Was I about to lose to an inanimate object?

There I was, in the gym staring at a 100 pound dumbbell. I had just failed on a chin-up with that thing strapped to my waist. Normally, I would be doing anywhere from 3-5 reps with relative ease but today it wasn’t happening.

I had just gotten back from a 3 week vacation, where I didn’t exercise. The weights were feeling heavier than usual. As I stood there, I contemplated whether to reduce the weight or try again.

Science based lifters would have said I needed to ramp back up to my usual pre-vacation loads, so I should have taken 70-80% of my normal weight. This wasn’t a competition and nobody was watching, these reps had no particular consequence. Yet in a way, they meant everything.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, it was just me in the frame. It was too late now. If I didn’t complete the set as intended, I would be giving up. If I gave up, I would have allowed the weight to snatch my soul.

This dumbbell had no feelings, and wasn’t trying to actively resist me. My competition, was my own mindset. There are two kinds of people. One group believes that their fate is preordained, and life is something that just happens to them. Others believe their will shapes the universe into what they want it to be. What kind of person did I want to be in that moment?

I strapped the weight back on the belt, and banged out 3 ugly reps.

Anybody who has ever achieved success had moments like these. Faced with an obstacle they could have advanced or retreated. If we know their names, it’s because they chose to advance.

Success largely comes from sticking with your mission until the right opportunity presents itself. Even critics that dismiss success as a function of luck or randomness, must also accept the longer a participants stays in the game, the greater their chances of receiving good fortune. That’s why if you want to succeed, it largely comes down to how long you’re willing to pursue your ambition. This longevity is dictated by two things: morale & pain tolerance. Both are functions of mindset.

Today’s article explains why the greats manage their mindset to spend their life chasing their personal legends and quests.

In case you missed them, here are some other recent articles to check out:

Longevity Matters

Who was the better military commander Napoleon Bonaparte or Joan of Arc?

Nobody would consider this a serious question. How can you compare a military career lasting under two years, against the track record of arguably the most famous military leaders in history? Napoleon went from infantry soldier to Emperor in under 20 years. If he had died two years into his military career, nobody would know his name, and the history of France and Europe would have been very different.

It takes time to do great things, often years or decades of persistent work before the break through arrives. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they laid bricks every hour for decades and centuries. That’s why it lasted 500 years, 1,500 if you count Constantinople. Centuries later, we still think Rome daily.

Why shouldn’t we? Rome is responsible for many of the underpinnings of Western Civilization. There are still many relevant lessons for us today, such as expansion. How far do you keep pushing after you’ve already experienced success? What do you do once you’re out of Beginner’s Luck and each incremental gain takes pain and sacrifice?

Pain Tolerance

Can you name somebody that reached the top of their domain without pain?

Some make it appear effortless, but don’t be fooled. In any competitive endeavor, nobody that’s ever won consistently did so without countless hours of discomfort. Before he was tennis great or a fashion icon, Andre Agassi, hit thousands of shots each day in his backyard, while his father yelled at him. Andre hated it, but nobody could argue with the end result. Even Federer, who was noted for how smooth and effortless his game looked, couldn’t reach the pinnacle of the sport until he took his training more seriously.

They had to. They were going against other professionals, that wanted to win as much as they did. Differences in natural ability net out, as competition improves. All pro athletes are born with natural athleticism; in some sports that alone is sufficient for a top amateur career. Once you reach the pro ranks, everybody is going to be athletic, and skill increasingly dominates.

This isn’t limited to sports. It’s possible to be a top high school student without studying endless hours if you have high intellectual horse power. Once you reach an elite university, all your classmates will have been top students (besides a few legacy and suspicious scholarship admits). To be a top student at an elite university, the gap in raw intelligence won’t be as pronounced, you will need to work as hard as everyone else.

Elon Musk isn’t the smartest man to have ever lived, but he’s one of the most successful. SpaceX didn’t come to be because he knew more about propulsion. Tesla didn’t become the leader in electric vehicles because Musk had superior insight into the auto industry. Musk was successful because of his ability to tolerate pain. To this day, he works longer hours with more intensity than almost anybody else. If you think this is overblown, I invite you to read Walter Isaacson’s biography, or listen to anyone who has worked with him.

Many of the companies Musk competed against were bloated and led by empty suits/pant suits, not built to handle pain or pressure. In their defense, it’s hard to rally employees. Most big companies aren’t built that way, bureaucracy designed to insulate pain, makes them weak.

You can’t expect even the most motivated employees, to tolerate pain for the same duration as a founder/CEO, it’s not their life mission. A leader’s job is to help their followers tolerate pain. They do this, my maintaining good morale.

Morale

Alexander was defeated without having lost a battle. Despite all the success, his men’s faltering morale is what ultimately ended his campaign. Sure, the copious amounts of wine, poisoned or not, didn’t help but if the booze didn’t get him, his men’s refusal to continue his conquest would have.

Alexander’s pain tolerance was legendary. His track record, unquestionable. Toughness aside, when it comes down to it, as a leader, he needed his men to follow him. He asked a lot, and he got a lot out of them. If they mutinied early in the campaign, Alexander wouldn’t have been remembered. He couldn’t have inspired Napoleon, Charles de Gaulle and countless other military geniuses, that would eventually learn the war ends once their side loses the will to keep fighting.

Some people can maintain good spirits in any conditions but most can’t. Coaches and leaders are valuable if they can motivate people to tolerate pain for extended stretches. Agassi hated tennis for most of his life, his career would have ended early if not for the team around him that kept him from quitting.

I worked with many gifted athletes that never panned out as professionals. Some would blame injuries or bad luck. The honest and introspective amongst them would admit, it’s because they fell out of love with their sport. With the right motivation, you can bounce back from tough breaks, you just need to be willing to keep going in the face of adversity. This doesn’t guarantee success, but quitting guarantees failure.

Great leaders know how to keep their followers motivated. Successful CEOs need their teams to tolerate more pain than their competition. Coaches need their athletes to keep pushing, even when they don’t want to. All political leaders experience setbacks, but they still need to energize their supporters to achieve their agenda.

The best way to do this is to deliver on promises. If you promise your troops glory, you better win great battles. Great employees will always have options, if you want them to stay, you need to give them confidence you can deliver. Nothing kills motivation faster than overpromising and underdelivering. A leader only has so many chances, before their followers decide they can’t trust their assurances.

For individual activities, the follower you need to convince, is yourself. I could have skipped that set of chin ups or took a lower weight, but then I would have been disappointed in myself. The more this happens, the less trust and confidence I’ll have in my abilities, and the worse I’ll be. If your goal is to pursue your life mission for a long time, you need to avoid this line of thinking; it’s a death spiral.

The successful people you see avoided giving up. They were able to keep a long term view, while tolerating pain and maintaining proper morale during their life’s mission.

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If this truism confuses you, it should. This logic only makes sense to con artists. Their act relies on deception, to others but most importantly themselves.

Deception happens everywhere. In the dating world, on social media, in professional settings but the highest stake deception relates to financial fraud to the tune of hundreds of billions each year.

You don’t understand banking or fintech unless you can identify all the ways a malicious actor can exploit them. Few people understand the financial system.

Most remember the film Catch Me If You Can as a cat-and-mouse game between two men who get it. Frank Abagnale Jr., played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a teenager who manages to defraud banks of millions of dollars before his 19th birthday. Carl Hanratty, played by Tom Hanks, is the FBI agent assigned to track him down.

At its core, the film is about duplicity. Abagnale is the walking embodiment of the George Costanza maxim: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Combined with a strong instinct for identifying vulnerabilities and a burning desire to succeed where his father failed, he is a dangerous and highly successful con artist.

Outside of duplicity and the relationship between Abagnale and Hanratty, the film is a lesson on how the banking system works and how it used to rely on trust. As banking has gone global, fraud has become more widespread and it has become harder for financial institutions (FIs) to trust customers.

The late 20th century was centralization. Taking individual discretion out of local branch managers hands, instead putting it in software credit scoring systems (mostly just Excel). The crypto solution is decentralization and transparency. Both approaches have failed thus far, because fraudsters keep finding new vulnerabilities.

As long as money, incentives, and human weakness remain part of the system, there will always be Frank Abagnales. This article is about why fraud never disappears, despite the financial systems best efforts.

In case you missed them, here are some other recent articles to check out:

What are Con Artists?

While often depicted as attractive and oozing with charisma, confidence men and women come in various forms. Methods can vary but con artists look to exploit vulnerabilities, often psychological, to manipulate people.

To run a successful con, the victim needs to buy into the story they are being sold.

If you saw a beggar on the street asking for money while dressed in designer clothing, it wouldn’t align with your mental model of what a beggar would look like and you would question their legitimacy.

On the flip side, in Tenet, The Protagonist needs to convince people he’s a billionaire but as Michael Caine points out, Brooks Brothers won’t cut it.

Like an actor, con artists needs to walk, talk and dress the part. The better you do this, the more believable you will be, making it easier for people to accept your story.

There are countless complicated schemes, hustles and plays they might run to achieve this aim but it all comes down to deception, in order to manipulate.

In the case of Catch Me If You Can, Abagnale’s schemes are fairly straightforward. He identifies easy marks, often young single women and distracts them with his charm. At first he poses as an airline pilot with the aim of cashing fraudulent checks, amassing millions of dollars (in 1960s dollars). Then he decides to pose as a doctor then later a lawyer, all to impress a girl he meets.

In reality, the facade he’s creating is not to impress her, but to feed his own growing ego. The more his schemes work and he evades capture, the more infallible he believes he is. Fraudsters and liars never quit while they’re ahead, they just keep building more elaborate lies until they eventually blow up and get caught. This is true for Frank Abagnale, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and countless others.

Common Types of Financial Fraud

Abagnale engaged in cheque forgery, Elizabeth Holmes lied to investors and customers, SBF used customer deposits to fund trades made by his hedge fund.

The application is different but these are all examples of financial fraud. They deceived and manipulated people to enrich themselves. To perform their heist, they all told stories their victims wanted to hear. Bank tellers want to provide fast and efficient service to wealthy bank customers. Investors want to back category defining companies. Abagnale, Holmes and SBF all walked, talked and dressed the part of somebody that fit the model of what their victims believed they would be like.

Abagnale wore fancy clothes and drove expensive cars. Holmes did a creepy Steve Jobs impersonation while SBF positioned himself as the young math genius, saving humanity from the evils of capitalism with effective altruism.

These crimes happened in different decades, and despite the banking system getting increasingly strict on fighting fraud it didn’t matter. Although regulations and technology has changed, at the end of the day, human judgement comes into play and this can be manipulated.

Banking Then, Now and In The Future

Banking has always been less about moving money and more about trust. The old system relied heavily on paper trails, local knowledge, and human discretion. Checks moved through routing systems and branch staff knew their customers, because suspicious activity had to be caught before it was processed. It was very high touch and personal but unfortunately slow, inefficient, and vulnerable to manipulation. In Catch Me If You Can, Hanratty explains in the 1960s, if somebody cashed a cheque in New York assigned to the California Federal Reserve, it would take two weeks to confirm the money was actually there. All Abagnale had to do was change a digit in the routing number and charm a leggy bank teller.

Modern banking replaced much of that with wires, ACH, card networks, and digital payments. Money moves faster, at a larger scale with less friction, but to enable this trust was industrialized. Instead of a branch manager making a judgment call, software scores the risk, compliance teams review the flags, and customers are forced through KYC, AML, and endless verification steps. Banking became more efficient by centralizing decision making to fewer people and financial actors.

This didn’t eliminate fraud; there’s an estimated ~$500 billion committed each year. It can take years to uncover these criminal actions, the real number can be much higher. Even if they’ve reduced paper, scammers have adjusted by hacking software systems or convincing gullible people to pay money for useless online courses, often taught by young dudes living in their parents basement. Fraud and Social engineering lives on.

The next shift is trying to further automate trust. Born out of dissatisfaction with the banking sector, Crypto aims to decentralize financial actors, and eliminate the need for trust, via transparency. Crypto and stablecoins promise faster settlement, at lower costs, on programmable rails. Stablecoins are quickly becoming must haves for financial actors, with many large players trying to quickly offer them to customers.

Now autonomous payments aim to take that further, with software agents transacting directly on behalf of users or businesses. This theoretically further reduces the need for individual trust, but so far Crypto has not managed to eliminate fraud, and it’s only a matter of time before somebody figures out how to hack autonomous payments.

This is because wherever money moves, someone will try to game the system.

Why Fraud Will Never Disappear

Every financial system is, at heart, a machine built to process trust at scale. That was true during Abagnale’s time and it’s true now. The infrastructure changes. The game does not.

Catch Me If You Can endures because it captures something permanent. Abagnale is not just exploiting a flaw in 1960s cheque processing. He is exploiting a flaw in human beings. People want the story to be true. They trust uniforms, credentials, status, confidence, and whatever best fits their mental model of legitimacy. That was true for bank tellers then, and investors in Theranos and FTX now.

Despite all the technical advancements, fraud survives every upgrade. This is because good sober judgement cannot be automated for every scheme, hustle and play that con artists can dream up. The method and applications will change, but fraud will never disappear because the incentives are too great. It’s will only a matter of time before the next Abagnale shows up.

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Roger Federer in his Dartmouth commencement speech pointed out he only won 54% of points during his tennis career, yet that slight advantage resulted in him winning 80% of his matches. Maintaining this over a 20+ year career that includes 20 Grand Slams, is why he’s one of the greatest ever.

Pretty much every moment of his life until he retired was dedicated to the sport. This is the case for any professional or almost made it athletes. Yet from this group, only a sub-group will be remembered after they retire, and even a smaller group will continue to garner respect generations later.

What separates these groups isn’t athleticism, skills or even hard work. It’s passion. Unbridled willingness to dedicate yourself fully to being the best at your craft for decades. Many will earnestly believe they have it, but few are willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to reach the very top. Even with this, it only matters if they win. Nobody cares about your pain and sacrifice unless it amounts to something.

If you want to be great, you need to win more than anyone else. To do this you will be propelled by two emotions: Fear and Love. Both are necessary, but the formula is delicate. The absence of one or the surplus of another will be a hindrance. You need to find the right formula, and get lucky if you hope to be great.

Nobody personifies this better than another tennis great, Andre Agassi. His autobiography Open gave incredible insights into the psychology of being a winner.

Fear gets you to the arena but love is what keeps you there.

Keep reading if you want to learn how to be great.

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

The Role of Fear

Andre Agassi is one of the best tennis players ever but for most of his life he hated tennis. He became the number ranked player in the world and won Grand Slams despite not even enjoying the activity he dedicated every waking moment to. This was only possible because of fear. Fear is also a proxy for insecurity.

As early as 6 years old, his father made him hit over 2,000 shots every day. Not softies either, he had to return shots fired at him from a souped up ball gun. Agassi didn’t want to do it, but he was afraid of his father, Emmanuel. The senior Agassi decided Andre was going to be a professional tennis player from the moment he was born. Emmanuel was a tough man who never knew love, and he took out the shortcomings from his own life on his son. This is a consistent theme among many greats.

His rational was that if Andre trained harder, played more tennis than anybody else and had the right coaching over time he would become the best player in the world. He beat the idea of perfection into him. Andre had to win every point and every set or his dad would yell at him.

Whether Andre was on board with his plan was irrelevant. He pushed Andre very hard and served as his coach until Emmanuel sent Andre to a tennis academy noted for its strenuous training regiment. This academy produced many professionals, but Andre was the star pupil to emerge.

He didn’t want to move across the country to a tennis academy or be isolated from his friends and family which were his only oasis from the sport. It didn’t matter, his father decided he was going to do this, so he went. The training Andre did put him ahead of everyone else, who were among the best young tennis players in the country.

This dominance carried over to tournaments, where he was beating professionals as a teenage amateur. He turned professional at 15 and never looked back. Within a few years he was among the top ranked players and regularly competing for Grand Slams. Despite the success, he never felt at peace or enjoyed tennis. His entire life he played tennis because he had to, not because he wanted to. His father decided for him he would be a tennis player and once he turned pro, he had no other career opportunities as a high school dropout.

Fear of his father and failure were enough to carry him to an elite level because of the work he put in. However, he didn’t become great until he discovered love.

(The only love he had was for his hair, which was unfortunately balding. Can you blame him?)

The Role of Love

Andre had a tight circle of friends that filled the void left from his father. If not for them, Agassi likely would have flamed out early on. His older brother, childhood best friend, a former Pasteur and his trainer Gil all played critical roles in his professional and mental wellbeing. They took care of everything outside the tennis court.

As his profile grew, Agassi to deal with the pressures of the sport, needed more love that his entourage could bear. He sought romantic relationships. He briefly thought he found it with Brooke Shields, who he would eventually marry, but he quickly realized he was wrong. She didn’t understand him, nor could she help him. If anything, her celebrity profile and lack of interest in tennis made it more difficult for Agassi. Shields was trying to revive her own acting career, and was looking for a similar level of support from Agassi, who wasn't in a position to provide it. What brought them together was their mutual fear of their overbearing parents and failure. They were both lacking love and couldn’t find it in each other. This is why both became depressed and their careers suffered. Agassi persevered though.

(They look happy)

Shortly after splitting from Shields, Agassi found a new objection of his affection. The tennis star Steffi Graf. She had previously ignored his romantic advances and was in a long term relationship, but Andre with encouragement from his team pursued her any way. His pursuit was eventually rewarded and once they started dating, they immediately realized how aligned they were. Steffi was near the end of her career at this point and had nothing left to prove. Graf had been the number one ranked player, won many Grand Slams and knew she would retire as one of the best woman’s players ever, yet one of her greatest contribution to tennis was the counsel she gave Agassi.

When Andre told her how he hated tennis, her response surprised him. She said of course he hated tennis. Nobody enjoyed spending every waking second training, practicing or worrying about what they can/can’t eat, dealing with the media etc. This was a common feeling amongst the professionals. Yet she said he wasn’t acknowledging the parts he loved about tennis.

His entire career he looked at tennis as something he was forced to do and he did it. Perfectionism made him hate tennis. He hated losing points and felt little satisfaction when he won them, since he expected to (sounds like prospect theory).

His approach brought him success without joy, since it felt like an obligation. Their relationship, reinvigorated him at a time when he should have been contemplating retirement. Instead he got a second wind and in his early thirties won a few more Grand Slams and recaptured the number one ranking, ultimately played until he was 35, well past his contemporaries. By this time he had two children and a loving relationship with Graf. He finally had something to play for.

With the shift in mindset of treating his profession as an obligation, rather than a craft he has the privilege of honing, he finally had the right balance between fear and love. It was during those final years, where the fans and sports writers who long wrote him off as a punk and an underachiever, changed their tune and in turn loved Andre too. This further motivated Agassi.

Although near the end his body was barely holding together, he couldn’t let go from the sport he spent such a long time hating. Fear got him to his knees, but love got him to his feet.

Many people start with love for their craft but quickly replace this with fear. This fear can help for a time but once they reach the top of their profession, the difference between the very best and the excellent is so thin, only those that love what they do can ascend. Being able to wake up and find joy in what you do is the not so secret to success.

If you want to be better than everyone else, you need to put in more time, work harder and get very lucky. The more time and hard work you put into your craft, the more luck will be able to find you. You have to remain persistent long enough to give luck a chance. If you don’t love what you do, you will give up too early, eliminating the possibility of luck breaking your way and giving you the outcome that will make you great.

Federer and eventually Agassi both learnt they didn’t need to win every point, perfection wasn’t necessary. Just systemically showing up, giving their best effort and loving the process. This is why they are among the few we will always remember.

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In the series Westworld, visitors knowingly enter a theme park of humanoid robots so convincing that the line between performance and consciousness begins to blur. In The Matrix, humans don’t realize their consciousness is just a projection of a simulated reality from a computer program.

Both stories explore what happens when simulations stop imitating reality and start replacing it. The experience becomes so immersive that participants can’t distinguish what’s constructed from what’s real. Eventually, the simulation no longer references anything outside itself, leaving the participant to accept it as the reality.

ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are trained on large data sets representing our world: text, images, videos, human designed programs etc. As they become more effective, people start using them to create these same representations and their outputs become an increasing share of internet content, software code, and white-collar work. They move from mirroring reality to becoming the models the world conforms to.

Until recently we could watch The Matrix, Westworld and other sci-fi and appreciate them as fiction. As society increasingly relies on AI, we trade our reality for one that more closely resembles theirs.

This is not new. Well before LLMs or the internet, Jean Baudrillard noted that society was shifting from using models to reflect reality, to allowing models to become reality.

His book Simulacres et Simulation (Simulations) published in 1981, inspired many of the ideas embedded within The Matrix but most were too distracted by Keanu Reeves and his impressive kung fu abilities to notice.

LLMs did not start this condition, but they are the latest edition of the Matrix we are creating. This is not another article claiming we live in a simulation; that question is irrelevant. If our reality becomes indistinguishable from a simulation, does it matter?

If you’ve ever wondered why people like Elon Musk believe we live in a simulation, what Jean Baudrillard saw coming decades ago, and why LLMs bring us further from the truth, keep reading.

If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

What is Simulation Theory?

Simulation Theory is the idea that what we experience is not reality but a simulated environment created by a more advanced civilization. The support for this theory doesn’t come from The Matrix trilogy but a probabilistic argument based on assumptions about technological progress and the vastness of the universe.

If we look at how much computing power has increased in recent years, imagine what it could be in hundreds or thousands of years from now. If that trend continues long enough, it would be possible to simulate entire worlds in extraordinary detail, including conscious beings inside them. These simulations don’t need to be perfect copies of reality, just convincing enough to those experiencing them.

Given the vastness of the universe, the likelihood there isn’t at least one civilization that much more advanced than ours, is low. If they can create one simulated world, they can theoretically create infinite simulated worlds, more than what exist in the universe. These worlds would be indistinguishable from one another, so neither people living in the simulated or base reality could know which one they were in.

You can listen to Elon Musk explain it in 2016:

Since we can’t confirm which one we inhabit, taking a Bayesian approach it’s statistically more likely we live in one of these simulations than an organic base reality.

This whole line of thinking was formalized by philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2003 paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?. The paper sparked serious academic debate and remains the foundation of modern Simulation Theory.

However, besides being a fun discussion topic, usually after a few drinks or semi-controlled substances, this theory lacks practical application since it makes no testable predictions and cannot be empirically proven or disproven. It’s like listening to fervent atheists and religious people argue about the existence of God, or Lebron and Jordan fans argue about who’s the GOAT. It can be entertaining but there’s no way to definitively verify which claim is accurate.

If the goal is to understand how simulations shape real behavior, power, and meaning, there’s a more useful place to look. That place is Jean Baudrillard.

A Short Introduction to Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

While Simulation Theory debates whether we live inside a literal computer simulation, Jean Baudrillard was concerned with something more immediate. He was not asking whether reality was fake, but whether the distinction between reality and its representations still mattered.

In Simulacres et Simulation, Baudrillard argues that modern societies have shifted into a new stage of abstraction. Humans used to use images, symbols, and models to represent reality. A map is meant to represent a territory. A photograph is a representation of the subject in the photo. Numbers and statistics eventually tie back to a real world phenomenon. Any meaning derived from these symbols or representations were nothing without an external reference point you can experience.

Baudrillard noted that this relationship had collapsed.

Societies became too complex, which forced us to rely on representations instead of the base entity. Our world became too large to understand so we distilled it into shortcuts: Symbols, models, narratives, heuristics etc.

Over time, these shortcuts were layered on top of one another. Models were built using other models, which were built using earlier abstractions. This resulted in representations disconnected from reality, because they only reference each other.

Instead of the model describing the world, the world was reorganized to fit the model.

Baudrillard called this condition: simulation. A simulation is not a copy of something real, it’s a self contained system of signs that work together to produce its own version of reality. Whether it aligns with the reality the base symbols were derived from is unimportant.

A video game world does not need to obey the laws of physics to feel real to its players. It just needs to be internally consistent. Once that exists, endless content can be generated inside the game without ever referencing the physical world outside it.

Baudrillard argued that modern knowledge increasingly works this way. Look at academia. Claims are often built by referencing other claims, models, and frameworks rather than direct observation. This does not mean they are necessarily wrong, they just operate inside closed systems that most people cannot independently verify. (In many cases they are wrong, for reasons covered in Most of What You Know is Wrong)

As a result, much of what we accept as reality is mediated through layers of abstraction. We can no longer easily distinguish what comes from direct observation and what comes from models interpreting other models.

Baudrillard’s warning was not that this process would happen. It was that it already had… by 1981. Now AI is only going to make this worse.

AI & LLMs Get Us Further From The Truth

LLMs are a great representation of a Baudrillard simulation. Computer programs lack sensory access to reality, so they ingest endless representations, allowing them to produce outputs that appear as if they understand it. Unlike humans, LLMs can never observe any of this “knowledge” in real life (IRL).

To compensate for this, they rely on more representations and reinforcement from humans and other machines to validate their knowledge base. Meaning doesn’t come from observations, just agreement between systems.

(If you want to learn how LLMs work, see LLMs as explained by The Big Lebowski)

LLMs are wonderful at retrieving existing representations, but that’s not how they are being used. Instead of using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude as a research assistant, users are increasingly trusting these tools to perform the task. This output will eventually become the representation these models will train themselves on.

As AI generated content makes up a greater proportion of content, we enter a Baudrillard simulation. A human coming across this content won’t be able to discern what came from another human or from AI.

If we haven’t reached that point already, it would appear we’re nearly there. In early 2025, many outlets reported that AI produces more internet content than humans.

At the same time, humans are becoming reliant on LLMs, which we’ve established lack a direct connection to the real world. As the representations they get trained on become more abstracted, the further they move from our reality.

This will make it impossible to tell when an LLM is hallucinating or missing relevant information. Things are quite bad as it is. People make major decisions based on headlines, slogans, or short video clips.

Many who passionately voted for Brexit, shortly regretted it afterwards. Shake weight sold millions of units off hype. Both were before the launch of ChatGPT. This is because humans have always struggled with decision making, we can’t blame AI.

Young people primarily get their information from social media, which is skewed for sensationalism, even if the Chinese government isn’t actively trying to make them dumber. Who can blame them? The platform is fun and designed to be addicting but it contributes to a society that’s poorly informed and less engaged.

It’s a natural progression of delivering content faster and easier. We moved from town criers to print, from print to television, from television to the internet. Each progression should have theoretically got us closer to the truth, yet misinformation remained. Now short form video and generative AI produce a hyperreality made largely of recycled symbols, optimized for engagement rather than truth.

The scary thought is many won’t see anything wrong with this. What does it mean for something to be real? Is there such thing as the objective truth? Finding out the truth of the universe is time consuming and hard, instead people consume useless content to escape from reality. Unfortunately, the longer they stay outside of reality, the faster they lose their grip on it.

This is why the question of whether we live in a simulation or not is no longer a relevant one. We have voluntarily chosen to leave our world behind by choosing the simulation.

In many cases, people only know or interact with the representation. Money began as an exchange between real assets such as fruit for cattle. Then wealth was represented by gold and silver coins. Then paper claims on those coins. Eventually, paper backed by nothing but the faith in government. Nowadays we rarely see physical money, just numbers on a screen. The underlying referent has faded from everyday life, replaced by systems that function because everyone agrees they do.

How much longer will it be until it’s our reality that’s been reduced to a simulation filled with representations with only faint echoes of what used to be the real world.

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By popular request, I’m releasing it earlier this year to give people a chance to buy some of these books before the holidays. Whether you know me from Substack, LinkedIn, or don’t, it should be apparent I enjoy reading on a variety of subjects, but they usually fall under one of these categories: finance/economics, history, productivity, health, and psychology, with some fiction thrown in. The same subjects I discuss on Serviceable Insights, funny how that happens.

Instead of combing through 8 years worth of posts, I created a Notion page with a Running List of Books From Previous Years. Check it out if you haven’t already.

If you want a bit of a description of each, I have a consolidated list in a Substack post for 2017-2023 (my apologies for the length & formatting).

For this year’s edition, I’ll include a short description of each book, along with my views and any associated articles I published related to them.

Keep reading if you want to inspiration for books to read in the upcoming year!

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2025 Reading List

I’ve read 12 books so far and expect to finish another two or three before year-end. This is in line with other years and excludes books I started but didn’t finish.

The list contains a bit more fiction but otherwise is pretty consistent with other years with the exception of the absence of health/fitness titles this year; I got my fix doing research for my article on creatine. I haven’t come across any interesting ones lately but perhaps that will change in 2025 (send recommendations if you have them).

Without further ado, here is the list.

1. The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker

   Rating: 70/100 (I would neither recommend no dissuade)

   Baker manages to make a journey up and down an escalator last over 100 pages, incredible from a stylistic standpoint. Fairly niche as a book, Baker isn’t the first to attempt this, but you need to be in the right mindset to get through a novel where nothing really happens. I enjoyed it, but if you’re looking for a page-turner, this isn’t it. I wouldn’t rate it higher because I don’t expect I’ll read it again, and I’d only suggest it for very avid readers, English-major types, or people who read James Joyce by choice.

2. The Castle by Franz Kafka

   Rating: 80/100 (I would recommend if asked)

   After thoroughly enjoying The Trial and The Metamorphosis, this one didn’t disappoint either. The Castle tells the story of a land surveyor’s efforts to reach the Castle in the town he was hired to survey. As you’d expect, in true Kafkaesque fashion, the task is anything but straightforward.

   It’s slightly more difficult to read than the other two mentioned above but nonetheless an all-time classic. Anyone who has ever had to navigate bureaucracy will relate to it.

   Not specifically about The Castle but my most relevant article from 2025 was How Society Uses Bureaucracy to Keep You Safe but Miserable)

3. How To Make A Few Billion Dollars by Brad Jacobs

   Rating: 75/100 (Would recommend but not insist)

   After listening to Jacobs appearance on the Knowledge Podcast, and hearing great things about his fireside chat with Paul Desmarais III, I decided to buy his book. If you don’t know who Brad Jacobs is, you should. He’s scaled several businesses in different industries to multi-billion dollar market caps. Few outside of Elon Musk can make that claim.

   The book itself is decent, though he performs better in podcasts discussing it. His charisma gets slightly lost in translation. I like Jacobs, so let’s blame his editors. If you don’t want to get the book, at least check out a few of his discussions. If you’re too lazy or time-pressed even for that, here’s an ultra-reductionist formula for making a few billion dollars: as a CEO or business owner, you need to

   (1) identify, attract, and retain the absolute most talented people you can; and

   (2) aggressively leverage technology, ideally in industries where others are not.

4. Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

   Rating: 80/100 (I would recommend if asked)

   Many are familiar with Nassim Taleb because of the success of his books The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and Antifragile, among others. Before his writing days, he was a trader, a successful one. As his interests shifted to writing and teaching, he did less trading but co-founded a hedge fund with Mark Spitznagel called Universa.

   While Taleb eventually reduced his day-to-day involvement, Universa’s trading strategies maintained many of the principles he’s written about, producing spectacular returns uncorrelated with other top strategies. The audience for this book is fairly narrow: likely someone who has read Taleb’s other work, has a solid understanding of finance, and wants to read about internal politics at major pension funds. That probably leaves just me. I enjoyed it, but I can’t promise the same experience for everyone.

5. Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parrish* (Re-Read)

   Rating: 90/100 (I would actively recommend)

   With my bookshelves overflowing with unread options, if I choose to re-read something, it’s a pretty strong endorsement. In this case, I recommended Clear Thinking for a book club at my company. As the moderator, I needed to prepare for the discussions, I summarized my notes in two articles which you can check out here (Articles 1 and 2).

   Parrish is the founder of the popular website Farnham Street and the Youtube Channel The Knowledge Project.His subscribers number in the millions, and for good reason. He’s been sharing insights on mental models, decision-making, and learning for over a decade. Clear Thinking doesn’t disappoint if you want to deepen your understanding of those topics.

   

6. The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes

   Rating: 90/100 (I would actively recommend)

   I wrote about this just the other week (check that out here). This is a great book for people interested in the behind-the-scenes world of private equity, debt capital markets, and bankruptcy court. Think of it as a modern Barbarians at the Gate without the hype.

   For those unfamiliar with finance, it might feel dense at times, but that’s secondary. The drama between the finance heavyweights is as interesting as Apollo’s financial engineering.

7. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Elis

   Rating: 80/100 (I would recommend if asked)

   Ellis, the author of American Psycho, published Less Than Zero at just 21 years old. While not an uplifting story, his ability to capture and subtly satirize wealthy LA teenagers in the 1980s is brilliant. Much of the criticism seems to come from readers who missed that Ellis was mocking this lifestyle. I’d consider it an accessible fiction pick for those who don’t typically enjoy novels, but if you’re looking for a feel-good story or lots of action, I’d look elsewhere.

8. The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

   Rating: 90/100 (I would actively recommend)

   This was the best book I read this year. Chancellor’s deep dive into the history and economic ramifications of interest rates does a better job of explaining monetary theory than many economics degrees. His rigorous work shows how prolonged, artificially low interest rates are a key factor in economic bubbles.

   The first 100 pages serve as a great history of monetary systems and financial collapses. You don’t need an economics background to enjoy it. The later sections are more technical, but if you’re vaguely familiar with economic principles or willing to spend some time with Chat or Claude, it’s worth the investment.

   (My Article Nobody Understands Interest Rates summarizing some of the concepts)

   

9. The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Alex Karp

   Rating: 70/100 (Would not actively recommend or dissuade)

   Karp is the Founder and Active CEO of Palantir. After operating in relative obscurity in the early years, Palantir has gradually risen in prominence as they’ve become an increasingly important part of the national security apparatus in many major countries. Their stock has been a meme stock with monstrous returns, that continues to trade at sky high multiples.

   As Palantir’s prominence grew, Karp became more outspoken. The Technological Republic recaps many of his public remarks, mainly that Silicon Valley’s reluctance to produce technology for the military weakens the West. He argues technologists have a moral imperative to work with the military.

   Realistically, his views could have been summarized in a few pages. The anecdotes are interesting, but the book drags; his charisma comes across better in interviews (many are on YouTube). You’ll get 80 to 90 percent of the takeaways from one of those.

   (See my article Is Alex Karp a Kafka or Dostoevsky Character?)

10. May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do about It by Alex Edmans

    Rating: 85/100 (I would actively recommend)

    This is next week’s article, so I will hold off on the summary for now but it’s worth checking out. Very good discussion how to separate fact from fiction. The best book on the subject since Thinking Fast & Slow, The Signal and The Noise or Thinking in Bets.

    Edmans, a finance professor at London Business School, examines how statistics, academic research, and media narratives can be manipulated, showing readers how to identify misleading claims and think more critically about data.

    Link to article will go here.

11. Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott

    Rating: 70/100 (Would not actively recommend or dissuade)

    I have a half finished draft on this to be released at a later point.

    Scott, formerly of Google and Apple, outlines a framework for giving feedback that balances personal care with direct honesty, aimed at helping leaders build more open and effective workplace cultures.

12. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

    Rating: 75/100 (Would not actively recommend or dissuade)

    What’s considered to be Nabokov’s most approachable work, the semi-autobiographical tale follows Professor Timofey Pnin, an exiled academic teaching at a small American college, whose social awkwardness and nostalgia for his homeland create both humor and quiet tragedy.

Books in The Reading Queue

1. Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

   A philosophical treatise exploring how modern society has replaced reality with symbols and models, leading to a world of “simulacra” where representation becomes more real than the real thing. Famously, this book inspired The Matrix franchise.

2. My Uncle Oswald by Ronald Dahl

   A comic, risqué novel about the adventures of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius, a wealthy and scheming bon vivant who sets out to build a fortune by exploiting the libidos of famous men. It’s Dahl’s most adult and mischievous work.

3. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

   A surreal, nonlinear novel that blends drug hallucinations, social satire, and grotesque imagery as it follows addict William Lee through a series of disturbing vignettes. It became a defining work of the Beat Generation and a landmark in experimental literature.

4. The 38 Letters from J.D. Rockefeller to His Son by John D. Rockefeller

   A collection of personal letters written by the oil magnate to his son, offering guidance on business ethics, philanthropy, and personal conduct. The correspondence reveals Rockefeller’s views on success, discipline, and moral responsibility.

   

5. House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess On Wall Street by William D. Cohan

   A detailed chronicle of the 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns, examining how arrogance, greed, and mismanagement brought down one of Wall Street’s most storied investment banks. Cohan draws on insider accounts to capture the drama and dysfunction of the era.

6. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson

   Explains how digital marketplaces and distribution networks have shifted business models from mass hits to niche products, showing that profitability now lies in catering to the “long tail” of specialized consumer demand. A foundational text in internet-era economics.

7. Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald

   A fast-paced narrative recounting the rise and spectacular fall of Enron, tracing the hubris, deception, and accounting fraud that led to one of the largest corporate scandals in history. Reads like a thriller but remains meticulously sourced.

I hope you find some inspiration from all of these titles, I look forward to checking in with you next year with the books I read in 2026 and other titles I’m looking at for 2027. Happy reading!

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Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and others stepped in with bailouts and money printing. I don’t need to explain that story. You’ve probably seen The Big Short or Too Big to Fail.

What if I told you that between 2005 and 2007, a similar wave of reckless risk-taking was happening elsewhere, in the beloved private equity (PE) industry?

Today, most people have heard of private equity. They are the ones who buy your favorite brands, load them with debt, cut costs, send the quality to sh!t and somehow still end up in bankruptcy court. Twenty years ago, PE was still fairly obscure.

The industry first rose to prominence in the 1980s, fueled by the junk bonds of Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert. The battle to take RJR Nabisco private was immortalized in the classic Barbarians At the Gates. After Milken’s arrest in 1989 (documented in Den of Thieves), activity slowed, but by the early 2000s, funds were larger than ever. With debt markets chasing yield, PE firms could once again take some of the biggest public companies private.

That period saw a wave of megadeals involving well-known brands such as Toys “R” Us, Hilton Hotels, and Harrah’s Entertainment (later Caesars Palace).

I picked up The Caesars Palace Coup on a transatlantic flight and could not put it down. The investigative work by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap outlines the leveraged buyout of Caesars by Apollo and TPG, the internal turmoil that followed the 2008 crisis, the financial engineering used to avoid breaching debt covenants, and the years-long legal battles among creditors, Caesars, and the private equity sponsors.

The book perfectly captures what happens when private equity overpays and overleverages. It also explains why debt covenant contracts today run thousands of pages long, earning law firms substantial fees.

In this piece, I will summarize the key lessons from The Caesars Palace Coup and explore what it reveals about private equity, debt, and how great businesses can be destroyed by financial engineering.

Keep reading if you want to learn about the private equity industry, debt, business management and bankruptcy courts!

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Basic Primer on Private Equity

Private equity firms raise funds that pool capital from investors known as Limited Partners (LPs). The private equity firm itself acts as the General Partner (GP). These funds are structured as partnerships for tax reasons. This is the whole carried interest tax loophole libs are always clamoring about.

The GP takes the committed capital from LPs and uses it to identify and acquire businesses it believes are undervalued. Once under their ownership, they usually make changes to the company’s management team, operations, and capital structure (more on that later) to increase the value of their stake before selling it.

A typical private equity fund targets between 6 and 15 investments. Unlike venture capital firms, which make dozens of bets expecting only a few to drive returns, private equity funds rely on more consistent outcomes across their portfolio. Their investments usually have a lower upside but less binary risk, so each deal must generate a meaningful return. (Click here for a long winded explanation of VC)

The LP commitments represent the equity that the private equity fund invests in its portfolio companies. The rest is financed with debt. In most cases, buyouts are funded with 60 to 80 percent debt, depending on credit conditions and the risk tolerance of lenders. This is why they are called Leveraged Buyouts (LBOs).

Covenants are restrictions placed on a company until its debt is repaid. They typically include financial ratio requirements such as EBITDA or operating cash flow needing to exceed interest payments by a certain multiple (anywhere from 2-6X). Covenants can also limit asset sales, dividend payments, or additional borrowing. They exist to protect lenders and ensure that equity holders don’t plunder the business and get reckless with borrowed money.

Debt is often issued in multiple tranches, each with a different level of seniority and repayment priority. Senior debt sits at the top of the capital structure and is often secured by specific assets or the company as a whole. Junior or subordinated debt sits below it, is often unsecured, and carries a higher interest rate to compensate for the greater risk of non-payment in the event of default or bankruptcy.

If everything goes according to plan, the private equity firm acquires the company, raises the necessary debt, makes operational changes (cost reductions or asset sales), and uses the company’s cash flow to service the interest and gradually pay down principal. When the firm exits the investment, the lower debt balance means the equity value has increased, similar to how a homeowner builds equity by paying off a mortgage.

Unfortunately, just like with mortgages, companies can fall behind on their payments or even default. When that happens, they must negotiate with creditors or file for bankruptcy. This is when the real fun begins. Creditors, management, and the private equity sponsors all fight to protect their claims, and if no settlement is reached, the battle moves to bankruptcy court, where lawyers argue over who is entitled to what.

Normally it doesn’t come to that, but when it does chaos can ensue. Just like it did in the case of Caesars Palace.

A Short Overview of The Caesars Palace Coup

I will now try to summarize a 300 page book in a few short paragraphs, if you find this remotely interesting, check out The Caesars Palace Coup.

Harrah’s Entertainment had been operating regional casinos for decades until a Harvard professor named Gary Loveman came along and realized there was a massive opportunity to use data and analytics to improve the customer experience. Other casino operators focused on real estate and spectacle, building ever-larger resorts, while Loveman focused on understanding customer behavior. He launched a loyalty rewards program that proved to be a gold mine for Harrah’s. Instead of returning to academia, Loveman stayed on and eventually became CEO.

Under Loveman, Harrah’s revenue grew consistently across all locations and business segments. Yet Loveman could never understand why the market wasn’t rewarding the stock with a higher valuation multiple. The stock seemed perpetually cheap. He wasn’t alone in thinking that.

Private equity giants TPG and Apollo group shared Loveman’s view. Harrah’s had all the qualities of a perfect private equity target. Strong management team, low debt in it’s capital structure, consistent cashflow and the casino business was believed to be recession proof.

In 2006, Harrah’s had at a market cap of ~$15B and $10B of outstanding debt giving it a total enterprise value (TEV) north of $20B. Acquiring a company of this size would have previously been unthinkable but in the early 2000’s PE firms had taken several large companies private such as Hilton Hotels ($26B), Toy-R-US ($6.6B) and Texas Instruments ($44B). PE funds were raising larger funds and there were many interested lenders willing to fund these large LBOs.

TPG and Apollo paid a total of $28B to acquire Harrah’s, which they later renamed Caesars Entertainment, after their most visible asset. From that purchase price, about $4B of that was equity with the rest coming from debt financing (85% debt). Some of the existing lenders rolled over their debt but TPG and Apollo had to raise ~$20B from the market. They had to do this during 2007 as banks and lenders were starting to become skittish about lending. Nonetheless, they got it done and the deal closed in January 2008. Just months before the financial crisis.

The debt carried pretty much no covenants. The only one was they needed to maintain an Interest Coverage Ratio (EBITDA / Interest Expense) greater than 2.0X. That’s not asking for much. Sign of the times. Probably why the financial system nearly collapsed a year later. As such, TPG and Apollo’s thesis of the Casino business being recession proof was put to the test.

Turns out, during a crisis, people don’t have money to go to Vegas and gamble. After years of steady growth, suddenly Caesars revenue was getting wrecked. This is after loading up with $20B of debt, much of it high yield. It wasn’t long before they started to flirt with the 2.0X Interest Coverage Ratio Covenant. TPG and Apollo needed to reach deep into their bag to stem the tide.

TPG tried to help streamline operations by reducing costs anywhere they can; not easy in a heavily unionized environment. The net result, Caesars stopped investing in hotel upkeep and they started to look shabby. Guest and employee satisfaction took a hit. Meanwhile Apollo took care of financial engineering. They created a maze of subsidiaries and special-purpose entities, transferring assets among them to raise cash and to protect certain properties from creditors.

These maneuvers were meant to buy Caesars time to weather the storm and get back on track but it didn’t happen as quickly as they had hoped. Caesars revenue continued to slump, underinvesting in maintenance wasn’t helping things. The debt burden kept growing and it eventually became clear Caesars was going to default.

Apollo’s use of these entities was not exclusively benefit of the Caesars parent company, they were trying to keep some of the better assets out of the reach of creditors in the event of bankruptcy proceedings. When creditors found out about this, they were pissed. These creditors they were upsetting were some of the largest and sophisticated firms in the financial world, such as Oak Tree Capital (led by Howard Marks), Appaloosa (David Tepper), Elliot Management (Paul Singer), GSO and many others.

In the years long legal battle that followed, Apollo and TPG lost badly. In 2017, the creditors were made whole and the partners working the deal for Apollo and TPG were lucky they weren’t personally held liable. Despite the stumble, neither firm really suffered. They continued to raise larger funds, their efforts to avoid bankruptcy was well received by LPs. Caesars Palace still exists today and they did eventually grow into the valuation Apollo and TPG expected it to, it’s just that the excess value went to the debt holders and none went to the investors, employees or other shareholders. Loveman lost his job but at least a bunch of law firms earned millions in fees from all their litigation efforts.

How Private Equity Impaired a Healthy Business

Harrah’s Entertainment was thriving under Gary Loveman’s leadership. The company was steadily growing revenue each year, customers were loyal, and employees were motivated.

Unfortunately, Loveman’s frustration with the company’s stagnant share price led him to fall prey to the same siren song that lured F. Ross Johnson into the ill-fated RJR Nabisco buyout. He was not only enticed by the financial upside of the deal but also believed that the expertise of Apollo and TPG would help take Harrah’s to the next level.

Harrah’s was performing well, it was not a distressed asset. That meant the private equity firms had to pay a high price to acquire it. The timing, however, could not have been worse. Revenues began to decline almost immediately after the deal closed. Apollo and TPG had contributed only a small amount of equity, relying on extreme leverage to create value.

As growth slowed, valuation multiples compressed and profitability fell. The company could no longer service its massive debt load. It was a perfect storm of everything that private equity investors fear: falling revenue, tightening credit conditions, and debt levels too high to sustain.

Their cost-cutting measures provided short-term relief but did little to address the deeper issues created by excessive leverage and a collapsing economy. The absence of strong corporate governance allowed the private equity sponsors to run Caesars with minimal regard for other stakeholders, treating it more like a balance-sheet experiment than a living business.

If not for the intervention of Oaktree, Appaloosa, Elliott, and the court system, Apollo and TPG might have escaped accountability. Instead, they were forced to confront the consequences of their own financial engineering and the value destruction it caused.

Still, both firms were large enough to move on. Within a few years they had raised billions more and were back to buying new companies. For them, Caesars was a lesson, not a scar. For everyone else, it was a warning.

Private equity can work when executed with discipline, patience, and aligned incentives. The asset class has produced genuine success stories. This was not one of them.

The Caesars Palace Coup highlights its dark side: when greed, leverage, and misplaced confidence combine, even great companies can be hollowed out from within.

The next time you see a beloved brand “go private,” remember that it might not be for its own good.

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Aligning with Clear Thinking, the first part covers why *actually thinking is important. Sounds obvious but we often do things without thinking because of various barriers and default behaviors which impede our progress. Between Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, and every other pop culture at my arsenal, you likely thought I was tapped out. The cupboard was bare.

Well guess again.

Buckle up buckaroos! Sequels are often disappointing but that is not the case this day. Building on what we covered in Part I, this article will focus on building mental strength. What are the skills and traits needed for you to overcome default cognitive biases and put you on the path to success?

How else do you plan on hosting the Catalina wine mixer and driving a Range Rover? Luck? Brute force? Creatine? Good luck with that.

Continue reading if you want to learn how to think good!

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Part Two: Building Strength

To defeat the enemies of clear thinking you need more than willpower.

You are fighting against biology and decades of existing behavior. You can’t willpower or white knuckle yourself to success. We need equally powerful forces on our side:

Last week we discussed why inertia can hurt, but it can help us as well. Once you start building positive habits, the longer you stick with them, the harder they become to break. Do you brush your teeth everyday? Is this a decision you struggle with? I hope not. You’ve been doing it for so long, it’s no longer a difficult habit to maintain.

Similarly, the longer you eat healthy, the easier it is to continue. A good diet becomes the new default and harder to break. Comedian Tom Segura recounts his experience eating fast food after a long streak of clean eating, suddenly one bite made him feel awful, discouraging him from reverting back to his previous unhealthy eating habits.

There are some tools you can use, such as rituals. Rituals focus the mind on something other than the moment. It creates a pause, enough time for the rational part of your brain to weigh in, before you act.

Beyond rituals there are four types of strengths you need to develop if you want to fight against the enemies of clear thinking:

2.1 Strength #1 — Self-Accountability

Self-Accountability is taking responsibility for your abilities and limitations. Without this you won’t be able to move forward.

Part of being an adult is the ability to hold yourself in check without needing parents, teachers or mentors to do this for you.

This is part of the danger of defining success or failure based on external rewards. Whether that’s trophies, praise or acknowledgement. To be successful you generally need to be willing to commit to things for extended stretches where you won’t get external feedback. They don’t conduct competitions or give out medals each day.

Only you can gauge if you are improving or on the path to success. You need to be able to accept responsibility when you screw up, or else you are feeding into your ego’s desire to shield you from blame.

You are the master of your fate, you are the commander of your own soul.

People who lack self-accountability are running on auto-pilot and will never be in charge.

Parrish gives the example of his inability to deliver the software update on time and despite his myriad of excuses, his colleague didn’t care. If he couldn’t deliver his work on time, they would need to delay an important mission. Parrish defended his ego with all the reasons it wasn’t possible. His colleague didn’t care. It was on Parrish to manage his workload based on the deadline, neither of them could control.

Parrish uses this to contrast the difference between kind and nice people.

Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not. A kind person will discreetly tell you when you have spinach on your teeth at a social event whereas a nice person won’t say anything because it’s uncomfortable. A kind person will share hard truths, even if it might be uncomfortable for them and the receiver of the message. A nice person will avoid giving critical feedback because they are concerned with hurting somebody’s feelings.

Nobody cares as much about your excuses as you do. At the end of the day, it comes down to if the outcome was reached or not. In the NBA, players acknowledge it’s a make or miss league. If you make the shot, you’re the hero. If you miss, nobody cares about how much you practice or how pretty your jumper is.

Self-serving bias will always come up with reasons or excuses why there was nothing you could have done to change the outcome. Whether it’s your fault or not, it’s still your responsibility. Sometimes the circumstances are not in your favor. You might have been dealt a bad hand but all you can do is your best given the circumstances. Poker players know even if they play a hand perfectly, they can still lose.

As a personal trainer, too often I could see clients refuse to accept accountability for their actions. They would show up to all you can eat buffets before a training session and blame external factors on this. Clients that only came because their wife/husband wanted them to be there, were almost never successful. I would only spend a few hours with my clients each week and couldn’t control what they did the second they left. To achieve their goals they would need to take accountability and ownership.

When I started as a fitness professional, I was nice. As I got more experienced, I became kind. I would start to tell them the reason they weren’t seeing results was because they weren’t holding themselves accountable. They could drive to McDonalds right after the gym and guzzle down 3 milkshakes. If they wouldn’t take accountability for their health, they could never be successful.

How you respond can make things better or worse

You can’t control everything but you can control how you react to things. This is a lesson from stoicism. If somebody cuts you off in traffic, you can’t control their car but you can control how you respond to the situation.

Parrish suggests asking yourself “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”.

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

“You’re refusing to accept something that already happened, and that’s crazy.”

Complaining is not a solution. You are not a victim. The most important story is the one you tell yourself. No successful person wants to be around a chronic victim, a passive person. Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you control how you respond to everything.

2.2 Strength #2 — Self-Knowledge

Know thyself

If you never utter the phrase “I don’t know” you are aren’t trying to understand. You are probably dismissing things that surprise you. Otherwise you are just trying to rationalize outcomes instead of figuring out how it worked or why that happened.

Accurately being able to assess what you know and don’t know is the key to playing games you can win. Smart people get into trouble when they try to step outside their domain of expertise. Believing because you are successful in one arena, this will automatically translate to success elsewhere is simply hubris. We touched on the Dunning-Kruger effect last time, proving a little knowledge about a topic is a dangerous thing. Understanding how much you know compared to the average participant is essential to figure out your chances at outperforming. Otherwise you are playing a game of chance, with bad odds.

Parrish uses the example of smart real estate investor declining to invest in a business outside of his area of expertise. Too often, our egos will lead us to overstate our chances of winning in activities we aren’t experts in. Charlie Munger shared a similar sentiment, figure out where you have the edge and stick with that.

In some cases, skill doesn’t play a large role in the outcome. The probability difference for winning between a professional and an amateur is relatively small, such as a single hand of poker or Bingo. In these cases, it’s not irrational to think you can win in these kinds of games. However, in other activities where luck plays a relatively small role, such as sprinting or swimming, talent is nearly directly proportional to your chances of winning. If you are going to try your hand at something you aren’t an expert in, you should first evaluate to what extent can a less skilled participant win. (I covered this in greater detail in How To Make Better Predictions).

2.3 Strength #3 — Self-Control

Without the ability to control impulses, you aren’t any different than wild animals in the forest. You can’t eliminate physiological reactions or the conditions that trigger them but you can manage how you respond to them. Often creating space by pausing or slowing down, gives a chance for your rationality to catch up to your default instincts or behavior.

Channeling intensity from short bursts into prolonged motivation is what separates winners from losers. This is why Odysseus can survive the entire Odyssey, whereas Ajax can’t even get past the first battle against Hector (film only reference. They nerfed Ajax like crazy in Troy (2004) but Brian Cox as Agamemnon was phenomenal).

If you can’t control your impulses, you are sabotaging yourself, making it harder to reach your long term objectives. It’s as if you’re in a canoe with one person occasionally paddling in the wrong direction. You might not always make the right choice but at least make sure you aren’t fighting dissent within your own camp (mind).

2.4 Strength #4 — Self-Confidence

Self-confidence is sticking the right balance between your earned competence and your aspiration (belief) of where it can be.

The story of Icarus flying too close to the sun, shared another, often overlooked lesson. If Icarus flew too low, he would have also perished. Many focus on hubris, and overconfidence leading to the fall but many ignore that most dreams are killed not by a lack of competence but people’s lack of confidence to even attempt a daring feat. (More about that in The Power of Confidence).

Dunning-Kruger effect is so powerful because it shows how a little knowledge coupled with excess confidence creates a dangerous cocktail. Being able to discern what you know, versus what you strongly believe is very important, otherwise you fall into dangerous thought patterns you won’t be able to break free from.

The people who fail the most are those more focused on proving they are right instead of being right. Outcome over ego.

2.6 Setting the Standards

You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

I discussed this in The Most Obvious Secret to Success. Set high standards for yourself, and this should hopefully raise standards for everyone. If you are in a losing environment, eventually you will become a loser. Any good coach, general manager or HR team’s job is to make sure they hire people that will contribute to a winning atmosphere that raises standards, and get rid of people that detract from this.

Champions don’t create standards of excellence, standards of excellence create champions. Parrish shares an anecdote about Henry Kissinger during his time in the State department. Known for exceptionally high standards, when a staffer came with a draft of a memo, Kissinger asked him if it was his best work? The staffer took it back and worked on it more. When he returned to Kissinger, he got the same question again. He returned to polish it further. Only after his third attempt did Kissinger agree to read it.

He didn’t want to waste time looking at unpolished, incomplete drafts. Parrish doesn’t want to either. If you create a culture where presenting incomplete drafts is acceptable, then that’s what you will get.

I do think it’s important to caveat that in some cases speed is better than perfection. Having spent endless hours working on internal documents that never got read or used for anything useful, I eventually opted for sharing drafts very quickly to solicit feedback before investing more time into it. When you are busy and you receive unclear, open ended instructions, it’s likely your efforts will be wasted.

This should not be an excuse to do work badly, when you receive a clear and precise request, it should be done well, the first time. Low standards often come because we don’t care. We lack pride. You shouldn’t accept shipping out low quality products or else you will eventually forget what good and great looks like.

At the same time, you need to exercise judgement when you don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of the good. If you can do something well in 1 hour but it would require 5 hours to make it perfect, you need to decide if the additional investment is worth it. In the case of airplane safety, I would say yes. For an internal memo nobody is going to read anyway, good is likely sufficient.

2.7 Exemplars + Practice

Choose the right exemplars, models to follow. Show me your role model and I’ll show you your future. A better boss will make you better. A strong colleague makes you stronger (check out this article by Giacomo Falcone (no not of the Falcone crime family you Batman nerds) about how your desk mate might be sabotaging your career.

The concept of Mimetic theory from Rene Girard, popularized in Silicon Valley from Peter Thiel and others, believes that desire is driven imitation of our models. We see somebody we aspire to be like, which guides our actions and behaviors to imitate them. If you have high quality A players, managers and mentors around you, there’s a pretty good chance you will mimic their behavior increasing the likelihood of you being an A player in your own right.

Your exemplars or models don’t need to be alive or somebody you know personally. If you believe mimetic theory, it’s preferable to be somebody you don’t know or can possibly compete with. Otherwise this will eventually invite rivalry.

Conclusion

Clear thinking doesn’t just happen, it’s a skill you cultivate. The strengths of accountability, knowledge, control, confidence, and high standards aren’t abstract ideals, they’re muscles you can train every day. Habits turn into defaults, rituals give you pause, and the right role models show you what’s possible. If you commit to practicing these strengths, you stop running on autopilot and start designing your outcomes.

In the end, clear thinking is less about avoiding mistakes and more about consistently stacking small, better choices that compound over time. The future will always test you, but if you’ve built strength, you’ll be ready to meet it head on. No excuses, no shortcuts, and without needing luck or brute force to carry you through.

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They are often an excuse for self-proclaimed intellectuals to convey status. A venue where they can embarrass so-called friends and acquaintances with their superior insights. Others might just be there for the snacks or excuse to socialize without having read the assigned book.

I have been part of several of such groups; good times were had and most ended without violence or death. This is why when my company was brainstorming ways to get employees engaged with the new core operating principles we were rolling out, I suggested we start a book club.

As the principle for the month of August was to "Be fact-driven and purposeful.” the first person that came to mind was Shane Parrish. Parrish worked in a Canadian intelligence agency before founding the popular website Farnham Street. Farnham Street is dedicated helping people “Think better. Make smarter. progress in () life and career. Find your focus.” Between Farnham Street, his newsletter Brain Food and his YouTube channel, Parrish has an audience of millions, including yours truly.

This is why for the inaugural book club meeting, I suggested Shane’s book, Clear Thinking. If you are serious about making better decisions and putting yourself in the best position to achieve your goals, Clear Thinking is a must read. In today’s article I give an overview of some of the principles and ideas from the first part of the book, with the hope this inspires you to read this for your own.

Check here for Part II.

Continue reading if you want to learn how to think clearly!

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Section One: Enemies of Clear Thinking

1.1 Think Badly or not at all?

Intelligent people regularly do stupid things. A stupid action isn’t when you get an undesirable result, but from following a process that obviously wasn’t going to work. Stupid actions usually arise not because we lack intelligence but because we weren’t thinking clearly.

Think back to the last time you did something you immediately regretted. Did you spend minutes to hours on the decision or did you just react?

Rationality is wasted if you don’t use it. Too often logic gets crowded out by other factors: our default actions or behaviors. Sometimes we are quick to anger or fast to assume intent. When we rely on our defaults, instead of our rational thought, we are more likely to do stupid things, or actions we will later regret.

Being aware of these barriers to clear thinking is the first step to try to prevent them from crowding out rational thought. Think of these barriers as little Gríma Wormtongues from Lord of the Rings whispering into Théoden King of Rohan’s ear. Only once they removed Gríma from his side could he think clearly again.

Here are some of the barriers to clear thinking:

1.2 The Emotion Default

Parrish uses the example of Michael & Sonny Corleone. One doesn’t allow emotions to cloud their judgement, the other succumbs to them. Predictably one dies much sooner than the other. Sonny’s inability to manage his emotions while making decisions causes him to make many unforced errors. This reckless behavior creates a huge mess for the Corleone family, forcing Michael to clean up the mess.

There is a Sonny Corleone in all of us.

When we are reacting out of anger, sadness or another emotion, we aren’t in an optimal headspace for decision making. Whether this is how we comport ourselves in our personal lives or make big decision for our careers, our emotions at the time of the decision should not be the loudest voice.

(Not a fan of The Godfather? you can also check out Stoicism Explained by Star Wars)

1.3 The Ego Default

What matters more, appearing successful or being successful?

The answer might seem obvious but hubris has been the ruin of many. Not only is it enough to win, people want the praise and trappings that come with it. Before long, people get more satisfaction from the latter, than the former and that’s when trouble arises. This is why victorious Roman generals would have a slave (servus publicus) stand in the chariot with them whispering reminders their mortality (“Memento mori”).

It’s also true that without confidence, you won’t accomplish much. What’s important is that your confidence needs to come from competence or it’s simply hubris. Being aware of your abilities and limitations is important when making decisions. Overestimating your talents or worth can get you into dicey situations.

It might seem obvious but this happens all the time. There’s a reason why one of my most viewed articles to date is titled “Should I Go into Debt for a Rolex”. People want to hack their way to status, which they wouldn’t need to do, if they had it.

Parrish reminds readers of the Dunning-Kruger effect; a little knowledge can give you unjustified confidence which begins to decline as you get a bit more.

1.4 The Social Default

How often are our choices our own? Are we doing things because we believe they are right or because that’s what everyone else is doing. Have you ever started clapping because other people around are? Sure you have. It’s hard to fight the urge. Social pressure is a powerful thing.

It’s not fun to feel part of the “outsider group” we want to be accepted. We don’t want to stand out, so we would rather do the same as others even if we don’t agree. We are effectively outsourcing our thoughts to others. Sometimes there’s strength in numbers and you can benefit from the wisdom of the crowd, other times that wisdom is madness.

As we increasingly outsource our thinking to LLMs or our investment decisions to ETFs, we are not really thinking, we are operating on auto-pilot and letting the universe decide our fate. If you’re an economist that believes that humans are rational decision makers, perhaps this is a good thing. For those of us living in the real world, we are just as likely to be listening to people that have also yet to abandon their defaults. Which is why groups can hold wrong views for a long time.

Parrish gives the examples of virtue signaling. Many people suddenly adopt the same set of professed beliefs because it costs them nothing to be wrong since they are sticking with the herd. He uses the example of a Princeton Professor that asked his students what their position on slavery would have been if they were white living in the south prior to abolition. Guess what? Everyone in the class believed they would have been abolitionists, that would have spoken out against slavery and worked tirelessly against it. That’s easy to say in 2025 but we know people rarely want to go against common convention.

Even if they felt like it was wrong, they probably wouldn’t have spoken out against it. They wouldn’t want to have risked the backlash by straying from the consensus. How often do you see somebody decidedly right-wing or left-wing politically speak out against their parties orthodoxy?

Ironically it’s those that go against convectional beliefs that often make history. We only know or care about artists who dared challenge convention or take risks. You might underperform but you also might change things for the better. This is also why best practices aren’t always the best. By definition they are average (I wrote about this in Benchmarking is Lazy).

Contrary to what people think, being right or wrong isn’t based on if people agree with you or not. You will be correct if your facts and reasoning are correct. Unfortunately in a corporate environment, risk taking or trying things outside convention is often discouraged. Managers or execs would rather stick with the crowd so if things don’t go their way, they can minimize their own involvement in the outcome. Buffett talks about the agency-principal problem. Personal gain/loss ratio is too obvious, most people just don’t want get fired so trying something new and risky isn’t worth it. If it works out the company benefits more than they do, if it doesn’t work out, they get fired but the company persists.

1.5 The Inertia Default

The reluctance to act or change is very powerful.

How often do you change toothpaste brands? Experiment with new hairstyles or take a different route to work? One of my favorite tv shows Westworld shows humanoid robots following different loops, yet upon reflection, we humans follow very similar loops since we rarely stray from pre-determined behaviors. We stick to decisions we made long ago, regardless of how our environment has changed or what new information has come to light. How open minded can we be if we don’t change?

Shane shared an experience many investors can relate to. He invested in a promising restaurant chain with a CEO, Shane highly trusted. In the years following the investment, the CEO made many small transgressions which were easy to rationalize at the time. Eventually the CEO’s attitude impaired the investment. Only when Shane zoomed out, did he realize the signs were there but he was too slow to change his mind. If he were quicker to react, he might have been able to salvage his investment.

Objects never change if left alone. They don’t start moving on their own if not touched. Once minds are set in a direction they will continue in that direction until an outside force forces a reconsideration of that view. This is why it’s not a coincidence conspiracy theorists often live alone in a cabin in the woods. There’s nobody to talk sense to them. This further gets into problems with LLMs re-enforcing problematic beliefs or when people create echo chambers by not seeking out contrary viewpoints or ideas.

There are many reasons why people don’t want to change. Anybody working in sales & marketing pros understand this well; since their job is generally trying to convince somebody to change or adopt a new behavior. People are afraid the change will lead to worse results. People will prefer discomfort over uncertainty. Assuming you clear the uncertainty hurdle, you next must contend with another: the resistance to new effort. Especially if they aren’t convinced this new effort won’t lead to a worse outcome.

Good salespeople or marketers can give their target audience the confidence that adopting their product/service will not require a lot of new effort and will lead to a better outcome. You need to be the best sales person for clear thinking.

How often do you double down when you are wrong instead of stepping back, re-evaluating and admitting you stuck with the wrong choice for too long? Don’t let your reluctance to change prevent you from making a better decision.

1.6 Default to Clarity

We can’t eliminate our defaults. We can re-program them.

Shane Parrish advocates for the same advice I offered in my most popular Substack article to date, Sorry Jocko, Discipline is Overrated (12K+ views). Instead of repeating what I covered in the article, I’ll summarize by saying we both posit the reason we fail to reach our goals is because relying on discipline alone will guarantee failure. Instead build systems which put you on the path to success. Re-program your defaults. If your goal is weight loss, remove sugar filled beverages from your house and replace them with healthy alternatives.

Conclusion:

Clear thinking isn’t about eliminating mistakes, it’s about stacking the odds in your favor by refusing to operate on autopilot. Parrish begins Clear Thinking by discussing barriers for a good reason. When you become aware of your defaults, you give yourself the chance to override them. That’s how better decisions are made. Not by luck, but by design. Part II will dive deeper into how to reprogram those defaults, but for now, the challenge is clear: start noticing when you’re about to act like Sonny Corleone, follow the herd, or cling to inertia. Awareness is the first step to clarity.

See here for Part II

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1. Hooded guy blasting Linkin Park through his headphones whilst fighting demons

2. Fitness influencer only training the gluteus maximus in front of their tripod

3. Loud, broccoli haired teenagers taking up space but not doing much exercise

4. Creatine

Creatine has been a gym staple since Jane Fonda’s workout tapes and for good reason. Unlike most gym supplements, it actually works. Results may vary but taking creatine will lead to an increase in muscle mass and strength. This has been known for decades. While there has been some debate around dosage, studies are aligned. If you don’t believe sissy scientists, ask a bodybuilder and they’ll tell you the same.

Yet suddenly creatine is appearing in places you would never expect. No longer relegated to workout sites, it’s now showing up in prominent podcasts, newsletters, and dinner party conversations. The Economist wrote about it last week and recently PGA tour golfer Ben Griffin blamed overdosing on creatine for his poor round.

This is thanks to the army of health gurus with microphones and dimmed out green screens. People like Andrew Huberman, Rhonda Patrick, and Peter Attia have elevated it from a strength-and-conditioning staple to a must-try bio-hack offering cognitive benefits and even the ability to offset sleep deprivation. Their audience, which numbers in the tens of millions hang on their every word.

As a mere mortal I wasn’t immune to the hype. I had tinkered with creatine early in my fitness days but never stuck with it. I was satisfied with my results without it, and stopped taking supplements after a bad experience with pre-workout (Jack3d should never have been legal).

After investigating some of the claims made by health influencers, I tried it for myself and the results were unexpected (to put it mildly). As I’ve previously documented by experience giving up coffee & alcohol, today’s article will discuss what the research says about creatine and what happened when I took it for 5 months.

Keep reading if you are interested if creatine might be right for you!

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What The Research Says

Muscle and Strength Gains

How Creatine Works

Your muscles and brain run on adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Creatine increases phosphocreatine, which enables faster ATP regeneration permitting your muscles to squeeze out an extra rep or sustain effort for longer. Over time, this translates into more training volume and growth. On top of that, creatine pulls water into muscle cells, making them fuller and triggering anabolic signals. So creatine lets you train more, which results in more muscle mass and greater strength.

A common question is how is this different from steroids? For one thing, creatine is a legal nutrient supplement, simply enhancing what you get from animal proteins. This helps accelerate ATP regeneration. Steroids on the other hand, are synthetic hormones that directly change your body’s physiology in order to boost muscle protein synthesis and recovery. This is why it can produce such rapid and dramatic increases in size and power. You are effectively turbocharging your hormones.

TLDR: Creatine tops up energy stores, steroids change your biology. Don’t do steroids. No matter how cool Sean Austin made it look in 51st Dates.

The Science Behind Creatine for Strength & Muscle Gains

The effectiveness of creatine isn’t just theoretical, creatine has gone through over 500 peer reviewed studies and 250+ controlled trials and held up to the scrutiny. Meta-analyses covering dozens of studies confirms creatine supplementation increases strength, power output, and lean body mass compared to placebo.

A highly cited example is a 2003 analysis of 22 trials published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, which concluded that creatine can increase strength gains by roughly 8% more than training alone. Another 2005 study from McMaster University, showed older men significantly increased muscle mass and bone density by taking creatine. Aging is associated with reductions in muscle mass and strength so if creatine is effective in helping older men gain or preserve muscle, then your gym bro should pass the shaker.

That’s not to say these results don’t apply to other demographic groups too. Plenty of studies looked at college aged, trained, untrained, women (pre and post menopause) and others. Basically it’s pretty universally accepted creatine works well for muscle gain and strength. With as little as 5g daily, you should expect to see an improvement of 5-10% after a few weeks. If you were to stop taking it, eventually your stores would go back to baseline levels but you won’t lose all the muscle and strength you gained.

Cognitive Benefits

Does Creatine Make you Smarter?

Like your muscles, your brain also runs on ATP. Expending mental effort burns energy. Creatine increases phosphocreatine in the brain, giving neurons a quicker way to regenerate ATP and keep firing under stress. Creatine doesn’t make you smarter but it can help you can handle a higher work capacity before tiring out, just like with your muscles.

I’m sorry to the people looking for a Bradley Cooper Limitless pill, creatine won’t increase your intelligence. The only confirmed way to boost your IQ is to Subscribe to Serviceable Insights.

Unfortunately, the science behind the cognitive benefits of creatine isn’t as solid as for muscle & strength gains and requires a bit more scrutiny. There are a few dozen studies and trials with positive results, but it’s far from a slam dunk.

For one thing, there are far fewer studies and many were on specific populations with a problem. This includes: sleep-deprived individuals, patients with neurological disease or vegetarians. You might wonder what’s the problem with the vegetarians? Well, they don’t eat meat.

This leaves them with lower creatine stores since meat and fish are the main dietary source of creatine. The next time a self righteous vegetarian/vegan tries to lecture you about how useless animal proteins are, just remember they are deficient from creatine and not thinking straight. So be nice to them.

Large Doses & Sleep Deprivation

In all seriousness, creatine seems to help these groups but results were less clear for young healthy omnivores. Some studies show promise, others lacked measurable effects. It appears the benefits of taking creatine for healthy adults already consuming animal proteins are largely muscular and not cognitive. Some studies tested larger doses (10 - 20 g daily) on healthy adults, yet were still inconclusive. Many health influencers such as Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman or Rhoda Patrick advocated for creatine for cognitive benefits and even recommend larger doses because of studies such as the 2018 study Avgerinos et al. showed improvements in short term memory and reasoning but other studies failed to replicate this.

In their defense, an interesting insight came from pairing sleep deprived individuals with high creatine doses. The 2024 study by Gordji‑Nejad et al. gave a single large dose of creatine (0.35 g/kg translating to 25 g for a 150 lbs person) during 21 hours of sleep deprivation. It produced marked benefits for the subjects: processing speed improved by 16–29%, memory improved by ~10% and lower subjective fatigue by ~8%.

So according to the research, there might be some cognitive benefits in taking creatine if you are naturally deficient from your normal diet or after a bad night sleep. Beyond that, it’s too early to declare decisively there are meaningful cognitive benefits to taking creatine. However, individual experiences may differ…

My Experience With Creatine for 5 Months

The Three Horse People of Fitness Nutrition Advice

I’ve been following Dr. Rhoda Patrick’s Youtube Channel Found My Fitness for over a decade. I haven’t taken all of her advice but I’ve appreciated her scientific approach and willingness to experiment with new protocols herself. She has many videos, reviewing scientific literature related to exercise or nutrition science. She’s also had authors of highly cited studies on her channel to discuss their findings as well as other studies. Dr. Patrick has been promoting the use of creatine for years, but she has recently been emphasizing higher dosages and its use for cognitive benefits. She claimed to take high doses on days where she’s sleep impaired, usually when jet lagged due to her travel schedule.

She’s not alone in promoting creatine to her loyal audience. Stanford researcher and professor Dr. Andrew Huberman, has more than 7M Youtube subscribers and has quickly emerged as a leading internet personality on anything related to health. Like Dr. Patrick, he’s recommended creatine on his channel several times, at times referencing studies highlighting cognitive benefits. He’s another internet personality I’ve been following dating back to before the global pandemic. While some people have questioned his advice, like Patrick, his suggestions are generally grounded in scientific research, even if they aren’t always the consensus.

Finally you have Tim Ferris, famous for authoring best sellers such as The 4 Hour Work Week, The 4 Hour Chef or Tools for Titans. Ferris has been successful in many domains and has shown his willingness to treat himself like a human guinea pig. He might lack the scientific credentials of Patrick or Huberman, but he’s been early on many health & fitness trends and even ran a sports nutrition company before becoming an author. If you don’t know him, you can think of him as a master of efficiency/optimization. He too had been advocating for large dose creatine usage.

With these three strongly advocating for its use, and a bit of Googling, there didn’t appear to be a large risk in trying creatine so I thought it was worth giving it a shot.

What Happened?

Strength & Muscle

The last week of March, I ordered a small case of creatine along with bottle of Omega-3 pills. While some suggest doubling up the creatine dosage for the first few days, which they call the loading phase, I just stuck with the 5g daily dose first thing in the morning mixed in a glass of water. People will say bloating is normal during the loading phase, but this normally dissipates after 5-10 days. In my case, I gained 20 lbs during my first week of creatine use.

This was only with the 5g daily dose. This gain can’t be fully credited to the creatine; I temporarily upped my calorie consumption after realizing I was operating at a daily calorie deficit of 500 - 800 calories. I workout every day and don’t eat breakfast, so my under consumption of calories was definitely impacting my muscle gain. Even with this concerted effort to eat more, I was still operating at a deficit closer to 300-500 calories, so this weight gain was definitely not isolated to that.

After a few weeks I went back to my regular eating schedule and with my creatine stores saturated, my weight dropped by 5lbs. I was still 15lbs heavier than when I started, however my body composition had not materially changed. This was noticeable in the gym.

I’ve been training regularly for 16 years, which categorizes me as an experienced lifter. At this point, progress should come more slowly, unless I’m attempting new exercises or ones I haven’t tried in a while. This was not the case with creatine.

For a handful of exercises such as the incline bench press, flat bench press or the barbell front squat, within a few months of taking creatine, I was able to lift at least 10% more. Not only could I lift heavier weights and for more reps, I was no longer experiencing as great of a drop off between my third and fourth set of an exercise. This drop off is fairly common for lifters with a higher proportion of Type II (fast twitch) muscle fibers. This was something I had grown accustomed to and dramatically lowered my training volume during my workouts. With creatine, my training volume could climb considerably allowing for great strength and muscle gains which, were consistent with what the studies and fitness influencers claimed.

Now some of you might point out, the increased power output could have come from gaining weight. This could partially explain it but since I maintained or increased my output for exercises where body weight is a disadvantage such as for chin ups, TRX rows or box jumps, I still consider this valid. At the same time, my cardiovascular fitness improved despite carrying more weight.

TLDR: The Strength & Muscle Gain Research is Legit

Cognitive Benefits & Large Doses

When it came to cognitive benefits, I didn’t notice anything new from the adoption of creatine or Omega-3. I felt pretty good as a baseline, and since I regularly consume meat or fish to begin with, the additional creatine didn’t do much for me. Still consistent with the research.

Some of the fitness influencers said to get the cognitive benefits, you would need to do at least 15-20g, to break the blood brain barrier or whatever. So to test the claims by Rogan and Patrick, for a few weeks, I tried upping the dosage to 10g per day or 20g on days when I didn’t sleep well. Well this protocol did have a noticeable effect. It might not have sharpened my focus or improved my memory but it did a terrific job of disturbing my stomach; especially on the 20g days. As I attempted the higher dose four months into the experiment, my creatine stores were already saturated so adding the higher dose seemed like overkill. Even when I was sleep deprived, I didn’t feel any shaper with the higher dosage. One possible explanation could be for my bodyweight, 20g is insufficient, but that dose was already pretty difficult to consume and I wasn’t tempted to add even more.

My conclusion is the people telling you to consume large dosages are probably just trying to get you to go through your creatine supply faster to sell you more. Shampoo companies try the same strategy. Speaking of shampoo, on major concern people have with taking creatine is the link to hair loss. This came from a 2009 study on Rugby players that saw a 56% spike in DHT levels after a high-dose creatine loading (25 g/day). This appeared to be a one off that didn’t appear in other studies. In 2025, a randomized controlled trial specifically tested for this for 5g of daily creatine and it found no significant difference in DHT, DHT-to-testosterone ratio, or any hair growth metrics between the creatine and placebo groups.

If you are afraid to take creatine because of hair loss concerns, you shouldn’t be. In my case, my hair’s fine. If you really are concerned, don’t just take my word for it, I’m not a medical professional or scientist, just a guy writing on the internet. I shared a few studies, but there are plenty more, which might be more appropriate and applicable depending on your specific situation. Speaking only for my experience, I can say creatine delivered what I was hoping for with the strength and muscle gain but fell short when it came to the cognitive benefits. Is this conclusive? No, but just another data point for you to consider when you decide if creatine is right for you.

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Between the publications of Antifragile (2012) and Skin in The Game (2017), Taleb co-authored a paper, “The Precautionary Principle (with Application to GMOs)” (2014) which generated a considerable amount of controversy upon it’s release. The scientific community were aghast because the Taleb and his co-authors had concerns with genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Being publicly against GMOs then and still today is the easiest way to get looped in with Conspiracy Theorists, Pseudoscientific Fitness Influencers or Hysterical Hypochondriacs (this group also represents my key Subscriber base).

Jokes aside, regardless of your views on GMOs, Taleb’s discussion of the Precautionary Principle is worth re-examining, as it’s helpful to understand the different types of risks, and why most risk models fail. At the same time, let’s take this time to re-visit some of Taleb’s key ideas when it comes to risk.

Keep reading to find out why you should use the Precautionary Principle to ensure your own survival.

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Principle Origins & The Philosophy of Nassim Taleb

“The Precautionary Principle” originated in the 1970s in Europe. First appearing in German environmental law, showing a shift in how regulators wanting to acting on risk instead of waiting for harm. This perspective gained momentum in the proceeding decades and has extended to other sectors. Yet when it comes to managing risk, there’s the academic view and the practitioners perspective.

Nobody understands the practitioners perspective better than Nassim Taleb. He’s been successful in finance and as an author because of his reflections on risk; he credits his experience as a trader since traders and hedge funds’ livelihoods are tied to their ability to manage risk. If they can’t manage their risk properly, they blow up, creating a natural evolutionary cycle. Academics on the other hand, can be wrong for decades without consequence since they are tenured salaried employees at publicly subsidized institutions. This is why when it comes to risk, Taleb suggests learning from people exposed to the impact of bad decisions; people with skin in the game.

Black & Gray Swans

Wall Street traders equipped with sophisticated academic models blow up by understating rare but extreme outcomes. In the stock market, most days are characterized by small gains or losses, which in aggregate trend up over time. From the perspective of an investor, this seems great. Investors portfolios are worth a bit more each year on paper and investment professionals get to charge fees based on these higher asset values. Individual stocks might rise or fall dramatically but market wide, volatility remains low and everybody is happy. However, this can create a false sense of safety. Taleb often gives the turkey example: A turkey is fed every day for 1,000 days, growing ever more certain the farmer cares for it—until day 1,001, when it’s killed for Thanksgiving.

Since the overwhelming majority of trading days are low volatility, when you plug market data into a risk model, it makes extreme high volatility days seem so unlikely, it’s as if they aren’t there. However, they do eventually happen and can wipe out years or decades worth of gains overnight, suddenly popping the illusion of safety. Just like the turkey on Thanksgiving. Each time this happens, investment professionals will say it was unforeseeable, unimaginable but most importantly: not their fault.

They will call it a Black Swan event. However, by saying that, they will only prove they don’t know what it is. A real Black Swan event would be an extreme event, falling outside any believed range of outcomes. Think Aliens arriving on earth or a horse winning a professional golf tournament. Neither a market collapse nor a pandemic qualify. Historically, the US enters a recession territory every decade with market sell offs happening more frequently. Major, deadly pandemics are known risks that happen infrequently. Most of us are just too young to remember the bubonic plague or the Spanish flu. These extremely rare but known risks are Gray Swans.

Understanding the difference between unprecedented and very rare events is an important step for risk management. Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld popularized the notion of different forms of military intelligence into:

1. Known-Knowns: Risks you are aware of and have insight into

2. Known-Unknowns: Risks you are aware of but lack knowledge or verifiable data

3. Unknown-Unknowns: Risks you don’t even know exist

This is important for military planning but apply to any type of risk activity. On Rumsfeld’s matrix, Black Swans are generally Unknown-Unknowns. Most military commanders or hedge fund traders, have an idea how to handle the first two types of risks, but it’s in the third type, which are the most consequential, that often carry the greatest potential for danger.

Ruin Dynamics and Systemic vs Self-Contained Risk

If somebody handed you a glass of water and said there was 4% chance of dying immediately, would you drink it? What if they instead said the entire planet would explode. Would that change your decision making process? Should we as a society treat these type of scenarios differently?

Nassim Taleb believes we should. Risks that only impact the principal actor or small amounts of people, should not be treated the same as events carrying systemic wide risk. If the ultimate goal is to ensure the continuation of the human race, we should do our best to eliminate or minimize risks that put this in jeopardy.

When negative risks are contained only to the person performing the action or a small number of people, these are considered localized harms. An example of this is driving. More than one million people die in car crashes each year, but it’s impossible for one single driving accident to kill more than a handful of people at a time. A fender-bender in Athens can’t physically harm somebody in London. Therefore Brits shouldn’t have a say in banning driving in Greece. When harms are localized, each person can take risk decisions on their own behalf. This is why despite the high death counts, banning driving isn’t necessary. Requiring insurance serves as an adequate system since repeat offenders would eventually be uninsurable.

However, some events have the potential to cause irreversible catastrophic damage. This is ruin risk. In these cases, more stakeholders should weigh in. Especially when all it takes is a single single instance (Ex: A major flood, pandemic or nuclear explosion) . This is why an individual shouldn’t have the right to risk blowing up the planet to quench their thirst. One problem with the scenario I provided, was it presented the question as if the probability was known to be 4%. It’s one thing to make decisions when the probability is well understood and a completely different thing when the model has little to no predictability. This goes back to the Known-Knowns versus Unknown-Unknowns.

When there is low confidence in the model and the potential for ruin, more prudence is needed. Dealing with Known-Unknowns or Unknown-Unknown risks, means the probability for ruin could be uncomfortably high. This is why more diligence should be done to improve confidence in the model before introducing this risk. Especially when some effects are irreversible.

“If the risk is one of ruin, standard statistical inference breaks down; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Taleb et al, 2014

The Ramifications & Conclusion

Taleb argues the conventional approach of putting the burden of proof on regulators or consumers to prove the danger before introducing these risks is backward. Anyone looking to introduce these type of risks should first prove there’s near zero probability of ruin first.

This is why he’s against GMOs, engineered pathogens or gain-of-function virology. These new and largely untested methods, have a lot of uncertainty coupled with the potential for ruin. Naturally, this drew the ire and criticism from the science community; taking his argument as being anti progress/science. Others say dismissing things with minimal risk of ruin but with guaranteed advancements for society is foolish. There was a lot of criticism to the article and concept at large.

Taleb failed to convince anyone to remove GMOs from the food system, and lost some clout with the science community. However, this line of thinking alerted him early to the potential risk caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020. He was among a group that warned the White House of the risks of the pandemic. They advised to close their borders to prevent the spread, implement aggressive testing, lock-downs and protecting the elderly before the pandemic could reach the US.

The White House, and pretty much every other country did not take their advice. Instead of acting quickly and decisively, they opted for a wait and see approach, to not unnecessarily cause economic harm. Well we know how things played out.

While this might not have changed anything, Taleb’s perspective on risk, could have potentially reduced the spread of the pandemic. This is because he understood the difference between localized and system risk, ruinous events and how to manage risks when the probability is not well known. Insurance, elimination or avoidance. You don’t need to be a best selling author or accomplished trader to understand the key concept: Make sure you don’t blow up!

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These I can live with. Don’t let laws of physics get in the way of a cool scene. What I absolutely cannot stand however, is any instance when you see a character break into a full on sprint while wearing a suit. Anyone who has ever worn one that’s remotely form fitting, immediately understands how absurd this is. Bringing your knee anywhere near your waist is a struggle, yet the idea Tom Cruise can take off on a full on sprint, then continue at an elite marathoner pace in a Tuxedo and dress shoes is stupid. I don’t question TC’s running speed, but not dressed like that.

Yet Ethan Hunt isn’t the only protagonist that believes they can’t compromise style while trying to save the world. I had my research assistant Chad Petey, go back and study the 100 most watched action movies ever and they’ve concluded this happens in at least 13 different films. This is just for the main character, if we include villains, henchmen and extras, this number quickly swells up. How did this get so out of hand?

In today’s article I will explore how this epidemic began, explore why and compare the performance of suit wearing protagonist versus our casually dressed hero’s.

Continue reading to learn why action movies and running in suits make no sense.

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The History/Timeline of Action Movies

Action movies began over a hundred years ago, during the silent film era. People normally consider The Great Train Robbery (1903) to be the first but it took until the 1920’s, for Douglas Fairbanks to emerge as Hollywood’s original action star. He starred in films such The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922), mixing athletic stunt work and charismatic heroism. When you can’t speak you need to make up for it somehow; some modern actors never got this memo.

The 1930s-1950s, the Golden Age of Hollywood, introduced sound and improved stunts in action films. Some memorable moving pictures included Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) or Wartime and Westerns from John Wayne such as Stagecoach (1939) or High Noon (1952). However, the big shift began in the 1960’s, when Sean Connery played James Bond for the first time in Dr. No (1962). This would begin one of the major film franchises, including dozens of films, spanning several actors. If you’re reading this, you know who James Bond is, don’t make me explain him to you.

It was the 1980’s when action franchises really blew up. Between Sly Stallone, doing nothing to help dispel Italian stereotypes, Arnold Schwarzenegger showing bodybuilding is at least as useful as a degree from Julliard and Bruce Willis, as the unstoppable everyman cop John McClane. Since then budgets, stunts and special effects have just gotten grander, to the point where these movies are considered a flop unless they generate $100M the opening weekend. With pressure like this, action heroes need to bring their best effort to win over demanding audiences.

This begs the question.

Why do Action Heroes Wear Suits?

Action hero’s take some variation of this formula:

Hero/Protagonist blessed with a particular set of skills, needs to

1. Prove they are worthy

2. Rescue/avenge their partner, child or pet

3. Reluctantly save the world, since they are the only one capable

4. Clear their name/survive the hunt

5. Protect or retrieve item so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands

Mostly to save time, the hero is usually already pretty skilled at the start of the film. They might not be in their final form, but they are rarely starting from zero, otherwise it will take a lot of plot armor to convince the audience with minimal training they can start defeating supercharged baddies. Unless of course, they are “The one!”.

Heroes sprinting or fighting in suits made sense in previous eras because that was the style at the time. Men wore suits to work, to church, on airplanes and even when they were just hanging out. It stands to reason, they won’t always have time to slip into athletic gear when they needed to get somewhere in a hurry.

As men started to abandon suits for casual outings, the only times they would be worn would be for work or formal events. From what Hollywood taught us, action hero’s generally work in fields requiring many of these. Especially spies or people in law enforcement that can’t appear inconspicuous therefore it’s essential they wear custom suits walking around large metropolitan centers at all times.

This is why it’s completely normal for James Bond, Ethan Hunt and John Wick to be wearing suits; it’s part of the job and it could blow their cover if they wore something else. Although perhaps saving the world might not be their only motivation.

James Bond is great, but let’s face it. The guy’s a boozed out womanizer. Audiences used to find that cute but in 2025, neither drinking or womanizing are fashionable. You should expect much less of that whenever they cast a new Bond actor. In any case, as effective as Bond is, his suit wearing is far more for style, than function. He has shown he will happily reduce his probability of success, if that helps further his cause with his desired concubine.

While Ethan Hunt is slightly less distracted than Bond, his motivations are far from pure either. Hunt only continues to save the world because he’s been suffering through a mid-life crisis since he retired after MII. This explains the unnecessary stunts such as running around the tallest building in the world, holding his breath for 5 minutes or hanging off an airplane in flight. He just needs to feel something.

John Wick isn’t even trying to save the world. He’s trying to obliterate anyone that has remotely wronged him. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next edition is a vendetta against a barista that gets his order wrong. It makes for a good movie, but real heroes don’t have the luxury of style points.

Real Hero’s Don’t Wear Suits

Great heroes accomplish the impossible. That’s easy when you have superpowers but when you are just a motivated cop, vigilante or agent, you need to really dig deep and give everything you’ve got.

John McClane was just trying mend a shaky marriage and surprise his kids for Christmas when circumstances forced him, a regular NYPD officer to have to take on Hans Gruber’s entire crew. With just a pistol and jet lag, he had to take on European tourists armed with automatic weapons. Do you think he had time to change into a suit first? No. Despite being invited to a formal event, he had to go functional. He needed something breathable, perfect for ripping up for bandages if he gets shot. That’s the type of guy he was. Do you think McClane would wear Lululemon? Of course not. If he’s going to the gym, it’s with combat boots and the same gym shirt he’s had since high school.

John McClane, an active cop. Probably doesn’t even own a suit.

Know who else would never be caught dead in a suit? The ultimate action hero. Jason Bourne. Jason Bourne never fights in suits, because he’s actually a killing machine. He doesn’t care about style points. He will kill with his bare hands, a magazine, a pen. Whatever he has at his disposal.

He doesn’t even know who he is. What he is or why people are after him. It doesn’t matter. Send whoever you want after him, but nobody you would want back. Bourne had the entire US National Security apparatus after him, yet he came out on top. He did this with minimal equipment or support. Relying only on his training and instinct. Of all the action protagonists, none can match Bourne’s ability to stealthily blend in with a crowd, and always find a way to extract himself or his target from the situation. A suit would only get in the way.

Can Anybody Pull It Off?

With the exception of anyone starring in a period piece or a Guy Richie movie, it rarely makes sense for an action hero to be wearing a suit. If they are wearing a suit, it can only be to impress people. Take the Kingsman series for instance. It’s an organization of posh British aristocrats. Of course they need to be wearing a suit while saving the world. How else would people know they are posh aristocrats?

Otherwise wearing a suit mostly gets in the way if you’re ever dealing with a villain that’s at least slightly above replacement level. Take Ryan Gosling. In Drive he’s in a white bomber jacket and jeans. Despite the tall task in front of him, he manages to overcome his obstacles. The next time we see him in an action sequence is in Only God Forgives. He foolishly challenges Lieutenant Chang, who beats him senseless. Despite removing the jacket, the suit definitely didn’t do him any favors.

If a suit must be worn, the best example to follow is Christian Bale/Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Bruce Wayne/ Batman. Bruce Wayne wears suits for his day to day sauntering. Attending board meetings, hosting fundraisers or bringing Russian dancers to dinner. When he is the Batman, he wears his Batsuit. Bruce Wayne isn’t trying to fight crime in $5,000 outfits. When you are going up against incredible villains such as Ra’s Al Ghul, The Joker and Bane you don’t have time to fix your lapel. You need to be locked in. Bruce Wayne is style, the dark knight is business.

Perhaps the one exception is The Matrix because apparently while inside, everybody needs to wear suits. This applies whether they are an Agent or part of the Nebuchadnezzar crew. Neo is “The One”, and can download any skill, so he must have found the package for maneuvering in sub-optimal clothing. This combined with his nemesis, Agent Smith, also wearing a suit evens the playing field. This is why Neo can get away with it. But what if we have it backwards though? Neo may not actually be “The One” or the hero of the story at all. What if Agent Smith is really “The One” and he would have defeated Neo, if not for his fashion choices? Makes you think.

After a century of action sequences, while it makes for a nice aesthetic, good style has never made saving the world any easier. When a protagonist chooses Italian tailoring over functional fabric, the filmmakers are just signaling the villain is made of cardboard and the stakes are not high enough. When you see somebody sprinting for extended stretches in Oxfords, it’s probably CGI. With no disrespect to Bond, Hunt and Wick but these are not serious heroes since they are not living up to their potential. They lack foes worthy of their full attention which is why they are the equivalent of great athletes stuck in an era of weak competition. This ultimately nerfs their legacy and leaves the audience wanting more.

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In recent weeks, I had the good fortune to see works of art that will likely be discussed and re-watched much longer than the usual TikTok cycle. Succession creator Jesse Armstrong returns with a film Mountainhead, the premise being a few tech executives on a weekend retreat as a global calamity occurs, caused by deepfakes and Artificial Intelligence. Sounds like a far fetched scenario, I know.

If you want something more realistic, what about a TV series about a comedian flying a Boeing 737 to prove a point about airline safety? Well Nathan Fielder in season 2 of The Rehearsal, takes things to another level, physically and comedically. Fielder stretches the limits of what can be allowed on network television. He has shown to be fearless; allowing him to take his comedy to depths not previously seen. The Rehearsal season 2 is must-watch TV, that is among the best seasons of television this decade (thus far).

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Mountainhead

Mountainhead is an incredible satire on the personalities of the Silicon Valley elites. It’s difficult not to see the film and immediately see it as an SNL style spoof on the All-In Podcast. Jason Schwartzman's character is clearly based on Jason Calacanis, the moderator of pod, that’s mostly famous for being friends with Elon Musk. He was also an early investor in Uber, which he reminds people about often. While’s he’s rich, he’s neither a billionaire or a centi-millionaire, making him the poor man of the group. Sacks and Chamath have ridiculed him for this on many occasions on the All-in pod. Although he’s well connected in tech circles, Calacanis lacks the pedigree of a top investor or company builder, which Chamath and Sacks are not afraid to remind him, when he’s taking a contrary position to them. They way they speak to him, sometimes borders on bullying, which is exactly the dynamic shown on Mountainhead.

While ripping on Jason is mostly good natured, some of their comments reveal the hubris from these besties. This isn’t completely unwarranted; they have played important roles in generation defining companies such as Google, Facebook, PayPal and others, while amassing large fortunes. Besides, what’s the point in having “eff you money”, if you don’t ever say eff you, every now and then?

This is all fine and good, but when you hear some of their comments and how quickly these tech executives have managed to secure access to the White House, it shows they clearly believe their powers extend far beyond the realm of tech or business. This isn’t exclusive to technology, plenty of energy or finance executives or former entertainers made forays into politics, with varied success. What’s different in this case, is the sincerity to which tech executives believe they are making the word a better place, regardless of clear negative externalities their products cause. The mantra of many tech elites appears to be, technology is not only the best solution to all human problems, it's the only one.

If regulators or governments dare get in the way, they are anti-progress. While satirical, it’s not a stretch to think that many tech elites would buy a country if they could. Not the U.S. or China, of course. But something small. Vulnerable. Maybe in the Caribbean.

The group dynamic in Mountainhead echoes what has been playing out in real time on the All-In Podcast. Chamath and Sacks are now full-on Trump whisperers. Calacanis is a devout Elon Musk loyalist, which, until recently, meant being softly pro-Trump even after years of warning how catastrophic his return would be. David Friedberg is the outlier, more intellectually honest, less partisan. Politically a libertarian, but still grounded in reality. He is the closest analogue to the film's Jeffrey "Jeff" Abredazi, a billionaire who, unlike the rest, seems aware that something has gone deeply wrong, and they might be the cause.

Then there is Venis "Ven" Parish, an amalgamation of Big Tech CEOs. He’s clearly some caricature of Zuckerberg, Bezos and Benioff, possibly others. Obsessed with biohacking, convinced he understands philosophy, and certain that his work is saving humanity. He does not just disrupt industries; he thinks he is evolving the species. Randall Garrett (Steve Carrell), isn’t exactly David Sacks. Maybe certain aspects of Peter Thiel or a Bill Gurly type. More of an old school VC, that serves as something of a mentor to the rest of the group. They give him a god complex, believing he can control his health and live forever. This is clearly referencing the longevity investments Thiel made a while ago. Perhaps also a reference to Bryan Johnson.

Regardless of the exact characters, the film will prove prescient. Misinformation and deepfakes are already distorting public perception. Open Twitter right now and scroll through footage from Israel or Iran. If you believed everything you saw, you'd assume both countries have been wiped off the map. In less than a generation, tech founders went from hoodie-wearing outsiders to front-row seats at inaugurations. Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, brings the same scalpel here, eviscerating the powerful while making you laugh. If you loved Succession, you will love this. If you hate Big Tech, you will love this. If you work in tech, you will probably call it "mid."

The Rehearsal

Nathan Fielder is the new king of comedy

With all due respect to Severance and White Lotus, Nathan Fielder just created the standout season of television this decade. He also just snatched the crown from Sacha Baron Cohen (SBA), Eric Andre, and even the late Andy Kaufman to become the reigning king of method comedy.

Method acting, popularized by Marlon Brando and employed by modern legends like Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeremy Strong, requires the actor to stay in character throughout the shoot. Nathan has adopted a similar commitment, except his stage is the real world, and his character is just a strange, obsessive version of himself. This is in contrast to SBA or Kaufman that played characters with no similarities to their own personalities. The difference from the character Fielder plays on his shows and how he is in real life, is subtle. To the point that when he’s doing interviews, whether he’s promoting a show or not, it’s difficult to decipher if he’s still show Nathan.

This is likely because for most of his career, he performed under his own name. Fielder began his television career nearly twenty years ago doing short segments on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a CBC comedy show. He was far from a main player but he did enough to convince execs at Comedy Central to let him launch his own show, Nathan for You. The premise was simple: Nathan, a supposed business genius, offers absurd marketing advice to small businesses. The execution was anything but. He started with simple premises such as having an ice cream store temporarily offer a poop-flavored ice cream. Convince a a realtor to guarantee any homes she sold were certified "ghost-free." He then took it to another level when he realized using parody law, he could rip off Starbucks. He created Dumb Starbucks. That last one went viral globally. People thought it was a Banksy installation. The stunt made international news before being shut down by health inspectors. Nathan had arrived.

The show wasn’t just about laughs, though it was consistently hilarious. It captured the quiet desperation of small business owners struggling under regulation, competition, and modernity. It revealed how easily Nathan could convince people to do outrageous things. And it hinted at the deeper commitment and ambition lurking beneath the surface.

(In 2014, I saw him at a show at the Just For Laughs Festival and got to ask him a question on stage)

By season three, Fielder had declared war on Uber with a sleeper cell of rogue taxi drivers. The logistics were insane. The laughs were real. But as his fame grew, and as smartphones made him more recognizable, the show became harder to produce. So he stepped back. He helped Sacha Baron Cohen on Who Is America?, consulted off-screen on other projects, and disappeared from the spotlight.

The Rehearsal

(Some Spoilers Alert)

The show begins with an odd but compelling premise: what if people could rehearse difficult moments in their lives before they happen? It quickly evolves into something surreal. In one storyline, Nathan helps someone rehearse becoming a parent by simulating an entire life with a child actor. Eventually, Nathan inserts himself into the simulation, raising the child himself, until it becomes impossible to tell where the show ends and Nathan begins.

Season one is weird, brilliant, and not for everyone. It is far from mass-audience sitcom territory. But if it clicks with you, it really clicks. Season two, is where he takes things further than you would expect from any network television show can go.

It starts with a genuine safety concern: many plane crashes are caused by miscommunication between pilots. Nathan investigates. He meets with the former head of the FAA, who agrees it's a problem. So Nathan does what any sane person would: he decides to stage a rehearsal for pilot communication. But not just that. He spends two years learning to fly starting on small planes working his way up until he is trained to pilot a commercial Boeing 737. Legally. He goes through the same training as a commercial pilot, finds a plan and flies 100 people, logging airtime under obscure FAA rules. The scene is astonishing. He actually lands the plane. It is not a joke. It is not CGI. He did it. Why? Because that is what the show required. Because that is who Nathan is.

Along the way, The Rehearsal explores real issues: the mental health of pilots, the pressure they face, the impossibility of disclosing conditions without risking their careers. It also remains funny, darkly, awkwardly, relentlessly funny. Nathan finds bizarre people and lets them talk. He recreates Sully’s Hudson River landing just to understand it better. He lives as Sully. He creates an alternate history where Sully isn’t actually a hero, he was just a dude distracted by Evanescence.

He takes on one of the largest film and television studios in the word: Paramount+. Fielder learnt they removed an old episode of Nathan for You , that as part of the episode, included the creation of a brand that raised money for Holocaust awareness. Paramount+ claimed it did not want to "take sides" in the Israel-Palestine conflict, so it pulled any content related to Judaism. Despite pointing out to them that they still host plenty of content related to N@zis and other potentially sensitive content, the studio did not reverse their position. His response is scathing.

At the time, The Curse, his other show with Emma Stone and the Safdie brothers, was waiting on a season two renewal with Paramount+. He wasn’t just risking a professional relationship. He was risking his career. That HBO let the episode air is nothing short of astonishing. This goes to show, not only the lengths Nathan will go, but the extend to which the network, will allow him to spend endless money and go after anything he sees fit. HBO or Max, whatever they call themselves these days, is not a small network. This isn’t Adultswim or some small network. They have shareholders and eliminate even decent shows at the drop of a hat. They allow Fielder to do this because they acknowledge that he’s special. He might not drive the most views, but for the people who get him, they will subscribe to HBO just to watch anything he does.

He’s built a fiercely loyal fanbase because Nathan Fielder is fearless. He commits harder than anyone. He never breaks. And somehow, always lands the plane.

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Franz Kafka became a legend creating surrealist worlds filled with human life size insects and inscrutable bureaucracies. For a century, his works such as The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle, inspired generations and made us contemplate the absurd nature of corporate life.

With attention spans shrinking faster than my Subscriber count; many millennials and Gen Z’s can’t be bothered to attempt reading hundred year old books. Instead, the geniuses at Apple realized, they can lure in these generations with Adam Scott and corporate office dance montages included in their Apple TV membership. This is because, not much has changed in the last hundreds years when it comes to how corporations view their workers.

The emergence of new technologies broadens the reach of these same entities, allowing them to interact with workers in new ways. Unfortunately, in 2025, we don’t have Franz Kafka but we have the genius behind classics such as Heavyweights, Zoolander and Tropic Thunder. Ben Stiller has shown to be a master at capturing the human condition, fortunately for us, he decided to investigate the role corporations can play in our life coupled with the emergency of new technologies.

It took 30+ years, but Severance represents the culmination of Ben Stiller’s artistic progression, making him the perfect person to create one of the most fascinating series of the 2020s. This article will explore why everyone is fascinated and loves Severance, his masterpiece.

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Is Ben Stiller this generations Kafka?

“Youth is wasted on the young. I’d go further: life is wasted on... people.” Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), Greenberg (2010)

An advantages of being born in the nineties, was a front row seat to the golden age of comedy films1. During the 2000’s, multiple classics were released each year from the likes of Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and of course, Ben Stiller.

Stiller was born into comedy. His father, Jerry Stiller (Frank Costanza on Seinfeld), and mother, Anne Meara, were a major comedy duo in the ’60s and ’70s. As a kid, Ben was always making characters and shooting short films, often in a mockumentary style. His early talent stood out, even landing him a spot on Saturday Night Live. He left after four episodes since SNL wouldn’t let him make the short films he actually cared about.

He did fine anyway. He got his own sketch show, scored roles in big films, and began directing studio features. Through the ’90s, his box office success was uneven, but a clear creative voice emerged. In Heavyweights and The Cable Guy, Stiller explored taboo topics with a kind of dark satire that didn’t land with mainstream audiences at the time, but would later earn cult status.

His breakout came with a streak of hits: There’s Something About Mary (1998), Meet The Parents (2000), and Zoolander (2001). These films proved he could balance wide appeal with genuinely funny, off-kilter humor. After these successes, as well as the growing profiles of frequent collaborators Owen Wilson, Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow and others, Stiller was given increasingly more freedom from film studios to make the movies he wanted.

He used it by making the movie nobody else would attempt. A brazen, critique of Hollywood, the film industry and everyone in it. I am of course talking about the comedy masterpiece Tropic Thunder (2008). The film is a satire that skewers Hollywood’s obsession with prestige, method acting, and box office glory. It mocks self-important war films, actors chasing Oscars by playing disabilities or other races, and studio execs who care more about profits than art. Each character parodies a real industry archetype: washed-up action stars to drugged-out comedians. It shows how far Hollywood will go to sell "authenticity." Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) summarizes it best:

In spite of the critical meta-comedy (or perhaps because of it), Tropic Thunder was smashing success at the box office and the film was well received critically. Yet some people failed to understand Stiller’s satire and took offense to some of the depictions in the film. As the culture shifted towards a higher emphasis on politically correct humor, making films such as Tropic Thunder were no longer feasible.

Stiller seemed to play it safe after that, reverting to sequels of his previous films, re-makes or drama comedies with more emphasis on the drama. This is why Tropic Thunder was probably the last honest thing Stiller made… until Severance.

Severance

If Tropic Thunder was Stiller’s bombastic takedown of Hollywood excess, Severance is his cold, clinical dissection of corporate life. It’s slower, dark and pretty strange but the satire cuts just as deep. Severance tells the story of workers who agree to surgically divide their consciousness into two parts, one that only exists at work (the innie) and another that only exists outside of it (the outtie). Both are unaware of what happens while the other consciousness is “awake”. It’s a sci-fi metaphor turned brutally literal: the most extreme version of “leave your personal life at the door.”

The concept is surreal, funny in a bleak way, and deeply sad. It feels Kafkaesque not just in tone, but in how it reflects our real lives back at us through a distorted, corporate lens. A person becomes two people. Neither is free. Both are trapped.

Severance is unfortunately perfectly suited for the time. Trust in big tech has plummeted, public sentiment toward corporate power is at a generational low, and the promises of meaningful work have never felt more hollow. Younger generations, already spending more of their social time in work settings than any cohort before them, are growing wary of companies that refer to themselves as families but behave more like cults. I’m not sure what kind of families they grew up in, but most don’t fire children after a poor performing quarter or two. It’s no wonder a show about slicing your soul in half just to survive the workday feels more like documentary than fiction.

Stiller’s previous work gave him the perfect source material to make Severance funny while also feeling too real. In The Cable Guy, we met a man addicted to television and desperate for connection. In Greenberg, a man disconnected from the world and paralyzed by meaninglessness. In Tropic Thunder, actors trapped inside roles they no longer understood. Severance is the natural extension of this through-line: people playing roles so deeply they forget who they are.

Stiller learnt his lesson from Tropic Thunder; if he was right, funny and obvious, people would feel alienated. If he wants to point out hypocrisy without upsetting his audience, he had to return to the darker, more subtle approach. Stiller easily could have made a film like The Office Space (1999), that shows the absurdity of bad management and the gradual descent towards apathy. Instead, Stiller replaced this apathy with pessimism. This is why now, Severance strikes such a nerve, with generations burned out by corporate life and craving a different relationship with work. Everyone is so miserable in their home and work lives, the idea of disconnecting from either or both is not such an implausible prospect in 2025.

Conclusion

If Kafka were alive in 2005, and hired to create The Office instead of Greg Daniels, we likely would have ended up with something closer to Severance2. Since he wasn’t, we had to wait a bit longer for Ben Stiller to get a few bad cash grabs out of his system, to instead go back to what he had caught onto to, nearly 20 years earlier in The Cable Guy. Another story about somebody obsessed with their job, disconnected from reality and grasping for connection.

So while it may have taken decades, Severance feels like the project Stiller was always building toward. It’s funny in a way that’s not funny at all, just like modern life. As one of Stiller’s earlier characters White Goodman once said, “I'm not okay, you're not okay, but that's okay!”.

If you liked this and are a fan of The White Lotus, check out last week’s article, Why does everyone love The White Lotus?

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Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolridge), dashing across the deck of a yacht in the beautiful waters of Sicily, shrieks her now iconic line during the second season of The White Lotus. It’s absurd, but also deeply tragic, which represents what the show is about.

The White Lotus is managing to dominate public discourse, proving that long-form storytelling can still command attention in the age of algorithm-driven content. Their success is no accident, like all good art, they tap into something deeply relevant about the world we live in today and make people reflect, between laughs (maybe cries).

This article will break down why The White Lotus isn’t just great TV, but how it reveals as much about the viewer, as the characters on the show.

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The Premise: Luxury, Entitlement, and Chaos

“What do you think is gonna happen? You’re gonna travel the world and suddenly, like, gain some perspective?” Olivia Mossbacher (Sydney Sweeny) —White Lotus Season 1

The White Lotus is named after a fictional luxury hotel chain with locations around the world. The premise is simple: each season takes place at a different resort, following a new cast of ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) guests and the hotel staff who serve them. The dynamic remains the same: entitled, high-maintenance guests indulge in an extravagant vacation while finding endless reasons to be dissatisfied with the hotel, their travel companions, locals or themselves.

The show masterfully parodies the concept of first-world problems. The characters are so rich that basic survival is not a concern. Their problems are, for the most part, unrelatable to the average viewer. The White Lotus creator, Mike White, masterfully exaggerates their grievances, highlighting their detachment from real-world struggles. They can’t sit back, relax and enjoy their vacation, because any inconvenience or perceived injustice is an assault on their sense of self. They can't let that stand.

This alone isn’t what makes the show good. There’s too much content out there making commentary on rich people being bad. What keeps fans hooked is the intoxicating blend of exotic locations (Hawaii, Sicily, & Thailand aka Taiwan), hypnotic music, a bombshell cast, and a dark undercurrent exposing the complex moral decay of society, extending beyond the ultra-wealthy.

Giving The People What they Want

The subtlety is key, because for a film/tv series to go truly mainstream, they have to avoid alienating large parts of their audience. If The White Lotus went overboard, it would descend to anti-rich people propaganda, that only appeals to people looking for that sort of thing. It’s not impossible to have success by catering to a niche group, but it will be hard to reach the same cultural relevance if most of the population feels like the show isn’t for them. You can’t accuse The Sopranos, Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones of trying to repel certain audience types. Well perhaps, some vegans were triggered by all those deli meats and prosciutto sandwiches (sorry!).

Most people aren’t looking for explicit political declarations when watching premium television. The White Lotus is a good show because it threads the needle of bringing up charged topics without bludgeoning viewers with their own ideology. This allows for various viewing motivations. For those that want to see beautiful rich people making funny quips in exotic locations, great. If you want a more intelligent show, you can get lost in the thrill of a murder mystery with overly self important nouveau riche people. Regardless of who you are sitting with everyone can find a way to enjoy the show. Anyone can find a character to root for, regardless of their beliefs.

This is because of the subtle Rorschach test embedded into the writing.

The Rorschach test, (also known as the inkblot test) is a psychological test where individuals describe what they see in a series of inkblots. Their responses are analyzed to assess personality, emotional functioning, and potentially screen for certain mental conditions. It exemplifies how people can come up with many different interpretations despite seeing the same image.

The White Lotus, is a rare example of a show that can address charged topics without alienating potential audiences. During this era of hyper polarization, it’s increasingly rare. The clever writing permits people to watch whatever show they want to see. If certain viewers are looking for a show depicting out of touch rich people, they have plenty examples of this. If others want a show depicting the irony of people whining about injustice while staying in a $10,000 per night resort, this is served to them as well. Regardless of your politics or bias, The White Lotus is here to welcome you.

A perfect example of this was on display during the first season, when Nicole Mossbacher (Connie Britton), a successful CEO of a big tech company, shared her views on diversity equity inclusion (DEI). As a female in an industry overrepresented by men, many would expect her to be supportive of such measures but she wasn’t. During a dinner discussion, she says DEI makes it impossible to hire young straight white men, therefore they are the ones that deserve sympathy. Naturally her college aged daughter Olivia and her friend Paula, disagreed, thinking she was out of touch. This depicts a conflict between different generations of women, that can have conflicting views of what equality means.

Some younger women feel the more senior women at their firms are not doing enough to support their growth; that they see other women as competition instead of allies. Nicole would represent this perspective. She exhibits this behavior when Rachel Patton (Alexandra Daddario) tells Nicole that she was an inspiration. Nicole at first seems touched, then quickly turns sour then accuses Rachel of writing an unflattering article about her, implying she didn’t deserve her position. This scene demonstrates the clash between the second and third generation feminist movements, the tension around DEI and other topics in a nuanced but not cringe or over the top way. This brings thoughtful discussion to the topic without making the audience feel bludgeoned politically.

This is done by acknowledging different perspectives, thus performing the Rorschach test. Those that agree with Nicole’s point of view, can dismiss Olivia and Paula’s perspectives as self interested or the ignorance associated with their lack of life experience. Those sympathetic to Olivia and Paula, can equally dismiss Nicole as being old and out of touch, or that this confirms their view on women whom view other women as competition. The same scene can be shown to a diverse range of views but they will come away believing that Mike White shared their perspective.

To left leaning fans of the show, The White Lotus is a satire of the moral decay of the wealthy. It reinforces their belief that we need to eat the rich. To those on the opposite end of the spectrum, it shows how out of touch global elites are, and why these aren’t the people we should trust to run our institutions. The White Lotus can pull off this delicate balance because of great writing, and terrific acting.

Casting Brilliance

The White Lotus team has mastered the art of casting. They are great at selecting actors that perfectly embody charcutiers of people we know or can imagine knowing in real life. Since The White Lotus is a dramedy (Drama-Comedy), which is an added difficulty for the actors to balance. If they are too realistic, we will simply detest their characters and the show won’t be funny. If they aren’t authentic enough, it feels more like a sitcom, lacking any real stakes or tension.

Take Tanya McQuoid. If she was played by anyone other than Jennifer Coolridge, we probably would have hated her; which would have a significant impact on our enjoyment of the show. Her silly exclamations and one liners make her impossible not to love, even if she occasionally does objectively bad things. Portrayed differently, Tanya can easily come off looking as a villain.

Great art can challenge us and enhance our understanding of the world. When we are confronted with characters we are meant to dislike, but find ourselves loving, we should reconsider our beliefs. Many from the woke crowd will hate on rich people all day but the second Jennifer Coolridge comes on, they can’t help but laugh and smile. They won’t admit this, but maybe they don’t hate the rich as much as they claim.

What is equally impressive and adds to the difficulty, is that the cast and location change every season, effectively depriving the audience of the emotional connection they forged with the previous characters. Few shows have been able to successfully pull this off. True Detective season one with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, was among the best seasons of television ever. Unfortunately the show runners could not repeat this success in subsequent seasons.

The fact that The White Lotus has managed to do this for multiple seasons now, puts them in unchartered territories. They have done good job of mixing in new personalities such as the Spillers (Audrey Plaza & Will Sharpe) in season 2 or Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) in season 3 while also trying new takes on similar characters such as with Cameron Sullivan (Theo James) and Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Although the basic format can get stale very fast, these great characters quickly win viewers over, making us forget about previous seasons.

So Why Does Everyone Love The White Lotus?

Most people think of The White Lotus as a show that skewers the excesses of the ultra-wealthy, but the reason it’s so enjoyed, is because viewers can see the show they want based on their own biases and sympathies. The White Lotus is a dramedy, but the extent it’s a drama or a comedy, depends how you view the world.

Each characters has plenty to like or hate, so what Mike White has done, has given each of us a canvas to build our own adventure around. This stands in stark contrast to many contemporary shows that attempt to take a clear stance on morality, but fail to sway anyone or make a watchable show. The White Lotus thrives in the murky in-between in its gorgeous settings while beautiful people, do ugly things.

As we approach the Season 3 finale, the question isn’t whether Mike White and his team will deliver but what we’ll see in the inkblot of its story. The more we watch, the more we learn about ourselves. And if there’s one thing people are truly obsessed with, it’s themselves, which is why everyone loves The White Lotus.

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Upon reflection, I saw a strange parallel. The Trial depicts a society where individual liberties have been replaced with an ever-growing bureaucracy, designed to further perpetuate itself, at the expense of everyone else. The Technological Republic, on the other hand, argues that this is what our society will become if we do not stand up for individual liberties, which are among the hallmarks of Western civilization. The way we defend these liberties, is technological and military superiority.

Translation: He wants you to buy more Palantir stock. If you are a short seller, he especially wants you to put down the coc@a!ne and reverse your position. Karp is a colorful character. Since Palantir has become a stock market darling, he has become increasingly outspoken. One of the topics he has regularly discussed in public is his belief that Silicon Valley companies should focus more on solving problems related to national security instead of launching another photo-sharing app.

(not AI, he did this during a live interview)

This article will give a short primer on The Trial and what Kafkaesque means. Discuss what Alex Karp wrote about in The Technological Republic, and contemplate whether his views and actions would be consistent with a Kafka protagonist or other great characters of literature. If you haven’t already clicked off, buckle up, buckaroo!

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The Trial & A short intro to Kafka

Franz Kafka’s The Trial is one of the most unsettling novels you’ll ever read. Josef K., is arrested and prosecuted without ever being told what crime he committed. He becomes the latest victim of a nightmarish legal system, where guilt is assumed and justice is just an abstract concept without a functional reality. While it’s a darkly funny, it lingers with you as the weight of the implications settles in mostly because of how prophetic it turned out to be.

The Trial was published in 1925, shortly before the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany. Soon, Kafka’s absurd bureaucracy would be mirrored in real-world horrors, where Jews, like Kafka would be arrested without accusation, due process, or access to a legitimate court. The legal machinery that devoured Josef K. in fiction became horrifyingly real, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust, where millions of Jews and other targeted groups were systematically exterminated. Kafka, who died in 1924 from tuberculosis, would not live to see these events unfold or he likely would have perished in a concentration camp, like most of his family.

The Trial is not about hateful political ideologies but rather the crushing weight of excessive bureaucracy. A system that no longer serves people but instead perpetuates itself for its own sake. I wrote about this earlier this year in How Society Uses Bureaucracy to Keep You Safe but Miserable, before I started The Trial. I took a different approach but the bottom line’s the same: if bureaucracy is not actively kept in check, it will become overgrown and eventually erode everyone’s freedom.

Beyond bureaucracy, Kafka’s novels discuss themes such as dehumanization, authority and existential isolation. His work is so iconic, that people refer to things as Kafkaesque when a situation is surreal, oppressive, and/or absurd. The term is often used to describe when individuals are caught in nightmarish bureaucratic loops, against nameless/faceless illogical agents acting on behalf of an uncaring system. In Kafka’s novels, the protagonists are generally the victims of these bureaucracy, yet still choose to fight or reason against their oppressors. These characters often exhibit alienation, guilt, and deep self-doubt, making them appear depressed or overly self-critical, as though they are fundamentally flawed.

If you contrast this with another great fiction writer of the 20th century, Fyodor Dostoevsky, his characters often go through major moral and psychological turmoil, and encounter existential questions. They differ from Kafka protagonists in that they often perceive themselves as more enlightened, morally superior, or "better" than the people around them. Therefore depending on how people perceive themselves, we can decide if they are a Dostoevsky or Kafka character.

We can all find ourselves in Kafkaesque scenarios; anyone that has ever gone to renew their drivers license or apply for a permit, will attest to this. Yet when faced with this scenario, do you accept your fate or try to be like Josef K? Alex Karp sees the West approaching this.

Alex Karp & Palantir

Before co-founding Palantir 20 years ago, Alex Karp did not fit the bill of the typical Silicon Valley Founder at the time. Instead of coding late into the night on side projects, he was busy earning his law degree from Stanford and a PhD from Goethe University. Karp started his career at the Sigmund Freud Institute, an institute focused on psychoanalysis, as per its namesake. He ran a hedge fund for a couple of years before joining Palantir with his former Stanford classmate, Peter Thiel in 2004.

Palantir Technologies is a software company that specializes in data analytics. They work with many large companies but they are primarily known for partnering with governments and military organizations. They first rose to prominence when reports suggested their work aided the operation that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. Shortly after, documents leaked by Edward Snowden indicated that Palantir played a role in supporting the National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance programs, which were designed to monitor and analyze global internet traffic. Despite questions about these programs, nothing hindered Palantir’s growth.

In 2024, Palantir generated ~$3B of revenue, while growing at a rate of around 30%; they currently have a market cap of around $200B, which is in line with Salesforce and Adobe that generate around 10 times more revenue. The market is currently rewarding Palantir with a very high multiple, which means investors expect sustained future growth.

This can be partially explained by the many ongoing military conflicts providing a boon for military and defense stocks. The United States alone spends nearly a Trillion dollars per year on military and defense, meaning there is plenty of money up for grabs for those that can secure those sweet government contracts. Possibly inspired by the success of Palantir, there has been an emergence of newer startups entering the space. VCs are suddenly very interested in funding defense-tech companies, investing $3B in 20241. This contrasts sharply with when Palantir started; Karp said no VCs were interested in the sector, forcing them to raise funds from the CIA and Thiel’s Founders Fund. This is why, two decades later Karp can confidently take a victory lap, since those investments paid off handsomely and Palantir is well positioned as a leader in a space that is suddenly the hot thing.

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

Alex Karp through The Technological Republic posits the West's technological leadership is endangered by a culture of complacency and misaligned priorities. He believes Silicon Valley has deviated from its historical collaboration with the government on significant technological advancements, such as the internet. Instead founders have been focusing on photo sharing apps and other trivial products. This is consistent with Thiel’s famous quote:

Karp sees this shift as part of a broader societal trend where intellectual fragility and a lack of ambition have infected academia, politics, and business, making this generation weak and less equipped to address, real pressing challenges. He’s certainly not the only person to lodge similar complaints about Silicon Valley innovations failing to address more important issues. For Karp, ensuring Western Democracies, remain the most technologically advanced is the most critical issue of the day. This is needed to maintain hard power, and soft belief.

If the US does not win the emerging artificial intelligence race, it will cede its superiority to rivals such as China, which has a different set of values. This might sound obvious, but as Karp sees it, many people in Silicon Valley and major institutions, are unwilling to say the quiet part out loud, America/the West needs to win. They are afraid of alienating anyone, so they choose not to say or stand for anything.

When Karp sees employees at big tech firms such as Google and Microsoft unwilling to work with the US military, but having no qualms working with the Communist Party of China (CCP), he sees this as an example of people wishing to benefit from the comforts of Western civilization without doing anything to protect it. Karp does not believe you can fence sit. You either support a cause, or you support its opposition. If you don’t support America and its allies, then you are for their enemies. Most people try to pretend these dilemmas do not exist, but in a competitive situation, opting out, is tacit support for somebody. This is effectively the trolley problem.

Many in positions of power feel unable to express their perspectives on issues of consequence, without potentially damaging their institution. However, not offering an opinion, is sometimes worse than taking a position. Karp highlights how this led to the ousting of former Ivy League Presidents Claudine Gay and Liz Magill; when they failed to denounce on-campus antisemitism. Karp doubts they are antisemitic or supported what they saw, but chose not to do anything because they felt unable to exercise their personal judgement, without in some way alienating a stakeholder of their university. In essence, they found themselves on the trolley and instead of choosing a track, they stepped out of the control room, hoping they would not be held responsible for the outcome. This approach failed them.

Karp on the other hand is not afraid. He has risked alienating customers and employees by taking public stances supporting Israel after the attacks of October 7th. He and Palantir were among the first Western companies to visit Ukraine after the invasion by Russia. Karp sees the situation as absurd. The West is in a great competition, yet many of its brightest technologists don’t want to help them win, which aids the competition. As CEO, Karp does not believe his job is to be a soulless agent serving only the system and shareholders. Therefore this begs the question, is Karp a Kafka or Dostoevsky character?

Conclusion: Who is Alex Karp?

Undoubtedly, Karp in his public appearances is giving off Dostoevsky main character energy. He does not follow the generic strait laced, publicly traded tech company CEO playbook. He’s brash, loud and unapologetically outspoken when sharing his views. On the spectrum he’s much closer to believing he’s the smartest person alive instead of being fundamentally flawed. While right now Palantir’s share price is on an incredible run, and he’s flying high, markets can be unpredictable and this can change almost overnight, just look at Zoom shares over the past 5 years.

Yet, you cannot overlook some absurd contradictions in Alex Karp’s rhetoric. He criticizes Silicon Valley for prioritizing trivial consumer apps over serious technological innovation, yet his co-founder, Peter Thiel, helped bankroll the very social media revolution that led to that shift. He argues that American tech companies have a moral duty to strengthen the West’s technological superiority, yet Palantir’s involvement in NSA surveillance raises questions about whether all "Western values" are being upheld equally. If Palantir and other American big tech companies win, how certain are we, we can still enjoy all of these freedoms2?

This paradox makes it difficult to place him cleanly in the Dostoevsky or Kafka archetype. If the West maintains its technological dominance, Karp will be seen as a visionary that saw what others didn’t and prevented the decay. If the West loses the AI arms race and America cedes control to adversaries, then Karp was a Kafka protagonist, that saw this happening but lost because too many in our society were afraid to standup for something. Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether we win this technological war or not, because one way or another, we will all be Josef K.

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Given this is coming out in late December, this story can be considered a holiday story, so long as you consider Die Hard to be a Christmas movie.

I hope you enjoy this story, If this is not for you, I have plenty of other articles for you to check out (see list below) and I will be returning to regularly scheduled programming next week. If you do like this and want to see more in the future, let me know and I might publish more in the future.

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Luigi Mangione chose to be Tyler Durden

The world needs another Ben Franklin

The Power of Confidence

The Most Obvious Secret to Success

“All Pain, No Gain” by Ben Saltiel

Am I dead? I wake up with an absolutely throbbing headache.

Sunlight streams through the window—late morning or early afternoon, probably. My nightstand’s knocked over, the alarm clock’s unplugged. The room’s a wreck: clothes are scattered, drawers are out, wide open. Looks like I had quite a time last night.

I struggle to my feet and hobble over to the bathroom, in the adjoining room. That blinding light isn’t helping. I think I hear something, a faint shuffle. Probably just the neighbor through the thin walls. I open the bathroom door, then notice it’s occupied.

“Sorry about that!” I call out as I slam the door shut , then notice even my bathroom products are scattered on the floor of the bedroom next to me. I pick them up then call out “I’m just going to go brush my teeth in the kitchen, take your time!” I can’t make out the muffled response through the closed door.

As I enter the hallway, I step on a piece of broken glass. What the f#ck is that doing here? Grabbing my foot in my hand, I hop on one foot into the kitchen and settle on a stool. The glass is one solid piece, only a few centimeters in diameter. Not very deep, small enough to remove without danger. I pull it out and grab a napkin to soak up the blood that seeps out of the wound.

Looking around the kitchen, I see that my first aid kit is conveniently already open on the floor next to me. Then the rest of the room comes to and I see it’s in a similar state to the bedroom. A huge mess. Furniture toppled over, removed drawers lying in the middle of the floor. Man, what did I get up to?

As I apply a bandage to my foot, I try to retrace my steps. It was my work’s holiday party, which started early, around 7pm. I don’t think I had much to drink; maybe one glass of wine? I never get drunk at work functions. Did I go somewhere after?

Glancing around the room, I search for clues that could help. What the hell, did I seriously forget to hang up my favorite Loro Piana suit? It’s so wrinkled, I’m going to need to steam it. My Ferragamo shoes, not too far away, are toppled over with the soles facing one another. Glancing around, I see a few of my other expensive suits, shoes, and watches in a pile on the couch. As usual I probably couldn’t decide what to wear. Can’t believe I didn’t at least hang them back up after, I must have really been bombed out.

I limp to the kitchen, grab a cracked mug, and fire up the coffee machine. The first sip hits hard, but it helps. I immediately make another.

After the holiday party I remember meeting up with some people. We went to that cocktail bar, the one with the bathtub in the middle and no sign. We didn’t stay out that late though, did we? I quickly brush my teeth in the sink, looking at the time on the stove I see it’s 11:24 AM. Thank God I don’t need to work today.

I head to my office in the next room. Great, now where’s my laptop? I don’t see my bag either. I must have left it at work before dinner. I guess I’ll need to get that later. Limping back to the bedroom, I see my phone on the ground poking out from under one of my sweaters. Picking it up, I see 20 notifications. I sit down on my bed, covered in my clothes and other personal affects. I really hope the maid is coming today, I should still tidy up a bit before she arrives. Otherwise it won’t be cleaning up, it will be hurricane relief.

These notifications were mostly people tagging Instagram stories from the work dinner or a few group chat text messages I didn’t open from last night. Going through the conversations, it seemed like we left the bar fairly early. I checked the AMEX app, and there are no big charges. Why am I in such rough shape this morning? I don’t think my head has ever hurt this much from drinking before. Reaching up to my temple, I feel a huge bump. Well, that would explain it. Using the camera on my phone, I see a huge bruise and red mark just over my left eye. How did I get this?

Seeing the bathroom door closed. I guess it’s still occupied. They’re certainly taking their time. I sit back down on the bed. To avoid the bright light, I face the corner with my back to the window and bathroom door. I go back to scrolling aimlessly on my phone, checking out what’s happening on Instagram. Nothing interesting. Flipping over to ESPN.com. All my teams lost last night, that sucks. My landlord texted me, asking if everything was alright? Some neighbors said they had heard some loud noises. That’s embarrassing, I apologize and promise that we’ll keep it down.

Suddenly it hits me. I don’t have a roommate. I snap to my feet, my spine starts to tingle. Who is that in the bathroom? Just as I turn to face the bathroom door, I hear the sound of it creaking open. A masked stranger dressed in black steps out and grunts “Toss your phone over right now, or I’ll slug you again!”

****The End****

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For this year, I read a total of 10 books. This is below what I have done for the past few years but the weekly posting cadence on Substack has eaten into my reading time. Nonetheless I am pleased with quality of the writing I was exposed to this year, since I would recommend all of these books. Some are of niche topics, so if you are not into that genre, don’t force yourself on my suggestion.

Some of these books inspired their own Substack articles, therefore I shared the relevant links to those along with a quick summary and my review of each book below. I hope these can inspire you to read something new and interesting in 2025.

***Correction after releasing the article I realized I didn’t include The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, which I also read this year. I did the abridged version but I suggest doing the unabridged even if the length is substantial.

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Luigi Mangione chose to be Tyler Durden

The world needs another Ben Franklin

The Power of Confidence

The Most Obvious Secret to Success

The 2024 Ben Book List

1. Books# 1-3: The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground and Ripley’s Game all by Patricia Highsmith. ~1,000 pages all together or 300-350 pages per book.

Rating: 90/100 (I would gift/actively recommend)

Related Substack Article: Mimetic Theory as Explained by The Talented Mr. Ripley

Tom Ripley is one of the iconic characters of modern American fiction. His journey from obscurity to high status, is quick but alarming. Most have heard of The Talented Mr. Ripley from book lists, the 1998 film with Matt Damon & Jude Law or the recent Netflix Series but few realize that it’s only the first installment of a 5 book series. I read The Talented Mr. Ripley long ago but didn’t realize there were more in the series until Ripley Under Ground and Ripley’s Game appeared on my Amazon recommendations more recently.

We are first introduced to Tom Ripley as a young twenty something, living in New York pulling small scams and cons. A wealthy industrialist, under the impression that Ripley is good friends with his son Dickie, hires Tom to go to Italy and convince Dicky to return home. Tom takes him up on his offer but instead of getting Dickie home, befriends him and they hang out in Italy instead. I won’t go through any spoilers but the first book covers this initial period of Tom in Italy in his early twenties, while the sequel, Ripley Under Ground and trilogy Ripley’s Game take place a few years later.

All three books are really great and worth reading together, but the Talented Mr. Ripley is definitely the best. I didn’t continue with the 4th and 5th installments because they received universally bad reviews and the author herself admitted she wrote them for financial motivations.

2. Henry Kissinger by Walter Isaacson ~750 pages

Rating: 80/100 (Niche topic/I would recommend if asked)

Related Substack Article: Kissinger: War Criminal, A$$hole or Great Diplomat?

Within 5 minutes of picking up this book, I already had somebody screaming at me. They called Kissinger a War Criminal and an a$$hole. After quickly realizing that this person hated him, but didn’t know why, I decided that I had better learn more for myself.

I didn’t know much about him but he’s an important historical figure and I loved many of Isaacson’s previous biographies. Isaacson did a great job covering his early life, time as an Academic and role within the Nixon and Ford administrations. He did not gloss over Kissinger’s role in Vietnam, but he provided useful context for the many conflicts that were ongoing while he was in office. It came out in the nineties, so it couldn’t comment as much on his later life

Although the book is lengthy and the topic is not light, I am glad that I read it. It’s certainly not a topic or a subject that I would recommend to anyone, unless you are something of a history or international diplomacy buff.

3. The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon ~300 pages & $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi ~300 pages

Rating: 90/100 (I would gift/actively recommend)

Related Substack Article: How to not Suck at Sales

I spent a decent part of this year focused on evaluating the performance of my companies sales team. Earlier this year we hired a successful sales leader with experience managing large teams selling into some of the world's largest companies. During our sessions he shared numerous insights. One key recommendation he made was to read The Qualified Sales Leader.

McMahon has held executive sales roles at several successful technology companies, including PTC, BladeLogic, BMC Software, and others. His expertise lies in building scalable sales processes, developing sales talent, and driving significant revenue growth, so he knows how to sell.

Another book I came across was $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi. Hormozi was a gym bro that successfully scaled his and many of his clients businesses to six-nine figures in annual revenue. From his videos you would think he is another internet scammer but when you read $100M Leads, you quickly realize that he has a great understanding of sales and marketing, and knows how to explain it, in a simple and direct manner.

I would expect most people seeing this do not work in sales, but much of life revolves around your ability to sell yourself. Knowing the basics of why people buy, or would be interested in what you are trying to sell, will give you a great in advance in any endeavor that you attempt.

4. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut 300-350 pages

Rating: 80/100 (I would recommend if asked)

Related Substack Article: A 1952 Satire Book Predicted Chat GPT

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., one of the great satire writers of his time, quickly established his prowess in his debut novel Player Piano (1952). Written shortly after WWII, Vonnegut created a world almost completely automated by machines, leading to societal changes once considered unthinkable.

In 1952, Player Piano was clearly a satire. In 2024, you might confuse some of its lines with quotes from technology or media companies. Vonnegut was eerily prescient with many of his predictions of the future; not only have we achieved many of the innovations that seemed like science fiction at the time, we continue to approach a society mirroring the one shown in Player Piano.

Good book and as everything from Vonnegut, quite funny at times.

5. Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson ~600 pages

Rating: 85/100 (Niche topic, I would recommend if asked)

Related Substack Article: The world needs another Ben Franklin

Benjamin Franklin was successful as a newspaper editor, tradesmen, entrepreneur, politician, diplomat, scientist, inventor and author. Oh and he also played a major role in the American revolution and drafting the Declaration of Independence and US constitution. Not only did he accomplish all of this, he managed to have more fun than anybody else.

Walter Isaacson as usual, does an incredible job bringing readers back to the early establishment of the United States, why Benjamin Franklin, all of the Founding Fathers best embodies the spirit of America, and how his personality was entrenched in the constitution and the spirit of America.

Franklin was a very successful polymath that managed to impress people across America, Europe and many domains. If you are interested in learning about the early history of the United States or just want to know more about a legend, this is a great book to check out.

6. The Trial by Franz Kafka ~300 pages

Rating: 85/100 (I would recommend if asked)

Related Substack Article: Millei+DOGE: Austerity is cool again?

The Trial, regarded as Kafka’s most famous works, masterfully portrays the dangers of oppressive and absurd bureaucracy. Kafka is an excellent writer, that can make great points while being very funny. Although it was written over 100 years ago, the novel’s surreal and nightmarish exploration of justice and power, should still concern us today since individual liberties versus the role of government remain an ever pressing matter.

Seemingly citizens of each country has accepted that some level of bloated government bureaucracy is a necessity of life. This angers some more than others. The recent mandates of Javier Millei in Argentina, and Elon & Vivek with DOGE, appear to be trying to reverse this trend although they face substantial opposition.

7. How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie ~350 pages

Rating: 80/100 (I would recommend if asked)

Related Substack Article: How to not suck in 2025

The timeless guide to building strong relationships, winning people over, and influencing others effectively while staying genuine. Through practical advice and real-life examples, Carnegie teaches skills like remembering names, being a good listener, and making others feel valued. He outlines strategies for persuading people by appealing to their interests rather than through argument or manipulation.

The book also highlights the importance of encouragement, recognition, and constructive feedback in leadership and collaboration. Structured into clear sections with actionable takeaways, it remains a relevant resource for navigating personal and professional relationships with confidence and grace, offering readers tools to foster authentic connections and inspire cooperation.

It’s still worth reading in 2024 or 2025.

See also:

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Rating: 90/100 (I would actively recommend/gift)

Related Substack Article: Revisiting Peter Thiel's Zero to One: 10 Years Later Part I

Neither a new book or something I read for the first time, but it has now been 10 years since Thiel released Zero to One. In 2014, Thiel was largely unknown outside of technology circles. Few would have guessed in the years after its release, Thiel would silently become one of the more influential members of the Republican party. Many former employees or colleagues such as JD Vance, Elon Musk & David Sacks now hold heavily influential roles in the Trump White House.

Even with this political influence, he remains focused on business and technology. Palantir, which he co-founded, is one of the most highly valued technology stocks and his many funds continue to back the most iconic startups. One of my early Substack article was to look back at some of the predictions he claimed in 2014 to evaluate if we would agree with him in 2024.

Despite his politics, he is one of the most interesting people alive today. His insights on businesses and the future should not be ignored, as he has exhibited many times his ability to see where the puck is going, before anyone else has even shown up to the arena.

Have a great holiday season to all my readers!

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From what Hollywood’s idols of masculinity have taught us, ambitious young men can only pursue four paths:

1. Become a capitalist unconcerned with civic strife —> Patrick Bateman

2. Become a capitalist concerned with doling out social justice —> Bruce Wayne

3. Become a nihilistic anti-capitalist, looking to break the system —> Tyler Durden

4. Burn out and give up. Let circumstances decide your fate —> NPC

Luigi Mangione has captured the internet’s collective attention these past weeks after he was identified as the prime suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson was shot, at close range, outside the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel, on his way to a conference. Even before the suspect was known, there was a mixed reaction to his death. Most were naturally shocked that an executive, relatively unknown outside his industry, would be killed in such a manner.

On the other hand, a small but vocal group took the internet in celebration of his death. They saw his killing as retribution for what they consider a broken and corrupt US healthcare system. Since many people die or are severely debilitated because of this system, some saw Thompson, as a representative of healthcare, as deserving of his fate. I disagree with this line of thinking, but all I will say on the topic is: I would suggest not killing executives or anyone from companies you disagree with.

If the internet was not already invested enough, once Luigi Mangione was unveiled as the prime suspect, all hell broke loose. Today’s article will provide a recap of the best memes related to the event, and explain why LM was faced with a metaphysical decision and decided to go with the most extreme outcome. To become Tyler Durden.

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Who is Luigi Mangione and where are the memes?

Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of Thompson, is an Italian-American, the last group socially acceptable to make racial stereotypes about1. Once his name/photo were revealed and people found his online presence, the internet broke. Luigi is not what people would have expected. He comes from a wealthy family, was valedictorian at a prestigious prep school, and graduated from UPenn. Upon graduation he worked as a Data Engineer at tech company for a few years. None of these attributes would generally align with what people would expect from somebody who murdered a healthcare executive, with no direct association.

Besides some wonderful shirtless pics and internet comments, the most revealing item from his internet history was his list of rated books on Goodreads, including The Unabomber Manifesto (which he gave 4 stars, didn’t quite stack up against the 5 star rated Lorax). Mangione was intrigued by Ted Kaczynski, at one point sharing some online takes he found interesting, including "when all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive."

This made many wonder, why a rich, Dave Franco look-alike with a promising career and active social life, choose to do this? There are many speculations, depending on if you trust the internet, it either had something to do with a back surgery he had undergone a few years ago, some bad trip after taking drugs or mental illness. When Mangione was caught, he had his own Manifesto with him. This was posted to Substack by Ken Klippenstein. In the three page handwritten document, he writes:

“Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it.”

Irrespective to what led him to this, Mangione was angry with the system, and chose to do something about it. What were his choices?

The Paths available to the Young & Ambitious

Mangione had his choice between ending up as any of Patrick Bateman2, Bruce Wayne3, Tyler Durden4 or an NPC5 (For the uneducated among us, see footnotes to learn who these people are). As a wealthy, well educated, muscular and ambitious young man, Luigi’s had the rare possibility to become Bateman and Wayne; most can only choose between Durden or being an NPC.

Becoming Patrick Bateman would have been the easiest route for him. Mangione could have gone to work in his family’s real estate development business, securing a mid-six-figure salary by his late twenties. Any anger or frustration against the world, could have been taken out in secret, with various extracurricular hobbies. Mangione had the option to remain generally apathetic to what was happening in the world around him; he had enough money that none of it needed to matter. Like our pal Patrick Bateman, the greatest issues in his life could have been securing a table at Dorsia, or having the best business card. This is the path most people born into Luigi Mangione’s position take, which is why we never hear about most of them.

For those that are privileged but unwilling to turn a blind eye to the troubles of the world, they can pursue the path of Bruce Wayne. Wayne himself was once at a similar crossroads; if not for Rachel Dawes, he likely would have become Gotham’s version of Patrick Bateman6. Instead of traveling the world with his billions or slinging it with the fat cats, he overcame the trauma from his youth, and chose to save Gotham. He took his privilege and made life better for everyone, at his own expense. Instead of accepting the way things were, he decided to change them into the way he believed they should be. He managed to do this largely without murder (my apologies to Ra’s Al Ghul, The Joker and Bain).

If Wayne decided that Gotham was not worth saving, or if his vigilante efforts couldn’t improve the lives of its citizens, he might have embraced an alternate path. That path is Project Mayhem. Project Mayhem was an organized campaign to dismantle modern consumer culture and corporate dominance through acts of vandalism, destruction, and chaos. It is positioned as a rejection of societal norms and as a way to achieve liberation from materialism. It was the brainchild of its charismatic leader, Tyler Durden.

Little is known about Durden’s background before the events of Fight Club. From what we know, in addition to leading Project Mayhem and organizing Fight Club, he worked various jobs: as a projectionist, soap salesman, and part-time anarchist. Tyler embodies many desirable traits. Not only is he cool and attractive, but he also has agency. You can’t threaten Tyler with anything, because there’s nothing you can take from him that matters.

Like Wayne, he is an idealist, yet where they differ is that Durden does not believe that the current system is salvageable, and society needs to be re-made. This cannot happen through the conventional channels, therefore society in its current form needs to be deconstructed and rebuilt. This is done by destroying the pillars keeping the system in place. In Fight Club, Durden decided the banks and credit card companies were to blame, so he blew up the buildings containing the credit records, wiping the slate clean.

Conclusion

Luigi Mangione saw a problem with the US healthcare system and rejected the paths most people in his position would take. He didn’t slip quietly into the Bateman life of wealth and apathy, nor did he try to reshape the world as a Bruce Wayne. Instead, he chose Tyler Durden’s path of destruction over reform, action over inaction.

Disillusioned with a system he believed was beyond fixing, Mangione’s decision was as extreme as it was final. Where others vented their frustrations online or looked the other way, he took a drastic action. Perhaps he feels justified in doing so but instead of fixing this broken system, UnitedHealth will find a new CEO, the healthcare system will not meaningfully change any time soon and he turned himself into a cautionary tale. One that leaves us questioning not just his choices, but the systems that created them.

He chose the path of Tyler Durden but he forgot something crucial. Tyler Durden does not exist. He lives only in our minds. Tyler Durden is not going to jail, Luigi is. Keep this in mind the next time you try to decide between staying as an NPC or becoming Patrick Bateman, Bruce Wayne or Tyler Durden.

(Happy Birthday Brad Pitt and another special Substack reader)

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Dec.23 2024 Update:

For those looking to learn more about why Luigi Mangione did what he did, you should check out this insightful piece from who had spoken with Luigi earlier this year. Their conversation touched on some of the items I discuss in this article.

The Prism

The Riddle of Luigi Mangione

After the suspected killer of UnitedHeathcare CEO Brian Thompson was revealed to be Luigi Mangione, a bright young man from a well-to-do family, thousands of pundits rushed to tell us why he did it. I, however, held back, because unlike them I’d actually met Luigi, and I knew all was not what it seemed…

Read more

a year ago · 45 likes · 7 comments · Gurwinder

The selection was small, but it was enough to get my hopes up. I scanned the shelves and saw the usual suspects: Capital by Thomas Piketty, a few titles by Paul Krugman, some Karl Marx classics, and other books in the same ideological vein. Despite my efforts, I couldn’t find a single book on Austrian economics. No Ludwig von Mises. No Friedrich Hayek. Not even a stray copy of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose or anything that didn’t champion expansionist fiscal policy. The only remotely dissenting voice in the whole section was Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

To the bookstore’s employees, any school of thought against deficit spending simply didn’t exist. This felt odd, given the context. The world was still grappling with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the European debt crisis, where austerity measures were hotly debated and widely implemented. You’d think there’d be books explaining why countries can’t run endless deficits or print endless money right?

Maybe people like me just didn’t go to bookstores like this one for economics books. Or perhaps minimum-wage bookstore chain employees with blue hair were not in agreement with the Austrian school. I could never quite figure it out.

Fast forward five years. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted governments to patch up their economies with massive stimulus packages and money printing. At first, it seemed to work: spending and investing got a short-term boost but then inflation surged to levels unseen in decades. As inflation hit harder, political tides shifted. Left-wing governments were replaced by center-right or right-wing administrations. Then last year, Argentina elected Javier Milei, who ran on a platform promising drastic cuts to government spending and tearing down burdensome regulations.

To the surprise of many skeptics, early signs are indicating that Milei is delivering on his promises. The Argentine economy is showing signs of recovery, and his bold reforms have the world’s attention. Among those taking notes? Elon Musk in his new role as co-head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), vowed to bring a similar approach to the U.S. under President Trump’s second term. Musk, alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, promise to tackle wasteful government spending and gut regulations much like Milei has done in Argentina.

Critics, of course, are circling. Some doubt Musk and Ramaswamy’s ability to significantly cut spending, while others warn that even if they succeed, such measures could harm the economy. Based on the different schools of economic thought, what should we expect from such drastic cuts? Could this be the start of a new economic renaissance, or are we hurtling toward disaster?

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TL;DR:

The Austrian school has largely been dismissed as an economic theory because it’s seen as being incomplete; although it does a good job of understanding the causes of financial crises and inflation, its prescribed solutions are seen as impractical that no politician would ever try in real life. The thing is, no economic school is complete.

Javier Millei, has been enacting many policies consistent with the Austrian school, and has thus far brought down inflation, and improved the creditworthiness of Argentina. Elon and Vivek are going to attempt likely a scaled back version of this in the US. This could potentially save billions in wasteful spending and unlock growth, or make matters worse.

If you find this interesting, you should check out Millei’s interview with Lex Fridman

Introduction to Economics 101 by not an economist

My interest in Austrian economics began like most people. I was on a school exchange in Paris for a semester, I only knew 3 people in the city, my class schedule was far too empty and courses were only pass-fail. When I wasn’t taking weekend trips to Lisbon, Prague or Barcelona1, I had way too much time on my hands.

I decided to fill the time by reading Nassim Taleb. When he wasn’t picking unnecessary fights on Twitter, I found his insights compelling. In The Black Swan and Antifragile, Taleb made scathing critiques against the New classical and New Keynesian schools of economics. He argued they misunderstood statistics, relied on unrealistic assumptions, and were often disconnected from the real-world consequences of their bad decisions. These schools have heavily influenced government policy since the U.S. abandoned the gold standard in 1971.

At the time, watching a few Taleb videos on YouTube inevitably led to the algorithm recommending content on the financial crisis, European debt crisis, and other economic calamities. If you indulged long enough, you’d end up watching hour-long debates about government responses between 2007 and 2012. Some of these videos included Austrian economists (Austrians) dunking all over Paul Krugman, a well known Nobel Prize winning economist, who was highly dismissive of the Austrian school. He’s not alone, the Austrian school has long been disregarded as a framework to inform government policies.

I will now attempt to summarize some of the main economic schools if you are already familiar or don’t care, feel free to skip below to What is Millei doing? I am not an Economist, just a fun guy so I am making many over simplifications. Feel free to correct me/call me dumb in the comments below.

Classical & Neoclassical School of Economics

For most of human civilization the explanation for why you or your country was poor was because it was Gods will. Broke? God. Ugly? God. Fat? God but maybe you should eat a bit less this winter until Easter comes around.

This changed when a Scottish philosopher by the name of Adam Smith decided to scrutinize the concept a bit more closely. He summarized his thoughts in a book called The Wealth of Nations (1776). Long story short, he didn’t think God was solely responsible for distributing wealth. He came up with a bunch of theories and explanations that would form the basis of the study of Economics. His view and general recommendation was that unencumbered markets were better at facilitating commerce than governments, if one country was better at producing wine, they should trade with a country better at producing silk, this way each country can optimize their production. Basically governments should let the markets cook. An efficient, free trading market without the government intervention is the invisible hand. The invisible hand knows best. People consider this the start of capitalism.

Inspired by Smith, a bunch of other economic thinkers, wrote more on the topic and formed what became known as the Classical school of economics. They dominated the 18th and much of the 19th century, advocating for policies like reduced tariffs and freer trade. While these ideas led to significant economic growth, they weren’t without drawbacks. Every now and then the market would crash, unemployment would rise and inequality would grow. People did not like this. Evidently, they wanted the government to do something when they were starving. By the late 19th century, economists believed that the Classical school might have been incomplete.

The Neoclassical school built off the Classical school and had a different perspective on what drove markets but in terms of policy prescriptions, they weren’t all that different. They still thought that governments should not intervene in the economy. When the Great Depression hit in the 1930s, Neoclassical and Classical theories couldn’t explain the economic collapse, the extended period of high unemployment, or the stagnation that followed. Evidently the invisible hand liked to take extended vacations. Making the Neoclassical school also incomplete.

Not everyone agreed with the Classical and Neoclassical schools though.

Marxism

On the opposite end of the spectrum in the mid to late 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published two seminal works that rival Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in historical significance: The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867). These books delivered scathing critiques of capitalism, arguing that it was inherently prone to boom-and-bust cycles and increasing wealth inequality. Since this is what was pretty much happening, their assessment looked pretty spot on.

They suggested instead of relying on the invisible hand, the government should take a very active role in managing the economy, laying the theoretical foundation for what would later evolve into communism and socialism. This was appealing to labor movements and left-wing parties in Europe during the late 19th/early 20th century. In 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks established the first Marxist state in Soviet Russia by the mid-20th century, more Marxist-inspired governments proliferated globally.

It turns out, people didn’t enjoy living in these kinds of countries as much as Marx would have expected. Marxist may have reduced inequality, but it came at a very steep cost. We don’t need to get overly detailed but boom and bust cycles could still happen, many people died of starvation and restrictions on freedom were not limited to economic choices. Eventually former Marxist states introduced reforms that loosened government control and embraced elements of market economies. While Marxists believe the Classical schools were flawed, their own track record also left much to be desired. Turns out Marxism was also incomplete.

*Keynes Enters the Chat

The Great Depression killed the Classical and Neoclassical schools. Following their suggestions, US President Herbert Hoover did not want to intervene in the economy, allowing the prolonged economic stagnation for most of the decade. In 1936, a British economist by the name of John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes said the Classicals and Marxists had some elements of truth but were in some ways very wrong. On the spectrum, Keynes was closer to the Classical schools, believing in Capitalism but trying to improve upon the shortcomings that could result in extended economic stagnation and high unemployment, if the government didn’t intervene.

According to Keynes, markets were not always efficient and the government could drive additional value to the economy beyond just adding demand. Governments should intervene when the economy sucks, run a deficit until the economy improves, then gradually get back to a balanced budget, until the next slowdown occurs. Governments took his teachings to heart and since then, pretty much every government runs at least moderate deficits.

The problem is, governments ignored the piece about reigning in deficit spending when the economy was not in a recession. Whether it’s right or left wing parties, governments always spend as much money as they can. Left wing governments generally spend more and raise taxes. Right wing governments might spend less but cut taxes, which still produces a deficit. If governments don’t want to run a deficit, they need to tax as much as they spend. Since people don’t like paying taxes, governments have a tough time raising them. Cutting spending is also unpopular so governments generally try to avoid that too. So they borrow. This leads to an accumulating and eventually unsustainable debt burden, that never gets paid back.

Turns out maybe the benefit of government spending has its limits, since governments can run multi-trillion dollar deficits for years and the economy can still crash. Once you’ve borrowed as much as you can and but don’t want to raise taxes or cut spending, what can you do? Print money.

Inflation, MMT & Austrian Economics

Inflation. If you are under the age of 35, you probably only learnt what this meant recently. Don’t feel bad, many politicians and economists advocating for Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) didn’t know what this was either (more on them later). Inflation largely happens when the money supply is growing faster than the aggregate value of goods and services in an economy. Each currency is managed by a Central Bank, who’s job is to ensure there is enough money in circulation and the economy is stable. They do this by setting interest rates, and buying/selling certain assets.

When governments can’t finance their spending through taxes and borrowing, they turn to their central banks (Federal Reserve in the US). Since the US abandoned the gold standard in 1971, their is no theoretical limit to how much money the Federal Reserve can print. Even before abandoning the gold standard, many countries got themselves into trouble by printing way too much money, tanking the value of their currency and hurting their economies. Despite many historical examples proving this, a relatively new theory called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) called this into question.

MMTers believe that a country that issues its own currency, can always print more money so spending is not constrained by taxing and borrowing limits. Taxes are not for determining government spending; their purpose is to control inflation by reducing demand and redistributing wealth. Moreover, they believe that deficits don’t really make that much of a difference to the economy and inflation, since if the government has a deficit, the private sector will have a surplus. Instead of setting interest rates based on the boom and bust cycle, governments should instead have a federal job guarantee that will keep the economy at full employment, regardless of the business cycle. Politicians like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren and other progressive/left wing politicians latched onto MMT, because it gave them a blank check to spend as much money as they wanted. Well, turns out, pretty much everything they believed was immediately proven wrong when global inflation reached decade highs starting in 2022. People are very quiet about MMT these days. Now back to at least semi-respectable economic theories.

Unlike MMT, the Austrian school has a coherent understanding of inflation. Like the Classical schools, they are against centralized planning but their explanation for boom and bust cycle has to do with artificial manipulation of credit and interest rates by central banks. They are against government intervention in the economy, believing actions that stimulate the economy in the short term, will eventually lead to more harm in the long term because of misallocated resources. Unlike the Classicals, the Austrians had an explanation for why the depression of the 1930s happened, however their prescriptions on how they would solve the problem, were not that different. This is why although the Austrians may have helped enhance the understanding of the Central Banks role in the economy, no country have seriously considered following their policy prescriptions…until now.

What is Millei doing?

Javier Millei is a self described anarcho-capitalist and student of the Austrian school. He inherited a country with an annual inflation rate above 200%, the most the country had seen in decades, while GDP was contracting. Instead of trying to further intervene in the economy or print more money like his predecessors, Millei has gone the other way. In the 12 months since assuming office, Millei has done the following:

1. Megadecreto: Removed over 300 economic regulations, which includes rent controls, labor market restrictions, tariffs on imports etc. He continues to removes more each week.

2. Shrinking the Bureaucracy: Let go more than 5,000 federal employees (didn’t renew their contracts) and is reviewing additional areas for efficiency. Early in his term he reduced the number of government ministries from 19 to 8.

3. Spending reductions, Monetary policy & inflation control: Monthly inflation has dropped from 25% to 2.7%. As government spending and inflation have come down, the Argentinian central bank has cut interest rates from above 100% when he assumed office down to 35% as of November 2024.

Not only have these changes brought down inflation, they have thus far been well received by the markets. Argentinian bonds are now considered much more creditworthy, and Millei’s popularity among Argentinian’s, remains high2. Although his disapproval rate has begun creeping up in recent months, he still has an approval near or above his predecessors through 12 months which ranks well on a global basis.

Thus far Millei-conomics has proven successful in taming inflation and erasing the deficit but for his policies to be successful, he will need to also reduce poverty and deliver the GDP growth he’s promising. Otherwise his term will have been ineffective and the next government will simply undo many of his changes. Millei will need to show that he can do it quickly since October 2025 is when half of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and a third of the Senate seats will be up for re-election. If voters are not in favor of Millei’s changes, they can vote to severely restrict his power for the rest of his term.

In DOGE we trust?

Elon and Vivek are watching Millei’s actions closely, to see what they could replicate in the US. Keep in mind, the US is not Argentina. Sure the US is running a large deficit, but inflation isn’t remotely near Argentina’s, the economy is not contracting and US treasury bills are still considered among the safest assets. That being said, the federal government has 36 trillion dollars in outstanding debt. That is a lot. US GDP, the largest of any nation, is only 26T per year. The government needs to pay interest on that debt, which amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Unless the US can pay down this debt, this amount will grow, further contributing to the deficit.

Most reasonable people agree that this growing debt and deficit are problems, where they disagree is how to address it. Reasonable Democrats that don’t subscribe to MMT, will suggest raising taxes, primarily at the wealthy or corporations. We will almost certainly need to do this, but that alone won’t balance the budget. Some reductions will need to happen, the question is from where?

As you can see, there are no obvious places to cut. Useless government waste is not a line item on the budget. You could just eliminate social security and defense spending, but people don’t want to give those up, so Musk and Vivek won’t go far with that approach. The Federal deficit is presently around $1.5T, to balance the budget assuming revenue stays around the same, they would need to cut near this amount.

One of Vivek’s early proposals was to simply cut every government department in half. The federal government employs ~3 million people (not including military personnel and reservists), costing around $300 billion per year (does not include retired workers benefits). Assuming they could do this, which is highly doubtful, not factoring in severance costs, this would save $150B per year. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a large sum but only 10% of what they need. Where is that other 90% coming from?

Social security is difficult to touch, and when it comes to defense spending, it’s tough to see that coming down while the US is involved in multiple conflicts. Still, Elon has been tweeting a lot about the Pentagon’s inability to pass an audit for the past few years, and can’t account for their $800B+ budget. He’s also taken aim at hundreds of billions of dollars in improper federal payments as well as pandemic relief funds abuse. While there could be explanations for this, it’s possible when Elon and Vivek take a closer look, they might be able to eliminate tens to hundreds of billions in wasteful spending that won’t be noticed by anybody outside the bureaucracy.

If that’s the low hanging fruit, would they be able to reduce the number of government departments like Millei? They can only do so much with executive orders, they would need to get many of these measures approved by the congress or senate. Many of the items they would look to cut would impact Republican districts as much as Democrats. How likely are they to go through with reductions that hurt their own constituents? It’s not unheard of. Governments have managed to engage in deficit reductions before, it happened in the late 90’s under President Clinton and a Republican controlled Senate. The difference, is that the deficit is much larger than it was then, the US is running the largest deficit since WWII.

In any case, the reflex of DOGE is the right one, given the large deficit and growing debt levels. Can Elon & Vivek achieve a balanced budget in the 18 months they have given themselves? Almost certainly not. Could they enact some deregulation that could help unlock industry, similar to what Millei did in Argentina? Possibly yes. Although, I doubt higher tax revenue from increased economic activity would be able to increase enough to fill the gap. This is before we factor in the tax cuts Trump wants. My expectation is that any spending reductions will be offset by tax cuts. The only way the deficit will meaningfully come down, is if they can prove that getting government out of the way, will help unlock more growth in the private sector. Even if they manage to prove this, I doubt their changes will be noticeable within the first 18 months, possibly even before the end of President Trump’s term.

What they are doing is not really Austrian economics. They are unlikely to eliminate the Federal Reserve and as much as they cut, the government will remain very involved in the economy, even if not to the extent that Marxists or MMTers would like. This is because Austrian economics like all the other economic theories mentioned, work better as a principal/philosophy than an actual economic prescription. If an economy gets into a slowdown, the government will naturally step in. Virtually all countries have some form of unemployment insurance or welfare, so this would be automatic. The notion of waiting for the market to work itself in to find the long term equilibrium is not practical because as Keynes famously said “In the long-term, we are all dead!”. What we can hope for, especially if Millei and the DOGE team are successful, is that book stores might begin stocking books on Austrian economics3.

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Bruce Lee doesn’t fear the man who has practiced 10,000 different kicks once but one who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. This sounds sensible. Given that Lee has gotten into many more fights than I have he’s probably right. As a spectator how boring would it be go to a UFC event to see a fighter with only one move? Variety and contrast make life interesting and worth living. Trust me, I’ve lived the counter factual. Near the end of my university exchange, with funds running low I had to survive on lentils alone for a week. Wasn’t fun.

Specialists are important and have their place, but too often these people focus on their craft to the exclusion of anything else, creating a society of non-playable-characters (NPC1s) with no distinctive interests or hobbies outside of their domain. This is why we don’t like career politicians and most people can barely name a CEO; for them all they see is a rotating door of nameless, faceless empty suit/pant suits2. While a specialist will know more about their domain than a non-specialist, knowledge does not always translate into effectiveness, especially in endeavours featuring other humans. Highly successful people can often accomplish more outside their original domain than expert specialists.

Case in point: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was successful as a newspaper editor, tradesmen, entrepreneur, politician, diplomat, scientist, inventor and author. Oh and he also played a major role in the American revolution and drafting the Declaration of Independence and US constitution. Not only did he accomplish all of this, he managed to have more fun than anybody else.

This article will summarize why varied interest and experiences are a super power, explain how Benjamin Franklin represented the ethos of America, why we need more people like him and which modern figures are most like Ben.

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If this week’s article does not interest you, please check out some other recent ones:

When 10,000 Kicks 1 Time > 1 Kick 10,000 Times

If you work in a field that cannot be improved with creativity or unique perspectives, then trying new things won’t make you better at your job. This would apply if you work on a conveyer belt, as a crash test dummy or the person that writes Jason Staham’s film roles.

Otherwise if your objective is to create excess value (alpha) in your domain, you should pursue many interest or hobbies outside your profession. Not only can these other activities give you new ideas, they make you more interesting. As knowledge is increasingly easy to access, you need to do more than just share information; you need to offer wisdom.

What is wisdom? According to Chat GPT it’s the ability to make sound decisions and judgments based on knowledge, experience, insight, and an understanding of life's complexities. Based on that, the more varied situations you put yourself in, the wider pool of experience you’ll be able to draw from, allowing you to make unique connections. If you can’t think or do something new or different, what replacement value do you offer above an AI chatbot?

This is why in the future if you want to add value, you need to decide which end of the barbell you want to occupy: Be the most knowledgeable person within your respective domain or have average knowledge in many domains? If you don’t fall squarely in either bucket, your job is at risk of getting replaced by AI.

This assumes you are in a position where skills or knowledge can lead to better performance. If your role is based on appointment, like politics, you can still hope to coast by with charisma, nepotism or relying on favours/begging the right people for the position. People will need to fill these roles but ideally, they should be made up of people who already experienced successes in other domains. A bit like our favourite founding father Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin’s Importance to America

1) Early Beginnings & Tradesmen

Benjamin Franklin ended up in America because of intolerance: religious and economic. His father, Josiah Franklin was a silk dyer at a time when there was insufficient demand. In 17th century England you had to do long apprenticeships and get permission to take on a trade. Josiah had a large family to support and couldn’t afford to live without a paycheck while starting a new apprenticeship, so he moved to Boston to sell candles. Nobody knew it at the time but this just cost England one of the brightest minds of the 18th century. Their loss was America and the world’s gain.

Despite early signs of intellect, his father decided against sending him to Harvard because of a combination of the cost and believing the clergy would not be the best place for Benjamin. Ben instead went into a trade: printing. He started working for his brother as an apprentice. With his wit and incredible work ethic, he quickly learnt the trade and won the respect of his colleagues. Like many printers, his brother James decide to also found a newspaper, The New England Courant.

James wouldn’t publish his brother’s stories therefore Benjamin began submitting anonymous stories pretending to be a widowed woman by the name of “Silence Dogood”. With nothing but his imagination, Franklin did a good enough job convincing people that he was a middle-aged woman living in on the country side, despite never stepping foot outside of Boston. Anon Twitter trolls were different in those days. After realizing there wasn’t going to be enough opportunity working for his brother, he ran away, ending up in Philadelphia, working in another print shop before eventually starting his own (Notice a trend in this family)?

BF’s upbringing differed from many of the founding fathers since he was born middle class while most were born wealthy such as Washington, Jefferson and Hancock. Franklin’s held hard work and talent in greater esteem more than the social class somebody was born into. He was quite against anything that would resemble elitism, believing strongly that it was preferrable to have a society with more social mobility. This was not a view held by many of the founding fathers and politicians at the time. While he was not alone in believing this, Franklin ardent belief was always among his most important tenants while drafting and debating the constitution.

2) Entrepreneur, Author & Community Organizer

Franklin eventually opened his own print shop and along with it a newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette, which grew to become among the most read in the colonies. He also printed books, including one he wrote Poor Richard’s Almanac. Poor Richard’s Almanac was among the best selling books at the time, selling about 10,000 copies per year (when there was only about 1 million people living in America). It included all kinds of helpful advice & maxims. The book sales were lucrative but his wealth largely came from a franchise model that he created for his business, creating possibly the first countrywide media conglomerate in America at the time.

If you aren’t impressed by that, he also founded several societies, the first public library in the country, first volunteer fire department, the University of Pennsylvania and contributed to many civic improvements to the city of Philadelphia. He eventually decided that running a nationwide media company no matter how lucrative, was taking up too much of his time so at the age of 42 he retired. Franklin sold the business to his partner, giving him an annual royalty/dividend and retired from business. Now with a steady source of income, and time on his hands, he had the conditions to make the leap from local hero to international icon.

3) Amateur Scientist, Inventor & Diplomat

“There never was a good war or a bad peace!”

Despite not going to university, Ben Franklin was an avid reader and deeply scientific in his thinking. Unlike many academics, however, he didn’t care much for theory; his focus was on the practical applications of science. He constantly conducted experiments and sought explanations for why things happened. This practical approach made him among the most important figures of the enlightenment era. He demonstrated electricity was a single fluid that could move between objects and that lightning was just a large-scale manifestation of this.

Before conducting the famous kite experiment, he had already submitted his theory to the science authority in England. At the behest of the French monarchy, it was translated into French; they thought it was the coolest thing ever. Eager to prove it, they started throwing rods over different buildings. When lightning struck, they proved Franklin’s theory. This happened months before Franklin’s kite experiment, but due to slow mail delivery, he only learned about their success afterward.

The discovery made him an overnight sensation in Europe, making him the first American international icon and American European intellectuals considered worth listening to. This newfound celebrity, made him a welcome dinner guest across the old continent. He had no shortage of topics to discuss. When not experimenting or making scientific observations, he invented items like the Franklin stove, the flexible catheter, and bifocal glasses. The man had Daniel Day-Lewis range.

Franklin’s fame granted him a stature that commanded respect. Despite France’s initial reluctance to support American independence, Franklin’s charm and intellect convinced them otherwise. When Franklin arrived in France, crowds lined the streets as if he were Bono, Kanye, or Taylor Swift. This admiration wasn’t limited to commoners; his spectacles and fur cap even influenced aristocratic fashion. Franklin regularly met with King Louis XVI and other key figures, gradually persuading them to provide gunpowder, troops, naval support, and funds. France became the first nation to recognize the United States as an independent country. Without French support, America would not have won the war—a remarkable achievement for a nation France initially hesitated to aid.

Franklin’s diplomatic style set him apart from his contemporaries. While John Adams and others preferred aggressive ultimatums based on realism, Franklin understood that approach wouldn’t work with the French. Instead, he adopted a patient, steady strategy that appealed to both realism and idealism. His understanding of French culture and his Enlightenment ideals made him the more effective negotiator. The other American diplomats, often inefficient and overly aggressive, only pushed the French away, leaving Franklin as their preferred contact.

If Franklin hadn’t led these negotiations, French support might have been minimal, or the Americans might have made concessions that would have hindered the creation of an independent republic. Franklin, while naturally conciliatory, knew when to stand firm and when to compromise. This wisdom was evident in his dealings with the French, the British, and even during debates over the U.S. Constitution. Franklin believed that refusing to compromise showed a lack of intelligence, as it reflected an unwillingness to admit the possibility of being wrong or to adapt when circumstances changed. He often accepted imperfect solutions that advanced progress, knowing he could revisit unresolved issues later. Preferring the good over the perfect. With this approach, assuming you are dealing with intellectually honest individuals, you can always return to the table and say, “We tried it this way; it didn’t work. Now let’s try another approach.”

Too often in politics or business, people refuse to compromise or support measures introduced by opposing parties, viewing such actions as weaknesses rather than strengths. The sign of great thinkers, is they understand the limits of their knowledge. Check out the Dunning-Kruger effect. The DK effect was not published during Franklin’s time but he was skeptical of people or institutions who believed they could not be wrong, whether this be Monarchs or Religions.

Conclusion

Benjamin Franklin’s life reminds us that cultivating diverse skills and pursuing varied interests, can give us a unique ability to solve real-world problems. Specialists will always have their place, but the ability to bridge domains, think creatively, and adapt to new challenges is what makes someone truly irreplaceable. As automation and AI reshape the job market, the Franklin ethos of curiosity, adaptability, and breadth of experience becomes even more valuable.

While we’ve explored modern figures with impressive achievements, none come close to Franklin’s unparalleled success and impact on the world. His contributions as a scientist, inventor, statesman, and philosopher shaped not just the United States, but the very Enlightenment ideals that continue to guide humanity. Franklin wasn’t just great because he excelled in many areas, he was great because he sought to improve himself and the world around him.

Whether you aim to master one kick or explore 10,000, the key is to maintain a mindset that values growth, experimentation, and wisdom. The future belongs to those who can connect the dots across disciplines, inspire others, and lead with both idealism and pragmatism. So, whether you’re in science, business, art, or diplomacy, ask yourself: how can you think and act more like Franklin? Because in a world increasingly dominated by AI and specialists, the ultimate differentiator is a mind that dares to wander.

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