, and the fact that it’s a luxury problem doesn’t make it less strange or less destabilizing once you’re inside it.

The core issue is that human beings evolved to solve problems under scarcity, and we’re phenomenally good at it. Give us a threat, and we’ll innovate. Give us hunger, and we’ll organize. Give us a mountain, and we’ll figure out how to climb it, literally and metaphorically. Our entire reward system is calibrated for effort under constraint. You try, you struggle, you overcome, you get a little dopamine hit, and then you do it again with a harder problem.

But that system has a fatal flaw. It assumes the problems keep coming and that solving them produces durable change. For most of human history, that assumption held. If you solved food scarcity for your family, that solution persisted. If you built a shelter, it stayed built. If you gained a skill, you became meaningfully different from who you were before. The world pushed back, you pushed harder, and the structure of your life bent around your effort.

That’s not how it works anymore, at least not for a growing number of people in developed economies. Now you can solve problems so efficiently that they stop feeling like problems at all. You can achieve things so quickly that achievement stops registering as transformation. You can collect experiences so easily that experience becomes a category of consumption rather than a form of growth. And once that happens, once you see the pattern clearly enough, it becomes very difficult to take any of it seriously.

Let me give you a specific example. I learned to write with my left hand in about a week. Not beautifully, but functionally. Legible sentences, consistent spacing, and no major deterioration after the initial learning curve. A week. That’s faster than most people learn to play three chords on a guitar, and it’s a skill that sounds impressive when you mention it at parties until people realize it doesn’t actually do anything for you. It’s just a parlor trick with no utility and no downstream consequences.

The problem isn’t that I learned it quickly. The problem is that learning it quickly revealed how shallow the achievement actually was. There’s no deep transformation hiding inside ambidexterity. There’s no secret level that unlocks once you can write your name with both hands. It’s just a thing you can do now, and then life continues exactly as it did before, except you wasted a week proving to yourself that mastery is easier than meaning.

Here’s another one. I trained myself to eat extremely spicy food, starting with shishito peppers and working my way up to Carolina Reapers, which clock in at over two million Scoville Heat Units and are officially the hottest pepper in the world according to Guinness World Records as of 2023. For context, a jalapeño sits around 5,000 Scoville units. A Reaper is four hundred times hotter than that. I ate The End sauce at Pepper Palace, which is their hottest offering and contains Reaper extract. I ate the hottest sandwich at Howlin’ Rays in Los Angeles without breaking a sweat. I considered doing the Blazin’ Challenge at Buffalo Wild Wings, which is supposed to be their nuclear option, but when they brought the wings out, I genuinely thought they’d made a mistake and given me the mild sauce.

The entire progression took maybe six months of deliberate tolerance building, and here’s what I learned from it: capsaicin tolerance is purely mechanical. You’re not developing strength or skill. You’re just desensitizing your TRPV1 receptors through repeated exposure until your body stops interpreting capsaicin as a threat. It’s not bravery and it’s not accomplishment. It’s receptor fatigue dressed up as a personality trait. And once you hit the ceiling, once you’ve proven you can eat the hottest commercially available foods without visible distress, there’s nowhere left to go except making hot sauce in your garage like some kind of culinary arms race with yourself.

So now I can eat Reapers, and that fact matters to exactly nobody, including me. It doesn’t make food taste better. It doesn’t unlock new culinary experiences. It just means I spent six months training my mouth to stop warning me about chemical burns so I could win an argument nobody was having. It’s ambidexterity all over again, just with more crying and gastrointestinal consequences.

And that realization, once you have it, starts showing up everywhere. You see it in travel. In 2019, I went to fourteen countries across four continents. I took my kid to every national park in California and collected fifty Junior Ranger badges along the way. I ate at Michelin starred restaurants in multiple countries. I climbed mountains in Japan, Korea, and California. I did Disneyland in four different countries just to see how the formula changed. And you know what I learned? That novelty has a ceiling, and once you hit it, more novelty just feels like repetition with different props.

The economist Tibor Scitovsky wrote about this in his 1976 book “The Joyless Economy,” and he nailed something important that most people still don’t want to hear. He argued that comfort and pleasure are not the same as satisfaction, and that modern consumer culture is extremely good at delivering the first two while accidentally destroying the third. Comfort is passive. Pleasure is passive. Satisfaction requires effort that meets resistance, and resistance is exactly what we’ve spent the last century trying to eliminate.

Scitovsky pointed out that we’ve built an entire economic system around removing friction, but friction is what makes effort meaningful. When you can buy your way past obstacles, when you can optimize your way around difficulty, when you can skip straight to the reward without the struggle, the reward stops working. It’s not that the experience isn’t pleasant. It’s that pleasant stops being enough once you realize it doesn’t accumulate into anything.

The same pattern shows up in relationships, careers, hobbies, fitness, food, entertainment, and basically every other domain of voluntary human activity. Once you’ve proven to yourself that you can do the thing, once you’ve closed the loop and confirmed that yes, effort converts into competence, the competence itself stops mattering unless there’s some external system that depends on it.

I have a brown belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and a black belt in Taekwondo. I’ll probably get my BJJ black belt within a year and my third-degree black belt in TKD the year after that. I can tell you with absolute certainty that neither of those accomplishments will change my life in any meaningful way. They’re just markers on a progression system that someone else designed, and the progression system doesn’t lead anywhere except to more progression. It’s leveling up in a game where the endgame content is just more leveling.

The worst part is that people hear this and assume you’re depressed or burned out, but that’s not it at all. Depression is painful. This isn’t painful. It’s just flat. You can still enjoy things in the moment. You can still appreciate a good meal, a beautiful view, a hard workout, or a clever conversation. The enjoyment just doesn’t stick. It doesn’t build into narrative momentum. It’s just a series of pleasant moments that evaporate the second they’re over, leaving you back at baseline wondering why you bothered.

There’s a concept in video game design called the “content treadmill,” and it’s instructive here. Game developers learned decades ago that if they want to keep players engaged, they need to keep adding new content faster than players can consume it. But players eventually notice they’re on a treadmill. They realize that no matter how much content they complete, there will always be more content, and the content itself doesn’t fundamentally change anything about the game. It’s just more stuff to do. Once that realization hits, player engagement drops off a cliff, not because the game got worse, but because the player finally understood the structure.

Real life has the same problem, except you can’t uninstall it. You’re stuck on the treadmill, and the treadmill is very well designed. It’s comfortable, it’s entertaining, it offers plenty of variety, and it will never, ever stop unless you choose to step off. Stepping off doesn’t solve anything either, because then you’re just standing next to the treadmill watching other people run, which is somehow even less satisfying than running yourself.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari has this bit in “Sapiens” where he talks about the Agricultural Revolution as humanity’s biggest mistake. His argument is that hunter-gatherers actually had better lives than early farmers, they worked fewer hours, had more varied diets, suffered less disease, and weren’t tied to a single plot of land. Once farming started, it was irreversible. You couldn’t go back to hunting and gathering once your population had exploded, and you’d forgotten how to live without grain stores. Agriculture was a trap that looked like progress.

I think we’re in a similar trap now, but it’s a trap of optionality rather than scarcity. We’ve built a world where almost everything is optional, reversible, and consequence-free, and it turns out that when everything is optional, nothing feels necessary. And necessity, it turns out, was doing a lot of quiet work to make life feel real.

When I tell people I’ve climbed Mount Fuji, Mount Whitney, Hallasan, and a dozen other peaks, they usually say, “that’s cool” and then immediately change the subject. When I tell them I’m a New York Times bestselling author who writes multiple books a month, they ask if I’ve heard of ChatGPT. When I mention I can eat Carolina Reapers without flinching, they either don’t believe me or ask “why would you do that?” and I don’t have a good answer except “to see if I could,” which is the same non-answer that applies to most of what I do. When my friend used to introduce me at bars by listing my credentials like a boxing announcer, people either didn’t believe him or, if they did believe him, responded with interest that evaporated the moment I said “yeah, it’s not a big deal.”

Also, I’m not wrong to say it’s not a big deal. It objectively isn’t. I didn’t cure cancer. I didn’t end a war. I didn’t invent anything or save anyone. I just accumulated a bunch of achievements that sound impressive in aggregate but don’t actually matter to anyone except the person who collected them. Even for me, they matter less and less the more of them I accumulate, because I’ve finally internalized what should have been obvious from the start: achievements don’t propagate forward unless someone needs you to keep achieving.

That last part is crucial, and it’s what most self-help and productivity culture refuses to acknowledge. They’re still operating on the Maslow model, where self-actualization is the endpoint, where becoming your best self is the goal, where optimization, achievement, and experience add up to a complete life. But they don’t. They add up to a very impressive resume that nobody reads and a lot of memories that don’t mean anything to anyone except you, and even for you, they compress into a vague sense of “yeah, I did that” without any emotional weight.

The only things that seem to stick, the only things that don’t evaporate immediately, are ongoing obligations. Not accomplishments. Obligations. My kid’s Junior Ranger badges matter more than my mountain summits because they represent something that’s still happening, a story that’s still accumulating, a system where my presence continues to matter beyond the moment of achievement. My four Maine Coons and English Bulldog matter more than any marathon I’ve run because they’ll need me again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.

There’s a polydactyl cat in my house right now, a black smoke Maine Coon with twenty-six toes instead of the normal eighteen. That cat is more real to me than any of the fourteen countries I visited last year, not because the cat is more interesting, but because the cat is specific, irreplaceable, and ongoing. The countries were just places I passed through. The cat is a small, weird, persistent responsibility that would degrade if I stopped showing up. That’s the difference.

And this, finally, is why I understand the Epstein thing, why rockstars do cocaine and sleep with groupies, why people have affairs and blow up their lives in spectacularly stupid ways. I’m not saying it’s good. I’m saying it’s legible. When everything becomes optional and nothing sticks, some people reach for forced consequence. They need something that can’t be undone, something that resists competence, something that creates irreversible stakes. Drugs, affairs, and criminal behavior aren’t primarily about pleasure. They’re about salience. They’re about making life feel consequential again when achievement has failed to deliver consequence.

I’m not going to do any of that, partially because I can already see the curve and know it doesn’t work, but mostly because I’m not desperate enough to need the chaos. I’m just standing here in the middle of a very comfortable, very successful, very empty-feeling life, looking around and thinking “huh, so this is what winning looks like.”

And the strangest part is that I don’t even think this is fixable, not in any systematic way. You can’t un-know what you’ve learned. You can’t make achievement feel meaningful again once you’ve seen through the mechanism. You can’t pretend that effort automatically converts into significance when you’ve run enough experiments to know it doesn’t. The illusion, once broken, stays broken.

What you can do, I think, is stop expecting significance to arrive as a reward for doing things correctly. You can stop treating life like a progression system with a hidden endpoint. You can accept that most of what you do will evaporate cleanly and that the things that don’t evaporate are mostly small, unglamorous, ongoing responsibilities that never feel like achievements because achievements have endpoints and responsibilities don’t.

That’s not inspiring. It’s not going to show up on a motivational poster or in a TED talk, but it has the advantage of being true, at least for a growing number of people who’ve climbed enough mountains and eaten enough Reapers to realize that the view from the top is just more mountains and the burn in your mouth is just more receptors shutting down, all the way down, with no final summit and no prize for reaching it.

So here I am, a person who can do a lot of things, who will probably keep doing some of them, who understands intellectually that none of it matters in any durable sense, and who is trying to figure out how to live honestly inside that understanding without either pretending it’s not true or using it as an excuse to stop trying entirely.

If you’ve read this far and you’re thinking “wow, this guy sounds insufferable,” you’re not wrong. But you’re also probably feeling some version of this yourself, even if you haven’t articulated it yet, because optionality is spreading faster than anyone wants to admit, and it’s hollowing out meaning for everyone it touches. The only difference is that some of us have run more experiments and seen the pattern more clearly, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and nobody has a good answer for what comes next.

Welcome to the plateau. The view is fine. The company is confused. The gift shop is permanently closed. And the hot sauce stopped working a long time ago.

Let’s start with the receptor that started all of this, which is called TRPV1, short for Transient Receptor Potential Vanilloid 1, and it’s the reason capsaicin feels like heat even though nothing is actually burning. TRPV1 is your body’s thermometer for dangerous temperatures. It activates when things get above roughly 43 degrees Celsius, which is where real tissue damage begins, and it sends a signal to your brain that translates to something pretty clear: this is wrong, stop, please. Capsaicin, the compound that makes peppers hot, is shaped in a way that slides right into TRPV1 and trips the exact same alarm. Your mouth isn’t on fire. Your mouth is being lied to by a molecule that’s very good at impersonating fire, and your body believes it completely and without question, every single time.

Here’s where it gets interesting. TRPV1 receptors can be desensitized. When you expose them to capsaicin repeatedly over time, something happens at the cellular level that scientists have spent decades arguing about, and the result is that the receptors become less responsive. The calcium influx that drives the alarm signal gets blunted. The receptor gets phosphorylated and dephosphorylated in ways that leave it functionally quieter than it was before. Research has confirmed that heavy chili users report significantly less oral burn from capsaicin than non-users, and that this isn’t just bravado, it reflects a measurable change in how the receptor actually behaves. One study found that repeated low-dose capsaicin exposure over as little as two weeks produced a statistically significant reduction in perceived burn, even at concentrations that would have non-users reconsidering their relationship with food entirely. The body adapts. It’s infuriatingly good at deciding that things which should be unbearable are, in fact, fine.

What this means practically is that someone who puts Thai chili flakes on everything, every single day, has essentially been running a years-long desensitization protocol on their own mouth without knowing it. The TRPV1 receptors in their oral cavity have been hit with capsaicin so consistently and so thoroughly that they’ve stopped panicking about it. The receptor’s still there. It still technically activates. But the signal’s been turned down to a volume the brain registers as background noise rather than emergency. This is why a Carolina Reaper, which averages 1.64 million Scoville Heat Units at its Guinness certification and peaks well above two million, reads as manageable to someone with that level of exposure history. It’s not that their mouth is tougher. It’s that their mouth has been successfully negotiated with, over years, one meal at a time.

This is where the story would end, tidily and without incident, if the human body were a simple system, which it absolutely isn’t. It’s a humiliating collection of overlapping hardware that didn’t get the memo that resistance to one type of burning should carry over to all types of burning. It doesn’t. There are at least three entirely different chemical systems at work when we talk about spicy food, and they operate through separate receptors, separate mechanisms, and separate pathways that don’t share tolerance information with one another. You can max out your resistance to one and walk directly into the other two like a man who just earned his black belt in karate and is somehow surprised by a taser.

The second villain in this story is piperine, which is the compound responsible for the heat in black pepper, and here’s where things get interesting and also slightly embarrassing for everyone who assumed spice tolerance was a unified superpower. Piperine does activate TRPV1, the same receptor capsaicin targets, but it does so through a slightly different binding mechanism with a distinctly different kinetic profile. Research in pharmacological literature established that while capsaicin produces a slow, spreading, sustained activation of the receptor, piperine’s activation pattern is sharper, faster, and followed by what researchers describe as more efficient desensitization. One study found that piperine actually showed greater efficacy than capsaicin at the human TRPV1 receptor in lab conditions, which is a fascinating and deeply unfair finding suggesting that black pepper is doing something to your pain receptors that’s chemically distinct from what a ghost pepper is doing to them, even though both are technically using the same door.

The practical result is that the desensitization you’ve built through years of eating chili-based food doesn’t straightforwardly transfer to black pepper. Your capsaicin tolerance is a record of your relationship with capsaicin specifically, and the different binding profile of piperine means your receptors haven’t been trained on that particular stimulus in the same way. This explains why someone can casually eat a Carolina Reaper and then crack fresh black pepper over their pasta and immediately make a face. The fresh grind matters too. Whole peppercorns release their volatile aromatic compounds, including piperine, most intensely right after grinding, which is why the person using a pepper mill is consistently getting a harder hit than the person shaking pre-ground powder from a jar. You’re choosing maximum concentration every time you crank that handle. You’ve got nobody to thank but yourself.

But we’ve barely gotten started, because black pepper isn’t the most extreme case. That distinction belongs to wasabi and horseradish, which operate through a mechanism so different from capsaicin that they might as well be a different category of experience entirely, and which, unlike the pleasantly slow tongue-warmth of chili heat, deliver their entire payload directly to your sinuses like a small, targeted, extremely personal chemical event.

Wasabi and horseradish both belong to the Brassicaceae family, the same family that includes mustard and broccoli, and their pungency comes from allyl isothiocyanate, abbreviated AITC, which chemists sometimes call mustard oil. AITC doesn’t actually exist in the plant until you damage it. In intact wasabi rhizome, you’ve got two compounds sitting in separate cellular compartments: glucosinolates and an enzyme called myrosinase. When you grate or chew the wasabi, you break the cells, the two compounds mix, the enzymatic reaction fires, and AITC is produced on the spot. It’s the plant’s defense mechanism, manufactured only in response to being attacked, which means every time you eat wasabi you’re being counterattacked by a vegetable that was waiting for exactly this moment and had been preparing for it the whole time.

What AITC does once produced is volatile. It evaporates. It travels as a vapor. And it doesn’t primarily activate TRPV1 the way capsaicin does. It primarily targets TRPA1, the Transient Receptor Potential Ankyrin 1 receptor, which is sometimes called the wasabi receptor in scientific literature for exactly this reason, and which is present in high concentration in the nasal passages and sinuses. This is why wasabi does what it does. The compound goes airborne inside your mouth, travels through the nasal passages via retronasal olfaction, and activates pain receptors in your sinuses that haven’t been desensitized by your years of eating chili flakes, because those receptors are in a completely different location, using a completely different receptor type, responding to a completely different chemical. Your TRPV1 receptors in your mouth couldn’t help you here even if they wanted to. This isn’t their jurisdiction and they weren’t consulted.

The burn from AITC is also short because of its volatility. Unlike capsaicin, which binds tightly to TRPV1 and hangs around producing sustained activation that can linger for an hour or more at high concentrations, AITC evaporates off the receptor surface relatively quickly. The sensation spikes hard and then drops fast, which is why the wasabi experience is a flashbang rather than a slow fire. Research has confirmed that drinking water has minimal effect on sinus-based AITC burn, because you’re not trying to wash a compound off your tongue. You’re trying to ventilate a volatile vapor that’s already gone where it was going. Breathing through your mouth is actually more effective at reducing the sensation because it helps the vapor clear. None of this feels dignified while it’s happening, and it isn’t meant to.

Now here’s where someone might reasonably ask whether you can build tolerance to AITC the way you can to capsaicin. The answer is technically yes, sort of, temporarily, and with caveats that undercut the point entirely. Because AITC evaporates quickly and clears from the receptors fast, the desensitization window is narrow and the resensitization happens quickly. TRPA1 receptors bounce back much faster than TRPV1 receptors do after capsaicin exposure, which means even someone who eats wasabi regularly will find that a week or two off is enough for a nearly complete reset. Compare this to capsaicin tolerance, which can persist for days after exposure and where heavy users show receptor-level changes that appear genuinely durable, and the difference is stark. The wasabi system is simply less trainable, largely because the thing doing the training evaporates before it can finish the job.

So what we’ve got is a taxonomy of burning that most people collapse under the single word spicy, when what they actually mean is at least three distinct biological events that share approximately nothing except that they’re all unpleasant in ways some humans have decided to pursue recreationally. Capsaicin hits TRPV1 on the tongue and produces a slow, spreading, trainable burn that responds to dairy because casein in milk actually binds to capsaicin molecules and pulls them off the receptor. Piperine hits TRPV1 with a sharper, faster, slightly different signal that your capsaicin tolerance doesn’t fully cover, and it’s worst when fresh-ground because the volatile oils are at peak concentration. Allyl isothiocyanate from wasabi and horseradish hits TRPA1 in your sinuses because it evaporates and travels there, produces a brief, intense, mostly nasal experience that fades fast, doesn’t train out particularly well, and responds to milk only modestly because the mechanism is different and the location is mostly unreachable by swallowing things.

These are separate systems. Having a high tolerance for one doesn’t make you brave in the face of the others. It just means you’ve put in the hours on that specific receptor. The person who eats reapers for breakfast and then tears up over a wasabi pea isn’t weak. They’re encountering a different piece of hardware that they haven’t negotiated with yet. Their sinus TRPA1 receptors are sitting there, completely untouched by years of hot sauce, factory fresh, waiting patiently for the exact moment someone puts real wasabi in front of them so they can introduce themselves properly.

There’s one more thing that needs to be said, which is that your mouth isn’t the only place you have TRPV1 receptors. Your gastrointestinal tract has them too, all the way through, which is why extremely spicy food can cause stomach cramping and why the experience of eating a ghost pepper doesn’t necessarily end when you swallow it. But the most clarifying location, the one that brings this whole conversation to its natural and humbling conclusion, is that TRPV1 receptors are also present in the anorectal region, which is the scientific way of saying that your tolerance ends exactly where your digestive tract does, in your butthole. The capsaicin that your highly trained, thoroughly desensitized mouth barely noticed is going to arrive somewhere else in your body that hasn’t been running the same protocol, hasn’t eaten a single chili flake in its entire existence, and has absolutely no idea what’s coming. You can negotiate with your mouth. You cannot negotiate with the other end. It doesn’t know you. It didn’t agree to any of this. And unlike the TRPV1 receptors in your oral cavity, which you’ve spent years quietly convincing that fire is fine, the ones at the finish line are going to give you their completely honest and unfiltered opinion of what you’ve done.

It’s also worth noting, because nobody else seems to want to say it out loud, that the people at the extreme end of this spectrum, the ones developing peppers that register in the range of pepper spray and bottling them as food, are by their own description chasing a high. This isn’t a metaphor. Capsaicin activation of TRPV1 triggers the release of endorphins and activates endocannabinoid pathways as a response to what the body genuinely believes is tissue damage, and the result is a rush that habitual users describe in terms that would be immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with other kinds of substance enthusiasm. Ed Currie has talked openly about his history with addiction and described his relationship with peppers in exactly those terms. The community around extreme hot sauce has the same internal logic as any other tolerance-chasing behavior: the baseline keeps moving, the old stuff stops working, and what used to be enough isn’t enough anymore. This is fine to know about yourself. What’s important is understanding that there are actually 3 tiers of spicy food, and they have almost nothing to do with each other. There’s normal spicy, which is what Thai food, Mexican food, and Indian food are doing, which is using heat as a flavor component in a dish that was designed by people who knew what they were doing and wanted you to enjoy it. There’s hot sauce spicy, which is a condiment that adds heat to things that benefit from it, and which a reasonable adult can navigate.

Then there’s the third tier, which has no culinary purpose, which exists purely as a biochemical dare, and which is essentially recreational drug use that you eat. All 3 are fine. But only 2 of them are food.

The clarifying truth at the center of all of this, the thing the hot sauce community would really rather not sit with, is that none of this has anything to do with toughness. What it has to do with is repetition. Your TRPV1 receptors didn’t get desensitized because you’re a person of exceptional character. They got desensitized because you ate a lot of chili flakes. The biochemistry isn’t impressed by your identity. It’s indifferent to your YouTube comments about how the Last Dab is barely a two out of ten. Calcium fluxes happened, receptors got dephosphorylated, intracellular signaling pathways quieted down, and here you are on the other side of that process describing a 2.69 million Scoville pepper as warm. It’s not a moral achievement. It’s a training response. Your mouth did it because mouths do this when you give them enough repetitions.

Which means, incidentally, that the whole thing is reversible. Stop eating spicy food for a few months and the receptors resensitize. The adaptation isn’t permanent. Your body, with its usual cheerful indifference to your preferences, will simply unlearn what it learned, because the original TRPV1 desensitization is a calcium-dependent process that requires ongoing stimulus to maintain. Remove the stimulus long enough and the receptor climbs back toward baseline. All those years of hot sauce, all that careful construction of an identity that includes eating Carolina Reapers without making a scene, and the machinery doing it will just quietly reverse itself if you stop feeding it. The body doesn’t care. It’s never cared. It’s simply doing what the chemistry says.

So yes, the pepper hits different. The wasabi hits different. They were always going to hit different, because they are different, and the version of spice tolerance people carry around in their heads, the unified, transferable, comprehensive fire resistance that makes you immune to all forms of heat, doesn’t exist. What exists is a collection of specialized adaptations, each one specific to a stimulus, each one reversible, each one built through repetition rather than resolve. Which is fine. Repetition is how most useful things get built. But it does mean that the next time someone who eats ghost peppers like candy makes an involuntary noise at a particularly aggressive crack of black pepper over their carbonara, the correct response isn’t embarrassment. The correct response is to understand that this is simply two different pieces of biology operating on their own terms, and that one of them wasn’t consulted before the pepper mill made its decision.

You trained one system. The other systems are still out there, and they’ve had a lot of time to think.