Modernity thinks the body and mind are separate but, of course, that’s an absurd concept only us 'removed from nature’ humans would ever consider. It’s hogwash when you sit and think about it for more than a few seconds.

I’m glad to see much of the world waking up here and paying more attention to our bodies, and how if you’re not physically healthy, you can’t really be as mentally healthy as you could be if you were. I previously shared just a little on my own journey here and that you should be able to push mow 2 acres as a solid benchmark of fitness. I’m happy to hear your benchmarks and try them out, too.

Anyway, no one who gets regular exercise and sun needs research to tell them these are key activities for a good life, and if they’re part of your routine you already know their benefits for your mood and pretty much every other part of your day. You also know you can’t just take an injection or pill and consider the work done. But for those who want more research (or just find it interesting) on why this is the case, the other day I saw an interesting study showing muscles actually talk to the brain to fight depression, which is pretty cool.

From the study:

Recent advances have identified exercise-induced myokines as key players in muscle-brain communication, with emerging evidence suggesting their involvement in alleviating depressive symptoms. Among these, apelin, a multifunctional myokine upregulated by exercise, has received attention for its dual role in regulating both muscle health and brain function.

There’s plenty of other papers on the health benefits of regular exercise, but this one was fun because it’s basically this wonderful meme my gym-loving friends share regularly come to life.

The gym bros were correct, and honestly all of modern society probably listens too much to the nerds these days (frequently depressed doomers) or mentally ill socialists who actually believe “fitness is fascism,” and not enough to the jocks, who have a different, more lindy kind of wisdom to offer. The people who sit inside anxiously on computers most of their lives are for sure far more miserable than the people who make time in their day to get away from screens for movement and contemplation. Doing this actually makes you more productive when you come back, and if you think you’re too busy, you’re just plain wrong.

Oh one more comment here, just like you shouldn’t send a robot to the gym for you, don’t use AI for your personal writing (at work you might find these tools beneficial, but that’s all the more reason not to use them outside of the office). You would be robbing yourself similarly and end up docile, compliant and intellectually obese, like the Eloi from The Time Machine.

This continues the tradition of decades before, where we had the most influential crank in modern history (one of the fathers of the so-called “environmentalist” movement, really just an anti-human movement) convinced countless people to end their futures by not having kids because Earth couldn’t handle more people. The billions more people here are actually doing better than ever and there’s no accountability for these false prophets, if anything just a wake of destruction in the tragedy of people who followed them and ruined their lives for no reason. Here’s a long list of climate doomer predictions from the 1950s-1990s that did not come true if you want to see how wrong histrionic people are about the apocalypse.

All the apocalyptic climate prognostications, fearmongering, goalpost moving all seem eerily similar to what’s happening today with AI. There are perfect parallels one can draw from AI existential fears to both the "climate crisis" and Y2K, although the climate is far better because on both the goalposts will be forever moved, there is never enough we could possibly do, there will always be a priest class to comment/consult (for power, status, or fees) and of course go on the news/online and stoke fear. Y2K was a closer analog to solving the Ozone problem because it was a specific task with a final endpoint (specifics are good, we can solve those, but the population management and “nudging state” is not in the solution, it’s in the fear and control offered). And that’s the point. It actually doesn’t matter that much what risks are present, because in both cases it’s not really about that. This is just how the managerial state works, and it’s actually not that different from prior versions of “end times.” You think it’s new because we have weather data and GPUs, but it’s not. We’ve been doing this for centuries: an impending catastrophe is identified, a priesthood is appointed to interpret it and convince everyone only they can save us, while expanding their power accordingly.

Let’s draw more parallels because it’s just too easy, there’s dozens we could make. Just a few should help you see this clearly if you don’t already get it. The climate crisis has people flying to Davos each year sipping champagne and having caviar on 700-1,000 private jets to discuss what we should do. They’re of course hypocrites and won’t fly commercial, same as the celebrities and politicians who try to shame you for eating steak. At the same time, we have people working within the AI labs themselves who say there’s a chance this is world ending. No one is going to give up their private travel, the companies won’t stop work. Ironically both of them want more control while you, normal citizen, are forced to eat bugs, use paper straws, and have regulatory burden for you starting your own AI firm to be so high as to be impossible in the future, and also of course any open source AI will be deemed “too dangerous” for retail.

Then we have China, which AI development presents precisely the same situation as the so-called climate crisis. China’s leadership are engineers and will not slow down AI development because of some Hollywood-style fears. They’ll simply work through any issues as they arise. On climate they are not materially slowing carbon emissions, while places like EU and UK try to achieve net 0 and already barely contribute here. America is already past peak Co2 emissions. It’s hilarious and none of it makes any sense (the UK basically nuking their economy for no reason). Also to add to the hypocrisy here, the same people melting down about the climate are also the same ones who think the climate cares what kind of EV you get, which again shows you what this is really about. They also have succeeded in shutting down nuclear power (abundant green, carbon-free, elemental energy) forcing places like Germany to restart coal (they’re de-growthers, like Paul Ehrlich, they simply hate civilization). Oh also the data center issue is a Venn diagram of environmental misinformation, anti-tech luddites, and China laughing as they build more (they are even throwing fuel on the fire by propagandizing us against our own innovations).

The AI apocalypse scenario is also notably now being pushed by the same politicians who ushered in the DEI regime and pandemic lockdowns, so basically the ones who would gladly undermine basic freedoms and markets. These people will use anything to grab more power, as that’s always been their end goal. They also want to have a say in how the AI is trained and what the information environments look like, but we’ve seen how this works for many years, you just hope more people are aware of the game by now.

I mentioned consultants and the “priest class” of AI doom, as someone on my social media feed noted: “the academic-NGO complex specializes in the rhetoric of "get on board or we will all die because this is the big one and it is happening now, people." It also produces the books, conferences, slogans, manifestos, op-eds, fellowships and all the rest of it until the next "do our will or die" crisis comes along. Then the old problem that threatened imminent death strangely recedes.” We’ve actually seen even more recent examples of this, ie Greta pivoting from the climate to “Palestine” AKA their new ‘omnicause’.

On the climate issue the free market left to build has done the most good of all. Texas, without even having a formal climate mandate, is beating California on utility-scale green energy production (interestingly, a lot of the technology made that allows this was innovated in California). You would think we would put together that the market can solve problems and an infinitely expanding regulatory burden/NGO-industrial complex of middlemen just gets in the way of things. But these people have to take their cut and make 100 reports/approvals and analyze potential bird nesting sites before anyone builds anything (even to help us go greener). AI isn’t special here to not also let it be subjected to market forces if we want it to succeed safely, in fact there’s probably more risk if it’s just one or two companies (who ultimately will atrophy).

Again, the point here if you’re not catching on, it isn’t really about what the actual threat is. It also doesn’t even matter if the climate “crisis” or AI “apocalypse” are real or not. You will be subjected to continuous news about these things and “the end” will always be just around the corner (and if something is solved, the goalposts will simply move). It will purposefully be trying to scare you (whether actually warranted or not) for control and demoralization and so an expanding class of middlemen can take their cut. But I would say to think for yourself, ignore any macro apocalypse news (you can’t do anything about it anyway, whether real or imagined) and live your life. It’s all a trap to be anxious about and doomerism is a form of mental illness.

When you read enough about humanity, power and history you take a more realist view. It’s actually not cynical, it’s just human nature and how our civilization interprets and processes perceived crisis and advancement. The climate has always been changing. Technology has always been advancing. We solve problems, the world continues, with or without you, no matter if you’re made anxious or not (it’s a trap).

And honestly, both the Earth and AI tools are going to be fine. Go enjoy the weekend, don’t worry about the clankers (they’re our friends, actually).

J.K. Rowling's life is a remarkable story, and one for sure worth celebrating if you don’t know the specifics. She was not born into any sort of literary dynasty or financial wealth. Her mother died of MS when she was 25, after which she married and moved to Portugal, had a daughter, and eventually returned to Britain as a single mother after things didn’t work out. It was then she wrote Harry Potter while surviving on benefits and sitting in coffee shops with her daughter. When completed and pitched, 12 publishers rejected it.

A reader at the Christopher Little agency decided it had promise. Seven books and nearly two decades later, Harry Potter became one of the largest franchises globally: the books have sold over 600 million copies and have been translated into 85 languages. This is truly the pinnacle of what any writer could ever hope to achieve.

After her success, she didn’t go and relax on a tropical island and sip margaritas, instead Rowling has proven her character as a human being well beyond most celebrities, having given >£200 million to charitable causes. Her mother died from MS, so she funded a major neurology clinic in her name. In 2004, she saw a photo of a child in an institution and it affected her so deeply she created Lumos, an international charity dedicated to ending the institutionalization of children. Lumos says it has since helped more than 280,000 children move into family-based care. Rowling has also founded a sexual-violence support service for women in Edinburgh.

This is a woman who went from being a struggling mother on benefits to one of the most successful authors in history, then spent a substantial portion of the resulting fortune, time and visibility trying to solve problems she personally and deeply cared about.

Which is why, when I saw her included in a graphic of “cancelled celebrities,” on LinkedIn (of course, it’s the bad place) my first reaction was pretty simple: what did she actually do? Below you can see what was posted by an academic. You would think LinkedIn would be a place that might champion women in leadership who actively support other women. But you would be wrong.

Let’s set aside the internet discourse or what the media has fabricated about her for a moment (more on all this shortly) and look at what Rowling actually says. In her own words, Rowling has argued for some basic rights for women: that they should have access to female-only changing rooms, bathrooms, rape crisis centers; they should not have to compete against men in women’s sports; female prisoners should not automatically be housed with violent male prisoners; women should remain protected as a sex class in law; people should be free to disagree re: whether sex can be changed; and that troubled minors should receive appropriate mental-health support as opposed to irreversible medical interventions where the evidence of benefit is disputed.

You can disagree with any of those positions. But which of those statements, exactly, is supposed to justify putting her next to people like Harvey Weinstein and Kanye West? It’s totally bonkers. On a separate note, for this story, I asked several of my friends who aren’t extremely online and they had no idea about any issues with Rowling, if you want to know where the normies are at.

When I first commented that I wasn’t sure why Rowling was on the list, I genuinely was shocked to see her the above graphic, it just makes no sense. But quickly, I was told to Google the issue (as if I should already know why she is on the cancelled list), that Rowling is a “leader of the anti-trans movement,” that her views are “objectively” bigoted, and that, when I pointed to her decades of charitable work as relevant to the question of her character, the KKK was offered as an example of a community organization that also did good works. I found that a rather astonishing response. There is no coherent “anti trans” movement I could find anywhere online that Rowing is the supposed leader of. And everyone from heads of medical associations to the NYT, Science Journals on both sides of the political spectrum and other mainstream outlets have discussed this topic since it actually does affect everyone. We live in a liberal society not an authoritarian state where people may not present facts or having opinions on certain topics, lest I remind you (even as reporters are personally attacked or lied about merely for covering the topic).

Anyway, we have apparently reached a point where a woman publicly arguing for women’s rights can be discussed in the same conceptual category as an organization historically defined by racial terror and violence (the LinkedIn conversation above is not the only place this happened, I saw similar comments by others around the web when researching this topic, so it’s not unique but certainly emblematic). This is the type of extremism the left resorts to when you go against their religion, the conversation quickly veers into strange territory and people make extreme comparisons (another example, these same people have no idea what the word genocide actually means and casually throw it around against groups they don’t like). To be fair the right can do this too, and I would like everyone to disarm and find a way out of this ideological era altogether.

Also as I mentioned above it’s also notable the media have engaged in outright lies about Rowling and what she believes, so it’s likely many upset are arguing from a position of being agitated/propagandized for clicks (as they’ve never read her actual beliefs, which don’t at all seem hateful or worthy of cancelation). As just one recent example I found, UK publication Metro was forced to give an apology to Rowling for slander about patently untrue statements. These are the people running the narrative, and many online believe them uncritically or simply want to tear down others for attention. Of note many readers see the original fabrication and almost no one sees the corrections.

The wild part about all this is much of the public doesn’t agree with members of the online mob upset at Rowling. A 2025 British poll found that 47% approved of Rowling’s efforts to fund organizations advocating for women-only spaces, compared with 18% who disapproved. 59% agreed with the UK Supreme Court’s ruling concerning the legal meaning of sex and woman under the Equality Act (they unanimously concluded that those terms have a biological meaning).

The American numbers are even more striking. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 66% of Americans favored requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching their sex at birth, while just 15% opposed it. Gallup found essentially the same thing: 69% of Americans said transgender athletes should only play on sports teams corresponding to their birth sex. And in another Pew survey, 67% of Americans said whether someone is a man or woman is determined by their sex at birth, compared with 31% who said it can be different.

You are of course free to disagree with Rowling’s views. But if 2/3 of Americans hold the same position on one of the central questions she's been publicly arguing about, it becomes pretty difficult to characterize the position itself as some sort of fringe ideology normal people couldn't possibly agree with. The Death penalty, marijuana legalization, same-sex marriage, and a legal path for undocumented immigrants all have about the same amount of support, by the way. Should someone be canceled merely for holding those views?

I’ve written before about the strange paradox of modern “diversity” where the people most loudly demanding it are the least tolerant of ideas they don’t agree with, even while their own ideas are unpopular. The Rowling story presents another good example of this. It’s basically mob behavior demanding compliance, even when our own institutions and researchers don’t agree on the topic.

I also want to note I don’t think being successful, then donating wealth makes someone immune from criticism. And perhaps more importantly I don’t think being famous makes someone’s opinions automatically correct (in probably more cases, I think famous people’s opinions are pretty bad). But, I do think it is crazy to pretend a woman who spent decades being a humanitarian and inspiring millions of young people should be placed on a “cancelled” list alongside people who committed actual violent crimes, merely for expressing her opinions on something that most of the population agrees with.

Not that she is actually cancelled by the adults in the room who make the important decisions in the media sector, because they are obviously level-headed enough to see through this particular drama. She’s still an executive producer on HBO’s new Harry Potter series, which is adapting the seven books for streaming, and premiering this December. And also, to LinkedIn’s credit, if you query her name you see plenty of professionals sharing quotes and stories from Rowling’s life and non-profit work as inspiration.

Anyway I’ve said enough, and I’ll throw it over to the community: do you think J.K. Rowling warrants being “cancelled”? Or, phrased another, more specific way: do you think someone who is clearly a moral person, who has contributed creatively to the world and via vast philanthropy should really be thrown out of society for holding an opinion you disagree with, on an issue that will likely be debated forever?

Interesting post-script to this story: a reader today sent me several clips of major democratic political candidate James Talarico saying the same things Rowling was canceled for, and points out the irony or perhaps hypocrisy that many people vocally against her now support him, someone who has come around to agree with her position.

Jensen Huang, president and CEO of NVIDIA started working at Denny’s at age 15. He worked there through high school and his progression was dishwasher, busboy, then waiter (a position he was promoted to). He talks about this frequently and how it helped him build humility, work ethic, and to expect excellence in mundane things. Basically, it helped him build character and become a great man.

I personally grew up working at a deli in South Florida at the age of 16, and did all of the same jobs as Jensen as well as worked in the kitchen, and found the experience similarly formative. It’s critical life experience while young in addition to school, socializing, sports, etc. You enter the adult world unafraid to get your hands dirty and realize no job is too small, and that people from all walks of life and in all types of businesses make the world go. It’s a great bulwark against becoming a degenerate, or at least a socialist (same thing).

Related to this topic, I came across this chart about teen summer employment being down, and I think it’s a terrible thing to see.

I’m sure some of you have similar stories of being active in the workforce from a young age. I have friends who also worked while growing up, and then have friends who never did until post college. While not 100% of the time true, it’s striking how often the differences in attitude, work ethic, etc are of people who have worked an hourly role in something like hospitality or food service vs those who haven’t.

Probably the most frequent observation I have here is that the ones who have done a form of blue collar work treat those around them best, including those they manage or hourly workers they encounter throughout the day. They’re never unnecessarily rude, they’re more patient and kind, they empathize more (with people who actually deserve their empathy, not randomly).

We lose something as a society when we have distinct classes not merely separated by net worth, that’s one thing, but simply experience. I don’t think inequality would matter as much if everyone respected everyone else, no matter what they earn or do, even if the job is hourly. Working as a youth greatly helps address this. Someone like Jensen has more respect for his server at dinner than most executives, and it’s palatable in his talks and public appearances. His company is performing better, too. This stands in stark contrast to wealthy people constantly flexing about their watches or cars. There’s really something to this. Send your kids to work.

The human brain runs on two different modes, psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls them “discover mode” and “defend mode” and it’s a great model to parse how you operate with reality. The brain is of course far more complex than being purely binary here but there’s still a spectrum we all operate within.

Discover mode is curious, expansive, creative, reward-seeking (hopefully harnessed well and not pursuing blind hedonism). Defend mode is narrow-vision, protective, defensive, threat-scanning (you can imagine we spent a lot of evolutionary time here, for good reason). You’re supposed to move between them fluidly depending on the situation presented. For example, historically, if a wolf appears, you must defend. If it leaves, you can go back to forging for fruits and nuts, finding a mate and other less stressful opportunities. The problem is that for many, modern life keeps defend mode stuck on, despite few actual physical threats remaining.

Researchers on this topic found something fairly consistent, when you’re in defend mode, activity in the prefrontal cortex dims. Your brain gets dumber at the precise moment when you think you’re being more careful (a very good formula for poor decision making on complex topics). Being trapped in chronic defend mode stresses you past the point high functioning knowledge economy professionals should regularly go, and makes you worse at creative/expansive thinking. I’ve written before about how inaccurate anxious predictions actually are, where 91% of clinical worries never actually materialize. Defend mode is protecting you from immediate threats, at the cost of intelligence and joy.

Why are so many in modernity trapped in defend mode? For most of those who are, the attention economy has realized defend mode is sticky/addictive and the path of least resistance to hooking you, and discover mode is not (as higher level thinking happens here, so you’re less easily emotionally influenced). Outrage, fear, and threat content get more engagement than curiosity and wonder, so the algorithms optimize for it. This is also why you now see so little, if any actually novel or creative art in your feeds these days. Algos simply don’t know what to do with it. Slow paced beauty and sustainable dopamine don’t make companies money, so it no longer gets prompted (I still try and share it with those of you who have freed yourself from this prison).

Of course, the internet didn’t invent defend mode. You evolved for it, for very good reasons, namely not becoming prey yourself. But behavioral science nerds and analysts in Silicon Valley and Vegas industrialized it, cleverly stripped out any recovery periods, and monetized your resulting stress reactions. None of us evolved to process every single dramatic event from around the world delivered constantly to us, at best your ancestors worried about a few wilderness predators and the tribe over the mountain.

Research on this shows how much this is impacting young people, but it affects everyone similarly: Pew Research Center reported nearly half of teens (48%) say social media has a negative effect on people their age, which is up almost double from 3 years ago, and heavy users are 3x more likely to show depressive and anxious symptoms vs light users. None of this is by accident, your phone pings and your nervous system lights up like something in the dark of the wilderness just moved.

The fix isn’t all that difficult, although requires some self control: notice which mode you’re in and don’t let the internet pull you too far into defend mode. Sign off when you catch yourself being dragged into far off dramas that don’t actually affect you instead of exploring or doing something productive. And remember that discover mode isn’t some kind of fake optimism, it’s a flow state where you can actually think clearly, create, and do things that matter. You evolved defend mode for emergencies, don’t let it be exploited by product managers to beat next quarter’s numbers.

Some people think AI is “too new” to have real thoughts on, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. No matter how good these tools get it’s all still just the automation discussion and we’ve been having that on this blog and the old one for many years.

Anyway, I’ve also been tinkering with these tools since the early days and putting down thoughts for a bit, and something many people like to deny is tradeoffs exist, like they do everywhere else. You can get a car and drive to get places quicker and that’s great, but if you don’t also go to the gym and hike you will end up obese and sickly. The intellectual equivalent is real, too.

Because someone asked, I thought this week I’d put down a list of some of my favorite ideas on this topic in one place (not in a particular order). These should hopefully help anyone from creatives to managers walk a better future path.

The rise of AI nihilism: if we did turn all creative work over to machines, we’ll have more output but considerably less meaning.

How ‘The Time Machine’ explains the future of knowledge work: AI will create a new divide b/w people who let machines do all thinking for them while their creative brain atrophies, and a few holdouts remain sharp.

You are not Rick Rubin: Rick Rubin's influence was part of a totally different world and not people think, and AI can't recreate what made him valuable.

AI is already making people less creative: research suggests leaning heavily on LLMs can flatten the ways people think, write, and solve problems.

Don’t let machines or the crowd decide your world: When algorithms and consensus make all the decisions for us, taste gradually become someone else's, deliberately choosing things for yourself matters.

You can’t prompt your way to meaning: Having AI produce finished creative product may save effort, but removes the struggle that makes the work personally rewarding and kills all the small decisions that matter.

Writing is thinking: If you outsource your writing, you end up losing the muscle for thinking that writing forces you to do.

Resist slop world: The easier it is for people to flood the world with mediocre AI-generated spam, the more valuable genuine effort, taste, and craftsmanship becomes.

People are openly bragging about AI spam operations: There’s a huge difference between a real business and webspam, yet some people are clueless enough not to understand it.

You can’t call people “luddites” for having taste: A person can embrace tech while still believing tools are secondary to skill, judgment, and the desire to make something excellent.

Where does AI actually make sense: There are plenty of boring/repetitive tasks where AI is an obvious win, but replacing human judgment makes far less sense when the value of the work lies in its individuality.

Some friction is good: The work some spend so much time trying to automate can frequently be what force people to develop a distinctive voice.

AI’s narrative problem: The industry has a huge communication problem, and it’s worth solving now before too many turn into doomers.

The post-literate age is here: In a culture increasingly hostile to reading and focused attention, being someone who can still sit with a book and follow an argument all the way through has a massive advantage.

I hope you too are spending time deeply considering this topic, what you think is worth automating from your creative work (and what is worth keeping). As I go into in these stories there definitely can be a productive use. But machine intelligence is not the same as human intelligence, it’s just a poor facsimile. Know where it makes sense for your own work, and where human judgement is necessary. And don’t lose your edge to the clankers.

Someone asked me the other day why I post about political topics (how sad, that some people think being civically interested is strange). But I still love this question, because it exposes a lot about how many people think, so I’m going to put down thoughts on this from a couple perspectives. It’s just so interesting in modern times some feel it’s inappropriate for someone else in the public light (say, working in a senior role at a company, an athlete, a comedian) to have an opinion on topics that affect us all. Of course, if you were saying things which supported their side they wouldn’t say anything (which kind of gives away the game). I talked about this a bit in my previous post on “stick to sports” from a different perspective, and I still think these people are divorced from what it means to be American or perhaps just civically involved. Great leaders throughout our history, from Warren Buffet being pro America to Sergey Brin being anti-communist have made political statements. These are people I think it is admirable to aspire to be like, not like the frightened, timid masses who never speak what’s in their heart or they know is right.

Not only are politics a perfectly cromulent topic for any of us in a free country like America to engage with, I find it nihilistic and kind of empty to not care. And you might be free to, at least temporarily. But as the saying goes, “you might not be interested in politics, but politics are interested in you.” This is very true for me right now as a Jewish person, where currently we have people on both extremes ready to line us up against a wall and shoot us at worst, or simply suppress our opportunities at best merely because of our religion and genetics. There was historic high levels of antisemitic assault, harassment and vandalism in 2025. So you might feel compelled to speak before it’s too late if you were in our position. If you think that’s extreme you simply are ignorant of history and what invariably happens next if left to proceed, something many are. Also notable how many new generation political candidates are blatantly antisemitic, some going as far as to stand with actual, factual terrorists. Again, things you might not care about today, because you aren’t affected yet, but the day will come. It’s emblematic of a sick society, Jewish hate is a canary in the coal mine.

But even aside from this, every marketer should actually care about the culture in our sector and the reality is this now may involve politics. Let’s be clear about something too: marketers, real marketing and ad men (and women), are competitors and capitalists, whether they vote Democrat or Republican. And I actually think you can certainly be free to express your disdain of capitalism as a marketer, but if you are hiring expressed socialists for your marketing org, it’s a laughably bad choice (it’s great they post too, they’ll tell you!). These people hate your company, your profits, they hate markets/freedoms/America, they think free trade is oppressive, government should have total control over the “means of production” etc. It’s a philosophy incongruent with this craft, and frankly much of the business world. Some of these people support the DSA in earnest and legitimately believe these things, others admittedly are naïve as to what they want (some days I think being naïve is worse). If you actually read the literature and take them seriously, you would see they are extremely hostile to America as it stands. And honestly, we should all view socialists similar to Nazis, in fact the death count is even higher (>100M vs 15-20M). Again, begging everyone to read history if you don’t understand these things.

Where I personally draw the decorum line: normal Democrats and Republicans should feel completely free to say what they believe without fear, because none of those opinions are at odds with core American values. That’s the whole point of living in a free country with free speech. But free speech isn't freedom from consequence. If someone's a committed communist on the left, or a groyper on the far right, they're free to make all the deranged, hostile and insane commentary they like, and many indeed do so loudly. That's their right, and I wouldn’t want to take it from them. It's also everyone else's right to see they are deranged and anti-civilization. Employers don't owe anyone a pass merely for exercising their right to speech in the form of yelling fire in a crowded theater for some internet attention (negative signal, honestly). I hope the distinction is clear here, that you should be free to act like a jackass or promote suicidal ideology and the government can’t lock you up, but that a healthy and functional society would have a social immune system with repercussions for that. If not, our enemies will continue to use this against us as a wedge.

Frankly, the business world and marketing world in particular have made a calculated error allowing destructive ideology in over the last few years (mostly on the far left, since that is what has permeated our institutions). We see it manifest everywhere, in the ads and the culture. And again, I think you should be free to express whatever you want. But if corporate America wasn’t sleepwalking or HR wasn’t (frequently) run by Marxists and people with specific derangement syndromes, hiring would look differently. It already does at more capitalist-run firms who have rejected the ideologs (very successful companies like Shopify, 37 Signals, Coinbase, and others have done this and seeing company performance and reading the thoughts of leadership it’s all gone very well, their teams are focused on the work instead of strange and unrelated pet causes).

Another, separate point here is normal things that shouldn’t even be political have been dragged into the political discourse, which fine, whatever, but that also doesn’t mean they’re off limits. In fact it sort of demands normal people push back and try to remove politics from areas where it doesn’t make sense, especially disciplines like science and technology. That’s what moderate, sane people do. Activists and radicals do not want us to do this, they want to make you feel uncomfortable sharing basic truths. If we do nothing, they’ll win, and our spaces will remain polluted, propagandized and progress will slow. This only happens if normal people like you and I cede the public square since we feel we may not comment.

In my industry of marketing, I've continually seen both agency and brand teams staffed with people who are ideologically opposed to basic American values, promoted by media who were similarly captured, all wonder why real users told them the work felt preachy or annoying instead of persuasive (I’ve written on this before). Marketing only works if you believe people should be free to choose products from privately owned businesses, and you trust the best products win. Hire someone who thinks that freedom is evil or exploitive, and you end up with a team of soviet-era commissars who are going to publish lectures with the brand logo slapped on it, and ultimately destroy brand value. They want to take over your company and wear it as a skinsuit.

To further answer the original question in this story of why I discuss political areas, I feel compelled to talk on certain subjects to try and balance things, particularly to my marketing peers. I feel this is a more important exercise than a 10,000th post on ‘ways to build revenue’ or ‘how to tell a story.’ Countless other people already do that. I also already spent a decade building one of the web’s most popular marketing blogs. All this is kind of pointless now when you can simply ask the AI, and, even without that, I find marketing mostly a “solved” problem at this point. You just need to get to work and put in the reps, and your company either has products that you can sell or not. It’s very binary and I don’t think all that complicated.

The fact that people like me and other execs like David Hansson comment does annoy certain types of people, because they hate moderates and badly want to turn America against itself. But my opinions are indistinguishable from any moderate liberal or conservative from the 1990s. I believe in free markets, capitalism, freedom of speech, meritocracy, law enforcement, and that countries should have borders. I don’t believe all companies or people are equal at everything. Neither does any functional adult. It’s frankly stupid and I’m tired of playing along with these strange postmodern games.

You personally don’t have to post anything, probably because you are afraid, but perhaps because you care but simply aren’t in a position to do anything. It’s okay. A few of us will keep sharing what is honest and reflects reality, and try and do our part to nurture an environment that helps businesses and people thrive. I think the world would be significantly better if everyone did this and didn’t let extremists drown us out in their propaganda and demoralization. And on the subject of cancelation, I think it’d be hilarious if a company didn’t want to hire me because I was too pro markets or capitalism. I wouldn’t want to work for them either, so we’re doing everyone a favor. All these things are self-sorting.

I’m sure some of you miss the nuance above, and I went through a few different areas so I’ll summarize briefly: I believe political discourse is a perfectly cromulent topic to discuss in our free time and normal people like you and I should speak up. I think you have to be somewhat civically depressed, or take a nihilistic, empty view of life to never share your opinions. And to add, if you are unwilling to update your beliefs based on data, research or evidence, or at least discuss tradeoffs and consider the other side, you are in a cult and no longer a political party. Talk politics peacefully. Be respectful. Find a middle ground. Don’t push silly conspiracy theories, lies, or insane/treasonous thoughts (we should stop constantly promoting certifiably insane people altogether). That’s what the West is all about.

A true story you probably heard before is a banana which was taped to a wall sold for $120,000. Later, someone ate it and the “artist” called that “a performance,” who then replaced the banana. This sold, too, I believe for 150K. This absurdity and mockery of craft is the destination our deeply unserious clown world has taken us. You should care about this, if you care about creativity at all, lest we end up even further down the path of our dystopian spectacle reality.

When you follow the postmodern art philosophy to its logical conclusion, there’s a final nihilistic place you’re left, marooned alone. It’s somewhere with no beauty, no craft, no meaning, only empty spectacle someone put a price tag on to trick you into thinking something meaningless is legitimate. It’s all just a big con (sometimes for tax purposes) but you, fellow citizen, are still the mark.

The grift says that “everything can be art.” But once you’ve decided everything qualifies, what you’ve actually decided is nothing does, and when you accept this you are indistinguishable from a nihilist (postmodernists are mostly nihilistic, empty humans btw). Collapsing the distinction between someone who spent 10 years mastering a form of painting and someone who taped a banana to a wall because somewhere in your liberal education you were fed some bad propaganda, which should be more questioned. Really what has happened here is the elimination of standards, which is the removal of the only real mechanism by which excellence can exist at all. Of course this all came to light during the “everyone gets a trophy” generation who were endlessly promoted “equality” and “everyone is exactly the same.”

But I flatly reject all this, and find such premises as ‘beauty is subjective’ as complete hogwash. Yes, taste varies, but that’s not remotely close to the same thing as saying all output is equal, and anyone saying otherwise knows this deep down even if they won’t admit it publicly. There are objective standards of beauty, and if you don’t accept this it’s more likely you’ve been demoralized than anything else. This is the same logic that makes every opinion equally valid, every choice the same level of worthy, and thinking every culture is worth the same respect (including ones which suppress women’s rights and basic freedom, sorry these are wrong too). The moral relativism is honestly all so tiresome, I find it fairly gaslighty as it’s asking you to ignore core truths that allowed Western civilization to exist in the first place. This is the same reason you see people supporting strange things.

Want to know why we get “enshittification” in our creative sectors? This is the end result of our fast/cheap culture that spent decades optimizing for averages, and managing out anything or anyone interesting. Average products for average people should apply to Tupperware, but our creative sectors should be better, and we should demand it. It’s also interesting how there’s so much discourse around “taste,” but you see almost no one able to make any real aesthetic choices anywhere in popular culture.

AI has unintentionally taken this philosophy to its logical endpoint. Type a prompt and receive an image, even an entire novel or an album. And NPCs who couldn’t tell the difference between a fast food and gourmet burger have decided this is “making art.” But only psychopaths would put up the equivalent of a picture frame from Target with the stock photography in it on their wall. No normal person actually does this. Prompting is essentially the same, it’s stock photo generation, not a creative skill in any meaningful sense, neither is Googling for information to do research by itself. Fake skills, fake competency. It’s fine for memes, content designed to be created and consumed in a day. But if that’s your whole life, it’s just kind of sad and empty.

Here’s another simple analogy to help further, I’m pretty sure I’ve said this in a past post about AI somewhere: you are not a furniture builder because you assembled some IKEA furniture. It’s fine if you do this by the way, many people do. But imagine someone who did this going around telling people they build furniture, or worse, arguing IKEA assembly is “the future of all furniture making,” that the craftsman in his workshop is doing the same thing just slower. The craftsman would say: why not build something unique yourself? And the IKEA person, if they had any self-awareness at all, would see this as a challenge to progress their skills further, instead of mindlessly doing more of the same, faster. Can you tell the difference yet, anon? And to add, this obsession with speed is antithetical to doing anything meaningful.

Same is true of the banana artist, the AI prompter, and every relativist who’s been praying at the alter of “everything is valid.” You can call it art, you can price it at $120,000 (and if you can get someone to pay, good for you). But the person who actually made something via years of sacrifice and created something that couldn’t exist without their specific years of effort is not playing the same game at all.

And remember, having standards is not a form of “gatekeeping.” They’re how excellence comes to exist. Abandon them and you get a world of endlessly produced, instantly forgettable work and empty, sad humans who never sharpen themselves enough to build anything memorable that lasts the test of time. You really have to do this first to understand where automation and AI could actually be useful. I’m confident you’ll see this eventually, even if you don’t get it today.

There’s a lot of talk about socialism these days, despite it’s inherently flawed premise and repeated failures, resulting in millions dying, mass starvation, widespread human suffering, readers here already know the history. Unfortunately, it’s rising again due to new promotion from people who hate America, combined to create the perfect storm since we also recently stopped promoting the story of prosperity and our information ecosystems are deeply propagandized. Also, our biased education system simply ignores past examples that might challenge some of the ideals they’re so keen to promote, which I find both annoying and civilizationally suicidal. Perhaps this is cyclical, and every civilization has to re-learn forgotten mistakes (even though we have parables that try to help, but ofc they’re unhelpful if no one reads them). So all we can do is share stories which are more instructive than dry statistics.

Today we have a fun one which takes us back to the year 1825. Here, a wealthy Welsh industrialist named Robert Owen acquired a complete American town, a plot with 20,000 acres, 160-plus buildings, working mills, workshops, barns, farmland already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony, and 1,000 people showed up in year 1, most convinced they were present at the birth of a new way of running civilization. It’s also notable that Owen wasn’t some kind of crank, before ever setting foot in Indiana he’d already made his name running textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland with shorter hours, real schools, better housing, and the mills still turned a profit. For the early 1800s that’s really impressive and illustrative of his operator skills.

Although, his prior success is exactly what made him dangerous. Owen had convinced himself that people are basically a product of their environment, where you could rearrange the environment and you rearrange the person. Kill private property, kill competition, split the rewards evenly, and cooperation just... happens, naturally, without anyone having to be talked into it, which is of course idealist and ignorant of human nature. As is always the case, a very intelligent person is unable to model the behavior of others, many of whom simply operate differently.

The experiment pulled in serious people. Real optimism, real brainpower, real $ behind it. In January 1826 William Maclure floated an entire boat of scientists and educators down the Ohio River, historians still call it the “Boatload of Knowledge.” Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it, so was naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur along with Geologists, artists, educators, people like this. So this wasn’t some kind of backwoods commune of true believers with no credentials interested in getting high. It was, arguably, one of the highest concentrations of talent in America at that moment. If intelligence and good intentions were sufficient conditions for a new economic system to work, New Harmony had every box checked.

Unfortunately, it fell apart almost immediately. The hardest workers began to realize they were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who contributed much less while receiving the same rewards. Over time, those workers had less reason to continue putting in extra effort. The incentives that existed in a normal market system had been removed, and the results were predictable, and disastrous. Production declined, food became scarce, disagreements grew, and the community became increasingly divided over who was contributing what.

By 1827, residents were leaving in droves, with roughly 80 people departing in a single day at one point. Owen eventually found himself arrested in a financial dispute with his own partner, then spent another $200,000 of his own money paying off the community’s debts before finally abandoning the experiment.

Josiah Warren, one of America’s earliest libertarian thinkers, watched the whole thing from inside and later wrote that “the difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity.” He identified the incentive problem decades before Mises and Hayek would make it central to economic theory: when people are separated from the rewards of their own effort, incentives change. If additional work produces no additional benefit, fewer people will choose to do additional work. Human nature is undefeated, and most modern economists and behavioral scientists would have spotted the problem before the project began (that is, if they hadn’t been brainwashed by Marxist hogwash).

Owen’s own farewell address really shows a refusal to learn from failure, and I find it hubristic. Rather than conclude that the system itself had flaws, he blamed the settlers, describing them as “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality.” The implication was clear: the system would have worked if only the people participating in it had been better suited for it. Oh, how naïve. As has been said before:

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

This has been the recurring defense of socialist experiments throughout history. The theory remains sound: the problem was always the circumstances, the leadership, the timing, or the people involved. It’s basically the Tobias theory of life (from the show Arrested Development).

The irony is that Owen had already discovered what actually worked and I guess simply didn’t like the implications. New Lanark, his profitable mill town, proved decent wages, humane conditions, education, and improved quality of life could exist within a market system and everything worked well. Workers could be treated better while businesses remained profitable, he had built a model that successfully improved people’s lives, but he couldn’t accept his existing answer was the best one.

New Harmony had elite talent, abundant capital, a functioning town, and genuine goodwill, it wasn’t lacking intelligence or idealism. It was one of the most carefully constructed attempts to build a cooperative society in American history and it still failed within 2 years.

Every generation since has found a reason to believe the incentives can be solved this time, but the experiment itself has remained remarkably consistent: good intentions are valuable, but they are not a substitute for understanding how human incentives actually work and how humans behave in real world conditions. As we continually see, what works in the minds of academics and really smart people doesn’t work out so well in reality.

Socialism is evil and civilizationally suicidal, and we should stop pretending the same failed experiment will magically work this time.

Rose Horowitch’s new Atlantic cover story is a fairly comprehensive read of something I’ve been writing about for a while in various ways: Americans on the whole are getting dumber as we in fact do get richer.

The numbers are fairly stark, we’ll go through some of it in case you can’t access the essay. The share of Americans reading for pleasure dropped 43% between 2004 and 2023. Less than half of us read books anymore, even as we’re drowning in text messages, captions, and posts. NYT bestseller sentences have shrunk by a third over the past century (a proxy of complexity people are able to process, even when they do read).

The comprehension data shared here is also wild, almost 30% of adults can’t paraphrase or draw an inference from a few pages of text, up from under 20% in 2017. That feels way worse than people reading less, as it’s actually people losing capability. And it’s compounding downward: 4th and 8th grade reading scores have slid for a decade, and the share of 13-year-olds who say they rarely read for fun jumped from 8 to 29 percent since 1984.

My favorite, most damning part is the Harvard anecdote: some students now genuinely believe professors are “being unfair” by making them get information from a book instead of a summary, as if reading itself were an arbitrary obstacle rather than the whole point.

I’ve made the underlying case before: some friction is good. Reading a book is friction by design, and that resistance is exactly what builds the capacity to hold a complex argument in your head. Skip the struggle and you might save time but you also skip the workout. This is the same instinct I described in resist slop world: the outsourcing of the human parts of thinking to whatever’s easiest, until the muscle that used to do the work atrophies from disuse.

The downstream effects of this have broader implications for all of us. I’ve written before about how little today’s undergraduates actually know about history, and how comfortable large numbers of them are with censorship and even political violence. It’s hard not to connect that directly to a generation that never built the stamina to sit with a difficult book, wrestle with a hard argument, or hold 2 competing ideas at once long enough to reason through them. You can’t Socratic-method your way through an issue if you’ve never trained the underlying muscle on anything longer than a meme or Instagram photo caption.

The concerning part I took away from all this isn’t purely that people are reading less. It’s that an entire generation is growing up incapable of the deep, linear thinking that reading trains, at the exact moment AI can hand them frictionless summaries instead. Convenience and comprehension are trading off in real time, and convenience is winning.

This all makes me think we’re witnessing the beginning of a massive gap between people who read deeply (and can think deeply) and people who don’t. A huge new IQ study I saw recently brings this together. People who were read to more as children score meaningfully higher on IQ tests as adults, and the effect holds even after stripping out wealth and class. Reading early builds intellect that compounds.

The same dataset shows what happens on the other side of the trade. Lower scorers report more TV watching, more celebrity gossip tracking, more lotto playing, and more trouble filling out a complicated form. Most tellingly, they find it more boring to just sit and think. This is really the entire regression in one finding. The capacity to sit still with your own mind, without a feed refreshing in front of you, is itself a marker of the thing we’re losing, and the thing short-form content trains people out of.

The study also found that people with higher measured intelligence score much higher on “actively open-minded thinking,” the willingness to sit with evidence that contradicts what you already believe instead of closing the loop early. This describes a trained skill, and it’s the exact skill a difficult book forces on you page by page.

Interestingly, the same study found people with higher IQs are better at spotting pseudo-profound nonsense, grammatically correct sentences that sound deep but mean nothing. This is precisely the skill you need to survive an internet full of AI-generated summaries and synthetic insight. The people who never built that detector are going to be the easiest marks for the next decade of slop merchants.

AI has, perhaps counterintuitively, made long form reading more valuable since it’s now more scarce. The people who can wrestle with long-form ideas, synthesize information, and think critically will use AI as a force multiplier (or know when to skip it entirely). Those who rely entirely on summaries, short-form content, or AI to do their thinking for them will find it increasingly difficult to separate signal from noise or really provide much value to the world at all (these are the people who AI genuinely can replace). The future will be divided between people who can evaluate, question, and build on what AI produces, and people who simply accept it uncritically. Those capable of deep reading will possess a truly unfair competitive advantage.

I’ve been writing about the rot in higher education for a while now. In Half of Social Science Falls Apart Under Scrutiny, I covered how a massive seven-year DARPA-funded study found only half of social science papers hold up when tested, a consequence of the ideological monoculture I documented in Academia Is Exactly as Biased as You Think. In We Stopped Teaching the Story of Prosperity, I argued universities have quietly abandoned the intellectual tradition that built the modern world. And in The End of America’s Marxist Era, I traced how postmodern Marxist ideology, dressed up in corporate-approved buzzwords, embedded itself in American institutions. We’ve debated and discussed these previous topics, but taken together there’s a clear story our universities are ideologically captured. And if you still want to debate it’s not a big deal, at the very least you can acknowledge universities have failed to provide a bulwark in the broader culture against things we’re seeing play out now.

In our latest piece of evidence, Stanford goes and votes, nearly unanimously, to expand a mandatory freshman curriculum that perfectly illustrates everything I’ve been describing. Today I want to go into that briefly and hope people will read with an open mind, because I think it’s important we get everyone on the same page with this problem so it can be clarified and discussed.

A courageous Stanford accounting professor, Iván Marinovic, brought actual diversity of thought to his school by voting no to a new curriculum and wrote about it in the Stanford Daily. His piece is worth reading in full, but we’ll go through just a bit of it. The mandatory course Why College? is meant to introduce students to liberal education and the good life. It assigns roughly 45 pages of canonical Western philosophical writing across an entire quarter, against more than 500 pages of contemporary work organized around identity, oppression, and “indigenous ways of knowing.” That’s an 11-to-1 ratio of, I would argue, ideas meant to undermine Western values and ideas that you and I would find honorable.

And it’s not like the canonical 45 pages are a greatest hits collection. Students get 8 pages of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a short Epicurus and Seneca selection, and a single Nietzsche aphorism. As Marinovic puts it: “There is no Aristotle, no Augustine, no Aquinas, no Montaigne, no Locke, no Mill, no Newman, no Steiner, no Bloom, none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend. A course advertised as a defense of liberal education has been built without the thinkers who defined it.”

It truly is incredible that Stanford is charging students and their families a staggering amount of money for a mandatory introduction to the life of the mind, and the architects of that very tradition are essentially absent from it. What fills the space instead? Students are introduced to two flavors of determinism: biological (Sapolsky argues free will is an illusion) and social (Lowery argues the self is a social construction) and to a sustained critique of Western education as an instrument of power and oppression. That’s the philosophical orientation Stanford has chosen to hand to 18-year-olds in their first weeks on campus.

The epistemology section is quite revealing. Week 7 of the course assigns 50 pages arguing that Western scientific epistemology should be supplemented or corrected by “indigenous ways of knowing,” at the university responsible for a quarter of all Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to American institutions in the last half century. The students arriving at this university, many of them on their way to becoming the scientists who will extend the tradition being questioned, are introduced to that tradition primarily through its critics. This is a university that has been ideologically captured.

This is simply not a normal liberal education, it’s something else entirely. And I don’t even think it’s subtle. It’s written into the syllabus, ratified by a faculty vote that was nearly unanimous, and dressed in the language of liberal education while gutting its actual content. The replication crisis I wrote about earlier is deeper than a methodology problem, it flows from exactly this kind of intellectual capture, where a discipline becomes so ideologically uniform that weak ideas never face real challenge. What Stanford is now doing is taking a postmodern leftist monoculture and hard-coding it into mandatory freshman year curriculum before students have even had a chance to encounter the tradition being replaced.

Students deserve better. They deserve Aristotle on virtue before Freire on oppression. They deserve actual arguments for freedom before arguments against it. They deserve a university that trusts them with the real intellectual tradition, not a curated critique of it designed to turn students against the culture that built their society. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov warned us about all this, and we continue to ignore that warning. It’s hard to see how any rational person doesn’t see our culture is being subverted by our enemies, and even if that wasn’t happening, reality is indistinguishable from what they would do.

The faculty voted and we know where they stand. I personally wouldn’t want my kids attending a school like this, would you?

And how has all this been carrying over into the world? It’s not good:

You can see the “long march through the institutions” (a slogan coined by the German socialist student activist Rudi Dutschke to describe the strategy to create radical change) has trended actual, factual communism (not Nordic-style capitalism) higher across demographics. And yes, social media and economic conditions play a role too, but I don’t think you can just ignore the bias in our education system which heavily favors this ideology, and should really serve as a vaccination against this.

There’s a difference between not knowing what someone believes and not understanding why they believe it. Any shallow internet conversation on politics or really any hot topic treats these as the same thing, but they’re not, and confusing them causes a lot of problems.

Liberals aren’t confused about where conservatives stand on immigration, they know the position just fine. What’s frequently missing is any model of how a reasonable person actually gets there. So when you ask someone to explain it, the answer frequently devolves into “of course, they’re just racist.” Point that out and you’ll get a long thread about how desperate you are for approval, which is, ironically, just another version of the same thing. They can’t model your motive either so they resort to the same flattening move. It’s not that different from a lot of the takes I read online why the Dems lost the last presidential election, honestly. People weren’t confused about what voters wanted, they just never bothered asking why they wanted it.

The term for this is theory of mind. Not knowing what someone thinks is an information problem, but not knowing why they think it, what values or fears or tradeoffs actually produced that belief, is a theory of mind problem (this is also really just another form of context understanding). All behavior makes sense once you know enough about the person behind it, and political belief doesn’t get some special exemption from that. You need both because they’re different failures, and they get fixed in different ways.

Here’s a useful test, and from what I observe it’s a missing piece of what healthy debate actually requires. Can you argue the other side’s position as well as they’d argue it themselves, without sneaking in “and that’s why they’re wrong, dumb, or evil” as part of the case? If you can’t, you don’t really understand the debate.

We can crystallize the above with some examples. Let’s try it out on a conservative position, we’ll do an easy one: gun ownership. The steel man isn’t “they like guns” or “they’re scared of everything.” It’s that a population capable of defending itself is a check on state power that no law or court can fully replace, and that historical cases of mass disarmament before a crackdown looks, to someone holding this view, a lot less like paranoia and a lot more like pattern recognition. You don’t have to agree with any of that. But if your model of a gun-rights conservative is “gets off on feeling powerful” or “is horny to have a gun collection” you’re not arguing with a person, you’re arguing with a cartoon. And if you’re a reasonable person, you can’t honestly think another human being is a cartoon.

Now let’s try it on a liberal position, we’ll do another frequently debated topic: abortion rights. The steel man isn’t “they don’t value life” or “they’re selfish.” It’s that bodily autonomy, the idea that no one, including the government, can force you to use your body to sustain another life against your will, is treated sacred in almost every other context, including ones conservatives themselves defend, like the right to refuse medical treatment or decline organ donation. At its strongest, the pro-choice position is simply an argument for applying that principle consistently. Again, you don’t have to agree. But if your model of that position is “doesn’t care about babies,” you’ve skipped the argument and gone straight to the ending you already wanted.

None of this is both-sidesism, and it’s not even a request to be nicer to people you disagree with (or change your mind). Today’s thought experiment is merely a diagnostic tool I wish more people would use. If you can pass this test on a position you reject, you actually understand the disagreement, and you can fairly argue against it on its merits. If you can’t, what you’ve got isn’t a real political opinion, it’s a tribal marker and you’re basically just being an NPC. And the people who fail this test the loudest are usually the first to reach for whataboutism or another form of deflection the second you ask them to actually try it.

If more people did this before commenting on the news of the day, that alone might be most of what it takes to climb out of our ideological era and back into something that resembles a conversation.

Every candidate Zohran Mamdani backed in this week’s New York City congressional primaries won. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old doctoral student with no legislative experience who organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia, attended a rally celebrating October 7, has posted that “Israel doesn’t exist,” backed convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh, called the United States “a fucking disgrace”, referred to the US as “occupied” Native American land, joked about wiping her dirty hands on the American flag and refused in a recorded interview to say whether murderers should go to prison, just beat a five-term incumbent to go to Congress. Claire Valdez and Brad Lander won theirs too. DSA congressional representation is about to double. At the victory parties, crowds chanted “Free Palestine” and told Hakeem Jeffries he was next. I don’t even understand how we would allow anyone who hates our country (their own words) to hold office.

I’ve seen some right-wing triumphalism about all this online (because these people are so insane, they think it’s a win for the cons). But I’d issue caution. Have we learned nothing about the ratchet effect? The ideology that’s fringe today could be mainstream in two or three cycles. The “PR disaster” framing stops working the moment it becomes the normalized position of the opposition party. In a two-party system, a massive chunk of voters are better described as “anti-Right” than “pro-Left.” Whatever the Left becomes, that bloc follows. We are potentially watching normalization of civilizationally-suicidal beliefs and positions in real time, only if we’re all very lucky is it a self-limiting catastrophe.

But the people who should be most paying attention right now are normal liberals, as these people are not liberals. Liberalism believes in pluralism, free markets, rule of law, tech optimism, building things (YIMBY), boarders, police, capitalism being a force for good. The DSA believes in none of that. As I’ve written before about how we stopped teaching the story of prosperity, the catastrophic track record of socialist economics has been quietly edited out of the curriculum and the culture, replaced with vague moral hostility toward success and achievement. The result is a generation that absorbed one side of a debate and was told it was an education. Now 66% of Democrats view socialism favorably. The 20th century ran the socialist experiment at scale. It produced engineered famines, gulags, empty supermarket shelves, and tens of millions of dead. This is not an ancient tragedy, it’s the known destination, and many do not take history seriously enough.

The people driving this don't emerge from nowhere. They come from schools where anti-American professors, many funded by Qatar and China, have correctly identified the American university as the highest-leverage point for capturing the next productive class. This ideology has successfully shaped the activist core that now staffs the DSA machine, and Chevalier is herself a product of exactly this pipeline. The foreign funding of American campus radicalism is well documented and not a conspiracy theory, it's an ongoing influence operation and this week showed it's working. The same thing is happening online, and people are constantly falling for the op whether they listen to Tucker Carlson or any of the extremists on the left who want to capture or tear down our institutions.

The good news for normal liberals is that the math is actually not complicated. The country is not naturally socialist. Beating Republicans does not require any of the extremism, it’s actually much easier: it requires being reasonable, pro-growth, and genuinely interested in making people’s lives better. The Democrats would win in a walk if they simply acted like a normal party. Instead the machinery keeps selecting for whoever most aggressively signals opposition to American civilization, and the centrists keep complying rather than fighting. The question is whether anyone stops it before the ideology from people who vocally hate our country (their own words) becomes impossibly entrenched.

And again, if you’re a normal liberal reading this, I understand that many of you are advocating for something closer to the Nordic model. Those countries are capitalist market economies with strong welfare states and social programs. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen even addressed this during a U.S. visit, pushing back on the idea that Denmark is a socialist or planned economy. That is a reasonable political position to debate. The DSA is a different conversation, they openly describe themselves as a socialist organization, and their stated goals go well beyond the traditional Nordic welfare-state model. We need people to come to terms with this, that this group is not aligned with what you want.

Light spoilers ahead for Looper, go watch it if you haven’t and read this one after.

I watched the movie Looper the other weekend at the suggestion of a friend, and immediately knew I had to write about it. The flick gets categorized as a time-travel thriller, which is technically correct but sells it very short. The protagonist, young Joe, works for a criminal syndicate but methodically stacks his pay and runs the job cleanly unlike his peers, deferring gratification toward a specific endpoint: the day he retires, cashes out, and disappears to Paris to “live well” (do drugs and party). He’s deliberate, works carefully, and has a plan. But the end goal is pure hedonism, the good life as a destination you reach once you’ve finally saved enough at something you don’t really want to do. This all sounds really familiar doesn’t it? A lot of people are running this exact playbook right now in our actual reality, trying to score a big payday to “exit.” You see people doing this via day-trading, crypto moonshots, publishing make money online content, working jobs they hate, all with the goal of stacking enough money to finally live. Young Joe would fit right in on fintwit.

Then old Joe shows up: broken, haunted, driven by a grief young Joe can’t yet imagine, and the plan reveals what it always was: optimizing for the wrong thing entirely. Because what actually changed young Joe wasn’t the money, the escape, or Paris. It was love. A real thing, built with another person, that gave the future self something worth protecting. And none of that was in the plan, because you can’t really put something like that in a plan. You can only become the kind of person it finds (in the case of the movie, it was just by chance).

The diner scene where both Joes sit across from each other is the movie in miniature. Two versions of the same person, barely recognizable to each other, shaped entirely by the intervening decades. Old Joe doesn’t hate young Joe even if he’s frustrated with him. He simply knows exactly how little young Joe understands about what’s coming, and how badly the math of a life built purely around high risk accumulation and exit eventually fails you.

Most people are young Joe, they treat their future self as an abstraction. A person who will eventually deal with things. Someone who will get fit, sort out the finances, build career capital, develop the relationships worth having and the skills they really want to have …later. The future self becomes a kind of debt repository, and most people think ‘well, he’ll deal with those problems.’ They dump the consequences of present decisions there and don’t think too hard about it, because their future self feels far away enough to be theoretical.

Except they’re not theoretical. You will be that person, and you will live inside the accumulated residue of every decision you’re making now. The body you’re in at 55 is being built today. The financial position you occupy at 60 is being constructed incrementally across decades of small choices that compound in one direction or the other. The professional reputation you carry is being written by how you show up now, when fewer people are watching and the stakes feel lower. The skills you want to have to write a screenplay or compose an album need to be nurtured today if you want to do something meaningful there tomorrow. There is no reset, there’s only the loop closing.

This is what makes compounding such a useful concept beyond finance, though it works there too, dramatically. Neglect compounds, debt compounds, poor health compounds. So does skill, reputation, fitness, and emotional resilience. Even the way you make your money matters, it tends to inform how you act in other areas. And the math doesn’t care whether the inputs are positive or negative, it just runs. The only variable you actually control is which direction you’re feeding it.

What’s most interesting about Looper philosophically is that young Joe’s problem isn’t recklessness, it’s that he’s built an airtight case for a shallow destination. The self-control crisis is largely this: the present self reliably overweighs immediate reward and underweights future cost, and modern life is engineered to exploit exactly that tendency at every turn. But young Joe isn’t even failing at self-control. He’s succeeding at it, just toward the wrong end (I wrote about a hauntingly perfect real-world example of this before, it’s emblematic of so much). This is a different and more interesting problem, the exact one we see people suffer from constantly.

The good news is the intervention isn’t complicated, it mostly requires asking one question with some regularity: is what I’m doing right now making things better or worse for the person I’m going to be? Don’t do this in an anxious or pretentious way, just as a genuinely orienting question. Am I building something or consuming it? Investing or extracting? And more importantly: what am I actually building toward, and is that thing worth the compounding? If you’re merely trying to enact the circumstances for a pleasurable, hedonistic life you don’t have to do anything in, you should definitely think through that more. The check always comes due, and the longer you wait the more pain you’ll suffer later. Arriving somewhere with enough money to pay bills but no friends, no creative skills, no interests, no spouse might not be fun. You’ll be behind just in different ways, and might find money alone isn’t even the most difficult thing to make up time for.

Most people know the answer when they ask it. They just don’t ask it very often, and they refuse to answer it honestly. Old Joe, by the time we meet him, is trying to fix his accumulated damage through sheer force of will across a time loop, the kind of solution available only in a science fiction flick. In real life there’s no closing the loop on a past version of yourself, you just carry forward whatever was built. The better intervention is the boring one: become the kind of person your future self would be grateful for, consistently, before it becomes urgent.

Young Joe eventually figures this out. It costs him everything. You don’t have to wait that long.

Innovation in bits can happen anywhere, a great engineer with a laptop and internet connection can build something world-changing from Tulsa or Taipei. But innovation in atoms: rockets, chips, biotech, etc, still requires physical co-location. The same way the industrial clusters of 19th-century Britain weren’t accidents, neither is what’s happening right now in South Texas.

Starbase, Texas is real. In May 2025, local voters (nearly all SpaceX employees and their families) ratified their new municipality by a 97% margin, 212 to 6. When’s the last time you saw that level of civic consensus on anything?

Boca Chica was a sleepy coastal hamlet with no particular destiny before SpaceX arrived. What happened next echoes the great company towns of the past except with one crucial difference: nobody had to be there. These are engineers who chose to work, live, and now govern a place built entirely around a technical mission. Post-IPO many are now millionaires, and even on IPO day were still hard at work. You love to see people this focused on the mission (and rewarded for it).

But this is also what Balaji has been pointing at for years: ambitious people will eventually stop trying to fix captured institutions and simply route around them. Move to the place that wants you and isn’t yelling that you’re somehow “the problem” or whatnot because you have ambition to build things and advance industry.

California used to be that place, but it’s trending in a direction that isn’t anymore. The Google founders just left, quietly shifting dozens of personal and business entities out of state ahead of a proposed billionaire’s tax, as California perfects its art of making life difficult for precisely the people who generate the most value. High taxes, regulatory paralysis, a political culture that thinks punishing productive citizens is virtuous. The talent has noticed, the capital has noticed and even many of the companies have moved their headquarters.

Green energy capacity tells the Texas growth story nicely. Without even having a formal climate mandate, Texas overtook California in utility-scale solar generation in 2025 for the first time, and it's not close on wind, where Texas generates nearly 3 times more than the next closest state. The state is also set to account for roughly 40% of all new utility-scale solar capacity coming online nationwide in 2026.

It’s sadly not just California, there are other places that seem to be promoting an odd strain of what I feel is fairly anti-American. Seattle elected Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist, on a platform of new payroll taxes and capital-gains-style levies, layered on top of Washington’s new 9.9% “millionaire tax.” Business leaders noticed: a large share say they’re considering leaving, and some major employers are already shifting jobs to Bellevue or out of state. I even got my liberal friend Ken to agree it’s very bad. Meanwhile Delaware, the state that wrote the rulebook for American corporate law, watched one Chancery Court ruling against Musk’s pay package set off a “Dexit” wave to Texas, Nevada, and Florida who are all consistently pro-business.

Capital and talent don’t leave overnight. They leave after years of accumulated signals. A regulation here, a tax increase there, ongoing unhinged anti-capitalist speeches and quotes, and a culture that increasingly views builders as something to be controlled by the state rather than partners in creating prosperity. Eventually, entrepreneurs stop trying to convince institutions to change and simply move to places where the incentives are aligned with what they’re trying to build.

Texas is a shining example of such a place, and has no income tax, functional governance, and, crucially, a willingness to get out of the way. The formula isn’t complicated: freedom of movement + economic opportunity + civic participation = the conditions where innovation actually compounds. Silicon Valley was built on exactly this. Permissive regulation, abundant capital, a culture that treated risk as respectable. That environment has since been regulated and taxed into something that’s quite the opposite of what created its abundance, but its venture community clearly enjoys living there so it will continue, I just always wonder how much pain they’re willing to take. NorCal for certain has nicer weather during the summer, but weather doesn’t build anything, functional institutions do.

As The Economist recently noted in a story (I’ll paste the important part here since it’s paywalled):

Technology professionals have to stop accepting the premise that they’re obligated to fight for cities that have decided to fight them. Tech firms and entrepreneurs should vote with their feet. If you can, move to a place where the culture reflects and encourages what you’re trying to build. It’s way more fun than fighting Marxists.

Starbase is that place in its purest form, while the entire Texas triangle is pro-technology, growth and innovation (and a big reason I moved here to the Austin area).

Innovation in atoms needs a home. Increasingly, that home is Texas.

Fun bonus for today’s story: check out this video from Core Memory on how an entrepreneur in the middle of nowhere, Texas has become a telescope rancher, it’s pretty neat (and profitable). What if you used your imagination and built something similar?

I also understand this type of thinking, in a way I used to be like them and incapable of believing I could be incorrect on certain investments (to my own detriment). I don’t hold losing stocks anymore either, it’s much better to live this way. Cut your losing positions and ideas! I cannot stress to you enough how much easier things become after. “We cannot change the wind we can only adjust the sails” is a good way to live your life. You can be wrong, just don’t stay wrong.

Let me help you with what some of you want to say before you comment, because you don’t have to use every social network, and no one is forcing you to like every one either. I think TikTok and Instagram are dumb, but I don’t declare them dead (they are indeed quite popular). I just think they are rotting your brain. Easy enough to say something like that, at least it’s honest. Just please stop gaslighting us.

So now we’ll share some stats, which I’ll let speak for themselves. Recent eMarketer analysis (below) shows US unique visitors from June 2025 to March 2026: X holding steady around 130 million while Threads collapsed from 12.4 million to 7.1 million, less than a rounding error in Twitter/X’s shadow. Bluesky, the other would-be replacement, sits at 1.5 million (but it’s still at least a real community, niche communities are great, maybe they don’t have to be billions of users).

The second chart from Apptopia is even more telling: X daily active users up 44% since May 2025, Threads down nearly 50%, Bluesky down 85%. As the headline on the eMarketer chart puts it, and you really couldn’t write it better, “X is outlasting its would-be replacements.”

As for web, Twitter remains a top 10 website in the world according to multiple sources which are all as valid as you’ll get from sampled data (here’s similarweb below). But even the people who work internally there have posted they’ve hit several ATHs in usage, which would be the most valid numbers of all.

Meanwhile, what about Threads, the Meta clone that was supposed to finally kill Twitter? I wrote about its existential problems when it launched, and nothing has really changed. Whatever user numbers Threads posts need a large asterisk: this is part of a company with billions of existing users across Facebook and Instagram, with every incentive and algorithm at its disposal to funnel them into a new product. Of course it has downloads, that’s what you can do when you have a captive audience. But the user behavior tells the real story: Threads users spend an average of 3-5 minutes daily on the app versus ~31 minutes for Twitter. The discourse there is exactly what you'd expect when you populate a network by dragging Instagram users into a text box: shallow, empty, throwaway (I’ve still never seen a serious screengrab from a Threads post shared elsewhere, other than to poke fun at it). These are not proper posters. There's no edge, no real debate, no one saying anything of consequence. Threads has bodies in seats, Twitter has a community. You cannot manufacture what Twitter built by importing Instagram accounts and calling it microblogging, and no amount of Meta's traffic funnels will change that.

The media’s relationship with this story has been pretty crazy. The same outlets that spent years writing Twitter’s obituary are still posting their scoops there first, embedding tweets in their articles, and using it to build sources. The cognitive dissonance required to repeatedly call something dead while also treating it as part of your reporting and marketing infrastructure is remarkable, though by now, not surprising.

I also wrote at the time that the “Twitter killer” narrative fundamentally misunderstood what the product is. It’s not a feature set. It’s a specific concentration of people who actually care: politicians, journalists, founders, researchers, anon weirdos all in one place, in public, in real time. You cannot recreate that by pressing a button in Menlo Park.

On management: I’m actually a fan of what Nikita has been doing as product lead (if you don’t follow him, he’s personally nuking spam/grifter accounts, very satisfying). He’s one of the best people in social, visibly uses the product, and clearly cares about it in the way only actual users can. That’s rarer than you’d think in this industry and it shows if you’re paying attention. I do think they could fix the algorithm but that’s a different team, and I mostly don’t use that part of the product, I browse who I follow and lists I curate, which is a much better way to use social. Other social products don’t let you do that, LinkedIn for example might have a decent network, but they don’t let you customize your feed at all, making it a toy in comparison.

As for the broader Elon derangement syndrome that colored so much of the "Twitter is dead" discourse, it’s also something I noticed when I bought a Tesla and some people lost their minds about it. The same strain of irrationality: people who couldn't name the CEO of their bank, their health insurance company, or the firm that made their laptop's chips, suddenly developing a specific, burning need to lose their minds about this one product from this one person (meanwhile these teams all have many people working on them, some of them might even be your friends). They’ll all still use Starlink on an airplane and simply not tell anyone.

Maybe my friend Morgan Housel, author of Psychology of Money can help some of you understand leaders with extreme personalities better (I’ve queued up the time). I’d really recommend watching this if you are someone who sees red whenever you see Elon’s name, perhaps this will help.

The weirdest part of the whole saga to me was watching people insist Twitter was dead for reasons that had nothing to do with whether anyone was actually using Twitter/X. Usage became secondary to symbolism. The platform wasn’t being judged as a product anymore but as some kind of political Rorschach test (meanwhile, I actually see people across the political spectrum there). Once that happens, evidence stops mattering as every data point gets filtered through identity first and reality second. That’s why so many people were able to confidently predict Twitter’s collapse and then simply ignore the fact that it never happened.

The “it’s over” crowd was wrong in 2015, 2018, 2020, 2023, pick a year they’ve declared it dead (it’s happened so many times!). They’re still wrong now. And again, it’s okay to be wrong, no one bats 1,000, just don’t stay wrong.

I previously wrote what turned out to be a very popular piece about Reddit’s descent into madness, how a platform that once hosted genuinely diverse, chaotic, interesting discourse was slowly captured by a small class of ideologically-motivated moderators until it became a monoculture. Since that story resonated with many readers, today I want to talk about how something similar is happening on Wikipedia, far more subversively, with even more dangerous consequences.

Many people don’t know any better and treat Wikipedia as a “neutral” starting point. Reporters cite it, students build papers from it, it’s become ubiquitous in our culture. And increasingly, this is the part that should most concern you, Wikipedia is one of the most influential information sources represented in many AI training datasets (concerningly, Reddit is too). It’s now far more than simply an encyclopedia “anyone can edit” (casual contributors will find their edits reverted quickly, even if true), it’s become operating infrastructure for how internet users (try to) understand reality. Increasingly they do not.

Which is why two recent investigations deserve your attention, and there could easily be 100s if not 1,000s more if people bothered to look.

Ashley Rindsberg at Pirate Wires published a detailed investigation into how a coordinated group of roughly 40 Wikipedia editors systematically worked to reshape the Israel-Palestine conflict narrative: delegitimizing Israel, softening the portrayal of Hamas, and pushing fringe academic positions into the mainstream of articles read by millions. Six weeks after October 7, one of these editors successfully removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter (the one calling for the killing of Jews and destruction of Israel) from the Hamas article entirely. A separate group, Tech For Palestine, ran a parallel campaign coordinating edits across an 8,000-member Discord server in open violation of Wikipedia’s own policies. When a blogger discovered what they were doing, they panicked, deleted their talk pages and sandboxes, and one editor wiped her entire chat history. That’s not the behavior of people confident they were doing something legitimate.

The Cipher Brief just went further, examining how anonymous Wikipedia editing is now directly shaping AI systems and global narratives, including an investigation into how Al Jazeera’s Wikipedia entry was systematically reshaped, with downstream effects on how every search engine and LLM now characterizes Qatar’s state-funded media network. By the way, this problem isn’t confined to one conflict or one topic.

In addition to foreign adversaries shaping narratives and perceptions, the domestic political bias in Wikipedia is also widespread. A study covered by National Review found evidence suggesting what critics have argued for years: Wikipedia skews demonstrably left across political topics. Libertarian writer John Stossel documented the mechanisms: the editor demographics, the sourcing hierarchies that privilege certain outlets over others, the way “reliable sources” gets defined in ways that systematically exclude center-right perspectives. This bias is hardly accidental, it’s baked into who edits, what counts as a credible citation, and who has the time and motivation to fight edit wars until the other side gives up.

Now consider who ran Wikipedia before becoming CEO of NPR. Katherine Maher led the Wikimedia Foundation, then went on to run public broadcasting’s flagship network, which if you’ve listened to has a very clear ideological slant. Anyway, in a 2022 TED Talk she gave while running Wikipedia, she said this: “Perhaps for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start. In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

Read that again if you didn’t carefully enough, or better yet watch her say it. The person running the world’s most-cited reference site believed that truth was getting in the way. This is not some peripheral figure, nor a fringe view held by a lone editor. This is the institutional philosophy, stated plainly, by the person at the top. It explains a lot of what’s wrong with our digital information ecosystems, which are seriously polluted, as many others editing the web hold this same perspective. If you don’t yet see these people as the enemies of our civilization they are, you should start to before it’s too late. To my dedicated liberal readers, I find nothing about these people actually liberal, they are not on your side and represent something else.

There’s more subtle things that are awful happening here too I personally have noticed. There's a thriving academic industry (that would applaud Maher’s post-truth ideals) dedicated to finding historical figures "problematic," and its output flows directly into Wikipedia as citable sources, which then flows into AI. For a project I was interested in a quote from William Osler, the father of modern medicine, who invented the residency program and transformed how physicians are trained worldwide, and then went to look him up. His Wikipedia page calls him a "renowned practical joker" in one paragraph, then in another cites a 2020 grievance paper that uses his satirical fictional alter ego (a fake character invented specifically to prank colleagues, whose writings were never meant to be published) as evidence of racism. The same page, the same man. Wikipedia isn't noticing the contradiction because it's not trying to give you a coherent portrait; it's a document with many authors and many agendas, and the grievance authors are always the most motivated ones in the room and get consistently high placement. One citation at a time, great figures get quietly stamped "problematic" in the infrastructure that trains your AI. Osler quite literally willed his personal library to McGill University and spent his final years building the institutions that train physicians to this day, the idea that future doctors should encounter his name bracketed by a caveat about a joke he played on a colleague in 1884 is honestly vandalism.

And it’s not just how Wikipedia treats the historical dead. It’s also how they treat living, demonstrably notable people who don’t fit whatever invisible checklist their editor class has decided matters. A friend of mine Barry Schwartz has covered search engine optimization and Google’s algorithm changes longer and more consistently than virtually anyone alive. He founded Search Engine Roundtable, has been cited as a primary source by journalists, researchers, and industry professionals for over two decades, and is widely considered one of the most important chroniclers of the SEO industry’s entire history (this is a multi billion dollar sector). His Wikipedia page was deleted anyway, not once, not twice, but three times. If you go read the deletion discussion, you will spend the next twenty minutes shaking your head. The editors debating his “notability” write with the confidence of people who have never heard of him, which is itself the tell. There are Wikipedia pages for moderately trafficked food blogs and mid-tier local politicians, but the most prolific SEO journalist of his generation doesn’t clear the bar. The criteria aren’t applied consistently because the criteria aren’t really the point, the point is who controls the room. Danny Sullivan, who helped build the search marketing industry alongside Barry and works at Google, called it out plainly: Barry has made a recognized contribution to the historical record of search longer than almost anyone. That apparently isn’t enough. What’s particularly rich is a possible outcome here, if someone wrote a definitive book on the history of SEO, Barry would get a page the next week. The encyclopedia would credit the book and the book would have gotten half its material from Barry. You see how absurd all this is, I hope.

The uncomfortable truth about Wikipedia is the same as the uncomfortable truth about Reddit, about academia, and about many previously prestige information institutions, and it’s not some grand conspiracy. They became captured through neglect. Organized groups with strong ideological commitments and moderators on egotistical power trips simply showed up, consistently, until they set the defaults. The rest of us naively assumed the system was self-correcting, but it isn’t always that way.

Use Wikipedia to find out the year a movie was released or about a breed of dog. For anything touching politics, history, foreign policy, so-called ‘notable’ figures, or contested science, treat it the way you’d treat any other source with a known point of view. Read it, note who wrote it, check what it’s citing, and don’t let it be the last stop. It’s not special, you should be skeptical, and you definitely shouldn’t blindly trust it. With certainty we can say Wikipedia is a reason why many people are misinformed about the world, and their management would consider that of greater importance than truth (their own words).

The encyclopedia that trained your AI has an editor class with a subversive agenda, and it’s one the majority of Americans don’t agree with. What we really want is Veritas, but you won’t find it on many parts of that website.

Many people have anxiety issues in modern times, it’s understandable, although solvable once you understand what’s actually happening. If you’re someone who suffers from this, let’s share some brief research with you today to help (if you go to the gym regularly you likely already suffer from this less).

A paper I found published in Behavior Therapy tracked the actual outcomes of worries in people diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, a population whose entire psychological profile is organized around anticipating bad outcomes. Using ecological momentary assessment, researchers had participants log their worries in real time, then tracked what actually happened over 30 days. Independent raters coded the results.

The finding: 91.4% of worry predictions did not come true. The most common outcome per person was a staggering 0% accuracy, meaning the majority of participants had not a single worry materialize into reality. Even more damning, participants’ expected likelihood of their worries coming true was dramatically higher than the observed rate. The anxious mind is confidently and systematically wrong. And most importantly: the more people recognized this inaccuracy during treatment, the faster their anxiety symptoms dropped.

Now consider those participants are professional worriers, the clinical worst case. If the people most practiced at worrying are wrong 91% of the time, the rest of us should assume our own predictions are at least as unreliable (we simply have fewer).

And yet the modern world is engineered to keep the worry machine running hot. The internet delivers a fire hose of amplified catastrophe from across the entire planet 24 hours a day. Certainly, there’s always something you could worry about, and algos will find it. You did not evolve for this environment, in fact your evolutionary instincts are working against you here. Further, the smartphone collapsed the boundary between work and home, creating an ambient anxiety of 24/7 notifications many people don’t turn off. Making things worse, AI anxiety is now layered on top of legitimate financial precarity, meaning people are genuinely unsure whether their job will exist in a few years. These are real pressures, and I won’t be annoying today and fully dismiss them.

But here’s the thing: even with all of that, most things are fine. The constant emails or Slack notifications don’t ruin you, the financial news doesn’t wipe you out, the outrage on social media doesn’t exist if you log off and go for a walk. Most of the worst-case scenarios your brain rehearses at 2am simply do not arrive. The data on this is clear, your brain is a catastrophizing machine making you consider worst case scenarios or stay in fight or flight because it’s wired for survival, and the modern attention economy figured out how to monetize that anxiety and pipe it into your eyes all day.

Worry feels productive or perhaps like preparation, but it’s neither. It’s expensive cognitive overhead burning your focus and peace on outcomes that, in the vast majority of cases never happen.

The practical move is simple once you understand the above: treat your anxious predictions like your favorite bad forecaster you’ve caught being wrong over and over. You wouldn’t keep listening to a pundit who was wrong 91% of the time, would you?

We’ve written before about how doomerism is a mental illness, a hardened state of despair no amount of good news can penetrate. We’ve also written about permabears, those constitutionally committed to the dark side of every ledger, for whom every green shoot is a trick and every recovery is a setup for the next disaster. Depression about life, economics, anything really is a choice. You alone are responsible for your own happiness or sadness. It’s called being an adult.

Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic has combined both pathologies into a single 3,000-word essay titled in a way that infers all is doomed, forever. She’s coined the term “permacession,” a permanent recession that, by her own extensive admission in the very same piece isn’t actually happening, in an economy she herself describes as “pretty darn great.” In America, the country that has lapped the entire developed world economically for two straight decades.

Let’s go through her story point by point, because when you see what’s really happening if you were actually upset about things you should be less so after.

Claim: Consumer sentiment is at its lowest since 1952. This is very alarming.

University of Michigan sentiment surveys measure feelings, not facts. Feelings are downstream of media consumption, tribal identity, and what your TikTok algorithm decided to show you this morning (still suggest deleting it). The author eventually cops to this herself, she just buries it in paragraph 15 after spending paragraphs 1-14 treating the sentiment data as gospel.

You cannot simultaneously argue sentiment surveys are capturing some profound economic truth AND that social media is poisoning people’s perception of economic reality. You have to pick one, and she picks both.

Claim: People feel worse now than during the Great Inflation, the Volcker shock, the 2008 financial crisis, and the early COVID months.

This is actually a more interesting data point in the piece, and the author basically shrugs and moves on after noting it undermines everything she thinks she understands. If people felt better when mortgages were at 18.6% and the unemployment rate was flirting with 15%, the obvious conclusion is that sentiment surveys are measuring something other than economic conditions. Political polarization and media negativity are the variables that changed. But these are hardly economic facts.

Claim: “I found that my usual explanations fell short.”

At least she admits it, credit where it's due. Unfortunately her response to this admission is to invent a new word ("permacession") instead of updating her priors. A scientist runs an experiment, the results contradict the hypothesis, and instead of revising the hypothesis she names the anomaly herself and brands it terminal. This is precisely the pattern we wrote about recently with biased academic research: the conclusion comes first, the framing follows.

Claim: The economy is delivering real improvements but people won’t admit it. This is a serious problem.

So she’s saying things are getting better? Yes. Inside her gloom piece is a genuinely brave acknowledgment that the American economy is working for most Americans. The Federal Reserve’s own data shows the net worth of the bottom 50% has risen dramatically in the 2020s, up from roughly $1.9 trillion pre-pandemic to over $4.2 trillion today, more than doubling. Near-full employment. Low-income wage growth outpacing high-income wage growth for an extended stretch. Americans spending more on restaurants, vacations, cars, and wellness. The median household net worth hit $193,000 in the most recent Federal Reserve survey, up 37% from 2019 in real terms, the biggest jump on record.

The author knows the economy is not in complete shambles. She just won’t let herself feel okay about knowing it. Physician, heal thyself.

Claim: Europe’s GDP per capita was 77% of the US in 2008. “Now, the continent is half as productive.”

This is one of the most staggering economic facts of the 21st century and it gets one sentence in a doom piece. As of 2024, the US GDP per capita sits around $86,000. France is at $39,000. The UK is at $48,000. Mississippi, America’s perennial last-place state by this measure, has a higher GDP per capita than France, the UK, Italy, and Spain. The American economic model: messy, unequal, chaotic, and constantly criticized by unemployed people in the EU, has so thoroughly outperformed every major allied competitor that France and Britain would be among America’s poorest states if you transplanted them here. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, the US runs about 38% higher than the EU average, and the gap is widening every year. This is the part where a normal person says “holy cow, we’re doing something right.”

Claim: Inequality is the fundamental problem. The top 10% make as much as the bottom 90%.

Inequality is a real issue worth discussing. But it’s also been a fixture of American life for decades, and the piece offers no real explanation for why it would suddenly be causing record-low sentiment specifically right now, when by the author’s own admission low-income wage growth has outpaced high-income wage growth in recent years. The inequality argument actually cuts against the permacession thesis if you follow it honestly.

And if you turn off social media, which has industrialized the constant comparison of your life to everyone else’s curated highlight reel, inequality stops dominating your daily emotional experience. Comparison is a thief of joy. We’ve written about this. The fix is really easy, deleting Instagram.

Claim: The cost of housing, child care, health care, higher education, elder care has crept up faster than inflation for two decades.

This is true, and worth being angry about. You know what caused most of that? Massive government intervention, regulatory capture, and the deliberate restriction of supply. This is a policy failure people mistakenly believe is a market or “capitalism” failure. The solution is to build more, regulate smarter, and get government out of the way of housing construction (NIMBYs are the actual villains, we’ve covered this).

Diagnosing the problem and then using it as fuel for generalized economic despair rather than specific policy reform is the Atlantic’s entire model.

Claim: Republican/Democrat economic sentiment gap has grown from 20 points to 50 points. This is distorting everything.

This is the most honest and important observation in the piece. Partisan identity is now so fused with economic perception that roughly half the country will describe the economy as bad regardless of the data, depending purely on which party holds the White House. If you don't believe me, note that Republican sentiment cratered the moment Biden was inaugurated and skyrocketed the moment Trump won, with zero underlying change in economic conditions at either specific point. This is a psychology and media phenomenon.

And if sentiment is 50% political theater, then sentiment surveys should be weighted accordingly when making policy, or writing 3,000-word Atlantic essays about economic despair.

Claim: Sam Peltzman at UChicago found a “happiness crash” — a historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness since 2020.

It is fascinating research, and here’s the variable that explains most of it and that the author dances around without landing on: smartphones + social media. The happiness crash begins exactly when algorithmic social media achieved mass adoption and started optimizing for outrage engagement. Jonathan Haidt has been screaming this from the rooftops for years with extensive data. The economy didn’t make people unhappy, too much screen time in the attention economy did. These are very different problems with very different solutions.

Claim: “We never got back to socializing in person after COVID.”

Actually, the more I think about it, this one is just wrong. No one is wearing masks anymore, airports are full, people are going to concerts and traveling. For the people who are still socially isolated, this is pretty sad. But again, not an economic problem. An atomization problem, a cultural problem and a device addiction problem. Will be solved in time.

Claim: TikTok and Instagram are giving people “money dysmorphia” and a distorted sense of economic doom.

She looked up “how jobs are doing” on TikTok and got fed crypto spam and AI apocalypse content and, I cannot stress this enough, she included this as evidence in her argument. TikTok’s algorithm is not economic data. Using your For You Page as a research tool for an Atlantic story is silly analysis which shows you what we’re dealing with. Ironically, this is exactly how these sites manipulate people, and probably why the author herself feels things are permanently hosed.

Claim: “In a roundabout way, the country’s affluence might be contributing to its pessimism.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. This is actually the thesis that explains everything and the author stumbles into it 2,800 words deep. Ronald Inglehart’s postmaterialism theory is real and well-documented: as societies get wealthier, they shift from survival concerns to identity and meaning concerns, and the goalposts for “good enough” move to places they can never realistically reach. Rich people in rich countries are not grateful for being rich people in rich countries. They are furious about the remaining problems in their rich countries (everything amazing, these people aren’t happy). This is a spiritual problem people need to solve for, it’s actually not that hard, and it’s amusing (and on brand) that an intellectual at The Atlantic can’t offer a good solution.

Claim: “I don’t see an easy salve for what’s ailing us.”

Here’s one: buy the S&P every month, and stop publishing 3,000-word essays in major national magazines telling people the economic vibes are permanently bad when you’ve spent the entire piece demonstrating that things are actually pretty good.

Media that profits from anxiety is part of the negative feedback loop Lowrey herself identifies. The Atlantic gets clicks when people are scared. TikTok gets engagement when people are outraged. Politicians raise money when the base is terrified. The permabear industrial complex has a business model, and understanding the op is step one. The call is coming from inside the house.

On the title itself: “Permacession”

Nothing in a dynamic market economy is permanent. That’s definitionally true, it’s what makes it a market economy rather than a planned one (which is what these people actually want, what better way to get there than constantly preach doom about what we’re doing?). The word “permacession” is doing the same thing “vibecession” did: giving an emotional state an economics-y name. Except vibecession made sense (I’m a big fan of Kyla who coined it), and permacession doesn’t.

The Great Depression ended. The Volcker recession ended. The dot-com crash ended. 2008 ended. COVID ended. Every single one of them ended because that is what economies do. They adapt, they grow, and ultimately confound the people who named the bad thing themselves. Eventually, even in a raging bear market (which we don’t even have) the short sellers who aren’t complete morons flip long.

America has the most dynamic, innovative, and resilient economy in human history. It has outgrown all the haters. It keeps doing it. The people who have been betting against it in markets, in policy, in prestige magazine essays have been wrong consistently for 250 years. Permabears recognize no such track record. They just invent new words for the same bet.

As always: stay curious, ignore the doom merchants who profit from your misery, and remember that things can be imperfect and still be extraordinary.

When a person sees some topic of discourse they don’t like being noticed, the following is what happens after. First, they say: it’s not happening. Then, if that doesn’t work: okay, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal. If that doesn’t stick: why do you even care about this? And the latest one, which might be my favorite for sheer audacity: yes, it happened, but it’s over now, so you can stop talking about it. Ironic that the expiration date on noticing a thing is set by people who didn’t want you noticing in the first place.

This is a fascinating little behavioral loop that amuses me when I see it, and it’s happened enough times I wanted to put it down in a post so I’d have a reference point (and you can too). Each stage of dismissal is essentially a ratchet, when one position becomes untenable, it’s quietly abandoned and a new one takes its place, all without acknowledging the previous denial ever happened.

I’m hardly alone in noticing this phenomenon, Rob Henderson posted about a variation of this which is similar enough years ago (I personally notice steps 3 and 4 vary a bit, but mostly say the same thing). Clearly there is some psychology on display here, and it’s very similar to one of those the steps of grief flow charts.

What strikes me most, though, is the reaction baked into all of this: the instant assumption because I’ve written about something, I must be a committed partisan of some side or cause. I write something noting a cultural shift, and suddenly someone thinks that means I’m endorsing of an entire buffet of other ideas I’ve never endorsed. I observe something odd in how institutions behave, and I’m assigned a tribe because I’m not precisely on the side of people who think they’re “the good guys” who are beyond critique. The idea that someone might simply find a thing interesting and worth examining or simply worth articulating seems almost incomprehensible to certain people. The sin of noticing, apparently, is itself a political act requiring justification.

I write about what I think is pertinent or interesting and what I see as true or important. The blogging project which I’ve done for nearly two decades now has always been about trends, culture, and the occasional uncomfortable observation. I don’t have a specific political agenda but do have a low tolerance for things that seem strange that I don’t see enough people talking about, and a habit of writing them down. If a pattern in culture is worth examining, I’ll examine it because I think it’s worth our time and notable. Usually, it’s because I think we can do better. And I don’t think certain topics are off limits, because I don’t look to a tribe for approval. You should live like this too. Think for yourself, it’s great.

I’m actually not calling out commenters today, the people willing to debate things in public here are mostly good faith. The most interesting replies are via email privately. What I find most telling is that the volume of the reaction tends to be proportional to how much the observer doesn’t want the thing observed. If it were truly not a big deal, why the energy? The ‘stick to sports’ people, as I wrote before, reveal themselves precisely by showing up. Silence is the response to things that don’t matter. The dismissal cycle above is the response to things that do.

So no, I won’t stop noting things when told they’re supposedly over. That’s not how observation works, and it’s a great way for us to forget and repeat past mistakes. And unfortunately, I think a lot of bad ideas have deep tentacles into our world and we’re going to need to do more work to fully extract them. Of course some might simply be terminal philosophical battles, and that’s fine too. But don’t dismiss things you don’t like or call people names, engage with the issue like adults.