Image: Rendering of a Moon base that will be built over the next decade. Credit: NASA
[ed. In the next 10 years.]
Thursday, March 26, 2026
NASA 'Lunar Viceroy' on Moon Base Plans
Seeing Like a Sedan
Waymos and Cybercabs see the world through very different sensors. Which technology wins out will determine the future of self-driving vehicles.
Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.
Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.
One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.
In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.
This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.
The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.
This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.
The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.
Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond.
Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.
Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.
In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.
This scenario is only partially imaginary. Waymo already operates, in limited fashion, in Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Phoenix, with announced plans to operate in many more cities. Tesla Motors launched an Austin pilot of its robotaxi business in June 2025, albeit using Model Y vehicles with safety monitors rather than the still-in-development Cybercab. The outcome of their competition will tell us much about the future of urban transportation.
The engineers who built the earliest automated driving systems would find the Waymo unsurprising. For nearly two decades after the first automated vehicles emerged, a consensus prevailed: To operate safely, an AV required redundant sensing modalities. Cameras, lidar, and radar each had weaknesses, but they could compensate for each other. That consensus is why those engineers would find the Cybercab so remarkable. In 2016, Tesla broke with orthodoxy by embracing the idea that autonomy could ultimately be solved with vision and compute and without lidar — a philosophical stance it later embodied in its full vision-only system. What humans can do with their eyeballs and a brain, the firm reasoned, a car must also be able to do with sufficient cameras and compute. If a human can drive without lidar, so, too, can an AV… or so Tesla asserts.
This philosophical disagreement will shortly play out before our eyes in the form of a massive contest between AVs that rely on multiple sensing modalities — lidar, radar, cameras — and AVs that rely on cameras and compute alone.
The stakes of this contest are enormous. The global taxi and ride-hailing market was valued at approximately $243 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $640 billion by 2032. In the United States alone, people take over 3.6 billion ride-hailing trips annually. Converting even a fraction of this market to AVs represents a multibillion-dollar opportunity. Serving just the American market, at maturity, will require millions of vehicles.
Given the scale involved, the cost of each vehicle matters. The figures are commercially sensitive, but it is certainly true that cameras are cheaper than lidar. If Tesla’s bet pays off, building a Cybercab will cost a fraction of what it will take to build a Waymo. Which vision wins out has profound implications for how quickly each company will be able to put vehicles into service, as well as for how quickly robotaxi service can scale to bring its benefits to ordinary consumers across the United States and beyond.
by Andrew Miller, Asterisk | Read more:
Image: Jared Nangle
Correct Gray
There may be 50 shades, but there’s only one Correct Grey.
Sometimes a colour name is a whole mood. Rouge Noir: the stamp of cult 1990s glamour. Millennial pink: the colour of overthinking and oversharing. Elephant’s Breath by Farrow & Ball: the imperial age of the gastro pub.
I have a new favourite. Pairs is a lovely little Scottish brand which makes great quality socks at good prices. There are many cute names – Frosting Pink, Milky Tea Beige – but the one I just had to click on was Correct Grey, “a warm grey with nods to a classic British school sock”, according to the website.
Correct Grey nails it, because grey is absolutely correct for right now. Not just for socks, but for style top to toe, it is the coolest shade at this moment. No need to panic. Black is always fine, navy is perennially elegant. Brights are going to make a comeback this year, too. You have options. But grey is the colour that says: when it comes to fashion in 2026, I have understood the assignment.
Those Correct Grey socks are, well, the correct grey. This is a different colour to what I think of as tracksuit-bottom grey. (Was the grey tracksuit bottom the defining object of the first half of this decade? But that’s a question for another day.) Tracksuit-bottom-grey is wan and pale, with all the energy of an old photocopy. If tracksuit-bottom grey were a person, it would be scrolling its phone and not looking up when spoken to. Correct Grey is richer and more intense, with a nod to box-fresh school uniform and a new-term attitude.
But, wait. Didn’t grey used to be boring? How did it become fashion’s coolest colour? Sportswear, for a start. I was slightly rude about grey tracksuit bottoms because I’m a bit over them, but the ubiquity of grey marl flannel has done a lot to reframe grey as a fashion colour. Quiet luxury, with its emphasis on fabric and feel, has helped too, because soft neutral shades – grey, camel, navy – show off a quality fabric at its best. And psychologically, there is something about the liminal nature of grey, standing as it does in direct opposition to the notion that life is either black or white. This speaks to the blur of modern life with its lack of boundaries, of working from home in pyjamas but dealing with office emails on your phone while out at dinner.
by Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Pairs
I have a new favourite. Pairs is a lovely little Scottish brand which makes great quality socks at good prices. There are many cute names – Frosting Pink, Milky Tea Beige – but the one I just had to click on was Correct Grey, “a warm grey with nods to a classic British school sock”, according to the website.
Those Correct Grey socks are, well, the correct grey. This is a different colour to what I think of as tracksuit-bottom grey. (Was the grey tracksuit bottom the defining object of the first half of this decade? But that’s a question for another day.) Tracksuit-bottom-grey is wan and pale, with all the energy of an old photocopy. If tracksuit-bottom grey were a person, it would be scrolling its phone and not looking up when spoken to. Correct Grey is richer and more intense, with a nod to box-fresh school uniform and a new-term attitude.
But, wait. Didn’t grey used to be boring? How did it become fashion’s coolest colour? Sportswear, for a start. I was slightly rude about grey tracksuit bottoms because I’m a bit over them, but the ubiquity of grey marl flannel has done a lot to reframe grey as a fashion colour. Quiet luxury, with its emphasis on fabric and feel, has helped too, because soft neutral shades – grey, camel, navy – show off a quality fabric at its best. And psychologically, there is something about the liminal nature of grey, standing as it does in direct opposition to the notion that life is either black or white. This speaks to the blur of modern life with its lack of boundaries, of working from home in pyjamas but dealing with office emails on your phone while out at dinner.
by Jess Cartner-Morley, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Pairs
[ed. Works for me.]
Should I Stay or Should I Go
Image: Amit Dave/Reuters
[ed. TACOman in action. Cool picture. See also: For Putin, the War in Iran Changed Everything (NYT).]
Earlier this month, President Trump lifted restrictions on Russian oil exports, allowing shipments to resume to buyers around the world as officials scrambled to stabilize global supply following disruptions tied to the war in Iran. Days later, the administration temporarily waived sanctions on roughly 140 million barrels of Iranian oil sitting at sea, opening those cargoes to the global market for 30 days.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
A Critical Political Season Could Decide if Alaska Is a Failed ‘Petrostate’
A governor who spent two terms cutting services to preserve Alaskans’ oil-funded annual checks is leaving office. Voters must now decide what comes next for the state’s faltering fiscal model.
Juneau, Alaska, takes pride in providing services that some larger cities would shy away from — child care and housing assistance, arts grants, three libraries, two public pools, an arboretum, a ski area and a pledge that all 250 miles of borough roads will be plowed, if possible, within 48 hours after a snowstorm ends.
But the system that has made that possible — a steady flow of revenue from oil production — is cracking like Arctic ice in spring, not just in Juneau, Alaska’s capital, but across the state. Even with the war in Iran sending oil prices sky high, the oil-dependent model that has financed generous public services while giving Alaskans annual checks from a Permanent Fund can no longer keep both promises.
And a political year that will include a wide-open governor’s race and one of the most watched Senate contests in the country could help decide the future of what has become known in some circles as a “petrostate,” for its public reliance on oil production, on the brink.
“The petrostate hasn’t quite failed yet,” said Joseph Geldhof, a Juneau lawyer, but “it will if something does not change.”
Anything that increases global oil prices is good for Alaska’s finances, and state economists expect that the Iran war will mean a revenue bump of at least $500 million this fiscal year, as well as a similar windfall next year if the fighting continues.
But that money is essentially already accounted for to fill existing budget gaps, and short-term war gains won’t solve either the immediate problem for Alaska residents — rising gas prices hit them hard, too — or the long-term supply-and-demand fundamentals, such as the spread of electric vehicles in Europe and China, the freeing up of supply from Venezuela and the long-term decline in production along Alaska’s North Slope.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican who has spent nearly eight years cutting state government services to protect Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend, is leaving office this year with one of the lowest approval ratings of any governor, according to recent polls. The crowded race to succeed him coincides with Senator Dan Sullivan’s bid for re-election against a formidable Democratic challenger, former Representative Mary Peltola.
Those elections pose a fundamental question for Alaskans: Will voters opt for more financial austerity in the name of preserving their annual payments and almost nonexistent state taxation, or will they accept a more politically fraught reimagining of the state’s fiscal structure?
The governor called it “a philosophical debate over the role of government.”
“If you look at where we are and how expensive things are here, we just don’t have the ability to do the kinds of things you can do in Texas or Iowa,” Mr. Dunleavy said. “It’s not going to be roads everywhere, schools everywhere, services everywhere. Alaska is a different place.” [ed. especially if you give away all your revenue.]
The math no longer works, even for the minimal level of services Mr. Dunleavy describes. Nils Andreassen, executive director of the Alaska Municipal League, estimated that one in 10 local governments are now “semi-functioning, unable to keep the doors open for a full year.” He predicted some will eventually close.
Brett Watson, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, agreed.
“Practically speaking, we are probably at the end of our ability to continue to pay a dividend, provide the same level of state services and not broadly pay taxes,” he said.
Alaska’s financial dilemma started in 1968 with the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. Voters and elected leaders created a sovereign wealth fund, whose principal cannot be touched without a vote of the people. They legislated an annual dividend for nearly every resident and abolished the state income tax.
But as oil production has risen, not only in the Middle East but in new parts of the United States, Russia and elsewhere, prices have become more volatile and Alaska’s revenues have plunged.
The war in Iran and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have offered Alaska politicians reprieves, Mr. Watson said, “but waiting for global disruption isn’t a long-term strategy.”
Alaskan lawmakers now use interest, dividends and investment profits generated by the sovereign wealth fund for government operating costs, and for an annual dividend to residents. That payout peaked at $3,284 in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and oil prices topped $100 a barrel, but it has averaged $1,370 over the last decade.
This year, even before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the governor asked legislators for $3,600 per person, and he proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee a dividend in perpetuity.
But such payments now compete directly with core government work like road maintenance, education and prisons. Mr. Dunleavy has used his line-item veto hundreds of times to cut programs and preserve the annual dividend, which he views as “nonnegotiable” because “the people know what to do with their money better than politicians do.”
As state government shrank, local governments either had to go without many basic services or go it alone. Juneau has chosen the second option, using local money to help keep people in a region reachable only by plane or boat, and where prices reflect that remoteness.
“Go take a look at another town that’s 32,000 people, maybe in the Midwest,” said Laura McDonnell, who owns a store selling Alaska-made crafts and jewelry just steps from where cruise ships dock. “How many performing arts centers and libraries and museums and swimming pools do those communities have?”
Plenty of communities subsidize housing construction, said Neil Steininger, who is a Juneau city and borough assemblyman and a former state budget director, “and we extend that to other things because we believe they’re important for quality of life.”
“I don’t skate, and I don’t swim, and I don’t play hockey, but those things are a big part of why I’m here,” he said. [...]
Many Republican leaders continue to maintain that Alaska is on fundamentally strong fiscal ground: Like a family that is house rich but cash poor, Alaska just needs to make some changes in its financial structure.
“We are as far from a failed petrostate as you can imagine, but we have a revenue problem,” said the co-chairman of the Alaska Senate Finance Committee, Bert Stedman, whose office is decorated with historical photos, maps and MAGA memorabilia.
Mr. Dunleavy said the dividend was created to ensure both that the natural resources fueling Alaska’s economy would belong to its residents and that future legislatures could not spend oil money recklessly.
But lawmakers have not approved his $3,600-an-Alaskan dividend request. Instead, politicians in both major parties hope upcoming elections for governor and Senate will clarify what voters actually want — changes to the dividend, a seasonal sales tax aimed at tourists, an income tax or still more cuts.
“It is going to take a governor willing to put it all on the line,” said Bryce Edgmon, who is the state House speaker and a former Democrat who is now an independent. “Just saying ‘protect the dividend’ is no longer an answer.”
Under Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, the top four candidates will advance from an Aug. 18 primary to the November general election. Most of the prominent Republican candidates, including Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and the conservative activist Bernadette Wilson, echo Mr. Dunleavy’s calls to protect the dividend at almost any cost. Most of the Democrats support a more substantial remaking of the state’s fiscal structure, including by changing the formula for funding public schools and potentially making oil companies pay more in taxes.
In all, 17 people are seeking the governor’s mansion, which sits in the shadow of Mount Juneau and up a hill from the hard decisions facing Juneau’s civic leaders. As they ponder what to cut, they’re also worried that the current financial crisis, like others in the past, will not be enough to push through real structural change.
by By Anna Griffin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson[ed. Republicans and greedy Alaskans have killed what used to be a unique and vibrant state. I say this fully acknowledging that Republicans were once the most vociferous protectors of what we'd call Alaska's culture and pioneering spirit, but that was a long time ago. When the Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) was being debated shortly after oil started flowing - and even before that, when the state received $900 million in lease sale revenue for future Prudhoe Bay development - I thought it was a bad idea, giving free money away to people just for living there. I understood the reasoning - that politicians and special interests couldn't be trusted not to blow it all - which, in fact, is what they've done with most of the account's contingency funds (interest on investments, criminal penalties, etc). Everything but the principal, which is constitutionally protected. What's worse was the decision to get rid of state income taxes. Once you do that it's almost impossible to get those taxes resinstated again. Human nature. Governor Jay Hammond, who conceived of the PFD program, imagined it being based on longevity and commitment - the longer you lived in Alaska the more you'd receive in payments. But the state supreme court struck that down for being discriminatory and unconsititutional. So, anybody that came up, became a resident, and stayed for just a year qualified. Even the military. You can imagine how that affected (infected?) the population and mindset of residents and politicians ever since. Red as any red state, Alaska was, and continues to be, one of the most socialist states in the country. It also receives (or used to, anyway) more federal dollars per capita than any other state. So greed and a deep sense of entitlement became the new ethic. That's how the current govenor got elected - by promising massive PFDs that would exceed anything ever seen before, while cutting govenment spending and other essential services, which he has done every year during his tenure. Now they're broke and we'll see how much people still living there care about Alaska's future. Are they willing to make the difficult decisions that will put it on a sustainable course, or continue to push for endless freebies? I have my guesses. As an aside - if you can contribute to Mary Peltola's senate campaign for Senate, please do. She's the real deal, and cares deeply about the future of the state, its history, and its people and is running against another of Trump's zombies. You can learn more about her at this link. See also: Thanks for all the fish (ADN), which also includes links to recent stories like this: Anchorage School Board approves ‘severe’ budget with hundreds of staff layoffs and 3 school closures (ST).]
Juneau, Alaska, takes pride in providing services that some larger cities would shy away from — child care and housing assistance, arts grants, three libraries, two public pools, an arboretum, a ski area and a pledge that all 250 miles of borough roads will be plowed, if possible, within 48 hours after a snowstorm ends.
But the system that has made that possible — a steady flow of revenue from oil production — is cracking like Arctic ice in spring, not just in Juneau, Alaska’s capital, but across the state. Even with the war in Iran sending oil prices sky high, the oil-dependent model that has financed generous public services while giving Alaskans annual checks from a Permanent Fund can no longer keep both promises.
“The petrostate hasn’t quite failed yet,” said Joseph Geldhof, a Juneau lawyer, but “it will if something does not change.”
Anything that increases global oil prices is good for Alaska’s finances, and state economists expect that the Iran war will mean a revenue bump of at least $500 million this fiscal year, as well as a similar windfall next year if the fighting continues.
But that money is essentially already accounted for to fill existing budget gaps, and short-term war gains won’t solve either the immediate problem for Alaska residents — rising gas prices hit them hard, too — or the long-term supply-and-demand fundamentals, such as the spread of electric vehicles in Europe and China, the freeing up of supply from Venezuela and the long-term decline in production along Alaska’s North Slope.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican who has spent nearly eight years cutting state government services to protect Alaska’s Permanent Fund dividend, is leaving office this year with one of the lowest approval ratings of any governor, according to recent polls. The crowded race to succeed him coincides with Senator Dan Sullivan’s bid for re-election against a formidable Democratic challenger, former Representative Mary Peltola.
Those elections pose a fundamental question for Alaskans: Will voters opt for more financial austerity in the name of preserving their annual payments and almost nonexistent state taxation, or will they accept a more politically fraught reimagining of the state’s fiscal structure?
The governor called it “a philosophical debate over the role of government.”
“If you look at where we are and how expensive things are here, we just don’t have the ability to do the kinds of things you can do in Texas or Iowa,” Mr. Dunleavy said. “It’s not going to be roads everywhere, schools everywhere, services everywhere. Alaska is a different place.” [ed. especially if you give away all your revenue.]
The math no longer works, even for the minimal level of services Mr. Dunleavy describes. Nils Andreassen, executive director of the Alaska Municipal League, estimated that one in 10 local governments are now “semi-functioning, unable to keep the doors open for a full year.” He predicted some will eventually close.
Brett Watson, an economist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, agreed.
“Practically speaking, we are probably at the end of our ability to continue to pay a dividend, provide the same level of state services and not broadly pay taxes,” he said.
Alaska’s financial dilemma started in 1968 with the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay. Voters and elected leaders created a sovereign wealth fund, whose principal cannot be touched without a vote of the people. They legislated an annual dividend for nearly every resident and abolished the state income tax.
But as oil production has risen, not only in the Middle East but in new parts of the United States, Russia and elsewhere, prices have become more volatile and Alaska’s revenues have plunged.
The war in Iran and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have offered Alaska politicians reprieves, Mr. Watson said, “but waiting for global disruption isn’t a long-term strategy.”
Alaskan lawmakers now use interest, dividends and investment profits generated by the sovereign wealth fund for government operating costs, and for an annual dividend to residents. That payout peaked at $3,284 in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine and oil prices topped $100 a barrel, but it has averaged $1,370 over the last decade.
This year, even before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, the governor asked legislators for $3,600 per person, and he proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee a dividend in perpetuity.
But such payments now compete directly with core government work like road maintenance, education and prisons. Mr. Dunleavy has used his line-item veto hundreds of times to cut programs and preserve the annual dividend, which he views as “nonnegotiable” because “the people know what to do with their money better than politicians do.”
As state government shrank, local governments either had to go without many basic services or go it alone. Juneau has chosen the second option, using local money to help keep people in a region reachable only by plane or boat, and where prices reflect that remoteness.
“Go take a look at another town that’s 32,000 people, maybe in the Midwest,” said Laura McDonnell, who owns a store selling Alaska-made crafts and jewelry just steps from where cruise ships dock. “How many performing arts centers and libraries and museums and swimming pools do those communities have?”
Plenty of communities subsidize housing construction, said Neil Steininger, who is a Juneau city and borough assemblyman and a former state budget director, “and we extend that to other things because we believe they’re important for quality of life.”
“I don’t skate, and I don’t swim, and I don’t play hockey, but those things are a big part of why I’m here,” he said. [...]
Many Republican leaders continue to maintain that Alaska is on fundamentally strong fiscal ground: Like a family that is house rich but cash poor, Alaska just needs to make some changes in its financial structure.
“We are as far from a failed petrostate as you can imagine, but we have a revenue problem,” said the co-chairman of the Alaska Senate Finance Committee, Bert Stedman, whose office is decorated with historical photos, maps and MAGA memorabilia.
Mr. Dunleavy said the dividend was created to ensure both that the natural resources fueling Alaska’s economy would belong to its residents and that future legislatures could not spend oil money recklessly.
But lawmakers have not approved his $3,600-an-Alaskan dividend request. Instead, politicians in both major parties hope upcoming elections for governor and Senate will clarify what voters actually want — changes to the dividend, a seasonal sales tax aimed at tourists, an income tax or still more cuts.
“It is going to take a governor willing to put it all on the line,” said Bryce Edgmon, who is the state House speaker and a former Democrat who is now an independent. “Just saying ‘protect the dividend’ is no longer an answer.”
Under Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, the top four candidates will advance from an Aug. 18 primary to the November general election. Most of the prominent Republican candidates, including Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and the conservative activist Bernadette Wilson, echo Mr. Dunleavy’s calls to protect the dividend at almost any cost. Most of the Democrats support a more substantial remaking of the state’s fiscal structure, including by changing the formula for funding public schools and potentially making oil companies pay more in taxes.
In all, 17 people are seeking the governor’s mansion, which sits in the shadow of Mount Juneau and up a hill from the hard decisions facing Juneau’s civic leaders. As they ponder what to cut, they’re also worried that the current financial crisis, like others in the past, will not be enough to push through real structural change.
by By Anna Griffin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ruth Fremson
China and the Future of Science
[The following post is a polished transcript of a speech I recently gave to a private gathering of American technologists. Its contents may be of interest to a larger audience. -TG.]
The Chinese socio-political system differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.
In the early days of Mao, the overarching aim of the communist system was to seize state power, first through subversion and insurgency, then through more regular combined arms warfare. In the later days of Mao the newly established Chinese state and the society it intertwined were oriented around class struggle, both at home and abroad. From the 1980s through the 2010s the Chinese system was orbited a different yet still very explicitly stated goal: getting rich. In theory, if not always in practice, every action taken by every cadre, every soldier, and every state employee was subordinate to this larger, unifying aim. We must make China rich.
That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state must bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.
The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.
Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and—voila!—you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.
How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?
And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.
The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.
The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.
The most granular analysis of all is published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. ASPI publishes a neat research tracker that surveys new publications in 74 distinct high-end technologies. Unlike the statistics I just discussed, their tracker includes research published by scientists working in national laboratories and private institutions as well as those published by academic scientists. For each category they make a list of the ten institutions that are publishing the most high-impact science in that particular topic. What have they found? For 66 of the 74 categories tracked, a majority of the institutions that are now publishing the highest-impact science are Chinese. In many areas of science the dominance is total: For example, ten of then most productive research institutions in the fields of nanoscale material manufacturing, photonic sensors, chemical coating, drone operations, automated swarms, and undersea communications are Chinese. The number is nine out of ten for work on supercapacitors, advanced composite materials, inertial navigation systems, and satellite positioning, eight out of ten in advanced optical communications, advanced radiofrequency communications, and new chemical coatings, and seven out of ten for directed energy technologies, nuclear engineering, and nuclear waste treatment.
The scale of Chinese scientific production is in part a story about people. China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because—depending on the exact year you do the counting—between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.
Many of these researchers go back. They go back partially because they are well compensated for doing so. They also go back because of the research opportunities afforded to them. A recent study found that returning Chinese scientists go on to become the lead author on 2.5 times more papers than their colleagues who stay in the United States. Many Chinese research labs have 30 or 40 people attached to them—the equivalent to a commercial research lab in the United States. Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.
Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”
My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?
Something similar might be said for science and China.[ed. See also: The China Tech Canon (Asterisk).]
The Chinese socio-political system differs from our own. From the perspective of the topic of this conference, here is the most salient distinction: the Chinese system has a telos. The Chinese party-state is fundamentally a set of goal-oriented institutions. This is not unique to China—it is in fact a distinguishing feature of all Leninist systems. I sometimes think of Leninist systems as a little bit like that bus in the movie Speed. Who here has seen it? For those who haven’t, here is basic gist of that film: an extortionist attaches a bomb to the speedometer of a bus. If the bus ever slows below 50 miles per hour, everyone blows up. So it is with your average communist system. Either it hurtles towards some clearly defined goal or things start to fall apart.
That is no longer the animating telos of the Chinese system. There is a new goal, one that has been articulated with great clarity by Chairman Xi and the Chinese central committee: In 2026, the aim of China’s communist enterprise is to lead humanity through what they call “the next round of techno scientific revolution and industrial transformation.” The Chinese leadership believes humanity stands on the cusp of the next industrial revolution. China can only be restored to its ancestral greatness if it is the pioneer of this revolution. All machinery of party and state must bend towards this end. All 100 million members of the Communist Party of China, all 50 million government employees of the PRC, all two million soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, and ultimately all of the 1.4 billion people that call China home must be mobilized to accomplish this aim. That is the ambition. China will be the greatest scientific power the world has ever seen—or bust.
The communists are deadly serious about their pursuit of this aim. Statistics provide one window into the seriousness of their intent. Now I don’t intend for the remainder of this speech to be a laundry list of numbers, but I think the numbers are useful for helping us see the scale of what China has already accomplished and the speed with which they have accomplished it. They are also strong signal of future intent—it is difficult to survey the numbers and not appreciate just how ironclad China’s commitment to scientific achievement really is.
Now scientific achievement is difficult to measure. One common metric is to count the so-called “high impact papers” – journal articles highly cited by other leading lights in a given scientific field. Count up these papers over the course of a year, see who wrote them, see where those authors work, and—voila!—you have a ranked list of which institutions are putting out the most high-impact science in a given year. Had you done this counting exercise in the year 2005, you would have discovered that six of the world’s ten most productive universities were in the United States. Today only one of those universities is in the United States. That university is Harvard, coming in at spot number three on the list. At spot number one? Zhejiang University.
How many of you have heard of Zhejiang University? Can I get a show of hands?
And of course, Zhejiang University is just one of the Chinese institutions on this top ten list. China claims not just the number-one spot, but also the number-two spot. And not just the number-one and number-two spots, but also the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth spots go to the Chinese.
The scientific publisher Nature makes a similar catalog on a slightly more granular level, looking at specific fields of science. According to Nature’s most recent rankings, 18 of the top 25 most productive research institutes in the physical sciences, 19 of the top 20 in geosciences, and a full 25 out of 25 in chemistry are Chinese. Only in the biosciences do American scientists still have a lead—but even on that list three of the top ten are Chinese.
The kicker is, none of that was true even just a decade ago.
The most granular analysis of all is published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI. ASPI publishes a neat research tracker that surveys new publications in 74 distinct high-end technologies. Unlike the statistics I just discussed, their tracker includes research published by scientists working in national laboratories and private institutions as well as those published by academic scientists. For each category they make a list of the ten institutions that are publishing the most high-impact science in that particular topic. What have they found? For 66 of the 74 categories tracked, a majority of the institutions that are now publishing the highest-impact science are Chinese. In many areas of science the dominance is total: For example, ten of then most productive research institutions in the fields of nanoscale material manufacturing, photonic sensors, chemical coating, drone operations, automated swarms, and undersea communications are Chinese. The number is nine out of ten for work on supercapacitors, advanced composite materials, inertial navigation systems, and satellite positioning, eight out of ten in advanced optical communications, advanced radiofrequency communications, and new chemical coatings, and seven out of ten for directed energy technologies, nuclear engineering, and nuclear waste treatment.
The scale of Chinese scientific production is in part a story about people. China graduates five times the number of medical and biomedical students than we do every year, seven times the number of engineers, and two-and-a-half times the number of undergraduates with research experience in artificial intelligence. Last year China graduated almost double the number of STEM PhD students than we did—and that number is actually worse than it sounds because—depending on the exact year you do the counting—between one sixth and one fifth of our STEM graduates are themselves Chinese.
Many of these researchers go back. They go back partially because they are well compensated for doing so. They also go back because of the research opportunities afforded to them. A recent study found that returning Chinese scientists go on to become the lead author on 2.5 times more papers than their colleagues who stay in the United States. Many Chinese research labs have 30 or 40 people attached to them—the equivalent to a commercial research lab in the United States. Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.
Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”
My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?
Something similar might be said for science and China.
Enneagram Types
[ed. If you read the post following this one which discusses personal "agency" (which I encourage you to do) this might be helpful.]
On Agency and 'Can You Just Do Things?'
Clara Collier: In the spring of next year, you have a book coming out called You Can Just Do Things. It’s about agency. I'm interested in agency as a buzzword, as a concept, as a Silicon Valley cultural phenomenon, as a thing I can exercise in my life — maybe even as a thing I shouldn't exercise so much in my life. So, to start: How do you define agency? And why did you want to write a book about it?
Cate Hall: I define agency as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life offers. So it has two components: One is noticing degrees of freedom, the other is taking action on the basis of them.
I think agency is a hot topic right now for a lot of reasons, but I personally care about it because I have been through periods of my life that were characterized by very low agency, which made me miserable. I think that there is a pervasive belief — in tech and in the Bay Area, but also in the the world at large — that agency is an inherent trait. I think that is really wrong. So I'm interested in talking, at a practical level, about how agency can be cultivated to make it more accessible.
Clara: There’s an interesting cleavage between the way that you think and write about agency, and agency as a tech world buzzword. Why do you think this concept is so popular now?
Cate: I've wondered a lot about this. Certainly at least some part of it is that different ideas just become fads, but it's hard to understand why things take off when they do.
However, I suspect that some part of what is driving this interest is a concern that people have that they don't really know what their future looks like. They desire to control or lay claim to their future in a way they hope agency will provide.
The idea that intelligence is not what matters — because intelligence is becoming cheap — is growing. So there has to be something else that we can rely on, as humans, to supply a sense of control or meaning to life. Part of the enthusiasm about agency emerges from that perspective.
Clara: One thing in this space that I find concerning is the idea of “just do what high agency people are doing”. I think that leads to inauthenticity, where people pursue something that they think they should do just because it seems to be “high agency.”
Cate: That seems like a valid concern. I am interested in a flavor of agency that has to do with freedom above all else. There's one version of agency that is primarily concerned with personal freedom. There's another version that is primarily concerned with personal ambition — the version of agency that I hear more often in tech circles. I think that LARPing [live action role play in gaming] as a high-agency person by following the playbook of a tech founder seems unlikely to be a true exercise of agency, and therefore is unlikely to confer the benefits of “true agency:” a meaningful life that, upon reflection, you are happy to have lived.
Clara: I like the term reflection there. I have a kind of Rawlsian definition of agency: doing what you would do at reflective equilibrium.
Cate: I think that makes sense to me. There's the concept of coherent extrapolated volition: What would you do if you had more information? I've always liked that idea. If you were a better version of yourself, wiser and more knowledgeable, what would you actually want?
Jake Eaton: Maybe we can narrow this down more by talking about your own experiences, Cate, because I think you define agency orthogonal to how it’s sometimes used in the Bay. When you were younger, you graduated Yale Law, you held several high-status, high-performing jobs — you were a supreme court attorney and you clerked for a judge on the Second Circuit. I think most anyone reading your CV would think: This person has high agency. But you talk about these accomplishments as if they were done before you had any.
Cate: Yeah, I think this points to where agency and ambition actually diverge. It seems fairly clear, at least to me, that you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.
You can also be highly successful and highly ambitious without being highly agentic. That looks like following a path with a certain kind of excellence and endurance that reliably leads to success, to accolades, to money. But you haven’t reflected on that path; it’s not a matter of you having decided, yes, this is the life path that I want to be on. And that is what characterized my life until around the age of 30.
Jake: Do you reject the use of the term NPC? [non-playing background character in gaming]
Cate: I really hate it. The one context in which I will not reject it outright is when somebody is using it to describe their own personal transformation. Otherwise, I have a very strong allergy to the term and find it morally repugnant. The idea that some people do not count because they are not thinking for themselves in the way that the speaker believes they should is, to me, really vile. I have a hard time even getting along with somebody who I know has used the term, I find it so offensive.
Jake: Yeah, our Slack is full of both of us ranting about everyone who uses it and how much we hate it too.
Clara: It's so horrible. I'm not against ambition. I like being around people who want to change the world. I like being around people who want to do unusual things. But the more time I spend in spaces that valorize these qualities, the more I tend to run into people who have this deeply dehumanizing view of others. How separable are these things?
Cate: My first instinct is that you're seeing some sort of selection effect, where sociopaths tend to do both. People who tend to view others in transactional terms are also people who are high agency, in the sense that they have never bothered to learn social scripts. They are very low in conscientiousness. And so, naturally, without any study, they are able to exude high-agency instincts. A large part of learning high agency is learning not to be so constrained in your view of the world and of what comprises possible action. The people who, for whatever reason, never learn those things in the first place are who we think of as naturally agentic — but they are also high in dark triad traits.
So this is a consistent concern that I also have: that it is probably the worst people that you can think of who are really high agency. Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.
Jake: What's your model for how someone actually gains agency? Where did it come from for you; what happened around age 30? My own experience, and that of others I’ve spoken with, is that you can read plenty about self-determination or self-actualization that simply doesn’t click, until, one day, it does. That experience feels to me much more like grace than something that can be deliberately chosen or affected.
Cate: I think that there are a few different types of situations which reliably prompt people towards this direction. The first one that I ever benefited from was LSD. Drug experiences can be really useful in extracting you from your ordinary environment and giving you a newfound perspective on how you’re living your life. I think if I had never tried LSD, I might plausibly still be a lawyer living in DC. So psychedelics in particular — maybe MDMA.
Another is something that I discuss in my TED Talk and in the book: desperation, or call it being in emergency mode. I was trying to escape from the very low-agency point of addiction. Sometimes life becomes unbearable, and that prompts you to take dramatic action. In addiction circles, this is called the gift of desperation. That can be a result of addiction, but it can also be a health scare, or any event that serves as a trigger to reevaluate how you are living.
The third category is exposure to high-agency people. You can osmose agency from your environment if you're exposed to the right kinds of people. I experienced this while at Alvea, my gig before Astera, where I was working with a couple of people who were radically high agency — total outliers in this sense. I saw how they operated in the world and how much they were willing to question. That was really instructive for me.
So psychedelics, desperation, exposure to high-agency people. I think those are the standard things. And then there is just grace. Sometimes people wake up one day and they're like, oh, I don't like the way that I'm living. And that happens. But it's less reliable for me.
Jake: From a predictive processing framework, it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about is just finding some way to break your priors about what’s possible for yourself.
Cate: Totally.
Jake: How, then, does the book fit into the broader project of actually providing people with agency?
Cate: I guess I'm trying to provide a fourth pathway, which is: Somebody puts a book in front of you and gives you something to think about. Agency has a reputation for being an inherent trait, as opposed to something deliberately cultivated. I think that fairly describes how a lot of people pick up agency. If it's not inherent, then it can be a matter of luck — who they happen to meet, or life circumstances that call them to become higher agency.
But I think agency is something that can be deliberately cultivated by a lot more people. And the hope is that I'm able to describe a useful set of approaches to life that cause people to feel more free and able to do what they want to — as an alternative to taking acid or bumping into people, you know?
Clara: This is also something I've noticed in my own life. Moving to the Bay Area and ending up in a very particular community here was really instrumental in me deciding I could do things that had not been on my action menu before. On the other hand, it's always hard for me to tell. When am I doing something that is actually, again, high agency? And when is it something that my community considers valuable, or cool, or agentic?
Cate: Working in AI safety is a version of this too. There are certain scripts you can follow that seem radical from the perspective of somebody outside of the community, but within the community, they're just the way that things are done. It can be easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are doing something radical and creative as an expression of your own deep interests, when in fact you are doing what everybody around you is doing. This is not an indictment of AI safety, or anybody in particular. [...]
Clara: What do you think about the relationship between agency and risk?
Cate: There definitely is a relationship. It's interesting: a lot of what I view as high agency involves taking a chance on something that is uncertain, instead of sticking with something certain. For example: Going to work at a startup instead of taking a corporate job, or deciding to break up with your partner of two years who you aren't enthusiastic about marrying, knowing there's a chance you won't meet anybody that you are more excited to date.
I think that there is an openness to risk and uncertainty that seems to go hand in hand with agency. Beyond that, there's probably a sociological overlap: many of the groups especially drawn to agency discourse right now also tend to be risk-loving for other reasons.
Fundamentally, I believe that most people take too few risks and limit their results in life because of that. Embracing some degree of risk is probably part and parcel of a high-agency mindset.[ed. See also (from Ms Hall's substack Useful Fictions): How to be more agentic.]
Cate Hall: I define agency as the capacity to both see and act on all of the degrees of freedom that life offers. So it has two components: One is noticing degrees of freedom, the other is taking action on the basis of them.
Clara: There’s an interesting cleavage between the way that you think and write about agency, and agency as a tech world buzzword. Why do you think this concept is so popular now?
Cate: I've wondered a lot about this. Certainly at least some part of it is that different ideas just become fads, but it's hard to understand why things take off when they do.
However, I suspect that some part of what is driving this interest is a concern that people have that they don't really know what their future looks like. They desire to control or lay claim to their future in a way they hope agency will provide.
The idea that intelligence is not what matters — because intelligence is becoming cheap — is growing. So there has to be something else that we can rely on, as humans, to supply a sense of control or meaning to life. Part of the enthusiasm about agency emerges from that perspective.
Clara: One thing in this space that I find concerning is the idea of “just do what high agency people are doing”. I think that leads to inauthenticity, where people pursue something that they think they should do just because it seems to be “high agency.”
Cate: That seems like a valid concern. I am interested in a flavor of agency that has to do with freedom above all else. There's one version of agency that is primarily concerned with personal freedom. There's another version that is primarily concerned with personal ambition — the version of agency that I hear more often in tech circles. I think that LARPing [live action role play in gaming] as a high-agency person by following the playbook of a tech founder seems unlikely to be a true exercise of agency, and therefore is unlikely to confer the benefits of “true agency:” a meaningful life that, upon reflection, you are happy to have lived.
Clara: I like the term reflection there. I have a kind of Rawlsian definition of agency: doing what you would do at reflective equilibrium.
Cate: I think that makes sense to me. There's the concept of coherent extrapolated volition: What would you do if you had more information? I've always liked that idea. If you were a better version of yourself, wiser and more knowledgeable, what would you actually want?
Jake Eaton: Maybe we can narrow this down more by talking about your own experiences, Cate, because I think you define agency orthogonal to how it’s sometimes used in the Bay. When you were younger, you graduated Yale Law, you held several high-status, high-performing jobs — you were a supreme court attorney and you clerked for a judge on the Second Circuit. I think most anyone reading your CV would think: This person has high agency. But you talk about these accomplishments as if they were done before you had any.
Cate: Yeah, I think this points to where agency and ambition actually diverge. It seems fairly clear, at least to me, that you can be high agency without being highly ambitious. That might describe somebody who is highly agentic in shaping the kind of personal, emotional, or spiritual life they want, but who is not especially motivated to succeed financially or professionally.
You can also be highly successful and highly ambitious without being highly agentic. That looks like following a path with a certain kind of excellence and endurance that reliably leads to success, to accolades, to money. But you haven’t reflected on that path; it’s not a matter of you having decided, yes, this is the life path that I want to be on. And that is what characterized my life until around the age of 30.
Jake: Do you reject the use of the term NPC? [non-playing background character in gaming]
Cate: I really hate it. The one context in which I will not reject it outright is when somebody is using it to describe their own personal transformation. Otherwise, I have a very strong allergy to the term and find it morally repugnant. The idea that some people do not count because they are not thinking for themselves in the way that the speaker believes they should is, to me, really vile. I have a hard time even getting along with somebody who I know has used the term, I find it so offensive.
Jake: Yeah, our Slack is full of both of us ranting about everyone who uses it and how much we hate it too.
Clara: It's so horrible. I'm not against ambition. I like being around people who want to change the world. I like being around people who want to do unusual things. But the more time I spend in spaces that valorize these qualities, the more I tend to run into people who have this deeply dehumanizing view of others. How separable are these things?
Cate: My first instinct is that you're seeing some sort of selection effect, where sociopaths tend to do both. People who tend to view others in transactional terms are also people who are high agency, in the sense that they have never bothered to learn social scripts. They are very low in conscientiousness. And so, naturally, without any study, they are able to exude high-agency instincts. A large part of learning high agency is learning not to be so constrained in your view of the world and of what comprises possible action. The people who, for whatever reason, never learn those things in the first place are who we think of as naturally agentic — but they are also high in dark triad traits.
So this is a consistent concern that I also have: that it is probably the worst people that you can think of who are really high agency. Agency itself is not necessarily a good thing. It becomes a good thing as a toolkit, developed by people who are also high in conscientiousness, who want good things for the world, and who might otherwise be constrained by narrow perspectives on what counts as socially acceptable action.
Jake: What's your model for how someone actually gains agency? Where did it come from for you; what happened around age 30? My own experience, and that of others I’ve spoken with, is that you can read plenty about self-determination or self-actualization that simply doesn’t click, until, one day, it does. That experience feels to me much more like grace than something that can be deliberately chosen or affected.
Cate: I think that there are a few different types of situations which reliably prompt people towards this direction. The first one that I ever benefited from was LSD. Drug experiences can be really useful in extracting you from your ordinary environment and giving you a newfound perspective on how you’re living your life. I think if I had never tried LSD, I might plausibly still be a lawyer living in DC. So psychedelics in particular — maybe MDMA.
Another is something that I discuss in my TED Talk and in the book: desperation, or call it being in emergency mode. I was trying to escape from the very low-agency point of addiction. Sometimes life becomes unbearable, and that prompts you to take dramatic action. In addiction circles, this is called the gift of desperation. That can be a result of addiction, but it can also be a health scare, or any event that serves as a trigger to reevaluate how you are living.
The third category is exposure to high-agency people. You can osmose agency from your environment if you're exposed to the right kinds of people. I experienced this while at Alvea, my gig before Astera, where I was working with a couple of people who were radically high agency — total outliers in this sense. I saw how they operated in the world and how much they were willing to question. That was really instructive for me.
So psychedelics, desperation, exposure to high-agency people. I think those are the standard things. And then there is just grace. Sometimes people wake up one day and they're like, oh, I don't like the way that I'm living. And that happens. But it's less reliable for me.
Jake: From a predictive processing framework, it strikes me that a lot of what you're talking about is just finding some way to break your priors about what’s possible for yourself.
Cate: Totally.
Jake: How, then, does the book fit into the broader project of actually providing people with agency?
Cate: I guess I'm trying to provide a fourth pathway, which is: Somebody puts a book in front of you and gives you something to think about. Agency has a reputation for being an inherent trait, as opposed to something deliberately cultivated. I think that fairly describes how a lot of people pick up agency. If it's not inherent, then it can be a matter of luck — who they happen to meet, or life circumstances that call them to become higher agency.
But I think agency is something that can be deliberately cultivated by a lot more people. And the hope is that I'm able to describe a useful set of approaches to life that cause people to feel more free and able to do what they want to — as an alternative to taking acid or bumping into people, you know?
Clara: This is also something I've noticed in my own life. Moving to the Bay Area and ending up in a very particular community here was really instrumental in me deciding I could do things that had not been on my action menu before. On the other hand, it's always hard for me to tell. When am I doing something that is actually, again, high agency? And when is it something that my community considers valuable, or cool, or agentic?
Cate: Working in AI safety is a version of this too. There are certain scripts you can follow that seem radical from the perspective of somebody outside of the community, but within the community, they're just the way that things are done. It can be easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are doing something radical and creative as an expression of your own deep interests, when in fact you are doing what everybody around you is doing. This is not an indictment of AI safety, or anybody in particular. [...]
Clara: What do you think about the relationship between agency and risk?
Cate: There definitely is a relationship. It's interesting: a lot of what I view as high agency involves taking a chance on something that is uncertain, instead of sticking with something certain. For example: Going to work at a startup instead of taking a corporate job, or deciding to break up with your partner of two years who you aren't enthusiastic about marrying, knowing there's a chance you won't meet anybody that you are more excited to date.
I think that there is an openness to risk and uncertainty that seems to go hand in hand with agency. Beyond that, there's probably a sociological overlap: many of the groups especially drawn to agency discourse right now also tend to be risk-loving for other reasons.
Fundamentally, I believe that most people take too few risks and limit their results in life because of that. Embracing some degree of risk is probably part and parcel of a high-agency mindset.
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Scary Cool Sad Goodbye 88
“I did not gamble, cared not at all about the Mob and even less about Howard Hughes. But there were other stories and other people, and there were days when I told myself that through the travail of others I might come to grips with myself, that I might, as it were, find absolution through voyeurism. Those were the good old days.”
~ Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, John Gregory Dunne
LED arrows inside Harry Reid Airport pointed left to the carousels and right to the liquor store: “the nation’s only non-duty free liquor store located in an airport baggage claim,” the advertisements bragged. “Stop by before getting your luggage to stock up on what you need. We know why you came to Las Vegas, and Liquor Library is here to help you.” The dusk settled into darkness as I smoked a cigarette on the second floor of the parking garage, watching the distant lights of the Strip and the rippling glow of the Sphere. The 108 bus idled at the terminal beneath me, its destination flashing: “PARADISE: EXPECT DELAYS.”
“We know why you came to Las Vegas...” Well, that made one of us. I did not care for “nightlife,” gambling gave me the willies, and I’d already gotten married on a cheap whim once before. But I had never been, and my book was through with edits, and it seemed like an opportunity for a hard personal reset plus some quality material, what others called eavesdropping. Whether or not I would “have fun” was basically beside the point. In writing, unlike in Vegas, the more you lose, the more you win.
Searching for secondhand clarity, I’d started a book on the plane. “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas,” begins John Gregory Dunne’s 1974 memoir about his six months in Sin City confronting his recent obsession with death and avoiding his wife and young child. The year is 1969, and Dunne is doing swell on paper: two published books, three-year-old daughter, oceanfront home in Malibu. And yet he exists in a state of panicked dread about his health, his writer’s block, and most of all, his marriage, which is perilously frayed. “I sometimes had the feeling that we went from crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town,” he writes, “every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.” His wife barely seems to notice when he disappears for days or weeks to drive around the desert loitering in cheap motels. Perhaps this is because she’s just written a novel about the same thing called Play It as It Lays.
After months of languishing, Dunne gives himself an assignment, something to do to take his mind off of himself. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems,” he writes. “There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you, someone to whom you can ladle out understanding as if it were a charitable contribution.” As for where he will pursue “salvation without commitment,” a random billboard on La Brea serves as inspiration — a picture of a roulette wheel and a message “with a Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP.”
And so he does, moving into a sad apartment off the Strip to watch TV and eat junk food and befriend some local characters who help him write an account of America’s most sordid city, which doubles as a portrait of one man’s personal rock-bottom. The people whom I mention are not his friends, exactly; their relationships are predicated by Dunne’s private knowledge that these eccentrics are grist for the mill. He does not much like Jackie Kasey, a painfully unfunny lounge comic who once opened for Elvis, though he still follows him from casino to casino, taking notes. “I tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,” Dunne writes with a guiltiness that I know all too well, though his shame often feels misplaced for a man who’s run off on his family under the pretense of art.
“What’s new with you?” asks his wife, Joan Didion, when he calls.
“Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight,” he says. “She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.”
“It’s research,” she replies, unfazed. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.”
“But I don’t want to fuck her.”
A silence on the other end of the phone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she says after some time.
I checked into my room at the El Cortez, a dingy old casino full of leathery retirees glued to babbling slot machines with Orientalist themes. Far too sober to even briefly consider tossing $40 away at the roulette table, I set off on foot past the drive-through wedding chapel where Britney Spears was married, the 24-hour pawn shop from Pawn Stars, the jailhouse that I recognized from TV’s JAIL. It was too late to turn back by the time it had become clear that the only pedestrians in downtown Las Vegas were tweakers, the homeless, and confused people like myself. I speed-walked down quiet side streets in whose shadows I could sense the occasional moving presence, exhaling when I reached a strip mall where a neon sign above an unmarked door said simply “BAR.”
Open 24 hours a day since the early 1960s, the Huntridge Tavern was a windowless dive bar and package liquor store with video poker screens at almost every barstool and karaoke until 3 a.m. each Tuesday, which it was. Milling through the smoky room were locals of the alternative persuasion: aging punks, Mexican goths, women whose chests heaved from tight pleather corsets. A steampunk fellow in a sleeveless vest and kilt drank directly from a pitcher of amber ale as the karaoke MC gave a lugubrious performance of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears. “Nine dollars,” said the bartender as she slid me a High Life and a full rocks glass of tequila. “Wait, no, I overcharged you. It’s just eight.”
Breaking from his keno game, a 50-something metalhead in a Bret Michaels bandana showed off his permanent eyeliner. “Yeah, that was my midlife crisis,” he said with a shrug, downing the last of his Dos Equis. “Four sessions, 90 minutes each. Hurt like a bitch.” On his phone, he scrolled through pictures of his latest ex-girlfriend. “She’s an ex-Playboy chick,” he gloated. “Hey, I like what I like.”
A pair of older men settled in beside me, wealthy-looking Boomers I initially pegged as perverts, misplaced among the grizzled lifers and polyamorous goths. In fact, they were not creeps but friendly regulars — a longtime local journalist and a prominent restaurateur whose second marriage was to a famous female magician who pioneered the illusion known as the “Drill of Death.” “What are you doing here in Vegas?” the men asked me. “The same thing I do back home,” I said. “Drinking in bars.” They liked this answer enough to pay for my next round.
The journalist shared with me a passage that his friend had written about the tavern. “A few drinks in, I’d talk to anyone — stray cats, my friends called them. A plumber. Coke dealer. A wannabe magician. Their jobs fascinated me; their confessions came easy. One was new in town. One’s card tricks failed more than they succeeded. One turned out to be a raging racist; we sent him packing. Characters with character. Every race, color, creed, gender. My mother always said you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Hey girl, you good?” a woman whispered when the men went to the bathroom. “If those guys are bothering you, you can sit with me.” I thanked her for the offer, but she had no need to worry. I did not know how to tell her I was right where I belonged.
“We know why you came to Las Vegas...” Well, that made one of us. I did not care for “nightlife,” gambling gave me the willies, and I’d already gotten married on a cheap whim once before. But I had never been, and my book was through with edits, and it seemed like an opportunity for a hard personal reset plus some quality material, what others called eavesdropping. Whether or not I would “have fun” was basically beside the point. In writing, unlike in Vegas, the more you lose, the more you win.
After months of languishing, Dunne gives himself an assignment, something to do to take his mind off of himself. “Reporting anesthetizes one’s own problems,” he writes. “There is always someone in deeper emotional drift, or even grift, than you, someone to whom you can ladle out understanding as if it were a charitable contribution.” As for where he will pursue “salvation without commitment,” a random billboard on La Brea serves as inspiration — a picture of a roulette wheel and a message “with a Delphic absence of apostrophe: VISIT LAS VEGAS BEFORE YOUR NUMBERS UP.”
And so he does, moving into a sad apartment off the Strip to watch TV and eat junk food and befriend some local characters who help him write an account of America’s most sordid city, which doubles as a portrait of one man’s personal rock-bottom. The people whom I mention are not his friends, exactly; their relationships are predicated by Dunne’s private knowledge that these eccentrics are grist for the mill. He does not much like Jackie Kasey, a painfully unfunny lounge comic who once opened for Elvis, though he still follows him from casino to casino, taking notes. “I tried not to think how ultimately I would use him,” Dunne writes with a guiltiness that I know all too well, though his shame often feels misplaced for a man who’s run off on his family under the pretense of art.
“What’s new with you?” asks his wife, Joan Didion, when he calls.
“Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight,” he says. “She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.”
“It’s research,” she replies, unfazed. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.”
“But I don’t want to fuck her.”
A silence on the other end of the phone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she says after some time.
I checked into my room at the El Cortez, a dingy old casino full of leathery retirees glued to babbling slot machines with Orientalist themes. Far too sober to even briefly consider tossing $40 away at the roulette table, I set off on foot past the drive-through wedding chapel where Britney Spears was married, the 24-hour pawn shop from Pawn Stars, the jailhouse that I recognized from TV’s JAIL. It was too late to turn back by the time it had become clear that the only pedestrians in downtown Las Vegas were tweakers, the homeless, and confused people like myself. I speed-walked down quiet side streets in whose shadows I could sense the occasional moving presence, exhaling when I reached a strip mall where a neon sign above an unmarked door said simply “BAR.”
Breaking from his keno game, a 50-something metalhead in a Bret Michaels bandana showed off his permanent eyeliner. “Yeah, that was my midlife crisis,” he said with a shrug, downing the last of his Dos Equis. “Four sessions, 90 minutes each. Hurt like a bitch.” On his phone, he scrolled through pictures of his latest ex-girlfriend. “She’s an ex-Playboy chick,” he gloated. “Hey, I like what I like.”
A pair of older men settled in beside me, wealthy-looking Boomers I initially pegged as perverts, misplaced among the grizzled lifers and polyamorous goths. In fact, they were not creeps but friendly regulars — a longtime local journalist and a prominent restaurateur whose second marriage was to a famous female magician who pioneered the illusion known as the “Drill of Death.” “What are you doing here in Vegas?” the men asked me. “The same thing I do back home,” I said. “Drinking in bars.” They liked this answer enough to pay for my next round.
The journalist shared with me a passage that his friend had written about the tavern. “A few drinks in, I’d talk to anyone — stray cats, my friends called them. A plumber. Coke dealer. A wannabe magician. Their jobs fascinated me; their confessions came easy. One was new in town. One’s card tricks failed more than they succeeded. One turned out to be a raging racist; we sent him packing. Characters with character. Every race, color, creed, gender. My mother always said you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Hey girl, you good?” a woman whispered when the men went to the bathroom. “If those guys are bothering you, you can sit with me.” I thanked her for the offer, but she had no need to worry. I did not know how to tell her I was right where I belonged.
by Meaghan Garvey, Scary Cool Sad Goodbye | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Image: uncredited
The TACO Trade Meets the Fog of War
I’m obviously not privy to President Trump’s thinking on why he decided to go to war with Iran. But even among well-connected reporters, there seem to be conflicting accounts on whether the White House and the Department of War anticipated that Iran would seek to effectively block shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil and gas prices to spike. (Though it’s hard to think they were totally unaware, given that this has been a well-known consequence of attacking Iran since my high school debate days.)
But maybe it’s as simple as this. Trump is a man who has faced remarkably few consequences for his own actions. It’s easier to do what you “feel in your bones” when you don’t bear the downside risks.
Trump has usually gotten away with it
Not only were there no real legal consequences to Trump from January 6, but he actually got re-elected four years later! (And everyone seemed to have forgotten about his mishandling of COVID.) Meanwhile, in the second term, being a lame duck has arguably been freeing for Trump. It will probably be bad for Republicans at the midterms, but Trump has never seemed to particularly care how other Republicans fare when he’s not on the ballot himself.
On the foreign policy front, Trump didn’t face any particularly adverse consequences for nabbing Nicolas Maduro under cover of night. On domestic policy, the Supreme Court sometimes bails him out.
Indeed, “you can just do things” is often a sound approach when you’re playing on a low difficulty level. In poker, we’d call this an exploitative strategy. Game theory will tell you that, if your opponent is playing optimally, you have to make some effort to balance and disguise your strategy. You can’t always bluff or the other guy will wise up. But some guys do always fold.
And if we’re being honest, Democrats are often like that player who falls for the same trick every time. (I mean, this is literally a party that might nominate fellow Californian and electoral underperformer Gavin Newsom four years after Kamala Harris’s loss.) Furthermore, there’s some degree of context collapse in what news stories draw sustained public attention. The sense one gets is that there’s always a rising tone, an escalating crisis, whether or not that’s actually the case. Breathless coverage of inconsequential stories blow out the speakers for when there’s a story that should truly raise alarms like war in the Middle East.
The game theory of market behavior isn’t well-resolved
“Markets” sometimes provide more discipline to Trump, whether because of his personal financial interests or because he watches a lot of TV and red downward arrows don’t look pretty on the screen. But I put “markets” in scare quotes because I’ve struggled in this newsletter to operationalize how this actually works in practice:
A game-theory equilibrium would almost certainly reveal that both sides are supposed to employ mixed strategies. In other words, sometimes they might be bluffing, but they can’t always be bluffing or there would be no deterrence. Some percentage of the time, they have to follow through with their threats: Trump to do the thing that markets don’t want, and the markets to actually get past the “freak out” stage into sustained, full-blown panic that might cause irreversible damage.
In a true mixed strategy, the participants in the “game” are supposed to be literally randomizing their actions. It might actually help Trump in a weird way that his behavior is effectively random in some ways based on the last person he talked to or the last TV segment he watched. Markets, though, would seem to be at a disadvantage because they’re composed of thousands of individual participants and there’s no way for them to coordinate:
Back to markets. It might be the case that, even though individual market participants can’t coordinate on a strategy, their behavior is nevertheless effectively chaotic enough to serve as a deterrent. (In the literal sense of Chaos theory: i.e., small changes in initial conditions can produce highly variable and unpredictable results in a sufficiently complex system.) Thus, the market effectively does have a “mind of its own” and behaves randomly for all intents and purposes. There’s a lot that can be said for this theory. But if markets’ behavior is essentially random, it implies that markets sometimes will escalate an initial sell-off and it will cascade into something worse.
Oil prices have been fluctuating wildly, of course, from a steady state of about $65-$70 barrel before Iran to as high as almost $120, before settling into something in the $90-$100 range recently as of this writing. But some analysts think oil could reach as high as $200 a barrel if the crisis in the Persian Gulf persists for more than another few weeks. At $95 a barrel, or even $120, markets actually are still hedging their bets. These prices imply that Trump probably will chicken out: $120 is closer to the baseline of $70 than to $200-a-barrel oil. But there’s a credible threat that he does not. I’m not sure that’s so irrational, even if prices at any given moment can become unmoored based on market psychology.
Trump and markets aren’t the only players with something at stake
Or, the matter might be out of his hands. Tariffs, a previous source of market anxiety, are unusual to some degree because, especially before the SCOTUS ruling, they’re something that more or less could be turned on or off with the literal stroke of the executive’s pen.
Sure, there might be some purely market-based mechanisms for moments of anxiety over tariffs to spiral into something more, like from bond markets panicking. But when you can’t just press the “UNDO” button — we’ve already killed Iran’s leader — there are far more ways for things to go wrong, especially in a multilateral “game”.
Iran has a say, for one thing. If it believes the best way to deter Trump is by triggering a decline the markets and/or a spike in his unpopularity ratings because oil and gas prices are surging, it has every incentive to keep oil prices surging. Or a country like China could try to take advantage of overstretched American military capabilities. And the United States didn’t go to war alone; we’re partnered with Israel, which reportedly threatened to proceed unilaterally with or without us.
So I do not trust the notion that every autocratic regime will collapse if only a few of its unnatural supports can be knocked out from under it. May it be true in this case. That is my hope. But it is only that.
But what of the “climb-down” option—will any outcome short of regime collapse suffice? I am not so sure. By assassinating their head of state we incentivize the Persians to act outside the normal pale. That action may not come right away. As of March 2026, the Iranians have never assassinated an American of national significance. Nor have they murdered a significant mass of American civilians. Will that still be true in March 2032? What could we do to deter it? We have already gone for the jugular. “In business, a maximal ask shifts the bargaining range. In security affairs, a maximal ask can also shift the escalatory range.”1 Short of a proper ground invasion we cannot escalate our threats against this regime far beyond what we now are doing. If they survive this they will survive whatever form of retaliation we might threaten then. Our enemies are godly men: they do not fear to meet their maker if they meet him as martyrs."
But maybe it’s as simple as this. Trump is a man who has faced remarkably few consequences for his own actions. It’s easier to do what you “feel in your bones” when you don’t bear the downside risks.
Trump has usually gotten away with it
“When you’re a star, they let you do it” has basically been Trump’s superpower. For instance, his strategy of telling off the entire Republican establishment in 2016 actually proved popular with GOP primary voters, defying the conventional wisdom from idiots like me who claimed the primaries are mostly about building intraparty consensus. Then he won the general election when polls had him losing.
On the foreign policy front, Trump didn’t face any particularly adverse consequences for nabbing Nicolas Maduro under cover of night. On domestic policy, the Supreme Court sometimes bails him out.
Indeed, “you can just do things” is often a sound approach when you’re playing on a low difficulty level. In poker, we’d call this an exploitative strategy. Game theory will tell you that, if your opponent is playing optimally, you have to make some effort to balance and disguise your strategy. You can’t always bluff or the other guy will wise up. But some guys do always fold.
And if we’re being honest, Democrats are often like that player who falls for the same trick every time. (I mean, this is literally a party that might nominate fellow Californian and electoral underperformer Gavin Newsom four years after Kamala Harris’s loss.) Furthermore, there’s some degree of context collapse in what news stories draw sustained public attention. The sense one gets is that there’s always a rising tone, an escalating crisis, whether or not that’s actually the case. Breathless coverage of inconsequential stories blow out the speakers for when there’s a story that should truly raise alarms like war in the Middle East.
The game theory of market behavior isn’t well-resolved
“Markets” sometimes provide more discipline to Trump, whether because of his personal financial interests or because he watches a lot of TV and red downward arrows don’t look pretty on the screen. But I put “markets” in scare quotes because I’ve struggled in this newsletter to operationalize how this actually works in practice:
Wednesday evening’s headlines after the bump in the market were full of happy talk about the “Trump put”. But the celebratory tone already looks premature. The term is borrowed from options trading — a “put” is an option to sell a stock at a specified price that’s typically lower than its current value, which caps your downside risk. So more broadly, the “Trump put” is the idea that Trump will back down if markets have too much of a tantrum.TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) has become the slogan for the “Trump put” thesis that I described above. Trump does something that imperils the United States’ economic interests, whether tariffs or threatening to invade Greenland. The Dow sheds 1,000 points, and he reverses course. This doesn’t seem like a very stable equilibrium, however. If traders know that Trump is going to chicken out, they shouldn’t sell off in the first place; otherwise, you could always profit by “buying the dip”. But if markets don’t panic a little bit, how does Trump get the signal that he needs to TACO?
I’ve expressed skepticism of this idea before because it anthropomorphizes “the market” into an entity that has agency and is capable of strategic behavior — when, in fact, the market is composed of individual firms and investors who are on a financial and emotional roller coaster.
A game-theory equilibrium would almost certainly reveal that both sides are supposed to employ mixed strategies. In other words, sometimes they might be bluffing, but they can’t always be bluffing or there would be no deterrence. Some percentage of the time, they have to follow through with their threats: Trump to do the thing that markets don’t want, and the markets to actually get past the “freak out” stage into sustained, full-blown panic that might cause irreversible damage.
In a true mixed strategy, the participants in the “game” are supposed to be literally randomizing their actions. It might actually help Trump in a weird way that his behavior is effectively random in some ways based on the last person he talked to or the last TV segment he watched. Markets, though, would seem to be at a disadvantage because they’re composed of thousands of individual participants and there’s no way for them to coordinate:
Still, even other non-zero-sum “games” like nuclear deterrence rely on some degree of implicit randomization — what Thomas Schelling called “the threat that leaves something to chance”. (Basically, you don’t want to escalate when nuclear weapons are involved because mistakes can be made in the fog of war.)But in that earlier story, I think I gave short shrift to the idea of Thomas Schelling’s idea of “the threat that leaves something to chance” as it applies to market behavior. Schelling, an economist who was one of the early developers of game theory, especially around nuclear deterrence, proposed the “threat that leaves something to chance” as a mechanism to explain why you don’t want to fuck around and find out when a country has nuclear weapons. It might be true that it would be irrational for them to retaliate with a nuclear strike for some lower-magnitude, more conventional escalatory move. But there can be misunderstandings in the fog of war. The world has only narrowly averted an inadvertent nuclear crisis before.
If investors could get together and say: “every week you keep up with this tariff crap, Donnie, there’s a 5 percent chance we’ll have a panic that triggers a global financial crisis, with unrecoverable long-term damage to the economy,” then maybe that would work if Trump had read his Schelling, which he surely hasn’t. But that’s not how markets work. You can’t half-panic any more than you can be half-pregnant. And even if markets could work this way, the strategy entails sometimes pulling the trigger, so you’re playing Russian Roulette.
Back to markets. It might be the case that, even though individual market participants can’t coordinate on a strategy, their behavior is nevertheless effectively chaotic enough to serve as a deterrent. (In the literal sense of Chaos theory: i.e., small changes in initial conditions can produce highly variable and unpredictable results in a sufficiently complex system.) Thus, the market effectively does have a “mind of its own” and behaves randomly for all intents and purposes. There’s a lot that can be said for this theory. But if markets’ behavior is essentially random, it implies that markets sometimes will escalate an initial sell-off and it will cascade into something worse.
Oil prices have been fluctuating wildly, of course, from a steady state of about $65-$70 barrel before Iran to as high as almost $120, before settling into something in the $90-$100 range recently as of this writing. But some analysts think oil could reach as high as $200 a barrel if the crisis in the Persian Gulf persists for more than another few weeks. At $95 a barrel, or even $120, markets actually are still hedging their bets. These prices imply that Trump probably will chicken out: $120 is closer to the baseline of $70 than to $200-a-barrel oil. But there’s a credible threat that he does not. I’m not sure that’s so irrational, even if prices at any given moment can become unmoored based on market psychology.
Trump and markets aren’t the only players with something at stake
Or, the matter might be out of his hands. Tariffs, a previous source of market anxiety, are unusual to some degree because, especially before the SCOTUS ruling, they’re something that more or less could be turned on or off with the literal stroke of the executive’s pen.
Sure, there might be some purely market-based mechanisms for moments of anxiety over tariffs to spiral into something more, like from bond markets panicking. But when you can’t just press the “UNDO” button — we’ve already killed Iran’s leader — there are far more ways for things to go wrong, especially in a multilateral “game”.
Iran has a say, for one thing. If it believes the best way to deter Trump is by triggering a decline the markets and/or a spike in his unpopularity ratings because oil and gas prices are surging, it has every incentive to keep oil prices surging. Or a country like China could try to take advantage of overstretched American military capabilities. And the United States didn’t go to war alone; we’re partnered with Israel, which reportedly threatened to proceed unilaterally with or without us.
by Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin | Read more:
Image: Still from War Games (1983). Blu-Ray.com.
[ed. I don't know how you reasonably game out a cult involving an unstable, possibly mentally disfunctional leader. But there are other players with deeper interests that, as this essay notes, will definitely be ready to benefit from the chaos. See also: On bombing Iran (Scholar's Stage):]
[ed. I don't know how you reasonably game out a cult involving an unstable, possibly mentally disfunctional leader. But there are other players with deeper interests that, as this essay notes, will definitely be ready to benefit from the chaos. See also: On bombing Iran (Scholar's Stage):]
***
"As a general principle, I do not have much faith in regime disintegration. Many describe the Iranian regime as fatally wounded and chronically unstable. I have not studied Iran with any depth and cannot offer a well-reasoned assessment of this claim. I suspect, however, that most of the generalists involved in these debates have also not immersed themselves in all things Persian. Their conclusions spring from general ideas. Speaking generally then: we do not give autocracy its due. We assume that autocratic systems are unnatural and brittle. They are always tottering on the cusp of judgement day. I see no basis for this faith. On every continent in which civilization emerged, it emerged first in an autocratic form. Authoritarian order seems far more “natural” to our species than democracy—and in the long history of human polities may prove less brittle.So I do not trust the notion that every autocratic regime will collapse if only a few of its unnatural supports can be knocked out from under it. May it be true in this case. That is my hope. But it is only that.
But what of the “climb-down” option—will any outcome short of regime collapse suffice? I am not so sure. By assassinating their head of state we incentivize the Persians to act outside the normal pale. That action may not come right away. As of March 2026, the Iranians have never assassinated an American of national significance. Nor have they murdered a significant mass of American civilians. Will that still be true in March 2032? What could we do to deter it? We have already gone for the jugular. “In business, a maximal ask shifts the bargaining range. In security affairs, a maximal ask can also shift the escalatory range.”1 Short of a proper ground invasion we cannot escalate our threats against this regime far beyond what we now are doing. If they survive this they will survive whatever form of retaliation we might threaten then. Our enemies are godly men: they do not fear to meet their maker if they meet him as martyrs."
Michael Hurley
I'll walk with you, 'til the morning slows me down
I'll walk with you 'til it's over my friend
And if it proves that in the end I can't be found
Keep on rollin' and I'll find you 'round the bend
June, June, sweet June, and July
Juniper berries and rye
There go the flowers to the sky
[ed. For my lovely grandaughter, June. My little juniper berry.]
Carving Up Big Bend
A massive border wall expansion is underway (Washington Post/Archive Today)
TERLINGUA, Texas — The Trump administration is building hundreds of miles of border wall through iconic national parks, public lands and ecologically sensitive wilderness, empowered by provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill that provided $46.5 billion in funding and a 2005 law that waived dozens of environmental rules for border security projects. [...]
The aggressive pace — three new miles of wall a week — has alarmed advocates and national parks staff who say the construction will destroy pristine country, threaten endangered species, and cut off access to sacred Indigenous and archaeological sites. And it has sparked an unusual degree of bipartisan pushback, with sheriffs, conservative county judges, environmentalists and Texas state lawmakers lobbying Trump officials to change course. [...]
The Department of Homeland Security has issued waivers under the 2005 REAL ID Act, allowing the department to disregard the wall’s impact on plants and animals normally protected by the Endangered Species Act. The project is exempted from the National Environmental Policy Act — a sweeping law that mandates an extensive review of a federal action’s potential impacts and public consultation that can take years...
Big Bend National Park has emerged as a political flash point in the new expansion, with many landowners and conservationists describing a border wall as an unnecessary encroachment from big government seizing one of the last vestiges of unspoiled freedom and frontier.
by Arelis R. Hernández, Jake Spring, John Muyskens and Thomas Simonetti, Washington Post | Read more:
Images: YouTube/WaPo
[ed. Of all the national parks in the lower 48 Big Bend is the one I'd most like to visit. Beautiful and rugged, and not overly ruined by tourism (yet) or walls (yet). More great pictures in the article. If you've seen the movie Fandango (with Kevin Costner) you know the area. Then there's Marfa (a small nearby arts community) and Terlingua (ref: Jerry Jeff Walker's Viva Terlingua). And, a night sky that's been documented as the darkest in the country (floodlights will do wonders for that). I guess it's ok to just ignore every law on the books and outright take people's property against their will in this administration.]
"Mankeeping" and How Women Still Find Male Vulnerability Annoying
It wasn’t that long ago that I tended to hear a fair number of women complain that men weren’t “emotionally available” or sensitive and sharing or vulnerable enough regarding their feelings. Now, pretty much turning on a dime, the narrative has switched to “mankeeping” which, reading between the lines, basically suggests women are tired of all this male emotionality which, it turns out, is annoying.
I was always skeptical of the narrative women really wanted men to be more like women in terms of emotional expression. After all, if women really wanted that, they could have used sexual selection over generations to mate with the sensitive men and weed out the big lugs. Alas, that was not what women generally did. I generally figured all the “men should cry more” talk came out of gender studies classes but that young women would actually find it irritating if they got stuck with a dude who actually took the invitation seriously.
There are probably evolved reasons for this. In hunter gatherer societies, men generally evolved as risk takers for hunting but also for protection (quite often from other humans). Men are physically larger, more physically aggressive, have deeper voices, thicker bones, etc. In general, men have evolved to project strength and, not surprisingly, this has tended to reflect in behavior for good or for ill. By contrast, women are physically smaller on average, have higher-pitched voices, softer features, etc., and the argument is much of this was evolved to elicit protectiveness in males. And, again, this reflects in female behavior including a greater ease in emotional expressiveness including alarm.
But humans aren’t fully at the mercy of evolution and genetics and when women say “We want more male tears”, some suckers might actually think it’s true. Enter the mankeeping concept, as recently covered in the New York Times. There’s a lot of talk about “emotional labor” and how the breakdown of male friendship relationships has placed a burden on women to support men through their emotional problems (more or less the thing they said they wanted in the first place). The NYT article assures us “Mankeeping isn’t just emotional intimacy” but then fails to explain what the difference is.
The couple in the article, used as an example, mainly seem split on who should be making the decisions about how they spend their time. The lady in question does most of it, which she finds burdensome. The gentleman assumed that was what she wanted (which I am going to go out on a limb and guess it was until she got it).
The NYT also assures us “Rather than viewing ‘mankeeping’ as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts said they see it as a term that can help sound the alarm about the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships.” I dunno…do “experts” say this? I’m a licensed psychologist and I kinda think it sounds like a new way to dump on straight men. Was there a NYT poll for “experts” that I missed?
The funny thing about it is this very gripe…that one’s partner is too emotionally needy…was used by men against women for generations. Ultimately, it came to be seen as sexist and rightly so. So, it’s a little surprising to see it resurrected in reverse.
by Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D., Grimoire Manor | Read more:
But humans aren’t fully at the mercy of evolution and genetics and when women say “We want more male tears”, some suckers might actually think it’s true. Enter the mankeeping concept, as recently covered in the New York Times. There’s a lot of talk about “emotional labor” and how the breakdown of male friendship relationships has placed a burden on women to support men through their emotional problems (more or less the thing they said they wanted in the first place). The NYT article assures us “Mankeeping isn’t just emotional intimacy” but then fails to explain what the difference is.
The couple in the article, used as an example, mainly seem split on who should be making the decisions about how they spend their time. The lady in question does most of it, which she finds burdensome. The gentleman assumed that was what she wanted (which I am going to go out on a limb and guess it was until she got it).
The NYT also assures us “Rather than viewing ‘mankeeping’ as an internet-approved bit of therapy-speak used to dump on straight men, experts said they see it as a term that can help sound the alarm about the need for men to invest emotionally in friendships.” I dunno…do “experts” say this? I’m a licensed psychologist and I kinda think it sounds like a new way to dump on straight men. Was there a NYT poll for “experts” that I missed?
The funny thing about it is this very gripe…that one’s partner is too emotionally needy…was used by men against women for generations. Ultimately, it came to be seen as sexist and rightly so. So, it’s a little surprising to see it resurrected in reverse.
by Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D., Grimoire Manor | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, March 23, 2026
The Downsides of Being a Billionaire
What Does Extreme Wealth Do to the Brain? The ultrarich divulge how money bent their reality (and whether they even noticed).
A former CEO with a high eight-figure net worth spent a recent morning searching online for cheap flights. He drives a sensible car. He wears $140 shoes, and he winces whenever he flips over the price tag on a Prada sweater. He owns a mere two houses. He knows exactly how much money he has — he can check his bank balance anytime — but it never quite feels like his. “I’m still not acclimated to being rich,” he told me. “I find even saying these words to you now a bit disturbing. It’s just not part of my identity.”
For two months, I interviewed people with extreme wealth, asking them how money had changed the way they think — how their view of the world shifted once financial constraints disappeared. How did becoming rich alter their perceptions of status, friendship, obligation, and maybe even reality itself?
I sent many requests, offering anonymity. Many said “no.” (“We’re going to pass this time,” said a rep for a well-known hedge-funder. “Not my jam,” replied a famous entrepreneur.) Even more just ignored me.
But some said “yes.” One founded a large company. Another had made millions on his own and then married into hundreds of millions more. Another multiplied his family inheritance many times over by buying into the investment firm where he worked. Another was Mark Cuban.
At first, few of them would tell me outright that wealth had changed their thinking. But almost none could say it hadn’t, either. They deflected and hedged and resorted to hypotheticals. The former CEO said his perspective “hasn’t shifted that much” but then admitted “I might be deluding myself.” An acquaintance of mine who married into old money joked that “other people I know might regale you with the various ways I have dramatically and reprehensibly transformed,” but he couldn’t name one.
Meanwhile, ask pretty much anyone without money what wealth does to people and the answer is usually more straightforward: It makes them worse. Resentment of the rich now powers politics both left and right for slightly different reasons but with the same math: A tiny few control staggering amounts of wealth while ordinary people struggle to pay for rent and groceries. The number of billionaires has tripled since 2010, and the most visible among them are often the most obnoxious, many of them building the very AI companies that threaten to automate everyone else out of a job and into a permanent underclass. Hollywood has received the memo; every prestige-TV show now seems to be about affluent people who are either evil or dumb or both and who seldom make it through an episode without cheating on a spouse, defrauding a business partner, or murdering a poor person with their bare hands. Then, in January, into this already charged atmosphere dropped 3 million pages of Epstein files, exposing hidden depths of our elites’ depravity and also how often they have dinner with Woody Allen. The reputation of the rich has rarely been lower.
But the people I spoke to didn’t seem evil or dumb. None of them had emailed with Jeffrey Epstein. These weren’t the billionaires building bunkers in New Zealand or trying to buy the U.S. Constitution. Anyone willing to have this conversation is, by definition, self-selecting and probably an unrepresentative sample. All were willing to engage with my occasionally awkward questions and to struggle, in good faith, toward some kind of honest self-accounting.
However reluctant they were to draw conclusions about themselves, the people who agreed to talk often had plenty to say. In several cases, I asked for a short phone call or Zoom and they went for an hour, sometimes two. What surprised me most was how many of them, despite undergoing one of the most dramatic life changes possible, told me they were discussing this topic for the very first time. “I’ve actually never talked about this with anybody,” one said. “And it feels strange to do it with you.” Said another, “These are things I haven’t really thought about. I probably should.”
Not everything they told me was a revelation. A lot of their thoughts were tentative, the kind of things a person comes up with when they’re working it out as they speak. People contradicted themselves, changed the subject, and started stories they couldn’t finish. A question about money would turn into an answer about marriage, then into a long silence. Only some of it resolved into clean, quotable points. Still, in the accumulation of half-formed ideas and accidental admissions, a portrait took shape.
Early on, one source warned me that writing this story may be difficult because there is no universal experience of wealth. “I know a lot of very wealthy people,” he told me, “and you see some who are just epicurean hedonists. You see some who try to pretend that they don’t have it and feel quite guilty about it. Then you find some who either find a balance or keep working because they want more.” And yet, he said, just as studies have shown that poverty creates a scarcity mind-set — shaping how people think about things like risk and time — there must be something like an inverse effect. “There are probably some behavioral trends that can be pulled out.”
What emerged was less a unified theory than a cluster of variations. Wealth seemed to work differently on different people, depending on who they were and how the money arrived. A software developer whose start-up sold to a tech giant for nine figures — making him very rich, if not quite ultrawealthy — told me that when he got his payday, his first emotion wasn’t happiness but something closer to vindication. “It felt like things were finally as they should be,” he said. He’d grown up with ADHD and struggled in school. The money wasn’t just about money. “It was about showing the world — and my high-school English teacher who didn’t like me very much.” His fortune felt like a kind of scale-balancing, as if the universe had belatedly recognized who he was and compensated him accordingly.
I heard stories like this mostly from the self-made. Inheritors tended to describe their money as a source of gratitude, guilt, or embarrassment but rarely a solution to cosmic injustice. The self-made often believed they could rebuild their fortunes from scratch if they had to. “If you lose all your money today and wake up on the streets tomorrow having nothing but the clothes you’re wearing,” said a European entrepreneur who is both self-made and the son-in-law of a centimillionaire, “knowing that you can yourself build the life that you have is a vastly different feeling than basically having everything thrown into your lap.” He compared it to driving a race car. The self-made person has earned his spot on the team and “can control every tiny movement in that car if anything happens. But if you’re just placed in this fast machine with no training, that’s scary.”
David Roberts was born into money. His maternal grandfather, he told me, made a fortune in oil in the 1930s. As an adult, Roberts grew his inheritance by using part of it to buy an ownership stake in the firm where he worked, which sold for $2.7 billion in 2023. Still, he puts himself in the inheritor camp. “The drive forged in self-made people,” he told me, “is of a different caliber” from his own. The sacrifices someone born to wealth is willing to make, he said, are rarely as challenging. “There’s a resilience you probably only get from confronting scarcity and defeating it.” He was candid about what he saw as his own limitations. “I don’t think I ever had the confidence and risk tolerance” to be an entrepreneur, he said. Even so, he had his own version of striving. As a young father, he remembers worrying about whether he would “ever make enough money to mimic the lifestyle I had been brought up in.”
Ed McCaffery, a tax-law professor at USC who advises wealthy families, told me that among inheritors, the psychology isn’t uniform. In his experience, it splits along gender lines. Female heirs, he said, more often treat the money as something to protect. Male heirs are more likely to invest inherited money in risky ways — active trading, crypto, hedge funds, some aggressive bet that lets them feel they’ve transformed the wealth into something earned. “The son wants to feel like it’s his money, so he’s going to do something with it to make it feel earned,” McCaffery said. “Take the money, put it in bitcoin, claim that you made a fortune in bitcoin.”
For all those differences, certain effects seemed to recur. One of the most common was isolation. For some, it set in almost immediately. The European entrepreneur remembers the exact moment. As a university student, he’d launched a business on his own, and one afternoon he sat in his dorm room refreshing his laptop screen as hundreds of thousands of dollars flooded his bank account. He would go on to make much, much more, but that first infusion was the most destabilizing. “I was like, Fuck, what do I do now?” he says. That night, he went to dinner with schoolmates and said nothing. “My friends would’ve called me a prick.” He also couldn’t tell his parents, who are hippie anti-capitalists. “I couldn’t say, ‘Hey, I made more money in literally one second than you do in years.’ I got what I wanted, but in that moment, I felt totally isolated.”
It became a pattern for him, especially after he married a woman who came from a much wealthier family. He noticed his wife talked less about herself with others than anybody he knew. “You don’t tell your friends in high school about all the exotic places you’re jetting off to because they’re going to be jealous. They’re going to tell stories about you,” he said.
For anyone already inclined toward solitude, money can make it easier to withdraw further. “I’m naturally very introverted, and I don’t like being around a lot of people,” said the software developer who sold his company to the tech giant. “Wealth allows me to just be a little more insulated and less dependent on other people,” which perhaps indicates he recognized that this was not entirely a good thing. “As you move up in terms of luxury and comfort, experiences are always going to be more private,” noted the European entrepreneur. “When you get a bigger house, your neighbors are further away. In a nice hotel, the people that service you are going to be more polite and less personal. And you don’t meet anyone in a private jet.”
Without honest company, even people who suspected that wealth had changed them didn’t always trust themselves to say how, likely because our brains are built to normalize whatever life throws at us. The European entrepreneur had studied psychology and knew the term for this phenomenon: hedonic adaptation, or the human tendency to adjust to new circumstances quickly no matter how drastic the change. “Our senses don’t work objectively,” he said. “We can only see light compared to dark. We can only hear loud sounds compared to quieter ones.” Happiness works the same way. It’s not a fixed target but the gap between what you expected and what you got. He understood all this in theory. Then his expectations rose anyway.
Most of my sources said that buying nice stuff gets old fast. “Having your new car — the anticipation of which model, which style, which color — it really got me excited,” said the European entrepreneur. “But after the first couple of drives, you don’t use any of the features. It is just like your old car, a way to get from point A to point B.” The software developer described something similar. Before he could afford them, he would occasionally splurge on $500 sneakers. “Now I buy myself those same $500 sneakers and I don’t get the same pleasure,” he says. It turned out the pleasure wasn’t in the shoes themselves but in the irresponsibility of the purchase. He said he recently invested a million dollars in OpenAI — and that did the trick.
Not everybody I talked to believed that money changes people in such complicated ways. I sent Mark Cuban a cold email on a Tuesday afternoon, and by that evening he was calling me from his car in Dallas.
Cuban grew up in a working-class family in Pittsburgh — neither parent had graduated from college, and his father never made more than $40,000 a year — and once slept on the floor of an apartment he shared with five roommates. Then, at 40, during the dot-com boom, he sold his company Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. I asked whether becoming rich changed him, and he said “not really.” “It was an enabler, but not really a change factor,” he said. “If you were happy when you were broke, like I thought I was, you’re going to be insanely happy when you’re rich. And if you were miserable, that doesn’t change.”
So maybe wealth isn’t transformative; it’s an amplifier. It turns up the volume on whoever you already are. When you don’t have money, your personality runs up against friction all day long. You might be generous, but your generosity has a ceiling when you’re living on a fixed income. You might be anxious, but ordinary life forces you to confront your stressors often enough to keep them manageable. Money removes that friction, and whatever it was holding in check is free to run. The generous person can give amounts that change other people’s lives. The anxious person can design a life without any of their old triggers and then fall apart when the smallest thing goes wrong because their coping muscles have atrophied. This might sound reassuring — You’re still you! — but how many people really know who they are when there’s nothing pushing back on them? Plenty of billionaires probably seemed normal when their eccentricities were still bound by everyday constraints.
Even if money doesn’t change a person in major ways, it still introduces new asymmetries into everyday life. In many of my interviews, the conversation found its way to the same topic, usually before I could bring it up myself: the restaurant check. It might be the thing that makes the abstract strangeness of being wealthy feel most concrete. It’s a tiny war over status, pride, and generosity that happens every time the rich and non-rich sit down to eat together.
Here’s the situation: You’re a deep-pocketed person out to dinner with shallower-pocketed friends. The meal winds down. The check arrives. You could easily pay the whole thing and never think about it again. But paying might send a message you didn’t intend — that you think you’re better than everybody else at the table, or that you want to be thanked, or that you’re keeping score. Not paying, or splitting the bill, sends a message too — that you’re cheap or clueless or pretending to be modest. Every option sucks.
For two months, I interviewed people with extreme wealth, asking them how money had changed the way they think — how their view of the world shifted once financial constraints disappeared. How did becoming rich alter their perceptions of status, friendship, obligation, and maybe even reality itself?
But some said “yes.” One founded a large company. Another had made millions on his own and then married into hundreds of millions more. Another multiplied his family inheritance many times over by buying into the investment firm where he worked. Another was Mark Cuban.
At first, few of them would tell me outright that wealth had changed their thinking. But almost none could say it hadn’t, either. They deflected and hedged and resorted to hypotheticals. The former CEO said his perspective “hasn’t shifted that much” but then admitted “I might be deluding myself.” An acquaintance of mine who married into old money joked that “other people I know might regale you with the various ways I have dramatically and reprehensibly transformed,” but he couldn’t name one.
Meanwhile, ask pretty much anyone without money what wealth does to people and the answer is usually more straightforward: It makes them worse. Resentment of the rich now powers politics both left and right for slightly different reasons but with the same math: A tiny few control staggering amounts of wealth while ordinary people struggle to pay for rent and groceries. The number of billionaires has tripled since 2010, and the most visible among them are often the most obnoxious, many of them building the very AI companies that threaten to automate everyone else out of a job and into a permanent underclass. Hollywood has received the memo; every prestige-TV show now seems to be about affluent people who are either evil or dumb or both and who seldom make it through an episode without cheating on a spouse, defrauding a business partner, or murdering a poor person with their bare hands. Then, in January, into this already charged atmosphere dropped 3 million pages of Epstein files, exposing hidden depths of our elites’ depravity and also how often they have dinner with Woody Allen. The reputation of the rich has rarely been lower.
But the people I spoke to didn’t seem evil or dumb. None of them had emailed with Jeffrey Epstein. These weren’t the billionaires building bunkers in New Zealand or trying to buy the U.S. Constitution. Anyone willing to have this conversation is, by definition, self-selecting and probably an unrepresentative sample. All were willing to engage with my occasionally awkward questions and to struggle, in good faith, toward some kind of honest self-accounting.
However reluctant they were to draw conclusions about themselves, the people who agreed to talk often had plenty to say. In several cases, I asked for a short phone call or Zoom and they went for an hour, sometimes two. What surprised me most was how many of them, despite undergoing one of the most dramatic life changes possible, told me they were discussing this topic for the very first time. “I’ve actually never talked about this with anybody,” one said. “And it feels strange to do it with you.” Said another, “These are things I haven’t really thought about. I probably should.”
Not everything they told me was a revelation. A lot of their thoughts were tentative, the kind of things a person comes up with when they’re working it out as they speak. People contradicted themselves, changed the subject, and started stories they couldn’t finish. A question about money would turn into an answer about marriage, then into a long silence. Only some of it resolved into clean, quotable points. Still, in the accumulation of half-formed ideas and accidental admissions, a portrait took shape.
Early on, one source warned me that writing this story may be difficult because there is no universal experience of wealth. “I know a lot of very wealthy people,” he told me, “and you see some who are just epicurean hedonists. You see some who try to pretend that they don’t have it and feel quite guilty about it. Then you find some who either find a balance or keep working because they want more.” And yet, he said, just as studies have shown that poverty creates a scarcity mind-set — shaping how people think about things like risk and time — there must be something like an inverse effect. “There are probably some behavioral trends that can be pulled out.”
What emerged was less a unified theory than a cluster of variations. Wealth seemed to work differently on different people, depending on who they were and how the money arrived. A software developer whose start-up sold to a tech giant for nine figures — making him very rich, if not quite ultrawealthy — told me that when he got his payday, his first emotion wasn’t happiness but something closer to vindication. “It felt like things were finally as they should be,” he said. He’d grown up with ADHD and struggled in school. The money wasn’t just about money. “It was about showing the world — and my high-school English teacher who didn’t like me very much.” His fortune felt like a kind of scale-balancing, as if the universe had belatedly recognized who he was and compensated him accordingly.
I heard stories like this mostly from the self-made. Inheritors tended to describe their money as a source of gratitude, guilt, or embarrassment but rarely a solution to cosmic injustice. The self-made often believed they could rebuild their fortunes from scratch if they had to. “If you lose all your money today and wake up on the streets tomorrow having nothing but the clothes you’re wearing,” said a European entrepreneur who is both self-made and the son-in-law of a centimillionaire, “knowing that you can yourself build the life that you have is a vastly different feeling than basically having everything thrown into your lap.” He compared it to driving a race car. The self-made person has earned his spot on the team and “can control every tiny movement in that car if anything happens. But if you’re just placed in this fast machine with no training, that’s scary.”
David Roberts was born into money. His maternal grandfather, he told me, made a fortune in oil in the 1930s. As an adult, Roberts grew his inheritance by using part of it to buy an ownership stake in the firm where he worked, which sold for $2.7 billion in 2023. Still, he puts himself in the inheritor camp. “The drive forged in self-made people,” he told me, “is of a different caliber” from his own. The sacrifices someone born to wealth is willing to make, he said, are rarely as challenging. “There’s a resilience you probably only get from confronting scarcity and defeating it.” He was candid about what he saw as his own limitations. “I don’t think I ever had the confidence and risk tolerance” to be an entrepreneur, he said. Even so, he had his own version of striving. As a young father, he remembers worrying about whether he would “ever make enough money to mimic the lifestyle I had been brought up in.”
Ed McCaffery, a tax-law professor at USC who advises wealthy families, told me that among inheritors, the psychology isn’t uniform. In his experience, it splits along gender lines. Female heirs, he said, more often treat the money as something to protect. Male heirs are more likely to invest inherited money in risky ways — active trading, crypto, hedge funds, some aggressive bet that lets them feel they’ve transformed the wealth into something earned. “The son wants to feel like it’s his money, so he’s going to do something with it to make it feel earned,” McCaffery said. “Take the money, put it in bitcoin, claim that you made a fortune in bitcoin.”
For all those differences, certain effects seemed to recur. One of the most common was isolation. For some, it set in almost immediately. The European entrepreneur remembers the exact moment. As a university student, he’d launched a business on his own, and one afternoon he sat in his dorm room refreshing his laptop screen as hundreds of thousands of dollars flooded his bank account. He would go on to make much, much more, but that first infusion was the most destabilizing. “I was like, Fuck, what do I do now?” he says. That night, he went to dinner with schoolmates and said nothing. “My friends would’ve called me a prick.” He also couldn’t tell his parents, who are hippie anti-capitalists. “I couldn’t say, ‘Hey, I made more money in literally one second than you do in years.’ I got what I wanted, but in that moment, I felt totally isolated.”
It became a pattern for him, especially after he married a woman who came from a much wealthier family. He noticed his wife talked less about herself with others than anybody he knew. “You don’t tell your friends in high school about all the exotic places you’re jetting off to because they’re going to be jealous. They’re going to tell stories about you,” he said.
For anyone already inclined toward solitude, money can make it easier to withdraw further. “I’m naturally very introverted, and I don’t like being around a lot of people,” said the software developer who sold his company to the tech giant. “Wealth allows me to just be a little more insulated and less dependent on other people,” which perhaps indicates he recognized that this was not entirely a good thing. “As you move up in terms of luxury and comfort, experiences are always going to be more private,” noted the European entrepreneur. “When you get a bigger house, your neighbors are further away. In a nice hotel, the people that service you are going to be more polite and less personal. And you don’t meet anyone in a private jet.”
Without honest company, even people who suspected that wealth had changed them didn’t always trust themselves to say how, likely because our brains are built to normalize whatever life throws at us. The European entrepreneur had studied psychology and knew the term for this phenomenon: hedonic adaptation, or the human tendency to adjust to new circumstances quickly no matter how drastic the change. “Our senses don’t work objectively,” he said. “We can only see light compared to dark. We can only hear loud sounds compared to quieter ones.” Happiness works the same way. It’s not a fixed target but the gap between what you expected and what you got. He understood all this in theory. Then his expectations rose anyway.
Most of my sources said that buying nice stuff gets old fast. “Having your new car — the anticipation of which model, which style, which color — it really got me excited,” said the European entrepreneur. “But after the first couple of drives, you don’t use any of the features. It is just like your old car, a way to get from point A to point B.” The software developer described something similar. Before he could afford them, he would occasionally splurge on $500 sneakers. “Now I buy myself those same $500 sneakers and I don’t get the same pleasure,” he says. It turned out the pleasure wasn’t in the shoes themselves but in the irresponsibility of the purchase. He said he recently invested a million dollars in OpenAI — and that did the trick.
Not everybody I talked to believed that money changes people in such complicated ways. I sent Mark Cuban a cold email on a Tuesday afternoon, and by that evening he was calling me from his car in Dallas.
Cuban grew up in a working-class family in Pittsburgh — neither parent had graduated from college, and his father never made more than $40,000 a year — and once slept on the floor of an apartment he shared with five roommates. Then, at 40, during the dot-com boom, he sold his company Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. I asked whether becoming rich changed him, and he said “not really.” “It was an enabler, but not really a change factor,” he said. “If you were happy when you were broke, like I thought I was, you’re going to be insanely happy when you’re rich. And if you were miserable, that doesn’t change.”
So maybe wealth isn’t transformative; it’s an amplifier. It turns up the volume on whoever you already are. When you don’t have money, your personality runs up against friction all day long. You might be generous, but your generosity has a ceiling when you’re living on a fixed income. You might be anxious, but ordinary life forces you to confront your stressors often enough to keep them manageable. Money removes that friction, and whatever it was holding in check is free to run. The generous person can give amounts that change other people’s lives. The anxious person can design a life without any of their old triggers and then fall apart when the smallest thing goes wrong because their coping muscles have atrophied. This might sound reassuring — You’re still you! — but how many people really know who they are when there’s nothing pushing back on them? Plenty of billionaires probably seemed normal when their eccentricities were still bound by everyday constraints.
Even if money doesn’t change a person in major ways, it still introduces new asymmetries into everyday life. In many of my interviews, the conversation found its way to the same topic, usually before I could bring it up myself: the restaurant check. It might be the thing that makes the abstract strangeness of being wealthy feel most concrete. It’s a tiny war over status, pride, and generosity that happens every time the rich and non-rich sit down to eat together.
Here’s the situation: You’re a deep-pocketed person out to dinner with shallower-pocketed friends. The meal winds down. The check arrives. You could easily pay the whole thing and never think about it again. But paying might send a message you didn’t intend — that you think you’re better than everybody else at the table, or that you want to be thanked, or that you’re keeping score. Not paying, or splitting the bill, sends a message too — that you’re cheap or clueless or pretending to be modest. Every option sucks.
by Lane Brown, Intelligencer | Read more:
Image: Zohar Lazar
[ed. Pity the poor billionaires. Let me remind everyone again struggling with basic math (me included), that a billion dollars equals one thousand millions. Sometimes the scale just overwhelms. For example, the national debt now stands at $39 trillion, so we pay $900 billion in interest each year servicing that debt. This idiot war in Iran is adding more to that (we used to increase taxes to cover our various military adventures, now we just issue bonds that further increase our debt) - still a small portion of what we'll pay over time when future veteran's benefits are added in (now in the trillions from previous wars and administrations). But, uh yeah... this was about billionaires.]
[ed. Pity the poor billionaires. Let me remind everyone again struggling with basic math (me included), that a billion dollars equals one thousand millions. Sometimes the scale just overwhelms. For example, the national debt now stands at $39 trillion, so we pay $900 billion in interest each year servicing that debt. This idiot war in Iran is adding more to that (we used to increase taxes to cover our various military adventures, now we just issue bonds that further increase our debt) - still a small portion of what we'll pay over time when future veteran's benefits are added in (now in the trillions from previous wars and administrations). But, uh yeah... this was about billionaires.]
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