A few weeks ago I wrote comparing AI existential risk to the climate hysteria we’ve all been subjugated to over the last few decades. I actually think it’s a perfect analogy, and by the way neither one of these groups will ever give an inch that things will be “okay” despite the world continuing just fine or whatever progress is made addressing either issue. The goalposts will simply move. There’s no incentive to ever say either problem is possible to “fix” when a priest class can continue to monetize this fear and use it to assert power over the rest of us. This also doesn’t mean we should do nothing about things like AI cybersecurity risk, or let big companies pollute infinite amounts haphazardly (of course they shouldn’t, don’t be daft). But the fears are all greatly exaggerated by neurotic people.

Anyway I already spoke on the AI part, let’s share some recent stories on climate change that should sober you up on this issue. I think it’s important you don’t live in fear, and I still think it’s extraordinarily reckless to promote doom in the population at the retail level for things we should solve at utility and commercial scale. Four recent pieces I read make a related case about climate change itself that you should read. Unfortunately, because it’s a religion some of you will refuse to read any of this and skip to the comments, but maybe you will consider another view? This is actually the mark of an intellectual by the way. Some would even go so far as to say it’s morally responsible to change your mind when presented with good arguments. As usual, I’m going to present you some.

The question to ask today isn’t whether ‘climate change is real’ (the Earth’s climate is always changing, and was long before us, there’s clear evidence of this) but whether we’ve been conditioned to vastly overstate its importance, and whether the policies pursued in its name are actually making the world better or worse. If you live in the EU or UK and spent the summer without HVAC because of some beaurocratic policy decision, we know how you feel already.

Richard Hanania on “Climate Change: The World’s Most Overrated Problem”: As Hanania writes, you could fully trust the climate scientists and still ask whether this deserves to be the issue of our age.

But just because something is happening and has some negative effects, it doesn’t mean that we should spend a lot of time and energy worrying about it. We need to ask how big of a problem climate change is in the grand scheme of things, and whether the solutions advocated for are worthwhile. This is especially true since we have entire nations adopting climate goals that slow economic growth, and serious people put forth proposals that would keep some of the poorest people in the world in crushing poverty for much longer.

If you’re going to look at one chart to understand why we shouldn’t worry much about climate change, it is the one below, which comes from Alex Epstein’s book Fossil Future.

Michael Doran on “China’s Net Zero Advantage”: As published in Tablet Mag, the emergency label is purely about politics and has nothing to do with the climate.

That label has political utility. It softens some of the opposition to a project for restructuring labor, housing, transportation, investment, race, consumption, and industrial policy. It also encourages the public to judge the project by the standards of an emergency rather than the standards of ordinary politics, where such a program would have to win an argument on its merits. Climate screams “fire” so that socialism can deliver the fireman.

If the fall of the Berlin Wall discredited state ownership as a comprehensive economic program, it did not inhibit the left’s belief in its historical rightness or its quest for centralized state control. In the post-Cold War era, climate politics supplied a new moral rationale and a new set of instruments for these aims.

Sir Richard Dearlove on “Energy Security: Blowing in the Wind”: As the former MI6 chief says in the GWPF’s 2026 annual lecture, Britain has been so fixated on climate that it missed the bigger threat.

As my title suggests, the UK’s climate stance/policy currently lacks security anchors; and the answer, my friends, is certainly not blowing in the wind. It has been more a finger in the wind. As a country we have been drifting and we are dangerously exposed. The most pressing threat to this country is not man-made climate change, as Ed Miliband and now Dr. Fahnbulleh, avidly supported by legions of so-called experts, would have us think. There is no simple link between cancelling Rosebank and stopping wildfires. To believe such a thing is the height of naivety, or ignorance of the science, or conviction akin to religious belief.

The country has lost the industrial capacity to reproduce its own energy system, so that uncertain access to equipment and spares (for example generators and transformers) is a graver and more chronic danger than a temporary shortage of gas.

We are not the victims of a conspiracy to make us vulnerable. We have quite casually done this to ourselves. We have as a nation negligently wandered close to a cliff edge and the adversaries I have described stand ready to help us over it; and the fragility of the present international order enhances the risk.

Noah Kaufman in “The Climate Question That Economists Cannot Answer”: Kaufman examines how climate economics can lend a veneer of scientific certainty to policy decisions that depend heavily on assumptions and political preferences.

Despite this, the most visible use of climate-economics analysis today is to advance extreme arguments that most economists do not agree with. How did that happen? One important reason is that policy makers want these damage estimates. Elected officials want to show that the benefits of their preferred climate policies exceed the costs. [...] Small changes in assumptions [...] can yield results that appear to justify virtually any policy response.

People hate the idea of knowing they have been deceived or manipulated or perhaps the issue wasn’t exactly what they thought. The climate issue has religious-like beliefs from people who as you know are not very rational. Or activists like Greta who foam at the mouth about every “current thing” issue without actually understanding them.

But I think pretty much all of us have been made to think the climate issue is something absolutely dire in our current lifetimes. And that if we didn’t do small things in our personal lives like use paper straws (might actually be worse for the environment btw) or big things like have fewer children we were evil or complicit in some existential issue. But that’s just not the case, and we actually can solve it without living uncomfortably. We should acknowledge when issues of our time, however real, are also used to gain power over ourselves or our nations by those who do so in order to nudge our behavior in some way they see fit. It’s naïve to ignore the climate is one of those issues, and AI will be too.

The ironic part of all this is where I live Texas, without even having a formal climate mandate, is building more green energy infrastructure than anywhere in America. And it’s at utility scale so everyone is being green without really trying. Meanwhile, the places most heavily regulated with the loudest “protect the Earth” views frequently have the least productive new carbon-free infrastructure buildouts.

For example, we see places like the UK and Germany commit economic Seppuku by bowing to the “green” climate zealots, while having to turn back on coal (high emission energy). None of it makes any sense, they’re actually increasing carbon in the name of the climate by shutting off nuclear (green, elemental energy). If we stop listening to these idiots we’re going to solve this stuff where the market is free to act, and anyway it ultimately makes the most sense for solar and nuclear to power most of the world.

It turns out, the so-called “environmentalists” are actually evil and the people focused on building and innovating carbon free energy are the good guys. This is why environmentalists make such great movie villains as others have noted (they legitimately want to make your life worse). Also, I really just don’t worry about the climate, again it’s simply not a thing that I care about at the retail level. What does bother me are things like PFAS chemicals, actual environmental pollutants that are honestly unnecessary and we have perfectly good substitutes for. Some carbon emissions are fine, the Earth will filter them. It’s not a problem, we do not need to have “zero” (this would mean no humans would exist).

Finally, and this is endlessly amusing, the same people constantly crying about the climate are currently fawning over a “we hate Elon” documentary that (I think unintentionally) showcases everything he’s accomplished in service of reducing carbon emissions. This is while these amoebas lecture everyone else professionally yet do nothing themselves other than saying “progress and technology bad.” We’ve talked about them before and pointed out the hypocrisy, you simply can’t take them seriously. As always, the Randian heroes were fake but the villains are absolutely real.

The world is going to be fine, the fewest people on record are dying due to climate-related deaths, first world countries have developed efficient technologies that could only be dreamed about 50 years ago, all while the media covers everything like it’s end times. Go live your life, buy an EV, have more kids, the real issue presented here is actually to people’s mental health by consuming too much doom porn (which never comes true) or letting meddling bureaucrats halt progress.

If you aren’t watching what’s happening in France, Italy and across the EU, you should, and don’t look away or pretend it can’t happen where you live. France built an immigration system that allowed nearly unlimited poorly vetted migration. They overwhelmingly refuse to deport even those who come there illegally and pose a risk to citizens or infrastructure, and they did little about the domestic radicalization that followed. Their left-wing radicals gladly partner with the religious radicals coming in. They do this everywhere (and are of course being used, AKA useful idiots).

We have written extensively about the civilizationally suicidal belief of socialism (a left wing radical belief), if it’s not something that keeps you up at night, it should be. Even a casual awareness of history illustrates why. And, our youth are actively being poisoned via this reliably destructive and economically illiterate virus not only via TikTok but via our own academic institutions.

France presents an example of a more advanced socialist position than Americans are used to. It is a remarkable country with a proud history, and the concept of revolution is woven into its culture. But this one is clearly different if you simply open your eyes. It looks far less like the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and far more like the Arab Spring, and that’s where the danger lies. Like all socialists, they were more interested in lecturing the rest of the world than fixing problems at home. Now ordinary French citizens are paying the price, with businesses destroyed and public spaces in disarray. Many assume France will weather this season and emerge into spring, but they may be sleepwalking into a winter that lasts for decades, possibly even centuries. The riots will quiet down in the short term, but the underlying problems won't disappear, and more will recur. If left to continue and no corrective action is taken, wealth and talent will leave, the tax base will shrink, economic opportunities will deteriorate, and future generations will inherit an even more fractured country.

Over on Twitter/X, a financial friend points out something to be keenly aware of that most Americans continue to sleep on. I’d suggest reading it:

It took a year of me living abroad to really understand that most educated people in the US are living in a bubble. There is a lack of seriousness/willingness to dismiss any fears around the emergence of socialist ideals in America as it’s easier to call someone an alarmist boomer or say it’s just a problem for the 1% in big cities like NYC. My fear is that’s how things start. An increasingly alarming number of younger people & non-finance professionals I talk to think socialism has serious merit.

As someone who spends a lot of time in Paris, it’s extremely sad to see the riots & the damage they caused all over France. The worst part is the educated people who say even though this was not the *real* point of the protests, the conditions that precipitated it (inflation/lack of affordability, strained public resources etc) essentially guaranteed the outcome, ie “the ends justify the means”. Btw this is what socialist policies & unchecked globalism eventually descend into.

France is the blueprint for what a massive welfare state looks like. The overt results are what your algorithm is currently feeding you. The more pernicious, subtle effects are that kids in school are told there are limits to their ambitions. If you talk to French people, you come to realize that functional mediocrity is an acceptable baseline for them bc this is effectively what they were taught. This is obviously in sharp contrast to what makes America great. For those who think socialism has a place in the American political discourse, be careful what you wish for -- & keep in mind France is a bit smaller than the size of Texas & has 20% the population of the US.

France already spends roughly 57% of its GDP through government, with social spending around 30% of GDP. It has one of the most generous welfare systems of any country and supposedly the answer to their problems is just a bit more redistribution. Like giving a drug addict more supply, it only makes things worse. The tragedy is that rioting over inflation and the cost of living by burning stores and destroying businesses only makes both worse. Fiscal problems become social problems, which create more fiscal problems, and the cycle continues. The demand for “more” will never end.

This is coming to America if you let it. These people do not value civilization like you and I do, they are demoralized enough to join an orgiastic mob only interested in tearing things down. Everything is simply part of the revolution and to be cast aside in the name of “the cause” which has no respect for our culture and civilized norms.

The UK and the rest of Europe should take note. If they don’t wake up en masse and act with urgency, it risks losing something it may never get back. For people who live in France or any part of EU with conflict or degrowth, the question is simple: is it worth it to gamble your kid’s future on the hopes that one day things will somehow work themselves out? We obviously hope for a better outcome, but hope is not a strategy. We’ll find out in our lifetimes just how far parts of the EU will deteriorate, or if they can right the ship. In the meantime, it’s all genuinely sad to watch.

Bonus: the WSJ has a posted similar story here, and has a quick video on the situation here expanding on what we’ve said above.

I previously said we needed Twitter/X now more than ever, that Twitter/X is not dead, and everyone who predicted that was wrong. Of course every time we say things like this we get some angry emails and replies by people who rage quit Twitter because some deeply biased, untrustworthy media told them to, or so-called “experts” said it’s not a “safe space” (as if you’re a little child and need to be told where to participate online).

Anyway, it’s great to see John Gruber from Daring Fireball post basically the same thing I’ve been saying for years, in X Once Again Marks the Spot:

You may not like it that X has re-found its footing under Elon Musk’s ownership, but it has. I’m citing Apple executives here but they’re far from alone. There are hundreds of interesting people and accounts I follow that post on X very regularly and do not post anywhere else at all…

The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator. If you believe the world is falling apart and doomed only to get worse, that our obvious and real problems cannot be surmounted, X is not the platform for you. If you think the world is full of fun and amazing people and things, that humanity’s defining feature is our collective ability to solve any problem, that the only time better to be alive than today is tomorrow, it might be.

If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back!” On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis” — by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts Pikachu videos. These people have either lost their minds or refuse to check their prior assumptions. (Most of the ones who chime in about it publicly are the lost-their-minds types.)

Many posts on this blog are actually in a way, about these precise types of people who have also lost their minds a bit. We’re trying to get everyone back to a sane place in the middle, with rational thought and less emotional responses to everything. I think it’s working as we see normal liberal media types like Gruber post stories like this. People are honestly tired of living in a looney tunes world.

Even far left influencer Taylor Lorenz says Twitter/X is back which really puts a hole in the entire “it’s only conservatives there.” Zuck is posting AI announcements. Jensen Huang is sharing thoughts on the future of work. TBPN built and sold a 9-figure daily tech show basically off the back of the Twitter algo. Startups are acquiring new users and spreading memes. People from all across the political spectrum engage with my ideas daily, and many of them are very intelligent and high quality.

There’s just a ton of upside to be part of that community: I’ve personally gotten new business from it many times, professional opportunities, new friendships and coffee with interesting people I otherwise wouldn’t have met. It's a bit rough around the edges but it's always been that way, that’s not new, the authenticity and realness is actually what makes it compelling. Those of us who have been posting to the internet since the early days appreciate this. There’s just not that many places like Twitter left that feel like a proper forum and actually alive.

I want to come back to the point that all the people who declared it "dead" were wrong. Many will of course continue to say this, and not admit it’s still an important starting point of culture and conversations. I’ve seen very few of these folk admit they were wrong, because they’re the types incapable of doing that (actually something I respect when I see it). But the site is not only more important than ever from a culture perspective, but also has peak user numbers, as Nikita is the best in the business at social growth and has spent time helping turn the ship around. Just two cool features they launched under his leadership are a country location feature, so you can easily see if an account is a spammer from a far-off place, and Community Notes, where if someone posts false information the community corrects them. Both greatly improve the information fidelity from users you don’t know. No other major social network has rolled these features, but they should.

Also, a lot of people say “X is toxic” but I use it all the time and it’s not more or less toxic than Facebook, Instagram or any other social product. I actually find LinkedIn far more distasteful simply because it has so much AI spam and people pitching me useless products and services, which is more annoying than anything I see on Twitter. I also don’t think some people really are cut out for a raw internet forum like Twitter is, perhaps private group chats are better for them. Maybe they “put up” with it during the Jack days because the algo leaned left and so catered to their preferences. But now, at least to me, their team has done a great job and the algo presents a more balanced view of the world and provides many perspectives. I always find it the most compelling place online other than Substack (because, well, long form is still best). Also interestingly, I find it the place most willing to defend the Jewish people, so always feel a bit gaslit when I see people proclaim it’s somehow the “Nazi” site. Ironically, these same people post on another website that is zealously supportive of and march alongside (much larger) modern groups who are actively antisemitic and would actually align with the Nazis. As a Jew I’m used to being gaslit on these things of course, and am acutely aware of the moral inversion of modernity as I’m subjected to it daily.

Anyway, make sure you follow me on Twitter/X here if you don’t already.

Most people in Silicon Valley and the tech industry at large have AI psychosis. It’s a real, documented phenomenon, you can read about here. AI is all they think about 24/7, they’re so investment and automation-pilled they’re incapable of processing anything else at this point in the market cycle. All must fit into AI whether it be art, business, their social life, name it. It’s truly a mass psychosis event.

But for fun, let’s take a second and imagine someone fully reliant on AI. On their own, they can’t book somewhere to go to dinner without their agent. They certainly can’t write an essay themselves. They can’t play an instrument or compose a song. They can’t pick a place to meet a friend for coffee. They don’t know what to do on a Saturday without asking for help. Do you even like this person? Do they sound completely helpless? I’ve described where this goes before.

This brings us to the latest trend we’re being pushed: to use AI agents to do simple tasks that are already convenient and frequently enjoyable like book a flight, hotel or dinner reservation, things like this. These tasks are easily accomplished on the web right now, today. They take seconds, sometimes a minute or two, and have interfaces designed for the specific task. Unless you’re under duress, or simply do not care where you sleep or how you travel, a trip for instance should take a small amount of time and consideration, that’s good. You want to look at photos, read reviews, daydream a bit …act, you know, human. A voice or chat interface is in my opinion inferior to visually seeing all options (not just options the AI decides to show) presented in one window, with another window for your own research or context. As an adult I have a workstation with two monitors, plenty of screen real estate. I do not require an infantilized view, and since I am not cognitively impaired also do not require a machine to make decisions for me. Notable, I also don’t use mobile to accomplish these tasks, which are tasks suited for an office. Other people have no boundaries nor opinions on computing best practices and simply use mobile for everything. They’re measurably less happy by the way. I can see why they’d want to use AI instead, as they already don’t really like computing, do so without thought for ergonomics, sophisticated decision-making etc. Perhaps some percentage of the population doesn’t really want to do anything.

I’ve watched for years as the tech industry manically promotes the next thing merely because it’s new. But as agents are pushed on us, AI is especially pernicious because it presents a pretty large ceding of agency to machines. And while I want machines to do some things for me, I don’t want them to do everything. I personally disliked the time I even had a human personal assistant to book travel at a previous job. I prefer to do things myself (I also don’t pay someone else to work on my yard, aka get exercise outside for me, that’s enjoyable, too). I want to live my own life, and that involves being capable and practiced at things, and more importantly, the one who decides the details. You start to lose something when you outsource too much of this. There’s a reason we encourage older people to stay socially, physically, and mentally active, and why cognitive stimulation is incorporated into care for people as they age. Using your brain, making decisions, remembering things, and learning skills are all forms of mental engagement. What happens when we systematically remove those little opportunities for agency and effort from everyday life, across an entire society? I don’t think we’ve really thought through what that means.

The irony here is so much of Silicon Valley talks about the importance of agency, and yet they themselves are building products that remove it from the user. A bit of ‘agency for me, not for thee,’ and here, they are happy to become the intermediary in your life. They think you’ll thoughtlessly accept this. But I’m willing to bet you find the people with the fewest things to do are also the least happy. They have the most time to sit around and contemplate their mortality instead of actually accomplishing anything or be active participants in their own life. It’s literally the formula for unhappiness! You can listen to these same people on podcasts talk endlessly about seeking happiness in their own life and the lengths they go for “optimizing their routine.” But everyone else who still has some tasks and meaning is already happy. No pharmaceuticals, psychedelics, life hacks or self-help books required, it’s just not a thing that needs work. Even people at the highest echelons of wealth like Markus Persson who sold his company to Microsoft for $2.5 billion ended up depressed and empty when he was left with nothing to do. I really don’t see how we don’t see a similar rise of nihilism driven by AI if we allow it to sufficiently live people’s lives for them.

And this isn't limited to the big decisions in life, for sure the same thing happens with taste. I personally don’t find interesting music, friends to follow, or much else in the way of creative work through machine-selected choices (algos or AI). I like to select what to subscribe to. I go to the physical vinyl shop and browse records in all sorts of different sections and genres. I browse Beatport by release date in the category without any other signals, and certainly don’t let any large tech firm dictate playlists for me (my collection is local, but I also hand-make sets on SoundCloud). All this helps me resist slop world, and not have machines dictate my life and taste. This is important.

We’ll for sure see more latent cultural functions of technologies emerge as AI does more things for people here. The important thing that no one talks about in these discussions, and the AI permabulls don’t understand is tradeoffs are real, and rule everything around us. They also don’t really think about the concept of diminishing returns, and honestly everything around us is already pretty efficient. I personally would rather spend an extra few seconds on tasks where I get to decide specificity vs let a machine or company decide. In a way this is no different than letting another form of government control your life: it might be okay today, but what happens when people you don’t agree with run the show? And anyway, are you really so busy you want every small decision outsourced? It would ultimately leave you empty.

One other interesting comment here is the gaslighting, or maybe just odd commentary. I posted about how I prefer a visual UI to text or voice interface here, and you can read some of the responses. I think the most interesting ones are from people who automatically assume every new way of computing with less personal control is superior (conveniently, this also pumps their stocks or is beneficial for their startup). Everyone is just talking their book here. The other are the people who, like clapping seals, simply applaud a ceding of agency to machines. The funny part is I actually do things like travel more than they do (many times per year), whereas most engineering nerds with the strongest opinions on technology actually live a different, stranger existence. It’s certainly going to be an interesting battle of normal people vs nerds in the future. Having sat in the room at large technology companies before, I just hope they occasionally do still focus on the user. Perhaps our only hope here is open source AI remains legal and we do not end up at the whim of one or two large companies.

You can imagine a future where all control is taken from us, and it’s just you and the chatbot. You can ask it for anything, and it will return what it deems, based on whatever digital signals it has the “correct” choice for you. Perhaps it will be the right choice, but perhaps you’ll simply accept it because that’s what’s presented. You won’t question the price, which could be determined based on an estimation of your net worth instead of a market rate. How would you know, everything is abstracted away. Your hotel might be fine, but probably won’t be unexpectedly in a more active part of town and cause you to visit some nightlife you wouldn’t have experienced. Of course, serendipity is mostly managed out of your life here. Maybe it’ll program it in by suggesting a new video game. Something to sell you. But the magic and chance of the world ever dwindles. Your agency shrinks. Your life continues to be more outsourced. Are you sure you want this future, anon?

“Nothing offends people more than the truth” is an axiom I think couldn’t be more descriptive of the modern world.

A post I ran a bit ago (doesn’t matter which) where I didn’t even share my own position on an issue and simply described some events, elicited an, let’s say interesting email or two. But the behavioral science nerd in me finds it fascinating and not bothersome when people respond oddly, both because I’m on the spectrum and have been sharing thoughts online a long time. We’re at a point many lose their minds if they disagree with you on something, even when there’s plenty of data supporting the side they seem to be upset with. There is actually a very simple test you can run on any idea: simply post a basic truth on something like 2 + 2 = 4 and you can find out who is irrational pretty fast. It works! Try it sometime with your social graph, there’s any number of objectively truthful things we aren’t supposed to notice or comment on.

I actually think the core difference between myself and some of the, let’s call them “devout religious” (post)modern authoritarian secular crowd is I am willing to investigate ideas and decide for myself. I read my friend’s and peer’s thoughts online, click links, check out their citations, read their sources (if they have any, note the bad ones are typically just ‘appeal to authority’ arguments). But I can tell you many will not reciprocate if the idea is something that is part of their cult’s mythology. It’s actually so cult-like, they are worried for me if I share an idea that doesn’t agree with how they think. I even get notes of concern that I might be cancelled or “the optics are bad” for not thinking just like them. It’s crazy! I’ve published ideas online since the 90s, sharing my perspectives of the world from first principles and really only since the pandemic have people had this response. It’s novel and notable.

Let me tell you guys something. If “the optics are bad” or “I couldn’t be hired again” for merely sharing stories with links to such edgy citations as science journals, publicly available raw data or simply other interesting voices in the world from people who are in my observation super reasonable, while asking my community to have calm discourse, I’m happy to be excluded from any organization that doesn’t want that. It’s self-selecting (and honestly pretty hilarious). I stand by everything I’ve written here and on the old blog. I also don’t argue in bad faith even if I’m sometimes direct. I even take the time to reply to commenters and clarify thinking if they disagree or seem upset.

It’s just super clear to me many people who don’t even regularly practice religion have become dogmatic in their beliefs, interestingly people who even in recent history would be guided by science, data and reason. I say this as someone who grew up a small amount of religious, became not at all religious, and recently re-discovered my faith. I understand all sides of the trade here pretty well, especially at 40. But my faith is about God and the universe, not political dogma. God actually encourages me to seek out truth even if it’s painful.

I saw an interesting story related to this recently in The Argument and that Jeremiah Johnson did a quick thread about on Twitter/X here talking about a big part of the problem, and this actually inspired today’s post. He describes how certain ideas can become “totemic beliefs” that people place outside normal cost-benefit analysis. Once that happens, you don’t think your own side (or for leftists, certain “oppressed” groups, sometimes even murderers or terrorists) can do anything wrong. Arguments become your tribal soldiers, and admitting your side was wrong starts to feel like betraying the group. This is the antithesis of liberalism by the way. Your north star should be base reality, not a tribe.

Anyway, it’s just an interesting observation as someone who has blogged on a variety of topics for 2 decades that you can spend all the time in the world adding links, citations and references to support your point, is many (most) readers will never click any of it let alone consider it. It’s basically just you reading research and citations for your own benefit and the other small % of nerds who actually will follow it. The majority of people will simply read, continue thinking about what they already had in mind before, and are unwilling to consider different perspectives or even just new data. Which is kinda surprising for people willing to read textual stories, but I suppose that’s why fiction is far more popular than non-fiction (actually saw a crazy stat about this in a recent post on the non-fiction book market collapsing, noting a few weeks ago the entire hardcover nonfiction bestseller list sold 42,000 copies, whereas just the top two bestselling fiction hardcovers the same week sold 52,000 copies). But you’re obviously a non-fiction reader. Perhaps the most interesting question to ask yourself: what would actually change your mind on a topic? If the answer is “nothing,” then you’re not really evaluating an idea anymore, you’re defending some kind of identity.

Interestingly, if these same types of tribally pathological people don’t like you, they will not just ad-hominem you (which whatever, who really cares) these are people with anger issues and obviously are unbalanced, who will try and attack your personal integrity and even attempt to get you fired or cancelled. But again, if you are honest, if you share opinions and perspectives that are morally aligned with the basic concepts of Western civilization then really they’re the ones who will ultimately look crazy. I personally never worry about this, and neither should you. And remember, it took 20 years for people to sober up after the Salem Witch Trials. Of course you could say I’m wrong on something, but again I think the difference is I’m willing to calmly consider the other side. My detractors hold pitchforks and I sit calmly with a cup of coffee. It’s pretty obvious if you’re a pitchfork person or not.

One final comment here, if you believe modern society is infinitely “oppressive” or “evil” and unfixable you’re wrong. We’re the most free we ever have been, things are the most fair, and a lot of what people are asking for now would actually make things far worse. I feel like people just don’t grasp the concept of diminishing returns. As Fukuyama warned at the end of the Cold War, once liberalism has won, people will start turning against the very peace and prosperity it created simply because they need something to struggle against:

“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they then will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”

This quote aptly describes at least one major pathology I’m speaking of in today’s post.

Anyway, it’s honestly surprising how dogmatic some people are on certain topics in modernity, even when there’s a whole host of research sharing multiple perspectives. Maybe the most surprising thing about the modern world for me.

I previously wrote about how the left and right have been infected with the same disease in a different wrapper. My friend Sean sent me a recent story on what the latest is with the woke right and wanted me to talk about this topic again, so let’s try and help America once more.

An important caveat up front: I don't actually think the woke right is meaningfully conservative. On the contrary, they are spiritually leftist (note: leftists aren’t actually liberal either, don’t let the word fool you). The obsession with racial identity, desire for more government power, struggle sessions, hatred of Jews, etc are the same impulses that drove the woke left. The wrapper is different, but the operating system is remarkably similar.

Before we talk more about the woke right, it’s important to talk about the far or woke left briefly to see the behavior pattern (see the diagram above for examples of what both groups have in common). The DSA (which is, of course, not representative of all Dems, so I still don’t understand why they let them in their party) is terminally woke and will pretend to moderate, but is simply biding their time. AOC just went on record saying “woke 1 was crazy” but then immediately pivoted back to her woke ways by rallying to the defense of a 9/11 truther/antisemite (see the Venn digram above). She’s of course still woke, as are many aspiring politicians who seem to not even like the country they live in. But the average American is not woke, and honestly tired of when left does things like calling everything they don’t like “racist” or everyone they disagree with “fascist” etc. Many leftists genuinely view the world like this:

Seeing the left act like this, one would hope that the right would see it’s a bad idea. Unfortunately on the other side of the horseshoe, there are also extremists, and this brings us to some stories you may have read about the woke right. See this recent story from Noah on the topic that Sean linked us. I saw others but I’m not going to link them, because they also did the above chart which is not discourse or dialog I think is appropriate or helpful. Still, the people I saw covering this topic otherwise disagree on an enormous amount, yet they broadly agree that this fringe of the right is real, exists within conservative politics, and should be confronted, lest the right suffers from a similar pathology as the left. Again, the main thing to take away is the woke right isn’t a competing conservative philosophy, it’s simply leftist identity politics just with some preference differences. In the Republican stronghold of Florida, woke right candidate James Fishback received 10.48% of the vote in the 2026 Republican primary for Florida governor. This is still concerningly high, but it’s still way different from the DSA candidates who are actually winning elections in NYC, Seattle and other places where there’s a strong, highly educated (read: indoctrinated) population. It’s notable if the left doesn’t stop doing its own identity politics, this stuff isn’t going to go away on the right.

If you actually look at where voters have moved, most of the craziness has gone left, with a lesser % on the right in recent years. There’s many charts that look just like this, and the issue that actually triggered today’s discussion was immigration which is in this data (more on that in a minute).

But normal Americans hate all of it. They don’t want politicians on either side obsessed with racial identity. They don’t want any form of socialism, although if they feel like the government can’t help but spend infinite money on citizens, it should probably go to Americans. They want leaders who don’t think the West is “oppressive or evil.” They want lower taxes and less government control. They don’t want everyone obsessed over race all the time, something the left did to us in the 2010s you can see documented here (everything was trending fine before, the identity politics stuff is what started breaking our country). They want us to build, love capitalism and the state mostly leaving them alone.

Still, in super leftist places, many citizens are already indoctrinated and the socialists could easily continue to win. They’ll then suffer the same pain San Francisco did before recently sobering up and moving to the center (no one reads history, so people have to repeat mistakes). It’s all just terrible policy as Seattle is going through now, and ends up being a war on builders as we’ve talked about before and others have documented. I’ve been happier in Texas, a place that actually builds every day than I was when I left California (but always root for our California friends to sober up, and hold no ill feelings towards them). Bless America for having 50 states (50 experiments) where if your state becomes too socialist you are free to move, there’s no walls holding you in …yet.

As for national elections, the country will go with whatever party is most successful at jettisoning the crazies, or they feel is less insane. I wrote about this in 2024, but many liberal friends still can’t understand why they lost last time, because think they were saner. Religions have a hard time seeing perspective. If the right did in fact adopt at the party level, at scale, a different flavor of woke I think they’ll be sealing their own fate too. The fact that it’s losing locally shows how unpopular it is.

The discussion that people are mad about this week is immigration, which we should always be having a national debate about. The appropriate amount is obviously not 0 but it’s also not infinite, borders are important for every country and they should be enforced (without this, we don’t even have a country). Obama in 2006 was correct on this topic, and I think sane Democrats and Republicans would agree with what’s said here, but for years you weren’t even allowed to opine on this topic without being pro infinite immigration (and called all sorts of names if you disagreed). Those days are over, so we should be able to go back to proper discourse and find a middle ground.

To wrap, I’m once again asking everyone to simply be normal. And America will ultimately at the national level vote for whichever side is more normal. If you want your party to win, plead with them to eject the crazy people. And yes, as The Atlantic notes, we should judge politicians by the company they keep.

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.