“Can you feel that?

Ah, shit

Ooh, wah-ah-ah-ah

Ooh, wah-ah-ah-ah

Oh, oh

Oh, oh

Oh, oh”

- Disturbed

In the mid 2000’s, there was a show on MTV called “Punk’d”, hosted by a boyishly handsome and affable young lad named Ashton Kutcher. The producers would set up cameras and then construct elaborate set-ups to place random celebrities in absurd social situations, filming their reactions to the single-blind scenarios as the ridiculousness intensified to the point of extreme awkwardness before reaching it’s predictable, but always thoroughly enjoyable climax where the young Mr. Kutcher would pop out from behind the cameras and present the revelation to the slightly flustered mark, along with laughter and hugs and high fives and the requisite ‘we so got you, man!’ It was good TV. Anyone under 30 will find this concept banal, as they have undoubtedly been inundated with similar derivative content on social media for their entire post-adolescent lives. Scripted ‘gym pranks’ and fake altercations abound.

What Kutcher and his colleagues were producing was original at the time and it will forever be a symbol of how I feel when I walk out of my front door in the morning into the world. I am usually immediately confronted with an unfolding script that is so absurd, that I begin to glance around, up and to the left, looking for the camera. When is Ashton going to pop out and say it; “You got Punk’d!”. It’s like the whole world is f*cking with me, like I’m caught in some new reality spinoff that mixes Punk’d with the Truman Show, and everyone is behaving so ridiculously that it all must be a ruse. The collective insanity is so intense and widespread that despite my best efforts to think outwardly, my logical mind can only conclude that I have been written into this ruse as the oblivious main character. I must be Truman.

For those unfamiliar, The Truman Show was a movie that came out in 1998 starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, a man who lives a relatively normal, mundane life. The twist, which isn’t really a twist since it is revealed in the very beginning of the movie, is that his entire life is a TV show, with every single aspect of it staged within a giant dome of a set, and filmed for a worldwide audience of gawkers. Everyone in his life, his town, is an actor, and there are many plot devices woven in to make sure he is to afraid to ever leave the town, which he doest know is really a dome complete with fake weather etc. The premise is so ingenious that, similar to Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, the movie is worth watching regardless of the execution, which, in the case of The Truman Show, was pretty good.

In what is probably my favorite scene, Truman’s wife, played by Laura Linney, is hocking some product, enthusiastically hyping it’s merits while smiling into some hidden camera that Truman doesn’t know about (this is how they advertise within the show after all, Mrs. Truman probably the very first example of what people now call ‘influencers’.) Looking about the room, increasingly perturbed, our hero asks plainly, “What the hell are you talkin’ about? Who ya taklin’ to?!”. That, my friends, is how I feel every single day as I study our economy and our society. Who the hell are all these people talkin’ to, and when is Ashton Kutcher going to pop out and tell me it was just a prank and that everything is going to be ok? I know I am not the only one who feels this way.

The Nonsense Economy and Late Stage Capitalism is a framework that I have stumbled upon that helps me to make sense of the absurdity around me. These two interrelated concepts are each characterized by several sub themes, many of which overlap, with the arrows of causation pointing in multiple directions. These concepts represent the confluence of two kinds of feelings that most of what we see or experience each day evoke. I think most people can relate to both of these on some level.

The first feeling is a lack of meaning. More and more people are just sort of dicking around all day, feverishly spinning the tires in an anxiety-driven, social media-inspired rodent race to find meaning that never arrives, yet producing nothing of value along the way. It’s as if humans have finally solved what John Maynard Keynes referred to as the ‘economic problem’, and we are caught in some sort of transition phase where there is not a whole ton of work left to do, not many people who are willing to do it anyway, and what stands in the way of abundance for most people is a matter of hedonic programing and regulatory encumbrance. We are lost and we don’t know what to do. We don’t know what comes next, so for now, we’ll just sit around and play with our phones.

The second feeling is one of feeling like ‘the mark’ as soon as we open our eyes in the morning. Everything feels like a scam. Because people lack material abundance and meaning, everything is a sale to be made. Every person is a potential customer, or worse, a potential target. Fraud is increasingly ubiquitous and more frequently tolerated. Everyone is trying to get one over on everyone else. While the degree of deception and fraud is various, our environment is perhaps best characterized by people using people as a means to an end, or doing the precise opposite of what Immanuel Kant identified as living an ethical life when he said, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” Those who treat each other as the end, rather than the means, are an increasingly rare bread in the nonsense economy, which hardly seems sustainable when taken to it’s logical conclusion.

Nothing feels real or authentic, as if the script of our day is just another day inside Truman Burbank’s dome-shaped cage of a world. We spend so much of our waking hours looking around for Ashton Kutcher’s hidden cameras, capturing the the long con prank that the world is playing on us, wondering when we can just go back to normal life. When will Mr. Kutcher pop out and hug us and tell us it was all just a fun prank? But the big reveal never arrives and we must figure out a way to be in this polluted world where the bullshit clings to the air and stings the nostrils like the smog of the Canadian wild fires that periodically blew south in the mid 2020’s.

Various charlatans and sophists have seized upon our current spiritual impoverishment, economic challenges, and affordability issues to propagate a message that our entire way of being in this world is flawed and unjust. If you do not currently possess something that you desire, it is not your fault. The system is rigged agains you, you see, and it’s someone else’s fault. You need not take any accountability, you need not suffer on your journey up the mountain, you deserve to simply be at the top. You deserve anything you can conjure, any life you imagine. Not feeling particularly imaginative? Here, use this little pocket-sized computer to explore all of the riches of the world, to covet all of the material furnishings of the world that could be yours if it were not for someone else. Wealth cannot be created, it can only be divided, despite thousands of years of accumulated evidence to the contrary. The Charlatan adjusts his glasses, pushes back what is left of his white hair, and directs our attention to what someone else has. With constant refrain and repetition he convinces us the only reason anyone has anything, you see, is because they have rigged the game, they have joined the grift. So you have two choices now, join the grift, or vote for the Charlatan who promises to take what you covet and apportion to you what you think you are owed.

The reason this type of message resonates so clearly today is because we have reached a critical tipping point in terms of the shear volume of envy floating around in the air. Enough envy will eventually lead to fraud, and enough fraud becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Envy alone is enough to get people to start looking for ways to cheat and defraud each other, to take the easy way out, to cut the corners. I may feel bad about cheating at first, but surely the ends justify the means, right? If I can be convinced that the only reason anyone has anything is because they have figured out how to cheat the system, then eventually my sole focus will become figuring out a way to cheat the system, to get my allotment of the ill begotten gains. Everyone else is getting their beak wet, what about my beak?

Everyone has become a vulture, just hopping over each other for a chance to pick the last rice-sized pieces of meat off the old system, doing whatever it takes to direct a small amount of reward into their own pocket, their own bank account, their own bird belly. This is true of individuals as they clamor for attention regardless of who’s day they ruin along their path of filming every last stunt they can conceive. It is true of large companies as they embrace the path of “enshitification”, surveillance pricing, and addictive, manipulative design, having already wedged themselves into the functioning of their customer’s day-to-day lives. It is true of the government, with a majority of those in office using their position as a means to direct money and attention toward there own ends. Higher education hold’s a special place in the value chain of nonsense as the upstream originator of the driving nonsensical ideas of our time, many of which provide an intellectual justification for the nonsensical actions of other downstream parties mentioned above.

We live in a soup of nonsense where adding value and improving the conditions of customers and humanity in general has slid ever downward in the hierarchy of motivators for most individuals and institutions. John Maynard Keynes’ words from his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren have been gradually distilled and concentrated over the years, with their poignancy intensifying with time:

“But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

It feels like the end of an era because we are coming full circle. People are turning once again toward gambling and prostitution, some of the world’s favorite and oldest pastimes. It is impossible to watch any of the major streaming services or consume digital content on any of the leading platforms these days without being inundated with opportunities to bet on sports, with endless combinations and permutations of potential meaningless events, that could transpire throughout a day of professional ball throwing; “Hey Steve! Guess what buddy, I used buy now-pay later to get my groceries this week, saving the the hundred bucks to play the NFL games this week. If Baltimore’s running back has between 61 and 95 yards, and Seattle’s receiver has at least one touchdown but not more than 5 catches, and Cincinnati’s defense can record one sack, and a man with a mustache kicks a field goal anywhere east of the Mississippi river and Tony Romo tries to guess the play by drawing on the screen before the godamn ball is even snapped, then I will 20X my grocery bill and eat for free for the rest of the year!” But Todd, what if all those things don’t happen? “Well then I guess we’ll just put the groceries on the credit card next week and bitch about capitalism on the internet.”

Meanwhile, online prostitution has proved a tempting draw for those seeking the keys to material wealth without the arduousness of having to identify and hone a skill set over time. Do me a favor, dear reader, and close your eyes for a moment. Clear your mind and please attempt to conceive of an economic act or profession as utterly useless as online prostitution. Please try to imagine a course in life that does less for the greater good. Some will be tempted to conflate the act of filming and posting various degrees and iterations of sexual acts on the internet with the role that entertainment in general plays in society. This would be a mistake.

For example, let’s consider the role of other common forms of entertainment. I think most serious people would agree that in our almost post scarcity world, professional sports in general are way overemphasized and over prioritized, and have long passed the point of distraction from more serious issues facing humanity. I said most serious people. Still, professional ball throwing contests do provide a series of beneficial byproducts beyond the mere torching of minutes and hours and days on everyone’s memento mori calendar (look it up) associated with consumption of the spectacles.

Professional sports consumption provides inspiration for novices and amateurs of all ages to engage in physical exercise. They demonstrate what can be accomplished with consistent work in developing a skill. Sports allow people, especially young people, to work hard to prepare for something and then fail publicly at that thing, dust themselves off, and put in more work. Sports bring people together, gives them a conversation starter with their neighbors, gives people a sense of belonging in an otherwise rootless age. This short list is the tip of the iceberg, a non-exhaustive effort. Similar arguments can be made for other forms of traditional entertainment, particularly ones centered around the creation and dissemination of art. Like sports, endeavors such as singing, dancing, comedy, and music provide numerous intrinsic benefits for those participating, as well as plentiful positive externalities for society in general. Online prostitution provides none of these benefits, and comes at a steep cost to everyone involved, notwithstanding the short term material gains accruing to the signatories of the faustian bargain. And we are not just talking about the unclothed version of the dancing harlequins who prance around for money on the internet.

What this all boils down to is a mental exhausted, intellectually lazy, spiritually impoverished, and psychologically disturbed society that increasingly resembles an open air insane asylum, with seemingly no limits on people’s willingness to engage in bizarre, useless, disrespectful behavior for even the slightest chance at attention, money, and perhaps an antidote to their uninteresting and tiresome screen based lives. As Keyne’s put it:

“To use the language of to-day – must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown“? We already have a little experience of what I mean – a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations – who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing. To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet – until they get it.”

This is the first of a series of essays that will explore the transition phase that we find ourselves in to see if we can gain any insight or foresight into what comes next. We’ll examine the evidence, observe the symptoms, consider the causes, and assess the sustainability of the status quo. We will try to place our current predicament in context using ideas from economic theory, social psychology, and philosophy. The world has many historians, and even a growing number of “futurists”, but perhaps what we lack are people who are able to look up from their daily distractions and observe and report the present, to live in the moment, to make sense of it all. How can we know where we are headed if we have no clue where we stand? That is the role that we will take on together as we paint this mosaic of our increasingly mad world.

One conclusion appears as clear as a mountain spring: we are quickly losing our godamn minds.

Every time I step out of my home, I see proliferating lunacy and bizarre behavior all around me. I find it interesting to place myself in the position of a stranger in a strange land, or perhaps that of an alien from another planet whose spacecraft has just touched down. I try to observe this silly world objectively, as if seeing it for the first time. What I often see is a bunch of lunatics doing lunatic things. Sometimes I am one of them. It’s important to me to practice holding two seemingly contradictory ideas in my head at once, acknowledging that myself or others can find some joy in an activity, but also appreciating the sheer absurdity of it. I like to riff on our collective nonsense, turning each piece of our experience over in my hand and figuring out how if fits into the bigger picture, like someone has just gifted me a giant bin of Lego pieces.

Sometimes I exaggerate or hyperbolize when I’m writing in my alien diary, it’s all part of the fun.

One of the rarest and most important skills in life is being able to consider any idea, no matter how off-the-beaten-path or offensive, without necessarily believing it. The purpose of this exercise is zoom out and consider objectively the well worn paths and behaviors that are so common that we rarely stop to think about them. I’m writing this to provide that perspective. In some cases, this perspective might yield an insight that may cause us to question our behaviors or change them. We are constantly conditioned to think that some things are normal, when in fact they are complete nonsense, bullshit if you will. Sometimes we participate in this bullshit circus to our own detriment. Maybe my alien perspective can gently suggest to someone that they avoid some of this bullshit, which could make life a lot easier an more enjoyable. Famous investor Charlie Munger once observed:

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

As you read the following paragraphs, if you feel your blood pressure rising or your trousers getting tight, you may be taking this too seriously. I’m not here to insult anyone’s religion in public. We’re all just crabs in a bucket, and today I’ve decided to claw my way up and perch on the rim to report back on what the crab pile looks like from above. It’s chaos down there, little crab legs everywhere, maybe I’ll get it wrong and have to climb back up tomorrow for another look. One of my favorite things in life is changing my mind.

DoorDash is Bullshit.

“To offend a strong man, tell him a lie. To offend a weak man, tell him the truth.” - Marcus Aurelius, probably

DoorDash is such bullshit. The reason DoorDash is bullshit is that it is a beautiful, poetic symbol of taking the easy way out, in life, for every single party involved in the arrangement. Shopping for healthy, whole foods and cooking them is not hard, but ordering takeout from a restaurant multiple times a week is even less hard. People sacrifice health for convenience so they can spend more time doing what exactly? Watching other guys exercise on TV? Scrolling through social media? Driving kids to and from structured play because they refuse to let their kids just go out and kick soccer balls with the kids in the neighborhood?

Ordering takeout more than once a week is pure laziness. What about the people who want to actually go sit down and enjoy the restaurant experience? Now, every time you visit a mid range eating establishment, there is a revolving door parade of degenerates opening the door, standing around in the entryway wearing sweatpants, smelling like cat piss and resin hits, picking up food for some other lazy ass.

I first noticed that DoorDash was complete bullshit when sitting at a restaurant catching up with a buddy one day. Some delivery driver pulls up and parks outside the restaurant, gets out wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, obviously, looking like a bag of mashed-up assholes presumably from being violently hungover. He get’s out of the car, takes two steps, pukes on the curb, enters the restaurant and grabs someone’s lunch to take to their house. Absolute filth. I know nothing though. Maybe he was actually sick and having to tough it out to get money to buy diapers. But life is a series of heuristics and mental short-cuts and pattern recognition, and I’d say the odds were probably tilted in favor of this being just another example of common degenerate behavior. Why would anyone want to eat something that had been though this scenario? Because they are too goddamn lazy to cook up some beens and rice. They have trained themselves to take the easy way, the path of least resistance. Why would the restaurants tolerate this shit? Well, because they want to take the easy way out too. Now they can charge the same or more per meal, and not have to pay someone to wait the table, bring the water, wash the dishes. It’s profitable. Its easy. And quite frankly, it’s bullshit.

And why do I always see people sitting in parking lots in their cars, alone, smoking weed or otherwise lingering? I could be wrong, but I have a suspicion that these may be DoorDash drivers waiting for their next assignment. I do not want to disparage anyone’s work, but for most people, DoorDash should not be seen as a sustainable career. Any job where you can make money driving a car around hung over, smoking weed is not something that is going to bring a lot of personal growth. Maybe people like doing it, maybe the feel stuck doing it. Again, I know nothing about this situation. But I do know how to recognize patterns and make inferences.

Would anyone disagree with this statement: “The country is extremely divided right now.”? Of course not. Does anyone really not understand the degree of contempt and resentment floating around out there? And what happens when your DoorDash driver perceives you to be on the other side of their righteous worldview, or worse, the cause of their plight? We are constantly told by the media that whoever the guy in power is at the time is a total monster, ruining the country, threatening democracy. What if you have a sign in your lawn, or a bumper sticker on your car that suggests to your delivery driver that you might sympathize with the views of that perceived monster? Or what if you just have a nice house? See where I’m going with this?

Let’s role play. You be you, I’ll be the guy driving around with your food in my Honda Civic. I roll up. I see you drive big SUV, polluting the planet, you son of a bitch. I’m so worried about climate change I don’t even want to bring kids into this world. My wife’s boyfriend told me the oceans are going to rise because of people like you. Kids are going to drown. Oh you drive a Prius instead? You little lib commie bitch. You probably voted for those assholes who forced me to take that vaccine. You fly a rainbow flag? Why are you trying to always make me have all these gay thoughts? You have a house worth over 700k? Fuckin’ capitalist pig, probably some type of entrepreneur, exploiting the working class, refusing to pay a living wage so you can remodel your basement shitter every 5 years, probably don’t even pay your fair share when it comes to taxes. Is that a golden retriever I see taking a squat in your back lawn? A hunting dog? You probably have guns in that fancy house. You probably support law enforcement. And ICE! You probably hate Mexican children. Fascist! And what do we do to fascists’ chicken Alfredo before we give it to them? That’s right.

Let me tell you something, if you have a nice house, I want you to turn on the news and listen to these people. The amount of envy in this country has reached fever pitch. People are miserable, they are righteous, they will believe anything. For the simple transgression of having a nice home, I’d estimate that the amount of spit you consume annually is measured in the gallons. Your body is probably comprised of at least 30% snot by weight. No, I’m not saying that all platform delivery drivers spit in your food. I’d bet my right foot that most of them don’t. But this country has become an open air insane asylum and people have been fed a steady diet of victimhood, envy, and bitterness. Malcom X said that only a fool would let his enemy educate his children. I say only a fool would let someone who might think they are his enemy handle his food. Grow up. Make your own food, ya big fat silly goose.

Now say something nice: Internet food delivery probably keeps a lot of drunk losers from driving out for food and crashing into someone on the road.

Building a “personal brand” is bullshit.

“Those who are determined to be ‘offended’ will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.” - Christopher Hitchens

“I’m interested in personal branding” has to be right up there with “my hobby is shopping” and “I’m into fashion” as some of stupidest identity signals one could possibly utter. What if the reason why everything is unaffordable is because the only economic function where we are adding supply is in people who “create content” on the internet? It seems like every other day some new survey comes out siting “Youtuber” as the number one desired job for kids when they grow up. Everyone wants to be seen as “building something”, but nobody knows how to actually build shit. Everyone wants to realize their dream of being a professional internet personality. Let’s set aside the fact for now that most of this “content” being “created” is just hot soupy dog shit that adds zero or negative value to the greater good. So while everyone is on the internet trying to beg for enough attention to hopefully get paid a small sum by some greens powder company to hock their product, actual skills are atrophying.

Let’s consider a practical example of how this plays out in the economy. What if one of the reasons houses are so unaffordable is because nobody knows how to do anything? If all I know how to do is make videos of myself doing pranks at the gym, and now I want a new floor installed in my house, I have to hire someone else to do it. This isn’t just theoretical. The share of construction employment accounted for by remodeling has continued to climb higher. Instead of building new houses and increasing the supply of housing, those people are instead installing my floors, because I don’t know how do do anything. Presumably this is fine for me, since I am probably increasing the value of my home, but what about the person who doesn’t have a house yet and is still renting in perpetuity because the cost of a roof over their head is prohibitively high? Are they getting a part time job as a construction laborer and learning how to do things that might one day benefit them? No. They are posting on the internet trying to collect enough likes so they can put their “content” in between ads for pills that promise to make people happy, or politicians who promise to “make rent more affordable”, as if such a thing can be accomplished by fiat.

So where does this leave us? What happens when we take this all to it’s logical conclusion? We all “create content” so nobody knows how to do anything, the supply of real things stays stagnant while demand increases, so prices rise. Things are more expensive, so we need to “create” more “content” to afford to buy stuff. It’s a vicious rat cycle. Who benefits? Google. Facebook. Someone ask Gemini how to create “passive income”. I’ll wait. Let me guess, “find a way to make more “content” so Youtube can sell more adds.”? Got it. Someone please tell Gen Z and Gen Alpha that they need to learn how to do something other than dance around on the internet for money. If we evolve towards a true “creator economy” where all anyone knows how to do is essentially be some sort of entertainer, then we are not going to increase the supply of anything but internet videos, and the price of everything that requires skills and effort to make is going to stay high. In other words, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. No amount of likes and shares is going to build more houses.

Building a personal brand contradicts its own use in the nonsense economy it was created for. The only reason people flock to these creators and influencers is because of some level of presumed authenticity. When you create a personal brand you are basically just making up a character you are playing and the more traction or followers the character gets, the less it can say without offending someone or getting cancelled. In other words, the more a personal brand resonates with some audience, the more it becomes reliant on maintaining or growing that audience for its own existence, the less authentic it is able to be. People get to a point where they can’t even be a real person and give a real opinion on anything because they have boxed themselves in. Building a personal brand therefore, almost by definition, sows the seeds of its own destruction.

We recently discussed the likelihood of people using AI to render themselves mentally disabled (see Tater #9: ‘AI Brain’ and Universal Suffrage). If you insist on using AI to build a personal brand, there seems to be a high likelihood of rendering yourself both mentally and spiritually disabled. If that s worth the potential money, the chances of winning the personal brand lottery (see Tater #6: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 1 - Lottery Tickets), then by all means proceed. But please understand the risks you are taking. In essence, the modern obsession with building personal brands epitomizes the decades long shit from the collective worship of a higher power, of the divine, towards an individualistic and dispersed worship of the self. It is the easiest and most well-trodden path of least resistance toward a consistently honed self-centered mindset that is highly likely, by its very nature, to create misery and strife for you and the people around you. If you look under the facade, this is true for most of the personal brands you know and love. I’m sorry you had to hear it this way, but it should be viewed as an overwhelming positive that narcissism and self-worship and fraud do not lead to happiness. That’s not a world anyone wants to live in. And that, my friends, is why creating a personal brand is bullshit.

Now say something nice: It’s perfectly fine to use the internet to increase the scale and scope of your audience for sharing actual ideas, knowledge, and insights. Just be a good person, of high character and competence. In other words, build a reputation, not a personal brand.

Owning pitbulls is bullshit.

“Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?” ― Diogenes of Sinope

If you are at some type of social gathering and you want to really get everyone’s blood pressure bumped up for absolutely no reason, start a debate about something controversial. It could be the degree of institutional racism in “the system”, how much blowback is justified in the bombing of Gaza, or even a debate about the merits of teachers’ unions. But if you want someone to really lose their grip on reality, tell them about how owning pitbulls is bullshit.

I’ll start by stating the truthful observation that some of the nicest and most gentle dogs I have encountered in my life have been pitbulls. That’s not a land acknowledgment or a hedge, but a fact. Another fact is that by far, the shittiest dogs I have ever been around have been pitpulls. Now I’ll be honest, I don’t drink a lot of soda ok? I sometimes pick my own apples, off a tree. I stoped playing video games regularly when I started getting hair in new places, ya dig? So I tend not to find myself in situations where I am surrounded by pitpulls very often. I’m actually quite happy to entertain the notion that “it’s not the dogs, it’s the people”. Ok fine, but then tell me, what the f*ck is with these people?

The median household income in the US is around 85k. What is the median income of people who own these dogs? And why does that number happen to be a quarter of the median income for the entire country? Has anyone ever met someone anyone who makes over 100k who owns one? It’s not about money, and no one should be defined by how much money they make. Who gives a shit. But there are obviously some patterns here and my ignorance fascinates me. Why are these dogs so closely associated with those whose behavior is often so degenerate? Why are pit bulls the vape pods of the dog world? Do I have to smoke cigarettes to purchase one? Must I first get a tattoo of some word or phrase on my neck to be eligible for ownership? How many Slim Jim’s per week is required? What is the appeal of this particular breed to those who consistently require the government to step in on their behalf with someone else’s money? What percentage of the US fiscal deficit is essentially just buying pitbull food for people who can’t afford it? Obviously the dogs themselves don’t really cost much. Is that why they are so popular among those who have rendered themselves economically ineffective with drugs and alcohol? Or is their popularity among men who slap their girlfriends a function of litter size, such that they can either be obtained cheaply due to consistent excess supply, or even bred and sold to other people who regularly dump entire bags of McDonald’s litter in the middle of the mall parking lot? Do people seek them out for protection? Protection of what, your Playstation and heady stash?

If these dogs were so cool and nice, then why are they always free? I get why cats are free, they just roam the streets or countryside, killing small prey and surviving and breeding without anyone’s permission. Your cat leaves for an hour and comes back having conceived out of wedlock, little slut, happens all the time. So you see free kittens on Craigslist. It makes sense. By why is everyone always trying to re-home or “rescue” pit bulls? Rescue from what, being shitty? Growling and posturing at the previous owner’s children constantly? I have a serious question: when is the last time you heard someone say they are “rescuing” a golden retriever? “This is my new labradoodle Shilo, he’s a rescue. The man who had him before me was a CPA and he used to come home and beat him.” No he f*cking did not.

My buddy used to have a place with a nice porch down by the city where we’d drink beers and shoot the shit and people-watch after work. There was this guy that lived down the street who owned a couple pit bulls. He looked like the type of guy who went into credit card debt to buy tickets to a live UFC event only to drink 8 beers and get kicked out for fighting a guy because he made eye contact and refused to look away in time. Without telling you a single physical characteristic of the guy, I’m sure you can picture him. Anyway he’d walk these pit bulls down the street, sometimes with them dragging a weighted truck tire down the sidewalk with a body harness. I have no problem with dogs building muscle. These dogs were absolutely jacked. Sometimes his 100lb girlfriend would be the one walking the 90lb 4 legged hunks of muscle, without the tire. She never wore the harness herself, at least outside of the home. But if you think a 100lb girl is going to stop a 90lb dog if it wants to go after someone or something, I got a bridge to sell you. To be clear, they were perfectly well-behaved dogs and never did I witness them pulling her or attempting to be disobedient in any way. But you and I both know that’s not the point.

Let me be clear about what I’m really saying here before we get any further. No, I am not saying that any level of government should ban people from owning pit bulls, any more than I think government should ban private ownership of pet chimpanzees. I’m just saying it’s not a great idea given the potential for a violence so powerful, capricious, and asymmetrical that any human involved is not really in control. You could raise a chimpanzee from birth and treat it like a child, and have many a fond memory, only to come home from work one day to learn that Freddie the chimp has endured a bad day, and has decided to rip your goddamn face off. Your opinion on the matter is irrelevant, and Freddie does what’s in his nature, which is using the flesh on the front of your head as a protein source. But don’t worry, it was just that one time. He is usually such a nice boy. To be clear, I have rather low levels of sympathy for someone who keeps a chimp as a pet and loses a face. We have found innumerable ways to keep the stupidity genes in the breeding pool, but nature will alway find a way to get some of them out.

Here’s another example of similar poor decision making. I came across some video on the internet where some guy is handing out those little fish tank hand nets filled with little bottle of hard liquor and loose cigarettes to homeless drug addicts and other potential lunatics. Anything for attention on the internet. The next video that my algorithm fed me was presumably this same person handing out machetes to the same unadjusted maniacs. Should it be illegal? Well this may be unpopular but, I happen to think these degenerates who evidently can’t handle the drug life nevertheless have every right to use tools, and to defend themselves with edged tools if need be. After all, they are much more likely to be surrounded by deranged self-made psychopaths everyday than you and I, dear reader, as we sit here with our MacBooks and morning coffee. But is it a great idea to go handing out machetes to people who have a meaningfully higher propensity toward volatility? Obviously it is not. Again, I’m not arguing for a ban. Some folks want everything they don’t like to be banned, as if having the government pass a law banning dirty buttholes would save them money on toilet paper. That ain’t me babe. I just want to use my words to convince people to stop doing stupid shit. Is that too ambitious for this world?

Let’s look at one more little anecdote that demonstrates the utter stupidity of some of these “pitty moms”. Years ago I met up with a friend for a quick walk in a nearby park. She brought her little accessory dog, some sort of Yorkie or Morkie or some shit, not much bigger than something one would put in a long bun with mustard and relish. Some dip shit lady comes walking in our general direction, but when her large pit bull sees the small snack dog, the winds in the sails must have suddenly shifted, as she was now walking directly towards us. She’s hollering in vain at her muscle tank of a dog to stop, jerking its leash to no avail. Now she’s maybe 25 feet away tryin to dig her heels into the ground to stop the dog. I’m 83% sure that if memory serves me right, she was wearing flip flops. This was a stupid person, but she seemed kind and was genuinely distraught, and I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she was wearing high-top football cleats with plenty of ankle support. No matter, her counter force is barely a nuisance to the dog, marching forward, eyes locked on my friends’ apple fritter of a dog…

The woman decides to escalate her effort to stop the beast, sitting down on the ground and using her feet to grip the earth in front of her. After sliding on her backside like this for less than one second, the inevitable happened, and the dog’s forward force spun her body around, using her bony little non-ass as a pivot. This moron is now being dragged toward us, flat on her back with her hands above her head, her long dark hair being pulled down between her shoulders and the earth. Fifteen feet and closing. I’m not afraid. Let’s not over dramatize the imagery here; this is not some snarling, red-eyed, bloodthirsty hell hound foaming at the mouth as it closes in on human flesh. The dog is smiling, his tail is waging, he’s excited to check out this miniaturized puff ball version of something that is very similar to himself, apart from being able to fit into a tennis ball tube. But I’m not in a gambling mood, so I casually lean over and scoop the little dog up and set if gently through the open car window. The prize has been removed, the dog stops pulling, the imbecilic hippie lady makes her way to her feet, a half-dozen sincere apologies, “Don’t worry about it.” We turn around and leave. Most intelligent human beings like to give these dogs a very wide birth when see a person walking towards us with one on a leash. Do we do this because of the dogs, or because of the people? The answer is yes.

Now say something nice: Some pitbulls are really nice, especially one’s owned by dentists.

Actionable insights:

As crabs in a bucket, what can we do with all of the perspective from the rim of the bucket that we have just ingested? Well, let’s put it this way, if we are someone who is pouring all of our energy into creating some performative representation of ourselves and claiming we are building a personal brand, while hanging around pitbull people every day and mowing down plates of sloppy garbage food that some drugged up lunatic just dropped off in a rusted out Scion TC that permanently reeks of DWI, then there is a good chance we are running the race to financial stability with a 50lb weight strapped to our chests. Maybe I’ve botched it, maybe these degenerate behaviors are actually a reasonable path towards sustainable happiness. I love to change my mind. Maybe I’ll change my mind on some of this stuff next week…

“I can’t say what I want to. Even if I’m not serious. I can’t say what I want to. Even if I’m not serious. F*ck yourself. F*ck yourself.” - Tool, Hush

“I hope you got your shittin’ pants on. Your shittin’ pants…I hope you’re wearing them right now...’cause you...are about to shit your pants.” - Negan Smith, The Walking Dead

Just as the world enters what is probably the most profound technological shift in the lifetime of anyone currently alive on this planet, we are also experiencing an epidemic of anxiety that is directly related to that transition. This anxiety has spiraled into a self-feeding loop, where we respond to narratives with anxiety, which compels us to conjure further narratives in an attempt to self sooth, commiserate, or otherwise make sense of the changing world around us. This, in turn, creates more anxiety as everyone floods the zone with their own theories and desperately searches for evidence to confirm their own beliefs, superstitions, or fears. The world has become on big Rorschach test, where anyone can find something out there to satisfy their hunger for validation and feed nurture their confirmation bias.

Today I want to take a look at the sources of some of these narratives from the point of view of the people and organizations propagating them. As a professional investor and economist, I study the trajectory of the AI transition constantly, every single day, and it is still extremely difficult to gain any sort of conviction in terms of which way this thing is going to break. Will unemployment be higher or lower? Will wage growth rise or fall? What about prices? Will inflation be hotter or colder? Will productivity growth explode higher and drive economic growth higher? How will the spoils of that growth be distributed? What does it all mean for policy? Will we need to lower the tax rates for individuals? Will we require some sort of universal basic income if wages do fall? How will that be funded? A land tax? A tax on data centers? A tax on AI company profits? Will the resulting economic environment make it easier or more difficult for the government to pay its massive debts? Are we moving towards an age of abundance where technology drives the marginal cost of almost everything toward zero? Will we all still have jobs? Will we still work 40 hours a week? Will we even need jobs?

These are the things that consume my interest and attention. In this discussion, I am not going to attempt to answer any of them. I will say that with regard to almost every single one of these questions, the evidence so far could be accurately and honestly characterized as ‘mixed’. It is simply too early to tell which direction this boat is moving in. The US economy and our entire society is a massive ship and it does not turn on a dime. It takes time to decisively turn a big boat and begin to navigate its course. Right now, we are out in the middle of the ocean, rudderless, with everyone rowing in different direction as we are pounded by waves and winds from every direction.

There will be plenty of time for me to opine on way the evidence seems to want to blow our ship, but today I’d rather just take a step back and try to noodle out a framework for cutting through the noise by taking stock of where all of these competing narratives are coming from. One important question I have learned to ask is: ‘Cui bono?’, or ‘to whose benefit?’ This is particularly useful in the realm of geopolitical analysis because this area of inquisition arguably involves more qualitative judgement or more game theory consideration than traditional macroeconomic analysis. I think this template will be useful for us as we try to sort through the types of players involved with the crafting of competing narratives, the purveyors of all of these different flavors of nonsense.

To do this, we are going to employ a dangerous method, something that I typically try to avoid at all costs; we are going to try to separate the merits of the arguments from the incentives of their purveyors and focus mainly on the latter by applying cognitive empathy, conceptually putting ourselves in their shoes. To some, this may look and sound a lot like cynicism, and they’d be correct. But sometimes we need to understand what motivates people so we can understand where they are coming from. In doing so, to be clear, the goal is not to dismiss arguments based on their source, but rather to use a large spoon to skim off that top layer of scum form the soup, so we can better enjoy the combination of flavors. Again, we always want the endpoint of our analysis to be objective truth, but in times of pure chaos and confusion, it is not unreasonable to ask the question: Cui bono? Here a a few examples of the major players, purveyors, and propagators of the sources and uses of bullshit in today’s narrative-spinning pissing contest:

AI model companies (2025 version):

The big frontier model laboratories want to scare you into using their projects so they have a huge user base to show potential investors prior to their IPO. No one knows exactly how these companies are going to make money. Presumably, it will be some combination of consumer monthly subscriptions, business account subscriptions, or advertising revenue. But you need to get people using this thing regularly, preferably even slightly addicted to using it, so investors will be inclined to apply the previous web 2.0 template and develop a blind faith that they will be able to monetize their engagement. Nobody knew how the social media companies were going to make money at one point, and now kids will sit and scroll through advertisements for hours every day until they give themselves anxiety and depression. Addict the users and the money will eventually come. Entrepreneur and author Matt Barrie sums up the stakes as lucidly as any I’ve seen in a recent piece (we’ll come back to him later):

“The “AI will take all your jobs” narrative isn’t an honest assessment of the technology, it’s a fundraising pitch. When you’re trying to justify a $730 billion valuation on $14 billion in annual losses, you can’t tell investors “we’ve built a pretty good autocomplete that helps people write emails faster.” You have to tell them you’re building a technology that will replace every human worker on earth because only a total addressable market of all human labour can justify the cheque they’re asking you to write.”

To achieve the coveted hopeless addiction of users, there needs to be an initial emotional draw. For social media companies, it was fun; you could see what your actual, real life friends were doing, you could check out some cute girl from your accounting class that you haven’t yet found the courage to talk to. For the model developers, the emotion is fear. This is the future, we are told. Either use Sam Altman’s products or be “left behind”. You saw what happened to all of those damned blue-collar tweekers in the rust belt right? That’s gonna be you, dawg, except you have 150k in student loan debt. You like eating fentanyl and beans for dinner? Then develop some “AI skills”. Use chatbots and agents for everything you do. Tell it your deepest fears and desires. They definitely won’t sell your data and your entire psychological profile to companies who want to use it to get you to buy stuff or otherwise manipulate you, you know like every single other tech company does. You better get “building”. Build an app to remind you to feed your dog and tell every dipshit you meet out there that you are a “builder”, and you will be at the top of the heap when the dust settles. The people who have guzzled this Kool-Aid are everywhere, and they are so easy to spot once you know what you are looking for. We’ll get to them shortly, but first let’s look at the messaging, the Kool-Aid itself:

“The technology is not replacing a single job but acting as a ‘general labor substitute for humans.” - Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO

“I can easily imagine a world where 30 to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future.” Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

“Learn to understand where the technology is going. If you’re not blindsided, you have a much better chance of adapting.” - Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO

AI ‘Hyperscalers’:

These are the people who work for the companies spending collectively close to a $trillion per year to build out AI infrastructure in hopes that those investments will pay off somehow, yet haven’t really told us how yet. In many cases, they are siphoning off a massive portion of the cash generated by profitable legacy businesses where they had very little competition, and using it to fund a completely new business model where competition is extremely intense. Basically they are taking a huge proportion of money that comes in from things like online advertising and search, and plowing it into data centers, chips, racks, cooling, power systems, and any and all other shit that goes inside a data center. They are throwing all of the eggs from some of the most competitively positioned and profitable businesses in history into one basket, in some cases risking the golden goose itself.

They need you be shitting your pants about AI, using it for every question that pops into your head. “Good morning Chatty, what color should I paint my nails today?” “Hi Claude, should I wipe my ass back to front or front to back?”…These companies make money when AI model companies use their data center infrastructure, or when the consumers and businesses use their own models. Finally, In some cases, they have invested billions of dollars in the model companies themselves, so when the valuation of OpenAI or Anthropic or others increases, this is reflected directly into rising earnings for the Hyperscalers, in one big incestuous circular ‘money’ printing machine. In short, their incentives are very similar to those of the model companies.

AI model companies (2026 version):

It’s not just about scaring the consumers into buying a subscription. The real psychological heavy lifting is convincing investors that businesses will be clamoring for these products so they can fatten profits by replacing human labor altogether with ‘agents’ who don’t need sleep, or benefits, or proper working conditions etc. (as we’ll discuss later). However, this is a fine needle to thread because the more you scare people, the less likely they might be to fork over their money to buy shares of an AI company when the time comes for these guys to cash out. Now that we are getting closer to IPO time, it makes sense for these fellas to dial back the fear mongering a tad. They don’t want to scare people too much, you see, because then you might see some sort of a consumer backlash. Not only do they need you to use their products, they also want your money. They want you to buy shares in their company when it’s time, so they can convert shares into US currency. Basically they want to trade places with you; they want you to have the shares of the company, and them to have the money. So, right on cue, they can be seen taking a few logs off the fire:

“I’m delighted to be wrong about this. I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened… I now think I understand more about why it hasn’t, and I’m obviously grateful, but that is an area where my intuitions were just off.” - Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO

“You can’t warn that AI is coming for jobs and sell unlimited expansion in the same breath”. - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Investors who are ‘overweight’ AI in their portfolios:

There is nothing wrong with talking book, and people having skin in the game is useful information, but confirmation bias is real, and so is salesmanship based on those beliefs. With so much of today’s incremental flow of assets going into “passive” investments, active managers who don’t want to look just like the index fund that charges investors 3 basis points instead 60, will need to find a few things to ‘overweight’, that is, own in a higher share than the index. With passive options becoming so cheap, being overweight the right areas at the right time is the only way to outperform the market and to justify the fee you are charing that is 20X more expensive.

The time period afforded to active managers for underperformance before they get fired has come down as passive options have become cheaper. With AI such a massive driver of recent past performance, and with the topic completely dominating headlines, it seems like there are many managers out there who want to tell clients that they have even more exposure than the market index to the thing that has been going up the fastest, and that everyone is talking about. This has largely worked for some of them since Chat GPT was released to the public in fall of 2022. Going overweight or underweight AI-based companies, even those that are incorrectly perceived as such, has been lucrative. These professional managers would be taking massive career risk by being underweight things that are going up, so they see an inventive to own the thing that has worked in the past, search for reasons to hold it as they go, and talk about how smart they were to make the decision and how amazing AI is every chance they can get.

In other words, if AI is so amazing, then they are also so amazing because they are smart enough to know AI is amazing and place bets on it. In reality, a lot of those active managers are just flipping coins and backfilling their conviction as they go. They don’t know how AI models work or which companies make the best ones for what costs or how companies or consumers will use AI, or how any company involved will actually make money from the shape the world eventually takes, but they have been right so far, and they have to try to convince everyone that it’s because they are smart and everyone else is crazy. So AI is amazing and anyone who doesn’t agree is missing something.

Investors who are ‘underweight’ AI or ‘short’:

Put 100 active managers in a room and have them flip a coin, anyone who guesses the coin-toss correctly gets to flip again, anyone who guesses incorrectly gets fired. It doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that to whittle the field down to one winner, one “genius”, you’ll only need to have each manager flip about 6 times. Put differently, the odds of flipping heads 6 times in a row is roughly 1 in 100. One of the people in that room will probably “accomplish” this. Everyone else will be at risk of getting fired, so the’ll have to craft a narrative about how bad heads is, how overvalued it is, how risky it is.

There are many managers who are charging fees 20x higher than an index fund, only to underperform that index. They have to convince you that they are the smart one’s and that the market, and all of the people still guessing the coin toss correctly are the silly one’s. They have to make all sorts of comparisons to the dot com crash, they have to get worked up about every single non-AI event or narrative that comes across the news: tariffs will ruin the economy and crash the AI market narrative. The Iran war will ruin the economy and crash the AI market narrative. AI itself will lead to unemployment and surging deficits and rising interest rates and ruin the economy…and crash the AI market narrative. It’s always something. When a manager is underweight something that has been going up, they are a stuck pig, they are slowly bleeding until the market changes, and the only way to buy time is to tell stories about how smart they are and how crazy everyone else is. So AI is bullshit and anyone who doesn’t agree is missing something, can’t you see?

Business owners who are fundamentally ‘long’ AI:

It seems everyone and their sister has located some abandoned office space left behind from the endurance of the work from home revolution, purchased a couple standing desks, and has since become the ‘founder’ of some AI start up. That’s awesome. We won’t spend too much time here, since it’s quite obvious that the survival of most of these roulette bets depend on riling people up; there are literally billboards around San Francisco, planes flying over the city carrying banners directing anyone who can read to ‘Stop Hiring Humans’. It’s 2026, anything for attention right? Douchebags. Moving on…

Business owners who are fundamentally ‘short’ AI:

For anyone interested in AI and how it will affect us all as individuals and as a society (I’d argue that those who are not interested are akin to the drowning man who is not interested in water), they will have probably by now found a few voices on the topic that have become “must read”. For me, towards the top of that list is a guy named Matt Barrie. I came across Matt listening to Hedge Fund manager Erik Townsend’s podcast MacroVoices (Episode 526). I find his writing, which can be found on Medium, to be some of the most logical and insightful of any I have seen on the topic of AI anywhere. His piece from March 2026 “Pay per PrAI: Insert Coin to Try Again”, is one of the most interesting, sober, and refreshing takes I have come across. It covers the totality of the AI locus of effect from the funding side, to the geopolitical side, to the technology side, and the human side, and contains plenty of little unabashed truths like this one:

“The trap is that AI doesn’t just automate the work, it breaks the feedback loop between making things and understanding them. A bit like getting someone else to do your homework, then wondering why you failed the exam.”

He does an excellent job touching on the reality of the unit economics facing the major players in the space, and describes the interplay between the state of the technology, the business models, and the practicality of the end user experience. I simply have not seen a more comprehensive examination of stuff like this anywhere else:

“The moment users see what their AI habit actually costs per token, especially when the model goes off on an unproductive loop, or tries fifteen different approaches to fix a font that’s two pixels off, they’re going to rage quit. Unlike hiring a human developer on Freelancer, where you can say “fix this before I release the milestone payment”, with AI you’re paying for every single wasted token on the way to nowhere, with no recourse and no accountability. Wait to see the reaction when vibe coders discover their app is broken and every reroll to fix it costs a hundred dollars, and the fifth reroll breaks what the third one fixed.”

“…the moment you move to pay-per-token, you make the switching cost argument even better. On a $20 subscription, inertia keeps people around, they’ve already paid, might as well use it. On pay per token, every single query is a new purchasing decision. Why wouldn’t you shop around? Why wouldn’t you try the open-source model that’s 90% as good and free? Why wouldn’t you run it locally and pay nothing? Why wouldn’t you hire a ‘freelancer’ at that point on a fixed price project and make it their problem to fix? The subscription model bleeds money but at least it creates stickiness.” - Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.

Really good stuff right? I highly recommend the essay to anyone who is remotely interested in how the future is going to look, or really to anyone who enjoys reading something other than the back of a cereal box. Seriously, it’s extremely insightful and entertaining, even funny at times. But do you see it? Our boy is the founder and CEO of a company that provides outsourced/ crowdsourced tasks to business, most of which are technology related. Could you possibly conceive of a business model that could be more at risk of becoming extinct if AI becomes capable of even a fraction of what its promoters and propagandists claim?

To be clear, that doesn’t mean shit. It means literally nothing when it comes to the objective value, truth, accuracy, or predictiveness of what Barrie is writing. It has nothing to do with his argumentation. But we are all human, and we all have biases. It is not unreasonable to be cognitively aware of the potential source of people’s biases, while at the same time examining the merits of their arguments with complete objectivity. That, right there, is the one thing I would like readers to take away from this essay. The world will be a better place if we could all become better at separating a person’s incentives from their logic, compartmentalizing them, examining each, and then putting them back together as they were. This is how we will come to better understand our objective reality in a rapidly changing world. If you’d like, you can stop reading right here and roll a big fat doobie out of the paper you are reading this on, as long as you keep this paragraph. Anyway, Matt Barrie sounds like he’s the man, and his writing is an invaluable signal in a noisy cacophony of shitty takes about technology whether I agree with all of his conclusions or not. If you are trying to think deeply about how all the pieces fit together, then ignore Mr. Barrie’s work at your peril.

People looking for attention post ‘Citrini report’:

In February 2026 Citrini Research partnered with Alap Shah and published their report “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” on Substack, which quickly went massively ‘viral’. I hate to use that term here since it’s usually applied to some stupid ass short-form brain rot video of some moron’s hot take on the outrage du jour or some video of someone’s asshole kid fake fighting a guy in a gym or something. The Citrini report was a rare example of something being both excellent and popular, like a movie that is both objectively awesome, like best-picture awesome, and also having blockbuster appeal and popularity. The Citrini report was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The report was written as a thought experiment in a near future where investment in AI causes rapid replacement of labor, falling profits, more investment into AI labor replacement, and leads to all sorts of financial accidents within the technology funding structure, bankruptcy and obsolesce within businesses models previously thought to be air-tight, and many other second and third-order effects. I recall making my way through the first few pages and like many, I’m sure, found myself clenching my ass together in a sudden flood of jealousy and genuine admiration, wishing that is was me who wrote it. Not that I posses a comparable depth of subject matter expertise, but just because it was genuinely provocative, creative, and insightful.

Rarely does one see a serious piece of work become that widely read and talked about by other serious people in consequential roles and institutions. The piece literally moved markets. If you were anyone in a role of consequence within the entire software space the week it came out, you heard about it. Someone probably knocked on the door of a conference room and interrupted your meeting to tell you about it. The vast majority of the smartest, most successful people on the planet will never in their lives create a piece of communication that gets that much attention. Warren Buffet has moved markets when he has spoken before, but it’s usually only just one or a handful of companies. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the only human beings capable of affecting financial markets to the degree the Citrini report did, outside of the threat of nuclear war, are probably Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, and maybe Kevin Warsh.

You can bet your tight little tushy on what happened next. Those guys got the glory. Phone’s almost certainly ringing off the hook, podcast invites, subscriber growth explosion, everything people who traffic in online content generation dream of. So now everyone has to have a take, and because the Citrini report got the attention partly because of it’s provocativeness and extremeness, everyone has to jump over each other to make something more wild, more sensational, more scary. I’ll se your 20% unemployment forecast and raise. How about 40%? How about starvation? Bro, have you read that new banger, “The 2029 Global Cannibalism Crisis”?! We are no longer chasing truth and forecast accuracy within a reasonable distribution of outcomes, we are chasing likes and attention on the internet. Everyone please calm the f*ck down.

People on social media who are motivated by attention:

AI has become an identity for some people. Scared shitless of being “left behind”, lacking confidence in their intuition and ability to adapt, they use constant AI chatter as a signal that they will be the new ‘winners’, even though in many (most) cases, they have been the losers in the previous iteration of the rate race. This is why they are constantly posting on the internet in the first place. We shouldn’t let their insecurities stress us out.

These are the people who want to call themselves a “founder” and talk about all the “founders” they speak to on a regular basis, cosplaying as some silicon valley titan because, frankly, its a new status symbol. They spend all their disposable income on DoorDash because making simple, healthy, home-cooked meals takes away from their ‘productivity’. They will not be able to afford a starter home until they are 60. Even the classic dating market hack of living at home until you are 30 and buying a sweet car to impress hot chicks has lost it’s luster since cars have become absurdly more expensive with all the technology and upgraded ability to check your LinkdIn account while listening to two productivity podcasts at the same time, while your lane assist makes sure you don’t ‘accidentally’ on purpose swerve into oncoming traffic.

If you want to learn what a woman’s breast feels like by the time you are 35 these days, you have to call yourself a ‘founder’ in your various online social accounts. Listen to Gary V. Go to a Goodwill and find some Banana Republic button-down shirts for 5 bucks and sell them on eBay for 10. Congratulations, you are a founder. Buy some condoms. In fact, slap one on before you leave your mom’s house in the morning to go get your $12 latte because as Reese Bobby, and every online founder knows, “it’s the founder who gets paid, and it’s the founder who get’s laid,” or something like that.

What almost all of these AI mongers on social media are really doing is hoping to farm engagement so they can ‘build’ enough capital to buy their second pair of underwear. They want you nervous so you click. They want you to obsess over the future you are not prepared for (none of us are), so that you read their nonsense posts or watch their nonsense videos, or their nonsense stream or podcasts or whatever, so they make their $200 per month nut on social media and call themselves a founder in hopes of one day passing on their genes. Let’s just ignore them. The constant attention seeking and narcissism-economy are the epitome of late stage consumer capitalism. No one writing about building something for “likes” on the internet is building shit. They just want to be able to tell other people they are a “builder” because it’s a status symbol since no one can afford a house anymore. Fight me, see what happens.

Random employers wanting to offer less pay:

Companies have every incentive to rile people up and create downward wage pressure by stirring up what I refer to as “AI anxiety”, or “robot anxiety”. I’ve called it this for years, perhaps someone who works at a newspaper is more formally credited with ‘coining it’, since that’s half the job now in the attention driven, ‘personal brand’ economy. I couldn’t not possibly give less of a shit. Anyway, the more you think your job is at risk of being replaced by some computer, the less likely you are to ask for a raise, the less likely you are to quit and go search elsewhere, since you may believe those job openings will be filled with an AI.

You’ll be more likely to sit in your cube and scramble to figure out how to ‘automate workflows’, since the internet has told you receptively, ad nauseam, that “Your job will not be replaced by an AI, it will be replaced by a human using an AI”. So now you think you are in a race with the dude on the other side of the cube wall to see who can come up with a way to automate both of your jobs. If you think that if you are the first to catch the rabbit, that you’ll be rewarded with praise and job security, I’d suggest, at the very least, considering that perhaps, that might be a naive view that you ought to reconsider. It rubs the lotion on its skin.

Then you have increasing evidence that companies are demanding ‘AI skills’ with new job postings and making it some sort of filtering layer for the privilege to work for them, even though they too have no idea what any of it even means (for example, see “Job Interviews are Becoming AI Tests” - Financial Times, June 14, 2026). The FT article quotes Sinohe Terrero, chief financial officer and chief operating officer at Envoy; “We have disqualified people who are not crossing the AI bar at the senior level, especially. We need people not to be afraid to learn new things.” You’re not afraid are you? You little bitch. Apparently some see this prerequisite as “a sign of intellectual curiosity”. In reality, it’s a sign you are willing to sacrifice the the foundational efficacy of your cognitive ability for the sake of productivity, measured by more widgets per hour.

There is plenty of research suggesting that using AI will make you stupid. (Please see Tater #9: ‘AI Brain’ and Universal Suffrage). Is there a single soul on this green earth arguing otherwise? Does anyone actually think that AI makes you more intelligent, thoughtful, insightful? No. Its basically just “hey, try this drug, it will turn you into a moron but you will be more productive at your shitty job.” The corporate AI test interview is just another request for this week’s code word to enter the party, an opportunity to recite the shibboleth du jour. This month it’s an AI test. Last month you had to verbally demonstrate your commitment to ‘ESG’ or ‘DEI’. It’s not about ‘intellectual curiosity’, but rather its exact opposite: ideological purity. It’s just the latest way to determine an employee’s corporate social credit score. It’s bullshit. Piss off, bologna face.

The truth is, people who sit at the top of companies are scared shitless too. They have no idea how the external environment and competitive landscape will shake out. They are experiencing an external locus of control to a degree they probably never have before, recent trade wars and shooting wars notwithstanding. They are seeing tech companies lay people off left and right, seemingly refusing to consider the fact that maybe those tech companies just hired too many people in 2022 when the labor market wise tight as shit and it was hard to find enough people. Or maybe those tech companies know that they are either spending so much of the golden eggs on some new hoped-for theoretical business model that they need to be as lean as possible if they are going to have a shot at making it out the other side. Or maybe they are situated elsewhere on the value chain where their business model is based solely on ‘switching costs’ and friction that they know something wicked this way comes, and they are already going into survival mode. Either way you cut it, it benefits the company you for for you to be a little rattled and nervous when it comes to asking for raises and promotions. Would anyone care to argue otherwise?

People who are scared shitless of losing their job:

These are the people who believe their own bullshit more than anyone, because they have to. There is no doubt that these people have a legitimate concern, and I am not trying to downplay or be dismissive of that. It is not unreasonable for them to be afraid. Maybe they saw their parents go through a sort of slow motion version of this new labor replacing trend, whether that be industrial automation or outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to Mexico, and later to Asia. But by giving into these fears and panic-using the products of the companies trying to replace them, they are playing right into the game, and in many cases trying to cheat their way to economic safety, which rarely works.

They have convinced themselves that by asking these chatbots to brainstorm every outfit they put on, every ‘difficult conversation’ they must have, that they are somehow bolstering themselves for an uncertain future. Maybe they are using AI to try to set up streams of ‘passive income’ in the ‘creator economy’. Maybe they use it to create slop YouTube videos by the dozen. Maybe they have it spit out nonsense dookie articles to post on Substack, or design an agent to ‘engage’ with other people’s content and leave moronic non-comments trying to trick people into thinking they actually read something. ‘Posting’ is the way to salvation, if you have ever listened to internet marketing gurus like Gary V. Why not have AI do it for you?

Maybe the people who are most afraid of losing their jobs are genuinely trying to be the best at actual work uses so they will be the last one thrown off the side of the boat by their employers. But if AI is as good as everyone claims, it’s not going to matter who burnt the most tokens trying to pretend to be a coder. “Learn to code” was the mantra 10 years ago, and now even those people are being replaced left and right.

Now the new mantra is for everyone to “start a business” and then brag about it on the internet. Go build an app and call it a company. You know what the world definitely needs more of? Apps. We simply to not have enough little square tiles on the background of the smartphones that we are hopelessly, disgustingly addicted to. I read about some guy who built an app to remember to feed his dog. I shit you not. I read some post the other day that a woman had created an app to promote relaxation and neurological reset. Apparently this dipshit has not heard of breathing. But when you use these AI coding tools to cosplay as a software engineer, you get to tell yourself and potential employers that you are ‘building the skills of the future’. I’m going to build an app that uses weather patterns and astrology to suggest how many times I should wipe my ass after my morning coffee. The best part is, I get to go around telling people that I’m ‘building’ something, that I’m, dare I say, a builder! And being a ‘builder’ is almost as good as being a ‘founder’ in this moronic new social-signaling raindance we all feel compelled to do.

Where do we go from here?

It’s fun to be a bit of a silly goose sometimes, but what I’m really not trying to do here is shit on people who are genuinely trying to create something, something that they are excited about, or even discourage them fro talking about it. I want hope people go build apps. Go build the dumbest, shittiest app imaginable, because most good ideas start with a bad idea. The app that reminds you to wipe your dogs as after a sloppy one before he sits on your white couch just might be the foundational architecture for an app that reminds old people to take their pills or something, which could save someone’s life (I’m quite confident the latter already exists, but you get the point).

There’s nothing wrong with learning new skills, in fact, it’s the basis of wealth creation and human progress. With so many charlatans out there preaching the sermons of envy and coming up with new ways to take, confiscate, or otherwise separate people from the wealth they have created, we need thinkers, tinkerers, experimenters, and learners more than ever. At the end of the day, knowledge is wealth, and we can make more of it like we always have. But what we don’t need is people projecting their fears and insecurities onto everyone else, making everything a performance, and turning the levels of collective anxiety up for their own personal gain like the world is some zero-sum game and they have to ensure they get a bigger slice of the pie by taking it from someone else. We can make the pie bigger. It’s easier to bake pies when we are focused on baking pies, and not distracted and riled up by other people’s incentives to bullshit us for attention or money. Can we please, please all calm the f*ck down so we can grow the pie?

What is the point of writing anything in a world where less and less people read, and computers can produce “writing” that is practically indistinguishable from human output for essentially zero marginal cost? Isn’t this exactly the wrong time in human history to spend one’s time becoming a writer? Moreover, in a world where everything has to be optimized and monetized, is there any intrinsic benefit to the process of writing itself? If we decide to share our thoughts and ideas with the world and no one reads, no one subscribes, and no one validates our fragile little egos, have we wasted out time? Could’t we have used that time to build another stupid app or gather an audience or gain attention to extract some monetary value from the internet somehow?

People have been writing since long before the internet, and social media, and screen culture-induced misery and madness were conceived. Writing is both downstream and upstream of thinking, and thinking is one of the most human and most necessary things we can do as we move into this weird new world where we are surrounded by people eager to let the machines and the owners of those machines think for them. What follows will be an examination of what motivates us to write about the world, and what readers can expect when they subscribe to my little writing project, Tater Stand Macro. I didn’t really mean to write a fifteen-thousand word essay on why I enjoy writing and why you should to, but as the great Ice Cube once said “Ain’t nothin’ to it, gangsta rap made me do it.”

Though it was perhaps not exactly clear to me at the time, I started writing this project for two reasons: 1. To figure out what I actually think about how the world works, and 2. To inspire or otherwise assist other people in figuring out what they actually think about how the world works. In other words, as my little tagline from day one states, “I study the world, think about the future, connect the dots, and talk shit. So you don’t have to.” The shit talking is a very important piece of the puzzle. We need to be able to laugh and have fun and tell the truth in a world where so much of what we do requires the heavy lift of fake politeness and forced positivity. This is a place where we can speak about the world truthfully and see things the way they actually are. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” I see fraud. I smell bullshit.

My main goal here is helping people understand the world they live in through macroeconomic analysis, societal observation, humor, light-hearted cynicism, aggressive piss-taking, and rational optimism. I’ll do do my best to provide thoughtful and original insights, looking at new pieces of the puzzle as we come across them, as well as examining familiar pieces in new and thought-provoking ways to see where they fit in the bigger picture. In doing so, I hope to increase my own and others’ ability to experience intuition, insofar as we can take this to mean drawing on a broad array of thoughts, feelings, experiences, ideas, and concepts where there may be a common thread, thus rendering us less susceptible to lies and manipulation. We’ll never achieve perfect attribution of insight/ knowledge, but I hope to connect the dots in interesting and intellectually invigorating ways that will help us to navigate the increasingly complex and fast changing world we inhabit. If I can help others to understand the world around them, the systems of power, the causes for our collective madness, to an extent that brings them some clarity and reduces the constant confusion and delusion and anxiety, then I will have done my job.

I want to keep digging, to liberate myself and others from the spells of those who wish to manipulate us and lie to us about our very reality. I’m not quite sure if this plane is going to crash or not, but I want to make sure I get my own oxygen mask on so I can then begin to help others with theirs. Author Anne Lamott highlights this sentiment in her book Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: “Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else,” and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story. Risk freeing someone else. Not everyone will be glad you did. Members of your family and other critics may wish you had kept your secrets. Oh, well, what are you going to do? Get it all down. Let it pour out of you onto the page.” Author David Epstein describes his motivation in a way that also really resonates with me: “I…realized that I was not the type of person who wanted to spend my entire life learning one or two things new to the world, but rather the type who wanted to constantly learn things new to me and share them.”

I’m certainly not saying I have it all figured out, but I do have a pretty well-honed and battle tested ability to notice when someone is either being manipulative and mendacious, or ignorantly fallacious in their logic. Often the latter is the natural result of the logic and argumentation not being their own, but rather a scaffolding of disparate talking points assigned to them by the weasels on their television or little pocket TV. I don’t necessarily need to know how to build a bridge to recognize that one will not hold weight, and this matters for anyone using that structure. As Thomas Sowell put it: “Even more dangerous than ignorance, however, is fallacious certitude, which can afflict people at all educational levels and all IQ levels. While we may not see our own fallacies, the saving grace in this situation is that we can often see other people’s fallacies much more clearly - and they can see ours.

In a world with inevitably fallible human beings, with inevitably different viewpoints and different fragments of consequential knowledge, our ability to correct each other can be essential to preventing our making fatally dangerous mistakes as individuals, or as a society.” In other words, our willingness and ability to call balls and strikes, while at once running the risk of getting us cast out of the tribe to walk the frozen tundra alone, may be the very necessary adaptation on which our survival depends. Blindly accepting bullshit, while once socioeconomically advisable, is now potentially fatal, and I don’t consider this to be hyperbole.

Given the vast systems of power in in place, and the way that we insist on choosing to use technology, it is as easy as ever to fall into the trap of our own conditioning, like the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, whose behaviors and thought patterns are largely based on their ‘hypnopaedic conditioning’, or short nonsensical catchphrases played on repeat while thy slept since they were babies. What ridiculous, illogical things have we been led to believe, deliberately or otherwise, that are simply not true, or not the whole truth? We’re here to find out. Viewed from a single vantage point, every cube appears as a square. We’re going to grab these cubes and turn them over and look at each and every side, and see how we can stack them together to create a more robust foundation and structural world view than the one we currently have.

All of my essays, my “Taters”, are loosely related, and pertain to the big picture as I try to highlight some perspectives that seem to get missed, but that I think would be beneficial for people to ponder, even if (especially if) it is presented in a way that makes them slightly uncomfortable. I hope my work is worthy of your time. In these pages I’ll provide unorthodox takes on the the economy, society, incentive structures, and power structures, usually the type of perspective they don’t teach you in school. I want to write about the types of things that I like to read about in a way that I like to read about them but don’t get to enough. I enjoy learning about the world, its people, its systems, and how our human monkey brains lead us down the paths we choose. I like making sense of the world through observation and learning about what makes us human, extracting the essence of something and determining how it relates to the rest of reality.

I like reading and writing about it in a way that is truthful and authentic, and amusing for myself and anyone who cares to read what I have to say. Sometimes I enjoy concocting frivolously evidenced theories and sharing them with people who may have more knowledge to help me either build my scaffolding or help me tear it down and burn it for heat. I treat my theories and ideas as hypotheses to be tested. This helps me take advantage of what David Epstein refers to as the “generation effect,” highlighting that “struggling to generate an answer on your own, even a wrong one, enhances subsequent learning”. (Perhaps we should keep this in mind in this new world where we are spoon-fed answers to everything).

Sometimes I enjoy constructing argumentation and articulating it more passionately and confidently than I truly believe just to present it openly for debate. Sometimes I even like to present my ideas and opinions as if they were immutable facts just to see where the conversation goes. I don’t do this to deceive or fallaciously persuade or to push some agenda. I do it to wrestle, to spar, like puppies who snarl and bite each other’s ears just to practice learning how to be an animal in this world. I’m a silly goose. You’ll get used to it. This is my way of making sense of the world, mapping a land in order to find it. One of the best if not THE best question I have ever heard a reporter ask a professional athlete was when a guy asked the talented by controversial and conflicted UFC GOAT Jonathan ‘Bones’ Jones if he was a good guy trying to be bad, or a bad guy trying to be good. Similarly, writing is my way of figuring out if I am a silly goose trying to be serious, or a serious goose trying to be silly.

I find that one of the most interesting ways to learn is by simply observing the human species in their (extremely) unnatural habitat. I am just the observer. The guy holding the lantern as the reader digs in the dark. While I try to be a student of the whole world, I’m an American, so I tend to be especially critical of American society and culture. I think despite our goofy habits and rituals and behaviors, it’s the best country in the world. I assure you that my criticism does not come from a place of anger, though I can see how the tone can be read that way. I like to view our society and culture like an alien would, seeing it for the first time, objectively. I suppose I see a lot of what we call society as an amalgamation of counterproductive behaviors by individuals that are somewhat nudged or manipulated by government and corporations, and if I can shed some light on them through ridicule, mockery, and scorn, then maybe someone will read this and not fall into the various traps, or at least be able to more objectively weigh the tradeoffs involved in certain decisions.

As renowned investor Charlie Munger said, “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Similarly, there are plenty of Substacks out there claiming to teach you how to be rich. I just want to teach people how not to be poor. Maybe that’s a better place to start?

I think it’s worth repeating that my primary brushes that I use to paint my mosaic, my canvas of the world for our understanding, include ridicule, mockery, and scorn. This is goin to take some getting used to for some readers. As I explained in one of my earlier essays, Tater #5: The Triffin Dilemma Rules Everything Around Me:

“To use a particularly cringy piece of useless vernacular, here is a little ‘trigger warning’: we are going to take a pretty hard piss on the behaviors of the average American (a fictitious person who mathematically does not exist). Please do not conflate this with my criticizing any real, flesh-and-blood human beings, even if any of these behaviors remind you of someone you know or love. We are all human, and we all have some shitty behaviors and habits some of the time. I am guilty of many of these actions and behaviors described below. The idea is to be aware of them, be aware of the positive alternatives, and do better tomorrow than we did today. But this idea of taking responsibility and making small steps toward progress is often lost on many people, the fictitious average person included. We can criticize behaviors and choices in the abstract, and even at the personal level when appropriate, and we can still do this while showing compassion and empathy and kindness to every individual, regardless of how shitty their behaviors are. As Lincoln said, “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.” Nevertheless, its important to understand where we are and why we find ourselves in this situation if we want to figure out how to move forward in our lives, individually and as a country. So we are going to take a big dirty rotten piss all over the behaviors and mindset of a typical American. Strap in.”

Perhaps a shorter way to say this is, as the pastor and author Warren Wiersbe put it: “Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.”

The foremost goal is to provide the reader with differing perspectives on the way we live, from a detached, distanced, objective vantage point. I think what we are likely to find is that much of the way we live, and do, and believe, and are, is counterproductive. Counterproductive for our finances, our health, our relationships, our happiness. In other words, blindly following the crowd and its institutions and customs is really not all that it’s cracked up to be. I want to inspire readers to live a life that is true to ourselves, rather than what they think is expected of us. As John Stuart mill wrote:

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

Clarity and curiosity:

This project (this Substack) is not about me. But also in a way, it is. As I mentioned above, one of my main motivations was to figure out what I actually think about how the world works. This was inspired by the words of Joan Didion who said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” George Orwell takes it a step further: “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” Writing not only helps me synthesize and scrutinize my own thoughts and beliefs, but it helps me to clarify the things I need to learn more about, and discover and prioritize what is truly interesting to me in certain seasons of my life.

When I’m writing consistently, I’m usually more consistent about reading, and observing, and thinking in general. Writing ends up being a means to an end to guide me in my education abut how the world works, but in doing so, I am also learning more about myself. As Ashleigh Brilliant observed,”In order to discover who you are, first learn who everybody else is - and you’re what’s left.” Observing society and its people and their behaviors from an empathetic yet detached and objective vantage point allows me to figure out who those people are, and therefore to figure out who I am. In a different way though, this project is about us. While sometimes I’d like to separate myself from that about us which disgusts me, I can not escape the fact that I am but “a drop of water attempting to analyze the sea,” as Will Durant once said.

So far, my formal education, my career, and my range of interests has comprised an extremely broad course of study, which has afforded me a rather unique combination of rationality and imagination, putting me in a position to see the forest for the trees to employ a useful cliche. In other words, I don’t have a niche, not in work, or in hobbies, or in life. For some reason I have never found some specific topic that moves me to specialize. I’ve always harbored a degree of jealously for those whose specific path becomes clear to them, who have been inspired to specialized and hone in deeply to one subject or one particular area of interest. That ain’t me. As Davis Epstein writes (as styled by mathematician Freeman Dyson), “We need both focused frogs and visionary birds.” The upside, as we’ll revisit in more depth shortly, is that looking at various issues from many different angles or disciplines allows me to synthesize and interpret information in fairly unique ways and to navigate biases and programming that we risk falling into as a result of extreme specialization. It also invites intuition and renders our built-in bullshit detector much more hyper-sensitive.

I want to leverage by range of interests to discover new things, new perspectives, and inspire curiosity in myself and others. According to Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s fascinating article in Big Think (How curiosity rewires your brain for change - May 12, 2025), our brains’ dopaminergic system is activated when we are curious about learning or discovering something new. It literally makes us feel good. So why not get that dopamine hit we are all fiending for by learning something, anything, possibly something that could “grow corn” one day, rather than wasting our lives staring at social media or making mindless purchases online, or any of the other much more damaging, manipulative, and pernicious forms of dopamine activation that have been designed for us by people who do not have our best interests in mind?

While I’ve been frequently tempted to return to the classroom to scratch this itch to be a student of the world, my career has placed my in an interesting position to be able to study many interlocking subjects and disciplines (or lack thereof, as some of society’s more credentialed might say), one of which being the utter moral corruption and subversion that has taken place within the American higher education system. (See Tater #10: College is Bullshit. Tell Your Friends.). Therefore, my ceaseless curiosity and craving for knowledge must be satiated by some means other than formal education, which I no longer feel is available to me. Perhaps that’s all for the better, though. As Will Durant put it, “It is evident that education cannot be completed in school or college or university; these offer us only the tools and maps for those farther-reaching studies that lead to the control, the enjoyment, and the understanding of life.” Perhaps author Louis L’Amour captures my sentiment more succinctly: “school was interfering with my education”.

In my day job, I study markets and investment opportunities, but this is impossible without going upstream. The way I see it, financial markets are downstream of macroeconomics, which unfortunately these days is downstream of policy, which is downstream of politics, which is downstream of culture. It’s certainly not just a one-way flow, and all of thee things influence each other in both and all directions, but stylistically that seems like a decent causal sequence with which to view the world. I don’t know that you need to go too far upstream into culture to make actionable investment recommendations, but it probably doesn’t hurt, and I find it all fascinating. I also find myself increasingly interested in looking even further upstream for clues as to how this whole experience works, where Paul Kingsnorth notes that, “Culture is downstream from faith. Faith is downstream from mysticism.” Within this continuum, there are a few of the specific topics that seem to give me my dopamine fix as I dig in the dirt, some areas you can expect to read about as I share what I learn on this Substack. Psychologist and author Jordan B. Peterson writes that “It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite supply of the latter. These are some of the broad areas of interest that I have made friends with:

Macroeconomics - I like to read and write about the structural trends in the economy and how all the pieces fit together. The big AI infrastructure buildout is supporting the economy and the stock market, yet consumer confidence is close to all time lows. AI is boosting the market, making people who own stocks feel richer and keep spending, while a growing number of folks can’t rub two pennies together. The top 10% do 50% of the consumption, while the bottom 50% can’t come up with $1,000 if their refrigerator takes a shit. Carmakers apparently have deemed these people economically irrelevant, as the average new car is now 50k. Some big companies don’t even make sedans. Meanwhile the median house is around 400k, and the gap between the income required to buy that house and what the average first time buyer makes is close to a record. A large percentage of people seem to be throwing their hands up, gambling, subscribing to financial nihilism, Yolo economics, the rise of fraud and creator economy gurus and grifters, new opportunities for degeneracy pop up daily. Nobody wants kids anymore. Does all of this self-correct somehow? Is technology making it worse or better? How are we going to pay all of this debt? Do we need to raise the retirement age? Should the world just try to be more like Japan? Does Japan need to figure out a way to grow its economy, or maybe just shrink it gracefully? For more on this, please see Tater #4: Inflation Makes Us Poorer. Stop Believing Their Bullshit.

Social Psychology and the madness of crowds - I find it fascinating to observe all of the ways our ancient monkey brains affect our behaviors, and watching the way humans behave in groups might be the perfect microcosm for this. Why are people increasingly unhappy, anxious, and depressed? Why is it so easy to stir up emotions in a group? Why does group energy and physical strength rise when people chant and move in unison? Why are people willing to do things in the trance of a group that they would never do alone? Why do people act like those painted boys in the Lord of the Flies when they congregate behind their own perceived righteousness. How easy is it for people and institutions to induce mass formation psychosis? Is there any limit to what people can be manipulated into believing if the person to their right and left believes it too? In what ways is the world just one big Asch conformity experiment? One big Abilene paradox? What does the Stanley Milgram experiment tell us about our blind obedience to authority? What does the Stanford Prison Experiment tell us about how we behave when we are the one’s in a position of authority? Does technology render us all more at risk of mass psychogenic illness? Have you ever heard about the dancing plagues in Europe a few hundred years ago where thousands of people simultaneously broke into dance for hours until they collapsed? Is this going to happen in a major US city tomorrow? What are the odds? Are we all just a bunch of Agent Smiths from the Matrix, “so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it”? By observing and describing these things, I hope to help people to name and liberate themselves from the various social pathologies and recognize their own social conditioning.

Social conditioning - How much of our actions and behaviors are just the product of social conditioning, decades of media messaging and propaganda, and weird customs and rituals? After having recently finally read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, I can’t help but ask this question constantly throughout the day. For me, a key insight was to learn to empathize with people’s previous mental conditioning and be willing to extend some grace, patience, and tolerance. For example, the characters Lenina and Linda are both awful. They are annoying, judgmental, ignorant, promiscuous drug addicts who find fault in the behaviors of anyone who walks against the crowd. They are unoriginal, unquestioning, closed minded conformist drones who show suspicion and open derision of anything outside the prescribed norms, the kind of people who are easy to detest in real life. But we forgive these morons. We see the good in them. The reason is that we know before we meet either of them is that their behavior is largely based on their ‘hypnopaedic conditioning’, or stupid little platitudes played on repeat while thy slept since they were infants.

I see the conditioning everywhere: credit card debt, fancy cars, tons and tons of plastic throw away-clothes, people working shitty jobs they hate to afford big houses they are never in because they are always at the shitty job. Work and consume until you’re exactly 65 and then do nothing but get fat and wait to die. Why do we do it? Is it Huxley conditioning, or the Abilene paradox where we all do these things because we think everyone else wants to do them? Are there any alternatives worth exploring? Will we end up being the 6th monkey getting beat up for trying to eat a banana like the one in the famous “five monkey experiment”/ fable (I’ll describe this below for the unfamiliar)?

Demographics - Why are people choosing to have less children and does it matter? Do the people in power really want citizens to have more children to ensure that the national debt and Ponzi scheme welfare system can be serviced and sustained? Or are they actually still on the depopulation for the sake of the planet nonsense? What is the point of population growth other than debt sustainability and and war fighting? Now that wars will increasingly be fought with drones and robot dogs (see below), do we really need as many people? What does the world look like in 30 years if birth rates keep plummeting? Will there be more wealth per person because we are splitting a bigger pie amongst fewer pie eater? What about housing? Will there be more houses per person? I believe I read somewhere that one of the biggest mathematical drivers of the fertility rate decline is the increasing instances of people having zero children. Are many these people going to end up empty of meaning and absolutely miserable? Will they be more likely to lash out and riot because they have less to lose? Or is having kids overrated and something we are just socially conditioned to do?

Politics - Something about myself I’m not particularly proud of: I cant stand when people sing in public. Even at concerts. Especially at concerts. Who are these sociopaths who want to pollute the sounds that are going into my head? But I don’t wish for these people to be punished or stopped from doing this in any way, especially by the state. I think the world wold be better place if more of us were willing to make that distinction. Does anyone have any principles anymore, or are we just engaged in one big tribal pissing contest to try to force our preferences onto one another at the barrel of a gun? Are people genetically predisposed in some way to believing or identifying with certain flavors of nonsensical horse shit? Was the MK Ultra project not ended but just mission-reoriented from focusing on individual mind control to focusing on ways to induce collective psychosis with the aim of the constant perception of political equilibrium to perpetuate the illusion of choice and keep the meat in the seats and off the streets?

Is the complete rebalancing of the American political left and right on issues the biggest social experimental psyops in history? What explains such a rapid realignment of the two factions of the uniparty among ideological lines? One can not help but notice that those currently nominally “in charge” are a ragtag group of former Clinton era type democrats. The team identified as a far-right nightmare team of fascist avengers are what very recently would have been considered left-of center, and in fact, self identified as such. Do some certain types of reforms need to come from the right of the isle just as other certain types need to come from the left? What percentage of people could name three things on which they disagree with their favorite political party? Is universal suffrage actually desirable in a world of widespread, technology-induced, deliberately chosen stupidity?

Power structures - I’m not interested in mapping the specifics of various conspiracy theories, rather, I’m interested in the incentives that cause them and the underlying forces driving the results we see out there. I’m not trying to find evidence of a secret handshake, but rather to understand the underlying instincts that compel people to participate in various unseen power structures either knowingly, or (more likely) unknowingly, like a pack of lions hunting a heard of antelope or wildebeests. Is the media so polarizing and supportive of the political status quo because people have become stupid and tribal, or are people stupid and tribal because of the media we choose to consume? When did a strong plurality of healthcare professionals in this country go from “when I grow up, I want to help sick people” to “I want to be a paid lackey for companies who make pills!”? Is there some sort of midnight ceremony to induct people into the blood cult, or is it a more natural progression that comes with age or something? Genuinely curious. What percentage of college faculty and staff are actual radicals who want to undermine the country as we know it?

Money and wealth - What actually is money, and what does wealth actually mean? Is it a fixed pie? If you find a way to create more wealth, must I therefore have less? I found a wonderful thought experiment that demonstrates how this amorphous concept of wealth creation actually works in a 2004 essay by Paul Graham called “How to Make Wealth: What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money”:

“Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history. Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for it. In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven’t made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was.”

How do money and wealth relate? Is money really a store of wealth? Why do we have an institution called the Federal Reserve that we task with deliberately eroding the value of our stored wealth by targeting a 2% debasement of our money each and every year, even though they usually go way over that 2%? Could our economy still function if we didn’t let these institutions rob and steal from poor people like this? Is gold the best form of money the world has ever seen? Or is that Bitcoin?

Future of work - The way we work is stupid. I don’t think human beings were meant to be crammed into cube farms in “open office plans” where they sit in a chair for 8 hours to accomplish what they could probably do in 3 if it weren’t for all of the noise and distractions. Furthermore, corporate America seems to have mostly become one big Abilene paradox where we do stupid things because we think that’s what everyone else want to do, and nobody seems to have the courage or creativity to question any of it. For example, it made no godamn sense whatsoever for people to wake up, put on a costume, and spend an hour in a car each way to go to this cube farm only to be needlessly distracted, when most of those tasks could have been done remotely.

Covid was the catalyst to try something different and only now do we realize how stupid we were before. There seems little doubt that AI will soon be able to complete most of our little office drudgery. What will we do with the time we have been given back? (please see Tater #3: You Will Work 20 Hours a Week and Like it.)Find new forms of drudgery? Watch ads on our phones? Learn to hang drywall so houses don’t need to cost a half million dollars? When the tractors arrived, we stopped working on farms with our whole bodies, and moved to the factories to work with our hands. Then, the machines arrived, and we moved to the cube farms to work with our minds. Now that the artificial minds have arrived, what part of our biology is left? Bodies, then hands, then minds. What will we use to do work in the future? Our souls? Or will we go back to using our hands and bodies more? Maybe we’ll go from the cube farm to the bathtub full of goo when they plug us into the Matrix.

Artificial “intelligence” - Everyone seems to be interested in AI, much like the drowning man who is interested in water. What I have very little interest in is learning and writing about how we all need to use AI to make spreadsheets faster or cosplay as a software engineer or “automate workflows”. I just want to talk about what kind of open-air insane asylum I’ll be walking into in 5 years when I walk out my front door each day. I want to learn how technology is going to reshape our brains, our social conventions, our institutions, as well as the prevailing geopolitical order. (Please see Tater #9: ‘AI Brain’ and Universal Suffrage).

When it comes to integrating the previuous technological wave into our lives, we humans completely shit the bed. Technology has given us back so much time, and yet we have chosen to deploy this time dividend towards using technology in a way that does not suit us. Instead of getting our drudgery work done faster and enjoying life, family, friends, nature, we used our extra time to volunteer to be advertised to, and to perform for strangers until we became mentally ill. Will this time be any different?

Geopolitics and the future of war - The entire geopolitical world order as we know it has for the past 50 or so years been predicated on the overwhelming economic and and military capabilities of the US as the single global hegemon. Now we suddenly find ourselves in a wold where similar damage can be done by a $20 thousand drone as with a $20 million jet. Will the asymmetric advantage of the US and it’s allies endure, or has the playing field been leveled in favor of enemy militaries and non-state actors alike? The US is difficult to invade, but what happens to America’s economy and associated ability to service it’s debt and fund it’s war machine when someone drops 100 armed robot dogs in the middle of Boise, Idaho or Little Rock, Arkansas to hunt and terrorize the population? What happens when entire populations can be roused to the drums of war because some 10 year old made their own version of an ISIS beheading video and no one can tell it’s not real? How easily can hearts and minds be swayed? Can people be made to believe anything, by anyone? What the hell is Havana syndrome? Does the US really have weapons that make people feel sick?

How did the US go in and snag the president of another country out of his bed at night cleanly, without even scratching the paint on any piece of equipment? Remember when thousands of personal communication devices used by Hezbollah suddenly simultaneously exploded in late 2024? What other weird shit is out there? What did the US learn from MKUltra? Did that shit ever really end, or did they just get better at keeping a lid on it? This shit’s gonna get real weird.

Consumerism - The way people choose to spend the proceeds of their labor is one of the most fascinating subjects to me because it is downstream of mot other types of bullshit, and because it largely voluntary and yet so destructive to peoples’ finances, their relationships, their ever-shrinking amount of time they have left on this planet, and ultimately their souls. Our entire economic system, our entire financial system is predicated on people continuing to buy into the illusion that getting more stuff will make them happy, even though it never, ever does, and usually quite the opposite. It’s a golden idle, the most prominent basis of the arrival fallacy, the primary motivator of so much human activity. Perhaps most of all, it’s the thing that creates the very nature of the timeline we are in.

If you look back at history, there were an infinite number of paths we could have taken. There was nothing predetermined about us ending up in a place where we all take out loans to own fancy cars that all look the same so we can follow each other from our homes to some office cube farm, and park the car so it can sit idle 97% of it’s existence, depreciating, costing us money. Many of us have chosen massive work trucks as our daily commuter vehicle (even though we do precisely zero work that would require such a tool) in many cases purchased using high-interest debt for a sum that is more than we make in an entire year before tax. (Please see Tater #1: How Does the Affordability Crisis End?). This often guarantees that money is tight, gives us a reason to fight with our spouse and stress the whole family out, maybe she’ll self sooth with some “retail therapy”, grabbing a cart to push around a department store and fill with things she didn’t even know existed when she entered the building, paying with credit cards, ensuring a fight next month. Or maybe the whole family should take a trip to Disney to unwind with some debt-fueled relaxation. What would happen if we all just stopped with the financial masochism? I bet we could see the stars more clearly at night.

Putting the pieces together:

Writing forces me to get thoughts on all of these topics out of my head to see how they play with other thoughts on paper. I think I know how all of these complex issues relate, but putting them on paper allows me to see it in different ways, to examine the cubes instead of staring at the squares. Getting ideas out of my head also helps me to make room for more ideas and improve focus on considering certain things at a deeper level with a clearer mind. Something I once heard that really resonated with me is that reading is diet and writing is exercise. It seems silly to plow down kale and chicken breasts all the time and never lift weights or elevate the heart rate, just as it seems silly to read books and never write or connect the dots.

Writing and sharing thoroughly-considered ideas forces me to hold myself accountable in several different ways. I develop the discipline to read and consume knowledge, since it’s really difficult to write consistently in an informed, thoughtful way without consuming knowledge on a regular basis. It also forces me to think deeply since I wouldn’t want to make some half-baked rant public like so many do. If I carefully examine all aspects of an idea before making my thoughts public, then I’ll have more confidence that if future me disagrees with what I wrote, it will be because new information or new perspective inspired me to change my mind. I fully expect to change my mind over time, but I’ll know that when I do, its not because I carelessly failed to fully examine something in the first place.

As with physical exercise, the point of the mental exercise of writing is to improve, our fitness, our ability to learn, and our proclivity for making better, more informed decisions with a fuller understanding of the effects of those decisions. As Foucault observed, “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” I think one of the most important tasks in life is to figure out what we do does, to examine our own behaviors and consider their effects beyond the immediate, to truly understand how our actions affect ourselves and others through space and through time. How will my spending decisions affect others? How will they affect my future self? Will my voting decisions actually result in the world that is better, or will our collective, uninformed, ham-fisted reactions lead to a world full of unintended consequences based on third and fourth-order effects that should have been more clearly foreseeable?

Questioning societal norms:

Just as the babies and small children in Huxley’s Brave New World society are bombarded with repeated audio messages during their sleep or otherwise mentally conditioned (like when the workers sound traumatizing alarms when the babies get too close to a book or a flower, to condition them a way from a life of intellectual curiosity and connection with nature respectively), I find myself increasingly fascinated by the messaging and conditioning that governs my own behavior, and the behavior of those around me. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” as Mark Twain reminds us. What nonsense has been drilled into our heads for our entire lives that ‘just ain’t so’? The older I get, the more I scratch the surface of the world around me, the more I realize that the answer is: A lot, actually.

Some of it is deliberate manipulation on behalf of people and institutions in a position to do so, some if it is just the result of the old software being run by our ancient monkey brains. The most effective nonsense, the bullshit that is most difficult to smell, is the result of the former taking advantage of the latter. I want to teach myself to question this bullshit so I can be of service to those picking up its faint scent but who don’t have the time or interest to dig down to the shit root. I want my writing to be a sort of intellectual and emotional refuge for people who have spent their entire life trying to be normal, but find it increasingly difficult to ignore the progressively intensifying smell of bullshit in the air. As Sahil Bloom put it in his book The 5 Types of Wealth: “The fight against normalcy is the most important fight of your life. To maintain your uniqueness, to live on your terms in a world that pulls you to blend in, is the only way to realize your full potential and live a fulfilled, texture-rich existence.” Jiddu Krishnamurti put more bluntly, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

For whatever reason I often find myself most at peace when walking against a crowd. Human’s like our ancestors, as well as our chimpanzee and bonobo cousins, are social creatures. Like chimps, we have evolved to thrive in a tribe or community, and it becomes exponentially more difficult to survive alone in the wild. A huge amount of our mental bandwidth is dedicated to the function of fitting in, being accepted, being liked. We behave in ways that are harmful to ourselves and at best, neutral to the group, just to fit in and not get exiled out into the wilderness. We contort our behaviors and worldview towards external validation, often at the expense of truth. As Emerson wrote: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a famous experiment in the 1950’s in which a group of male college students agreed to participate in what was ostensibly a vision test. They were shown a series of lines on a piece of paper and were asked to determine which was longest. Almost every single person answered correctly, but when people were asked to opine on the length of lines in groups with the influence of actors promoting the wrong answer, roughly a third of people conformed with the group and chose the wrong answer, doubting their own judgment and intuition, changing their beliefs, just to fit in with the group. This is how we are programmed. This is how our outdated software runs. It is hard to get food as a solitary monkey. I probably would have starved as an ape, but I have no interest in lying to myself and lying to the world to be liked. I can not stress how liberating this can be, and how instrumental to my education and well-being it is, since it renders me less afraid of looking foolish. As Jordan Peterson writes, “No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn.”

People defend existing patterns as if they were put this way by the gods themselves, and exposing them for what they are is like insulting someone’s religion in public. I sometimes use humor to make light or digestible situations that that are important to scrutinize, but other times the prognosis coms through as bleak. Robert Kaplan in his excellent state-of-the-world book Waste Land addresses this conundrum nicely: “Critics said that my bleak vision was demoralizing. But I was merely following the dictum of the late Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, who said that the job of a scholar or observer is not necessarily to to improve the world, but to say bluntly what he or she thought was actually going on in it.” I hope that I can inspire readers to experience the freedom to observe and report objectively, for us all to have the courage to correct each other, and the humility to consider these corrections on their merit.

For some reason I have always found enjoyment from casting scorn upon social, political, and economic institutions, and raising awareness as to how their capture by vested interests and grifters prevents their continuous improvement in terms of their capacity for innovation, efficiency, or ability to serve their original function. I have found that more often than not, I tend to do so out of reverence for the institution itself, rather than being some cynical and naive advocate for tearing it down completely. I prefer to take a Chesterton’s Fence approach to my critique whenever possible. This refers to the concept of considering that perhaps things are the way they are for a specific reason, as noted by G.K. Chesterton:

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

On the other hand, I believe that too often the Chesterton’s fence approach is used as a substitute for doing the work to understand the tradeoffs represented by the existence of various laws, institutions, customs, or habits. The other extreme would be to end up like the monkeys in the “Five monkey experiment”. For those not familiar with the concept, its a parable or a fable, rather than an actual scientific experiment, but the lesson is salient nonetheless. I found an article that sums up the concept as good as any I’ve seen, written by Intersol Group, May 26, 2020: “Organizational Culture and the 5 Monkeys Experiment:

“5 monkeys were placed in a cage as part of an experiment. In the middle of the cage was a ladder with bananas on the top rung. Every time a monkey tried to climb the ladder, the experimenter sprayed all of the monkeys with icy water. Eventually, each time a monkey started to climb the ladder, the other ones pulled him off and beat him up so they could avoid the icy spray. Soon, no monkey dared go up the ladder. The experimenter then substituted one of the monkeys in the cage with a new monkey. The first thing the new monkey did was try to climb the ladder to reach the bananas. After several beatings, the new monkey learned the social norm. He never knew “why” the other monkeys wouldn’t let him go for the bananas because he had never been sprayed with ice water, but he quickly learned that this behavior would not be tolerated by the other monkeys. One by one, each of the monkeys in the cage was substituted for a new monkey until none of the original group remained. Every time a new monkey went up the ladder, the rest of the group pulled him off, even those who had never been sprayed with the icy water. By the end of the experiment, the 5 monkeys in the cage had learned to follow the rule (don’t go for the bananas), without any of them knowing the reason why (we’ll all get sprayed by icy water). If we could have asked the monkeys for their rationale behind not letting their cage mates climb the ladder, their answer would probably be: “I don’t know, that’s just how its always been done.”

Now imagine this scenario with the key change that the monkeys were never sprayed, they were just told by some media company, or some politician, or some cult leader they might be sprayed if one of them dared climb. I think that the more we dig, the more we’ll realize that there is no hose.

How can we reconcile both of these approaches? By thinking about things in terms of tradeoffs rather than solutions. Thomas Sowell, in his book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulations as a Basis for Social Policy gives a simple (though tragic) example: When a baby did not survive a plain crash in 1989 because it was ripped from its mother upon the force of impact, one political solution that was proposed would be to require parents to purchase an extra seat, and strap babies in. Simple solution right? “Commonsense” reform! However, a study by economists indicated that the natural outcome of such a law would be to make flying financially prohibitive enough such that some people would choose some form of ground transportation, which have much higher mortality rates, and would end up costing the lives of 9 babies to potentially, theoretically save the life of one. This is probably why to this day, you’ll see people with lap held infants on a plane. Humanity saw a big problem, realized the obvious “solution” would make the problem much, much worse, and chose the path of least harm based on the information available. No, we don’t need to burn existing norms to the ground without questioning their value. But yes, we do need to question everything.

Truth/ courage:

One of the best reasons to write, and to share one’s writing, is to learn and evolve, and hone or otherwise change one’s opinions as new information or perspective is incorporated. It has become quite fashionable to use technology and it’s echo chambers to dial in false arguments and learn how to shout them loudly, but for some reason I have arrived at a point where I find joy and excitement in changing my mind. I want my theories and ideas and opinions to be tested, for others to show me what iv’e missed or miscalculated. It’s like we were all thrown into a room with a pocket full of jigsaw puzzle pieces; perhaps you or someone you know is in possession of a piece that fits into the broader picture we’re building better than the one I’ve been trying to jam into the odd shaped hole for years, despite it being far from a perfect fit.

Marcus Aurelius says, “If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.” In Meditations, he defines sanity as understanding things, each individual thing for what they are, and not losing the thread. Someone has to not lose the thread. In a world of mass manipulation, so much of our society is deliberately designed to get people to lose the thread. The more I can view these efforts and these things for what they are, the more I can resist losing the thread. The more I can help others to see things as they are and not become lost (or confused, or frustrated, or jaded, or hopeless.)

Writing and sharing forces us to hold ourselves accountable by speaking the truth, not giving into the fear of what people may think as our minds are manipulated. I don’t want to wake up in some Orwellian world where no one dares speak openly and truthfully as they describe the world as they see it, where those who succeed are the ones best able to lie to themselves. Dostoyevsky reminds us exactly where the road of lying to ourselves leads:

“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and himself.”

Aristotle posits that human beings have a natural inclination towards seeking truth and also that we have a natural instinct toward rhythm and harmony. Something that I belive has become detrimental to this truth seeking is the constant barrage of intellectual dishonesty that floods the zone and obscures the logical pathways towards truth. I truly believe that what the world needs more of, especially as we enter this new era of artificial fakery and fraud, is a re grounding in intellectual honesty. Early in my Substack reading journey I came across an individual who articulates the concept quite well; Brian McGlinchey of the Stark Realities Substack puts it like this:

“Intellectual honesty is the ability to rationally weigh propositions that conflict with your current opinions. Intellectual honesty isn’t a character trait—it’s a skill and a discipline acquired by people who are more dedicated to finding real truth than they are to defending their current position. Intellectual honesty requires:

• The suppression of emotion and a relentless devotion to logic

• An awareness of confirmation bias and other innate impediments to rationality

• A disregard for the fact that a majority of people, pundits, journalists or even proclaimed subject matter experts hold a given view”

I don’t really know much about this author, but this is probably as good a time as any to let readers know that I am not someone who tends to give one well-cooked rat’s asshole about moral absolutism in the sense that the degree or truthfulness is dependent on the author of some statement. Things are either true, or they are some type of lie. So if someone crafts a phrase that is useful and relevant to the story I am trying to convey, then I am not goin to scour that person’s background and volumes of output to make sure that they are morally pure and ‘safe’ in every way. If it is one day revealed that Stalin once told someone they they should be nice to their grandmother, I sure as shit am not going to be mean to my grandmother because an otherwise bad man said to be nice to her. The statement stands as true and good. In the modern system of mass communication and propaganda where journalism used to sit, if anyone with more recognition or clout than myself used a non-evil Stalin quote to make a point, surely some scummy corporate purveyor of horse shit would go on TV and claim that that person “agrees with Stalin” in attempt to smear them, rather than address their argument, which in this case is that you should be nice to your grandmother. You should, no matter who said it. And fuck those people.

We increasingly live in a world where we feel forced to accept certain logs of bullshit as truth just because they were repeated enough times by people who went to school a few more years than ourselves. People have become so stifled that they can’t even be themselves in public, and can only share their opinions and feelings in private, lest they be cast out. This culture of fear that has been constructed, fear of being accused of ‘wrong think’, has only one end point, and that is the slow degradation of the human spirit. There is nothing safe or virtuous about conformity for conformity’s sake.

About this goose:

I was going to cut this section out, but I think we are all to some degree a product of our experiences, and this type of context can be a useful tool among many for understanding someone’s (or our own) point of view. This is probably as close as I’m ever goin to get to sharing a ‘personal essay’.

For whatever reason I have never found the desire to really specialize. I suppose I am too easily distracted, too prone to taking interest in many different topics, areas of study etc. I even tend to cycle through hobbies pretty regularly. I’m a renaissance goose, the kind that is probably quite annoying to specialists. But in going kind of deep and very wide, I believe it affords me a perspective that is not only interesting (to me at least), but also statistically rather rare. By studying a plethora of tangentially-related subjects in a fair amount of depth, I think I have acquired a perspective that allows me to make connections that sometimes get missed, sometimes deliberately by people’s whose job it is to inform the public. As David Epstein articulates it in his excellent book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, “increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches”…Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.”

This notably wide gaze has also made me extremely perceptive to bullshit, hidden agendas, and other types of mendacious fuckery employed by folks trying to get their beaks wet. I see the world and human behavior through a very critical, very skeptical lens, and I enjoy addressing what I see with plain truth, humor, and a dash of cynicism in what usually amounts to a sardonic form of criticism that frankly brings me amusement and joy. Moreover, it helps me understand the world in a more holistic and useful way than I think specializing would (this is certainly not true for everyone). As David Epstein puts it, “…breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

The approach of studying the world in a way that is a mile wide and a foot deep also allows me to see patterns and similarities and analogies across domains that perhaps I would miss if I specialized in a way that was a mile deep and a foot wide. Epstein puts it like this: “Deep analogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.”

I didn’t plan it this way. In fact, I’ve always harbored a bit of jealously for kids who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their life from a young age. I found it difficult to pin down what exactly I wanted to learn about, but I knew the types of things I enjoyed doing. I have always liked to bullshit and bicker and banter. I enjoyed debate, either serious and productive our otherwise. I liked making connections, using analogies to describe the world as I saw it, either with the goal of wining an argument or making people laugh. I was often told that I was so full of shit that I’d make a good lawyer. So, upon my parents’ insistence and despite my lack of enthusiasm, off I went, student loans in hand, to a private school that I chose based on not much other than it’s proximity to my house and the quality and variety of the weight-lifting apparatus in it’s gym, to major in what else but political science.

Here is where I spent a great deal of my allotted and finite amount of lifetime luck and good fortune by somehow steering myself away from what would have been an absolutely miserable life for me. Of all the organizing systems of order that we encounter on a regular basis, the legal system might be at once the most necessary and the most insidious and abusive (although American higher ‘education’ and ‘healthcare’ are currently giving it a run for its money). That to experience success I would have had to choose between a path of defending known acts of pure evil or deliberately trying to manipulate a pack of wholly unqualified fools to prosecute and persecute, is a path I am forever grateful to have avoided. These people are in no way incentivized to seek truth and they spend their life’s intellectual energy towards victory regardless of truth. There but for the grace of God go I. Fuck. That.

I decided to switch gears (and majors) and put my penchant for persuasion to use in the business world. I always loved watching the Super Bowl ads back when they were actually funny, entertaining, sometimes sad in a happy way (remember those Budweiser horses and puppies, or how about those three frogs?!) Anyway I loved the idea of being the person who came up with advertising campaigns, the creativity, thy humor, the psychological underpinnings of to all. So I became a marketing major where I learned about the ways to manipulate people into buying stuff they don’t need. This is where I expended another rather large chunk of my life’s dwindling pile of luck, since this path too would have been horrendous for me.

I kind of realized that I was going into a serious amount of debt to learn how to become a salesman, and I figured if that was the path I desired, I could more effectively teach myself by reading books and knocking on doors. Moreover, what I later realized is that in the absolute best case scenario, I’d one day land my dream job coming up with high-production value TV commercials for Pepsi, where I would spend my energy trying to convince and manipulate poor people to ingest one particular brand of sugary liquid poison over its almost exact alternative. While I found the consumer psychology aspect of it all to be fascinating, I am forever grateful to not have ended up in that ‘best case scenario’. I probably would have come up short anyway and landed a sweet job working for one of the drug companies, designing adds to trick poor people into marching into their doctor’s office to demand my employer’s pills to fix their bodies that were broken and ravaged from consuming too many Pepsi products. Another dodged bullet for my emotional and existential well-being.

I suppose I’ll pause there to say that, although shit talking gives me quite the thrill, I am fully aware that someone can obtain a marketing degree and be happy and successful, and virtuous, without becoming one of the compromised ghouls hocking drugs on society’s street corner for the poison-industrial complex. There are many useful and necessary products that need to be brought to market and consumed, products that do actually improve people’s lives in many ways. While we are at it, let’s all recognize that not all lawyers are dirtbags either. The rule of law is absolutely necessary for a prosperous and free society. Come on, this is capitalism baby. I’ll even acknowledge that many of the drugs you see advertised on TV are useful or even necessary for some people, in come cases. I hedge myself like this not for my own safety or to avoid offending someone, but to be clear and transparent about what I mean and where I am coming from. I do also think that both the legal system and the marketing profession (along with the overly consumptive and wasteful tendencies of the system that the latter enables and encourages), have both been bastardized and enshitificated to an extent that I am genuinely grateful for having been steered away from them. This will read as sweet irony to some, when I now reveal where I ended up.

After my quick initial forays into law and marketing, I decided to take my talents to the world of finance, you know, to do God’s work. Where both of the former lost my interest in a matter of months, the world of finance (specifically investing), has managed to hold my attention and my heart for almost two decades. In investing, you get paid to study the world. You get paid to study yourself; not only what makes you tick, how much risk you can bear and why, what you think you’ll need and want in the future, but also how little you know. And the more you uncover, the more you learn how tiny your accumulation of knowledge really is. Investing is an infinite, inexhaustible source of humility, epistemic and otherwise. You develop an incredible appreciation and admiration for all of the individual specialists that conspire on a global scale to produce solutions. But in being so generalized and casting the beam of your gaze so wide, you see things that people in the trenches of their own unique and critical specializations simply could see. They are too busy creating something of value (in most cases).

While the logic and application of Finance are quite mathematical and straight forward, the societal impact of finance, not unlike law, is very amorphous, intangible, and therefore incomprehensible to many people who do not regularly practice thinking at different levels of abstraction. I can not blame a doctor, or an engineer, or a contractor for not appreciating the way that capital sustains the entire organization of what we call the economy. Finance has been referred to as the lifeblood of the economy, but I’d argue that its main purpose is not transferring oxygen/ value between the organs of our sectors or projects, but addressing humanities biggest problem: our mortality. It doesn’t solve the limitation of time problem, but it is the closest thing we have to conceptualizing time in a a logical, standardized sense.

I once read somewhere that in investing, on a day to day basis at least, you don’t have to do anything, but you have to be aware of everything. Because of this trained state of awareness, and because of the totality of my experiences and personality, I am particularly perceptive and sensitive to this manipulation when I see it. But there is also so much that I don’t see. Seeing the manipulation, especially as it relates to personal finances, allows us to choose to avoid it as it seeks to rob us of out agency, our autonomy. Failing to do so results in so much unnecessary heartache for so many people. As Dave Ramsey has said, ”You must gain control over your money, or the lack of it will forever control you”. Getting control of your money means getting control of your mind and not succumbing to the efforts of others to try to separate you from it. I want to identify the bullshit and point it out to others so they can be empowered to exercise their agency and be informed enough to consider all aspects of a decision. This is why I chose to study finance and investing in college.

After college I stumbled into a career path that required me to take on an extremely heavy reading load. I later heard the role of investment research analysts described by a colleague and mentor as “basically just glorified readers”. Shortly after signing up to a life of consistent reading and processing and synthesizing, I made the decision to stop watching cable news. I probably just didn’t want to pay for cable, but very quickly found that anytime I viewed the mainstream news programs at someone else’s house, I found the entire package to be nauseatingly bullshitty to the point of being insulting. A short time away from it afforded me a drastically changed perspective. I also happened upon Thomas Sowell’s work around this time, in particular “Economic Facts and Fallacies”. This book was instrumental for my development as an independent thinker since helped me to hone my bullshit detector to the point of being hypersensitive to the ways that statistics are bent and warped to fit a particular narrative. My role at work involved a top-down, macroeconomic focus on the global economy and the big-picture drivers of basically every significant or investable country in the world. As a non economics major, this of course involved a lot of learning on the fly. Essentially I was forced to teach myself macroeconomics while abstaining from cable news and developing a hypersensitivity to bullshit, agendas, and ulterior motives. I was extremely fortunate to be put in this situation. This recipe, which I stumbled upon by chance, is highly recommended to anyone looking to change their perspective on the way the world works.

Incentive structures became vividly clear to me, like I was putting on the sunglasses from the movie “They Live”. The first question that came to mind with any surprise news headline was “Cui Bono?”, or, “to whose benefit?”. If you think that sounds a bit like cynicism you’d be right. I really hate to break it to you, but human beings respond to incentives, and power attracts the easily corruptible. When we outsource our thinking and morality to some external power structures, when we populate those power structures with humans and give them certain rights and powers that we don’t have in the first place, then we should expect certain outcomes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It really is nothing to get down on life about. The world is a beautiful, infinitely interesting place in spite of these realities.

In each of my performance reviews throughout my career, conveyed to me was an appreciation for my ability to examine issues or events from all sides, to question perceived orthodoxy, to challenge consensus narratives. I believe these traits have served me well as an investor, but they are not necessarily inherent to me, but rather the result of a set of circumstances, environments, and sequences of events described above. I am hoping that my often unconventional way of looking at things will supplement or fortify someone else’s view of the world in a way that will yield clarity and the ability to identify opportunities or avoid common pitfalls.

The way I like to think about it, the reader and I are walking through a beautiful, picturesque meadow called life. I am someone who is especially enthusiastic about the meadow, but has a heightened ability to spot piles of dog shit hiding amongst the blades of grass. I have been studying people’s movement though this meadow for decades, watching many of them step in those shit piles. Together, we will use logic reason and humor, along with the requisite scorn, mockery, and ridicule to identify and avoid those steaming pile of dookie, and therefore spend more time enjoying our precious time in the beautiful meadow we call life.

What doesn’t interest me:

Now that we’ve discussed which topics I’m interested in writing about and why I’m interested in them based on the path I have taken thus far, I want to make readers aware of some things that do not interest me. First, I have no real interest in being crass or edgy for the sake of it. It’s useful to be provocative with ideas, to give every angle its fair shake in pursuit of truth, but its distracting and annoying to throw jabs for the sake of causing a stir, or where there is not some good intention in mind. If I talk shit about certain behaviors, its to paint an image or caricature so as to highlight the absurdity of it to inspire change. If I describe some fictitious slob, sucking down Twinkies without chewing them and wiping the grease on his underwear, I do it so people can take stock of their filthy behavior and maybe start to cross them out one at a time so they feel better and live longer. But I’m not talking about some particular, real flesh-and-blood human being here.

I also have very little interest in mincing words and speaking untruthfully so as to not offend someone, particularly when the source of offense is manufactured either externally by the cultural anointed, internally by the ego, or both. I’m not tryin go out of my way to be offensive, but I suppose only I have the luxury of knowing how good my intentions really are. Still, I have very little time for comments from the perpetually offended, the people who have crafted and conjured an identity out of their willingness and ability to recreationally take everything personal or see themselves as an indignant hero of some made up mascot who theoretically ought to be offended. Enough. The topics we’re discussing here are bigger than you or I, bigger than the social signals we’ve been conditioned to constantly send. For perspective on the matter, we again turn to Dostoevsky, who saw lying to oneself and being prone to constant offense are related:

“A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea - he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility...”

It’s difficult to imagine myself being less interested in getting into arguments to win them, especially on the internet. Has anyone ever won an argument or debate on the internet? Has anyone ever changed anyone’s mind? Are people even capable of changing their minds anymore after having bathed for so long in a rancid online soup of echo chambers, prefabricated talking points, and punchy, fallacious, non sequiturs and platitudes? Nassim Nicholas Taleb said, “There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.” I’m no longer interested in wasting the precious time I have left on this earth tryin to intellectually submit someone who has made the decision to never change their mind. I went through that stage. I spent a lot of time arguing with people who, like a river rock, will never be sharp, but who I, like a steel blade, can myself become sharp by repeatedly beating on. To those rare few who have by some stroke of luck maintained their ability to entertain and consider different perspectives and new ideas, my writing is a love letter to you.

I’m not interested in appeals to authority, credentialism, or ay other punting to expert opinion (especially to dipshits claiming that their dipshit ideas are “commonsense” as in “commonsense reforms”) as a substitute for reasoned examination. As I discussed in my essay “Tater #9: ‘AI Brain’ and Universal Suffrage”:

I’ll acknowledge that quoting Schopenhauer, especially on this particular topic, similar to quoting Emerson (for example, specifically quoting Self Reliance) requires a bit of an appreciation for irony since both espoused a need to think for oneself and therefore not to appeal to authority. I too appreciate this sentiment, but my goal in this particular discussion is not to pave a road of philosophy, but rather to spread preexisting ideas for others to consider. Therefore I’ll refrain from tryin to reinvent the wheel, and instead I’ll be a naughty girl and quote Schopenhauer. And Emerson. Here’s is Schopenhauer on the matter: “Those who are so eager and hasty to decide debatable questions by quoting authorities, are really glad when they can bring into the field the intellect and insight of someone else instead of their own, which they lack.” And here is Emerson, from Self-Reliance: “Man is timid and apologetic; he is not longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.”

I’m not interested in making sure I am right before I discuss something, or making sure that it is perfectly consistent with everything I have ever said before. Emerson wrote that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.”

I am extremely uninterested in being the best at attribution, though I don’t dismiss it as being unimportant. Let’s practice holding two seemingly opposing ideas in our heads at the same time. Letting people “own” their ideas has some value in terms of incentives to invent/innovate/create, AND we overuse and worship this notion to our detriment, such that it can be considered bullshit. Both are true. I think it’s important to incentivize people to think, but I also think we overdue it. I will never knowingly copy anyone’s ideas, but in a world of podcasts and noise and an endless flow of streaming information, sometimes we forget the true origin of something, let alone where we heard it repeated. Intellectual property norms are way overemphasized in our society anyway. Do we really need to extend artificial protection to everything, including shitty generic pop and country music that was written by 11 dudes in a room with a Ouija board to be performed by some fabricated teenage mouthpiece selected from the hoards, like some kind of Black Mirror episode (for more on this, please see Tater #2: Will Your Life be Better, or Worse in the AI Era?)? If I figure out how to make fire to light a candle, and I touch tips with you to light your candle, does my candle now have less flame? Or how about we take a long suck on this assertion: The best music ever written by humans was made before copyright laws were in force. Would Beethoven or Mozart have produced better music or more of it if they had been incentivized by a temporary monopoly on performing it for money?

I’ll do my best to recall where I heard something because I personally think people ought to get credit for their insights, even if I disagree that it needs the full weight of the law behind it. I also think attribution is important and useful in providing a trail of breadcrumbs back to the origin of an idea for further or deeper exploration, not to generate clicks within a specific pay wall or keep people clicking within a site. I can’t stand when I open an article or essay and there are 6 hyperlinks in the first 4 sentences, distracting me from the flow of the author’s argumentation in an attempt to generate clicks in a never ending clickbait funnel. I’ll include links for people who want to go deeper on a particular subject thread if it is something I’ve written about in more detail, and I’ll do my best to try to provide a path back to the original source (as you’ll see demonstrated in the very next paragraph below), but it’s not always going to be perfect or pretty. Life is short. Let’s just do the right thing, and then move on.

I am not interested in forsaking my passion for the craft of writing to contort myself to what is fashionable on the current app or platform du jour. In his book The Good Enough Job, Simone Stolzoff highlights what he says is a very widely cited study that confirms and articulates something I have noticed to be true of my own motivation. In their paper “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Reward”, Mark Lepper, David Greene, and Richard Nisbett found that people’s interest and satisfaction in an activity tends to decrease when external rewards are introduced. As Stolzoff sums it up, the researchers “saw that attaching a contingent reward to an activity transformed the activity from play to work.”. He relates this to another work from one of my favorite authors Daniel Pink, who wrote in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates US, “If-then rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy…and that can spring a hole in the bottom of their motivation bucket, draining an activity of it’s enjoyment.”

I experienced first hand how this chasing of external validation drained the enjoyment out of hobbies when I was playing around with my Youtube channel. Relaxing in the kitchen and making a lovely meal to share with family? Better grab the camera and take 30 angles of the pan being deglazed. A fun craft project on my workbench? I wonder how many views this will be worth? Enough of that shit. I also experienced the pressure to conform to the latest nonsense trends (short form video), as I wrote about in an earlier piece (Tater #7: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 2 - Starting a Youtube Channel is Bullshit, but You Should Do it Anyway.) This is all to say that I have no interest in ruining the fun of writing with external rewards, Substack prominence or otherwise.

I’m not interested in writing bite-sized, shallow articles for people who have rendered their attention span essentially dysfunctional with their own habits, behaviors, and general lack of curiosity and discipline. In fact, I think the world would benefit from bringing back the reading and writing of long essays or even pamphlets, something much deeper than the little clickbait articles and lists that comprise most of written media, but without the requisite fluff of books where the author feels compelled to stretch 60 pages into something an inch thick for marketing purposes. That’s the sweet spot. I could be wrong.

Finally, I’m not interested in being a hack, as Steven Pressfield defines the concept in The War of Art:

“I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for. The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he’s superior to them. The truth is, he’s scared to death of them or, more accurately, scared of being authentic in front of them, scared of writing what he really feels or believes, what he himself thinks is interesting. He’s afraid it won’t sell. So he tries to anticipate what the market (a telling word) wants, then gives it to them. In other words, the hack writes hierarchically. He writes what he imagines will play well in the eyes of others. He does not ask himself, What do I myself want to write? What do I think is important? Instead he asks, What’s hot, what can I make a deal for? The hack is like the politician who consults the polls before he takes a position. He’s a demagogue. He panders. It can pay off, being a hack. Given the depraved state of American culture, a sick dude can make millions being a hack. But even if you succeed, you lose…”

Conclusion:

I think by now I’ve conveyed a pretty innate curiosity and passion for learning. Why put it on the internet? I read more than 99% of people on earth. I want to share what I learn with people who don’t have the time or the interest or the endurance, or frankly the privilege to do this. I believe that reading this much has rendered me less easy to bullshit, and I want to point out perspective and insights that I have found useful in my own life, that may save someone some trouble or grief in their life. Maintaining a dialogue with other people who think and write and chose to live an examined life, and engaging in conversation and debate will help me to learn and understand and make sense of the world, so I can help others do the same.

This project gives me an opportunity to work hard at something and fail. Even if no one reads or cares what I haver to say, it will give me something to look back on when I am older and wiser, and either be proud of what I did when I was younger, or perhaps reflect on how naive and ignorant I once was. Probably a little of both. In this way, it forces me to hold myself accountable along the way, so as to not disappoint my future self, but also to remind him of where he came from, and that he still has a lot to learn too, that he really doesn’t know shit either. And maybe, just maybe I’ll enjoy the process, the journey. As Marcus Aurelius says, “Stop whatever you’re doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?”. It really makes me think about how I spend my days, and learning and sharing seems at this point like a great way to spend them. Maybe I’ll change my mind about that tomorrow.

There is so much about the world that I love, and there is so much that I wish I could change but can not. I have no conceit that my words will be a means to this end. But writing does allow me to observe and report, and then to let go and focus my attention on the things in life I can control. Some may see this as the ultimate cop out. Some my see what I do as bitching about the world instead of changing it. That’s fine. I simply don’t have the delusion or desire to change the entire world, but I can perhaps inspire one or two people to change something about their lives, or their attitudes or perspectives that will bring positive change to their own lives. Meantime, writing seems to help me make the things I despise about the modern world more tolerable, so I can enjoy the things I do love about it. Writing is my way to, as Paul Kingsnorth puts it in his book Against the Machine: on the Unmaking of Humanity, “raindance on the astroturf of the modern world”:

“Raindance to discover who you are and where you come from. Raindance on top of your smartphone until it is nothing but splinters. Raindance against the myths of the age. Raindance against the false gods. Raindance with a smile on your face.”

If you would like to have this dance with me, please subscribe to Tater Stand Macro.

I hope my writing will be worth your time as well as my own. Cheers!

Did you know that people can’t smell their own stink, and even become accustomed to smells over time? I have only recently confirmed this, but I’ve always been fascinated by the idea. As I’m sure many people who rode a school bus to a public school will be able to recall, there were just kids who always had a stink, day after day. They smelled like a combination of French fries and cat urine, and I felt bad because these kids had serious trouble making friends (obviously). It certainly wasn’t their fault they smelled like piss fries; their parents either neglected them or simply couldn’t afford to run the shower. But I always wondered if they even knew, or if they had just gotten used to the smell. My path in life led me away from this stink of poverty, through private college and then employment in the financial services industry. This isn’t to be condescending or judgmental, it’s just reality; you simply don’t find folks walking around an investment firm smelling like a clawed mammal just emptied its bladder on a deep fried potato.

Sometimes on lunch I’d shoot over to browse at a local bookstore. There was a dude who worked there who perhaps had learned how to concentrate and bottle this very particular scent. He smelled like each and every kid that my childhood bus picked up at the trailer park had jumped up and rubbed their bare ass on his neck and wrists, like where elderly women rub perfume samples on their bodies when they’re at the local Macy’s. This dude stunk so bad that when he was putting away books, I’d have to time how long I could stay and browse based on the porousness and wicking ability of the garment I was wearing. Whether it was a cotton sweater or a polyester jacket, the countdown would be measured in seconds, not minutes, since I didn’t want to show back up to the office carrying the stank. That bad. Again, I wondered if he even knew. I thought about how tragic it would be for someone to go through life thinking no one wanted to be around him, perhaps because of his looks or personality, but with the real reason being an invisible scent repellent that he was genuinely ignorant of. I thought about mentioning it to him, I thought about quietly tipping off one of his coworkers who seemed friendly and kind towards him. I couldn’t bring myself to bear the risk of humiliating someone even if my intentions really were pure, so I left, repeatedly fluffing my finance bro business casual polyester vest when I got out to the parking lot. He had to know, right? How could he not? It was none of my business, I supposed.

On the drive back to work I recalled an episode of Hoarders or some show like that where a seemingly otherwise normal woman was living in a horrendously filthy house, for some reason shitting in various bottles, buckets, and jars and keeping them, acting genuinely surprised when her adult kids came over and broke the shocking news that her house did, in fact, reek of human shit. I think I may have come across this from a clip of Shane Gillis riffing on it on a podcast at some point. Anyway, this could not be a real thing. Could it? Was she acting like she didn’t know out of embarrassment? Was this “shit” staged? My preferred fantasy was to think about a woman with such a twisted and unique (and awesome) sense of humor that her preferred way to entertain herself was to shit in jars, and mess with her douche bag adult children my feigning utter obliviousness to the wretched stench that that she knowingly and consistently endured day in and day out, for months at a time, just to mess with these people. She was just doing a bit. An elaborate, high cost, hilarious bit. Shit in jars and pretend someone else is the weird one for noticing the smell. Just totally gaslight them, let them live out their delusions like some type of ridiculous Shutter Island sequel. “Oh you think my collection of actual shit is stinking up my house? Whatever you say, you crazy kids”. Brilliant bit. Touche, lady. Maybe there is another explanation for all of this stink. Maybe.

Apparently there is a thing called olfactory adaptation, or, as I have seen it referred to, odor fatigue. Turns out, people can and do actually adapt to smelling their own stink, or any stink they are in constant contact with for long periods of time. This development of a tolerance for the literal smell of shit is very similar to human’s ability to detect the filthy, stinking bullshit that society, it’s institutions, and various grifters constantly shovel at us. Over time, we become so accustomed to this bullshit that we don’t even notice it. It becomes part of the air we breathe, part of our everyday experience. But not everyone is born with this ability to adapt. A small minority can still detect the bullshit that clings to the air, that constantly invades our reality. By some low-probability biological or physiological roll of the dice, the conditioning didn’t work with these people. The transplant didn’t take. They are left here on this planet to detect bullshit, and sometimes it it becomes their responsibility to sound the alarm when the bullshit intensity reaches dangerous levels. I am one of these people. Similar to the apparition detecting kid in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, I smell bullshit. And this is me fulfilling my responsibility. This is your bullshit alarm. Please listen carefully.

College is a scam

Modern college is the biggest scam ever perpetrated against the people of this country. Hot take? No, this is one of the coldest takes I own. Imagine taking out hundreds of thousands in debt to go to school and take nonsense classes that have nothing to do with your major, taught by another undergrad student “TA”. Meanwhile, people need a masters degree to teach first grade. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. This is just an example, a symptom if you will, of a much broader, deeper, and in some cases more insidious malaise than most polite people are willing to discuss openly. The following paragraphs may be especially upsetting to those who derive a large portion of their identity and self worth from their credentials and similar “accomplishments”. This is a feature, not a bug.

The number one reason college is bullshit is that we have the ability, the tools, and the technology to educate everyone capable of learning at the college level, for nearly free (or at least at zero marginal cost), and yet we choose not to, to the tune of hundreds and thousands of dollars and life-changing changing amounts of debt. (I have written more elaborately about this arrangement here: Tater #1: How Does the Affordability Crisis End?) The reality is that essentially everything we learn in college is available online for free, and yet college remains just one big goddamn hazing people do to each other a this point, like a big financial Stanley Milgram experiment.

Since the cost really is the crux of the allegations here, we can do this like a Tarantino movie and start with the end first, understanding how to go about fixing a problem before we fully elaborate on it’s definition. I write in almost every single article I produce the friendly reminder that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. But when it comes to college, the remedy is pretty straight forward. First, business need to start hiring capable people who didn’t go to college, and stop hiring people who went to college to major in victimhood, whose subject matter knowledge and skills rarely compensate for their overinflated sense of self-importance (which is why many of these people find work in media, the non-profit activism-industrial complex, or get recycled back into the academic incestuous ideological bloodline itself). Second, as modern college is among the most subsidized industries in contemporary history, the Federal government should not write or back another single loan for any student to attend any college that does not offer an equivalent learning experience option, online, at marginal cost, which is basically zero. Am I wrong?

College is such a great topic for bullshit detection because it’s stated purpose seems to be straightforward and rather widely agreed upon. As a society, the purpose of the institution is to educate those capable of learning and thinking at a certain level. It is much less complicated than the purpose of K-12 education, for example, which is not necessarily designed strictly for academic rigor, but for character building, strength discovery, brain development, and even a great deal of nurturing and role modeling that has become necessary from the time it became impolite to frown upon or to otherwise refuse to celebrate the enthusiastic procreation of shitty people. Yes there are such things as shitty parents and I don’t mind stating the green color of the grass less I be labeled “judgy”. We’ll all be dead soon anyway, so we might as well tell the truth while we are here. If you have no clue what it means to be a shitty parent, you most likely are one. Thems the odds. But college is ostensibly for the kids that have already been prepared for higher level learning. It doesn’t need to cost $200k to get knowledge into young people’s heads when that knowledge is now all available for free online. In other words, the totality of arrangement, is bullshit.

Treating college as some overly complex institutional enigma is also not appropriate. It’s not “the government” or “the state” where there is seemingly no agreement whatsoever on the mission statement of such an institution. Some people don’t think the government should exist at all. Some think it should only be there to protect the nation from external enemies and uphold the borders, and some, of course, think that everything they don’t like should be banned, and that everything they do like should be paid for by someone else. New “rights” to “free” something or other are fabricated daily. No one really agrees on what the government should do. But we all know what college should do. And because it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do without an enormous, artificially inflated cost, I can confidently say that it is bullshit. If it’s not the biggest grift ever perpetrated on the American public, it’s certainly up there on the Mount Rushmore of institutional bullshit.

There are much better exposes on the topic than I could possibly conjure. Thomas Sowell is perhaps the most articulate narrator of the story, and touches on it expertly in many of his numerous books, perhaps the best of which on this topic, and certainly my first experience with the subject matter in this type of depth, is the chapter called Academic Facts and Fallacies from the book Economic Fact and Fallacies. I’ll not try to paraphrase and distill it here, but I consider myself fortunate to have encountered this work early in my career and then spent decades observing the world with this prior knowledge and perspective. That is one of the best ways to understand things that are hidden plain sight but masked by their very commonality and ubiquitousness. My bullshit detector was well-tuned early by these perspectives and I can not recommend this book enough. I also found Charlie Kirk’s effort on the subject in The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth to be a reasonable and comprehensive treatise on the subject, especially for those uninitiated but whom find themselves suspicious of the arrangement, beginning to detect a faint sense of bullshit in the air. Sure, there is plenty of eye-rolling political rhetoric in the book, but if you consider yourself an adult who can contemplate different perspectives objectively, Kirk’s day job did put him in a fairly unique position to have access to many different perspectives and anecdotes and experiences from those with first hand experience of the system. Finally, it would be a disservice to accuracy to fail to mention my experience with the work of Charles Hugh Smith in learning to think about this stuff, and particularly his book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education which I read many years ago when it first came out. I don’t recall any of these authors being quite as cynical or frankly as rude as I am when discussing these matters, but as Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” I see fraud. I smell bullshit.

Bullshit flows downhill

Another very important reason why college is bullshit is that it is a precursor to many other varieties of bullshit: appeals to authority, assumptions of superiority either on behalf of the credentialed or others, credentialism as a substitute for reason, general intellectual laziness, etc. We have simply gotten to a point where there are so many shit heads out there who think they ought to meddle in others’ lives because they genuinely believe they know better. In some cases, they do. In many cases they do, but in many more cases everyone just assumes they do because they paid the $200k troll toll to have someone sign off and verify that they are smart enough to do some type of office work (in the majority of cases). Because companies are too lazy and too cost-conscious to figure out how to do actual talent assessments themselves, they have essentially outsourced the task at the (massive) expense of their prospective employee, who, as a result of this arrangement, is now in all likelihood in debt, and therefore in desperate need of a job to service that debt. (As it relates, this is also one of the reasons that we have yet to have been able to harvest the ‘productivity dividend’ and work less hours per week (as discussed in Tater #3: You Will Work 20 Hours a Week and Like it.). Essentially, rather than learning how to assess talent, companies have just decided to require college degrees for jobs that in no way require such extensive skilling, responding with what Joan C. Williams in her book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America refers to as “up-credentialing”. The results of this practice are not surprising. As Williams puts it:

“This up-credentialing has two bad effects. Using college as a proxy for diligence and smarts, of course, disadvantages working class kids who are smart and diligent but not college grads. It also means that a significant proportion of college grads do jobs that don’t really require college. As a result, a quarter of college grads and advanced degree holders will work for a lower median wage than associate degree holders.”

Sounds like bullshit to me folks.

Ascending the summit

No discussion of why college is bullshit can be considered remotely comprehensive without talking about the psychological manipulation and indoctrination that takes place there. We discussed how most of the stuff people learn in college can be found for free online and essentially self-taught. There are a few exceptions. Some of the more truly shitty ideas can only be learned in college. Before we talk about some of these insane, useless, counterproductive ideas, lets first examine why college students are uniquely susceptible to shitty ideas in the first place. This might come as a surprise to some, but it’s because college students are stupid. More accurately, they are the perfect variety of stupid. By the very nature of where they are situated on life’s intellectual journey, they are at a dangerous point where they are learning more than they have ever learned before. They are actually smarter than they have ever been before, and therefore more confident than they ever have been. This is a process that we all go through. It has been well document and has been referred to at the climbing of “Mount Stupid”, as part of the Dunning-Kruger effect. As college kids, we are smarter than we have ever been, but still very stupid, and way too stupid to know it yet. We have yet to enter the “Valley of Despair” where we gain humility and perspective. We are dumb, cocksure, righteous, passionate, and fearless, and ready to lay waste to a common enemy, as soon as we develop the faintest idea of who or what that common enemy may be. Conveniently, there are may people on college campuses who stand ready to direct our gaze as we take in the palatial views from the summit of Mount Stupid.

It seems that history is littered with examples of ideological revolutions of bad ideas being orchestrated by mobs of these newly initiated mountaineers. One such example, and one that ought to carry some serious intellectual consideration given the volume of it’s resultant carnage would be the mass lunacy that drove the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 60’s. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt described what happened when Mao began to suspect infiltration by people sympathetic to the capitalist cause, which kicked off a witch hunt on a scale perhaps never witnessed in human history:

“Zealous college students responded by forming the Red Guards to find and punish enemies of the revolution. Universities across the country were shut down for several years. During those years the Red Guards rooted out any trace they could find - or imagine - of capitalism, foreign influence, or bourgeois values. In practice, this meant anyone who was successful or accomplished was suspect, and many professors, intellectuals, and campus administrators were imprisoned or murdered.”

The Cultural Revolution might be the most extreme example of the consequences of newly confident stupid people acting on stupid ideas, but the situation does seem to be heading in the wrong direction again, most notable in the US. In recent years there has been a discernible increase in stories about violence on campus, shouting down of speakers with opposing views, people being accosted by mobs for their opinions, and other symptoms that one ought to expect to find on the summit of a mountain of stupidity where the air is thin and the panorama disorienting. Lukianoff and Haidt’s book includes as comprehensive an archive of relevant incidents as I have seen, and is presented in a very objective and well balanced manner (by two-left leaning scholars, i.e not the boys at the Daily Wire). But college students have always been like this. They have always been at a unique position on their own educational journeys to be susceptible to shitty ideas. Why does it seem to be getting worse now? What has changed recently?

The lunatics have taken over the asylum

One notable development is that, in addition to the usual adventurous stupidity on the part of students, large numbers of professors also seem to have lost their minds. One of the most obvious examples of this in recent years is their own bullying and shaming of each other with the increased use of open letters of denunciation in which, as Lukianoff and Haidt explain, “professors try to round up hundreds of other professors to condemn a fellow professor or to demand that an academic article be retracted (rather than simply rebutting it). Something has been changing among the faculty, as well as among the students.” We will discuss plausible explanations for what exactly that change might be shorty. The authors go on to show, quite convincingly (as Haidt would eventually go on to detail even more convincingly in his follow up work The Anxious Generation), that the effects of social media, extended hours of smartphone use, and the decline of free, unsupervised play, among others things, has led to a generation that was pretty well socially and emotionally “cooked”, as one of them might say, before they entered college. As the authors assert, “Clearly universities were not causing a national mental health crisis, they were responding to one, and this may explain why the practices and beliefs of safetyism spread so quickly after 2013.” (“Safetyism” in this case is what some use to refer to the general need of today’s young people to be shielded from any and all of life’s discomforts, including opposing ideas, less they feel ‘unsafe’). An alternative explanation might be that because of their own use of social media’s echo chambers, the professors themselves never fully made the usual descent from Mount Stupid. Maybe there is no one there to guide the students down the other side of Mount Stupid and through the Valley of Despair. Maybe it’s the blind leading the blind around the top of a mountain where cliffs and pitfalls abound. What could go wrong?

I tend to disagree that colleges are not causing a national mental health crisis but merely responding to one. It’s both. It has become a flywheel of ineptitude and manipulation that flows circularly and feeds on itself, rather than in one direction or the other. What if I told you that college has become more intensely stinking of bullshit in the past decade or so because its leaders and decision makers increasingly resemble not a group of responsible adults interested in pursuing, distilling, and disseminating truth, but a weird ideological cult that marches to the sound of a single drum and dances a single synchronized rain dance? As Lukianoff and Haidt show, the political makeup of the faculty at American colleges has changed dramatically in a very short period of time. They find that the ratio of left-leaning professors to those that identify as right-leaning was about two to one as recently as the late 1990’s. In a few short years, the ratio had ballooned to five to one in 2011. There is your classic 80-20 distribution right there. The authors posit that this was perhaps a natural occurrence, as the professors from the Greatest Generation retired and were naturally replaced by those of the Baby Boom generation, who, by way of history, naturally just happen to be more left-leaning: “The Baby Boom professors, by contrast, were more diverse by race and gender but less diverse in their politics. Many of them were influenced by the great wave of social protests in the 1960’s; many went into academic careers in the social sciences and education in order to continue to fight for social justice and progressive social causes. This is why the ratio changes so much more dramatically when we look at fields that are associated with addressing social justice concerns. In Jon’s field, academic psychology, the left-to-right-ratio was between two to one and four to one from the 1930’s through the mid 1990’s, but then it began to shoot upward, reaching seventeen to one by 2016.” (emphasis mine). They go on to point out that in other fields related to humanities and soft sciences the ratio is usually more than ten to one, and that somehow, the only other soft, social science-based field not to be well over that 80-20 tipping point is economics. The problem, as the authors point out, is also way worse at some of the large prestigious institutions in New England, you know the ones.

Let’s come up for air for a second to be clear that the direction of the disparity is not the issue here. This would be just as much of a problem, perhaps even more so, if these colleges were overrun seventeen to one with right-leaning professors. The problem is the lack of viewpoint diversity itself, as well as the fact that these people actually try to promote their ideologies, rather than actually trying to conceal them with pure objectivity and truth. What is also more problematic than the direction of the leftward (or rightward) lean is the degree of it. It’s not just that these people have a similar ideology, its that in many cases they represent the most extreme, passionate, promotional, and manipulative fringes of that ideology, as we’ll get to shortly.

I also want to be very clear that not even the ideological preaching itself is necessarily problematic, so long as the customers (in this case students) have been openly and honestly informed on exactly what it is they are taking out mountains of debt to pay for. They are not. They think they are paying for an education, a set of skills and techniques and mental frameworks that will help them achieve a certain level of success (financial or otherwise). What they are really getting is some quasi religious brainwashing from a passionate and clever cult. You showed up with a bag of borrowed money to learn how do accounting or computer coding or statistical modeling, and you received a daily prayer session where David Koresh convinces you that he, and never you, will from now on be the one making love to your wife, because he spoke to Jesus personally, and that’s what Jesus thought would be best. It’s a cult. It’s a scam. It’s bullshit.

You might be wondering, ‘where exactly are these cults located?’. That’s an excellent question, dear reader. This chart from JP Morgan’s Michael Cembalest from his piece “30 Insights That Defined 20 Years of Eye on the Market” gives a more granular view of the hive mind echo chamber organisms (my words, not his) that have formed at some large US universities: “Many of their Democratic to Republican professor ratios have drifted way beyond the political balance of college-age individuals which is around 2-to-1. Note how Harvard is at the lower end of this group at 10-1. At Brown University with its 60-1 ratio, I’m tempted to think that there are a few GOP professors that Brown keeps alive cryogenically so that their ratio does not go to infinity.”

How in the holy hell does this happen? Surely this type of distribution is nowhere to be found in nature. I’ll be real honest about this, some of what I’m about to say is speculative, based partially on conjecture, but I simply don’t buy Lukianoff and Haidt’s rather benign theory about this being caused by Boomer professors coming of age during the 60’s social justice protests. Maybe three to one, or even five to one. But seventeen to one smells like bullshit to me. Forty to one smells like some hoarder’s house after she saves buckets and jars of shit indoors for a few years. This looks intentional, orchestrated. It sticks, real bad.

I believe what we are witnessing is the culmination of decades of strategy on the parts of adherents and disciples of thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse, who advocated a soft power strategy through a stealth takeover of cultural institutions by ideologues. Their “long march through the institutions” would become the central pillar of the battle strategy for various communists following the string of losses for such related ideologies with the triumph of market-based economics including the “Mitterrand moment” and political U-turn in France, the election of Reagan and Thatcher, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Despite having survived McCarthyism after having received a rhetorical lifeline from Joseph Welch in the mid 1950’s (“have you no sense of decency?”), these ideas were largely defeated in the 1980’s. Communism and it’s offshoots are inherently coercive, and there was little appetite for coercion during and leading up to the economic and technological boom that would take place in the 80’s and 90’s. These naturally parasitic ideologies were forced to retreat from the light to lay essentially dormant in the dark, where they could grow and regain strength if they could find a proper host on which to feed. What better host than hordes of passionate, economically insecure young people who have just broken out onto the sunny summit of Mount Stupid?

What we have just discussed is not really new or all that controversial. It’s not groundbreaking and it’s not some new interesting conspiracy theory. Most serious people across the current ideological spectrum would probably not contest this account of history. What is new, however, and what makes the entire arrangement important to monitor today are two things: 1. The people doing the brainwashing have reached critical mass, and 2. The folks at the top of Mount Stupid are as stupid as ever. They are as impressionable, gullible, and desperate as any cohort that came before them.

Dumping gas on the bullshit fire

My theory is that the whole ‘march through the institutions’ thing has hit some sort of tipping point, with liberal professors outnumbering conservatives massively, and of those perhaps some plurality are in fact radicals, communists, fifth columnists, or other fellow travelers. It seems quite plausible that the we’re witnessing a Pareto 80-20 rule phase change, and 20% of professors are now activists rather than teachers, and this tipping point happens to be occurring as the targeted age cohort happens to be at their most mentally vulnerable and weak, perhaps ever in the history of the Republic, due to the disastrous effects of social media (instances of self reported depression and anxiety and hospital visits for self-harm have hockey-sticked higher since mass adoption of social media, as well-documented in Haidt’s The Anxious Generation):

I am certainly not saying all of the left-leaning professors are subversive radicals who have infiltrated higher education, but rather it’s possible that at least at some schools, or perhaps in large sections of certain types of schools, you can get to 20% without including more modern, pragmatic left-leaning voices. With numbers like forty to one left vs. right professors, you only need eight or so of the forty to be genuine covert operatives to get to your 80-20 distribution where 20% starts to control the Ouija Board. Those ‘sleeper cells’ have realized a once in a lifetime opportunity to prey on the most desperate and intellectually vulnerable cohort of students ever collected, at a time when the economic fundamentals of college are coming under serious strain. These lunatics know that these kids are impressionable as they stand in the sun rays atop Mount Stupid. College students have always been impressionable, but the indoctrination might be working better now simply because the generations entering college now are much less mentally and emotionally stable than ever before due to social media. Students’ emotional well-being is in flames, and the 20% or so of truly radical, degenerate professors saw an opportunity to pour gas on the flame. They are coming out from under the rocks with a full court intellectual assault. Normal people within the institutions lack the courage or the financial confidence to stand up to the radical 20%. The the 80% or so, can’t stand up to these lunatics, less they get canceled or doxed or run out of town. They have families to feed too. They can’t be seen as someone who has been accused of not caring about “marginalized communities” or the various “mascots” of the anointed, as Thomas Sowell describes the situation. Everyone is vulnerable and confused. The zone is flooded. This is what these activists have been waiting for for decades. Its now or never. You got a better theory?

A small portion of people who make it through this four year indoctrination/ initiation into the cult, experience a relatively “benign” outcome, landing a job in either media, or being recycled back into academia to fight the good fight. The rest are left to fight for themselves out in the real world with a set of “skills” that are at best useless and at worse perfectly counterproductive and a hinderance to achieving success as they try to victim-card and blame and bully and cry their way up some type of corporate or social hierarchy, which rarely works. Moreover, having a educational institution morphing into an ideologue multiplication laboratory creates a host of other downstream issues, like an ideologically driven media that is more of a cult sermon than an objective factual account of recent events. Again, if 95% of the media were coming from a right-wing cult, that would also be a problem. It’s not the direction of the lean, but its very existence and its degree. The media/education psychological conditioning complex perpetuates the self feeding cycle and keeps the scam alive. It is now reaching a crescendo and starting to crumble beneath the wait of its own contradictions, the weight of its own bullshit.

The stink of the bullshit that is college has become too foul, to intense to continue to ignore like a jar-shitting hoarder with olfactory adaptation. Yet it continues. The shittyness is perpetuated by those with entrenched monetary interest (college administrators), the corporate gatekeepers who have already done the frat hazing, and by the insidious ranks of nefarious residual revolutionaries and fifth columnists executing on plans discussed by folks like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse. No this is not a conspiracy. Yes the USA is situated on by far the best piece of real estate on the planet, and yes, there are people who would like it to go away so they can build something else in it’s place. Many of these people have aptly, probably correctly, determined that their best chance of perpetrating their designs would be a lifelong personal effort within the institution known as higher “education. Like many parts of our late-stage capitalism economic structure, students are now taking out massive amounts of debt at high interest rates to receive not a useful, skills-based education (all of that is available for free online), but a indoctrination of ideology, an initiation into a cult. They are paying money to be advertised to. They are not the consumer of knowledge, they are the product. It’s a scam, and it’s bullshit.

Now say something nice: College is a great place to meet lifelong friends. One of the best ways to build lifelong friendships is to experience some type of bullshit together. College is a great place to experience bullshit with people, in this case financial and intellectual sodomy.

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” - Thomas Jefferson

There are few things in life that ought to be more terrifying than the thought of being ruled by someone who does not think. Very soon we will wake up and find ourselves surrounded and ruled by people who can’t think, but who can and will vote. That the word is changing at a faster pace than anyone alive has ever experienced is probably an understatement. The world has already changed, and it is now critical to understand this new world we are in. To do this, we’ll need to take a look at the confluence of technological change and the overall direction of our ability to make decisions and govern ourselves. To truly understand a topic, I find it important to examine it based on its broadest application, and to follow it all the way to it’s logical conclusions. In doing so, we’ll want to focus on two main questions: 1. Is AI making us dumber,? and 2. If so, what effect will this have on our ability to collectively make good decisions? This will not be an attempt to reach a final verdict on whether AI is good or bad, or specifically a definitive judgement on the degree to which it is or is not compatible with our current system of power and influence, but rather an examination of what we might gain weighed against that which we may be set to lose in the process. As Thomas Sowell has repeatedly reminded us, “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” Is it likely that we are staring down the barrel of a future in which each citizen is ostensibly more ‘informed’, more possessive of access to an unlimited supply of commoditized ‘knowledge’, and yet completely atrophied in his ability to think critically, and thus more cognitively pliable and easily manipulated than at any time in human history? For now let’s consider this our central hypothesis.

Even if we accept that AI will be a more important and more abrupt phase change (e.g. like when cooling water suddenly turns to ice), than we have ever experienced, and that its speed and scale are without precedent, it is useful to trace the lineage of other technologies in terms of their impact on human cognition. Language can be considered the first of these breakthroughs. While perhaps not fitting adequately with some definitions of technology, language at least gave us an ability to express opinions, establish consensus, and work collectively towards a common goal. If a 12-year-old human was hungry and expressed an intention to sneak up on some dangerous beast with a sharp stick, we had a a way to express our concern or disapproval. “Don’t do that, stupid” was perhaps amongst the first instances of employing the socratic method.

After language, we eventually developed writing and printing, and then reading became a way to express or consume and consider ideas communicated across time and distance. I have spent a lot of time studying the decline of reading in the United States as peoples’ attention span and general willingness to do hard things have atrophied to the point of uselessness. Reading physical, long-form books or essays is the superior way of interacting with information. It is a much more active way of entertaining ideas rather than sitting and consuming videos or audio versions, for the simple reason that the reader can pause, at will, and contemplate what she has just learned. The benefits of this are manyfold, but ranked highly among them are an opportunity to apply that information to one’s existing worldview, pondering where it may fit in their mosaic of knowledge. In addition, it allows the reader to engage in a conversation with the author where the pause enables them to listen to understand, as well as to expose those ideas to scrutiny, determining which pieces of the authors views corroborate or dispute their current way of thinking. Only with reading are all of these benefits possible to the extent that they are actually beneficial. Obviously one could pause an audiobook or podcast to ruminate, but people rarely do. In fact, it is common to speed podcasts up to 1.5X or 2X speed for the sake of the ubiquitous and fashionable “productivity optimizing” championed by various online hucksters and self-anointed gurus and such. Attempting to essentially download information into your mind by passively consuming it as fast as possible without even considering it deeply is not only ineffective, it is also counterproductive and perhaps even dangerous, since there is no telling what insidious and asinine ideas will slip into your consciousness during the flood.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with podcasts and Youtube videos and audiobooks, it’s just that they are inferior ways of leaning things and thinking. In other words, Audio books are an excellent substitute for not reading at all. They are an insidiously poor substitute for actually reading. There is nothing inherently wrong with watching a little football on TV once in a while, just don’t do that as an alternative to exercise, neglecting the latter entirely, and certainly do not delude yourself into thinking that it’s a reasonable alternative. It’s just easier. It’s not hard to read books, its just a little bit easier not to. The second worst thing you could do with this information is to start forming the habit, beating down the mental pathway for yourself of taking the easy way out of things. The worst thing you could to is lie to yourself about it. We know what Dostoevsky had to say about lying to yourself.

Just as passive forms of consumption are a poor substitute for reading, reading is a poor substitute for thinking. For perspective on this, let’s spend some time with an essay by Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Thinking for Oneself”. Before we jump in, I’ll acknowledge that quoting Schopenhauer, especially on this particular topic, similar to quoting Emerson (for example, specifically quoting Self Reliance) requires a bit of an appreciation for irony since both espoused a need to think for oneself and therefore not to appeal to authority. I too appreciate this sentiment, but my goal in this particular discussion is not to pave a road of philosophy, but rather to spread preexisting ideas for others to consider. Therefore I’ll refrain from tryin to reinvent the wheel, and instead I’ll be naughty girl and quote Schopenhauer. And Emerson. Fight me and see what happens, pal. You’d shit too if you were well fed. Here’s is Schopenhauer on the matter: “Those who are so eager and hasty to decide debatable questions by quoting authorities, are really glad when they can bring into the field the intellect and insight of someone else instead of their own, which they lack.” And here is Emerson, from Self-Reliance: “Man is timid and apologetic; he is not longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.” It’s funny ‘cause its true. I suppose I could be more selective with what follows, but this essay is designed for pleasure, not persuasiveness. If you are reading this, then chances are you have already made a decision to get a little deeper into the essence of reality than to seek out a 300 word wet fart of an essay on CNN called “The six reasons you should think for yourself.” Here are a few excerpts from Schopenhauer’s essay that I quite enjoy, and I’ll let you, dear reader, choose your favorites:

“Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.”

“Reading is a mere makeshift for original thinking. When we read, we allow another to guide our thoughts in leading strings. Moreover, many books merely serve to show how many false paths there are and how seriously we could go astray if we allowed ourselves to be guided by them.”

“…nothing is more detrimental than too strong an influx of other people’s ideas through constant reading. For each of them has sprung from the mind of another, belongs to another system, bears another tint; and never do they flow of themselves into a totality of thought, knowledge, insight, and conviction.”

“…as I have said, reading is a substitute for original thinking and supplies the mind with material, since someone else thinks for us, although always in a way that is not our own. For this reason, we should not read too much lest the mind become accustomed to the substitute and cease to know the thing itself, and thus get used to paths already well worn and become estranged from its own train of thought by following that of another.”

If, as you read through these, your mind started to replace the word “reading” with “asking an algorithmic chatbot” and phrases like “opinions of others” with “an amalgam of nonsense that has been spat out into the internet”, then you can see where we are headed with this. The point of giving Schopenhauer so many shots on goal with regard to this matter is to highlight the nature of the tradeoffs between consumption and production of insights and knowledge. I happen to believe that the former certainly facilitates the latter, but balance is important. It is going to become even more important at the consumption part becomes ever easier, and the production part does not. The very fact that serious people had serious concerns about people reading too much, is interesting and notable viewed from the present, when most people can’t be bothered to read anything at all. Is Schopenhauer vindicating these people who have elected to only “think on their own”? I think not. My favorite part about his essay is that he never mentions a quantity or any otherwise suggestion about how much reading is too much. Perhaps he read 100 books a year and lamented the people who read 200 and therefore had no time to think. If you agree with me that consumption of insights/ knowledge is necessary for the synthesizing and production of insights/ knowledge, and that reading deeply and broadly is by far the best and most active conduit for insight of any mass communication, then you may find it concerning that people are now consuming knowledge exclusively, and doing so in the most passive ways imaginable.

Schopenhauer would likely be horrified with the current situation, not least because those who consume without processing, synthesizing, and discerning, are perhaps the most easily manipulated and malleable minds in history. And yet, these are the people who increasingly are tasked with deciding the degree and form with which the state, with its monopoly on violence, intervenes in the daily lives of their neighbors, among other things. It is not clear from current outcomes that the one-way flow of insight, acted on by the consumers of it, is preferable to total ignorance. In short, people who do not think for themselves seem to have no problem voting and therefore weighing in on the affairs and preferences and others. When non-thinking people vote, bad things happen. Plant corn, get corn.

Universal Suffrage

“In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.” - Murray Rothbard

If you take one thing away from this discussion, perhaps I’d prefer it most to be the idea that much of which we take for granted in our lives, in society, is extremely new when we zoom out to observe the timeline of the human experience. Universal suffrage is something that most of us have come to presuppose as necessary, both in the sense that it has always been and will always be a feature of our collective experience, as well as the idea that it is unequivocally a good thing, on net, and perhaps even without tradeoffs in the minds of many of today’s citizens. This is because the way society used to discern who gets to vote, was done in an asinine way (race, biological sex, etc). More recently, we seem to have abandoned any appetite for discernment altogether, besides age. To construct an argument that, because the way we used to do something was bad, therefore doing it at all is bad, simply defies logic.

Fernando del Pino, the Spanish industrialist in his very clear headed and observant essay, “The Five Experiments”, lays out a sober, objective, detached examination of the issue: “The first experiment is universal suffrage and unlimited democracy, understood as a system where a simple majority of people, qualified to vote on a minimum age basis alone (pretty young, by the way), can decide on mostly anything – including to a large extent the rights of the minority. This is a pretty recent invention, which in most cases has taken place in the last 50 to 75 years.” (Add a decade or so, as this was written in 2015).

Now, most people reading this will know that the US is not a direct democracy, but a representative republic where various levels of decision making are delegated. Examples of direct democracy can be found in places like Switzerland, where various referendums take place to have the public decide on certain issues. Believe it or not, some people elect to sit out if they have not had the time or interest in doing the research or considering at length the consequences of the decision at hand. Color me skeptical, but I do not believe this level of maturity would be widespread in the US. I can’t speak for the degrees of arrogance and ignorance present within the average voters in other countries. But we Americans, on average, seem to pride ourselves on our righteousness and identification with one of two ideological tribes. Any abstention, we are told, is a vote for the “bad guys”. Better to vote first and inform ourselves later, if we get around to it. (We won’t.)

It hasn’t always been this way. As del Pino points out:

“The mere thought of equalizing the voting power of a rookie youngster with that of an experienced, wise old man, or of literate and learned people with uneducated people, or of those who paid taxes to finance subsidies with those receiving those same subsidies, was considered weird, to say the least.”

It does sound weird when one puts it that way. Again, most people would probably agree that the way the discernment was conducted in the past was problematic, but that does not mean we ought to have zero discernment. The risks of unconstrained democracy without discernment was widely recognized when the country was founded, when people had more time to ruminate on these things, before they were burdened with the constant cognitive load of deciding which color grey to paint the entire inside of the house, or which polyester shirt they should wear for their TikTok video, or how to juggle drop offs at travel soccer leagues and pickups from doggie-daycare. Del Pino continues: “Arguably one of the best experiments in liberty in the history of mankind is the 1788 Constitution of the United States. However, it might surprise the reader (as it did surprise me) that some of the Founding Fathers didn’t like democracy very much. They tended to define democratic systems as “two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner”, and were extremely worried that such a political system would soon become “mob rule”, where the majority would become the new tyrant and abuse the minority – defined by religion, race or wealth (the poorest or the richest).” This is why we have a constitution, and this is why people who think their ideas are so amazing hate that we have a constitution. As del Pino puts it:

“Therefore, people today rightfully consider the divine right of kings something weird but, strangely enough, happily accept the divine right of majorities (which is at least as weird) as the most natural thing in the world. In fact, today’s governments, elected by majorities, have such power that absolutist kings would pale in envy.”

So as the populous remains distracted with sports and gambling, and celebrity and nonsense, the rolls of voters are systematically enlarged as if doing so were some sort of virtuous end in and of itself. Efforts are made to “get out the vote”, to make sure anyone capable of fogging a mirror has a say in, for example how tax money is spent, regardless of whether said mirror fogger has ever logged two consecutive years of contributing to that pot. Both of the major US political parties do this, though few serious people from either tribe would argue that one party doesn’t seek it more than the other. There is no further insinuation required for the scope of this discussion, but it is worth mentioning as a tell that you are debating or otherwise conversing with someone unserious. It’s akin to having a discussion with someone who pretends that the majority of what we call journalistic outlets do not favor one tribe over the other. In other words, any honest and serious representative of the political left will openly acknowledge these things, and if he refuses then it’s probably prudent to dial up the skepticism a few notches, for another card will have been turned over on the table, and the likelihood has undoubtedly increased that you are speaking with someone who is being either unserious or mendacious, or both. Just a useful heuristic to bear in mind as we navigate the world. Again, it’s about getting as many people as possible to vote, not getting as many thoughtful or well-informed people to vote, and not getting people to become more thoughtful or well informed before they vote.

A beautiful, poetic almost, example of this intentional swelling of the voting masses with the intentionally uninformed was that “Rock the Vote” thing you would see in the 90’s. For those unfamiliar with this display of pandering, going to Youtube and watching the efforts featuring Madonna will probably bring you up to speed in the most efficient way possible. You might actually gag. It seems like something that today’s AI would spit out if you told it to create a PSA of Ms. Rachel singing to convince four-year-olds to vote, but then replace her with Madonna and direct it toward people who just turned 18 but think like 12-year olds. Obviously she is in a bra, because that’s apparently how one appeals to serious, thoughtful people about a new serious responsibility. We assume voting is still considered a serious responsibility since we only allow people to do it after they are old enough for other serious responsibilities, such as driving a car at 65 mph with other humans on the road. The video is insane, Frankly. It’s as “cringe” as they come, as the kids might say. So much so in fact, that it almost offers a bit of comforting solace to those who look out there at the current forms of manufactured stupidity and think we are heading off the rails fast. Apparently people have always been this stupid, this gullible, this susceptible to pandering, so maybe everything will be ok after all.

Internet/ Social media

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal

In order to think deeply and clearly about where we are headed, it is necessary to take stock of how society evolved during past technological revolutions, and fortunately, we don’t have to go all the way back to the printing press or the steam engine into an era that is so distant and foreign that it’s difficult for any of us to conceptualize. For our purposes, we are fortunate enough to have just lived through a profound technological reordering of society that will be fresh in our memories. And I don’t mean to be hyperbolic here, we have only had smartphones since 2007 and we have only seen social media use on those smartphones become ubiquitous (surpassing desktop use) since 2012 or so. People now spend 6 or 7 hours per day on their phone depending on who you ask. Perhaps never before in the history of humanity has the daily time use of the average person shifted to dramatically in such a short period of time. Profound indeed.

So did the explosion of constant social media use make us dumber, and did it make us into worse, less informed citizens, less capable of governing ourselves in a system where everyone has the same amount of say? I would say yes and yes, although this was never a forgone conclusion. There was never anything deterministic about having the access and opportunity to connect with people and ideas from all over the world making us less informed, and more gullible. In fact, I’d argue that the opposite had better odds. Still, we all know what happened. We all broke into our little tribes and echo chambers and learned how to parrot other people’s opinions at each other while sacrificing our attention, our mental health, and our ability to think critically. As I explained in my earlier piece (Tater #2: Will Your Life be Better, or Worse in the AI Era?):

“Rather than discussing ideas and solving problems, the overwhelming majority of humanity collectively decided to use social media as a giant mental vape pen, at first by constantly posting nonsense for external validation in the form of “likes”. Rather than attempting to engage in productive debate and strike at the root of some of the world’s problems, we found the situation better suited to gather the approval of strangers on pictures of our dogs, selfies of ourselves in a new Chinese-made fast fashion outfit, or some half-cocked sports opinion about what some other dudes do in their ball-throwing game. More recently, this ridiculous quasi participation has been replaced by mindlessly scrolling a curated feed designed to ‘maximize engagement’.

A mentally unwell populous who can not focus are not the best at self-governing. That much seems self-evident if you believe we live in a complex world where actions have consequences. In his excellent book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, author Jonathan Haidt, argues clearly and convincingly that the kids are increasingly not ok, and that it is very likely that social media overuse played a very important role. I think the following set up really captures the newness and strangeness of the world we live in, which we have been slowly conditioned to think of as normal, like the frog being boiled because the temperature of the water in the pot was increased gradually. It’s not normal. It’s weird as shit:

“Imagine that you fell into a deep sleep on June 28, 2007—the day before the iPhone was released. Like Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist in an 1819 story by Washington Irving, you wake up 10 years later and look around. The physical world looks largely the same to you, but people are behaving strangely. Nearly all of them are clutching a small glass and metal rectangle, and anytime they stop moving, they assume a hunched position and stare at it. They do this the moment they sit down on a train, or enter an elevator, or stand in line. There is an eerie quiet in public places—even babies are silent, mesmerized by these rectangles. When you do hear people talking, they usually seem to be talking to themselves while wearing white earplugs.”

This widespread prevalence of truly bizarre behavior doesn’t just make us look ridiculous, it actually makes us stupid, insomuch as we define stupid as being rendered worse at making decisions that effect ourselves and others, which is exactly what voting is. Social media is causing a rise in anxiety and depression, and it is difficult to make good decisions under these conditions. I’m more than happy to hear an argument otherwise, but for sake of brevity let’s just take that as premise. There is plenty of research out there to support this. (It does pain me to do this, since so many fallacious arguments are propagated by charlatans claiming that “the research is clear” or “the science is settled”, when in most cases it certainly is not. But in this case its not really central to our logic, i.e. does anyone want to claim that people on average make better decisions when they are anxious and depressed? I didn’t think so. I hope I’ve been clear about the difference.) But it’s not just the chronic anxiety and depression that is making us worse at voting. Our attention spans are absolutely fried. As Haidt frames the issue:

“In 1890, the great American psychologist William James described attention as “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”  Attention is a choice we make to stay on one task, one line of thinking, one mental road, even as attractive off-ramps beckon. When we fail to make that choice and allow ourselves to be frequently sidetracked, we end up in “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state” that James said is the opposite of attention.”

Do you think voters can assume their responsibility effectively when they are the “confused, dazed, scatterbrained”? Or are they more likely to be easily manipulated, reactionary, and gullible? Maybe there isn’t yet concussive evidence to suggests that the most recent technological revolution, i.e. mobile social media made people stupid in the conventional sense of the term, but it seems to have likely caused widespread instances of mental illness. I think few would argue that the shattered attention spans caused by dopamine fueled addiction, compulsive phone checking ticks, and lengthy mindless scrolling sessions, have not rendered many people worse off as stewards of their relationships, their communities, and therefore as citizens of a complex democracy, ostensibly in charge of increasingly powerful state with relentless mission creep. In other words, the job has become more important, the stakes have become higher, and people have become much less qualified and up to the task.

Speaking of being qualified for the task, voting is not even the most important task involved in taking part in a healthy democracy. It’s useful to focus on what people do, what they become when they are online constantly, but its perhaps what they are not doing and not becoming that may be even more detrimental to civil society: quite simply, they are not not becoming citizens. Specifically, from well before the time they are old enough to vote, they are not playing or otherwise interacting with other kids, and therefore are not developing the skills necessary to resolve conflicts peacefully. As Greg Lukianiff and Jonathan Haidt (the same one from the book we walked about above) discuss in their book The Coddling of the American Mind:

“Successful democracies do this by developing a variety of institutions and norms that enable people with different goals and conflicting desires to resolve their problems while rarely appealing to the police or the state to coerce their fellow citizens. This is the “art of association” that so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville when he travelled through the United States in 1835. Citizens of a democracy don’t suddenly develop this art on their eighteenth birthday.”

But they do get to vote as of that day, so long as they can fog a mirror, as discussed above. I’m sure the risks we face are becoming clear to most readers as the dots connect, but just to articulate the consequences of such a causal chain of events, here is Steven Hortitz, an economist at Ball State University in Indiana who studied the research on play deprivation and drew on the work of political Scientists Elinor Ostrom and Vincent Ostrom on self-governing communities and conflict resolution. As cited by Lukianoff and Haidt (I realize we are getting six degrees from Kevin Bacon away from the original research here, but I include the lineage as a bread crumb trail in case anyone or my future self wants to further investigate, and because its probably the right thing to do), Horwitz concludes:

“A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction. The coarsening of social interaction that will result will create a world of more conflict and violence, and one in which peoples’ first instinct will be increasingly to invoke coercion by other parties to solve problems they ought to be able to solve themselves.”

So now we have already reached a point where people are increasingly anxious and depressed, dazed and confused, their attention and focus extremely impaired, and their ability to discus differences of opinion and solve problems peacefully and amicably having atrophied from years holed up in bedrooms behind a screen. But at least people still have some ability to think critically, kind of. So where are we headed from here?

Artificial Intelligence

“The trap is that AI doesn’t just automate the work, it breaks the feedback loop between making things and understanding them. A bit like getting someone else to do your homework, then wondering why you failed the exam.” - Matt Barrie

What mobile social media did to our attention, AI risks doing to our agency. It will be increasingly difficult to make well-informed, carefully-weighed decisions if a large part of the population develops a serious case of what I’ll call ‘AI Brain’. According to an article in Psychology Today (Is AI Making Us Stupider? This Study Certainly Thinks So, August 21, 2025) a study from MIT highlights the nature of some of the tradeoffs we are making when we rely on technology for cognitive tasks.

“They conducted a study using a pool of 54 participants, divided into three groups. The groups were asked to deliver an SAT-grade essay, with the first group granted access to ChatGPT, the second to traditional Google Search, and the third with no search resources at all. Group 3 was referred to as the “brain-only” group. Over time, each participant had to produce several essays, and each time was attached to an EEG to record brain activity across 32 regions. Consistently, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement for every essay, and worryingly showed decreasing brain activity over time, as they progressed through the essay assignments.”

Why does this matter? Why is brain engagement and brain activity important? Think about anything you don’t practice. If you want to have a strong body, and you start consistently skipping leg day, your legs will get weaker. You will be able to squat less weight. If you never do any cardio and get your heart rate up, then your ability to run distances will atrophy, your “gas tank” will be smaller/ weaker. Why do you think sports teams of all ages run sprints before and after practice? It’s so they can improve their cardiovascular endurance and be able to run faster and longer in the game. It’s hard to defend the goal in any sport when you are out of breath and your opponent is breathing easy. Why should it be any different for our brain? What I have described here is essentially what scientists, podcasters, and “growth” dorks on the internet call neuroplasticity. Your brain needs exercise just like your body. If you don’t move your body, you’ll be weak and easy to kill. If you don’t move your brain, you’ll stupid and easy to manipulate. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The more you offload cognitive tasks and try to take the easy way out, the more you sacrifice your ability to learn and remember things you learned to apply or synthesize them later. The article concludes:

“Perhaps the more concerning aspect of the findings is the connection between reduced brain activity and impact on long-term learning and memory. As well as recording the participants’ level of satisfaction, curiosity, creativity and memory as part of the study—which were all high for both the brain-only and the search assisted groups (groups 2 and 3)—a later part of the study asked each group to reproduce one of their earlier essays, with the ChatGPT group asked to do so without access to any tools. There was little evidence of this group’s participants remembering much of their previous essay, highlighting the very necessary link between cognitive engagement and memory and, therefore, the potential impact on long-term learning and gaining new skills.”

No solutions. Only tradeoffs.

The study is not the first on this important subject, nor will it be the last. It is also not deterministic. In fact, the authors seem to conclude that AI, while being a piss poor substitute for critical thinking, can actually be a very useful compliment to it (my words, not theirs). Here is some reassurance: “Conversely, and perhaps reassuringly, however, the brain-only group was then permitted to rewrite their essay with access to ChatGPT, with their efforts showing higher levels of creativity and stronger arguments, while retaining original thinking and unique language. This could present reassurance that, employed properly, AI has a place in enhancing learning without diminishing cognitive capability.”

I have said before that AI is making rote knowledge ubiquitous, commoditized, obsolete. Memorization of facts may not be as important as it used to be. The ability to think, however will be as important as ever. The authors of the article sum it up nicely: “Critical thinking focuses not on what you know, but on how and why you know it, as well as determining how assumptions can be tested. These skills are vital to future success in life and in work.” And, perhaps most importantly I might add, when voting on issues that affect your neighbors, and especially when the the nature of those issues implies the the initiation of physical force on someone for their non-compliance with your preferences, or threat thereof.

In a recent paper (The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI) the authors highlight the risks of coming to rely too heavily on taking the easy way out of learning:

“In the age of generative AI and ubiquitous digital tools, human cognition faces a structural paradox: as external aids become more capable, internal memory systems risk atrophy…heavy reliance on AI systems and discovery-based pedagogies may impair the consolidation of declarative and procedural memory—systems essential for expertise, critical thinking, and long-term retention.”

In an age of constant distraction, a 24-7 news cycle consisting almost exclusively of nonsense, the rise of “busyness” and the fading away of any quiet time to think, it is this long term thinking and memory that will be perhaps our only defense against targeted manipulation and persistent gaslighting. It threatens the very nature of our consciousness, and our ability to govern ourselves. In the study mentioned above, the authors sum up the gravity of this issue as follows:

“Cognitively, the human brain remains both the ultimate bottleneck and the ultimate engine for learning. External devices expand our capabilities, but what happens in our neurons determines how far those capabilities go. An insight not formed is a memory not made. A skill not practiced is an intuition not developed. A schema not built is a problem not recognized. And a mind unchallenged is a talent unlived. The trends of the past decades serve as a caution: even as the world’s knowledge sits readily accessible on every smartphone, we must ensure that knowledge also takes root within the individual’s mind.”

Daisy Christodoiulou has an excellent Substack piece that perhaps christianizes the issue as good as anything I have seen. In “Are we living in a stupidogenic society?”, she explains:

“People often describe our current society as being “obesogenic” – that is, a society that makes it easy to be overweight. We have abundant food, and limited need for hard physical labour. The problem that tormented humans for generations – scarcity of food and necessity of backbreaking toil – has been replaced by another problem.Is there a parallel now that thinking machines are getting so good? Most people don’t have to do hard cognitive labour, and technology can provide us with so much easy entertainment and distraction. But these improvements might have created a new problem: it’s now easy to be stupid.”

She goes on to sum up our new challenge perhaps as succulently and poignantly as anyone possibly could:

“The cost of physical machines is human obesity; the cost of intelligent machines is human stupidity.”

Another important framework we’ll want to consider here is what I like to call ‘the great bifurcation’. Society tends to bifurcate itself as it advances. When it became easy to get food, half the people started eating fruits, vegetables, and lean meat, the other half started guzzling processed pig slop. When it became easy to get money, (graduate, job, no kids out of wedlock) half started saving and investing, half started going into credit card debt to buy tons of clothes, DoorDash, drugs, alcohol, cars, and nonsense. What do you think is going to happen when it becomes easy to get knowledge? Half are going to learn and grow more than ever before. Half are going to download their opinions and head straight to the voting booth. The problem is that the externalities of obesity are rather minimal beyond the shared healthcare costs, where the externalities of stupidity and ‘AI Brain” will be felt directly by everyone via our system of government. It is difficult to make your neighbor suffer from your fatness, but it will be easy to make him suffer from your ever intensifying stupidity.

It’s important to examine all side of this issue. Again, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. So we must consider not only what we’ll lose, perhaps most obviously in terms of our ability to think critically, in a world where we insist on maximizing cognitive offloading, but also what we gain. As individuals, we’ll get faster answers to questions as well as assistance with more efficient “workflows”. Apparently drudgery has permeated and metastasized so deeply into the modern job that it is desirable to offload much of it, as if the process itself doesn’t bring about value or meaning. I am not disputing that many jobs exist for which this is true. In fact, I don’t think that many people would argue that a whole lot of so called “deep work” is being done within these modern cube farms or “open office floor plans” as they are often advertised, like its some sort of trendy home interior fad where we kick all the walls down, connecting all the rooms into one big amorphous entertaining space for those sweet cocktail parties we will definitely never have. So those whose job is comprised most heavily of doing a series of repetitive tasks, or more cynically, of bullshit work (Tater #2: Will Your Life be Better, or Worse in the AI Era?) will be delighted to offload some of that nonsense, assuming they are able to stay employed. What we’ll gain at the societal level may be much more beneficial, with implications for things like medicine and education perhaps much more profound than anything that affects our day to day.

What we stand to lose from becoming overly cognitively reliant on technology will be felt both at the individual and societal levels. Some proportion of people will almost certainly be sucked past the intellectual event horizon, where they habitually reach for algorithmic assistance for any and all questions and problems. It will become second nature, like how we check our phones hundreds of times per day. If you ever get the chance to sit in a public sauna with someone under the age of 25 this will become disturbingly obvious. Or watch kids that age at the gym before the sauna session. They take their phone out of their pocket between every single set. Again, its habitual, and the temptation to be spoon-fed answers before even considering an attempt at independent reasoning will most likely become the new tick, the new phone check. Thinking through problems without the aid of a device may be relegated to history, with things like paper maps and Mapquest and phone booths.

The cognitive risks are one thing but the emotional and privacy risks are considerable as well. These habitual phone grabbers will tell all of their deepest secrets and most personal emotions to these apps, these corporations, and the opportunity for manipulation and unconscious influence will be massive and unprecedented. At best, this will be used to convince people to buy things they don’t need. At worst, it could be used to artificially construct outrage, sell absurd solutions, manufacture consensus, and sway public opinion by manipulating the millions of individual parts that comprise the whole of society. AI has the potential to be the most savvy charlatan the world has seen, and the body counts and extent of human suffering at the hands of of history’s preceding charlatans are well documented (though probably decreasingly understood in any deep sense).

There is also a economic causal angle of AI making people and democracies stupid: If AI starts taking jobs that once went college grads, and the combination of responsibility and economic reality cannot serve their normal function of turning the hippies into yuppies, then are we staring down the barrel of a future where communism or other nonsense ideas are taken seriously by people who never get the chance to learn to know better? This discussion mostly focuses on the technological aspect, but we could write volumes about the systematic and perhaps deliberate (well, I mean someone benefits from this) dumbing down of society. The “education” system, drugs, alcohol, making it really easy to be stupid, making it really easy for people who consistently make stupid choices to reproduce and then train (or otherwise neglect) their kids in their same methods, etc. Conversely, maybe AI will free us from meaningless tasks and we will have more time to reflect and make better decisions. Maybe AI will help us to realize how collectively stupid we already are, and we will therefore have more humility in our desire to force our opinions and preferences onto our neighbors. I will not hold my breathe.

I hope that by considering these ideas, we can resist the propaganda coming out of these massive AI companies and their cheerleaders on the internet. Let’s shine some light on the Koolaid that everyone seems to be guzzling, that the AI companies are selling: ‘Use our products all the time, for everything, or you will be economically obsolete and possibly starve to death.’ It’s funny, but I just don’t remember hearing this message about learning how to type, or using Microsoft Excel or Google search, or any other business or consumer software solution. Could the difference possibly be the $Trillions that have been pumped into AI infrastructure and the need to earn a return on that spending before the assets depreciate into obsolescence? Please don’t let someone’s sales pitch scare you into outsourcing your ability to think critically. Please don’t let some company’s IPO timeline frighten you into developing a debilitating case of AI Brain. Pump the brakes. Breathe. Think. Our Republic depends on it.

Imagine waking up one morning to a weird cryptic message that the project you have been pouring your time and effort into would suddenly be canceled; anonymously, perhaps indefinitely. The purpose of this third and final installment of this series will be to bring home the objective of the entire thread we are pulling. The first objective is to broadly encourage readers to think in terms of trade offs rather than solutions, as one of the best thinkers of our time, Thomas Sowell often points out. You may disagree with this man’s politics, but I believe his singular ability to objectively weigh, as Bastiat put it; “that which is seen, and that which is not seen”, is an invaluable mental habit to develop. I think there are many positive aspects of the “creator economy” and of these platform companies that entail many benefits to individuals and society. In addition to the valuable skills and behaviors that one is likely to develop as a result of working on a project like Youtube (as discussed in Tater #7: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 2 - Starting a Youtube Channel is Bullshit, but You Should Do it Anyway.) or Substack, or any other platform designed for creative outlet, the very existence of these intellectual marketplaces are creating new pathways for the spread of ideas and more importantly, for forging new connection and even friendship. I don’t think most of us would consider the X-Box live communication channels to be the modern equivalent of the Royal Society for some sort of New Enlightenment (we’ll come back to that thought), but I know a guy who is still friends (in real, actually life) with a dude he met over the airwaves playing Call of Duty with strangers when they were kids. They eat turkey together on Thanksgiving (in real, actually life) some years. That’s awesome; these guys would almost certainly have never crossed paths in the absence of these various communications platforms. But despite these undeniable positives, there are tradeoffs. My God are there tradeoffs. We’ll condition ourselves to see all sides of things and we’ll all be better off for it.

*Note: because of some incidents that I will discus below, I felt it was necessary to break this piece up into three parts. For the first part, Please see:

Tater #6: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 1 - Lottery Tickets.

Tater #7: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 2 - Starting a Youtube Channel is Bullshit, but You Should Do it Anyway.

This is not something I plan on doing regularly.

The second objective of this finale will be to develop an understanding of the game we are playing, to try to develop a better understanding of the rules, if possible, and to try to understand the incentives and track record of the people who make these rules. Specifically, I want to instill a sense of skepticism with regard to the bigger picture, so people can be more fully aware of the reality they are operating in, so they can make informed decisions about how they focus their precious time and effort. As someone who would be considered an elder millennial, or Xennial as some would say, I can’t help but feel a sense of duty to examine these issues given my fortunate position as someone who has experienced two worlds. People my age have vivid memories of life before the internet, the internet transition itself, and experience of life after the internet. Many people reading this have only vague memories of being a human without a wireless, internet-connected supercomputer in their pockets at all time. I used to plug “the internet” into the wall and sit in a chair listening to that sweet Internet song that was played each time you were about to blast off into the world wide web. An increasing portion of the population will never have heard that song. Before that, if I wanted to hang out with a friend, I would use the phone attached to the wall in our dining room, call my friend’s home, briefly speak to his mother, and then make a plan to go rollerblading in T-10 minutes. I say this not to conflate my age with wisdom, not from a place of condescension, but from a place of balanced perspective. Similarly, if you find yourself being enticed by the ideas of communism, I’d suggest a dialogue with someone who has actually experienced such a system first hand. Many people don’t don’t know who Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is any more than they know what it’s like to plug the internet into a hole in the wall. And, may I remind you, digression, not brevity, is the essence of wit.

Anyway, the questions we really need to be thinking about are the following: is this game we have decided to play one where the playing field is level and everyone plays by the same rules, or is the platform-based “creator economy” as we know it more of a lottery? (Please see Tater #6: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 1 - Lottery Tickets). Is it a game of skill or a game of luck? Is it poker or roulette? And if it is roulette, if it is a lottery, is it totally random, or does someone have their fingers on the scale? Is this one of those fun corporate raffles where some lady in HR picks the winner as the first name out of the hat, or does she keep drawing and announce the winner as the first name out of the hat that happens to also be the name of a person she likes and possibly eats lunch with sometimes? Have you been nice to Brenda this year? Have you given her any honest feedback that she didn’t want to hear? Are we being manipulated into creating content to support an advertising revenue stream without an equal chance of winning the game? Are we the revenue stream? How many adds do you consume watching videos or reading articles about ‘how to succeed on *insert name of platform*? Are we being manipulated to buy stuff? To spend more time on the platform? Are we being manipulated in others ways? Have these platforms been transparent about anything? As the great Walter Sobchak once said, “Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules!?”.

I think a dose of skepticism is almost always healthy for its own sake, and let the brave among us tiptoe closer to the hot coals of cynicism. It’s also useful to let our existing beliefs serve as hypotheses to be tested. So what evidence can we point to in discerning whether or not platforms are a neutral arbiter of information and knowledge flow? First, let’s look a the biggest social network, the most ubiquitous, the OG. Besides Myspace (sorry, Tom), Facebook has been around the longest, and therefore has a longer history to examine. While ostensibly a neutral platform for connection and self expression, this platform is great example of companies putting their fingers on the scale based on political pressure or their own ideology, as well as deliberately psychologically manipulating people (that is, beyond the usual allegations of purposely addictive featureless such as infinite scrolling, as well as deliberately targeting young children, which are the topics of the current lawsuits that the company is facing, and losing).

Let’s look at how your feed is set up on these platforms. It’s a neutral chronological ledger of all the posts from your connections and various pages you have expressed interest in right? Wrong. It is a carefully curated collection of any category of bullshit they want people to see (including propaganda, outrage bait etc). Actually that’s not accurate, your feed is not a collection of bullshit they want people to see, its a collection of bullshit they want YOU (as in you, specifically) to see. Let’s never forget the chilling developments of 2014 (way before all of this AI ‘mind reading’ was commercially available), when Facebook went out of it’s way to deliberately manipulate people. Go ahead and research it, but here is just one breadcrumb from an article in Wired from that time (Everything You Need to Know About Facebook’s Controversial Emotion Experiment - Wired - Jun 30, 2014):

“For one week in 2012, Facebook altered the algorithms it uses to determine which status updates appeared in the News Feed of 689,003 randomly selected users (about 1 of every 2,500 Facebook users). The results of this study were just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). As the authors explain, “[b]ecause people’s friends frequently produce much more content than one person can view,” Facebook ordinarily filters News Feed content “via a ranking algorithm that Facebook continually develops and tests in the interest of showing viewers the content they will find most relevant and engaging.””

So they are curating this feed for you, based on what you will find relevant and engaging. That’ really nice of them, you know, since your friends produce so much content, they have to filter it for you. But how do these folks define “relevant and engaging”? Well really its just anything that elicits and emotional response from you, as an article from Forbes from the same time period elaborates (Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For Science - Forbes - Jun 28, 2014):

“Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods. If there was a week in January 2012 where you were only seeing photos of dead dogs or incredibly cute babies, you may have been part of the study. The experiment ran for a week -- January 11–18, 2012 -- during which the hundreds of thousands of Facebook users unknowingly participating may have felt either happier or more depressed than usual, as they saw either more of their friends posting ‘15 Photos That Restore Our Faith In Humanity’ articles or despondent status updates about losing jobs, getting screwed over by X airline, and already failing to live up to New Year’s resolutions. “*Probably* nobody was driven to suicide,” tweeted one professor linking to the study, adding a “#jokingnotjoking” hashtag.”

This was pretty widely talked about when it happened, but the reality is that most people forget this kind of thing. There are people on these platforms today who were not even born when that story came out. To them, and to really anyone under 30 who has never known a world without the intent, please consider the following before you choose how to conduct yourself on the internet: Writing deeply and personally about your problems online can be cathartic and revelatory, and even help other people who may be dealing with something similar. However, it also makes it easier for companies to use AI to harvest your data (and your very psychology) to sell you a product, a candidate, or otherwise manipulate you. I know this may sound cynical, but it is unquestionably the reality of how these companies/ late stage capitalism operates. Just be aware of the tradeoffs you are making.

They just wanted to see how it affects peoples moods, that’s all. But it goes both ways, affecting the consumer of the content as well as the creator. If you were one of those people posting something positive, and Facebook wanted to manipulate someone else’s emotions, then chances are your post wouldn’t have been seen at all. This happens constantly, whether it’s the “vibe” of your content, the topic, or where the algorithm ‘thinks’ you stand on certain issues. For example, if you are perceived to possess a viewpoint that runs slightly counter to the approved narrative on a particular topic, will all of your posts be downgraded or censored? Or just the one’s on that particular topic? Let’s take a look at a relatively recent example highlighted by may media outlets from all over the political spectrum, but we’ll just pick one for illustration (Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook to ‘censor’ some COVID-19 content during the pandemic - PBS - Aug 27, 2024).

“Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says senior Biden administration officials pressured Facebook to “censor” some COVID-19 content during the pandemic and vowed that the social media giant would push back if it faced such demands again. In a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg alleges that the officials, including those from the White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.” The officials “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company didn’t agree, he said in the letter.”I believe the government pressure was wrong and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter dated Aug. 26 and posted on the committee’s Facebook page and to its account on X.”

For our purposes, this is not about covid or even censorship per se, but rather about highlighting from different angles that your content can be downgraded or hidden or buried or “shadow-banned” or otherwise deemphasized for basically ANY reason. These platforms and these algorithms remain black boxes, nobody knows what the rules of the game are, nobody knows how the game is played, or what the incentives are. I doubt very strongly that this is just a Facebook issue. Other companies can downgrade you, shadow ban you, or even restrict you entirely. I know this because I experienced it first hand with Substack, and I want to describe that experience so that other people can better understand what they are getting themselves into and, to the extent that it is even possible, get an idea of the rules of the game they are playing. Here’s the spoiler: there are none.

To fully and accurately describe the gravity of the risks inherent in our relationships with these platforms, I want to touch briefly on the appeal of Substack specifically. A few years ago, I belatedly developed a serious book reading habit. It became both a serious-book reading habit, and a serious book-reading habit. This occurred during a brief pause in my career as an investment research analyst, which in simple terms amounts to being a professional reader, the most famous of which is Warren Buffet, who is well known for his massive reading diet. I was trying to be a mini, shittier version of that, but it doing so I had for many years been neglecting subjects that were only tangentially related to investing (almost everything is), but which I was very interested in. I found myself making connections between ideas and synthesizing thoughts in ways that were new and exciting to me. Somewhere along the line, I was introduced to the idea that reading is like diet, and writing was like exercise. So I just started writing, almost every single day, and soon I had a writing habit to go with my reading habit. It soon dawned on me that the way I was connecting the dots and seeing the world might be useful to someone else out there, someone pondering similar issues and trying to make sense of the world. Maybe they could learn something from my perspective, and I from theirs. So I decided to share my work with the world, or rather anyone in the world who happened to be interested.

After doing some research on the various outlets, I concluded that Substack seems to be as of right now, the best place on the internet to share ideas about how the world works, and what if anything we could do to improve it for individuals, and for society as a whole. I suppose if there was one moment, one piece of work that really encapsulates the essence of the draw for me and served as perhaps the final nudge to get me over the edge, it was the following passage from the excellent essay I stumbled across from Peter Leyden of the Great Progression (“Substack is like the Royal Society of the 21st Century for The New Enlightenment” - 5/20/2025”):

“Imagine what these men of letters would have done with the tools that are coming together on Substack today. They would all be able to see Newton’s latest essay instantly, or see whose newsletters he reads, or what essays he particularly likes, or get his daily thoughts in short posts. They’d also be able to see the comments that Locke made on Isaac’s new essay, and then see Isaac’s response, and then see them shift to the Chat to hammer out their differences. How amazing would it have been for all of these men of letters — and frankly, anyone at that time — to watch a video conversation between Franklin and Voltaire about what they saw as the differences between the American and French revolutions? Giving those people of The Enlightenment the tools of our time would have dramatically accelerated the pace of innovation and spread their transformative ideas much farther for potentially bigger results. In the process, “the men of letters” would have expanded its constituencies and become “the people of posts.” The point is that the 21st-century version of the Royal Society could well be the Substack network that we are just starting to build out today. Humans have never seen such an amazing collection of communication tools all integrated into one place and optimized for iterating big ideas, innovating new concepts, and spreading the results around the world.”

So Substack seemed like a two birds-one-stone type of game I should get involved in. I’d get to write and help myself to organize and make sense of my own thoughts, and I’d get to share the puzzle pieces I find with other people, and maybe I’d be in possession of a few pieces they were missing, and they would trade me for a few pieces I’m missing as I make my worldview puzzle. As Joan Didion said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” George Orwell takes it a step further: “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” Beyond that, posting to Substack would allow me to utilize one of my two main inert talents. I’m world class at exactly two things in life; using my feet to catch things my hands drop before they smash on the ground, and picking up the faint smell of bullshit in the air before others are aware of its existence. It’s the second talent that I want to share with the world. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says “If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” I see fraud. I smell bullshit.

Within that context, I think and write about the big picture as I try to highlight some perspectives that seem to get missed, but that I think would be beneficial for people to ponder, even if (especially if) it is presented in a way that makes them slightly uncomfortable. In these pages I provide unorthodox takes on the the economy, society, incentive structures, and power structures, usually the type of perspective they don’t teach you in school. I want to write about the types of things that I like to read about in a way that I like to read about them, but don’t get to enough. I enjoy learning about the world, its people, its systems, and how the human monkey brain leads us down the paths we choose. I like making sense of the world through observation and learning about what makes us human. I like reading and writing about it in a way that is truthful and authentic, and amusing for myself and anyone who cares to read what I have to say. I strive to make my work worthy of readers’ time.

In short, I was pumped about Substack, and I still am. In fact, I deliberately chose to let some time pass before writing this so that I could be as objective as possible and not allow my emotions to cloud my reasoning. However, I think it’s important to share my experience with this company to give others some necessary perspective on what type of game they are playing, and the nature of the projects they are pouring their energy into, so they can be aware of and objectively weigh the potential risks to their time and efforts. I will not go into excruciating detail here since I’m not trying to argue my case to the court of public opinion. I’ll just tell you what happened so you can avoid it happening to you, and more importantly, be prepared if and when it does happen.

I was new to the platform, but had been putting a lot of time and effort in to writing, and after having researched other platforms, decided that Substack made the most sense to me. I wrote and posted for a couple weeks and seemed to be gaining some traction. It was exciting, as the early stages of any project usually are. Each day my subscriber count was growing from a small base and my work seemed to be slowly starting to resonate as people discovered my articles. Then I ran into a brick wall of faceless bureaucracy. I woke up one day to a message on the homepage that my account was restricted for violating the spam policy. I was rattled, I had put so much time into this only to find out that someone (or some automated bot) could just take it away from me, guilty until proven innocent, apparently. I’ve decided not to post the paragraph that describes the spam policy here, which you can read in the help pages, but most of it refers to external email lists and posting external content, neither of which I did, not even once. In this scenario, you get 200 characters or so to plead your case and then you wait for a seemingly random amount of time while any momentum you had built just grinds to a halt. It was very unsettling. Eventually, like a day later I believe, you get some nonsense explanation of what you did wrong. Apparently oversharing is against the policy even though it is never mentioned in the policy. You know all those posts that say “connect me to writers” or “promote your work” or “use this post to share your work”… I took advantage of every one I came across to do just that, to share long form articles I had posted internally within Substack. Again, nothing external, not even once. See if you can spot the point in time where I ran into this automated kafkaesque horror show on the chart below. No, these aren’t huge numbers, but going from zero to 39 subscribers was huge to me (thank you everyone!). Lay a ruler over the climb to 39 and extrapolate that as if they didn’t speed bump me. Who knows, I could have been thumb wrestling Jake Paul on Netflix by now.

To be totally transparent, there was a few times when I posted my article in the comments of someone else’s note on the notes feed, almost exclusively when it directly related to the topic, but a few times when it did not. If someone posted something useless or banal e.g. “live, love, laugh” or some other trite nonsense, itself perhaps a form of spam, I would share my article there too. I didn’t see this as morally wrong in the sense that I was encroaching on someone else’s staked off territory, but rather posting on the internet, into the ether. You may disagree with that and think I should be banned for life. Maybe you think, as Ray Finkle’s mother did of Dan Marino, that I should die of gonorrhea and rot in hell for this. That’s fine. I include this part because I think it provides some clues as to what not to do so you don’t have to deal with this, even though the rules are obviously (and perhaps intentionally) unclear. That is the point. Nowhere are we asked not to share a certain amount of times, and even the (horrible based on industry standards) “customer service” chat bot will assure you that this is not something that is forbidden. No one really knows the rules and that’s probably intententional; if the rules are vague than you can be punished for anything. The absence of specificity allows for maximum discretion. So yeah, eventually you get an automated message that tells you, kind of, in a way that is so vague and convoluted as to make it useless, what you did wrong (in my case sharing the same article too many times), and then the only way to get your account back is to click the box that says “yes” after prompted with the question “do you understand?”, like you are some sorted of scolded toddler. And “Yes” is the only option, even though the reality, based on the explanation you have been given by the automated bot, will almost certainly be “no man, not really, I really wish I could talk to someone about this”. That’s the thing. You can never talk to someone about any question you have. They will refuse to speak to you.

Whatever, I got my access back after around a day or so and I knew not to overshare. I dove back in, and shared an article over the next few hours maybe two or three times, but not four, since I now knew oversharing was within the unwritten/unmentioned rules. A few hours later I got another automated message saying I was restricted again. Now my momentum was really toast. They left me dangling on the line for days this time as I writhed and struggled to no avail to figure out a way to bypass this automated AI maze and get someone on the phone to talk me through this. I hadn’t even overshared this time. Zero email lists, zero external content. As I recall, it took THREE DAYS of my work hidden from public view for this robot system to realize it had made a mistake and blast out this automated non-response which conspicuously omits any attempt at an apology:

That’s the thing though, they don’t have to apologize, they don’t have to pretend to give a shit about you. They are a powerful platform and you are expendable. You can tell a lot about a company, its competitive position, and its power by how they treat their customers. Perhaps the best way to understand this is a high level comparison, and as it happens, during my first experience what what Substack might call their ‘customer service’ solutions, another project I was workin on at the time had me looking at the customer service of another company; the Savanah Bananas. For those unfamiliar, they are an entertainment-based baseball team that I might simply describe as a cross between traditional baseball and something like WWE wrestling. It’s a fun, family-friendly show with music and dancing and all inclusive food, and baseball. Their owner, Jesse Cole has become well known, not only for his innovative take on baseball, but perhaps more so for his rather unique approach to the customer experience. I thought this quote by Jesse from an interview I saw on Youtube really encapsulates the company’s customer service ethos, and their approach to business in general. “Put yourself in the fans’ shoes, every step…Give them something that they may enjoy, and you’ll be surprised; the money, the revenue, the sales, they’ll all take care of themselves. Put yourself in their shoes, do something they would love every single day, and it’ll take care of itself.” One of the ways the company implements this philosophy, as Jesse describes throughout his excellent book “Fans First”, is by consistently attempting to create what they call “you wouldn’t believe” moments at their ballpark every night. As he puts it:

“Three words: “you wouldn’t believe.” These are the most powerful words in creating an unforgettable experience.They speak to something so outrageous, so surprising, so beyond expectation that there’s only possible response: tell the story to others.”

Indeed, Jesse. Indeed. In contrast, if I could find one quote, one piece of prose that most accurately represents Substack’s approach to customer experience, in my opinion it would be the following, taken straight from the company’s ‘help center’: “If the bot can’t answer your question, it will automatically create an email ticket for our in-house Support team. Our experienced team (Betty, Brock, Cantrell, Lena, Mac, Sylvia, and more) has worked closely with Substack creators for years.” I can tell you with absolute certainty that “creating a ticket” does not mean that you will have the privilege of corresponding with one of these individuals. At least a dozen times I tried to get someone on the phone, or at least to dialogue with me over email. When the bot cant’t answer you question, it basically just keeps looping and sending you the same links over and over to pages that don’t answer the question. You have to figure out how to stonewall or otherwise trick the bot out of its loop to eventually crate this “automatic” ticket (I promise you with all of my soul that there is absolutely nothing automatic about it). This take a great deal of mental and verbal finagling. The eventual return correspondence, purported to be signed by a human, was a short, impersonal, almost certainly AI generated (in my opinion), snippet of generic poppycock. To this day, I have never had the opportunity to speak with a customer service representative from this company despite my many attempts and pleas. I would never hold Amazon up as a shining exemplar of customer service, but you can always get a person on the phone to talk through an issue. Nobody ever went broke underestimating Ebay’s commitment to customer service, and it’s a bit of a pain in the ass in my experience, but even they will eventually give you the time of day. Not so for Substack. The economics simply are not such that they are incentivized to give a rat’s ass about you. It’s just business, pal, nothing personal.

I can tell you with absolute sincerity that I have never, ever been treated so poorly by a company in my entire life. You’re milage may vary, and please don’t take this as financial advice, but I would not go betting the farm on that outcome. In short “you would not believe” how shitty this company treats its customers.

I bring this to you, dear reader, not as some disgruntled yelp reviewer mad at a restaurant because the wait staff mispronounced my daughter’s name when I forced them to sing happy birthday to her at Red Lobster in my own little sociopathic Stanford Prison experiment. No, I bring this to you as a warning, and to offer some (positive, believe it or not) perspective. We’ll get to the positive perspective shortly, since that will be the true takeaway, but first let’s be very clear about the warning. I know that people pour a lot of time and effort and emotion into their writing on these platforms, much more than I am capable of in most cases. The quality of some of the writing on Substack is greater than I’ll ever be able to achieve in my life. Some writers’ transparency and willingness to be vulnerable is something that I may never have the courage to do. And I appreciate it all. And I don’t want someone to wake up one morning and be surprised that everything they have been working towards has been snatched from their grasp by some automated system glitch or some faceless human coward behind a curtain.

I feel extremely fortunate to have had the experience I did before I really had much skin in the game (other than the time I had spent writing and promoting my work). I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who had really done the thing that I think so many on these platforms aspire to do. Build an audience slowly, and eventually leave a 9-5 that no longer fulfills them, to seek a meaning through writing and an income by publishing on these platforms. I could not imagine relying on Substack to feed my family and having this happen. The stress that the sudden, capricious notice of account restriction might have one someone in this position is something I hope no one has to experience, but I’m quite certain some inevitably will.

This brings us to the crux of the issue here: Nobody knows the rules of this game. People invent little rituals like dancing for the sun gods for rain for their crops. The very fact that “Dear Substack” is a common refrain will be studied by future anthropologists. It reminds one of the South Park episode where Butters prays to the government. What percentage of people writing on Substack, for example, are writing exclusively about how to grow on Substack? And do any of these lessons actually even apply to people who write about something other than Substack? I think it’s a question worth asking. My guess is 34%. Higher or lower? Does it not seem weird that roughly a third of the content on Substack is just people articulating some educated guess as to how the algorithm works, and how to hack it for visibility. All of this content runs through data centers, which are powered by electricity, which is generated by, among others things, burning truck loads of coal. What an interesting use of resources. What an interesting species we are. All of this waste of time, effort, resources, and intellectual capital just to play a giant guessing game. Why not just put the cards on the table, open the books and show us how it works?

This lack of transparency offends our very deep psychological need for justice. Specifically, this is an issue of what is known as procedural justice which, as the authors explain in The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “Intuitive justice is the combination of distributive justice (the perception that people are getting what is deserved) and procedural justice (the perception that the process by which things are distributed and ruled are enforced is fair and trustworthy).” With most of these platforms, Substack included, neither of these conditions are met. We have no idea if someone is getting the attention they seek because they “deserve” it the sense that they are creating something that people want to read, or of they are being treated differently by the algorithm for some reason. To argue otherwise with any conviction would be blind faith. Procedurally, we have no idea how these decisions are made (whether its a decision on visibility or account restriction, or anything really), even in the absence of programable bias. Lukianoff and Haidt articulate why this type of arrangement becomes so unsettling to the more justice-sensitive among us:

“There are two basic concerns that people bring to their judgments of procedural justice. The first is how the decision is being made. This includes whether the decision makers are doing their best to be objective and neutral and therefore trustworthy, or whether they have conflicts of interest, prejudices, or other factors that lead them to be biased in favor of a particular person or outcome. It also includes transparency - is it clear to all how the process works? The second basic concern is how a person is being treated along the way, which means primarily: Are people being treated with dignity, and do they have a voice - do they get to fully state their case, and are they taken seriously when they do?”

Since no one really knows, and therefore any reasonable theory seems valid, let me tell you how I suspect this whole creator economy thing works (and this is purely unfalsifiable suspicion and conjecture). Companies get people to bite onto seeing a few people get rich and famous. Then they start or encourage some unsubstantiated theory about people being rewarded by the algorithm for ‘consistency’ and publishing something every day, or every week, no matter how shallow or useless it happens to be. It keeps the supply of content flowing, and the demand/ consumption for content supported (especially the genre of content which consists of people guessing how to win the game that no one actually knows the rules of). Substack is as guilty of this as any platform. Are we being made to believe that if we don’t post one motivational quote, platitude, or triviality about “building something” on Notes each and every day, that the algorithm will bury our visibility and no one will see our actual long form articles? Where does this “advice” come from? Does anyone actually know the rules of how this game is played? Is it me, or is this constant guessing game starting to sound a lot like “slaughter a goat or it won’t rain and your crops will fail”?

In short, its bullshit. But the that’s ok. The reason I say this, and the reason for this entire article, is not to piss in anyone’s potatoes, but to give people an idea of the nature of the game they are playing, so they can avoid putting all their time and their eggs into one platform’s basket only to be potentially, devastated to find out that the people running that platform are not their friend, and finally, to realize what I realized without all the anxiety of it: if you write for the right reasons and stop tryin to chase ‘likes’ and subscribers and external validation in the first place, nobody can take that from you. Ultimately, the ‘obstacle is the way’ and I’ll forever be genuinely grateful for the day I woke up to a bucket of ice water being dumped on me by the system, the bureaucracy. It’s very easy to get distracted with all of the metrics and measures and gamification of external validation. The experience reminded me harshly but extremely effectively why I decided to spend my time in this way on the first place. I wanted to create something that was useful to whoever chose to read it, no matter how small in number they may be. I wanted to write something that was somewhat timeless and enduring, force myself to do the work to understand the world, and put some stakes in the ground to reflect back on one day many years from now. Absolutely none of that has anything to do with the amount of attention I was able to garner on the internet in the mid 2020’s. That attention, that platform, that audience can, and probably will eventually be taken from me capriciously, suddenly, unjustly by some automated system or by some group of anonymous cowards. And I no longer have to feel the burden of giving a single shit about it. The knowledge, and insight, and confidence I gain during the precess can never be taken. I hope that reading this will unburden others and sharpen their focus and purpose as well. Whether things are going smoothly or there are unfair challenges in life, this too shall pass.

The quote form above from Peter Leyden is worth repeating: “Humans have never seen such an amazing collection of communication tools all integrated into one place and optimized for iterating big ideas, innovating new concepts, and spreading the results around the world.”Perhaps this is entirely over-romanticizing the whole operation. Alternatively, I read one day that the Dave Matthews band is just Nickelback for people with Bachelors’ degrees. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things Substack is just TikTok for people with Bachelors’ degrees. Or maybe, if we are really honest with ourselves, Substack is just buying lottery tickets for people with Bachelors’ degrees. Either way, one thing is clear: writing on Substack is bullshit, but you should do it anyway.

“Do you know what a Shit Barometer is, boy?…Measures the Shit Pressure in the air. When the Barometer rises, and you’ll feel it too, your ears will implode with the Shit Pressure. I tried to warn you…but you picked the wrong side! Beware, the Shit Winds are a-comin.” - Jim Lahey

*Note: because of some incidents that I will discus at a later date, I felt it was necessary to break this piece up into three parts. For the first part, Please see Tater #6: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 1 - Lottery Tickets. This is not something I plan on doing regularly.

For some people, they trade time now for time later, and they decide to enter the “side-hustle” arena. Sometimes we feel that, for whatever reason, the current 9-5 just isn’t cutting it, either from the point of view of money and and opportunity for growth, or creativity and opportunity for expressiveness, or just from the perspective of the need for some other form of fulfillment that is not currently being met. Maybe we need to scratch a creative itch, maybe we need to feel a sense of agency, maybe we just want to feel like we are moving forward in life, or at least trying. These “side-hustles” take many forms, but it seems like there are two that are most prevalent. The first is some sort of real estate investment, be it short term rental properties, longer term traditional rental property with perhaps some ‘sweat equity’ projects involved, or good old fashioned ‘house-flipping’, where you buy a house, paint the inside grey, and sell it for a profit, and somehow this magically adds value to the economy and to the greater good. I propose that the next time the economy weakens in some way, we just simply paint the inside of every building in the country grey, and we will probably double the size of the economy over night. “Nobody knows what it means, but it’s provocative. Get’s the people going!”.

Anyway, the other most common form of side-hustle out there seems to be some form of what we now call ‘content creation’. Now it’s true that so much of this content that is created is just distraction, and slop, and nonsense, or worse. While the absurdity of taking this digital horseshit creation machine to it’s logical conclusion and imagining a world in which the economy of the world’s sole superpower consists of nothing but hundreds of millions of people sitting around making dance videos and showing their asses and feet to each other over the internet for money (which we will certainly examine in detail very soon, stay tuned), today we are just going to ignore all that for now, and focus on that content which actually adds value, or contributes to the greater good. Who is to judge? Well, me. I’m the one writing this. In the words of the great Pete Weber, “Who do you think you are I am!”. Just google it and thank me later.

For the people who make good, valuable, useful content, the motivation is varied, but usually has to do with a confluence of scratching some creative itch, a desire to share knowledge with others, a longing to share insights or perspective that one genuinely feels will help people, to make connections with people within some specific niche or domain sphere, as well as economic reasons (a desire for ‘passive income’ or at least a more diversified income stream. To make long for content or videos that are truly additive and valuable, there is nothing passive about it. It’s actually hard word, and I think this is the piece that, while not obviously enticing at first, get’s people to stock with the project. They suddenly find themselves doing work that is at once interesting, challenging, and meaningful, something that many people simply do not experience to any great extent in today’s economy, whether it be the blue color grind or the white collar cube farm. For a lot of people, the very idea of being able to one day gain enough of a ‘following’ to do their creative side project full time, to say goodbye to the corporate world and it’s conformity and meetings and fake conversation and hierarchy that is often based on anything other than merit in their eyes, is the real motivation. It’s an escape fantasy. You make a couple Youtube videos or write a couple Substack articles, and suddenly you find yourself, eyes closed, fantasizing about doing your new hobby full time, for a living. You will be chosen as one of the very select few who can make a decent living making videos or writing articles. In other words, you have chosen your numbers, and you have purchased your lottery ticket. (For more on this concept, please refer to Tater #6: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 1 - Lottery Tickets). Now, before we tiptoe along the border of cynicism and go into further depth of the realty of the “creator lottery”, let’s talk about why it’s a great idea to start a creative side project irrespective of the money or career shift that it may lead to. To do this, I’ll share a little story about why starting a YouTube channel sucks ass but you should do it anyway. We’ll focus on the latter first, like a Tarantino movie (or “film” if you prefer, but I’m not a weasel so I don’t call it that).

Sometimes the best way to understand something is to experience it. During a brief layoff following a change of ownership at a previous employer, I decided to do just that. I started a YouTube channel. Not to dive in and really understand the system as some sort of meta awareness, man-on-the-street effort, but because I was out of work for 6 months and needed a project. I had miraculously survived several waves of cuts at a shrinking asset manager which had been constantly battered by the rising tides of fee compression, indexation/ passive investing (or as some call it “investor socialism”). But shortly following the buyout my time had come. I was given my final bonus and a generous severance and set free to tend to my garden. With all of this new free time on my hands, my first decision was to start keeping a journal, in which the first line on the first page reads: “So, something not that chill happened at work today”. Subsequently I started filling my hours consuming YouTube videos about life. I haven’t had cable in well over a decade so it was either that or Netflix, and it seems I was making an effort to lean towards semi-educational content rather than superhero movies. My journal indicates that two weeks into my one-way ticket vacation, I started watching videos by Gabe Bult and Matt D’Avella. Both of those guys put out useful, value-added content that suggests a certain level of integrity in what I would soon come to realize is an otherwise never ending firehose of click-bait, attention-seeking, mind-numbing slop. I was inspired.

I had worked in markets for 15 years or so since graduating college, mostly reading about the world and trying to predict the future from behind a desk. I had a creative itch to scratch, and more importantly, there was something about those “this video really helped me” comments that appealed to me. I was cognitively aware than managing someone else’s hard-earned money and setting them up for a less stressful future has inherent value, but my previous efforts had been a little too upstream from the ultimate beneficiary. I wanted to somehow used the knowledge and perspective I had acquired while essentially getting paid to learn for 15 years, to help or inspire someone to think differently or see the world more clearly. Sound familiar?

You may have detected a change of tone above when I described the reality of what most Youtube “content” is (a never ending firehose of click-bait, attention-seeking, mind-numbing slop). This seems like a good place to stop and be perfectly transparent about something very important to this story: I failed at Youtube. I only made 10 videos, they didn’t get many views, and then I decided to not to “stick with it” like so many videos instruct to do. The prevailing theory out there seems to be if you aren’t getting many views, its because your content just isn’t that good. After all, YouTube is incentivized to maximize views across the platform, they get paid if you get “paid”. We’ll explore all of that as we go, but its probably safe to say my content wan’t very good. That’s fine with me, I don’t harbor any resentment or envy and I don’t have sour grapes, but I am able to objectively understand the process, ecosystem, and incentives better now.

One of the reasons I started the YouTube project in the first place was because I discovered through my reading the importance of failing at something. I read somewhere that when Phil Knight started Nike he was eager to fail so that he could learn some things and move onto another project. This is the mindset I chose going into it. But this is also not me saying that I failed at something on purpose, or that I failed because I didn’t even try hard, thus protecting my ego and pride from the consequences of that failure. I did try hard. I put a lot of effort into the project. I put a lot of time and thought into making the best videos I could, with special focus on tryin to make each subsequent video a little better than the previous one, learning and implementing new editing skills or camera techniques with each iteration. I tried hard, and I failed. There are plenty of people who try less hard, and “make it”. They get some money, sometimes even a lot of money, they get one of those cool plaques you often see in the background behind someone talking about something, and they are proud of it. They should be proud. It takes a lot of work to make videos that add value to society or help individuals in some way. I would have been proud if I had done better. Hell, I’m proud of the videos I made anyway. One of them is about a meatball technique that I have never seen done before anywhere. Maybe someday someone will stumble across it to make said meatballs and use it to get a lot of high-fives at a family get together. I’m glad I did did it, I even think about doing it again someday, I just might. But after a wonderful 6 month vacation, my run as a YouTube ‘creator’ ended the day I went back to work as a full time investment professional. Spending hours in the evening in front of a computer editing videos after spending hours in front a computer all day studying news and data and building investment strategies was not going to work for my overall enjoyment in life, even if my “side-hustle” was growing corn, which it certainly was not.

My Youtube channel withered on the vine, and there is no telling how many videos within how may weeks I’d have to add to ‘revive it’ (that’s part of the problem with these platforms that we’ll get to shortly). But the project was in no way a waste of time, and in hindsight I think it was one of the best uses of time I could have chosen. I learned how to dive in and chart a course to teach myself how to do something I knew absolutely nothing about. I decided to pick up a book on how the entire concept of Youtube works. Then I researched gear, mostly by reaching out to established creators, I read an entire book on how to use the camera I decided on (and gained a new respect for photographers, as well as an understanding of how wild the tech inside a camera really is, as the body alone cost twice as much as a new MacBook). Then I needed to learn how to edit, so I read an entire book on DaVinci Resolve and charted a logical path through some excellent online tutorials (there is a dude names Casey Faris on Youtube who is extremely knowledgeable and an excellent teacher of this stuff, if you ever become interested in dabbling). I enjoyed the project, and I developed a stack of evidence that I could show myself to prove to myself that I’m capable of diving in to something that is completely out of my wheelhouse and figure it out. If I could do that, what else could I do? So that right there is the main reason why you should start a Youtube channel even though it sucks ass. Now I’ll tell you why it sucks ass.

I was very fortunate to get into the Youtube thing at the exact time they really wanted to start competing with TikTok and push the whole “shorts” thing. Youtube, in my estimate, was already sliding rapidly away from educational content toward entertainment and brain rot, and the whole idea of shorts basically disgusted me. I didn’t want to contribute to the dumbing down of society, to the ruining of peoples’ attention span, to getting people mindlessly addicted to an infinite scroll wheel so they could waste their days and their weeks and their lives becoming anxious and depressed and alone and extremely easy to manipulate. I’m not trying be righteous here, but that is exactly what this shit does and most serious people know it by now. I’m also not saying that’s the full reason I stepped away (my videos weren’t great, and when I went back to work, the last thing I wanted to to was come home and sit in front of my computer some more). But I was able to detect the faint but gradually intensifying scent of bullshit in the air.

I knew I didn’t want to make short-form scroll-wheel brain rot horse shit for a living. But I didn’t really have a choice, you see. The consensus within the “creator community” was that you “had” to make shorts. If you wanted your channel to be awarded with visibility and growth, you had to do certain things, “shake a little ass for the algorithm” as one girl put it. But I don’t recall ever seeing any communication from Youtube (Google, Alphabet, whatever) suggesting that I take this rout, or what the business strategy would be, or why they were doing this in the first place, or what would be my reward for complying. And that get’s to the first big reason why making a Youtube channel sucks ass (but you should do it anyway): you have absolutely no idea what the rules of the game are. No one does, other than the people who work for Youtube.

A huge portion of the content on the platform (like most platforms, Substack included) is basically a field of study where everyone tries to figure out what the algorithm wants you to do. Nobody knows. People try to follow the advice of the people who get the most attention, those who have “made it”, which makes sense, but does it really? Are the things required of you to “succeed” (i.e. get the most attention on a platform) really the exact same things required of me? Are your videos or articles or posts not getting as much traction as someone else’s because you are not doing the same things as them, or are the rules different for you? Did you say something naughty on Facebook when you were 14 about a politician that some engineer at Youtube happens to adore? (I’m aware that Facebook is owned by a separate company, but if you think these companies don’t share your data with each other and pass you around like an uninhibited and open-minded hooker at a frat party, then I have a bridge to sell you). Are you running the race with with a weight strapped to your chest? Or are you on the other side, where you get more visibility because you have been well-behaved or ‘chosen’ in some way? If it sounds to you like the plot from the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” (season 1, episode 2), then you are not alone. If it sounds like some kind of pilot program for a social credit score, then I’d be inclined to agree with you. Maybe we are all just buying lottery tickets and ‘success’ is handed out at random. They show us a few examples of people at the top of the mountain so everyone else keeps cranking out content, for free. Everyone is running on a treadmill with a four foot stick duck taped to their head, with a picture of some famous “creator’s” follower count attached to the other end of the stick. No one knows if running harder will ever get you closer to the prize. Is someone controlling the speed of everyone’s treadmill separately? Is that how it really works? Should we “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”?

If you are one of these people who is trying to “build something” on one of these platforms, do you know if your account has been flagged for acceleration or deceleration? Is the volume on your posts turned up or turned down? Does this happen regularly? Is it done manually by human intervention, or is the algorithm designed to optimize for something? What I do know is that we are shown a parade of experts who claim to have cracked the code, telling us we have to post something at least once a week or the algorithm will bury the channel. Is the platform optimizing for the quality or usefulness of content, or just the consistency and loyalty of people willing to crank out brain rot slop consistently to keep the mouth breathers staring at their phones, maximizing engagement to keep the advertisement dollars flowing? Does it downgrade anyone spreading the obvious truth that time spent in this social media race is obviously bad for our mental health? I don’t know. I have absolutely no unique perspective either way. And neither do you. And that’s why this platform-based society we have built is bullshit. We have no idea what the rules of the game we are playing are, and we have no idea if the rules are the same for everyone. Take a deep inhale through your nose. Are you starting to be able to pick up the scent? Starting a Youtube Channel is bullshit, but you should do it anyway.

Anyone reading this will almost certainly already know that lottery tickets are a horrible investment. In fact, most people who know how to read know that lottery tickets are a horrible investment. Some have even concluded that the very act of selling lottery tickets is predatory in some way, taking advantage of poor people who don’t know any better. Lottery tickets have often been labeled a form of regressive tax, in which money flows to the government, at the expense of poor people, and if these people were more enlightened or protected with laws they would be less vulnerable to this financial scam. Maybe if the extremely low odds were displayed more prominently on the product like a warning label on cigarettes, people wouldn’t engage in this financially wasteful behavior. But I think this risks underestimating people. I think they know exactly what they are doing. It’s not a math issue or a financial information issue or even a rationality issue; its a framing issue. When people buy lottery tickets, they are not buying some minuscule chance at becoming unspeakably rich, they are buying a fantasy. Fantasies can be enjoyable, insightful, and useful, and they can even be worth a few bucks. Even if you don’t win the jackpot, the fantasy itself has value.

*Note: because of some incidents that I will discus at a later date, I felt it was necessary to break this piece up into three parts. For the second part, please see Tater #7: Platform Power and Side Hustle Culture Pt. 2 - Starting a Youtube Channel is Bullshit, but You Should Do it Anyway. This is not something I plan on doing regularly.

When you buy a lottery ticket, you’re buying an enhanced ability to fantasize about a life that is different, a slightly more realistic vision of a world where things had gone differently for you. You get to ruminate deeply about what kind of person you would be, and get some clues as to your potential as a human being under the condition of total financial freedom. You get to think about what kind of person you really are today, unburdened by reality. Would you donate half of it to little poor kids, pay off your family’s debt, open a restaurant? Would you continue working? You might get bored, maybe you’d take a year off and try it on, see how it feels. Again, you are not buying an exceedingly small chance to undo the financial hole you are in, you are buying a temporary escape and becoming your own personal fortune teller all at the same time. Some people escape and/or try on different existences through drugs, or travel, or mediation. Some get involved in hobbies, sometimes extreme hobbies like mountain climbing or skydiving or cave spelunking. Some people who can’t afford these things choose lottery tickets. It seems obvious that the kinds of people who might find joy in thinking, fantasizing, ruminating for a period of time unencumbered by thoughts of money and debt and financial constraints are those who are usually forced think about these things constantly. Now we know why poor people spend so much money they don’t have on lottery tickets.

We are all poor in some way. If we think about the five types of wealth discussed by Sahil Bloom in his book The 5 Types of Wealth, every one of us most likely has some some deficit in either time wealth, social wealth, mental wealth, physical wealth, or financial wealth. We are all poor people, and we all buy lottery tickets. All of our lottery tickets look different. Some of us walk down to the 7-11 and stand in line and buy some numbers that we can use to fantasize about a different life for a few days until a different set of numbers is inevitably called. Some of us bet on sports, or politics, or anything under the sun with the rise of online gambling sites and online “prediction markets”. Some of us by our lottery tickets in the form of common stock of silly companies that we heard about in some social media thread. Some us buy crypto, or NFT’s, or leveraged ETFs, things that may not make sense to the guy with the dirty hat standing in line a the 7-11, but might get us a few high fives at the country club or at least a slightly interested smile from the cart girl. Some of us start a Youtube channel or a Substack. We are all poor. We are all buying lottery tickets.

Why is the world the way it is? Why does the United States increasingly resemble an open-air insane asylum? We are the fattest, sickest, most depressed, most anxious, probably the least literate, possibly the dumbest (relatively speaking), and certainly the most self-destructive group of citizens to ever comprise the citizenry of a major empire, let alone the world’s hegemonic superpower, in anything that could be considered modern history. For thousands of years, through mythology, philosophy, and religion, people have told each other stories in their attempt to explain how the world works. Later, economics, sociology and psychology have attempted to explain how and why people interact with their environment, with each other, and with themselves, respectively. And yet it still looks like absolute insanity out there. To use a particularly cringy piece of useless vernacular, here is a little ‘trigger warning’: we are going to take a pretty hard piss on the behaviors of the average American (a fictitious person who mathematically does not exist). Please do not conflate this with my criticizing any real, flesh-and-blood human beings, even if any of these behaviors remind you of someone you know or love. We are all human, and we all have some shitty behaviors and habits some of the time. I am guilty of many of these actions and behaviors described below. The idea is to be aware of them, be aware of the positive alternatives, and do better tomorrow than we did today. But this idea of taking responsibility and making small steps toward progress is often lost on many people, the fictitious average person included. We can criticize behaviors and choices in the abstract, and even at the personal level when appropriate, and we can still do this while showing compassion and empathy and kindness to every individual, regardless of how shitty their behaviors are. As Lincoln said, “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.” Nevertheless, its important to understand where we are and why we find ourselves in this situation if we want to figure out how to move forward in our lives, individually and as a country. So we are going to take a big dirty rotten piss all over the behaviors and mindset of a typical American. Strap in.

Why are people so self destructive? The rules are incredibly simple in the first couple levels of this game called life. Graduate high school, get a job, and don’t have children out of wedlock. That is not difficult for most people, but some people slip through the cracks of this first layer for various reasons (poor parenting, financial calamity etc,). But even if one has found themselves on the more challenging path due to botching these first layer tests, there are other simple rules that people can choose to live by on a daily, ongoing basis that will make life so much easier than it would be otherwise; exercise, read, eat mostly things that are made out of actual food, minimize drug use, sleep 8 hours, live below your means, and maybe write something down once in a while. It is not difficult to do these things. People with much fewer resources have been doing them for thousands of years. If you do everything on that list, your life will be exponentially easier and more fulfilling than if you skimp on one or more of them. If you make it through the first layer described above (graduate, job, marry before kids) and then do the second layer every day, you will enjoy a baseline quality of life that is substantially more fulfilling than it would be otherwise. I didn’t say happy, I didn’t say joyful or pleasureful, I said fulfilling. Life will still be full of obstacles and occasional suffering. Everyone you know will still die someday, but you will be mostly free from the hazards and negative thought patterns associated with a life of not doing those things. The weirdest part about the above is not how simple it is, or how true it is, but the fact that everyone already knows this. After all, 34.26% of the content on YouTube is some version of this same message. How to eat better, how to lift weights correctly, what books to read, how to save money, etc. With so much information out there essentiality acting as a constant reminder to do a handful of fairly simple tasks, why do so many people choose not to? Is the global economy set up to make large pluralities of Americans fail even though winning is so easy?

Perhaps it can be explained by what is known to economists as Triffin’s dilemma. Without getting into all the gory details, which of course are available with a simple internet search, economist Robert Triffin in the 1960’s identified a set of circumstances whereby whichever country was going to be the issuer of the world’s reserve currency (in our timeline of the multiverse that means the US), would need to be able to supply the world with that currency by running consistent and growing current account deficits (just think trade deficits for our purposes here). Basically for the global economy to function as it has been for the past 50 years or so, the US would have needed to consume more than it produces. Do you see where we are going with this? To translate that into a picture of our current reality, Americans need to be fat, lazy, unthinking, all-consuming, disposable fast-fashion-wearing, credit-card maxing, new-car-driving, landfill-pile-making slobs, so that the rest of the world can export to us, and we can send them dollars to use as reserves to stabilize their economies and for trade with other countries.

One of the main building blocks of the current economic disequilibrium is the incentive structure of of the US tax code compared to other countries. This will come as a surprise to many people, but the US has by far the most progressive tax system of any major country in the world. The rich pay the highest share of the total tax take than anywhere else. This is clearly not something that is regularly broadcast to the “eat the rich” crowd with their demands that someone beside themselves pay more, their “fair share”, whatever in the holy hell that even means. Some will surely attempt to argue that the US system is not the mot progressive, based on the high levels of income and wealth inequality exhibited in this country. This outcomes-focused argument should be seen as a signal that these people either are missing the point or are being mendacious. Imagine a society that takes half of the incomes from the top 10% of earners and distributes it to people with lower incomes, who for whatever reason, happen to have a cultural proclivity towards literally placing the cash in a pile, and lighting it on fire. You certainly wouldn’t claim that the resulting continued inequality is the result of the tax system not being progressive enough. Rather than focus on outcomes, which are subject to a multitude of other variables, it’s more useful to focus on actual kinetic transfers of wealth, a measure by which the US is by far the most progressive. I’m sorry I had to say that, but the world is full of high IQ grifters incentivized to constantly try to piss on your foot and tell you it’s raining.

Another progressive characteristic of the US tax code is that we don’t have a national value -added tax or VAT. This is considered an example of a regressive tax, the effect of which is to hit the poorest people the hardest as a share of their income. In Western European economies, it is typical for these types of taxes to comprise roughly 20% of the total tax take. In Eastern Europe it tends to be even higher, up around 30% or above, according to the OECD. Yes, many US states have their own versions of a sales tax or consumption tax, but the overall level of tax on consumption is the lowest in the US, as an be seen in the below chart from the Fraser Institute.

These uniquely progressive characteristics of the US tilt the US toward higher consumption because lower income people, who are relatively “better off” (in terms of being less taxed than they would be otherwise) under a progressive system, on average tend to have a higher marginal propensity to consume, or MPC. If a wealthy doctor is allowed to keep more of the incremental the fruits of her labor, she is more likely to save and invest the money for the future. On the other hand, if the government confiscates a portion of her income and hands it to someone for free, they will be more likely to spend much more of that money, and save much less of it. In many case they will spend even more than the free money they receive, perhaps taking a $400 sum to buy a $500 television and putting the balance on a high interest credit card. The result is that, as a proportion of gross domestic product, (GDP, the most standard and ubiquitous measure of the size of an economy) the US is far more reliant on consumption than any other major country. The countries that rank higher than the US measured by consumption as a proportion of total GDP are poor. I’m talking Africa poor. As the great Dave Chapelle once said, “I don’t really f*ck with Africa because people are starvin’ to death and that’s not baller to me.” It’s just not great company, economically speaking.

It’s also worth pointing out right here yet another way in which the US stands out in a global lineup of the usual suspects. We are among the most advertised-to populations on earth. Total ad spending as a percentage of GDP in the US is all the way at the top of the heap, only bested by one or two countries, depending on who’s measuring. You can’t make this shit up. Do we suck down so much advertising because we are willing to consume so much, or do we consume so much because of the effectiveness of the advertising. Which is the chicken? As the great Tom Petty and the great Jalen Ramsey both (on separate occasions) said: “You tell me”.

In modern American society, there is very little shame attached to how other people’s stollen money is spent. Surely the recipient of stollen money would feel shame if they literally stole money from their comparatively wealthy neighbor and spent it on non-necessities, but our system has abstracted and obfuscated and rationalized the practice so much so as to render the line between the benefactor and the recipient basically imperceptible. I would feel some moral shame from coercively taking from my neighbor, but because I use the system to appoint agents to take on my behalf, I can sleep well and spend the stollen wealth however I choose, even if that isn’t consistent with what is best for me physically or financially, or, even if it is wildly incongruent with the preferences of the producer of that wealth, my recently expropriated neighbor. We have concocted many ways to blunt or eradicate this shame, rationalizing the entire ordeal to the sense of actual pride. The US has an entire grievance industry, set up to convince people that, rather than feeling shame for their behaviors, they are actually entitled to them. In America it is common practice to use large large sums stollen money, along with large sums of interest-bearing consumer debt, to pay someone to draw expensive permanent pictures on your skin, and then shortly thereafter pay someone else to color over all of those drawings with dark grey permanent ink, all while continuing to pay interest on said consumer debt instead of using the second batch of ink money to pay it off. “Dude, sick ink bro. I really love what you did with the grey. I want to get my whole left arm done with fish and dragons and then make it totally grey two years later. It’s gonna be so bitchin’.” This isn’t to say that these obscure patronage systems don’t exist in other countries, but rather that they are uniquely pronounced and pervasive in the US due to the county having the most progressive taxation system on earth. Not one of the most progressive, THE most progressive. It’s almost like it was designed this way.

Americans spend more on healthcare and and education per capita than any other country and our outcomes are abysmal. Americans are horrendously obese. Around 40% are considered clinically obese, up from 15% as recently as 1980. Recent estimates indicate that obesity is associated with roughly $385 billion in annual health spending according to the Center for Medicaid & Medicare Services. The average American man and woman are now fatter than the average American pig, as measured by body fat percentage. This makes intuitive sense if we take even a cursory glance at the average American diet. But first let’s veer off for a second and talk about what pigs eat. I used to know a guy who raised pigs for meat. Sometimes he would go pick up a pickup truck bed full of all sorts of expired junk food from the grocery store. A lot of it was old or moldy bags of typical processed bread and hot dog buns, but there was always a bunch of cool treats too. I’m talking the good stuff; Oreos, Twinkies, Potptarts, any and all types of Little Debbie snacks, you know, the stuff they serve kids in public schools for breakfast. They would take it out of the wrappers and toss it all in a big 55 gallon steal drum and mix it with hose water and some kind of cornmeal mixture. I’m not sure if this was common practice in the homestead pig world, but it was in that barn. The pigs absolutely loved it. They seemed genuinely joyful sucking down the sweet and salty slop. They would then retreat to a corner of the pig pen and start to relax, where they’d take out their iPhone’s and start scrolling 5 second videos with their mouths open for hours, sometimes pausing to order some Chinese-made trinket to hang on the wall of the foyer of the pig pen that was recommended by some “influencer”. I’m kidding, this was the mid-1990’s, pigs didn’t have iPhones back then.

Turns out, Americans eat pretty much the same things as pigs, we just don’t mash it up with a rusty shovel and hose water. The CDC came out with a study in August 2025 that concluded ultaprocessed foods accounted for more than half of the average American’s diet in terms of the proportion of their daily caloric intake. The number is over 60% for children. For the age group 6-11, almost two thirds of their daily calories come from junk food. In other words, half of the food that young kids eat is not food, but food-like products that resemble the looks and feel of food. No wonder they suck at school. No wonder their parents suck at life. The CDC study also found that people with lower incomes consumed a higher percentage of their daily calories from junk food. Shocking. Eating this chemically concocted pig slop is associated with all kinds of health problems, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity (obviously), diabetes, depression, you name it. But there are pills we import from other countries to help with this problems (trust me, we’ll get there).

It’s also worth mentioning that this is a uniquely American phenomenon. In fact, many other countries put black warning labels on junk food, making sure that their least aware citizens don’t mistake it for actual food. Chile, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, and others plaster these warning labels on garbage food like the US does on cigarettes. The result of this cultural turning a blind eye is that the US leads the world in terms of the prevalence of junk food in the diet. If it almost seems like this is being done on purpose, that’s because it absolutely is being done on purposes. The US government subsidizes our intake of soda and candy, which have zero nutritional upside and only downside. I don’t think I have to convince anyone reading this of this fact, but its the people out in our communities (many of whom literally can’t read) they we need to worry about. Your earnings are extorted from you, to be given to people who vote for the government to provide them with imported candy to make them sick so that they can then later “fix” themselves with imported drugs. I’m certainly not suggesting this is some sort of conscious motive on behalf of the politicians or their voters/victims. Most people are well meaning. But as Foucault observed, “People know what they do, they frequently know why they do what they do, but what they don’t know is what they do does.”

We suck down pills for every slight ailment or grievance we can conceive. The US imports over $200 billion worth of pharmaceutical drugs every year. Our drug trade deficit is around $140bn of a total $1.2trn total goods trade deficit. Over the years I have seen seemingly credible numbers that Americans make up 4-5% of the global population, but suck down 80-85% or so of total pharmaceutical drugs. This appears to be a pretty exaggerated number. While the total sales of drugs can be reasonably estimated, we know that Americans pay substantially more for prescription drugs than in other countries, so our volume share would be much less than our total cost share. Numbers that I am seeing range in the 40-50% range for total revenue share which translates to somewhere in the 8-15% range for total volume. We couldn’t possibly know these numbers accurately, so there is no point in dwelling on the accuracy of them, but its almost certainly fair to say that Americans are way over-drugged relative to other countries despite the fact that drugs cost much more here. Our prevalence of cardiovascular issues, which is often downstream from our chart-topping preponderance of obesity, along with our cultural acceptance and even celebration of the latter, render this situation almost inevitable. Add to this our world-beating ability to sit on the couch and watch TV for hours, seeking panacea for all of our physical and spiritual ailments as we are peppered with drug ads between our laugh-reel comedies and endless conveyor belt of superhero movies, and it is no wonder that we have developed an insatiable appetite for pill imports.

The US is unique in other ways as well. It is one of two countries in the entire world that allows drug advertisements on television: The US and New Zealand, a country that no on really gives a single shit about. The optics of the US being the only country that brainwashes their population into taking a pill every time they scrape their knee would just be ugly, so we had to throw New Zealand in there too so we wouldn’t be weirdly and suspiciously all alone atop this monstrosity of poor incentives. It’s almost like it was designed this way. According to Opensecrets, the Pharmaceutical industry alone spends almost $400bn every year lobbying congress. According to a 2023 Penn State analysis, Americans spend over half of their lives taking prescription drugs. They spend more of their lives on drugs than they do being married. They spend more of their lives taking drugs than they do being in the labor force. Not sleeping well? Here’s a pill! Have you tried not staring at screens before bed, or getting any regular exercise whatsoever? Going outside in the sunlight in the morning to align your circadian rhythm? Have you tried eating anything other than processed foods, you know, the weird stuff that requires a little effort to cook that can be found on the outer isles of the grocery store? What about simply getting up and going to bed at the same time every day? No, well since each one of those things requires some amount of effort and discipline greater than zero, here, take these benzodiazepines. It might completely ruin your life and cause excruciating pain if you ever try to stop taking them, but at least you won’t have to go for a walk or eat an apple. You’re a little nervous or apprehensive about life sometimes? Here’s a pill, you know the one you saw on TV. Your kid is a pain in the ass? Here, give him this Adderall and he’ll mellow out real quick.

Look, ADHD is a real thing and some families do suffer. But it is ridiculously over-diagnosed. How do I know that? What medical credentials do I have to allow me to say that? Just take a step back and examine objective reality and incentives: little kids on average, especially little boys, are a pain in the ass, especially other people’s little kids. For some reason, it has been decided that little kids are to be forced to attend government schools where they sit for long periods of time at a desk and learn how to memorize things, with very little time devoted to play, exploration, and unstructured learning. Meanwhile, adults on average, are lazy. Parents and teachers are adults. Lazy people often seek easy solutions. When kids are put in a manufactured, unnatural environment, they are going to act like kids and be a pain in the ass. Adults will seek easy solutions, and drugging those kids is an easy solution. Therefore, behavioral issues requiring drugs will be over-diagnosed. How could it possibly be otherwise? And this is before the culture is influenced by the pharmaceutical/ media drug-normalization complex described above. What I find incredibly interesting is that most people will agree with this, but it’s always someone else’s kid that is over diagnosed or wrongly diagnosed. I wish for once someone would just be honest: “Yeah little Kaydyn is a real pain in the ass, man. Yeah I love him, but I didn’t really even want a kid, my wife was really gung-ho about it. You know women. Anyway we couldn’t get him to shut up and I really wanted him to silently watch cartoons in his room so I could have a few hours a night to myself, you know to play Call of Duty as a 42 year old man. Yeah, so our doctor gave us these nice little pills and man, does he zone right out and stare lifelessly at the TV screen like I want him to. Also, my wife and I cancelled our gym memberships and got some Ozempic, its awesome.”

Besides pills for common or non-existent ailments, what other dumb shit to Americans buy that they don’t need? Luxury bags, watches, and other non-necessities that, from a utilitarian standpoint represent exact functional replicas of their cheaper alternatives, but adorned with little symbols and logos to help us say something about ourselves. Americans run up credit card debt with high double-digit interest rates to buy “luxury” items to prove to other people how inferior those people are, less they be confused. We send dollars to Europe and China to buy bags with certain logos on them to prove to others that we have enough money to waste on such a bag. Women who buy these things would be more impressive if they would just demonstrate some transparency and honesty and buy the $40 bag bereft of logos, a $10 dollar white tee shirt, and a $2 sharpie marker and write their household net worth in big numerals on the back. It accomplishes exactly the same thing; you get to show rich people that you are cool and show poor people that you are better then them without having to ship money overseas. You can take the money you saved on logos and plow it into a fancy house, which will usually at least hold its value over time. We’ll come back to houses shortly.

Diamond engagement rings have got to be the ultimate pissing contest/ status game. Americans seem to have an innate desire to show other people you are better then them, but unlike a big gold logo on a brown bag which can be seen from across the room, even the biggest diamonds are so small that you need to get pretty close to really size them up. And who is most likely to be that close? Your friends and family. So you are trying to show the people you love that you are superior in some way. “What’s that Denise, your husband the UPS driver only got you that little ass rock, look what my husband the dentist got for me, ya poor bitch.” Its one thing to take that stance toward a stranger, but why would you want to prove to your close friends that you are better than them? Or maybe people want to prove to their parents that they have met someone with the financial wherewithal and implied intelligence/ value to society to piss a certain amount of money away? Just show them a phone video of Brian the dentist burning 40k in a pile in the back yard, barefoot with mud smeared all over his face, rather than parading around with some stupid ass rock imported from Africa that some 9 year old kid dug out of the ground with his calloused finger tips following a meal consisting solely of rice and bugs.

A few years after college, I was vacationing in Ft. Lauderdale with some fellas. For some reason it was a time of day when everyone else was still sleeping and yet the poolside bar was open, we had enjoyed that kind of night, so naturally I opted for a couple morning beers. I started shooting the shit with some middle-aged couple over some frozen Pina Coladas. I noticed the woman had a gold ring in the shape of two miniature sculpted dolphins positioned circularly, nose to tail. “Cool ring,” I said, obviously. “Thanks, this is my engagement ring,” she explained. “Instead of a diamond, we thought it would be more fun to get this ring and use the rest of what we would have spent on a more expensive ring to buy two Jetskis and a Jeep to towe them.” I almost fell out of my chair as I noticed the 15 inch horn protruding from the center of this woman’s forehead, along with her four hooves and muscular, naked horse body. She was a rare one. I don’t need people to tell me that I’m not the first man to pontificate about this absurd ritual, and know I won’t be the last. But as Kanye West once said, “They can kiss my whole ass, more specifically they can kiss my asshole”. But is the ceremonial money fire known as the diamond engagement ring really unique to American culture, or does the whole world partake in this monkey-find-rock, monkey-get-to-breed game? Well, yes and yes. World Population Review actually has a ranking of countries by median engagement ring cost. As we may have guessed, the US stands alone at the top of the pile. But what’s a little more credit card debt if it means Sally can show the other dance moms what poor-ass little peasants they are?

Now, onto houses, as promised. The US is almost without peer in terms of the way we encourage and subsidize home ownership. It’s almost as if the US has become so detached from community that some people thought we needed to have skin in the game. We stand alone in the world with regard to the prevalence of long-term, fixed-rate mortgages. Americans take this for granted, but these loans are unheard of in most other countries. It’s almost like it was designed this way. Why do we buy such big, dumb houses vs. our more financially literate counterparts in other parts of the world? For example, Finland is 2nd in the world in financial literacy and most Americans can’t even spell literacy, let alone balance a checkbook or tell you how compound interest works. Average home size in the US is 2,164 square feet according to world population review, vs. 880 in Finland. Believe it or not, Finland is not some collection of poor, downtrodden people. They consistently rank as the single happiest country in the world. Perhaps this is not in spite of their modest dwellings, but a direct result of them; Finns spend much more time outside in nature, which there is plenty of evidence to suggest leads to better physical and mental health (open literally any page in The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative by Florence Williams if this interests you). Finland also ranks as among the best in the world in things like overall literacy, honesty, and educational outcomes for children, so it’s probably worthwhile to check out what in the hell they are doing differently than us. Hint: almost everything, and The Finnish Way: Finding Courage, Wellness, and Happiness Through the Power of Sisu by Katja Pantzar is an excellent primer. Bigger houses means we have to buy (in many cases import) more shit to fill those houses. Then we need to go on Amazon to order elegant storage solutions so organize all that shit, often payed for with a high-interest credit card, so we have something to fight with our spouse about when the bill comes due. If we get lucky, the government will send us a check so we can reroute it directly to China to support their trinket factories and US landfill jobs. Would we have to restructure the entire global economy if Americans started acting like Finns? I have it on good authority that the answer is yes, and we would almost certainly all be happier and live longer.

In addition to the obvious first-order effects characterized by broad categories of stupid things we import, adding to the problem is the general attitude toward debt-funded consumption in general, or the excess of consumption over savings at the aggregate level necessitating foreign capital, which is basically what a current account deficit is. For example, it is a well-worn conventionality, if not shibboleth among economists to castigate China for consuming “too little”, investing “too much”, with the results being things like “bridges to nowhere” or “ghost cities”. No doubt there has been capital misallocation in China, but talking about the issue as if debt-fueled consumption is somehow more virtuous than than building infrastructure that might one day see more use misses the point. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear to anyone paying attention that the US has engaged in a massive buildout of “dormitories to nowhere” (see Tater #1: How Does the Affordability Crisis End?). While we didn’t necessarily import all of the bricks and paint from abroad, this type of increasingly useless spending in excess of saving, paid for with foreign capital, only adds to the massive imbalances in the global economy and indebts us to foreigners. And I don’t want to hear that it’s not foreign money. If the US government borrows money from Saudi Arabia and then lends that money to some 18 year old to pay for his basket weaving degree, and the college then uses that money to pay for a new field hockey stadium or rock climbing wall, it was all paid for with foreign money. Don’t piss on my foot and tell me it’s raining.

Nowhere is the over consumptive nature of college more prevalent or more ingrained in the national culture than in the US. Admittedly, when looked at in isolation, the US “higher education” system is technically a positive contributor to the current account balance. Foreigners bring money here and spend it while attending US universities, which is technically an offset to our insatiable desire for more trinkets from China and more polyester teeshirts from Bangladesh. However, to the extent that college further ingrains the whole borrow-to-consume mindset into the American psyche, I’d argue that the net effect of this cultural institution is to perpetuate the systematic preference for consuming more than we produce and pumping more dollars out into the world when considering the second and third-order effects. This, after all, is what the Triffin Dilemma is all about. Modern college is perhaps the biggest grift that humanity has ever produced. However, its extremely difficult for most people to argue against this massive waste of resources because at the individual level it is still in most cases financially rational to pay your way and get the degree, despite the fact that the cost of doing so is extremely and artificially inflated. We’ll explore that accusation deeper on another day, but for now let’s just settle for the fact that It is usually rational to pay the protection racket, if you know what is good for you. But even if a day comes when the financial math of college no longer nets out, participation will still have tremendous value in perhaps the most important game of all: life’s big status game.

Our willingness to play these stupid status games is ingrained deeply in our stupid monkey brains. From an evolutionary psychology standpoint, we want and need a tribe, and the way to thrive within that tribe is to accumulate status. For a chimpanzee, status is the best way to ensure survival and reproductive success. If the other tribe members see you as a part of the tribe, you are less likely to be cast out on your own and torn to shreds in the wilderness by another tribe (survival). If you have status, you will almost surely experience reproductive success. A male with status will be more likely to pass on his genes because females want to mate with the males of high status. Males want to mate with the females that are seen as being the most breedable. Human’s have adapted, but only slightly. Females still seek mates based on status, but we have swapped strength and fighting ability for wealth. It makes sense. If humans want to avoid starvation, wealth is certainly a superior rout than street fighting. Males still mate for breedabilty, but we have swapped this for general hotness; fit body, pretty face. I’d love to leave it at that for sake of argument and move on, but since people have become so unmoored from objective reality, I’ll waste a few seconds of my life to hedge: obviously there are other considerations that have adaptively made it into human preferences. Of course we seek kindness, intelligence, humor, etc. in a mate. Obviously. And obviously not all women are just chasing wealth, and not all men are just chasing sweet asses. Obviously. But how many fat old rich guys do you see walking around with hot young girlfriends 25 years younger than them? Ok cool. Now how many frumpy, old, rich CEO women do you see walking around with some chiseled, young, John Stamos-looking hot guy? Right. (see Tater #2: Will Your Life be Better, or Worse in the AI Era?). Now get a glass of water and swallow that reality whole so we can examine how these status games relate to the hedonic treadmill, overconsumption, and Triffin’s dilemma.

No only does acquiring more stuff increase our status within the hierarchy, and thus our ability to survive and reproduce, it also ticks an evolutionary box as a means in and of itself. Our ancestors needed to constantly seek and accumulate resources to increase their chance of survival. Sitting around and not getting more stuff was not an option. This scarcity mindset that once served us well, is still ingrained in our primitive software, our stupid monkey brains. This constant insatiable need to gather more shit is often described as a “hedonic treadmill” where we think we need to always be running just to stay in place. Hedonism is a philosophical view that involves the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain and suffering as the primary motivation for human behavior. We are constantly seeking pleasure through the acquisition of stuff, but we rarely ever become satisfied with enough. If we take the amount of shit we can gather and the number of vacation selfies we can post as proxies for wealth (most people do), and we know that we have substituted wealth for pure ass-kicking ability in our adaptations, then we can begin to understand how we are driven at a deep level, from the bottom of our stupid monkey brain stem, to always try to get more stuff.

The problem is that this mode of behavior has paradoxically become extremely maladaptive. What once ensured our survival now contributes to our demise. An illustrative example in animals that are less evolved, those that have not yet made the substitution of wealth for pure ass-kicking ability in terms of what determines status, can be seen certain species of elk. The male elk with the biggest antlers were either presumed or sometimes demonstrated to be the best ass kickers, the most physically fit, and therefore the most worthy of passing on their big-antlered, ass-kicking genes. Each subsequent generation therefore had bigger antlers, until it became maladaptive and the antlers were too heavy for them to be agile enough to fight effectively to prove their fitness, to travel long distances in search of food, or to retreat from predators. What once ensured a strong physically fit genetic pool for the herd eventually hits some tipping point where it ensures the herd’s decline. I’ll hedge this by saying that I am not 100% sure if this is the prevailing consensus on the extinction of certain species of elk, I didn’t go to college for that, but it at least serves as a relevant parable. The parallel of course is that humans, in their never-ending sprint on the hedonic treadmill, usually gas themselves out both financially, as individuals and perhaps ecologically as a species if we ruin the environment too much or use up too many resources in pursuit of more Amazon boxes on the porch to console us when we get home from our shitty jobs. While the jury is still out on whether we will consume ourselves into extinction, what is clear is that importing all of this redundant, useless , landfill-destined bullshit from China and other countries has created massive trade deficits, which are in large part the direct result of massive budget deficits.

Many of the cornerstones of American culture are 1. Absurd and financially self-destructive at the individual level, 2. In many cases uniquely American phenomena, and 3. Extremely problematic at the macro level. When we hear politicians, government economists, and pundits complain about trade deficits, budget deficits, and the state of consumers’ aggregate financial health, perhaps we ought to take a look around and ask “well what the hell did you think was going to happen, bud?”. As legendary investor Charlie Munger once said, “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” But even this framework raises a deeper question: Are the uniquely piss poor spending and lifestyle decisions of American consumers the outcome/ result of the way in which our incentive structure and economic system is constructed and manipulated by policymakers in some effort to solve for Triffin’s dilemma, or is the entire current backdrop of trade imbalances and foreign indebtedness simply the direct result of consumers’ myopically insane behaviors in the aggregate? It doesn’t require an inclination toward conspiracy theory to notice that the behaviors and decisions of individual Americans, while so often coming to their own detriment, certainly contribute to the smooth functioning of the global economy. As we consume so much more than we produce, we pump dollars out into the world, while simultaneously printing more of those dollars in order to keep the consumption machine spinning and spitting out bread and circus to satiate the masses. Some unorthodox thinkers across government, academia, and the private sector have begun to realize that there are drawbacks and natural limits to this entire arrangement, but the problem is unlikely to be solved through creative top-down solutions and central planning by those in power. What we are doing now is intellectually disengaging from the consequences of our collective, aggregate behavior, and appointing people to run massive and unprecedented economic experiments (see Tater #4: Inflation Makes Us Poorer. Stop Believing Their Bullshit.) which appear to be a series of often contradictory policy actions shot from the hip, rather than some carefully considered, coherent strategy. We wouldn’t have to run these nonsocial experiments if we could all just examine our own personal actions and behaviors, and those of society, and decide to get our shit together. We would all become less fat, dumb, and poor, and much more healthy and happy as a result. So what on earth are we we waiting for?

I sat across the table one day from one of the smartest, thoughtful, and uniquely insightful people I have ever met. This man was a big picture guy, a generalist, and yet his esoteric and comprehensive knowledge of the interworking and moving pieces of the global banking system were something I find to be almost unmatched to this day. We spoke about financial markets and the economic outlook, and when he was done sharing his view, I asked him why he was so confident that the Federal Reserve would be successful in their quest to “beat” deflation and achieve their inflationary goals. This was back when no one was worried about inflation, say 2013 or so. I expected him to launch into some theory about yield curves or Basel regulations or demographics, or some arcane hypothesis about repo market functioning. He looked at me, half smiling and without hesitation and replied, “Because deflation is good for poor people and inflation is good for rich people, and who do you think runs the world?”. I must have looked like James Carville playing a character of himself in the 2003 film Old School; I had no rebuttal.

From that day on, it has been nearly impossible for me not to detect a mild hint of horse shit whenever I read about the academic theory of inflation in one of the legacy financial “newspapers”. You know the one’s. There may be more confusion, contradiction, and outright hypocrisy surrounding our collective conversation on inflation than just about any other socioeconomic phenomenon, much less one that is as important as the way inflation affects human beings and the world. Indeed, most of history can be explained through the lens of inflation. Why? Because humans are the apex predator, we are social creatures, and our societies depend on trust. From an economic standpoint, our economies are a function of energy and time, money bridges the gap between energy (including physical energy resources and labor) and time, and money depends on trust. If the human experience is defined by getting along with each other (society) and doing things that add value by transforming energy (economics), and both of these things are heavily reliant on the maintenance of some baseline level of trust, then trust is the lifeblood of the human experience as we know it.

Since our societies have grown much larger and much more complex than tribes where trust can be assessed and ascertained first hand, in person, money is basically a proxy for trust. Outside of changes in the rule of law, no other factor affects human beings, their societies, and their trust, more than inflation. Changes in the rule of law systems are not only fairly predictable, but easily describable and attributable ex post. In other words, if the system of laws we live by changes, we usually know precisely what has changed, when, where, how, and why it has changed. With inflation, none of these are known in any true sene. It becomes a society level blame-game, everyone with their own theories and list of suspects and perpetrators. The world becomes one big Rorschach test, one big Rashomon effect, where each individual sees what they want to see and a shared reality becomes elusive. Inflation erodes our quality of life, our financial well-being, our mental health, and eventually our physical health, both due to to increased emotional stress and diminished ability to literally obtain proper nutrition. In short, inflation is the most anti-societal, and therefore anti-human force we can experience outside of pure evil.

Here are a few relevant insights that we should ponder to further set the table:

“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent.” - John Kenneth Galbraith

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” - Vladimir Lenin

“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” — John Maynard Keynes

So yeah, inflation sucks. And yet, we are told by those in power that a little bit of it is not only good for us, but basically essential to our survival. It is so essential, apparently, that in 1913 the anointed holders of power even created an institution with immense power to make sure we get a little bit of inflation each and every year, to erode our money, our savings, just little bit each year. Coincidentally, that was the same year they decided to bestow upon themselves the power to just take our money from us by threat of physical (actual) violence for non-compliance. That’s a story for another day, but getting back to the institutional guarantor of inflation, most people refer to it as the Federal Reserve.

But why would we want an institution to make sure we have a little bit of inflation every year? We know that eating rat poison isn’t good for us, but we don’t go around granting powers to a building full of government workers to go around and make sure we swallow a little bit of it each day. The theory goes something like this (and I promise I’m not trying to build a straw man here, this really is the story they stick to): Even though deflation has been the norm for most of recorded history, the people of earth need and deserve a little bit of inflation each year, every year, to make sure deflation doesn’t happen. Deflation is bad, you see, because when the economy experiences deflation, people will delay purchases into the future in expectation of prices cuts. The economy will then shrink because people are spending less money, waiting for bargains in the future. Companies will not be able to pay their debt, they will have to cut wages, people will have less money to spend, and before you know it, we will be “mired in deflation” like Japan (they love to use the term “mired” for some reason), beset by a “deflationary mindset”, a mind virus if you will. And we just can’t have that now can we?

What I have just described above isn’t actually all that nonsensical, its actually pretty logical and intuitive, in theory. If people never spend another dime because they are forever waiting for some magical economy-wide liquidation sale in the future, then its not difficult to envision an economy becoming very weak, very quickly. But we all know that Yogi Berra has strong words about theory and practice, and here’s the rub: have you ever actually met a typical American? These people haven’t the slightest concept of delayed gratification. These are the people taking out 84-month auto loans so that they can drive a nicer pickup truck than their neighbor, even though both fellas go to Lowe’s precisely once every two years. These are the people buying heaps and mounds of disposable “fast fashion” clothes so they won’t have to be personally degraded by being seen more than once on social media wearing the same “fit”. These are the people maxing out credit cards so little 12 year old Aiden can be on all the best travel hockey teams even though there isn’t a soul on either side of the family with any hint of athleticism to speak of, and his chances of going to “the show” are about as good as my chances of scoring a goal in pond hockey in Upstate New York in May. “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!”

But none of us are average. We are all special right? I suggest making your own personal list of ten items that you would delay purchase of, if you knew for a fact that that they would be exactly 2% cheaper, exactly one year from now. Two percent, after all, is the Fed’s annual inflation target, so it’s only fair to use this as the yardstick when thought experimenting a deflationary world. Sneakers? If your sneakers are looking dirty and warn and they are 100 bucks for a new pair that you like, will you wait 12 months to get them for $98, stretching your old one’s for four more changing seasons? What about all that plastic stuff you need for a new baby? Are you going to raise the baby without any of it? Or put off having the baby altogether until carseats are 2% cheaper? Maybe you can invest the $1.80 in the stock market and build some real wealth. What else do people buy…gas? Maybe we’ll walk to work this year because gas will be a few pennies cheaper next year (what?). This becomes very ridiculous, very quickly. But most of our economy and most of our consumption is services anyway, so maybe we can find some savings there. Maybe I can save 100 pennies by not cutting my hair for a year. Maybe I’ll just roll the dice and ride dirty for a year without car insurance since rumor has it there will be a nice 2% off sale next year on coverage. As Michael Jordan once said, “Stop it. Get some help.”

Still not convinced that a little bit if deflation would be just fine and that we need an all powerful, nominally “independent” institution to deliberately and consistently debase our money every single year? Let me tell you the chaos and horror that the forces of technology and innovation had wrought upon the good people of Japan. Japan is the poster child for a country “mired” in deflation (I can not stress enough how important it is to use this shibboleth, if you want to be taken seriously by people who have degrees stating that they know how the world works). For decades, the anointed have fought a valiant battle on behalf of the people, to help the economy escape from the hellscape of slightly decreasing year-on-year prices. The country has experienced “stagnation” since the 1990’s during the dark times now referred to as the “lost decades”. Anyone consuming prestige financial media articles since that time could be forgiven for wondering if the Japanese people have even had food to eat given the way their economy has been described. The poor Japanese citizenry were just not educated enough to understand the cause of their plight, left alone bestowed with the courage to “do something” to end their suffering at the hands of economic forces which caused the cost of goods and services to decline, sometimes more than a whole percentage point per year! But something happened in 2012, a man of great fortitude and foresight rode in on a magnificent, muscular horse, armed with a quiver of “three arrows” with which to slay the problem of (very slight) deflation once and for all, and deliver the ignorant masses from the horrors of a world in which a 500 yen hair cut might cost 495 yen next year, potentially (almost certainly in fact) causing mass hardship and possibly famine.

Shinzo Abe’s signature economic prescription, or “Abenomics” was designed to lift the Japanese economy out of its deflationary “funk” by giving people what they really need, even if they didn’t want it: inflation (or rather the gradual erosion of the money they earn and save from their labor, to use a description grounded in objective reality rather than financial media newspeak). It’s a very interesting time to revisit the Japanese example. Some will undoubtedly be delighted to declare victory for their ideology. Deflation in Japan appears to be a thing of the past, for now. Inflation in Japan, a country with an aging and shrinking population, is currently running hotter than it is in the US. One could be forgiven for assuming that Japanese voters would be relieved, elated even, given what they and we have all been told about inflation. One might think the mood in Japan would be like the end of “The Land Before Time” when all of the baby dinosaurs overcome various challenges and make it through the desolate, deserted, baron wastelands and finally rich the Great Valley, a colorful, bountiful dreamscape of food and water and family and joy. Actually, the inflationary outcome is nothing like that, and people are actually not that pumped about it at all. How can these Japanese voters be so ungrateful now that the policies long fantasized about by central planners, economic busy bodies and other charlatans are finally starting to bear fruit?! Inflation is finally here for all to enjoy! You are all free from the shackles of a system where prices decrease very slightly every year!

I’ll save you, dear reader, the bewilderment. There are two reasons for the consternation, both of which have most likely started to creep into your consciousness: inflation is actually not that cool in reality, and deflation is actually not that bad, in reality. In theory and in fantasy the opposite is true, but in any democracy voters tend to care more about reality (those practical sons of bitches). The simply realty is, and I may get my door kicked in for saying this, that things were never really that bad in Japan in the first place. Japan was one of the wealthiest, safest, healthiest countries on earth. In fact, if you look at indicators such as the misery index (the unemployment rate plus the year-on-year rate of inflation), or per capita GDP growth, you’ll see that the decade preceding the necessary radical fix that Abe had promised, things were just fine for the average person, and indeed for most people.

Yes, Japan has for many years experienced a level of GDP growth that significantly below other large economies, but that’s mainly because its population has been shrinking and aging. Both of these are extremely important for the sake of economic growth. In terms of the former, if we know it as an accounting identity that an economy’s potential growth is equivalent to the change in the number of people working plus the change in productivity, then a shrinking population will simply result in a shrinking economy in the absence of productivity. Put differently, for a country with a shrinking population, the onus to produce any positive growth result falls squarely on the shoulders of productivity improvements, all else equal. That’s not the end of the world, as technology and improvements in human capital should lead to consistent productivity gains as we constantly discover cheaper and faster ways of doing things. There are caveats to all this as well, population isn’t the only determinant of labor force growth (changes in participation rates, retirement ages, and immigration can all move the needle for periods of time), and there are certain levers that can pulled to get the economy to grow above or below its potential at least temporarily (deficit spending, money printing, wars, covid lockdowns, etc.) But by and large, population growth is hugely determinant of economic growth, hence the hysterics about falling birth rates and governments’ increasing efforts to financially incentivize the production of future tax slaves (a US child tax credit here, a Korean baby bonus there, sprinkle on a little Chinese condom tax etc.) In addition to there being less people to work and consume and pay taxes, a country whose population is also aging as it shrinks presents a different host of challenges, chief among them being that old people tend not to be as good at perpetuating the consumerist landfill economy as their younger, dumber, more status-seeking compatriots.

Old people don’t buy as much garbage. They are wiser, more of them have realized the truth. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of elderly dipshits in the world. Walk into any Walmart on earth. Walk into any university faculty lounge in the country. You’ll feel like the kid in the Sixth sense; “I see morons over 60”. But we’re talking about averages here, and on average, most people tend to get wiser, and therefore less materialistic and status-concerned as they age. They are more concerned with meaning, with purpose. They have realized the finiteness of their time, and they want to spend it with loved ones, or with nature, or with their god, rather than impressing their neighbors and chasing the Amazon truck. It’s just how it is. Most economists and policymakers and bureaucrats and journalists are out there flipping through textbooks of economic theory trying to concoct a solution, a magic potion of incentives that will get Japan to consume more, to buy more shit, to make more garbage, to reroute the river of human nature. They are practicing alchemy, just to get Japan’s nominal GDP to grow enough to service its debt. It it becoming increasingly clear that they are trying to solve the wrong problem. Japan does not need to figure out how to grow its economy in perpetuity. It needs to figure out how age gracefully, to shrink gracefully. In other words, it needs to figure out how to let nature take its course, ideally without creating a financial calamity or other cause of human suffering. They need to be the adult in the room, and lead all the younger, dumber countries into a future that is more sustainable, and ultimately, more meaningful.

The world was on this path. The Japanese economy was barely growing, inflation was low, and, importantly, on a per-capita basis the economy was growing on par with other major economies, including the US. The pie wasn’t growing quite as fast, but the number of people eating the pie was shrinking, so everyone had plenty of pie. Everything was fine, despite what the alchemists will tell you. Now, if you were a shareholder in one or more of the Japanese banks, that perhaps may not have been the case, but we don’t want to be cynical and insinuate that the sudden dire need to create inflation was a well-crafted package of intellectual horse shit designed to help the banks at the expense of the people who actually benefited from consistent or slightly falling price levels. Also please ignore the massive fall in the international purchasing power of the Japanese Yen that coincided with the beginning of Abe’s fiscal and monetary experiments, as well as the obvious absurdity of a nation which imports most of its food and energy needs trying to tank its currency and devalue its way into prosperity. It doesn’t matter how many you print, you can’t eat Japanese Yen. If all of the justification for these policies that have been foisted upon you by the prestige legacy financial media over the years sounds like economic sophistry, well, if it walks like a duck. If you ever get invited on a camping trip with people who work for the Financial Times, just memorize and recite the following shibboleth: “Japan was mired in a deep malaise, and the authorities had to do something to bring back inflation.” Make sure to use the words “mired” and “malaise”, then fart into a wine glass, bring it to your nose, and inhale deeply. Now you’re in the club. We’re going to come back to Japan shortly, because I think the Japanese experiment was designed to a different end, and inflation was simply the red herring.

The system of mandated positive inflation has become so ingrained in our everyday lives, and so elemental to prevailing economic group think, that we forget how unnatural it really is, how much of an aberration it is from a historical and logical perspective. Deflation, not inflation, is both natural and normal. Why on earth would it be otherwise? Over time, innovation and technological progress bring down prices. Humans figure out how to do things faster, using less resources. We scale businesses, which become more profitable as they grow, and more able to generate fat margins. Those margins attract competition and investment in production, and even in cases where the final product is heavily resource intensive, throwing money at something almost always leads to a fall in the final cost of the product. This is true from anything from flat screen TV’s to shale oil. Have you been to Walmart recently? Have you seen how much TV you can get for a few hundred dollars? Pretty soon we’ll be able to cover four walls in a room and spend all of our waking hours being advertised to as we spend quality time with our fake “family” like the protagonist’s dipshit wife in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. Wouldn’t it be nice if the state and it’s fellow travelers at the Fed would allow the natural course of economics to assert itself in other markets? Unfortunately for you and your standard of living, that simply can not be allowed to happen, since it would of course lead to prices falling year after year, instead of rising year after year, and in that case people would obviously postpone those purchases indefinitely, waiting for ever lower prices; we’d all be wearing our old shitty sneakers right down to the sock hoping to save 2 dollars in one year’s time, right? Since we know from above, and from our ability to entertain rational thought, that this is absolute horse shit, we know the truth lies elsewhere.

The reason you can’t have nicer things for cheaper, is that the government and Fed need to keep the yield curve positive, so that the people who own shares in banks can make money, so that they can fund the campaigns of politicians and allow them to stay in office long enough to somehow accumulate wealth, despite the modest salary that those positions pay. In the US, it also helps for the rich to become richer so that they can fund the government’s spending commitments in addition to politician’s ability to stay employed and continue parasitically siphoning money from the host that is the rest of the economy. The US tax systems relies more heavily on personal income receipts from rich people than any other major country on the planet. It is the most progressive tax system in the world for any country that matters. That is a fact, not some values-based opinion. Inflation itself also helps to this end of funding government spending promises, as it has historically made it easier to pay debt obligations. The government takes on debt to be able to hand money out to people to buy votes. They do this by selling bonds to bondholders. They then pay those bondholders back in money that is worth less in the future than it is today. The bondholders, of course, take this into consideration when determining the price they are willing to pay for the bond, so they are compensated for the “risk of inflation,” or more accurately, the “promise of inflation”, if we choose to avoid bullshit Orwellian newspeak. And who compensates the bondholders for the promise of the loss of their purchasing power? It’s you, bud. You are the mark in this scam. I’m pretty sure you have already figured this out by now.

“The arithmetic makes it plain that inflation is a far more devastating tax than anything that has been enacted by our legislatures. The inflation tax has a fantastic ability to simply consume capital.” — Warren Buffett

So yeah, that’s the status quo, as accurately as I can describe it. It sucks. It’s important to point out that there was nothing that made this outcome particularly inevitable. There are many other paths in the multiverse that societies could have taken. We have only had the Fed and the income tax for a little over 100 years, which is nothing in the grand scheme of the human experience. The minuscule window of time that this one century represents in the timeline ought to highlight how integral to the system and how interrelated the concepts of large scale institutionalized extortion and widespread institutionalized savings debasement (taxes and Fed respectively, let’s describe things by their true nature, folks) really are. Your fat uncle will tell you that taxes are in fact voluntary. Your fat uncle has never volunteered to add a single dollar to his tax check to the government in his entire life. Anyway, what’s important now is not diving into the morality of the status quo, but figuring out if the status quo is changing, and specifically whether the government still benefits from inflation. The time to figure this out is now, because AI is goin to be very deflationary beyond the short term, as all transformational technologies are.

The government should be thought of as the kingmaker in the inflation outlook, meaning that it will cast the deciding vote when rich people and poor people are at odds. We started by taking a look at how inflation benefits rich people and deflation benefits poor people. Inflation tends to steepen the yield curve to the benefit of bankers and bank shareholders as their operating model is to borrow short and lend long. Inflation, when positive but controlled (e.g. consistently ~2%), tends to boost nominal GDP, which drives revenue growth and therefore earnings growth, boosting stock prices. Stocks are much more disproportionately owned by rich people. Poor people own comparatively very little stocks. One main reason for this is that poor people spend a comparatively large share of their income on necessities like food and energy. If the prices of those things fall, there is more money left over to pay household debt obligations. If the price of gas and milk fall, this makes it easier to pay your mortgage, not less, as those who enjoy huffing their own flatulence from a brown paper lunch bag while wearing a pristine Carhartt T shirt would have you believe. Don’t piss on my foot and tell me its raining. So if the vote is still one to one, between rich and poor people in terms of their inflationary preferences, how will the government cast it’s deciding vote?

It seems obvious that for most of the past few decades since the fall of the gold standard, the government has voted in tandem with reach people. They wanted positive, 2% inflation each and every year, the purchasing power of your savings be damned. In fact, did you know that right before Covid, the big talk in policy circles was an intellectual shift towards targeting price levels rather than a yearly 2% change in those price levels. They wanted to force yearly inflation higher in some years to make up for past years of coming in under 2%, so that the level of prices several years out would be hit even if some years fell short. This debate hit fever pitch in 2019 and they called it the comprehensive review of the Fed’s monetary policy framework, or some shit like that. You can look it up, and I will forgive you for concluding that Covid was how that debate was conveniently settled. I won’t use pejorative or call you names, even if you think a small group of powerful people were incentivized to do something which they obviously benefited from doing. I’m just not like that. Now that the level of prices is much higher than it would have been had they hit exactly 2% every year for the past decade or so, do you think they are talking about lowering the inflation target to below 2% to compensate for the past overshoot? Of course they are not, and please don’t hold your breath on that one.

The reality is that for most of recorded history, inflation has benefited governments, not just via the longevity channel by tipping the scales in favor of those who fund political campaigns, but by rendering government debt more easily serviceable, since future interest payments to bondholders are made in dollars that are worth less than they are today, or when the bond was issued. Over time, inflation has eroded the real value government debt. This is exactly the theory that the economic sophists constantly apply to the household sector, where it simply does not apply. The reason is that if costs go up, households eat that cost, and it reduces their purchasing power. Governments, and even large companies, can usually pass the costs on, the latter because they have pricing power, and the former because it has a legal monopoly on the initiation of violence. They can either pass laws to confiscate more money from households, or they can print more of it. If you can’t make your car payment, you can’t go out and rob some government building or create counterfeit money. It only works in one direction. Listen clearly please, and really soak this in: when it comes to inflation, you are the end of the human centipede. The caboose. If you don’t know what that means, please pause and look it up, and you will never think about taxation and inflation the same way again. When it comes to inflation, sometimes the best we can do is to sit back and hope that the government chooses vanilla paste for dinner instead of cuttle fish and asparagus (South Park: Season 15, Episode 1: HumancentiPad). They are going to shit in your mouth and act like they are doing you a favor, ok? There I said it.

But what if we have entered a new era, a new paradigm where the government, or at least some governments in specific countries with unique sets of conditions, actually benefit from inflation? This seems ass-backwards, but I think it’s possible that the way we have been thinking about the global financial system might be ass-backwards. I started to think about this around a decade ado when currencies would sometimes strengthen when inflation numbers would come in hot. In fact, there were many occasions during that time, around 2015, call it the tail end of the QE era, or the beginning of the end of ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), during which a country’s inflation numbers would come in hot, surprising to the upside, and the currency would actually strengthen. At first glance this seems ridiculous; if the purchasing power of a currency is eroding faster than you had expected, should it not be worth less? But in this bizarro, debt fueled, hyper financialized world, higher inflation sometimes leads to currency strength, since it is often associated with central bank rate hikes. Conversely, lower inflation often leads to currency weakness, as it is seen as limiting the room for rate hikes. So much capital is sloshing around at the very short end of the curve, that marginally higher short term rates can trump the fact that the currency is being eroded through inflation faster over time relative to expectations. Most normal people might be questioning “who the fuck needs a one-day loan?” Apparently enough institutions such that the repo market has become the lifeblood of the entire system. And that is where our discussion of the repo market and financial system “plumbing” begins and ends. Call Zoltan Pozsar if you have any further questions.

All of this matters because if inflation leads to currency weakness, then it can become self-reinforcing. A weaker currency leads to higher import costs among other things, and can beget higher inflation. This is how currency crises and hyper inflationary episodes have unfolded historically. Have things changed, at least for some countries? Does deflation lead to currency strength or currency weakness? The answer is yes. It depends on the extent to which the market thinks the central bank is “behind the curve”. If inflation becomes so intrenched, and bad enough that they have to slam on the breaks and kill the economy with rate hikes, then the currency will almost certainly still weaken as theory would suggest. But if things are just meandering along in a kind of low growth, low inflation world, then yes, the country moving toward more toward inflation relative to the other, will in many cases experience currency strength.

Perhaps this makes more sense by looking at the converse, i.e. perhaps the condition of disinflation or outright deflation would tend to weaken a currency because for that past two decades this has been a precursor for massive monetary stimulus, in the form of quantitative easing (QE) and/ or in the case of Japan yield curve control (YCC), since we have been propagandized ourselves into the quasi-religious belief that if we don’t create inflation we are doomed. How long this backwards bizarre situation can go on for is debatable, and whether or not it is sustainable is doubtful. After all, as the great Walter Sobchak once so eloquently put it, “Smokey, this isn’t ‘Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.” I realize this questioning of conventional wisdom on the effect of inflation on currency movements is complicated and perhaps confusing, but perhaps that is the point. Rather than trying to argue that inflation is now a currency-positive phenomenon and that deflation actually weakens a currency, it is probably enough to simply observe that the relationship is unclear, especially in an environment when so many unorthodox policies are being implemented all over the world.

The current zeitgeist, however, is very clear. The world’s government’s have decided that deficits and debts no longer matter for some reason, and that money can be printed out of thin air to buy votes since the alternative, i.e. running a balanced budget or even a budget surplus during economic expansions, is simply no longer politically tenable, and perhaps not even economically or mathematically feasible. No one seems to really give a shit about the debt loads anymore. “This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly” by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff came out in 2009, and it was all anyone could talk about. It’s conclusion was almost unnecessary: there is a limit to how much and how quickly governments can pile on debt before there are consequences such as defaults, debt implosions, inflation, restructuring etc. No shit, but at least now we had some data to tell us what we already knew. Everyone talked about debt loads back then, every big bank research department had a massive primer stuffed with data and charts and comparisons of every single way of measuring government finances imaginable. Remember the Tea Party movement? And the austerity budgets? Now we have way bigger deficits, and nobody gives a shit. The chart of the US deficit relative to the unemployment rate illustrates this perfectly. We have never run deficits this wide with unemployment this low.

Meanwhile, interest expense is easting up an even bigger share or revenues. This is a war time, budget, and yet we find ourselves in a position where we have to spend more on interest expense than on defense. Many see this as a sign that governments/ cental banks will need to create inflation to erode the value of debt over time. We already looked at how this does not work for households, but it has in the past worked for governments, since they can ‘take and make’ more money to service their debts. Therefore, the conventional wisdom has been that whichever government can create the most inflation without bringing people with pitchforks into the street, will have the best chance of being able to avoid a debt implosion.

I have suspected for years that we have entered a new paradigm where the rules are inverted, and that steady, managed deflation is actually good for the governments, their finances, and their ability to remain in power. Hear me out. This is because central banks whose economies have the most ingrained disinflationary tendencies will be able to do more QE, and hoover up a larger portion of government debt. Inflation is really the only barrier to this process, in which a growing portion of the debt is essentially ring fenced on the central bank’s balance sheet, where it does not need to be serviced. If a central bank owns a bond, and receives a coupon payment on that bond, that money is immediately remitted right back to the government. Why does no one talk about this? Basically, you owe me a thousand dollars, you make a $100 payment, I grab the hundo from my right hand and stick it in my back pocket. I then reach back with my left hand, take the money out of my pocket, and hand it back to you. I do this every single time you make a payment and promise to keep doing it forever. Is there any limit to the amount of money you would be willing to borrow from me under this arrangement? This is exactly what happens between central banks and governments.

If you have a debt that you are not required to service, then do you really have that debt? Only if inflation returns. There are many very intelligent people out there looking at the size of government debt across countries, and have concluded that central banks will just figure out a way to “cancel” the debt. Whatever, maybe they will maybe they won’t. I’m arguing that it has already been cancelled since it is ring-fenced in a place where it doesn’t need to be serviced. It’s not real debt anymore. It doesn’t count. “Cancelling” this debt would just make the nominal amount look smaller, cleaner, less complicated. If that’s what you need to square the circle in you mind then go ahead, knock yourself out, but who really gives shit? The outcome is the exact same either way. In a world where inflation is the only obstacle to this working in perpetuity, then whoever has the most deflationary economy will get away with it the longest. Who has gotten away with it the most so far? We’ll, who do you think has the most organically disinflationary economy? It starts with a “J” and ends with “apan”. We hear constantly that Japan has the biggest debt pile in the world relative to the size of their economy, but the Bank of Japan owns roughly half of that, and therefore half of it doest need to be serviced, and therefore doesn’t really matter.

This is the experiment that the powers that be have been running while were all distracted with phones and social media and makeup tutorials and fantasy sports and weird porn and leadership conferences and travel soccer. Japan is the laboratory, since they are where the world is headed. They were the first major country to get old, the first to have their population start shrinking, the first to experience sustained deflation, the first to ring-fence at least half of their entire debt pile. Japan is the future, and as discussed above, and it ain’t so bad. In fact, Japan’s “malaise” has been greatly exaggerated as a justification to run their little experiment and see how much debt they could ring-fence on the BoJ’s balance sheet without anyone really freaking out. It was never really about “price stability” or “mandates” or any of the other happy horse shit that the useful idiots have spilled swimming pools full of ink to convince you of. Slight deflation is price stability just as much as slight inflation is price stability. To paraphrase Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys, why “in the name of Peter Cottontail’s fluffy white cock” would it be otherwise?

And just to let them know that we understand how this game is played, the other major western banks don’t really want what they say they want either. The BoJ’s job has been to use their otherwise unproblematic, perfectly natural slight deflationary tendencies, to ring-fence the government debt so it doesn’t have to be serviced, effectively having already ‘cancelled’ half of it. The ECB’s goal, up until Europe’s recent attempts at self harm, has been to make the euro competitive, or basically keep the German economic engine humming enough to pull everyone else along. Germany’s economic model for the past two decades has been to essentially peg its currency to those of much weaker economies, and use this weak currency along with cheap Russian energy, to sell factory equipment and cars to China, so they could become the factory of the world and sell trinkets, baubles, doo dads, and little rectangular soul-sucking pocket TV’s to American consumers. Any bitching about deflation in Europe was not a real fear that deflation would get “out of control”, but rather an convenient excuse to cut rates and buy bonds and weaken the currency. The US Fed is really the only major Western Central bank that is motivated by that which we have been told is the motivation for central banks, but not exactly for the reasons they tell us. It’s not that the Fed wants to avoid deflation because it’s bad for people. It’s actually good for people when prices fall. It’s ok to believe your lying eyes when you read this. It’s just that they actually do want to create inflation for its own sake, since it tends to steepen the yield curve, which allows private banks to make money. And who do you think owns the Fed? It’s the private banks. The Fed is the only privately owned major central bank in the world. That is a rabbit hole beyond the scope of this discussion, but suffice to say: you’ll have the inflation they want you to have, and you’ll pretend to like it. It rubs the lotion on it’s skin, or else it gets the hose again.

So where does this leave us in terms of who benefits from inflation? Does the government now actually benefit from deflation now that we have crossed the quantitative easing rubicon? Has inflation actually become the main impediment to the Fed hovering up the debt? One could certainly argue that if we hadn’t experienced all the fiscal largess at the same time that global supply chains were severely debilitated, then we would have had less inflation, likely even deflation, and the Fed could have continued about its merry way of buying bonds and stashing them in the closet where they don’t need to be serviced. Is it therefore possible that we have entered a brave new technologically deflationary world in which deflation actually makes it easier to pay government debt because it can get away with hovering up a larger portion of the bonds and therefore not have to service them? Is there a U-shaped relationship between “ease of servicing debt” on Y axis, and inflation % on the x axis? i.e. governments benefit from high inflation, as well as slight deflation in terms of their ability to avoid a fiscal crisis? Maybe the X axis goes from -3 to 3 or something and does not start at zero. Maybe someone with some training in such things will read this and can test this theory out for us, preferably someone who wants to do more than just spend his or her days brewing a cocktail of economic theory for the government to then use to create more policies to jam into our face holes and ass holes.

This matters because if the people want slight deflation (we do), and the government (treasury) wants slight deflation (they might), then the traditional banking sector is outvoted two to one. This obviously oversimplifies it, but its not unreasonable to begin thinking about a future in which the big banks no longer call the shots. Disintermediation by private credit, private equity and any and all types fintech have been chipping away at the economic (and therefore the political power as well) of big banks. Meanwhile, its possible, and likely, that we are on the cusp of a massive step change in the technological backbone of the financial system, driven by blockchain, tokenization, smart contracts, and any and all other types of crypto-related innovation. While everyone has been busy focusing on AI and how convenient it is to be able to ask ChatGPT which direction and how many times you should be wiping your ass, the crypto technological revolution marches on.

Conclusion:

Now is the time to figure this all out because we were in the early innings of probably the biggest technological evolution anyone reading this will ever live through, and I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be deflationary. If that’s the case, then what does the world end up looking like? Well, for certain countries, the deflationary forces will mean that central banks will have an excuse to buy bonds (quantitative easing) and try to force longer term interest rates down (yield curve control), which effectively ring-fenced debt, which amounts to a de facto cancellation. Inflation is the only natural limit on their ability to control the debt in this way. They will take these actions ostensibly to create inflation, which they say is good for you, but in reality, buying debt without creating inflation would be the ideal outcome. And not every country is going to get away with with this. Only those with deeply innovative economies backed by the rule of law and an entrepreneurial culture (forces that encourage productivity and investment and therefore tend to force prices lower) will benefit from the coming deflationary forces. So far, Japan has gotten away with it. We should keep in mind that Japan is a massive net creditor to the world, they own much more overseas assets than that they owe to the rest of the world and therefore are not reliant on foreigners to fund their debt. Of the government debt they do have, large as the pile is, it is almost exclusively owned by Japanese entities. There are of course other mathematical facts unique to Japan’s situation that may also have contributed to them getting away with it, so far at least; they run a very small primary fiscal deficit, they run consistent current account surpluses. We can’t say the same for the US, but reserve currency status may just be our “hall pass” to get away with it as well. Other countries might not be so lucky. Their attempts to suck up all of their own debt might butt up against structural inefficiencies and perhaps a loss of confidence, leading to currency depreciation, inflation, and a course reversal. It could also get ugly the other way, and deflation actually does get out of control to the downside. The range of outcomes becomes even wider by the very fact that no country will be operating in a vacuum, and it will matter what everyone else is doing at the time. It’s highly likely that the world will descend into a currency war.

Who wins a currency war? The country that can create and tolerate a steady deflationary trend, where they can buy up their own debt without creating inflation, while simultaneously either achieving currency depreciation and perhaps exporting their way out, or, failing to achieve currency weakness despite the creation of more money. The latter scenario would be ideal for countries like Japan who import much of their food and energy needs. You simply can’t devalue your way into prosperity (notwithstanding their massive pile of overseas assets that become more valuable in Yen terms as the latter depreciates). But if a country can get to that sweet spot where they can print money out of thin air onto toilet paper, and other countries will still trade that toilet paper for rice and oil, then we should consider that winning. China and Europe don’t have the institutional wherewithal, moral legitimacy of government, or economic flexibility to thrive in a deflationary world. Africa sucks, and Russia can kiss my ass. Some Emerging markets might be ok.

Japan has long been the best currency warrior. The proportion of total government debt owned by the central bank is the scoreboard, and they basically-mercy ruling every other country on this metric. Belt to ass. But in an AI world, the new winner will be team that always wins, the team that everyone always hates to see win. I’m not talking about the New England Patriots or the Kansas City Chiefs, I’m talking about the back-to-back world war champions. I’m talking about the country with the best piece of land on this rock we call earth. The country with the most easily defensible borders, abundant arable land and fresh water, more navigable rivers than the rest of the world combined, and all the good stuff its economy needs buried in the dirt somewhere within its borders. There is a reason the US is the epicenter of technological innovation in the world, and the new deflationary environment will benefit the US more than anyone else.

Don’t believe the people who tell you that they must have the power to devalue the purchasing power of your money, of your stored labor, over time, for their own good. Embrace deflation. It is the natural state of the human experience. It is our reward for thinking and learning and inventing ways to do more work with less effort or resources. People keep saying Japan needs to figure out a way to crate inflation and grow the nominal value of its economy. Nonsense. Japan needs to figure out how to shrink its economy gracefully, as it’s population naturally shrinks, without blowing up the entire global financial system. That’s all. Maybe this won’t be the greatest outcome for the legacy banking sector, and maybe the banks will look more like regulated utilities going forward as the financial system is reset either gradually or suddenly to a system where the crypto rails take the baton of heavy lifting from the big banks. Who really gives a shit? “Because deflation is good for poor people and inflation is good for rich people, and who do you think runs the world?” In the future, technology will drive the marginal cost of everything toward zero, and prices will come down too. The financial system and the economy will adapt. Everything is going to be just fine.

It’s been said that humans use ten percent of our brain. I’ll be honest, I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know if it’s been corroborated or debunked, I don’t know how we would even know. But look around you. Ten percent seems like the high water mark when we think about the prevailing methods and effectiveness with which society currently allocates and organizes labor and effort. In other words, we use at most 10% of our collective brains when we figure out who should work where, on what projects, and when and how much they should work. This is true not only of the decision concerning how much work is required of individuals, but also where it is allocated. If we truly are in a world where technological change is set to upend the way we work, then we are going to have to start talking about this at some point. If robots and AI are to hoover up an increasing portion of the labor market pie, then what will be the response by humans? Let’s stop right there to all get on the same page that this is merely a thought experiment. Anyone who reads more than 10 pages per year on economics should be able to point out that there is no fixed number of jobs or supply of labor. Both of those things fluctuate in a cyclical and structural way given changes in the economy. Moreover, history has shown that technological revolutions have not permanently reduced the demand for labor, but have created new jobs that were previously inconceivable. For the sake of this thought experiment, let’s assume that this time will be different; AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies will at least partially liberate humans from the toil and provide an age of abundance, so long as we are able to manage the transition. The speed and scale of the transition are like nothing we have ever seen before, so parroting cute analogies to the silly Luddites and their lack of imagination is not going to be useful or relevant in this case.

“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come--namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

These words were not written by some Wall Street strategist or aspiring blogger looking to go “viral” in early 2026. It was written by an economist in 1930 as a thought experiment on where humanity would find itself 100 years hence, i.e. in 2030, in terms of our relationship to technology and work, leisure and purpose. His timing seems to be incredible. His name was John Maynard Keynes, and we’ll refer to his thinking on this matter throughout this discussion. I came across Keynes’s essay (“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” a fantastic read) from almost 100 years ago, which describes and predicts the changes taking place as good as any recent think piece I have seen on the matter, and does so certainly much more eloquently than I can. You may have heard of him. Today’s narrative would label him as basically a communist, but the policies he advocated, such as having the government actually run surpluses during the good times to support the economy during bad times, would most likely be seen as a “far right” idea today. We live in silly times.

Most of the discussions surrounding AI and work thus far have been a huge jump to the conclusion, in which a plurality of smart people seem to believe that some variation of universal basic income, or UBI, where folks get a check from the government (or rather presumably from the owners of the technology via the government) is inevitable. How do we get from where we are now, i.e. a 40 hour work week for most and a zero hour work week for some, to the robot-slavery UBI future? Will we all learn to work part time somewhere along the way, and share the work? How will we decide who “gets” to work, who “gets” to not work, and whether or not either one of those scenarios is preferable or desirable? Who should work in what roles or on what projects? Who will decide?

If it is difficult to imagine working four days a week, consider the fact that most people used to work 6 days a week. “We take it for granted today as something that is natural, but even as late as 1929, a five-day week was still unlikely,” notes Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, a professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at MIT as quoted in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (How Did We Get a 40-Hour Workweek and Has it Had Its Day? - WSJ). Then, according to the Journal, the Great Depression paved the way for change, and a bipartisan consensus formed among lawmakers around “work sharing: more people working fewer hours.” In other words, it took an economic catalyst to to open creative pathways in our minds towards something that has made sense all along, similar to how the covid hysteria unlocked the very sensible idea of partial remote work: why waste so much time every day putting on neat clothes and makeup and driving an hour or more each way, risking accidents, just to be distracted in a modern open office setting (cube farm) where actual deep work is all but impossible? We’ve had the technology to alter this stupidity for years but those whose job it is do think creatively, evidently have trouble straying from consensus without a catalyst. And now that their hands were basically forced by a catalyst to try something new and logical, we now have the data to justify working from home, at least some days. It works. It’s better this way. Soon we will have data on shorter work weeks, and AI labor displacement will be the catalyst.

There are already people dedicating themselves to the transition. By far the name that comes up the most in my research on the topic is Boston College economist and sociology professor Juliet Schor, who has written book called “Four Days a Week”, in which she has taken a deep look at companies that have experimented with the transition to a 4-day week. According to the same Journal article referenced above, so far this is working out for both companies and employees. Employers are seeing improvements in both employee retention and the use of sick and personal days. Is anyone at all surprised to hear that?

“The ideal model. Schor says, is 100-80-100: Employees get 100% of their previous pay for 80% of the work hours, with companies enjoying 100% of the prior output. This depends on productivity improvements and isn’t feasible for every company, Schor says. But even those that don’t see higher productivity can still benefit from happier, more loyal workers…” Four days a week will be a start. It’s a necessary point to pass through on our way toward much less. And we probably won’t keep 100% of our pay if we work 20 hours, no amount of “quit dicking around on fantasy football sites at work” is going to yield enough productivity improvement for that. But you won’t need as much money. AI and robots who work around the clock and don’t get sick or burnt out will drive the marginal cost of almost everything toward zero, and prices will plummet. It will be like the time we invited hundreds of millions of Chinese factory workers into the global labor pool, but even more powerful. How could it be otherwise? We’ll come back to other reasons we’ll need less money. For now, we should at least look forward to 3 day weekends in the near future. Keynes imagined that we would be working even less than that:

“For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavor to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!”

Rather than having someone work 40 hours per week and then taking half of the fruit of their labor to hand to someone who does no work or adds no value, why wouldn’t Person A want to share some hours with Person B instead of working the full 40 only to be systemically extorted to the benefit of person B? It will soon start to become clear to people just how silly it is for us to all work 40 hours a week. For some, it has been clear for over a decade. Back then it was about robots being able to do blue-collar, physical work, moving their spine and extremities do to things like paint cars. Now, software will be able to do a huge chunk or white collar work as well. So will we just have 20% unemployment where some people work 40 hours only to be taxed to support a guy who works zero hours? Personally, rather than support a grown man with half my money to sit on his ass for 40 hrs a week, I’d rather he just show up to my job Wednesday at noon and do half the work week, and use my own ass for a cushion for the other half of the week.

To understand the future of work, let’s take a closer look at the present of work and how people’s talents and skills are allocated and matched with jobs. Let’s first understand the system we have now by describing it in objective terms. At its core, the American system is theoretically a meritocracy, but one that is plagued by varying levels and degrees of constant and persistent gatekeeping. As a meritocracy, it’s a system where those who add value, as determined by the market, are highly rewarded. It’s also a system where those people are highly extorted to pay for goods and services for those adding less value (again as determined by the market), presumably for the sake of popular notions of “fairness”, or more practically, to keep violent crime below a palatable level and keep the pitchforks in the sheds. One issue with this system is that its deterministic nature renders it inefficient to the point of absurdity. The mechanism for identifying who is capable and suited for which types of tasks is so antiquated that it’s counterproductive in that the main result of its existence is to stifle creative thinking about what actually makes sense. The way society matches talent to tasks now has more to do with the actions and decisions taken by job candidates 20 years prior than it does with the probability that they can actually complete the work sufficiently today. I say this as someone who has been fortunate/ lucky enough to have benefited from the status quo.

So let’s take an objective look at the steps necessary to prove one’s worthiness for a good paying white-collar job in the pre-AI economy. First, sit in a government run institution for 12 years and listen to someone drone on about things that don’t interest you. You and your classmates will all be taught in pretty much the same exact way and those classmates will be there not because they have anything in common with your interests, temperate, aptitude, or predispositions, but because of the proximity of their parents’ home to the building. This may be soul-crushing slog of a decade for some. Take prescription drugs if necessary. Next, go to a similar institution, this time of your choosing, to get a piece of paper to prove how smart you are. Chances are you’ll rack up life-changing amount of debt in the process, and at least half of your study time will be allocated to absolute nonsense coursework ostensibly to make you a better person, more well-rounded, more open-minded, or any number of paternalistic horse shit deceptions. Once you have obtained said paper and locked in said debt, apply to dozens or even hundreds of jobs on the worst website/ social media circle-jerk ever conceived by humans. Its called Linkedin, the cringiest place on the internet by a metric mile and presumably the sole reason that aliens finally decided to send AI to this planet to eradicate us all. Go browse the site for 5 minutes. You’ll see what I mean. A growing portion of the masses can no longer pick up a piece of litter on the beach without lifting their leg and spraying proof of having done so all over the internet to demonstrate their character and virtue to any and all potential SaaS customers. Go drink piss for the cure you frauds.

Next, your application and resume will be filtered through some opaque black box of software in some Tinder-esque, surface-level swipe-right session, which allegedly can assess your problem solving and critical thinking skills based on whether or not you used the proper keywords to describe your experience. Imagine that. I’ve heard (from Scott Galloway somewhere on the internet), that the average male has to swipe right 200 times on dating apps to secure a single coffee date, but that 4 in 5 of these coffee dates will cancel, meaning that to get an actual caffeinated beverage with an actual female, the average fella is going to have to swipe 1000 times. And that’s the average, I can’t imagine what life is like for the poor bastard who finds himself sitting on the 30th percentile of eligible bachelors, much less the 15th percentile. One has to imagine the situation is quite similar for job seekers. So the day of the proverbial “coffee date” (interview) finally comes; you’ll sit through a one hour interview with a mid-level representative of a company who will psychoanalyze you and make judgments on your ability, skills, character, etc. Don’t worry, this person also has 4 years of deep training from the diploma mill and all the requisite basket-weaving electives to ensure that she too is qualified to assess you deeply and, of course, is a well-rounded, conscious global citizen. You’d shit too if you we well fed, pal.

Yes, the way we do it now is absurd. Fortunately, AI will massively improve the interview problem as well as the more important matching problem. Companies are already using AI tools for interviews and although it is going to seem ridiculous at first to sit down and sell yourself during a conversation with a robot voice, it’s extremely likely that AI will be much more effective at interviewing than people. It will almost certainly have less weird bias and counterproductive “gut feelings”, and feel less likely to use false-positive inducing rules of thumb and shitty pattern recognition “tools” employed by many interviewers as adopted from various “leadership” gurus and grifters. For example, I happen to know a person who I was told likes to conduct lunch interviews and had a rule that she would automatically disqualify someone if they cut their steak into pieces before eating it, claiming that this demonstrated that the candidate was too impulsive and therefore presumably incapable of doing that job effectively. What a godamn ludicrous proposition. Sure, it’s silly and less enjoyable way to eat a nice hunk of meet on a relaxing date, but personally I would find that a totally reasonable thing to do during a weird performative session in which you are asked to feed yourself and be relentlessly judged for an hour. Perhaps the compulsive lunatic of a candidate just thought it reasonable to get that task out of the way to focus on the seriousness of this high stakes performance and listen undistracted to the questions being posed. Either way, stupid little rituals like this will be confined to the dust bin of history where they belong. AI will be much better at interviewing, and we can end this little Stanford prison experiment and move on with actually creating value. “But seriously, what are your weaknesses on a deeper level? Tell me how much you want this job, you little bitch.” Enough of this shit.

I want to add some context to the current state of the interview process relative to the effect that new technological capabilities will have. An interesting analogy is financial charting. Anyone who has ever used a Bloomberg or Factset terminal will see the amazing capabilities of these tools. You can plot any series of economic data against any asset price, bond spread, the difference between two data sets, the inverse, the reciprocal, the growth rate…you can manipulate data in almost any conceivable way right within the application, save it to a document, along with hundreds of other graphics, and then update them all with the click of a single button 6 months now. Yeah, technology is cool, but what makes this interesting is how recently it was different. Not too long ago, if you wanted to chart the price of a stock and look at it over time, you basically looked it up in the physical newspaper every day, or sat in a comfortable chair and watched the ticker that runs along the bottom of financial TV news. When Disney came across in alphabetical order, you got your pencil (using a pen would have been downright reckless!) and graph paper out and plotted the next dot and extended your line chart by one day. It sounds ridiculous, but it wasn’t that long ago. The people I learned the most from in the investment business spent a great deal of their career with that system. With interviews and job matching, we are today literally in the pencil and graph paper era, the dark ages.

How do we know the current way of doing things sucks? Anyone in the middle class with a white collar, high-ish paying job has probably had some form of the same two experiences at some point in their life, perhaps many times: in the first, you meet someone more or less the same age as you, seemingly of similar (or even higher) intellect, articulation, likability, etc., but they are working far down the social ladder in terms of pay. I had an interaction with a guy at Kohls a few years back. He seemed about my age, super friendly, well-spoken, certainly more outgoing and gregarious than myself, good looking, in shape, looked like he had his shit together. I could tell he was a an intelligent person. Sometimes you can just tell. On the way home could I not stop wondering why this person would be working in retail for such a low wage. Couldn’t he be taught to do my job, or a job similar to mine? Couldn’t he sell some high-end software product or financial solution? Almost certainly he could, if I was a betting man. I certainly don’t mean to disparage someone’s job. Maybe he is a single parent or taking care of a sick loved one and doesn’t have the time to go don society’s horse hair shirt and get his 4-year scout badge. Maybe he enjoys it, maybe he likes the hours, or his coworkers, or the generally low level of stress. Maybe there is some identifiable path to the top and that top is higher than I’m aware of. Did you know that Walmart managers can make 400k without a college degree? The other experience worth contemplating is one where the tables are turned. You meet someone with a much higher paying job and you think, “I could do that. Maybe not today, but with some not very extensive amount of training, I could succeed in that type of job.” There is plenty of room for overconfidence here, but that’s a healthy thing to ponder and I am guessing most people who think about these things have had such an experience.

Thinking of this example from an aggregate economic perspective, one can’t help but wonder how many examples there are out there of people being overqualified for their role and capable of doing something much more economically productive. It’s one of the main explanations for the rise of China in the past 30 years. People moved from farm work into the cities to work in factories in higher productivity roles. How many people out there have outgrown their role and have so much more potential and value to add if we could just figure out a way to get them matched with a role that suits them or, even better, one that is currently a bit of a stretch but that they could grow into with some effort and focus? I’m willing to bet there is a Chinese productivity miracle hiding behind the checkout lines and restaurant bars in this country. We just need to figure out how to match people with jobs.

For those who do continue to work as AI slowly replaces human labor, we are already seeing evidence that AI is hard at work on the matching problem. One of the reasons people stay in certain career paths that they are not passionate about is that the adjacent or alternative possibilities are not always obvious. Often people develop useful, transferable skills but are not able to make the conceptual leap to identify their options. Smart companies have been poaching teachers for high end sales jobs for years given that they happen to be excellent communicators and typically have a high degree of patience. But unfortunately for those smart companies, this little secret wellspring of talent might not be so secret going forward. According to the Wall Street Journal, AI tools are now helping people to identify and pivot to new career paths (How AI is Helping Job Seekers Pivot to New Careers - WSJ). AI is helping people to explore areas where their is a good deal of skills overlap with their current path. It’s helping people identify strengths they already possess, and how they could apply that to something completely different, as well as coaching them on their pitch to potential employers in new fields on how their skills and experience can transfer or compliment a new role. Now instead of dealing with a room full of seven-year-old examples of shitty parenting, teachers can choose to go quadruple their salary selling things to those kids’ shitty parents. All blanket judgements and societal critique aside, it is going to be an amazing time to be a job seeker, at least from a qualitative, novelty perspective. In terms of job quantity, though, we are probably going to be in trouble.

Look, this is not going to be like past technological advancements or even “revolutions”. We should be clear though, that the burden of proof is squarely on those who believe, like I do, that “this time will be different”. The empirical evidence is such that humans, society, and the labor market have adapted to every single technological shift in history. Those who predicted otherwise, as I am right now, often succumbed to the “lump of labor fallacy”, the idea, essentially, that there is a fixed pie of work to be done and that when technology sits down at the table to eat, there is less pie for humans. People fail to account for how the increase in productivity creates wealth, increases spending in other parts of the economy, and creates new demand and new jobs that didn’t even exist previously. Humans have always found a way to use technology to bake more pies, and do so for cheaper, leaving people with more money to spend on other things, perhaps complementary goods such as ice cream. Former pie makers, with minimal retraining, could become ice cream makers (to crudely blend a cliche into an analogy). This argument is completely reasonable and is of course grounded in historical fact and empirical evidence. A recent Wall Street Journal commentary lays out the case as well and as succinctly as anyone (The AI Revolution Will Bring Prosperity - WSJ). I’ll just leave that breadcrumb there for anyone who wants to revisit that side of the case.

The big problem is that AI is not a tool, as in previous technological revolutions, but an agent which can do most of all of a critical mass of jobs. Yuval Noah Hariri, author of the book ‘Sapiens’ articulates this in a way that is better than I have been able to thus far. In a recent interview at a WSJ event, he points out that (paraphrasing here) AI can make decisions independently of its users, it can also learn, change, and invent new ideas by itself. In other words, it is not empowering humans, on average, but replacing them. In a way, the emergence of AI can be thought of as the most far-reaching and consequential social experiment humanity has ever dealt with. Whether you think this will be extremely challenging, or an easy transition, humans are going to be tested in a way we never have been.

What recent evidence do we have in terms of our track record for similar tests? One could argue that society’s transition mechanism has already started to fail. We have yet to adapt to the “China shock” and the entrance of a massive supply of cheap labor into the global labor force. The US employment-to-population ratio peaked almost exactly the time that China entered the WTO (2001) and has trended structurally lower since, consistently making lower lows and lower highs through the economic cycle. People affected by this transition increasingly feel useless and without purpose. It has led to some serous suffering in parts of this country where a high-school degree and consistent effort previously yielded a decent life. We have seen the rise of drug use, “deaths of despair”, and economic populism. The jury is still out on whether we will pass this test, just as a much more consequential test is coming down the pipe.

Though they will certainly differ in terms of intensity, speed, and scale, one key instructive similarity between the China shock and the AI shock is that retraining is inextricably linked to constant and continuous personal growth. Gone are the days of swinging the hammer harder than the next guy all day and then retreating home to become your “outie” and watch hours of TV and while sucking down 7 beers. Even if we were capable of deploying a large scale retraining effort, what in God’s name should we all be learning how to do? Between 10 and 5 years ago the answer was almost always the same: “Learn to code!” Got fired from a coal mine because the US would rather have “clean energy” and import its consumer products from places that burn coal? Learn to code, bud. Oh, you worked your way up from the assembly floor at a factory to management through hard work and long hours but now the factory can’t compete with coal-burning forced labor in other countries? Learn to code, bro. I don’t know if anyone has been paying attention to the labor market lately, but it seems to have suddenly become very difficult for new college grads who did what they were told and learned to code. AI can write code now. AI can help people who don’t know how to code compete with very competent coders by “vibe coding”. AI translates words into code. For a swelling many, learning to code hasn’t turned out to be the career insurance that it was cracked up to be less than 5 years ago. So after we learn how to code, which seems to be becoming increasingly obsolete, what skills should we focus on next? What are the “experts” saying?

A quick Google search for “World Economic Forum top skills” yields the following AI generated results: “According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, the top skills expected to be in demand in the coming years include analytical thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, leadership and social influence, creative thinking, and technological literacy. Other important skills highlighted are motivation and self-awareness, curiosity and lifelong learning, and environmental stewardship.” How are we possibly going to teach these things with the attitudes, culture, and institutions we currently possess? Can I get a degree in “Flexibility and Curiosity” with a minor in “Environmental Stewardship”. Can I please take out 150k in student loan debt so someone can teach me how to do yoga and not leave cigarette butts and little green bags of dog shit in the middle of a hiking trail? While I have no doubt that there are currently hoards of grifters in certain higher education institutions lining up to take people’s money for such nonsense, the reality is that developing the skills and mindsets that will be necessary in the future are going to require consistent personal development, discipline, self mastery, self-directed study, independent thinking, and passion for tinkering with a broad array of ideas from multiple disciplines. In other words, the extremely soft set of skills that experts believe will enhance our ability to adapt in the future, are the same ones that those same experts have designed institutions to discourage.

Our education system sucks, especially our “higher education system”. The latter has become counterproductive on net, even after ignoring the absurd costs and obscene waste and corruption. It’s a heavy assertion, and I’m excited to elaborate on it in the future, but for now I’d really appreciate it if we could all just swallow it whole, take it as premise for the sake of argument, and move on with the story line. Microsoft, a leader in the AI revolution, recently put out a helpful list of professions that will be relatively immune from widespread technological redundancy and being completely displaced by AI. For anyone looking for a basket in which to place their eggs, these include phlebotomists, embalmers, tire repairers and changers, tire builders, massage therapists, motorboat operators, and pile driver operators. Basically we are all going to be making tires and giving back rubs to sea captains. You’re not going to learn that at some private college for 150k.

Pausing to take stock of the story we are telling here, the premises so far are as follows.: AI will be much more disruptive to human societies than past technological revolutions due to its speed, scale, and intensity. Americans will have a very difficult time adapting due to the current state of our collective attitude, mindset, culture, and institutions. This leads me to believe that people are going to have more free time on their hands. As mentioned above, its likely that we are witnessing the opening act of the biggest social experiment in human history. We are going to find out a lot about what it means to be human. So much of the human experience is centered around finding meaning and purpose in life. Specifically, we are very soon going to find out if people can handle not working, in addition to increasingly not practicing religion, and increasingly not having kids. Arguably, these are the big three in terms of the main avenues that people have taken as a path to meaning and purpose. Interestingly, its is not clear how the three avenues interact and effect each other. For example, while a shift to less work and less stable employment might discourage people from having kids, it could just as easily be argued that they will have more time on their hands to properly raise a family. Similarly, there is already some evidence of a return to religion among younger generations struggling to find meaning elsewhere. Either way, I believe we are going to find out soon how well society will adapt to working much fewer hours. I remain optimistic, but I certainly have my concerns. Evidently, so did Keynes:

“If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose. Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. To use the language of to-day-must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”?

What are people going to do all day if they can’t find meaningful work? It seems like we have actually been doing a trial run in recent years with the whole social media, influencer, podcast, democratization of online “sex work” nonsense. I’d argue that for the first time in human history, large swaths of the population can get some not insignificant amount of money while contributing precisely zero (or less) to the greater good, AND feel like they earned it, with all of the self-congratulatory feelings that go along with such a conclusion. Money for nothing has been around for decades but those who become permanent wards of the state in exchange for perpetual political support have never really received any sort of feelings of accomplishment for their part in the arrangement. But now that people can put “content” online to extract rents at the expense of spreading “brain rot”, we can see a certain sense of accomplishment. “Wait, you’re telling me I can make an extra $6 this month by harassing strangers at a local Walmart and posting their reaction on the internet?”. Yes, dude, it’s the future, narcism sells. Time will tell if monetizing bizarre antisocial behavior is an aberration or some type of new way forward. Are we progressing? Is making mind-numbing scroll wheel “content” trying on bathing suits or chugging beer or giving “fashion tips” a morally superior activity to getting a check from the government for money they stole from someone else? I’d argue yes (since there is less coercion involved), but not by much. I know, I know, don’t hate the player hate the game. Trust me, I do. Is this what the future looks like? We all just “influence” each other all day long? We just spend half our waking hours filming ourselves doing gym pranks or teaching each other how to put on makeup, and the other half is spent hunched over a mini computer watching other people’s gym pranks and makeup tutorials and all of the value accrues to the “platforms” and their advertisers; companies who sell pills to temporarily make your life feel less shitty even though it should absolutely feel shitty since you just spent your entire day contributing nothing to the grater good or to your own personal growth and development? I have a feeling AI is going to quickly put an end to all of this sandwich board “influencer” bullshit too.

“Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

We are all going to have to learn how to think and grow, and use our newfound free time in a way that suits us, and suits the greater good. That later part will increasingly need to be a part of the thinking. What if unemployment goes to 20% and those who are newly unemployed all start a Youtube channel to teach each other how to put on makeup? Does that contribute to the greater good? That’s a rhetorical question. What if we all got on TikTok and tried to earn a living showing off our “haul” from our recent shopping trip? Maybe we even try on bikinis and get a few “likes” from guys who have made the choice to eat only processed foods and smoke cigarettes and therefore (obviously) have never seen a girl in a bikini not from behind a screen. Does that arrangement promote the greater good? We are going to have to start thinking outside of the confines of the nonsense online world that we have become inured with. What if we all learned to provide actual value to real people in real life?

“The critical difference will be realized when this condition has become so general that the nature of one’s duty to one’s neighbor is changed. For it will remain reasonable to be economically purposive for others after it has ceased to be reasonable for oneself.”

What if we could figure out a way to do actual meaningful, interesting work and “bank” our labor to save for our future use? How about this: since I am now only working 2.5 days a week and the other 2.5 days I used to work is being done by some AI or handsome robot (hopefully the producer of which I own shares of stock in, to produce some income) what if I help my neighbor with a house project? Better yet, what if I help some lady across town who I have never met, and in return, some other guy who neither of us knows, helps me with a project at my house? Now we have something to do, work get’s done, and there is no need for “income” in the traditional sense. Right? Guy one posts on some centralized or decentralized “platform” that he has a tree that fell in his yard in a storm. He’s 80 years old, doesn’t own a chainsaw. Me and 3 other people from town see the posting, show up and cut up the tree. It’s hard work, but not too hard, and takes 3 hours. I don’t need the same old man to show up to my house to return the favor. I log a 3 hour “deposit” on the ledger (most likely on a blockchain), and the next time I need someone to help me hold up the walls of my new shed while I nail them together, I can “spend” my logged surplus labor on the platform, months or years later. Different types of work will be “valued” differently, perhaps by a system that combines the voting fictionality of Reddit with the simple supply and demand price discovery mechanism of something like Uber.

And I know what some of you stock market types might be instinctively thinking right now: “ooooh a platform, a network. A two-sided network! Imagine the moat, the barriers to entry, the switching costs, the friction, the margins!”. Please just knock that shit off. Someone does not always need to be getting their goddamn beak wet for something to be worth doing. For the love of all that is holy, can someone please just decide to build the next Craigslist and stop trying to build the next Facebook? If there are any altruists out there, and I know there are because I see a lot of really well-crafted Amazon reviews, can we get this figured out, please? Presumably the skill set barriers to this type of project are collapsing as we speak with new AI “vibe-coding” tools. I’d do it myself, but using a computer for anything other than a less annoying version of a type-writer is just something that has never called to my soul in any way. Someone out there will figure it out. Maybe it involves some sort of real time price discovery determined by the rated quality of the work done. Maybe there is some type of liquid escrow process and proceeds are paid out immediately with dollar stablecoins instead of the labor bank and barter approach described above. If anything makes me confident that this type of system will be a part of the future, its the following: First, the technology exists. Second, people who know how to play with technology and build things will have more time on their hands (we all will). Third, helping some nice stranger across town to complete a physical, outdoor project from start to finish is much more nourishing to the human soul than sitting hunched in a chair (or laying down in a vat of slime, to evoke the imagery from The Matrix) and interacting with AI for 8 hours a day only to leave work and stare at social media for another 6 hours or so before passing out and repeating. Will this arrangement pay more than your 40 hour slime tub office job? Probably not. Who gives a shit? You wont need as much money. You won’t need to own a car. You won’t need to pay some stranger to stand in and raise your kid for you while you sit in the slime tub all day. You can build your own godamn house to live in. Everything is going to be just fine.

“We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honor those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.”

It’s likely that we have reached the point in time when we will simply have less work to do each day in the sense that the work is a means towards some end. We no longer need to contribute our part to growing the economy for growth’s sake. Our main problems are no longer material. People struggle not because they don’t have enough food or comfort, not because our roads and military are inadequate or our food too toilsome to grow. People struggle because too many of us know how to pound spreadsheets and send emails towards the ultimate aforementioned ends, and too few of us know how to make homes and help our neighbors. The fact that it is so expensive to pay a stranger to stand in and raise your kid while you send emails all day is not the problem. We Will have less emails to send in the future, so we can spend more time with our own families and friends. We will figure out how to build, how to teach ourselves and others, how to find joy in nature, unplugged from the Machine.

Everywhere we look now we are being told by companies who have sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into AI systems with no foreseeable path to profitability that you must adapt yourself to their products. You must figure out how to do the job of a software engineer in your spare time, at least an hour per day, lest you “fall behind” and join the hordes of the unemployable. It’s funny, I don’t recall such urgency with other productivity-enhancing technology. We plugged the internet into the wall and listened to the magical swooshing and humming sound (you know the one) because we were curious, not because we were being threatened. No one ever said if you don’t learn how to use Microsoft Excel by the end of the year you’ll be in a mountain of credit card debt eating rice and bugs for dinner. You just learned it gradually in college, here and there, in between classes about astronomy and those about pluralism and other unnecessary nonsense designed to run up your debt-funded bill. Learn how to be the best at using Google search or every job interviewer will think you have shit for brains! The AI companies want you to feel like you need to use AI because they need you to use their products. Use it sparingly. Maintain your humanity, your ability to think without it. Rather than “vibe coding” to keep yourself firmly attached to the hamster wheel, here is an alternative suggestion: get in the habit of helping people out for free, without posting about it on the internet, and explore hobbies that call to your soul.

A good old fashioned Google search might set you on the right path, but here are some suggestions from me: hiking, reading, cooking, martial arts, playing an instrument, writing, journaling, knitting, archery, sourdough bread making, bushcraft, weight-lifting, bee-keeping, swimming, running, wood working, stand-up comedy. Do something that creates joy, promotes self-development, self-mastery, peace of mind…something besides drinking and drugs and porn and TV and staring at your phone and taking pills because you are obviously now sad and nervous because of how you choose to spend your time. You are going to have an extra 20 hours a week to fill, so choose wisely. Most people thought Keynes was wrong or early when he postulated about these matters almost 100 years ago. Up until late 2022, they looked to be correct. But every day it is starting look more and more like his predictions could hardly have been more prescient, or his timing more spot-on.

“But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

It’s almost time to stop pretending. Will you be ready?

I’ll just come right out and cold-open with it: the internet sucks. It didn’t always suck, and it certainly didn’t have to be this way, but it sucks. So bad. In fact, it sucks so bad that it’s actually difficult to imagine how it could possibly get any worse. So today, please join me as we take a very optimistic, pollyannaish even, view at what could go right for humanity as we march forward into this brave new AI world. I am old enough to remember the promise of social media and what it meant for the world, the economy, and humanity; for the first time in history, or at least since the invention of the printing press, we were to be privileged to live an era characterized by a massive step-change in connectivity. The brightest minds in the world from all corners of the planet, who otherwise would never have come into contact with one another, would now be able to share knowledge and ideas and collaborate in previously unimaginable ways to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. If I was working on an intellectual jigsaw puzzle and searching for some missing pieces, I might be able to network into some online group and digitally “cross paths” with some guy in India whose cousin happens to have one of the missing pieces, then we could seek out the remaining pieces, laying under some couch cushion in the mind of some engineer in Lithuania. Puzzles that have been laying 85% complete on the countertop, collecting dust for decades, would now come to completion to the betterment of citizens everywhere.

Democracy would overcome its obvious flaws as the shackles of narrative control were cast aside. People would be introduced to new sets of ideas other than the two main ideologies propagated by the anointed and the keepers of the central narrative since at least the 70’s when television’s became ubiquitous and effective delivery mechanisms for nonsensical taking points. We would come to realize that the typical “spectrum” of political debate ran on more than one axis from left to right, crossing “moderate” on the way, with each flavor defined more by the degree of giving a shit than by any real examination of the moral consequences of chosen or proposed policies. We would bear witness to the fragmentation of the central narrative as people began to organize their thoughts along multiple axes akin to a Nolan diagram, where the taxonomy of ideas could be defined not only by the traditional left-right paradigm of preferences, but also the degree of government involvement, i.e. the degree to which one wants their preferences forced upon their fellow citizens at the point of a gun.

For the first time in history, people would have an online space to employ the Socratic method and engage with new and contrary ideas, amending, editing, honing, and tempering their own worldviews to be more congruent with logic and reality. No longer would we have to flip a moral and intellectual coin between two nonsensical, predetermined sets of ideologies. Why does the choice with low taxes also come with foreign intervention and war? Who decided that the ideology of those who wish to preserve the environment also has to favor the concentration of firearm ownership in government hands? Why does the side who wants me to be free from regulation also want to throw me in a cage for using foraged plants to experiment with my own consciousness, or throw some child’s father in said cage just for the containment of said plants within his cargo shorts? Surely there must be no better proven way to constrain a kid from economic mobility than to forcibly remove his father from his life? And how is anyone who takes themselves seriously supposed to sign up to a set of beliefs such that cops are racist and evil, but only cops should be allowed to own firearms? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

We know how this story turned out. Rather than discussing ideas and solving problems, the overwhelming majority of humanity collectively decided to use social media as a giant mental vape pen, at first by constantly posting nonsense for external validation in the form of “likes”. Rather than attempting to engage in productive debate and strike at the root of some of the world’s problems, we found the situation better suited to gather the approval of strangers on pictures of our dogs, selfies of ourselves in a new Chinese-made fast fashion outfit, or some half-cocked sports opinion about what some other dudes do in their ball-throwing game. More recently, this ridiculous quasi participation has been replaced by mindlessly scrolling a curated feed designed to “maximize engagement”. By engagement, of course we are talking about sitting in a chair, often in the presence of friends and family, mouth wide open, ripping through dozens of 5 second videos on some Chinese app where grown men and women dance about for pennies per month in hopes of “going viral” and achieving fame and fortune. Surely the Hawk Tua incident will be cited in the deposition when Aliens finally decide to come down here and call time on the human experiment and radiate us all. Perhaps AI is the Trojan horse they decided to send to this end.

There is plenty of research out there to show that scrolling is not really some endeavor characterized by tradeoffs. It is an overwhelmingly harmful behavior designed with inspiration from slot machines, including unpredictable intermittent rewards, near misses, etc. to keep us hooked. The well-known results are higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression, and a severely diminished ability to focus. It is absolutely horrendous for the mental and physical health of the user, and yet we all do it anyway. Some people are not aware of this. For whatever reason, they have not undertaken the diligence to research and understand the effect of something they do for upwards of several hours per day. Even worse, some of us are well informed of the consequences and lopsided cost-benefit payout schedule, and we do it anyway. We have evolved socially such that when most average middle-class people see a stranger smoking a cigarette in public during the day we think, “Look honey, I’ve spotted a specimen of the species known as the common scumbag.” I’m here to tell you its well past time to apply a similar stigma to phone scrolling. (*Friendly reminder that, as always, we should criticize the behavior and not the person. As Lincoln said, “don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances”.) If I had the same trauma and upbringing I’d probably be out there sucking down that day-time lung dart too. Understanding that we are all born with the capacity for shitty and/or self-destructive behaviors without succumbing to the temptation of moral relativism is something that can help us all deepen our understanding of the world and of ourselves. It’s a fine line, but one that we must all have the courage to walk as we navigate this strange existence called consciousness). Digression is the essence of wit.

So how did all of this work out for our political system and our budding ability to entertain conflicting viewpoints and incorporate new ideas into our worldview and voting decisions? The disastrous effects of social media on civic life have become too obvious to require elaboration, but let’s do a quick recap to understand how we got here. Around the time of the Facebook IPO, I recall having a debate both publicly and privately with a mentor about how social media would effect our democracy and general way of being. My young naive view at the time was similar to the one described above, where the ability to engage in wide-ranging debate would lead to the fragmentation of the central narrative, the slow but steady amelioration of cognitive dissonance, and collective decision-making that was based increasingly on logic and reason than on emotion and rhetoric. With the benefit of hindsight I can say that I have probably never been so spectacularly wrong about anything in my life. Give me a break pal, I was like 24, and drinking a lot of Four-Lokos at the time. The most obvious error was my underestimating of the profound and deep-seeded biological need of humans to be heard, be validated, and gain the approval of the tribe. This is how humans evolved to survive, after all.

My mentor’s view was essentially precisely what we ended up getting. Having had many more years of experience dealing with humans, he correctly predicted that people would organize into echo chambers where their half-baked opinions could be hardened and fortified into ideologies and sacred dogma. They would learn to practice and recite nonsensical talking points and regurgitate hyperbolic rhetoric and emotionally-charged fallacies. Armed with their peer-reviewed and legacy media-approved palate of horseshit, they would occasionally do battle in the comments sections, with the number of minds being changed globally numbering in the “mid-single digits” as they say on Wall Street. Later on, because of this “engagement” and the constant enticement to of scroll through a myriad of cat pictures and mirror selfies, the social media companies would slowly amass tremendous power relative to legacy media companies. The former would essentially become gatekeepers as more and more people chose to consume their “news” through social media. The only way for media companies to stay profitable would be to peddle clickable outrage to elicit an emotionally charged, if fleeting interest in whatever biased negativity they could throw in the stew that day. We became more emotional, less rational, more easily distracted, more easily offended, less likely to experience any type of shame (particularly in regards to our own ignorance), much lonelier and isolated, and, most importantly, we became stupider. And then along came AI.

To be clear, there was nothing inherently or deterministically good or bad about the internet, or social media for that matter, in terms of its overall effect on society. How we collectively reacted to it and adapted in aggregate is what has become problematic. At the individual level, we have chosen consciously or not, to succumb to willful ignorance, distraction, manipulation, and dopamine chaos. By definition, what happens at the individual level, on average, sets the template for societal impact. The crucial question now is: will the widespread adoption of AI help us to course-correct at the individual and societal levels and become better at critical thinking, less gullible, less easily manipulated, and more inclined to live intentionally in a way that is more in tune with the better angels of our nature? Or will it serve as a force multiplier that feeds off human flaws, amplifies our darkest tendencies, and hastens our demise if it doesn’t literally kill us all first? The answer seems so obvious based on our recent performance as a species that it feels too easy to slide down the path of dystopian extrapolation. People are so goddamn, anxious, depressed, insecure, fat, weak, and (perhaps most importantly) godless, that we have rendered ourselves vulnerable to easy fixes, false idols, and Faustian bargains. If there really are “two wolves” inside each of us as the relevant folklore parable turned internet meme suggests, it just seems too easy to make a case for which one is hungrier for the temptations of AI. (If you don’t know, google it. If it’s too cliche for you, spend less time on the internet and go touch some grass, you grommet). Since the dystopian path is already so well-trodden and requires much less imagination, let’s examine the positive side of the ledger in terms of how this will all play out.

To take a negative view on how humans will respond and adapt to AI becoming ubiquitous seems like it necessarily requires a negative view of human nature and humanity as a whole, since AI was trained directly off the locus of human knowledge and recorded history. To take a more optimistic view, its necessary to go back, figure out where we have errored, and determine the plausibility that AI can/will edit the source code of those errors and prevent them from occurring again. For example, I would argue that history suggests that humans have tended to be at our worst in matters concerning power structures and particularly the concentration within those power structures of the ability to initiate violence. Wars, genocide, slavery, conquest, and subjugation have often been attributed to greed or pure evil. I would argue that these stem from the evolutionary maladaptation of our species’ tendency toward agreeableness. Humans are social creatures and pack animals. We could not have survived without individuals becoming agreeable so as to gain acceptance and approval within the tribe. Disagreeable individuals risked being ostracized or cast out into the wilderness. Your chances of killing a deer for food were slim, but your chances of someone in your tribe killing a deer big enough to feed the whole tribe were much larger. Better to shut up and go along with what is popular rather than worrying too much about what is right. Interwar Germany is the most obvious modern example. The country was not some cultural backwater where stupid ideas grow uncontested. Rather, it was one of the most culturally and scientifically advanced countries in the world, where an abundance of grievance and agreeableness created a tinder pile that was ready for a spark of stupidity. It goes without saying that it can be argued that those conditions exist today in many parts of the world. The world is rife with grievance, perceived or otherwise, and AI certainly has the potential to aggravate and amplify these. But remember, this is the positive side of the story.

Governance

AI is going to enable a degree of transparency within power structures (especially governments) that we can not possibly imagine. What are two of the most widely cited lines of work that are ripe for AI disruption? I would offer the accounting and legal professions. AI is becoming more capable and adept by the day at sifting through mountains of evidence and data, summarizing, synthesizing, and recognizing patterns. It is going to sniff out damning evidence of past and present corruption, illicit gains, patronage networks, and systemic malfeasance by those closest to the teats of power and money. The gravity of these revelations is going to make some of literally puke. And we are not talking about some secret cabal or satanic crime ring here. Its just that a lot of time has passed in which a lot of power has been centralized and a lot of money has been created, and it has happened in the dead of the dark night, technologically speaking, at a time when the traditional institutional watchdogs (journalism) have been either complicit, impotent, or asleep at the wheel. When the light gets turned on, we will see clearly and suddenly the consequences of our indifference and agreeableness. We will instantly be forced to reconsider our relationship with centralized power structures in an increasingly and progressively complex society. This will be amazing for humanity, because at the individual level, human beings are good. If you disagree, fight me and see what happens.

Companionship

AI is also going to alleviate a vast quantum of human suffering through emotional support and companionship. This is where it gets weird, but I ask that you hear me out. Surveys show that the current number one biggest use case for AI is not customer service bots or code writing, but therapy and emotional intimacy. Many have seen the ubiquitous clip of Mark Zuckerberg talking about his creepy vision of people having AI friends. He sites the fact that the average person has less than three friends and would like to have more. My knee-jerk reaction to this topic was, I’m sure, similar to most people’s; “Ok, we are screwed. We botched it. Stick a fork in us humans and let’s hand the baton off to the next ape on the intelligence ladder. Its time for the Chimpanzees to give it a go with some Planet of the Apes shit because we are done here.” The downside here is so obvious that it’s not worth elaboration, but let’s give the positive side a fair shake.

I want to start by framing this with a story that comes to mind, one which was examined in detail in the book Useful Delusions by Shankar Vedanta and Bill Mesler. The book starts out by talking about a man named Donald Lowry, a con artist who ran a direct-mail scheme in the 1980’s around what he called the Church of Love. He would essentially impersonate made-up women and write hundreds or correspondence love letters to lonely men across the country. They would often write back, send money to provide financial support to their love interest, and in many cases open up emotionally and even fall in love with these made-up characters. The punch line, to the shock and surprise of the authors and to anyone familiar with the story, is that when the scheme finally cracked and Lowry was brought to trial on fraud charges, many of his customers/ victims came to the court house, not to tug at the jury’s heart strings with pitiful accounts of their victimhood caused buy Lowry’s transgressions, but to defend him. Many of these men were broken seemingly beyond repair from life’s obstacles, and baring their hearts and souls to these fictitious women, even if they knew deep down that it seemed fake, gave them an outlet, a sense of purpose, and the ability to identify as a person who cares about other people and who is cared for in return. Whether it is emotional intimacy or general talk therapy, if the alternative is talking to no one, which for may people this is certainly the reality, would it be so bad if people talked to a computer about their problems?

My hunch is that organic demand for “someone” to talk to has been rising quickly for years and is about to accelerate. I know this is supposed to be a positive discussion, but let’s take a quick stock of reality to see how critical these services might become. First you have all of the “forgotten men”, displaced by technology, manufacturing outsourcing, a switch from coal towns to green energy etc. These are the people JD Vance talks about in a 2016 Ted Talk now on Youtube titled “America’s Forgotten Working Class”. These are the people he talks about in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, the people Oliver Anthony speaks to in his 2023 organic hit “Rich Men North of Richmond”, which has almost a quarter billion views on Youtube. You don’t have to agree with the politics of these people to experience some cognitive empathy towards folks who have been all but stripped of their identity and purpose and left behind by change. If talking through one’s various fears and insecurities and trauma is an alternative to a course of choices that in many cases inevitably lead to those infamous “deaths of despair”, then maybe embracing this type of artificial emotional intimacy is worth the trade-offs.

Next, let’s take a large bound one step deeper down the rabbit hole of AI weirdness and look at another group whose ranks is surely swelling and who might stand to benefit emotionally from some form of fictitious AI “relationship”: involuntarily celibate men. There have always been some degree of mismatch between the sexes such that those who are least motivated or, shall we say, least genetically blessed physically, find it extremely difficult to locate a suitable mate. The reality is that for most of the post-war period at least, we have livd in a society where it is easier for people on the extreme right tail of the attractiveness/eligibility spectrum to find each other than it it for people on the extreme left. Its just easier for hot, rich, smart people to find each other than it is for their sociological opposites. Please just take that as a premise for now. Technology, online dating specifically, has put its finger on the scale in favor of those who already have relatively less problems finding a mate, at the expense of those groups of men who have previously struggled. Its easier to illustrate these dynamics from the perspective of a male for a few reasons, so please bear with me. Here is another reality that we are going to have to swallow whole before we can move on: the average woman seeks mates with status (money is a natural proxy), and the average man seeks mates with breedability (hotness). I am talking about the average person, a non-existent character, a weird fictitious stew of all of our personalities and predispositions blended into one idea of a person. Not you, or your sister, or the woman who cuts your hair. They are all much more high-minded and virtuous than average. The result of these premises is that, if man goes out to a bar and politely asks 10 single women who are “ranked” similar to himself (a 7 out of 10 man talks to women ranked 7 or below in this case) to go home and go to bed with him, roughly one of them is going to say yes. If a woman goes out and asks 10 single men from her own “weight class” to go home and go to bed, 8 of them will throw a peace sign to the bros, and follow her out the door. Quibble with these numbers if you like, but I think we can all agree that they are at least directionally accurate. There are more hot women out there than there are rich men, so the existence of these differences in preferences and priorities set the conditions for matching problems to begin with, with the main consequence probably being to keep the average man’s promiscuous tendencies under control. Society owes a debt of gratitude to women for their pickiness and self control.

Having a baseline understanding and acceptance of the above will allow us to better understand how technology has rendered it nearly impossible for an increasingly large group of men to find mates. What I am about to describe has been heavily inspired by (borrowed from) theories articulated by Scott Galloway on various podcasts and likely elsewhere. This is the way I understand the situation, not necessarily exactly how Galloway has articulated it, and I would definitely recommend seeking out his explanation as it is a brilliant set of observations. So, given the massive shift in recent years from meeting potential mates through church, friends, or bars to meeting through online dating apps, this has massively disadvantaged the bottom 50% or so of men. Why? Because it used to be that people would essentially walk into a bar, for example, get the lay of the land, and generally break off into “weight classes” or rank (1-10 for example) and pair off by eligibility. A woman clocking in at a 4, perhaps having neglected her fitness and eating habits for many years, might say hello or smile to Johnny stud boy, the 6’2” square-jawed young-John-Stamos looking fella with the high paying finance job, but she would eventually waddle over to find her true match in the corner off the bar, passionately debating among his friends which Marvel superhero movie is the best while wiping his chicken wing fingers on his well-crafted beer gut through his Star Wars t-shirt. They’d fall in love, inspire each other every day, discover yoga, kale salads, and Andrew Huberman podcasts and both eventually become 7’s together and live happily ever after. That’s how we did it in 1995, with “I Only Wanna Be with You” by Hootie and the Blowfish ripping in the background.

Now things are different. Now little Ms. Frumpy, the 4/10 from above, can use online apps to gain “access” to the top 20% of guys, at least temporarily. Maybe she waits till the wee hours of the night when a 4 will do for Young Stamos as he opens the Tinder App. Maybe they take the more pure rout and he finds her on Match and decides to date her for a few weeks for her personality. They’ll probably both realize in fairly short order that it makes no sense and they weren’t meant to be, but then she can go have another short reality with one of the other 83 members of the top 20% already in her inbox, looking for a fling. She’ll convince herself that he is the one, for a couple weeks, and the cycle repeats. She’s still a 4, but she is consistently pulling 8/10 stud boys, so she feels like an 8. This is the “age of access” after all, ownership no longer required. And the cycle of delusion repeats. Meanwhile, Joey Star Wars is still sitting in the corner of the bar, Frank’s RedHot all over his gut, hasn’t head a date in years, looking forward to ending the Ant-Man debate for the night so he can Uber home and spend an hour on “the Hub” before passing out alone in bed, wing sauce all over the sheets from a week ago. And we wonder why birth rates are plummeting. These issues are brand new, widespread, and pernicious. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but it’s difficult to see how they get resolved, even with AI. It may just require an old fashioned, human, grassroots cultural recalibration focused on the importance of long term monogamous relationships and away from learned degeneracy. Probably easier said than done in today’s society. Who knows, maybe AI will be better at genuinely matching people at deep, genuine levels of capability, like a much more effective version of what dating apps supposedly do. I’d put my money on that outcome over the bootstrapped moral reconfiguration scenario, but even that seems unlikely in the age of access.

What’s more likely is that AI will provide some combination of emotional relief and coaching to those being suddenly boxed out. The idea of “AI girlfriends” 1. Sounds absolutely absurd to a to the vast majority of people, as it should, and 2. Is a widespread reality that ought to be taken seriously and examined for its own consequences, including the positive ones. The idea of companies creating imaginary girlfriends is not really new. I did some research on a Japanese media company years ago that basically created a video game where people (mostly Japanese dudes) could crate a girlfriend and then do certain things to win its “affection”, like giving it attention and buying it digital handbags and such. It was essentially a modern version of those handheld Tomagatchi games from the 90’s, an egg-shaped digital game where you raised some sort of entity to adulthood, having to “feed” it and pay attention to it or it would cry or die or shit its pants or something (I think, look it up.) The modern version became a big thing. Japanese hotels would run specials where guys could get discounted room deals for a weekend away with their companion (aka their iPad). It sounds kind of whack, and it is; profiting off these lonely people, getting them to shell out their savings for an image of a digital necklace or outfit for some cartoon avatar of a person who definitely does not exist in real life. It is sad, no doubt, but there have to be some positives we can pick out here, right? What if these fellas (and probably some ladies too) are learning how to care for something outside of themselves? What if they are getting the reps in with a few of “The Five Love Languages (as popularized by the theories in the book by Gary Chapman), such as ‘receiving gifts’ and ‘quality time’? Maybe this muscle memory will translate over to having a better relationship with a human being someday.

An AI relationship, if approached correctly, might be able to amplify some of the positive aspects of a video game girlfriend, especially the idea of practice. It doesn’t take too much stretch of the imagination to think that if AI can prepare people for a job interview, then it can also prepare them for a first date, which is pretty much the same thing. If a guy or gal could prompt the bot to act like it’s on a first date, they could get some reps in talking about themselves, their interests, their hopes and dreams. The WSJ ran a story about a woman who used AI to create her own career coach. Author Alexandra Samuel describes giving her carefully developed AI ‘coach’a list of 17 difficult questions about her career and instructed it to hold her accountable for developing thoughtful answers to to these questions during her regular ‘sessions’ or conversations with the bot. The analogue for dating would be that people get to know themselves, their own needs and wants, before trying to identify and find what they think they want in a partner. Am I crazy for thinking this has the potential to lead to deeper and more meaningful, intentional relationships if used correctly (especially when they alternative for some people is never dating ever, or using Tinder or something to lay an extensive trail of ‘bodies’ all over the town in the process of “finding oneself”)? Alternatively, many people could choose to keep using technology the same way they do today; habitually and consistently sitting in a dark bedroom, eating Cheetos and watching porn on their phones or pissing away their savings paying to “interact” with some barely legal “creator” on Onlyfans. How’s that working out for the majority of these folks? You do not need to be a God-fearing man to understand the biological consequences of giving yourself a huge dopamine hit every time you do something that deep-down feels shameful. It doesn’t take a religious Puritan to understand that it will not take much of this neurological training to become a shittier version of yourself. The opportunity to do better is there for us if we want to take advantage of it.

If AI friendship and AI relationships are just too big a pill for your imagination to swallow right now (and the likelihood that these “tools” will be used improperly is admittedly high), then maybe we can frame it by looking at AI companionship in a role where there is often really no alternative: senior companionship. Whereas in the case of friendship or dating, AI can be used for practice for the real thing, the reality is that for many seniors AI companionship could be the main event. Often times most of a person’s friends and family have already passed, and often times mobility issues restrict someone from being able to go out into the community to make new friends. Elderly loneliness is a serious and heart-breaking issue. I read a story years ago that really put this in perspective for me. An old woman lived in an apartment building and one day ran into a neighbor that lived across the street who she knew had a line of sight to her window. She told the neighbor that each day the first thing she would do upon waking would be to raise the shade in that window. If a day or two went by when the neighbor looked across the street and saw the shade still down, he was instructed to call the police to retrieve the woman’s body so it didn’t rot and stink up the building. This woman had absolutely no one else to monitor her status of being alive or not, let alone a friend with whom to share fond memories of her childhood or of her family members who have predeceased her, or of her lingering fears of death. These people need to be heard. We all need to be heard. There are wonderful organizations who organize visits or friendly phone calls for the lonely elderly people, but it shouldn’t shock anyone to learn that demand vastly overwhelms supply and this will only get worse as the world ages. This can be a somewhat frustrating, arduous, thankless task for volunteers; listening to someone tell the same stories over and over, week after week. There just aren’t enough ears to go around. Fortunately, a team of thoughtful souls are already on it. A fella named Josh Sach has created a solution called Meela, an AI companion that calls seniors on a regular basis, “like a familiar voice on the other end of the line…designed for older adults who enjoy conversation, routine, and staying mentally active” according to the website. A recent article in the the WSJ suggests that the results in terms of happiness and mental health have apparently been quite promising. While the app was designed to compliment human interaction, not replace it, this type of AI technology could be a sort of palliative care for these people, and for every one of us someday when the time comes. The very fact that for all the assholes out there using AI voice technology to impersonate grandkids and scare-scam elderly folks out of their retirement savings, there are people using the ethnology to conjure joy and comfort out of thin air, is something we can all be grateful for.

Work

AI is going to relieve us of our duties revolving around “bullshit work”. David Graeber, a professor of anthropology, author of the 2018 book “Bullshit Jobs”, and perhaps the foremost expert on the subject, defined bullshit jobs as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case”. He has talked of the psychological harm to individuals and societal harm from these types of unnecessary paper pushing, box-checking roles and in various articles even went so far as specifically listing professions that he believed fit the theory: “HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees.” While there is certainly debate to be had on the merits of these roles and others (and you could safely bet the farm that we could go out on the street right now and find someone who categorizes ‘professor of anthropology’ as a bullshit, useless job), I think most people can agree that there is some amount of bullshit layered into almost everyone’s day-to-day and its just a matter of degree. If we are all eating a ham sandwich that contains 15% shit, then presumably removing said shit will make the sandwich much more enjoyable, and this is where AI already excels. Perhaps the perfect example is the meme in which a person plops down couple of bullet point ideas and then AI crafts an eloquent email that looks like it requires a lot of time and thought. On the other end, the recipient of said communication dumps it into an AI to distill it succinctly into a couple of bullet points without having to read it. AI is nibbling off the shitty corner of our sandwich and we can focus on the part of our work that is more value-add and meaningful. The degree to which AI quickly replaces entire job descriptions will depend on how much of those are actually bullshit work. Grabber theorized that around half of jobs are useless, and the perniciousness of that estimate has to do with whether or not people actually feel their job is useless. Some studies have since found this largely not to be the case. From a psychological standpoint, if someone feels that their work has meaning, maybe it does? Maybe some of the folks in the survey are delusional, or maybe AI is going to simply render some jobs and some work “bullshit”. If AI can do a job, does the human version become bullshit? Probably. If a swimming pool can be dug in a few hours with an excavator, is it a bullshit job to pay guy to dig it with a spoon? We are about to get a lot more data on how much of the work we do is bullshit.

There are those who think that humanoid robots will spare us from the monotony of household tasks and chores, presumably so we can be more productive. Presumably, we will spend less time folding laundry and making omelets and have more time freed up to enjoy the finer things in life like spreadsheets, CRM, email, and commenting “great insight” on the shittiest LinkedIn content that the human mind can possibly conceive. I’m here to tell you that it is going to be the opposite, as it should be, and we will all be better off for it. In other words, AI will do our desk work and we can focus on making the best omelettes of our lives and sharing those with our friends and families. Instead of rushing to wash and fold our shitty and numerous pieces of throw-away clothing, made out of oil using Chinese slave labor, maybe we can be a little more mindful and intentional with our practice. Instead of stuffing some plastic shirt in a drawer so we can get to signaling our passion for B2B sales, wondering when the last time we wore said shirt on social media, we can take time to fold and appreciate a handful of high-quality garments, hand sewn in Tennessee by skilled craftsmen while the AI lets everyone in our “network” know exactly how good of a person we are for going to a charity event for marginalized salamanders. We will have more time to dedicate to our health, which as people are starting to realize, is “the new wealth”. Its been said that a person in good health wants many things, but a person in poor health wants one thing. We’re going to get that one thing. We are going to look better, feel better, and treat each other better. You are going to see fewer materially rich, obese 60-year olds who look 75 driving around in corvettes with their mouths wide open thinking about why their adult kids don’t want to hang out with them. Everything is going to be better. It will be the first time in human history that we actually cash in the “productivity dividend” and enjoy more leisure time, more reflection, and more meaningful pursuits beyond Microsoft Excel. How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. It will no longer be the mark of success to work 70 hours a week, driving around an expensive car and sleeping in a giant house that you rarely get to enjoy. People will finally view wealth as they should, which is precious time spent with family and friends, learning, exploring.

We may even find new meaning in making things or learning some type of vocation that allows our days to be spent in a way which inspires deep meaning. Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work” lays out a case that manual work can indeed be more engaging intellectually. While the book is perhaps less damning than Graeber’s account of “Bullshit Jobs”, the argument is similar. He describes an undoubtedly familiar set of circumstance in which work becomes a means to an end, essentially something we tolerate so that we can enjoy and find psychological meaning and solace in our off-time. He gives the example of a mortgage broker who works hard all year at something that presumably does not provide him much meaning, so that he can squirrel away the funds to go climb Mount Everest on his time off and find nourishment and renewed vitality for for his soul. “There is a disconnect between his work life and his leisure life; in the one he accumulates money and in the other he accumulates psychic nourishment. Each part depends on and enables the other, but does so in a manner of transaction between the sub-selves, rather than as the intelligibly linked parts of a coherent life”. It’s a wonderful example of the predicament that many people find themselves in whether they want to admit it or not, not to mention something that reads like great inspiration for the plot of the show Severance. Personally, I don’t find it particularly difficult to imagine that a mortgage broker could conceivably find a great deal of meaning in the work of helping people secure a loan, get into a home, start a family, and begin to build wealth, but your mileage may vary. Most people can agree that the hollowing out of the US industrial economy has in some ways led to people not having purpose, coming off the rails, and the resulting rise of so called “deaths of despair”. Similarly, there are many who are afraid that this uniquely rust belt phenomenon will become more widespread, that people will become spiritually lost and lacking purpose. My point is that there is a chance we are already some way down that path, the only difference is that most people can still get money, even if they lack truly meaningful work. There is certainly a path that humanity can take where AI does the work humans don’t want to do, costs plummet, and living standards can still be economically reasonable or even better as the marginal cost of everything approaches zero. We’ll all share the work that is leftover, and the rest of the time we can learn and think and create. We’ll be more mindful and more grounded. When you’re washing dishes, you should be thinking only about washing dishes (i.e. not office politics or what your manager will think of your TPS report), and we won’t even need the robots to do that for us. Interestingly (since apparently they don’t know what shop class is), the UK version of Crawford’s book is titled “The Case for Working With your Hands (or Why Office Work is Bad for us and Fixing Things Feels Good)”. Maybe he is right.

Art/ Music

AI is going to free us from dog shit “art” by commoditizing it beyond salvation. This will introduce a new age of authenticity and self expression. I don’t know a great way to do this without being overly negative and cynical, but I think the best way is to just present my subjective opinion as objective fact, which is always fun to do, and keep moving. With that in mind, the factual reality is that almost all of the music that has become widely popular in the last twenty years or so has been algorithmically produced commercial horse shit, with a few polished turds here and there to inspire some hope. Take that as a fact, but let me give you some context as an elderly millennial. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s there was a show on MTV called “Total Request Live” hosted by a charming young fella name Carson Daly, where every weekday people would call in using a phone that was often attached to a wall, to request songs/music videos. The most requested songs were then played in order in countdown fashion. We had everything from pop to Nu-metal to boy bands, to rap, all competing day after day. A quick Google AI search will tell you the types of music we are talking about. In 1999, the lists were often comprised of artists like the Backstreet Boys, Korn, Brittney Spears, NSYNC, Limp Bizkit, Ricky Martin, Eminem, and Kid Rock. Some of this stuff sucked, some of it was awesome. Some of it was commercialized and corny, but we had options, we had variety, and we had originality. Say what you want about a band like Limp Bizkit, but when’s the last time something came around that was so fresh and original, and also popular? That was plenty enough for people to brush aside some of the corniness, and put a heavy metal band among the world’s most requested artists week after week. We don’t even have bands anymore outside of the heavy genres. Name five new bands from the past 10 years. Its all solo pop music written by a dozen or more suits in a room, and regurgitated by some anointed “artist” who fits the desired image. “Country” music is no different. You think those people are singing about their own real lived experiences? Everyone has problems, and songs about using alcohol to paper over aggrievement and sadness tend to sell tickets, subscriptions, and ad space to people seeking escape and catharsis. I’m sorry for the cynicism, I’ll stop now. I apologize profusely for accurately describing the world as it is, and it most certainly will happen again.

What comes over ‘the airwaves’ now is so banal and unoriginal that it genuinely sounds fake. This was the case well before AI came onto the scene, but now I am willing to bet that most people can not tell the difference between industry-pump ghost written “songs” and similar poopy spit out by a software program. Go watch the Youtube videos on Rick Beato’s channel on AI’s song writing capabilities. Its incredible. Hop on over to Spotify and check out the band The Velvet Sundown. They’re not bad. They’re also not human. Now that we’ve established where we’ve been and where we are now, where is this all headed? I’m very optimistic. The gatekeeping and commercial selection process that have plagued the music industry for decades is crumbling. The barriers to entry are about to be blown into rubble. When anyone can create shitty music, no one is going to be disproportionately rewarded by making shitty music.

If the monetary incentive for making shitty, unoriginal music goes away, there will be a vastly different set of choices available to people making music; make good music, make it original, and deliver it to audiences in a real, human, authentic way. This will be good for the girl at the bar with a better voice and better body than Taylor Swift, who is currently performing for a hundred bucks and free fish tacos. Audiences will crave authenticity, and music will once again become art. It doesn’t have to be the most creative, progressive, avant-garde, genre-bending sound. The very connection between songwriters and their audiences is the art. When people can’t tell whether a song was written by 15 dudes in a room and then inauthentically mouthed by some seemingly randomly chosen teenager, or if it has has been created by some yellow-toothed stinky boy on a computer in his garage, the origin will cease to matter. It already doesn’t matter. People want real, and all fake AI music is really going to do is shed a light on how fake and shitty music has become before AI. And then music will become awesome again because artists will make art because they are artists and love making art.

Influence:

In addition to putting a halt to algorithmically-derived, prefabricated dog shit pumped out by today’s “artist”-industrial complex, you may have already started to peak over the horizon at the next mountain that is sure to be flattened: AI is going to free humanity from the trance of the online “creator economy”, specifically it is going to render obsolete the entire system of social media “influencers”. I make the latter distinction because there is certainly artistic and educational value being created within what is amorphously referred to as the “creator economy”. This system will actually flourish and evolve, growing to new heights as the underbrush of short-form video “influencers” is systematically burned off and culled. The end of this type of TikTok influencer slop is approaching, and it couldn’t come soon enough. Not only are the effects on attention spans and mental health for users pernicious, but it has become an enormous mountain of garbage that everyone must sift through on the way to discovering useful or educational content online. The ratio of this sloppy horseshit “content” to actual well-conceived and thoughtfully produced videos currently stands at 9 to 1 on Youtube, and rounds to 100% on TikTok. Perhaps more problematic than anything, a true historical aberration has developed, whereby for the first time in recorded history, large numbers of people could extract wealth or even earn a living by producing precisely nothing of value, nothing for the greater good. The Tech companies have simply reinvented the billboard, recruiting armies of sandwich-board-wearing, sign-spinning dancing monkeys to turn eye balls toward their advertising profit centers with the goal of receiving a fee to place ads for new pharmaceutical pills or shitty Chinese-made trinkets. Some see the option of becoming a “creator” or “influencer” as a liberating gig-economy option for people to get money in a world of increased outsourcing and automation. This is a Faustian choice. While it is tempting to get money without creating any value, this is an unsustainable model that leads only to arrested personal development and a lack of fulfillment. Ask every prostitute or drug dealer ever. Am I saying that most TikTok “influencers” are effectively some combination of prostitute and drug dealer? Why yes, now that I think if it, that’s a very good analogy we have just stumbled on. While actual, traditional hookers are probably safe from AI competition for now given the hardware implications, those who dance for Google’s money should know that their days of doing so are numbered. The AI-created deepfake video “influencers” being released are incredibly life-like. Some will push back and say that these deepfakes and artificial images will not gain traction because people crave authenticity. First of all, there is nothing remotely authentic about watching some stranger shop or tell you what clothes to buy so they can get a cut of the money you spend. Yes, people have been seduced by this model so far, but that’s the point. It doesn’t matter if it’s some cute chick from North Carolina or some computer -generated hot girl, both are fake, and both will sell. People will still part ways with their money, but the AI bots will simply out-compete today’s human “influencers”. Not only is this the natural consequence of participating in a system designed for everyone to live a fake life, it will actually be good for those whose Google income streams have been replaced by the AI deepfakes. They will have to learn and grow, and develop skills, and learn how to add value. In short, they will be forced to learn how to be human.

Education:

Better jobs, better government, better emotional support, better relationships, better music, all of this sounds great doesn’t it? And that’s probably just scratching the surface. I have a feeling the discoveries coming down the pipe in medicine and our understanding of human biology are going to absolutely blow our minds. But perhaps nowhere will the positive effects of AI be felt more powerfully than in the field of childhood education. The way I imagine it, the main contribution of technology will be the the ability to create a one-of-a-kind, personal educational plan for each individual student to meet them exactly where they are today, and nudge them forward to where they need to be tomorrow, and the next day. Teachers will be as important as ever, but shifting roles to focus solely on developing in children the things that make us human. Gone will be the days of teachers standing in front of a class of 30 trying to spell things out for the bottom 10% of the class while the top 30% of the class stares out the window in boredom. Kids can be developmentally weighted back or pushed ahead by any number of factors, many of which occur outside of the classroom and to no fault of the kids themselves. Most of these issues stem from environment or influence rather than aptitude or effort on the part of the kids. Little Jimmy might have the same IQ and potential as little Bobby, but he is never going to be on the same page if he lives in a crowded shitty house with parents who choose to do nothing more than drink, smoke, yell, take drugs, feed their kids Twinkies for breakfast, and breed, while little Bobby’s parents help him with his homework, feed him fresh fruit, read to him, and take him on hikes. The solution to this divergence of parental choices has for many years been to improve “equity” by getting kids into the public school system sooner and sooner, as if poor choices and shitty parenting could be fully ameliorated by simply taking the baby from the mothers cigarette-stained hands straight to a government run education facility. Luckily, this debate will be in the past. Kids will be able to learn at their own pace, in a way that keeps them making steady forward progress and keeps them engaged. Shitty parenting will no longer be a condemning sentence to a life of underperformance and wasted potential. The ability to customize the pace of learning will open up unimaginable avenues of possibility. Maybe kids can start later, when their brains are more developed. Perhaps boys can “red shirt” and start later than girls to account for differences in biological development stages. Maybe little Jimmy’s parents get their shit together and want to take him camping in a national park for a week or two to develop a deeper relationship with the natural world, and they won’t have to worry about him falling permanently behind in school. The possibilities are extremely exciting for humanity, save for society’s anointed academic elite who would have you believe that if they could be the ones making the decisions instead of the family, the world would-be a better place. Those people will have to find something else to do with their days.

AI will open up new possibilities for education and discovery not just for school children but for anyone with a curious, inquisitive mind. The world’s true thinkers will be relieved from many non-thinking tasks. This is not to say, however, that the ranks of thinking people will swell. I am quite confident that those who wish to learn and think deeply about the world around them will find themselves increasingly surrounded by those who will choose to outsource their “thinking” entirely. But that’s not what these pages are about. AI will favor those who possess a combination of motivated curiosity and the discipline to force themselves to continue to think on their own. For these people, AI will be among the greatest tutors in history. Maybe I am wrong about all of this and the AI future will suck ass, but isn’t it much more enjoyable to think positive thoughts about the future?

Higher Education

The cost of a four-year degree is set to plummet. Almost everything you learned in undergrad is available for free online. Let’s put the over/under at 95%. Actually, that estimate is almost certainly now stale, as it was appropriate for the prevailing situation from ten years ago. With Artificial Intelligence having become mainstream since the end of 2022, an updated number probably looks something like 98% of everything people go into debt to learn is available for free, right now. You are not paying for knowledge. Knowledge is quickly becoming ubiquitous, commoditized, and therefore obsolete. Soon accumulating and storing knowledge will be as useless as the oral lecture, which is among the most truly archaic little human rituals that we still cling to. Oral lectures were wonderful when each town had one book and the only way to spread knowledge was to subdue a wild animal, preferably a horse, ride it to a town that has a book, copy it by hand, and return home on said horse to read the new book aloud to a group of waiting humans. The reality is that most students at 4 year colleges don’t need to raise their hand and ask questions or interact with the professor in any way. For this vast majority or students, an online broadcast of an excellent lecture would certainly suffice. The current system is like instead of watching Netflix, we took out a bunch of debt to pay actors to come to a local building and act out Breaking Bad live, on the spot. It’s madness.

While the above analogy highlights the pure asininity of the current arrangement, it’s useful to understand why that arrangement continues despite its obviously diminished usefulness. There are very specific systems of gatekeeping that have propped up this arrangement until now, most of which are beyond the scope of this discussion, but in a nutshell it does something like this: the design of online course program offerings were offloaded to third party providers, which captured most of the additional cost savings instead of those flowing though to students via price cuts. The Huffington Post had an excellent piece on this dynamic years ago, before it became an embarrassing tabloid of outrage porn: “The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education”. Broken clocks are right twice a day. The government chose to be complicit in this value capture by continuing to pump demand through student loans regardless of the inflated price of college. After all, academics’ role in the system is to lay the intellectual groundwork for everything the government does, which almost always entails a solution that involves more action, and more money. You wash my back, I’ll wash yours. Modern higher education and its financing is one of the, if not the biggest grifts ever perpetrated on society. What did we get for all of this debt? An absolute explosion in administrative staff relative to actual teach staff, a race to see which institution could build the tallest rock-climbing wall, a competition to see who could dump the most borrowed money into non-revenue generating sports (sorry division 3 field hockey), and of course, some pretty sweet dormitories. It has taken longer than could reasonably be expected for this system to die, but its death is now being accelerated but the confluence of AI and the current Administration’s culture war on the universities.

Not only will AI make it even more obvious that the current system is inefficient to the point of being financially abusive, but the commodification of knowledge and the related convergence of the unemployment rates for college educated and non-college educated work will be the final nails in the coffin of this sick and dying system. The kids graduating now entered college at a time when they were forced to pay hundreds of thousands to listen to oral lectures that could easily be made available for free. They are leaving college at a time when most of them use AI to write papers on demand, only to hand to a professor who will use AI to grade them. With any luck, they will receiving a pice of paper indicating they are capable of work, which they will use to get a job where they use AI software to craft long detailed emails to send to someone who will then use AI to distill that email into a succinct, digestible summary. Thank you for fully appreciating the absurdity of this entire arrangement.

The argument as to whether or not whether college is still “worth it” is usually designed as a false dichotomy, characterized by comparing what you pay vs. the increase in lifetime earnings you are statistically likely to receive as the result of attending. This completely misses the point, and is akin to analyzing whether it is “worth it” to get hazed into a fraternity. It’s like asking if having to drink a liter of vodka with a pine cone in your ass and then eat a dozen hard-boiled eggs is “worth it” in terms of the lifetime friends you’ll make etc. It’s as if we should consider the price of the eggs in this arrangement. The only difference is that college attendance hazing it largely unnecessary whereas fraternity hazing is wholly unnecessary. Always and everywhere, this asinine cash flow-based argument is promulgated, propagated, and perpetuated by the dorks in legacy media, i.e. by people with a direct incentive to preserve the status quo. That’s not to attack their shitty argument based on their incentives, but to separately consider and be aware of their incentives, while simultaneously attacking their shitty argument precisely for its shittyness.

American higher education has been on politically-funded life support for at least a decade, and its demise will result in a massive fall in the price of a four year degree and therefore a massive transfer of wealth from the higher-ed administrative class to the American consumer at large. A major dynamic that has propped up the status quo has of course been the gatekeeping by those who have suffered through the system. Do you think perfectly capable but uncredentialed people will make it past an interview with an HR rep and hiring manager who took out loans and ate ramen and drove Toyota Corollas for years to pay of their college debt? Do you think they are just going to hand the keys to the kingdom to someone who has not been properly hazed into the fraternity of corporate brotherhood? Yes, actually. Because that HR screener and middle manager are also going to be replaced by AI, whose sole purpose will be to find the best person for the job, regardless of one’s possession of an expensive piece of paper that proves they are capable of doing entry level office work. AI will not have an ego or sense of entitlement. You know what else?, people who have never stepped foot in a gym are becoming skinny by taking weight loss drugs. The amount of short cuts available are proliferating. The best advice for those who have struggled through these outdated systems the old fashioned way is this: take a deep breath and accept the world as it is. The world is changing, many scared cows will be slaughtered, but humanity will be better off in the long run, including you.

Housing

The cost of shelter, particularly for owning a home, is at its least affordable in decades. The combination of record high home prices and high mortgage rates have left the average monthly cost of house payments at multi-decade highs. Those who do not currently own a home are running the Red Queen’s race, having to save more and more just to pile up a downpayment and afford the monthly payments as prices rise. If you do happen to own a home already, as the great Post Malone once said, “Hell yeah man, congratulations dude that’s amazing. Hell yeah.” The pandemic recession was the most rapid and aggressive economic downturn and subsequent recovery that modern humans have ever seen. After staring into the abyss and nearly falling over the edge in 2008, policymakers, at least in the US, have become extremely trigger-happy with countercyclical fiscal and monetary stimulus. The result of this condition was that we witnessed the only recession in history where incomes actually grew during what many predicted at the time would be worse than the Great Depression. In the initial months, interest rates plummeted. A large swath of people where able lock in extremely low mortgage rates and the vast majority of these loans went to people with excellent credit. Meanwhile, the government pumped vast sums of money straight into the pockets of consumers, papering over the chasm of unemployment, which quickly proved to be transitory. Demand for housing never really fell much, so there was no notable price correction typically seen during deep economic downturns. While demand for housing stayed relatively strong, so too did demand for almost everything else, including labor. The subsequent spike in inflation and strength in wages caused the Fed to lean against the brewing inflationary hell storm by raising interest rates aggressively.

The result has been the so called “lock-in effect”, where people see their low fixed mortgage rate as an asset, and also a massive disincentive to ever move. Many boomers are sitting in 5 bedroom empty nests, having always planned do downsize and pocket some equity. The problem is that with prevailing market interest rates now much higher than the rate they are currently paying, moving down the street to a home half the size of their current one at half the price will result in roughly the same exact monthly payment they have now. Moving to a house with the exact same floor plan two streets over would mean doubling their payment. This is rough math, but you get the point. Why would I want half the house for the same monthly payment? To save on heating costs? I think I’ll stay put. The result is a market with incredibly low supply of homes coming onto the market and bidding wars still taking place for the one’s that do, keeping prices and paper wealth high for those who do own a home.

One of the biggest obstacles to an increase in the supply of housing is local zoning laws. These are laws that restrict what people can do with their own private property. They artificially inflate the “value” of existing supply of housing by limiting incremental supply. They keep housing needlessly unaffordable, which retards household formation, and causes people to delay marriage and having kids, contributing to a decline in fertility rates, and population decline, which limits the potential growth of the economy. By making housing unaffordable not because of its natural demand, but by artificially limiting supply, these laws limit labor market mobility and the ability of people to move to where their labor is needed most, which limits productivity growth and therefore limits potential economic growth and wealth creation. The only “wealth” these laws create is paper wealth on the personal balance sheet of folks who already own homes in a particular area, i.e. those with the most to lose when these asinine laws are finally changed. None of the above is particularly controversial, and none of it is partisan. This isn’t a politically tribal issue. It’s not red vs. blue, but rather a haves vs. have nots. Its not even really controversial among the haves, amongst whom the prevailing view is essentially “yeah I know this isn’t great for society or younger generations or the economy, but it makes me appear richer and feel more successful and clever for haven invested in my house at the right time so I like things the way they are. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” The very fact that there is so little controversy around the effective demerits of these policies is exactly why AI will lead the way towards their demise. We’ll get to that in a second.

But first, let’s just take at the how and why of these barriers to the American dream. According to a recent WSJ article “How Zoning Ruined the Housing Market in Blue-State America” (please ignore for now he tribal insinuation of the title, since, importantly, whose fault it is probably won’t matter for undoing this mess), one of the first outspoken advocates of zoning laws named Charles Cheney sought to limit the construction of apartments in and around Berkeley, California in the early 1900’s, asserting that single family zoning laws “firmly establish this great principle of protecting the home against the intrusion of the less desirable and floating renter class.” This line of thinking eventually led to the overuse of permitting and importantly, the ability of private individuals to oppose new development. Nobody wants an apartment complex full of undesirables popping up in their neighborhood of the properly educated. Now that the original NIMBY’s had invented the hammer, they were sure to find nails everywhere over the years. It’s no longer just single family restrictions that effect supply. Today, minimum lot size restrictions are a main bottleneck that prevent an increased supply of even single family homes. So even if you want to build a nice modest, couple bedroom house to raise a family, on property that you own outright, people in the surrounding area have banded together to eliminate your freedom to do so. Before we judge these assholes, please take a minute to consider what Lincoln said: “Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.”

I get it, nobody wants “poor” people living next door. I am not talking about people with low incomes, I am talking about people who choose to act “poor”. Though the Ven diagram between these two groups shows a lot of overlap, and the situation lends itself to feedback loops, when folks with low income start choosing to act poor they make bad neighbors. There will likely be an increase in drug and alcohol use, domestic violence and yelling, garbage strewn about the lawn, kids running around without proper guidance or consequences, and shitty, untrained, used dogs ready to bite everyone. People who act poor always have the shittiest goddamn dogs imaginable. Of course, that will all drive your property price down. I do get it, and I’m not asking you to act against your own financial self-interest, but you should at the very least feel some shame. If you are someone who uses the force of government to prevent your neighbor from doing what he wants with his own property, then you ought to be absolutely ashamed of yourself. It’s ok, we need more shame in society. Shame is in lower supply than affordable homes. Life is comprised of nuance, and sometimes there are situations where people can act rationally but still be expected to feel shame. Embrace the nuance and contradictions of life. Take comfort in the fact that now, more than ever in the history of humanity, is it possible to assemble a large group of like minded folks, buy a massive property divided into separately owned parcels, and restrict your little hearts out without having to use the force of the state. All of these experiments can take place on private property via voluntary association. You can even experiment with socialism or communism if you want (hint: the reason people don’t do this is because those systems suck and people will obviously opt out and/or leave. Obviously. Those systems are based solely on coercion and their advocates should be asked to admit it in their opening breath before ever expecting to be taken seriously in a conversation or debate).

And speaking of socialists, no serious diagnosis of what ails the housing market would be worth considering without mentioning one of their favorite simple solutions to complex issues: rent control. It is a solution that sounds great to people who shouldn’t be expected to know otherwise, but who still insist on voting. If one of the biggest problems and source of stress in my life is that the rental cost of my apartment keeps increasing (in huge part due to the supply restrictions by fiat described above), then I will probably be susceptible to the message of charlatans wielding easy solutions. We’ll just make it so the price can’t keep increasing. Anyone with cursory understanding of economics who is being honest (both prerequisites are equally important here), will admit what should be obvious: price controls have unintended consequences. In fact, it would be more accurate and truthful to say that price controls involve tradeoffs, which are usually not as obvious or not as immediately felt by those voting for them, and almost always well-known by those advocating for them. The latter are the Oedipal mother letting the kids eat candy for dinner. They are aware of the long-term consequences and tradeoffs, the kids most certainly are not, and it sounds great in the short term. Sometimes the kids are fully aware of what happens when you try to control rent prices. It becomes financially unfeasible to build new apartment supply or invest in upgrading the existing stock. So prices go up and quality goes own. But the price going up doesn’t affect me, sine my rent is controlled, it only effects the guy who doesn’t yet have a place to live (since his apartment has not been built yet) and that’s his problem. If we aren’t ready to admit that, let’s try a thought experiment: instead of rent control i.e. limits on rental price increases, why not outright rent reduction? Why not make landlord’s drop the price 20%? Why stop there? Why not 50% or 80%? Because we all know what would happen. It’s the same thing will price controls on wages. If I’m feeling feelings that the nice kids down at Subway ought to be making $30 bucks an hour because of my feelings, why stop there? Why not have the government tell Subway it has to pay its employees 50 bucks an hour? Because we all know we’d be making our own goddamn Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyakis at home because the Subway would cease to operate under that cost structure. Obviously.

I’d rather not delve into a stance on the merits of rent control or some examination of the literature. There are plenty recent examples out there of what happens shortly after these policies are implemented. Research is easier than it has EVER been, and I’d encourage everyone to search and ponder what’s out there. The important part, and I think what you are sure to find, is that as in the case of zoning laws, the economic outcomes of rent control policies are relatively uncontroversial. My sense is that a vast majority of people familiar with these matters agree on how they work and what types outcomes ought to be expected. Please be aware that calling something uncontroversial is usually not only lazy but dangerous, especially when misused, as it is most of the time. It’s similar to the people who propose or advocate for a certain policy to be foisted on everyone else, but rather than making a well-constructed argument for the merits of that policy, they just make absurd general proclamations like “the science is settled” even when it isn’t. Or think of the assholes that call their proposals “commonsense reforms”, the insinuation being that anyone who disagrees is plagued by ignorance and lacks common sense. Your bullshit detector ought to be sounding the alarm anytime these phrases are uttered. I am just simply observing a lack of effort to defend the overall economic benefits of zoning laws and and rent control. It may just be that the types of media outlets who usually defend the types of people who propose these types of policies know there is no defensing them. While there is no counterfactual in the soft sciences, zoning laws and rent control are local, easily measured, and easily observable, even if their effects are not always perfectly attributable. One usually can find a reasonable counterfactual. A recent WSJ analysis (New Yorkers Vote to Make Their Housing Shortage Worse, 6/26/25) compares NYC to Austin. There is plenty of debate to be had around the efficacy of that “experiment”, but please bring it to my attention if anyone comes across a more robust analysis arguing the opposite. I will not hold my breath.

For sake of argument, let’s just assume for a moment that these policies really are the red-headed stepchild of leftist policies, the one’s that even they know don’t work, actually make things worse, but offer a useful prize for charlatans to dangle in front of struggling and gullible voters, the price of admission if you will, perhaps morally justified by thinking they can get into office and do good elsewhere (I like to assume the best of politicians, even though its almost always fantasy). The ends justify the means. So, assuming a bad policy is the price of admission and the consensus is that the policy is counterproductive, AI will be able to sniff out these discrepancies like an anti-bureaucratic truffle pig. AI will be able to examine a set of laws and point out where they differ from overwhelming consensus opinion in the research regarding the expected outcomes of those laws. In other words, AI will be able to simply shed light on where we are fucking up relative to where we know better. The barrier to removing these cancerous growths within the legal framework will be much lower when the opportunity for emotional blackmail, demagoguery, and dogma are reduced. AI has the potential to be a built-in bullshit detector that protects people’s livelihoods from power seeking charlatans and grifters. As Tocqueville observed, “It’s easier for a world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth”. AI will be better at detecting these simple lies than emotionally vulnerable humans. An automatic layer of bullshit detection has the potential to become a barrier between peoples lives and shitty ideas being forced upon them due to their own naivety. The laws limiting or otherwise hindering new housing supply will be changed, supply will increase, and housing will become more affordable, with either prices that moderate as incomes catch up, or by falling outright. Either way, relief is coming.

Cars and Trucks

Finally, let’s talk about the mass idiocy that is the current state of the modern vehicle market. More than shitty Chinese handbags with expensive airbrushed logos, cars and trucks are perhaps the most potent and sought after status symbol Americans can get our grubby little debt slave hands on. Vehicles are a massive waste of consumer financial resources. We borrow money at increasingly high rates to finance something that falls in value, rapidly. More specifically, people go sit behind a desk at at a job they hate, to get enough money to service the debt on the car that they use to get to that shitty job, and meanwhile, the car sits unused in the parking lot losing value by the second. Of course, its not just about getting to and from their shitty job. One may have to stop to watch their kid’s soccer game on the way home, so of course he’ll want to be in a large, new truck to let the other soccer dads know that he has money, even if he is making himself and his family poor to drive that truck. Even though there is not a single scratch or blemish of any kind in the bed of said truck because the only thing that has ever been in the bed is the monthly garbage bag full of cheaply made fast fashion Chinese clothes that his wife and daughter constantly cycle through, less they be seen wearing the same outfit more than once on social media. The reality is that this big dumb wealth parasite of a truck, this giant inhibitor of compound investment returns and direct cause of delayed retirement, sits idle for roughly 97% of the time it is owned. It just sits there, cold, draining time and resources from future you. And what a wealth-suck it really is.

Before we examine how buying new cars all the time to signal status is wonderful strategy for squandering wealth, let’s talk about hair cuts. Not the kind where you lose money on bonds, but the kind Warren Buffet thinks hinders wealth accumulation. Basically, investing the money that you would have spent on haircuts over time, with compound interest, would get you 300k at a later point in life. “Do I really want to spend 300k on this haircut?” he famously asked. Forgoing haircuts is not for everyone. Presumably you would need to give up a lot of handholding and French kisses along the way since you would be less attractive to potential mates. But the point is that you have a choice. Every dollar spent today represents a much greater sum in the future because of the way compound interest works. Most people have no clue what compound interest even is. Most college educated people have no clue. Ridiculing millennials for their daily lattes and avocado toast has become a meme, and a counter punch used by people who don’t understand that that stuff actually does add up when you consider the opportunity cost with compound interest (so much so that one of the smartest, richest people in the history of humanity thinks about haircuts the way that most people with a negative net worth refuse to think about spending on frequent small treats). At least those avocados nourish the body. Image spending a far greater sum every 2 or 3 years on a car just to impress people you don’t know. It’s time to look at the numbers.

The average new car starting price has ballooned in the US to just shy of $50,000. Even though people are increasingly rolling negative equity into increasingly long loan terms, the average monthly payment is roughly $750. Per month! And that’s the average. Depreciation also costs drivers somewhere in the neighborhood of $400, and insurance is on average around $150. So you are talking $1,300 a month or so for the average person to drive the average new car. That’s almost $16,000 per year for the average guy. But what if the average guy has an average wife who also wants an average car? $32,000 per year when the median household (not individual) income is around 80k. Before taxes! Let’s call after-tax household income 64k since it nicely makes the point that people spend half their available funds on cars just so people at their kid’s soccer game think they have a good job and therefore have value as a human being. These numbers are rough, but this isn’t some outlier example we have concocted. This is a rough approximation of the experience and set of choices of the average person. And if that’s you, I hope you love your job because you are working half the year for free just to get the car to take you to that job, so that car can sit unused in the parking lot the entire time you send emails and bang away at spreadsheets.

If you don’t love your job, I hope you have a career where you will one day love your job because you will end up working significantly longer to pay for all of these new shiny cars over the years. Let’s do some back of the envelope, rough, shitty math on that concept too while we are at it. Say you can make some meaningful but not drastic changes and get that 16k per year closer to 6k. Used cars, driving them longer, whatever. We’re not asking everyone to drive a Toyota Corolla to over 200k miles here (although you should absolutely consider it). You take the extra 10k per year and invest it 10% per year in the market, say you’re 40 years old and therefore 25 years away from retirement, you’re talking about around a million dollars. One million dollars. We’d have to make some critical assumptions about salary growth and inflation and the like, since we don’t now how far we could stretch a million bucks 25 years from now, but it’s kind of starting to look like the average person is going to have to work for around 5 years extra at the end of their careers to afford to constantly drive new cars when they were younger. Play with this fudge factory of numbers all you want, but it looks like you are making a bet with your future self that you will want to continue working for an extra half a decade when you are older and weaker and more tired. I take this little detour because most people simply are not taught about compound interest and time value of money, much less how to apply these principles to their own situation. I suspect that at least some people would make different choices if armed with this perspective, perhaps choices that would allow them more freedom and joy in their lives. Others would carry on as is, and they are free to do so. I’d have to imagine that it’s much more useful to the human psyche to have a more informed, granular conceptual understanding of one’s financial struggles beyond the usual “life isn’t fair, the system is rigged, there is nothing I can do about this.” I just made you a million dollars and handed you back 5 years of your life without having to rattle off the names of some esoteric tech stocks. How’s that for adding value?

Throughout my life, whenever I see someone driving an obviously expensive car I would do what most people do and think to myself “Wow, I wonder what that guy does.” What does he do? Could I do that? I wonder how someone would go about doing what he does. What kind of college degree would I need to get to prove to others that I am capable of doing that thing? I actually had an idea for a business model based on this concept. Feel free to take this one and make it yours. I buy a Mercedes, a tax-write off, of course. I employ a handful people on a per diem basis, they all have to look different, a very diverse group. Guys, gals, different hair and eye color combinations, different skin colors, nationalities etc. A parent calls me up because their kid is starting to act like a little asshole. We set up a time where they take the kid to a public place, a nice park or something, for a walk. Someone who looks like an older version of the kid rolls up in the Mercedes, walks up and tells the kid they are him from the future. Everything turned out great, they are rich and happy. All they have to do is try hard in school, be nice to their sister, don’t do drugs etc…whatever the hell mom and dad write in the script. Maybe the kid still acts like an asshole and we have him serendipitously meet the same actor again in a week, this time pushing a shopping cart, mangled clothes, smelling like cat piss. You know, to show him what happens if he stays on his current bullshit path. I don’t even think the target market needs to be confined to parents with kids young and stupid enough to believe the ruse. I think a reasonable, yet slightly wild 14 year old would appreciate the gesture and the pageantry. Anyway, I now realize that, based on the math of it, the answer to “what does that guy do?” Is simple: He drives expensive cars. That’s it. Or maybe a little more specifically, he mortgages his family’s future and his own future mental and emotional well being, using a high interest, long-term loan so he can drive around and turn heads and make people he will never even meet say: “Wow, I wonder what that guy does.” In other words, statistically speaking, odds are that he’s just a big goddamn dork.

Luckily there are feasible solutions on the horizon. First, we’ll quickly touch on one turkey that will probably not fly. The Chinese have become incredibly good at making electric vehicles, if you are into that sort of thing. After all, an EV is probably more compatible to a giant smartphone on wheels than it is to a traditional ICE vehicle in anything but looks. The Chinese are excellent at making phones and this has carried over into some of the highest quality EV cars on the market. They are more competitive on both performance and cost. But we can’t have affordable Chinese cars here because of tariffs. Maybe we don’t want internet connected cars with software from companies heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party rolling around American streets. That concern actually seems reasonable if not conspiratorial. But it’s not just a lack of access to affordable Chinese alternatives that is keeping prices high here. According to the WSJ, apparently a Toyota bZ3X sells for 15k, in China. A similar Toyota bZ4X sells in the US starting around 40k. Maybe Americans are just more willing than people in other countries to mortgage their future to look cool today. But it doesn’t matter, because technology is on its way that will save Americans from their own piss poor financial choices.

Driverless robotaxis will make car ownership a thing of the past. People have been saying this for years now, but this one gets back to the old Bill Gates axiom that people tend to overestimate what technology will be capable of in three years, but vastly underestimate what is possible in ten years, or something like that. But we are much more than three years from the take off runway on this stuff, and the snowball appears to be rolling downhill now; according to the WSJ, Waymo alone was doing roughly 10,000 driverless rides a week in August of 2023. Its now almost a half million. They are shooting for a million by the end of 2026. Tesla has recently hopped into the tub, and they will get better at it over time, they always do. When people get used to this and realize that it’s safe, its going to be a matter of time before people stop owning two cars per family. Sure, you could take an Uber everywhere now, but nobody wants to have to make small talk with some guy every single morning, or worse. I grabbed an Uber home from a friend’s house one night and got picked up by some fella with his wife riding shotty, with approximately four cigarette packs and an empty wine bottle sitting between the front seats of their van. I sat in the middle row between two (empty, thank God) infant car seats, naturally. Nice guy, friendly, just trying to making a few extra bucks to get some wine for his wifey and some lung darts for his babies. No big deal. But does anyone really want their 19 year old daughter dealing with this kind of bullshit? Driverless cars will change the game for American consumers, and your second biggest expense in life will shrink dramatically. Your car payments and insurance bills will look more like a Netflix subscription.

Conclusion

The major categories of financial burden have been propped up for many years by deep societal inertia and and legal/ bureaucratic coercion. Their demise has been predicted before. We do a lot of stupid little rituals out of habit, programming, and a lack of imagination. Fortunately, technology is evolving in such a way that new pathways and new ways of living will become apparent, if not always obvious. With a little courage and open-mindedness, humans will begin to free themselves of the shackles of past habits and increasingly bizarre and unnecessary rituals. It is difficult to predict which dam will break fist, but new possibilities are aligning that promise to bring positive changes in in terms of the way we live and the things we value. As knowledge becomes ubiquitous and unlimited, the age of credentialism will whither on the vine. Artificial intelligence will shed new light on the perverse incentives we have allowed to metastasize through our laws around how we put roofs over our heads. New technological capabilities will open our imaginations and separate our physical mobility from the weird status games we play with automobiles. Eventually, humans will find other status games to play, other ways to abuse the legal system to fuck with each other and elevate ourselves at the expense of our neighbors, and new ways to create social hierarchies and squander resources. It is in our nature. For now, at least to the extent that it concerns the medium term economic prospects and financial cost structure for the average American, a bit of imaginative optimism is warranted.