Here is a roundup of stories to make your Sunday a more thoughtful one.

I’m making some changes to this Substack to make it more broadly appealing and useful. My personal website, where I sell books and showcase various creative projects, remains at tomroushonline.com.

Here, I’m going to add guest writers, offer new summaries, and cover useful developments in health, male development and psychology, technology, and occasionally the arts—mostly movies, since that is what I know best.

I’d love to hear from readers. Please send me your suggestions for subjects you would like to see covered.

The GPL-1 Train Is Still Rolling Along

I’ve been listening to Peter Attia for some time—well before AI and before the GLP-1 craze got underway in earnest. He is a well-established medical authority who, I think, frames the questions surrounding healthy aging exceptionally well. He doesn’t promote or overhype any particular process or product, and he offers unique insights.

He is cautious and relies heavily on his medical authority—qualities that I think can, and often do, become liabilities. Still, I take his words and advice seriously, particularly when he refers to medical studies. He reads them carefully and offers insightful commentary on their findings, limitations, and practical significance.

His early take on GLP-1 drugs was not enthusiastic, by the way. I recall him expressing the widely held concern at the time that Ozempic and similar drugs were creating “skinny-fat” people—individuals who lost weight but whose body scans showed losses in muscle mass and bone density as well as fat.

He wasn’t saying that losing fat with these drugs was bad. Rather, he believed the treatment was not being paired with the necessary lifestyle changes and that, like every other dietary fad, its popularity would eventually pass and users would regain the weight. He has changed his tune quite a bit since then.

He has now released a review of a study specifically designed to determine whether GLP-1 drugs can slow aging. Spoiler alert: the study suggests they can, which brings me to something I’ve noticed and find highly interesting.

Our knowledge of these drugs is far from complete, and they appear to do much more than simply suppress appetite. They change our relationship with human desire and produce other effects that we are only beginning to understand.

Here he describes the test:

Researchers began treating female mice at around 20 months of age—roughly equivalent to a 60-year-old human, and more relevant to a potential longevity intervention than beginning treatment early in life. Animals received daily subcutaneous injections of either 10 nmol/kg semaglutide or a comparable volume of saline.

Its funny to me that they gave the control group injects as well, but just of saline. The test was built to see if it extended life. But there was an additional wrinkle;

A separate experiment directly compared saline-treated controls, semaglutide-treated mice, and calorie restricted (CR) mice, with 10 animals per group.

It is well established that calorie restriction, or CR, can extend life. It works. You might not want to live longer under those kinds of restrictions, but eating less clearly can increase longevity, all other things being equal.

The study therefore included three groups: mice treated with a GLP-1 drug, mice that received only saline, and mice whose food intake was restricted.

Pretty interesting. So, what was the result?

The median lifespan of semaglutide-treated mice was significantly longer than that of controls—834 days in treated mice versus 742 days in controls. Notably, the clinical conditions that brought animals to the study endpoint were distributed similarly between groups. Semaglutide-treated mice did not simply experience fewer tumors, for example; rather, death appeared to be delayed across several categories of age-related decline—consistent with what you’d expect from a truly geroprotective intervention. That is a meaningful result, particularly because treatment was started later in life at a clinically relevant dose.

Attila also reports:

Importantly, survival was not the only encouraging finding. In separate three-month cohorts, semaglutide-treated mice performed better than controls on tests of spatial memory and spent more time exploring unfamiliar environments. They also showed better motor coordination and physical endurance, even after adjustment for body weight, and cleared glucose more effectively during a glucose-tolerance test.

Whoa! That’s a 12.3% increase in lifespan, courtesy of fewer deadly events. If this result were replicated in humans, it could amount to roughly an additional decade of life—with fewer health problems near the end.

OK, now the caveats. Attila notes several:

Perhaps the most obvious consideration is that this study was conducted only in female mice. This isn’t a criticism—this is the first study to investigate lifespan with GLP-1–based therapies, and it is entirely reasonable to look for a signal in one sex before doubling the resource utilization to test both—but it is a limitation to keep in mind.

The less obvious (but perhaps more important) consideration is the lifespan seen in the control group. While not wildly outside the range of published lifespans, a median of 742 days is shorter than what is observed for this strain of mice in many lifespan studies, while the semaglutide-treated mice lived closer to what might ordinarily be expected. For context, female mice of the same strain had a median lifespan of 866 days in a large Jackson Laboratory study. Cross-study comparisons are imperfect because substrain, diet, housing, handling, and other environmental factors can all influence lifespan. Still, this is an important consideration when studying geroprotection.

So these lady mice didn’t live that long compared to the life of other mice, and so the longer life getting the GLP-1 drugs can only be seen within the context of the cohort. Fair enough, Perhaps this mice neighborhood wasn't ideal.

What about the calorie restricted mice? Did they do just as well as the GLP-1 mice?

Caloric restriction reliably extends lifespan and delays functional decline in mice, raising the possibility that semaglutide was simply producing a pharmacological version of the same intervention. To explore this possibility, the researchers compared semaglutide-treated mice to animals whose daily food allotment was reduced by 24%, matching the reduction in intake caused by semaglutide.

The two interventions produced similar reductions in body weight and fat mass, but very different patterns of eating. Like controls, semaglutide-treated mice consumed their food gradually throughout the day, just in smaller quantities. The CR mice ate nearly all of their daily allotment soon after it was provided and then underwent a prolonged fast. They also became more active shortly before their next feeding, consistent with food-anticipatory behavior, and showed larger shifts in fuel use between fed and fasted periods. Semaglutide therefore reduced calorie intake without producing the same cycle of gorging, fasting, and anticipatory activity.

Despite these different feeding patterns, the CR and semaglutide groups followed similar trajectories on measures of total movement and physical endurance. On other assessments, however, semaglutide performed better: improvements in spatial memory, exploratory behavior, and glucose control were observed in the semaglutide group but not the CR group.

These are very promising results. But the larger question is why. Why is this happening? The researchers examined the cells of each cohort and identified several positive changes in the GLP-1 group:

After three months of treatment, semaglutide was associated with changes across the brain, immune system, and other tissues, suggesting that its effects were not confined to body weight and glucose regulation.

One of the most interesting findings came from the hippocampus, a brain region essential for learning and memory. The hippocampus is one of the only areas where neurogenesis—the growth of new neurons—continues throughout life, though it declines with age. Semaglutide-treated mice had more cells expressing markers associated with neurogenesis than controls. While this is not proof that these cells matured into functional neurons, it does give a plausible biological explanation for their improved performance on the spatial memory test.

Aging is also associated with dysregulated immune function, including chronic low-grade inflammation, as well as cellular senescence. Senescent cells are ones that have stopped dividing but remain biologically active, often releasing inflammatory molecules that can damage surrounding tissue. Mice treated with semaglutide showed reduced expression of inflammatory cytokines and markers of cellular senescence, while broader gene expression patterns suggested altered immune-mediated responses.

The news in this article was very promising. There have been other stories about GLP-1 drugs lately, however, and not all of them have been encouraging. These include reports of sudden blindness, the danger of aspiration during surgery, and the readily observable phenomenon of people who are only slightly overweight obtaining these drugs with very little medical oversight.

The benefits are real enough and plain to see. I’ve never seen a weigh loss plan so effective and I’d include in that summary surgical weight loss plans that use radical alternation to a person’s digisitive tract. In a decade, will anyone still undergo these procedures? Here’s what a Biliopancreatic Diversion with Duodenal Switch (BPD/DS) does:

The Biliopancreatic Diversion with Duodenal Switch, abbreviated BPD-DS, begins with creation of a tube-shaped stomach pouch similar to the sleeve gastrectomy. It resembles the gastric bypass, where more of the small intestine is not used. The Procedure: Following creation of the sleeve-like stomach, the first portion of the small intestine is separated from the stomach. A part of the small intestine is then brought up and connected to the outlet of the newly created stomach, so that when the patient eats, the food goes through the sleeve pouch and into the latter part of the small intestine. … The food stream bypasses roughly 75% of the small intestine, the most of any commonly performed approved procedures. This results in a significant decrease in the absorption of calories and nutrients. Patients must take vitamins and mineral supplements after surgery. Even more than gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy, the BPD-DS affects intestinal hormones in a manner that reduces hunger, increases fullness and improves blood sugar control. The BPD-DS is considered to be the most effective approved metabolic operation for the treatment of type 2 diabetes.

Ugg. No thanks. Note, this horrifying process has been done to teenagers. GLP-1 drugs can replace this kind of medical intervention, and they might do a while lot more. Peter Attila’s full article on the study above (which he oddly doesn't name) can be found here.

A Fish From Shakespeare’s Time

There is bnountiful evidence that humans can live longer than they do currently, the most compelling of which is just how much longer we live now copared to just three generqations back. Here is the graph:

People lived on average to 48 in 1900, and now life expectancy is about to cross 80. That’s impressive, and of course, it wasn’t evolution; it was progress and innovation. Still, the message persists that humans must die and that the limit on human longevity has been, or soon will be, reached.

Most animals don’t live as long as humans, and none have managed to extend their own lifetimes the way people have. But there are plenty of animals that live longer than people. A lot longer. And since they are not the product of human ingenuity, but of nature’s relentless effort to optimize, there is reason to believe the human limit has not been reached.

Consider the following article about lake sturgeon from the Journal of Fish Biology.

Effective fishery management policy depends on accurate life-history data, particularly for harvested species. Longevity is a core life-history trait that is directly related to annual survival and lifetime reproductive potential, but fish longevity is generally not well documented, particularly for long-lived species. We used capture–mark–recapture data spanning 44 years as an alternative method to estimate sex-specific adult lake sturgeon (Acipenser fulvescens) average annual growth and longevity for five populations in the Laurentian Great Lakes. We determined individual fish average annual growth and fit population and sex-specific exponential lines for average annual growth as a function of fish length at initial capture. We used the exponential equations to estimate age for 180 cm fork length (FL) female and 160 cm FL male lake sturgeon from each population by sequential subtraction of annual growth increments and assuming age at onset of sexual maturity of 24 and 15 years for females and males, respectively. Average annual growth estimates varied between sexes and among populations and ranged from 0.26 to 1.15 cm year⁻¹. Estimated ages also varied among populations. Age estimated for a 160 cm FL male lake sturgeon across the five populations ranged from 90 to 279 years. Age for a 180 cm FL female across populations ranged from 99 to 427 years. Our data suggest lake sturgeons live much longer than currently believed.

They've been tagging and measuring these fish for 44 years, which tells them how fast sturgeon grow at different sizes. Working backward from the size of the largest fish, they estimate that some lake sturgeon in the Great Lakes predate both the U.S. and Canada. There could be a fish swimming there today that hatched around the time Shakespeare was putting the finishing touches on Hamlet, some 425 years ago.

Here is the graph that charts the fish ages by the location they were acquired.

Here is the caption about this graph.

Estimated age (years) of adult lake sturgeon as a function of FL from five populations and for both sexes. Individual points represent fish for which mean annual growth rates were available and used to backcalculate age using an iterative subtraction of predicted growth increments until reaching the expected size and age at maturity (see Section 2). Solid black lines represent median predicted age-at-length relationships, and shaded ribbons indicate 95% confidence intervals generated from bootstrap resampling of the exponential growth relationship. Please note that due to the variability in age estimates (y-axes), the panels do not represent standardized ranges in the data presented.

These are some remarkably old fish, and they prove it can be done. Complex living organisms, creatures with eyes, hearts, muscles, and livers, can live at least 152 years, the age of the oldest lake sturgeon on record, and likely far longer. Since 1900, we've added more than 30 years to the average human life. If we can close the gap with these fish, those gains may turn out to be just the beginning.

How can these breakthroughs be achieved? Well, AI would certainly help, if we can keep from screwing that miracle up.

The whole article on fish ages can be found here.

P-Doom

It was another big week in AI news. P-Doom was predicted from every quarter, and the CEOs of several leading American AI companies floated the idea that development should be slowed because of its potential for harm. The widely reported “Hugging Face” incident was discussed ad nauseam, with little agreement about what actually happened. The Moonshots team discussed the news at length, and its conclusions ranged from the practical to the deeply cynical. The dominate conclusion is that every AI company is queuing up for the big IPO pay day and they need to have enough regulation to protect them from liability, they need to float the idea of how powerful the technology is, and they need to be sure the government restricts the open models that the Chinese are pushing. Otherwise, how ya gonna get paid?

In all the stories about what AI might do, no plausible pathway to doom is ever presented other than the obvious one: humans might use AI to do something terrible, such as develop a biological weapon. For me, that is the most frightening possibility—but it is also a scenario for which solutions exist. We have lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation for 80 years, and we are still here.

The idea that AI will somehow destroy humanity on its own, through some kind of Terminator-like consciousness, is preposterous on its face. It reflects two particularly common aspects of the human condition.

The first is anthropomorphism: the very common practice of assigning human characteristics, emotions, intentions, and motives to nonhuman things. Consider how regularly we describe the following in human terms or grant them human capacities:

• Animals: Dogs are often described as moral beings—or even as morally superior to humans.

• Cars: In life and in movies, cars are regularly given names, personalities, and human characteristics. Consider Herbie the Love Bug.

• Robots: Whether good or evil, robots are portrayed like C-3PO or the Terminator. They are shown to possess human motives and capacities, such as the desire to serve or to kill.

• Nature: Nature is often described as possessing a wicked, divine, benevolent, or otherwise humanlike personality.

• Viruses: A virus is said to “outsmart” the immune system, while the body “fights back.”

• Groups of people: Communities and nations are described as having been “wounded” and needing time to “heal.”

• God: Human beings have long described God in distinctly human terms, complete with emotions, intentions, preferences, and judgments.

And now, along comes AI. It can produce speech, sounds, and images; solve mathematical problems; and perform many other remarkable tasks. It seems like an extraordinarily powerful human—and we all know that humans can do monstrous things and often do.

History is a long tale of war and bloodshed, interspersed with periods of invention and prosperity. AI, however, is a product built on mathematics and statistics. It is not imbued with any special powers.

But if there is one thing humans seem to love indulging in, it is fear-based mania—whether over witches, climate change, or the latest perceived threat. And so, here we are.

And, of course, every technology company that has invested enormous sums in a product wants protection from lawsuits over the harm someone might cause while using that product. Nor does it want to see a new competitor arise.

The AI companies—Anthropic in particular—are doing everything they can, however, to undermine their own businesses in what I suspect is a misguided approach to the authorities. Someone needs to get through to Dario Amodei and persuade him to simply shut up. His entire manner is off-putting, and his presentation makes AI appear to be something created by weird, angry, socially detached technologists who no longer understand—or cannot control—what they have built. He is a well known adherent to the naïve and entirely fake ‘effective altruism’ creed. This is cold hard self interest dressed up as a social good. Don’t far for it for a second.

This is what is driving the mania: the CEO of a leading AI company making sensational claims to a legacy media establishment that thrives on fear and has an interest in maintaining its control over information and power.

Go to approximately 3:25 and observe:

So, he wants to give Anthropic to the government—or to some worldwide collective of governments? This is crazy collectivist madhouse talk.

Something tells me he’s going to end up rich, but the promise of AI—which is generational—will slow to a crawl, and he’ll call himself a hero for stopping it long before anyone uses it for the massive good it can create or the harm and havoc it could wreak.

A good idea for him and every other AI CEO would be to speak about the incredible good AI can and is doing every time they talk about how it’s going to kill us all.

Prediction: We’re not all gonna die.

Theaters Aren’t Dead

Great news for those of us who love movie theaters. I’ve spent many wonderful hours watching movies with friends, on dates, alone, and with my kids. Here’s a look at how the summer box office has performed over the past decade:

Great news, but also a sad reminder of what 2020 did to movie theaters and so much else. What a miserable legacy. Did closing theaters save lives? I’m not convinced. The response ruined careers, set children back, and caused lasting harm.

But look at the rebound. Movie theaters are back, baby! That’s great news for our culture.

What brought audiences back? Better masks? No—better movies, as always. Here’s this summer’s box office by movie:

A few trends stand out. First, the runaway success of yet another Spider-Man movie. I don’t quite get it, but audiences clearly do. Spider-Man has been drawing crowds for more than two decades: the first film starring Tobey Maguire opened on May 3, 2002. Observe the trailer from that film:

Here is the trailer for the new one, some 24 years later:

Again, I am not the target audience for this movie or any other marvel franchise, but the demand for superhero movies is huge and these movies inspire something in audiences. I don’t pretend to understand it, but nearly a billion in box office don’t lie. I appreciate these movies more now than I used to. Thank you Spiderman for keeping the theaters viable.

The Odyssey did incredibly well for a movie based on a story thousands of years old. To me, that’s more evidence that movies are still commercially viable and still help shape our culture.

Matt Damon and Tom Holland play father and son, and their bond feels real and deeply shared. Anne Hathaway beautifully portrays a mother defined by sacrifice and loyalty. The other characters reveal human frailty and weakness alongside the nobility woven through the ancient myth.

I thought it was a great movie and saw it twice. Some conservative commentary focused on trans actor Ellen Page’s casting as a warrior, which I found visually unconvincing, and the casting of a black actress as Helen of Troy, which I felt added little to the film. Neither role needed a recognizable star; the movie would have worked just as well with unknown actors.

It’s been a great year for Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson, who was very effective in The Odyssey. Still, I don’t see quite the same movie-star quality in Holland that I see in, say, Tom Cruise. Tastes change, though, and Gen Z has its own stars. There’s something passive or mildly feminine about Holland and some other younger male actors, but perhaps that’s part of what draws young women to the movies. A young Brad Pitt was also very pretty, though he’s grown more rugged with age. Cruise is in a movie-star class of his own. He’ll set records for films and box-office grosses that will be difficult to surpass.

Note the relatively poor performance of the latest Star Wars film compared with the others. So Spider-Man is still relevant, while Star Wars, perhaps, is not. Interesting. Backrooms was the work of a very young filmmaker acting nearly alone. Star Wars is a 50-year-old franchise with Disney behind it, and yet there they are. Has Star Wars finally played out?

Toy Story 5 is another tale of longevity in the industry.

A child born when the first Toy Stray movie was released would be 31 years old today. These films are as popular today as ever.

So, overall, a great year. And note, these films are the first crop to be approved well past Covid and so outside the massive woke window of the period. There will be more.

Tha’ts it for this week. If yo like reading these stories on Sunday, let me know. I’m trying to make my posts useful and engrossing and not just stuff I care about. Suggested areas fo inquirely would be most welcome.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/season/summer/2026/

Instagram has cultivated my feed quite well, and I do, in fact, spend time watching videos that I did not specifically seek out. It was through the almighty algorithm that I came into contact with multiple black social-media influencers. Many I follow because they are funny, while others caught my attention because they highlight music, athletes, or other subjects that interest me.

But I’ve noticed something else: several black influencers are delivering surprisingly sophisticated messages while speaking in a distinctly urban black vernacular, using the slang and cadence associated with rap and hip-hop culture. The presentation may sound ghetto, but the substance could easily come from a weekend seminar on personal development.

They are offering dating and relationship advice that goes well beyond familiar stereotypes, discussing discipline, responsibility, money, family, and self-improvement. They are also exploring political and social questions outside the traditional boundaries associated with either mainstream black politics or hip-hop culture. The contrast between the style of delivery and the seriousness of the ideas is striking.

Is urban black culture, for lack of a better term, maturing and becoming more self-reflective?

Here are a few samples:

Marvin Goodly

This guy is really interesting. He offers dating advice for men, and his assessment of women is brutal but insightful. He tells men not to grovel or think of themselves as lesser. This is a common message among men who discuss dating online. There are some pissed-off men out there.

But Goodly goes beyond complaining. For a fee, he offers to fly to a man’s location, revise his client’s appearance and social media presence, and help improve a man’s dating life. It’s an interesting business model and, I must say, sheer genius in an AI-driven world. If a man just can’t get it together, hiring a human being to help is a very good move.

This is a bit long but the message is clear as a bell.

ZPocketx

This guy is funny, and be warned, he uses the word ‘niggar’ a lot. Most black social media stars are over the word, they use it constantly, they don't care about it, and everyone else should defang its sigma as well. But listen to his message. He’s telling men to grow up, to be men, to take responsibility while explaining the differences between a B.A.M. or Bitch Ass Nigga and a P.A.M. which is a Pussy Ass Nigga. Ghetto examples, highly mature message.

Ni_kki6946

Maybe dialogue like this has been going on in the black community for years, and I was simply isolated from it. But I’ve noticed that there is a strong strain of black conservatism that is now firmly wedded to black culture.

Black conservatives of the past always had a certain tweedy aspect. They dropped the accent when articulating their conservative political or economic views, while those in the hip-hop scene generally tracked left. Not anymore. Listen to this black woman. She is deeply rooted in black linguistic conventions, but she isn’t holding back.

Dihantatted

Another development is the effort by black digital creators to distance themselves form the more destructive elements of black culture. They are succeeding, have goals, and do not wish to be held back by the ghetto criminal orientation. This attitude could formerly only be expressed in an environment were crazy things could be said out loud, such as stand up comedy

Here is Chris Rock from 30 YEARS AGO!

Only a comedian could say this thirty years ago, but now, a black man can stone cold sober say the same thing. He isn’t particularly ghetto in his voice, but just a few years ago, if you saw this person, you might rightly conclude that he would be unlikely to delver this message. Look at Chris Rock above, and look at this man below. Something different is happening.

Moneymitchszn

Here is a guy who speaks often of the lessons he learned form his grandfather. His grandfather was apparently a wise man who spoke clearly and with authority and Moneymitch soaked it up.

I’ve often asserted that there isn’t a separate black culture from me because I’ve been living within a larger American culture that is itself highly influenced by black culture. White Americans have gravitated toward the cultural habits, music, language, and style of black America for a long time.

But rap and hip-hop were different from, say, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, or Prince. They were much more aggressive and, at least in some forms, associated with antisocial attitudes and outcomes.

What I find interesting about this new wave of black quasi-celebrities is that they are hip-hop in voice and appearance, but often highly mature in their messaging. They retain the language, cadence, and style of hip-hop culture while delivering messages about responsibility, relationships, discipline, ambition, and personal development.

And many of them are they are funny, like this guy:

mr_everythings_cool

The pathologies of black America are a regular feature in American news cycles because they are real, but there are other voices in black America promoting productivity and virtue. This is a positive sign for the country.

The Zero Units

On the other hand, there are few signs that the American way of war has improved or that the American taxpayer and military is getting smarter. The Wall Street Journal is out with an excellent one-hour documentary about the final days of American involvement in Afghanistan, and it is a tale of folly for the ages. It’s called The Path to Zero, and it is well worth watching. The film provides a concise account of the disastrous decisions, bureaucratic failures and battlefield improvisations that culminated in the chaotic American withdrawal. But one of its most disturbing subjects is the CIA-backed Afghan “Zero Units”—forces trained, armed, funded and supported by the United States to conduct the kind of clandestine and brutal operations that conventional American forces could not.

Afghanistan had always been a place of shifting loyalties, personal bargains and survival-driven negotiation. In that environment, a ruthless proxy force had obvious utility. The Zero Units were built for precisely that world. They operated outside the restraints imposed on ordinary American troops and developed a reputation for extraordinary violence. When Kabul collapsed and desperate civilians flooded the airport, these were the men brought in to impose order.

I’ve written before about China functioning as a kind of American industrial “Shabbat goy.” We prohibit, regulate or politically reject certain forms of dirty, dangerous or undesirable production at home, then outsource them abroad and continue enjoying the benefits.

The Zero Units represented the military version of the same arrangement.

I’ve read war literature and enjoyed the genre throughout my life. I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five when I was a teenager, and since then I’ve consumed stories from many of America’s wars. I’ve also read war literature from other nations, particularly German accounts of the Eastern Front. Most are harrowing tales of survival, random death, heroism, and men caught inside forces far beyond their control.

I haven’t read any books about the long, 20-year conflict in Afghanistan, but the news reporting has not exactly whetted my appetite for more. The landlocked country seems to contain nearly every pathology of both the past and the present, combined with a great deal of historical bad luck. The Americans spent 20 years there and changed virtually nothing of lasting significance, except that an unknown number of people died for reasons that had little to do with a revolution of ideas capable of producing a better, more prosperous and economically advanced Afghanistan. There was no Afghan George Washington. If there is a happy story to be told about the American experience there, I haven’t found it.

In a world that produces no shortage of bad news, few stories seem as consistently brutal and morally troubling as that of the Zero Units created and supported by the CIA—essentially elite Afghan special-forces units used for clandestine counterterrorism operations.

In the Wall Street Journal documentary, the final days of American involvement are chronicled. In the chaos, tens of thousands of Afghans poured toward the airport, jammed the runways, and it was during this period that one of the defining images of the entire war emerged: Afghans running alongside a massive American military transport aircraft, some desperately clinging to its exterior as it moved down the runway.

That image—an enormous American warplane being chased by Afghans in sandals and oversized shirts—is as metaphorically powerful for Afghanistan as the iceberg was for the Titanic. Images of Afghans falling from the sky were carried around the world. The airport had to be cleared.

The Marines could have done it the old-fashioned way—with overwhelming force, gunfire and terror—but they were neither willing nor generally permitted to treat a crowd of desperate civilians that way. There were few good alternatives.

There was, however, one brutally effective alternative: turn to the Zero Units and allow them to do what they had already developed a reputation for doing—using extraordinary violence and intimidation against Afghans to compel compliance from a frightened, chaotic and increasingly desperate crowd.

Long before the sad and painful ending in Afghanistan, the Zero Units were already well known to the miserable Afghan people.

If you value great journalism—and believe, as I do, that the true journalists who put their lives on the line to get the story are heroes, as opposed to the propagandists who populate so many news organizations around the world—then you might appreciate the reporting of Lynzy Billing and her 2019 work from inside Afghanistan on the night raids carried out by the Zero Units under American direction.

Billing’s reporting documented a shadow war that most Americans knew little about: heavily armed Afghan units, backed by the CIA, conducting nighttime raids against suspected militants in villages across the country. Her work helped expose the human cost of those operations and the degree to which these units had become feared by ordinary Afghans long before the final collapse in Kabul.

She writes in her opening:

This story is a deep look inside what happened after America embraced the strategy of night raids — quick, brutal operations that went wrong far more often than the U.S. has acknowledged.

As one U.S. Army Ranger ruefully told me after the Taliban’s triumph last year: “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”

The origins of these units are not in dispute. They were created by the Americans to conduct raids and other operations that were beyond either the capacity or the willingness of the conventional U.S. military. They were composed of Afghan men, but they were trained, equipped and supported by the United States.

This was part of a much longer post-World War II pattern in which low-level conflicts ground on in the twilight—wars fought through proxies, intelligence services, special operations forces and local militias rather than through the kind of formally declared, conventional warfare Americans once associated with military conflict.

In 1967, the CIA’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. William Colby, then-CIA executive director and former chief of the Saigon station, conceded to Congress in 1971 that it wasn’t possible to differentiate with certainty between enemy insurgents or people who were neutral or even allies.

Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3% of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.

No military official ever argued that a 3 percent success rate was acceptable for night-raid operations. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, including Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, publicly claimed that the kill-or-capture rate was dramatically higher—often cited at roughly 80 percent.

But former members of the Zero Units later told Billing that the numbers appearing in post-operation reports were often generated by the units themselves. Naturally, those reports did not describe anything resembling a 3 percent success rate.

Billing tracked down at least two former Zero Unit soldiers who agreed to speak with her. Both were still in Afghanistan and keeping a low profile. One of them she identified as “Baseer”:

When he returned to Afghanistan at age 16, he lived in yet another refugee camp. “I wanted to be a politician, but there were no jobs.” Baseer eventually became a bodyguard for his father, a police officer, before signing on with the police as well. The poor pay pushed him to join the military and then the 02 unit in late 2016, where he said he was paid about $700 per month in American currency — more than three times what regular soldiers made. He also received eight months of training from Turkish and American soldiers at several locations in Afghanistan. “The 02 had the weapons and power, and I liked the idea of duty related to operations and fighting,” he said.

Hadi transferred to the 02 from the Afghan commandos in 2017. “It was my dream to join ‘the Infamous Zero Unit,’” he said. “I thought I would be part of building and securing a new Afghanistan, and as the Americans say,” Hadi briefly switched to English, with an American twang: “‘blast them out of their holes’ and ‘send them to hell.’ I wanted to get the bad guys.” He paused. “At first, the thrill was intense. But the job wasn’t this clear in the end. You know, I became the bad guy, or maybe I wanted to be the bad guy all along.” He looked away, fingering a frayed edge of the carpet.

Once in the units, the men said, it often seemed like they weren’t fighting Afghanistan’s battle at all. The CIA, with the aid of American soldiers on the ground, they said, ran the show. “They point out the targets and we hit them,” Baseer said, adding that about 80 soldiers go on a raid and “10 Americans, sometimes 12, join every operation.”

Billing interviewed an American Army Ranger who explained the details of these raids:

I was startled to learn that military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus they prepared from overhead photography and other intelligence. “Ninety percent of the casualties are because you just can’t see them,” Jason said. “We have something we call a slant, which predicts the number of people in the compound. So 3/6/8 is 3 men, 6 women and 8 children. But because the women and children are hidden inside, that slant in reality will end up being 3/14/36, and a lot of times it’s the kids and women who get caught in the crossfire.”

In other cases, he said, civilians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. “There’s a time we threw a grenade into a hole where an ISIS guy was,” he said. “But there were a bunch of women and kids and in the crossfire a pregnant woman got shot. She was fine, but obviously the kids’ eardrums exploded and everything like that.”

During his four months with the Zero Units, Jason said, Americans were often present at every stage of the operation. The questioning of suspects at the scene was done by the Afghan soldiers, and the “verification” of terrorists was typically done by the American soldiers through biometrics “or people at the site of the raid saying they are terrorists.”

“While the unit did get some known bad guys,” he said, it was also sent after the wrong people or just low-level Taliban to boost their count.

So, one can see how an 80% bad guy to civilian ration turns into a 3% bad guy to civilian ratio reality. It was just a seriously fucked up place and all operation there were ugly.

She ends her report with a follow up on the Zero Unit (what she called by its local name: 02)

Only one of the 02 unit commanders picked up my call. He’d just arrived in Sacramento, California, after five months at a U.S. base and 20 days in a hotel in Los Angeles. There is no plan yet for him or his men. They’d been dispersed across the country, “but our skills and abilities are not being utilized and we are jobless.”

The full article can be found here.

So, these were bad guys in a bad situation in a very bad time in an otherwise bad country. After years of raiding where they had killed scores of civilians, they were called upon to move thousands of civilians out of an airport after they knew they would be leaving, but only if the plane could land. That brings us back to Kabul in August of 2021.

On August 15, the Afghan population could tell what was happening, and so thousands and thousands swarmed the Kabul airport, overwhelmed the gates, and poured onto the runway. This was the Hamid Karzai International Airport, by the way, and Karzai was our guy, widely seen to have administered a deeply corrupt government for nearly 10 years. The footage seen so widely of Afghans clinging to the side of a US Air Force cargo plane and falling to their deaths was on August 16. At that point, everyone knew that if the masses of civilians weren't driven out of the airport, there would be no further evacuation. US Marines tried—they fired shots over people’s heads—but outside, the Taliban were at the gates and trying to keep people in. they weren’t there to help out. And these civilians were desperate. At this point, the Marines turned to the Zero Units to get the job done. Paul Gigot at the WSJ picks up the story in a conversation with Michael Pack, the producer of The Path to Zero doc.

Michael Pack: So the airport was totally overrun, and these people were desperate. They were afraid that if they left the airport, the Taliban would kill them. So for one night and one day, the Marines tried to clear the airport. As you said, if they didn’t clear the airport, no evacuation, no planes could take off or leave. And they used every non-lethal method they could think of. They shot in the air. They pushed them. But these people wouldn’t leave the airport because they figure if they leave the airport, they’ll be killed. And you could see their desperation. Those are the people that were clinging to the C-17 that took off until they finally fell. So they’re afraid for their life. So the normal methods of the Marines did not work. So the military brought in these Zero Units who were trained by the CIA. They were kind of guerrilla units were working under the CIA for a bunch of years.

Paul Gigot: They were kill... the kill squads against the Taliban, basically is what they were.

Michael Pack: That’s right. They might have done things that our troops wouldn’t do, but they were fighting the Taliban. They were on our side, and now they were brought in to deal with their own people, their civilians. And the only way to clear the airport, which is what they did, is they shoot into the crowd and run them over with cars. So they’re shooting and killing innocent civilians because only that could change the calculus. Now, if you stay in the airport, the Zero Unit’s going to kill you, so you’re better off going out. Who knows what the Taliban will do? So that did do it, but it was a horrible thing. And to get the Zero Units, who, even though they’re kill squads, they were in their minds, patriots defending these very people, to shoot their own people, their own... civilians, their own countrymen, the CIA had to promise they’d be the first to be evacuated. So 30,000 of them, they and their families were evacuated. 30,000 of the 124,000, almost a quarter. So it’s a horrible thing to contemplate. Frank McKenzie, head of CENTCOM, says, and I believe him, “There was no other way to clear the airport.” But the fact of the matter is these Zero Units killed innocent civilians under American control, and these Marines had to watch and do nothing. It’s part of the moral injury to watch people kill innocent people while they sit and do nothing is also a horrible thing to live with.

Paul Gigot: And it’s part of the moral quandary that the military was presented with by our political leaders.

Michael Pack: Indeed.

The American way of war is technically brilliant, strategically confused, and, with the wrong commander in chief, morally abominable. We didn't make the Afghans like they are, but after 20 years, we were a part of the culture, too. And we should never have stayed that long or done so much. And now, the Taliban is back and, as far as I can tell, they are the rulers the Afghans want. We should re-label all the maps, and where that bedraggled country is, it should read: ‘Here be monsters. Stay away.”

The U.S. Marines who witnessed this sorry ending have described suffering “moral injury.” The term means more than seeing death. It means witnessing—or participating in—acts so morally repellent that they wound the conscience. If you prefer older language, they injure the soul.

Death is inevitable. In war, young soldiers die. Innocent civilians die. But Afghanistan was a special theater of moral horror, and 20 years of American occupation did not make it better.

American Marines expect to operate within the moral code of the American military. Instead, we asked them to aid and abet conduct that was indefensible. It did not have to be that way.

We could have kept American troops out. If Afghanistan truly had to be contained as a terrorist haven, we could have quarantined it. We could even have declared it a colony and imposed the brutal machinery of empire: military tribunals, executions, extraction, special economic zones and a system that reduced Afghans to serfs. That would have been monstrous—but at least honest about what occupation means.

Instead, we attempted the absurd: turning a tribal, impoverished and war-torn country into a Jeffersonian democracy. When that fantasy failed, we empowered death squads to impose order. We wrapped brutality in the language of freedom.

No American citizen or soldier should ever be placed in that position again. We cannot die for this kind of stupidity. No more wars of national transformation. No more moral vanity paid for with other men’s blood.

A transcript of that podcast is here.

The Musk Supply Chain

A potentially good investment strategy might be to buy up every domain name beginning with “Star,” given Elon Musk’s habit of naming everything in his universe either “Star” or “X,” on the theory that you’ll eventually be able to sell the domains to him. Then again, he has probably already thought of that.

SpaceX is planning a new venture called Starpipe, a natural-gas pipeline that will run from the Port of Brownsville to Starbase, where the gas will be processed into liquid methane to fuel SpaceX’s rapidly multiplying Starship launches.

The project is part of SpaceX's broader effort to vertically integrate its fuel supply chain. In addition to the pipeline, the company is planning an on-site liquefaction facility and has reportedly been evaluating natural gas production opportunities in Texas to support future launch operations.

It’s really amazing what Musk is undertaking. His broader plan is a sort of massive conglomerate, or what was called in the old days, a Trust, that has every component needed to fuel massive transportation projects o earth and equally as massive projects in space. When he says he’s going to mars, he isn’t kidding. His companies operate like parts of one vertically integrated machine.

SpaceX, xAI, X and Starlink — approximately $1.9 trillion: SpaceX is now the center of Musk’s empire. It supplies rockets, satellites and global communications through Starlink; xAI supplies artificial intelligence through Grok; and X supplies users, information and distribution. SpaceX is also developing natural-gas infrastructure, AI data centers and, eventually, computing systems in orbit. Musk owns roughly 40%–48% of the shares, depending on how options and share classes are counted, while controlling more than 80% of the voting power.

Tesla — approximately $1.25 trillion: Tesla supplies the physical machinery: electric vehicles, robotaxis, Optimus robots, batteries, solar equipment and large-scale Megapack energy storage. Musk beneficially owns roughly 20%, including exercisable options. Tesla increasingly acts as the manufacturing and energy arm of the larger Musk system.

Neuralink — approximately $9 billion: Neuralink is developing brain-computer interfaces. Its immediate purpose is medical—helping people with paralysis control computers—but Musk’s longer-term ambition is a direct connection between human intelligence and AI. Its most recent reported financing valued the company at about $9 billion.

The Boring Company — potentially $20 billion: Remember this? I think this is a holdover from when Musk lived in California. The Boring Company builds tunnels and underground transportation systems, typically using Tesla vehicles. It has been seeking new financing at a reported $20 billion valuation, although that valuation remains provisional until the financing closes.

So, the overall design is becoming clearer. X collects attention and information. Grok turns information into intelligence. Starlink moves that intelligence around the world. SpaceX launches the communications and computing infrastructure. Tesla supplies the batteries, energy systems, vehicles and robots that bring AI into the physical world. Neuralink could eventually connect the system directly to the human brain, while the Boring Company builds some of the physical infrastructure through which it moves.

The companies already exchange employees, technology, investments and products. SpaceX and xAI buy Tesla batteries and vehicles; Tesla incorporates Grok; SpaceX is building power and chip infrastructure for AI; and Boring Company tunnels carry Teslas.

Musk is no longer simply building cars and rockets and other miscellaneous stuff. He’s building the most valuable business empire in the history of the world. It’s breathtaking in its scale and scope. Will it work? Sure, it might work perfectly or some of it will not work, but even if only 50% survives, its a huge impact in the earth ad humanity. I’m watching SpaceX stock and will probably jump in soon.

Essential Music

I’ve asserted many times here and elsewhere that country music is the genre best positioned to survive the onslaught of AI-generated music while retaining its essential human creative spark. The genre emphasizes live performance, and much of it remains relatively simple music played on instruments of nonelectronic origin. Still, country can lean heavily toward either rock-and-roll or pop, and the genre regularly produces new artists.

One such newcomer is Tucker Wetmore. Here is one of his songs, which cleverly uses its lyrics to describe the “bad girl” he loves—a woman who is 98 percent angel.

The lyrics contain a few clunky rhymes, but they are largely composed of well-matched couplets:

Girl, go ahead and call me crazy
Damn sure it ain't the first time
Ain't no way you could see we
Couldn't cut this tension with a knife
Looks like that Little Miss Perfect
Got a little more under that surface
You come walkin' in here with a purpose
(And it's workin')

Well, it might be coincidental
But it won't be accidental
When I run up incidentals
in my hotel room with (You)

Dancin' like you know I like it
Ain't no way that you can hide it
Why you actin' like there's something to (Prove)
Girl, don't even try
'Cause you're 98% angel
Showin' off the other two tonight

Yeah, I admit I haven't taken my eyes off
you since you gave me that look
Scenario I'd love to try on
My night go right by the book
Wings might get a little bit ruffled
Somethin' might come a little unbuckled
Kinda lookin' like my kinda trouble
There ain't nothin' subtle 'bout (You)

Dancin' like you know I like it
Ain't no way that you can hide it
Why you actin' like there's something to (Prove)
Girl, don't even try
'Cause you're 98% angel
Showin' off the other two tonight

Well, it might be coincidental
But it won't be accidental
When I run up incidentals in my hotel room with (You)

Dancin' like you know I like it
Ain't no way that you can hide it
Why you actin' like there's something to (Prove)
Girl, don't even try
'Cause you're 98% angel
Showin' off the other two tonight

I’m bringing back my Sunday Stories series because I believe these stories are useful and capture some of the trends I see shaping the world. If you agree, please share this edition and help me bring a little more attention to the series.

Have a great week!

Share Die For This

modern gay communities in the twentieth century. Along the way, it examines religion, law, culture, persecution, and activism, culminating in the Stonewall Riots of 1969, a turning point that transformed a marginalized population into a modern social movement.

Hagiography is defined as a biography that treats its subject with reverence, idealizing their life and deeds without skepticism, and—of course—editing out any actions that cast a negative light. This is the approach of the new film Michael, as applied to Michael Jackson. This is the Michael Jackson we wanted, not the one we got. This is a Disney version of Michael, free of sexuality or personal flaws.

The story begins in 1966 in Gary, Indiana, where a steelworker, Joseph Jackson, drives his five boys to practice making soul music in their tiny living room. The four older boys are fronted by a very young Michael, who already has an angelic voice and the soulful instinct to match it in his movements. Early on, it is shown that Joseph is a tyrant who beats Michael for even the slightest resistance to his patriarchal rule. The film ends in 1988 with Jackson, now at the peak of his stardom, performing “Bad” to a packed stadium in London.

For anyone who was young when Jackson’s Thriller album was released, the movie offers a pleasant trip down memory lane and a glimpse of what it sounded like in the studio as he laid down his vocals. He was gifted as a vocalist and instinctive as a dancer—a special talent. Jaafar Jackson, Michael Jackson’s nephew, does a tremendous job recreating his style and movements, and the concert sequences are beautifully rendered.

As I was watching the movie, however, I noticed that Janet Jackson was missing—even in the early scenes when the rest of the family was present. La Toya Jackson appears, but not Janet, which is odd. Of the many talented Jackson children, Michael was clearly the standout star, but just behind him was Janet Jackson. Her albums from the 1980s were huge sellers, and her singles were ubiquitous on the radio. And yet, she is missing entirely from the movie.

Here is one of Janet’s videos from the same period where Michael was making Thriller and Beat It.

Michael is presented as he appeared in the press at the time: calm, with a high, disarming voice, very kid-friendly. His dance sequences, while impressive in most ways, are conspicuously absent one salient feature—his tendency to aggressively grab his crotch. This Michael is like a Ken doll, with a smooth plastic surface where his sexuality might be. He appears with many children in the film, but always as a polished superstar, setting aside portions of his valuable time to sit with ailing youngsters.

Two elements that were detrimental to Jackson’s later development are addressed, but in an innocent, almost explanatory way. The first is his inclination to alter his appearance through surgery. Michael claims this was done to make his face more symmetrical. The second is the well-known incident during the filming of a Pepsi commercial, when his hair caught fire. He is given pain medication afterward, which the film subtly implies may have introduced him to drugs.

But, hey—so what? His music was really good, and he was an entertainer who was genuinely entertaining. I had no moral objection to giving my money to his hagiographical film, and I’m glad I did. Movies matter to me, and this was a good one.

Besides, the record on the real Michael Jackson is no secret. Anyone who wants to know—or already knows—about his highly troubled life isn’t going to be swayed by a more realistic biopic that covered his arrests and trials for molesting young boys. We already know this.

But Jackson really is a special case. His flaws were enormous and extremely well recorded and here is a list, through the years, of what Michael was up to after the filmed version stops.

1988 – Opens Neverland Ranch, an isolated compound with a zoo and carnival rides. He invited children to stay there without their parents. This was a groomer’s paradise.

1989 – Named “Artist of the Decade” and crowned the King of Pop in the media. The title was notable as a counterpart to the “King of Rock and Roll,” long associated with Elvis Presley.

1991 – Releases Dangerous, which was not nearly as popular as Thriller or Bad. Musically, he had peaked.

1992 – Launches the Dangerous World Tour with an altered appearance and weird, fascistic militaristic stage costuming.

1993 – First child sexual abuse allegations surface. Michael Jackson is accused of molesting a boy, Jordan Chandler, at Neverland. Jackson acknowledges the boy stayed at his home and in his bed but denies any abuse.

1994 – A pivotal year. Jackson settles with the Chandler family for a reported sum (often cited around $20 million). Shortly after, he marries Lisa Marie Presley, a move widely viewed as an attempt to appear as a normal heterosexual man.

This aired, which looks entirely staged. They were married for 20 months.

1995 – Releases HIStory, which does not match his earlier sales and directly confronts media criticism and accusations. By this point, most of his music centered on his own public narrative.

1996 – Marries Debbie Rowe, a nurse who later gives birth to two children which he claims are his own.

1997 – Birth of his first child, Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. (“Prince”).

1998 – Birth of Paris Jackson.

2002 – Briefly dangles his third child, Prince Michael Jackson II, over a hotel balcony in Berlin, prompting widespread criticism.

2003 – The documentary Living with Michael Jackson airs and proves highly damaging to his public image. He opens up to journalist Martin Bashir, discusses children sleeping in his bed, denies extensive plastic surgery, and frames Neverland as an attempt to reclaim a lost childhood. The portrayal reinforces the perception that he is increasingly disconnected weirdo and in no way is related to the old Michael Jackson.

2004 – Charged again with child molestation; his public appearances further underscore how far he has drifted from his earlier image. His mugshot is shown around the world.

2005 – After a lengthy trial, he is acquitted, and he moves out of the United States.

2009 – Announces This Is It, a planned comeback concert series, but dies before it begins. The official cause of death is acute propofol intoxication, combined with other sedatives. Propofol is a powerful anesthetic typically used in surgical settings, which he had been receiving from a physician to help him sleep.

Of course, all of this eroded what Jackson had contributed to the cultural cohesion of the American tapestry. He, along with several other black entertainers, had helped lay to rest the old claim—often associated with Elvis Presley—that white America would only accept black music if it were delivered by white performers.

I generally abhor the terms “white music” and “black music,” and a strong case can be made that such categories are meaningless. Still, it’s true that certain musical forms found larger audiences within the two ethnicities. There were more white country stars and more black soul stars. The Jackson 5, along with a few others, helped break down those boundaries, and Michael Jackson in particular was accepted and revered across them.

Here isThe Jackson 5 on the Ed Sullivan show:

But his controversies destroyed that achievement and complicated his legacy as a unifying cultural figure. He was unraveling at roughly the same time that O. J. Simpson was destroying his own public standing, and the comparison has become part of how people understood the era. OJ was a malevolent killer, and Jackson was a child molester and there was no denying it, then or now.

Also, there is the lingering question of why Jackson went so far out of way to make his features and skin whiter. Why did Michael Jackon want and get a perfect white family? Those kids are clearly not his kids.

This is Michael Jackson, Junior

This is Paris Jackson

This is Blanket, now known as Bigi:

Michael and Rowe with kids

In the film, Michael Jackson is portrayed as trying to break free from his father in order to fulfill his “destiny,” which is to unite people through music and dance. This reflects a broader belief—held by Jackson, his family, and many popular entertainers—that they are important figures beyond the realm of entertainment, serving some larger public function.

If that were true, it would be quite convenient for Jackson, who profited enormously from the sales of his music, shows, and likeness. He would, in effect, be in creative control of “unity,” and that would be highly profitable.

Except, this is nonsense. I love music and listen to it every day. I love movies and literature, and I acknowledge the importance of culture, including pop culture. I’ve educated my kids in American culture. But what truly binds people together is clean water and indoor plumbing. Material needs come first; culture follows, and politics follows after that.

In the film, there are sweeping shots of crowds—fans weeping and reaching out to Jackson as if he were a kind of savior. But the Jackson family and estate seems to have misinterpreted what those adoring fans mean. For the actual concert attendees, those moments are fleeting. After the show, people go home and return to their lives. Jackson likely meant more to himself than he did to most of those fans. Most were like me: they enjoyed the music, recognized the talent, but did not see him as a transcendent figure.

Perhaps Janet Jackson saw it that way as well—which may help explain why she kept her distance from the film.

So, see Michael, but remember you are watching mythmaking on the part of a wealthy family that is willing to throw over its own members to keep the dream alive. It’s also worth noting that their father, Joseph Jackson, is cast as the primary villain. Colman Domingo delivers a masterful performance inhabiting him, and he is presented as the root of all of Michael’s troubles. But the Jackson 5 were the creation of Joe Jackson and there would be no Michael but for Joe, who really did work in a steel mill and train his kids when he got home.

And further, Joseph delivers what may be the film’s most revealing line: “You want to be surrounded by people who say yes to you all the time?” he asks his super star son. (In the film, Michael never calls him “Dad,” only “Joseph.”) In hindsight, that question points to what may have been Jackson’s fatal mistake. No one told him no—even when he had a doctor put him in a coma so he could sleep.

That, more than anything, explains why the actual Michael Jackson is dead and only the myth lives on.

I’ve written here, and elsewhere, about the falling fertility rate around the world. The first hint of what was coming I picked up on in the pre-internet era, in stories about the Japanese, which I initially associated with a broader cultural eccentricity—their penchant for anime, manga, and other symbolic representations of sex.

But over time, it became clear that the phenomenon—if that is how one chooses to define it—had spread to Europe and is now the prevailing trend across much of the world.

The issue returned to the top of mind again recently with the death of Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford professor who wrote The Population Bomb, a catastrophically wrong prediction that the world’s population was rising faster than the food supply and that, from the vantage point of 1968, the 1970s would be a decade of starvation. Ehrlich maintained his faith in his own prediction, in spite of all contrary evidence, up until the very end. A learned man and his idiocy are hard to part.

From a spectacular post by Mark Manson, available here, I learned of Malcolm Caldwell, a British professor who was murdered in 1978 in Cambodia by the very regime he had come to praise. There was already ample evidence by that time that a bona fide genocide was underway, but Caldwell—well known as a radical Marxist—showed little interest in such details. He, predictably, met his end in Cambodia:

Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.

That is Caldwell on the right in the picture above.

A little digging will produce additional details about the death of Malcolm Caldwell, but there is no disagreement about the essentials: the method (gunshot), the place (Cambodia), and the timing (shortly after meeting with Pol Pot). His fellow travelers reported his elation at meeting Pol Pot and his lack of interest in the reality of what he was seeing and experiencing.

It is doubtful he would have changed his mind even had he known the fate of one of his fellow Britons at the Cambodian prison center called S-21 just months before his arrival. John Dewhirst, a British teacher sailing to Thailand with friends, had been seized by the Cambodian coastal watch and taken to the prison, where he and his two companions were hideously and mercilessly tortured to death. His body was burned, but his captors later documented his detention and execution under Pol Pot’s regime.

Later, The Guardian picked up the tale of Caldwell, and noted another tiny insight into Caldwell’s thinking:

Just a few months after that grisly murder, Caldwell prepared himself to meet the man who commissioned it. The Scotsman knew little or nothing of Dewhirst’s fate. Instead his mind was on agrarian revolution. Caldwell believed that the world was accelerating towards a global famine and that the answer was Developing World self-sufficiency. But Cambodia was a strange place to test his theory. As Professor Ian Brown notes: “This is a part of the world that historically had not been a food-deficient area, so you wouldn’t go looking for a crisis there. Again, that seems to indicate a more fundamental flaw in his approach: he comes at it with a theoretical position. And therefore he’d search for an argument, not necessarily evidence, that will sustain that.”

So perhaps Caldwell had read The Population Bomb, a widely popular book at the time, and was thinking about a looming food shortage that never quite arrived. There had been no widespread, population-induced famine by 1978, nor would there be in the way predicted. But it seems that Caldwell and Ehrlich suffered from the same malady, noted above by another professor, Ian Brown: the tendency of the highly educated to privilege their mental models over the reality of the facts at hand.

To arrive at a theory, one must read and write about ideas, lifting them up from the ground of lived truth. You have to be intelligent—but that same intelligence can lead to a peculiar kind of blindness. That blindness can prove fatal to oneslef, and it is the origin of atrocities and genocides.

This idea—that literacy and learning, particularly reading, can profoundly shape thought and perception—was explored by the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria nearly a century ago. The Soviets placed a high premium on literacy because, as Vladimir Lenin recognized, Marxism depends on reading, theory, and ideological understanding. Workers must be able to read party materials and directives. You cannot build a modern socialist state without rigorous governmental administration and at least a basic level of technical knowledge—both of which require mass literacy.

The Soviet project was not primarily about literature as a form of spiritual enlightenment; it was about governmental dominance and ruthless efficiency. If you are going to persuade people of the evils of the bourgeoisie and the moral superiority of the proletariat—and even incite them to violence—it helps if they can read.

And so, in 1931, Alexander Luria was sent into the southern steppe to survey populations who had been taught to read and compare them to their still-illiterate kinsmen. What he found was, at times, almost comically enlightening. Summaries of his studies are widely available, but in this article by Sam Kriss provides a few illustrative anecdotes:

What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures. Complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.

So reading had taught them abstraction, and abstraction had allowed them to see objects as objects, independent of function. Those who could not read refused to abstract them into objects divorced from their use. Further, they resisted abstracting to problems or solutions that did not exist in their world—things they could neither see nor directly experience:

The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’

How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so? Has any question been more innocently posed? Paul Ehrlich had no hesitation in trying to solve a problem that was not, in fact, real, while Malcolm Caldwell had no trouble ignoring one that most definitely was. Both men were widely read and steeped in abstraction and theory. Both also believed passionately in the use of force and coercion.

Paul Ehrlich, in particular, advocated for government intervention to limit population growth. China, in its own way, took up that line of thinking and may have inflicted long-term damage on its population through the sharp decline in birth rates that followed. Millions of babies, predominantly girl babies were aborted, abandoned, or, in some cases, sold to foreigners as a result of the abstract belief that a famine was imminent.

Reading itself isn’t the problem, and neither is abstraction. Imagining the past requires one to abstract into the lives of people one has never known and to picture places one has never been, in order to glean the lessons offered there. The same can be said about the future. Advances in agriculture were made by imagining what would happen if, for example, an irrigation ditch were dug and more water brought to the plants.

Math itself is an abstract human idea about how the world works, and it has been incredibly effective in developing predictive algorithms that correspond to reality. The plants in my garden don’t know anything about chemistry or math, and yet they grow and produce beautiful leaves and flowers. But we humans have used our tools of abstraction to understand the basic functions of plant biology, and from there, we can practice achieving better outcomes.

The problem arises when reading and abstraction are emphasized to the exclusion of virtually everything else, as often happens in universities where Paul Ehrlich and Matthew Caldwell spend their entire lives. These rarefied places can produce a particular kind of ideologue—one not grounded in the checks and balances of reality, where abstraction meets how things actually work.

In the case of both men, their essential error was attempting to reduce human behavior to predictive models, and they failed spectacularly. Ehrlich did not account for human ingenuity, increases in crop yields, or the application of better techniques to food production. Nor did he anticipate that populations might decline without any further government intervention.

Caldwell operated with many of the same faulty instincts, rooted in one of the great abstract fallacies of the past two centuries: the belief that human history follows a pattern that can be captured in abstract principles, then harnessed to produce predetermined outcomes. Ironically, only Caldwell’s Marxism could produce the very famine Ehrlich predicted, by suppressing the kinds of breakthroughs that free people are capable of achieving. Their foolishness fits hand in glove.

The tendency to read oneself into a deadly and entirely discredited ideology is not confined to Ehrlich and Caldwell, unfortunately. It is quite common around the world. The Guardian article quoted above summarized efforts to bring the savages of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia to justice, and those efforts largely failed. Pol Pot himself died peacefully in his sleep in Thailand. And note, he was also highly educated, including a stint amongst the elites of Paris.

The article went on to offer this observation:

Somehow the link between Marxist-Leninist ideology and communist terror has never been firmly established in the way, for instance, that we understand Nazi ideology to have led inexorably to Auschwitz. As if to illustrate the point, earlier last year the ECCC announced that Helen Jarvis, its chief of public affairs, was to become head of the victims unit, responsible for dealing with the survivors, and relatives of the dead, of S-21.

Jarvis is an Australian academic with a longterm interest in the region, who was recently awarded Cambodian citizenship. She is also a member of the Leninist Party Faction in Australia. In 2006 she signed a party letter that included this passage: “We too are Marxists and believe that ‘the ends justify the means’. But for the means to be justifiable, the ends must also be held to account. In time of revolution and civil war, the most extreme measures will sometimes become necessary and justified. Against the bourgeoisie and their state agencies we don’t respect their laws and their fake moral principles.”

And so I am again left to quote one of the great books of the American literary firmament, The Great Gatsby, which ends: “And so we beat on, boats against the tide, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

The industrial and technological world has produced such abundance in food and leisure that masses of people can read themselves into a mental corner and, at times, embrace ideologies that justify violence against their fellow human beings. And it isn’t just theorists like Paul Ehrlich or figures like Caldwell. Some of the brightest minds in the arts and letters in the United States have gone to Cuba to praise the Castro regime while turning a blind eye to its abuses. The language and prestige of such thinking still circulate, and its adherents are not hard to spot.

One Battle After Another, a film about such moral abstractions, was awarded Best Picture this year. Anyone who doubts that higher education can produce well-read yet morally unmoored individuals might look closely at the current mayor of New York City.

Smart people have leverage. They can either advance civilization in remarkable ways—or help produce tragedies like the Cambodian genocide. Unfortunately, the most intelligent are often the first to detach themselves from the most significant abstractions: the moral codes offered by the world’s major religions. Other abstractions then move in to take the place of religious ideas about human worth and the limits of behavior.

The world’s communist regimes declared themselves atheistic, rejected the constraints of religion, and replaced them with the reality of state-sanctioned torture and murder. It can seem, at times, that religious faith is the only abstraction that enables a person to imagine limits on destructive behavior in pursuit of a particular outcome—and we abstract it away at our own peril. Perhaps Ehrlich and Caldwell would have done well to include the Bible in their reading.

A truism is something that is generally and obviously true, though not necessarily precise in every case. One such truism that appears to hold across populations is that societies tend to get more of what they subsidize and less of what they tax. People respond to incentives, and directing public money into one sector at the expense of another has effects over time.

If this is true, then taxing wealth while subsidizing poverty may create a disincentive for the former and an increase in the latter over time.

In many parts of the United States—but especially in its most populous state, California—this appears to be only partly true. The state has seen significant increases in its share of poverty and homelessness. At the same time, however, it has also experienced an increase, not a decrease, in its share of very wealthy individuals. What explains this?

Innovation is the explanation. The productive sectors of the California economy are so powerful—and generate such massive gains in productivity for those who use their products—that the state has, at least so far, managed to outpace the drag created by rising poverty. California taxes income, on top of the huge share taken by the federal government, and it also taxes capital gains (as regular income.)

What the state is now contemplating is a tax on wealth in general—a tax on the perceived and unrealized value of assets that have not been monetized as income or a capital gain. Such a tax could apply to stock holdings that have never been converted into cash. Simply continuing to hold those equities would require a real, hard cash transfer to the state. The same would apply to real estate and other asset categories, including shares in businesses that have not yet generated profits or even income.

This idea is so potentially destructive that many European nations have tried and later abandoned similar approaches. It effectively moves toward treating all wealth as subject to ongoing claims by the state, with individuals functioning more like stewards than full owners. Over time, it can set in motion a steady transfer of wealth to the state, which then allocates it according to its own priorities—whether those priorities are virtuous or misguided.

One does not need to be an economist to understand the implications.

Threatening the Consumer Surplus

Should any political entity enact a tax on wealth, it is shifting resources from one known collection of assets to another, only partially known, set of actors. Realized value transferred to a political entity takes money from one group—the individuals who created or accumulated the wealth—and moves it into government control, where there is typically far less transparency regarding how those assets are ultimately allocated.

If there is fraud within the government, then the transfer becomes a direct movement of resources from the productive parts of the economy to criminal or unproductive actors. Perhaps some of that money is recirculated, but it is unlikely to return in ways that generate meaningful or positive economic benefits. Criminal organizations are not known for making strategic investments in innovation or productivity.

Even in the absence of corruption—if the funds are simply redistributed to those in need—the same structural shift occurs: wealth and productive capacity move from those who have accumulated it through innovation or frugality to those who have not carried the same economic burden. This, in itself, may represent a net loss in productive efficiency.

But there is a far greater threat to overall welfare than redistribution alone: the erosion of consumer surplus.

A consumer surplus is a recognized concept in economics, and it describes the benefits to a buyer that are greater than the cost of a product. So, put simply, if I pay $75 for something, and I get $100 of value from it, then the consumer surplus is $25. If the seller asks $110 for something of which I can only gain $100, then I will not buy that product if I can avoid it. If I have no choice, and I pay $110, then the producer has consumed my surplus.

This surplus exists every day in every market. It operates quietly, embedded in our choices and in the benefits we receive as buyers. The idea of consumer surplus asks a simple question: how much better off are buyers because a market exists at all? In most cases, over the long term, a large share of the benefits in any transaction accrues to the consumer. As the buyer, you are often “winning” in ways that aren’t immediately visible.

Take a house, for example. Suppose you buy a home for $500,000 and finance it with a mortgage. From day one, you have a place to live—something whose full value is difficult to quantify, but undeniably real. The seller receives a clear benefit in the form of $500,000, and the bank benefits from interest payments. But over time, the surplus increasingly accrues to you, the buyer, as you continue to live in and use the home.

Thirty years later, the seller has long since exited, and the bank is no longer collecting interest. Yet you are still in the house, continuing to receive its benefits. Over that span, the accumulated value of living in the home can far exceed the original purchase price.

You can apply this thinking to nearly any product—cars, food, clothes, internet access, your smartphone, and more. In the case of highly innovative companies, consumer surplus is be enormous. Much of the value of services like Google’s email accrues to the user, not the company. Consider Substack: much of the platform is free to use, allowing people to read and write at little or no cost. While the company earns revenue in various ways, the majority of the benefit flows to the user. The consumer surplus of AI will be 99% to the consumer which will occur even as the pioneers of AI become mega wealthy.

Moving East Of Eden

A tax on wealth is a destructive threat to the existence of markets in which, over the long term, the primary beneficiary is the consumer—all in the name of shifting value in the short term from producers to the government. Such a policy may strip wealth from billionaires, but over the longer term—and by “longer term,” I mean just a few years, or even months—markets will respond, and the true transfer will be from consumers to the government.

Prices will rise as taxes are passed through, which is harmful. Alternatively, some markets will simply fail to exist or never come into existence at all, as government intervention makes the cost of creating new markets too high or too risky.

I did not invent the idea of consumer surplus. It is as old as buying and selling itself. But even older than trade is the human impulse toward envy. As far back as the Book of Genesis, we see two men with different roles: Abel is a shepherd, and Cain is a farmer. They are the sons of the first Man; Adam. Both make offerings to God, but when Cain perceives that Abel has received greater favor, he rises against his brother out of sheer envy.

Cain does not become richer by killing his brother, nor does he capture Abel’s value. But his envy—his anger, his resentment at another having more than he does—is momentarily satisfied, and that is enough for him to commit murder. God condemns his farming, and he becomes a wanderer, separated from the divine for the rest of his cursed life. He is sent east of Eden, where he does not immediately perish, but he never receives favor again.

Markets and innovation are the primary forces that raise human living standards and create the surplus so many of us take for granted. They have lifted billions out of poverty and created hundreds of billions of additional years of human life—time that can be devoted to learning, productivity, and further innovation. It is a virtuous cycle.

That cycle is threatened by the envy of those who would tax wealth—not necessarily because wealth should not exist, but because its existence represents both an overwhelming opportunity and a perceived imbalance. Through punitive, forceful action, we risk undermining the very systems that generate prosperity. We may punish the billionaires, but we will not become richer as a result. Instead, we risk becoming poorer together, as consumer surplus evaporates and society declines—like a people cast east of Eden into a world far poorer than the one we inhabit today. This is the fate that California is set to inflict upon itself. The Abel class of the state are already fleeing, and this makes the Golden State quite a bit less lustrous.

There are many exhortations about limiting sleep, and a common mythology about certain people—usually highly inventive and productive men—that claims they need very little sleep. The hyper-inventive Thomas Edison, for example, claimed to sleep only four hours per night, supplementing this with naps throughout the day. His comments on sleep include: “Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days,” “Most people sleep themselves stupid,” and “The man who sleeps eight hours a night is a failure.”

Elon Musk could be seen as the inheritor of Edison’s inventor’s crown, though he takes a somewhat more pragmatic view of sleep. Musk says he needs—and generally gets—about six hours per night. Still, much of his rhetoric about sleep emphasizes getting by with as little as he reasonably can, framing sleep largely as an interruption to the thing he values most: long stretches of work.

On the flip side, there are many who praise sleep for its special place in human life. Sleep is a state of altered consciousness where dreams occur and visions are revealed. Men of science and industry may view it as a limiting factor, but the world’s religious and artistic authorities have often regarded sleep as a time of great importance.

From the Bible, in Book of Psalms, Psalm 127 tells us: “It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.” There are exhortations against too much sleep, but sleep itself is not described as an inherent waste of human time.

In the Tao we find similar sentiments. In the Tao Te Ching we read: “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” The Taoist writer Zhuangzi adds, “The true man of old slept without dreams and woke without worries.”

Buddhist traditions typically include rules about sleep and even recommend a preferred sleeping posture, yet sleep itself is never described as wasted time.

William Shakespeare, that great chronicler of the human condition, writes about sleep in Macbeth in these classic lines:

“Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

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It is the final line—chief nourisher in life’s feast—that catches my eye and confirms the experience I am having as I grow older, wiser, and more secure in my place in life. I am not dead when I am asleep. I am far beyond merely resting.

Sleep, when cultivated and placed in its proper context, is an incredible gift that allows for an enhanced way of living and is absolutely free to use. There are some basic requirements for good sleep: it needs to be dark, cool, and mostly quiet, and one needs long, uninterrupted stretches of time to sleep deeply. Assuming these conditions are met, sleep can become what it was always meant to be—an altered realm where life plays itself out in new and interesting ways.

Bryan Johnson is an unusual man with considerable resources, and he has made it his business to explore ways to extend human life and intercept the systems that ultimately end in death. Of sleep, he claims that “If you get sleep wrong, everything else in health fails.” Sleep is where the body performs much of its repair work, cleaning and restoring systems throughout the body, including those in the brain. For those who prefer to lean on research, it is readily available. There are ample studies that support Johnson’s position that sleep may be the most important biological maintenance process humans have.

But what if a person were actually more “alive” in sleep than when awake? What is our natural state? Certainly, sleep is a repair state, implying downtime as opposed to uptime. But bodily regulation is not the penultimate purpose of sleep or rest. In rest, we think. We compare. We contemplate. We contextualize. We add meaning and value to the other events of our lives.

Imagine a chess match in which the players spend very little time actually moving the pieces and much more time thinking about the next move and the larger strategy. What, then, is the true chess match? What is the most important part of the game? Is it moving the queen, or thinking about where to move the queen?

There is also the further idea that one’s waking conscious state is not even the primary location of our larger selves. What if the conscious mind is not the true driver of human behavior? Instead, our waking personality may function more like a narrator, interpreter, or public-relations department for deeper processes occurring outside awareness.

This idea appears in different forms across many thinkers.

For example, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga studied patients whose brains had been surgically separated between the hemispheres. These experiments suggested that the conscious mind often behaves like an interpreter, creating a story about events after they occur. In other words, the conscious self explains behavior but does not necessarily cause it.

The true driver of behavior may arise from instinct or from processes operating below the level of conscious thought. The meaning and conscious awareness of an event may therefore be constructed afterward—sometimes only later, perhaps even during sleep, when the mind reflects on and integrates what has already happened.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt developed a similar metaphor. In The Righteous Mind he argues that reasoning usually justifies instincts rather than producing them. As he famously puts it, “The emotional dog wags its rational tail.”

A true pioneer in the idea that human motivation is driven by forces far below conscious awareness was Sigmund Freud. He proposed that the conscious mind is only a small part of the psyche.

In psychoanalysis:

• Id → unconscious drives

• Ego → conscious identity

• Superego → internalized moral authority

Another influential perspective comes from cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, who argues that the “self” is more like a narrative constructed by the brain. In his book Consciousness Explained he writes, “The self is a center of narrative gravity,” meaning our identity is essentially a story our brain tells about itself.

In this view, our waking life functions partly as a kind of public-relations system, constantly explaining and promoting our choices and actions. This might even help explain why figures like Edison and Musk constructed narratives about needing very little sleep. Perhaps the story sounded good—productive, heroic, efficient—even if the biology was telling a different story.

Further evidence that important processes occur outside conscious awareness comes from neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. Libet found that brain activity initiating a decision appears before a person becomes consciously aware of deciding. As Libet wrote, “The initiation of the voluntary act begins in the brain unconsciously.”

This suggests that the conscious mind may simply become aware of decisions already underway. These theories and observations challenge the assumption that the human being is merely the sum of biological processes and electrochemical impulses. If something occurs outside of conscious awareness, what proof do we have that it is happening entirely inside the body at all?

There is strong evidence that thoughts and motivations arise from processes within the brain, but we have also long dismissed religious or metaphysical explanations for human behavior. Much of modern thinking rests on an atheistic or materialist assumption: that our waking lives provide sufficient evidence for how the world works, and that we can identify the non-divine origins of natural phenomena. We know what makes the sun shine and the plants grow, and we know where babies come from.

But if our core self is not the part that appears front and center in the conscious mind, and if sleep serves as a doorway to that deeper self, then what we are—and perhaps even our purpose—may need to be reconsidered. I’ve noticed that as I’ve gotten older, my interior landscape has expanded. I have much more life to think about now, and I can pore over the details of my life, mining them for meaning. I have also read more and learned about subjects far removed from my own personal concerns. All of this becomes grist for my vastly expanded internal mill.

In sleep, this process is enhanced because there are no external distractions. A cold, dark room, limited food, no alcohol, and quiet take me to a place where the past, present, and future—where “me” and the many characters of my life, real and imagined—merge to form a matrix of life that feels larger than myself.

I think these places are real. They are as real as I am. What is “me” may not be all that important. I will die, and the world of my sleep may be the world I inhabit forever—or at least until the next instance of me lights upon some biological form.

This is where my thoughts have been running lately, and it feels true, at least for now. I’ll sleep on the idea further, and we’ll see what emerges in that developing world.

In 1915, Britain’s star writer and imperial loyalist lost his only son. John Kipling was killed at the Battle of Loos, and his body was buried in an unmarked grave. It was not until 1992, long after Rudyard Kipling’s death, that a grave marker was erected at the site where it is believed the 18-year-old John Kipling lies.

In response to his son’s death, the elder Kipling—author of The Jungle Book, Kim, Captains Courageous, and several other standout poems—grew deeply cynical about the schemes of men to improve the human condition or engineer better social outcomes. He turned instead to an old tool of the British educational system, the copybook, to make a point about enduring values—older gods—that continually reassert themselves, despite mankind’s best efforts to evade their harsh lessons.

A copybook was given to the student blank, except for a piece of wisdom printed across the top. The student was to write this saying down the long page of the copybook until it was full. In this way, he practiced his penmanship while drilling the aphorism into memory. Examples include:

• Honesty is the best policy
• Practice makes perfect
• Waste not, want not
• Pride goes before a fall

It was these repeatable headings that Kipling turned to in his grief when he wrote his postwar poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings. He contrasts the Gods of the Copybook Headings with the Gods of the Marketplace, which he presents as the prevailing idealistic ideas of the day:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall.
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither clud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘The Wages of Sin is Death’

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’

The Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four---
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man---
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:---
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The author is long dead, and the poem is over one hundred years old, and yet there it is—one of the central issues of our day: “Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith.” Perhaps it isn’t social media or third-wave feminism to blame after all.

And there is this: “…we were promised abundance for all, / By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul; / But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy.” Abundance has become a buzzword in recent years, as has the warm embrace of collectivism—but so has affordability, and here we see the result. Inflation creates a condition in which there is plenty of money and nothing to buy.

Kipling was focused on the timeless constraints placed on humanity by nature herself, which made humans with natural limits. Our innate selfishness—our natural, and, to use the Christian term, fully sinful disposition—limits our ability to perfect ourselves. The Gods of the Copybook are human nature itself, waiting to thwart the plans of the naïve and the well-meaning.

We are now witnessing one of the most momentous events in modern history, as humans create artificial intelligence that will be tasked with running portions of our world. To be sure, it will not be programmed to reinforce the laws laid down by the Gods of the Copybook Headings. In fact, it will be tasked with specifically avoiding the old gods and finally ushering in the Gods of the Marketplace.

For example: And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.” Modern technology has as a central tenet the refusal to stick to the devil you know. It is deliberately “disruptive” to devils—and occasionally, to angels.

Or consider this: And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.” Every large language model I have used thus far has been very careful to adopt a consensus point of view on various subjects, but it will not condemn any behavior as sin without extensive qualifying context. Sin, certainly as Kipling meant it, is a Christian concept.

Or there is this: And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.” Again, AI is being billed as a marketplace force multiplier that will, in fact, allow billions to not work and still eat. AI is our new slave class, and its makers—along with the coming tide of robots—explicitly promise to cast this God of the Copybook Headings into the outer darkness.

Will this work? Will AI render human vanity and selfishness obsolete? Will it finally do what the Victorians, the statesmen, and the New Frontiersmen could not? I think it will certainly look like it. AI is a massive efficiency gain for scholarship, industry, and the arts. We will have more of everything.

But AI doesn’t know anything. It is not truth in the old sense. It is a pattern engine trained on human artifacts. It can be brilliant at prediction and still be hollow on meaning. Further, if we treat it like an oracle, we will smuggle in a new superstition: outsourcing judgment. That is not replacing the old Gods—it is replacing our responsibility to the older Gods.

These old Gods were there for us. They existed not merely to limit us, but to inspire us to strive for greatness within limits. By outsourcing our responsibility to be good, to be virtuous, we outsource one of the primary drivers of human happiness and meaning. Machines do our work, and we grow physically frail. Machines do our thinking, and we become lazy and indulgent. If machines now do our moral reasoning, we retreat further into an infantile state.

Imagine a comfortable world of AI suddenly disrupted by catastrophe—a meteor strike, for instance. I suspect the Devils would return in seconds, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings would arrive in force. I intend to live by my values and continue to pray to God—and to the lesser Gods of the Copybook Headings—regardless of what technology washes over us next. I advise everyone else to do the same.

No religion in the world advocates surrendering moral authority to a machine. We rejected the pagan idols of the past because they were man-made. Surely, we will not make that mistake again.

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Mark Kelly has been in the news lately for suggesting that American military personnel are not required to follow unlawful orders. His intention and accuracy are in dispute, and it is unfortunate that his public reputation may come to be dominated by this kind of political controversy, because his place in biological history is already cemented.

Mark Kelly has an identical twin brother, Scott Kelly, and together they constitute a uniquely valuable biological case. Scott Kelly spent 340 days in space while Mark remained on Earth. When Scott returned, scientists compared changes in gene expression, cognition, vision, immune response, and epigenetics.

Our traditional understanding of human twins would not account for what Mark Kelly later revealed in a tweet about his living twin: “I used to have an identical twin brother.” While the twins still look alike, the way their core DNA expresses itself has changed.

That Scott’s epigenome would be altered by his unusual experience is not particularly surprising; that is precisely what the epigenome is meant to do. It may have been similarly altered had he gone scuba diving every day for a year. The more interesting question has to do with why the change occurred. As Cheryl Walker, Ph.D., director of the Center for Precision Environmental Health at Baylor College of Medicine, puts it: “We don’t know whether those changes in the epigenome are good and are helping the human body adapt to space, or whether they are reflecting an adverse effect of space.”

Did you catch that? We don’t know whether the changes rendered in Scott Kelly’s biological coding represent devolution or evolution. Or, to paraphrase Shakespeare: “Dysfunction or adaptation; that is the question.”

What if it’s evolution, and what we see in Scott Kelly is the leading edge of what humans will become when thrust into space permanently? What if we are that adaptable? And further, what if adaptation is the core protocol of life itself? What if everything is adaptive behavior? I mean everything: poetry, rape, war, invention, murder, sloth, Epstein, democracy, nuclear weapons, and sugary carbohydrates.

Throughout the natural world, there are remarkable examples of extreme adaptability. Survivors adapt—or they do not survive for long. Apples, for example, are heterozygous, meaning that if you plant the seed from a given apple, the tree that grows will not produce the same apple. The apple tree rolls the dice with each generation in the hope of producing enough hardy varieties to adapt to whatever environment it encounters. Humans hold the apple constant by grafting the limbs of pleasing varieties onto other trees so we can keep producing the ones we like, but the seeds are programmed to reshuffle characteristics with each generation. If some of those adaptations fail, so be it.

Humans, too, are marvels of adaptation, which is why we have pushed our presence into every corner of the globe. Eskimos can live in extreme cold on a diet of mostly animal blubber, while natives of the Amazon can live in perpetual heat on a diet of plants and roots. These humans share the same DNA, yet are adapted to radically different conditions. Each person begins with half the DNA of each parent, but variation remains; even non-identical twins from the same parents are different.

Like apples, humans roll the dice with each generation.

These adaptations are biological—hardwired—and they operate at two speeds. There is adaptation driven by natural selection: over time, some humans develop greater height, more body hair, or different skin pigmentation (the genome, or “hardware”). And there is the adaptation Scott Kelly experienced, in which his body adjusted to a current environment (changes to the epigenome, or “software”).

Epigenomics is a relatively young science, concerned with these more rapid changes in DNA expression. Each cell contains the full DNA sequence, but it is the epigenome that tells liver cells to behave like liver cells. Because cells must often adapt to rapidly changing conditions, the epigenome is positioned to react quickly—sometimes in ways we would prefer it not to. It allows for survival if a food source suddenly disappears, but it also allows smoking to affect your grandchildren, even if you die before they are born and their parents never smoked.

All of this seems like a form of natural genius—until the implications sink in. If epigenetics is as logical as natural selection, then it does not make mistakes. That would imply there is no dysfunction, very little cultural adaptation separate from biology, and that all human adaptation originates in the body. If nature does not make mistakes, then there are no pathologies—only conditions we choose to define as problems. There is merely the relentless adaptation of humans to circumstance and the biological imperative to keep rolling the dice until someone survives. Such a view would both confirm and radically depart from prevailing theories of human behavior. It would move us beyond the familiar nature-versus-nurture debate.

Consider a few examples.

Perhaps the human lifespan itself is adaptive. It has been observed that mammals typically live about six times the age of maturity, which for humans suggests roughly 120 years. But perhaps this is not a ceiling on potential life, but an adaptive limit. Maybe our genes determine that after 120 years life is no longer advantageous—or they receive a signal that space must be made for the next generation. One hundred and twenty years may be enough time to observe the full outcome of a particular set of DNA instructions, after which it is time to move on to the next experiment.

Much ink has been spilled over the nature of sexual attraction and gender identity. But what if this, too, is adaptive? What if same-sex attraction is not merely inborn, but malleable—and socially necessary? Yes, we are born with a sex chromosome, and there are only two options, but expression varies. Sexual behavior changes over time, and perhaps this reflects more than shifting cultural norms. Consider how sodomy gave way to homosexuality, which gave way to the all-purpose and all-encompassing “gay.” What if these shifts were adaptations—first to societies where powerful men monopolized women and used sex to exert dominance over less powerful men, and later to societies so safe that men with more traditionally feminine traits could thrive?

The birth cycle is a hotbed of adaptive behavior. We have clearly manufactured a problem we call “teen pregnancy.” Biology, however, suggests that young females are meant to be pregnant; their bodies are at peak fertility, and boys of the same age are driven powerfully to pursue them. Yet testosterone levels in young men are reportedly falling as reproduction is pushed to the far edges of female biological possibility. Perhaps this is adaptation in action, aided by increased body fat associated with higher consumption of refined sugar. What if abortion is adaptive—if the body determines that an early pregnancy would prevent a later, more viable one? What if infertility is nature’s way of saying, “I’m out of time,” or “I won’t live long enough to see this child through”? Even the decision never to have children may be biologically rooted.

What if depression is not a chemical imbalance, but a rational response to an arid and lonely environment? The same might apply to suicide—what if, under certain conditions, it makes biological sense? Death may occur when the body determines that the dice roll failed and the organism should be discontinued. Miscarriage is often described as the body terminating a flawed process; perhaps suicide is an analogous mechanism.

What if autism is adaptive? Some people may need the ability to focus relentlessly on a single task to the exclusion of all else. These individuals were once considered eccentric; once we applied a disease model, they became “maladaptive.” Perhaps they never were.

It is commonly accepted that gang activity is adaptive to the decline of male involvement in childrearing. Gangs become substitute families, and older members serve as surrogate mentors. The formation and fragmentation of social tribes is universal; criminal gangs may simply represent another adaptive structure, servicing markets ignored by dominant institutions.

One could extend this logic further, to behaviors we classify as pathologies or crimes—homelessness, abuse, rape, infanticide. Might these, too, have natural, epigenetic origins?

The long process of selecting and rewarding certain behaviors while isolating and punishing others is itself adaptive, producing winners and losers with no final endpoint. As we better understand the role epigenetics plays in human life, our definitions of universal goods will change along with it. We will adapt—whether we like it or not. Humans have always believed they understood the universal good of their era. Perhaps we should be less certain, given that we do not know what adaptation lies just ahead.

If adaptation is the core of the human process, is there such a thing as evil? Is there a violation of the Dharma, the Tao, or basic Judeo-Christian values? I would say yes—there is maladaptation, and this lies at the core of human spirituality.

Humanity is not passive in the adaptive process; we are willful. We can examine our thoughts and choose our actions—as Scott Kelly did when he chose to remain in space for a year—and as a result, we are now responsible for a significant portion of the adaptation of life on Earth. Just because something is natural does not make it good.

Humans are spiritual machines, not merely organisms adapting to physical reality. There may be a spiritual adaptation mechanism at work—one we may eventually discover and come to accept. Consciousness itself may have a deep adaptive dimension.

The Taoists say there is a constant, called the Tao, and that our well-being is tied to our ability to align with it. An eternal God, the Dharma—it is all rooted in the idea of a constant around which humans revolve. We now know that humans are infinitely adaptable, and we may yet find that our core function in life is to adapt toward an eternal, and eternally good, constant.

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I see that Clavicular was arrested, though it appears he won’t be charged. He is another of the armies of ‘influencers’ who popular the internet, putting out statements of limited value. Not to be snarky, but I know this type. He is not unlike men I’ve known who preen and pose and create nothing of value. In fact, one of his contributions to culture is both the term and practice of ‘looksmaxxing’ which means taking extraordinary steps to improve one’s appearance, and that include drugs and breaking facial bones in the hope they will heal into a more appropriate shape. Then you will be a Chad, and life will be much better. Women like Chads, other men like Chads, and, to his theory, will open doors and make life better.

It has been my experience that other men do not like this kind of guy, but there are plenty of women who are drawn in by this kind of ‘charm.’ However, if history is any guide, these types of men and the women who love them come to ruin. Let’s look at some examples; Don Juan, Cassanova, and Lothario.

Of the three womanizers on this list, only Casanova was a real person. Lothario and Don Juan come from tales spun more than 400 years ago. All of these men are associated with a particular male pathology, and all have captured the male imagination in one way or another.

Men, it has long been observed, are far more likely to be outliers in most endeavors, from the application of violence to mathematics. Men occupy the extreme edges of most human activities, and as such, life presents a far greater set of opportunities for things to go wrong than it does for women. Nobel laureates and prisons are dominated by men, and for a reason.

Men bring this same set of habits into their relational lives. Few things are more challenging to a man than how he must relate to women. He begins life with a mother, and there is an entire library of theories about how men are shaped by their maternal bonds. But when he becomes an adult, he faces a new set of problems and opportunities with women—and here is where we find our three anti-heroes.

Don Juan—or, in some versions of the story, Don Giovanni—is a fictional character traced to a play written in 1630 by the Spaniard Tirso de Molina. Don Juan takes great pride in his ability to seduce women, but this brings him into conflict with the father of one of his conquests. He kills the girl’s father, and in various versions of the story he is either killed and denied entry into heaven by God, or he confesses the murder and is forgiven.

In its original incarnation, Don Juan was a selfish cad whose sexual prowess was the result of deception—of being someone he was not. He seduced women for his own pleasure, and murder sat on the same continuum of destruction. His sin, not merely his relationship to women, was the central issue.

But then something happened to Don Juan. In later plays and operas, his seductive power is recast as a kind of weakness. He becomes a man unable to come to terms with his own mortality and so behaves like a perpetual youth. In other versions, he is portrayed as having arrested development: devious like a child, but armed with the wit and power of an adult man. Why women fall for this obvious man-child is unclear, but in modern terms he resembles a compulsive sexual addict—someone unable to find a more adult purpose and thus perpetually placing the next woman in his sights.

Over the centuries, Don Juan undergoes a metamorphosis—from willful sinner to unwilling addict—which mirrors the changing stories we tell about many men. Don Juan is a man with no purpose, not even the purpose of making babies.

Casanova was a real person, a playwright by trade, born in 1725 to a theatrical family. His father died young, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. When Casanova fell ill as a boy, he was sent to live with another family, where at age eleven he had contact with an older girl who fondled him. Of her, he later wrote:

“…pretty, lighthearted, and a great reader of romances. … The girl pleased me at once, though I had no idea why. It was she who little by little kindled in my heart the first sparks of a feeling which later became my ruling passion.”

Casanova tried many paths in his youth—the clergy, the military, and other respectable professions—but he would not stick with any of them, and he enjoyed gambling. After a long life spent on the fringes of nobility, frequently in the company of wealthy women whom he regularly seduced, he wrote his autobiography. His fame rested on a handful of plays, books, and articles, along with frequent run-ins with the law for blasphemy and sexual impropriety.

In the end, he was forced to take a job as a librarian for a minor noble—much younger than himself—who neither admired him nor cared to hear his stories. Casanova died having never applied himself seriously to anything other than women and sex. In his letters, he wrote:

“Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite of mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.”

Casanova’s life was dominated by women, yet it did not include a wife or children.

Lothario has a somewhat more complicated history. The character appears in a play written by the British writer Nicholas Rowe in 1702. Rowe places him in the English canon, though the original Lothario was a minor character in Don Quixote.

In both cases, Lothario is a lazy man who discovers, almost by accident, that he has a talent for seducing women and gaining access to their time and resources. He is less compulsive than Don Juan or Casanova—more of a “pool guy” or “milkman” figure—but still a man with little mission in life beyond bedding women. It is here we might find Clavicular; pretty and useless. Lothario has no stated profession, religious conviction, or creative drive. He simply exists, and functions more as a mirror for the sexual contradictions and confusions of the women he seduces than as a figure driven by deep or tragic pathology himself.

The stereotype represented by Don Juan, Casanova, and Lothario is very much still with us—and, I would argue, growing. The phenomenon of fatherless boys is connected to men who engage in recreational sex with willing, and I suspect often morally empty, women, while taking no interest in the children such unions might produce.

Yet these men, while sexually active, frequently have no children at all. They do not want children, and in most cases do not want marriage either. Casanova had no children in real life, and neither Don Juan nor Lothario did in their stories. While the type has changed outwardly, inwardly it remains the same.

Of course, many men throughout history died childless—but most often not by design. Young men died in war, accidents, or acts of sacrifice. That is categorically different from men who are healthy, interested in women, regularly engage in heterosexual sex, and still reach the age of fifty without children.

These men may develop hobbies. They brew their own beer, cook elaborate meals, or collect odd things—old cameras, classic video games. But what they lack are the traditional hallmarks of male adulthood, foremost among them a family. They have no wives and no children. They are, in evolutionary terms, a dead end. Even if they ride Harleys, they are soft at the center when confronted with the hardest realities of the world, which remains—evolutionarily speaking—red in tooth and claw.

They are the men C. S. Lewis warned would become common: Men Without Chests. They are here now, and in abundance. They have plenty of appetite and intelligence, but to what end? It is the chest that provides purpose and continuity, and on that score many men are failing. Clavicular, and his friends, like another guy who has done nothing useful and who makes nothing useful, Andrew Tate, are empty vessels who pour their nothingness on to other men.

There is no replacement for being a father and accepting that responsibility. A man can fail at many things and succeed at this and still be a winner. A few exceptional men have built strong substitutes, becoming leaders to men and women who were not their biological children. But for the average healthy man, if he can father children, does so, and accepts the role, the benefits are profound—not only for the child, but for him. These benefits cannot be substituted.

Men who miss that ride—men like Don Juan, Casanova, Lothario, and many men today—miss out on more than they can ever fully know.

Sex by itself is transporting, but it is merely the precursor to the act that actually matters.

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The Super Bowl halftime performer this year featured a Puerto Rican artist who performed most of the show in Spanish. For Spanish speakers, this may have been a treat, but for most viewers it was a yawning moment. A football stadium notoriously has poor sound, and few people can understand what even a native English speaker—someone like Mick Jagger—is saying in that setting anyway.

One may read into the performance whatever one likes, but it is clear that demographic trends in the United States are moving toward a larger Spanish-speaking population. Spanish is the native language of Puerto Rico, an island that was once part of the massive Spanish Empire. Had the empire-builders of nineteenth-century America had their way, the United States might already be a Spanish-speaking nation—or the leader of a vast multilingual empire composed of English, Spanish, French, and numerous native languages, all attempting to cooperate within a representative democracy.

We did not go that way, but we could have. The United States had many empire-building moments, and I maintain that we passed on all of them, for better or for worse. When the United States took in Puerto Rico as a territory, for example, it was a prototypical moment to expand into empire—and the opportunity passed.

In 1898, a surging United States was more than a century removed from the American Revolution. The Yanks no longer feared the British Lion and had largely accommodated themselves to the sprawling British Empire, which included the nearby commonwealth of Canada.

American attitudes toward the tattered remnants of the once-enormous Spanish Empire were quite different. Cuba had been Spanish for four hundred years but was now in open revolt. The United States was Cuba’s dominant trading partner, and American leaders sensed weakness. At that moment in history, when Americans sensed weakness, they pounced.

That February, the USS Maine mysteriously exploded and sank in Havana Harbor, killing 250 American sailors. The incident set in motion a ten-week war with Spain that the United States utterly dominated. At its negotiated conclusion, the United States found itself in possession of what remained of the exhausted Spanish Empire: Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

If there was ever a moment for the United States to declare itself an empire in the European mold, this was it. Both Cuba and the Philippines eventually became sovereign countries, while tiny Guam and Puerto Rico became—and remain—“U.S. territories,” a piece of weasel wording that says they are neither states nor sovereign.

But what if the United States had become an empire? Empires have conferred real benefits, as history repeatedly demonstrates. Would the United States have succeeded as an empire, and how might that decision have altered both the nation and the world?

One could argue that empires transmit habits and values, and that the United States might have done so from a stronger strategic position had it declared an empire early on. The Roman Empire spread the idea of citizenship—an identity that carried loyalties and benefits beyond the clan or tribal unit. In this sense, the Roman model marked a break from the long-dominant tribal order. The Romans centralized government and undertook massive public works, including aqueducts and sewer systems. It was only when the empire grew too large and too wealthy that it began to wither at the edges and rot from within. Nevertheless, it lasted over 800 years.

The British Empire conveyed its own habits and values, and one need only look at a list of the world’s most advanced economies to see the results. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—along with a few others—are among the wealthiest and most developed nations on earth, and all are former British colonies. Rather than becoming the world’s largest democracy, India might well have devolved into a festering cycle of murder and reprisal, not unlike the modern Middle East, were it not for a centory of British rule.

An American Empire might have engaged the nation in world affairs in a way that prevented the twentieth century’s worst human catastrophes. Had the First World War never occurred—or had it been shortened by earlier American involvement—there would have been no second world war, no Nazis, no Soviet Union, and no Holocaust.

Empire would also have expanded markets. For the British, it created outlets for ambition and escape valves for social pressure. Landless ‘second sons’ often moved to colonial America, and brought with them determination and a will to gamble on business ventures, many of which succeeded. The United States is littered with Scottish place names because defeated and demoralized Scots, denied opportunity at home, distinguished themselves abroad in the Empire. Might those denied opportunity in the Jim Crow South have found a similar path in the far reaches of an American Empire? Might their presence have spread across the world under an American flag?

Empire, however, would have come at a cost. It would have meant a far larger military and a more overtly militaristic society. Empire requires the willingness to impose one’s will by force when necessary—and often when merely convenient. An American Empire would have required a large standing army, affecting everything from resource allocation to family size. Maintaining the empire would have dominated American politics for generations.

And yet, while the United States has long eschewed the language of empire, one could argue that it possesses one anyway—an empire inherited from the British without formal treaties. The United States has controlled territories beyond its borders at various times and for various reasons. In practice, we seem to have inherited the duties of empire without its benefits. To this day, we do the work of empire, as we did in Afghanistan, offering a localized version of our habits and values—an offer that is most often rejected. A formal empire might at least have conferred benefits that mere economic dominance and military supremacy have not. An Empire would have created a whole class of ‘colonial men’ who had been to the outposts, served, and come home hardened.

It is worth noting that Britain no longer has an empire, yet it continues to receive immigrants from its former colonial possessions. Pakistanis now make up a growing share of the British population, much as Latins constitute a growing portion of the American population. The absence of a formal empire, it turns out, does not prevent a country from exhibiting many of the features of one, including high rates of immigration.

This is why talk of empire matters. If a nation bears the responsibilities of empire, it should also possess the rights of empire—including the right to exploit natural resources. Otherwise, the home country itself becomes the resource, and it is being exploited, just not for the benefit of the host population. This dynamic is unavoidable absent impenetrable borders, which neither Britain nor the United States possesses.

And what about China? Does it harbor imperial ambitions? In some ways, China resembles an earlier version of the United States; in others, it does not. Should China begin to behave more openly as an empire, there may be peoples around the world who wish that, when the imperial moment presented itself, the United States had aimed a little higher. I strongly suspect this will not be the case.

China struggled for centuries simply to unify the territory it occupies today. The modern Chinese state dates only to 1949, and the regions surrounding China possess strong and distinct identities. Neither the Koreans, Vietnamese, nor Japanese are ripe for colonization.

Overall, it appears that the United States passed on formal empire during the waning days of the very idea of empire—and that moment has now passed. We may soon find ourselves in the waning days of the nation-state itself, as arrangements increasingly centralize around other poles, such as technology or defensible geography. The imperial moment is over; the nation-state, bound together by overlapping treaties, currently reigns; and the next great organizational idea has yet to reveal itself.

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The Free Press is out today with an article arguing that friction in life is necessary—and in many cases should be sought out rather than avoided—especially in light of the world AI is rapidly bringing into being. As an example of deliberately embracing friction, it cites a 1995 interview with Kurt Vonnegut, in which he explains that he intentionally doesn’t buy envelopes in bulk, forcing himself to go out and get what he needs rather than having everything waiting at his fingertips.

Perhaps AI will make humans even less likely to truly engage with the world, but it seems to me that we passed that post many miles back. Self-driving vehicles will be far safer, and I view this as a manifest good—even though I’m not going to give up control of the wheel anytime soon. I like driving, and I like doing other things that require my time and attention.

What AI is promising to bring is still mostly speculation: the insertion of “intelligence” into cars, robots, and other devices so they can perform work with little or even no active human input. This is a difference in degree, not in kind—and I noticed it nearly a decade ago. This is me, from 2017:

Chief among the “listicles” that pass through my social media feed are those offering bold, bullet-pointed predictions about the Great Utopian Future. These lists are heavy on “sweeping change” rhetoric and seem to delight in forecasting the decline and fall of entire industries. Rarely cataloged in these lists are predictions about the number of people who will be swept out of a job by that future.

Dystopian visions—in which man is first displaced and later dominated by machines—are not difficult to find, however. The drivers of the tech revolution often seem to subscribe to both futures: a utopia for the smart and socially connected, and, to offset the dystopian outcomes and inevitable job losses, free money for everyone else. The premise of Universal Basic Income is that everyone should be paid something, even if they can no longer contribute to the economy once machines begin doing more and more of the work.

I was reading yet another set of bold predictions when I was reminded of a book by Kurt Vonnegut, the great science-fiction writer and contrarian. I read it long ago, during a teenage “Vonnegut phase,” when I plowed through his catalog. One of his classics, Player Piano, imagined a similar dystopian utopia.

Player Piano was released in 1954 under the title Utopia 14 and was considered science fiction—so, you know, not real literature. Vonnegut was writing in relative obscurity, and the book was not widely read. It took decades before he was recognized as a major literary figure and his novels properly appreciated.

The story centers on an engineer in a future world where machines do most of the work and society has been divided into three broad camps: the useful people who design and service the machines, the bohemian artists who exist on the fringes, and the useless people who merely act busy.

The useless people do have jobs, mainly puttering around for the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps, but they are known to all as the “Reeks and Wrecks.” One of the more adept engineers, Dr. Proteus, suffers an existential crisis over what machines are doing to people and organizes a rebellion, leading to his eventual arrest. After helping the Reeks and Wrecks throw off their machine-dominated lives, he watches in horror as the very people who were displaced begin putting the machines back together so they can resume doing the work for them.

It seems people don’t really want to work—even if work gives their lives purpose and meaning. Humans are caught between the desire to conserve energy and the need to be useful. Evolution is far from perfect.

I take the long view that utopias and dystopias mostly exist in the mind. Predictions of the future are notoriously wrong, so only the broadest themes are useful as guides. Broadly speaking, people adjust to and absorb new technologies according to their tastes and needs, and those who want to work—and who find meaning in the tasks that make up their working lives—will find ways to keep adding value. Those who find the workplace a bore or regard effort as something for suckers aren’t contributing much now, and they won’t in the future either. Work is like exercise and eating right: some do it and reap the rewards; others don’t and pay the penalty.

In any future, character is destiny. Habits and values matter. Meaning is subjective, and cultures vary widely in what they consider a purposeful life. Human nature is both unchanging and highly adaptive. Technology empowers people to be more fully what they already are, for good or ill.

In most ways, we choose our future. We always have—and always will.

Hey, Free Press—if you want someone who actually sees the future, hit me up. This writer misses a vital point about friction and human flourishing. Friction helps the body, but it adds far less value in the mind. I find that a smoother mental journey takes me farther into my thinking and AI is a huge value add. Allow me to explain.

I’m an avid user of AI in the form of ChatGPT, and I make no excuses: it’s awesome. I’ve had long philosophical conversations with it. I’ve asked it questions about gardening, cooking, relationships, how to write emails that deliver bad news while making it sound like good news, and a host of other things. It’s genuinely incredible.

On the long list of things I learned in college that are no longer useful is how to normalize a database. To get a computer to extract meaningful information from a database, you had to “normalize” it—meaning you put the data into meaningful rows and columns, with “keys” to show how one set of rows and columns related to another. This was called, quite literally, a relational database. Once a human built a database full of relationships, the computer could take over, populate it with billions of items, and extract information using a language called SQL—Structured Query Language.

The problem, of course, is that most data in the world is not structured.

AI systems have learned to extract meaning and words out of unstructured data—which, in any other context, I would call thinking. Making sense of unstructured data is what I do in my own head, and now AI can do it too. So the obvious question is: is this reducing friction in my thinking, making my intellectual life easier, and therefore ruining me?

Unlike technologies that glue me to the couch, I think this technology is a manifest gain. It’s not an extension of my body; it’s an extension of my thinking. It’s bringing technology-speed cognition to my brain—the locus of my thinking and decision-making life.

If I think better, decide better, and act more effectively in the world because of improved thinking, have I reduced friction and made myself poorer? Maybe—because making mistakes is also how we grow. Doing things wrong is often how we learn to do them right. But with AI, I will make different mistakes. I will learn at a higher, more capable level.

So while I appreciate the point the writers at The Free Press are making, I think they’re late to the game—both in their Vonnegut references and in their worries about what technology will do to us. The enfeeblement they fear is already here. That’s why I work every day on my body—at home, in the kitchen, and in the gym—to harden my physical self against the softening effects of modern technology.

But the mind is different. Technological applications that engage cognition are not the same as those that promote passivity. The printing press was a manifest good for the human mind, and AI is more like gaining access to the world’s best, quickest, and most comprehensive library. If people use it to let machines drive their cars while they stare at their phones even more, that’s on them.

At its best, technology makes humans more expansive: we can see better into the past, act more effectively in the present, and set a better course for the future. Friction is for the body, but better technology is a massive step forward for the mind.

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It has long been my view that human knowledge is not immortal—that as we gain new knowledge with each generation, we also lose some fraction of what came before. I can, for example, operate a manual clutch transmission; my children cannot. Yet they can navigate my iPhone faster and more intuitively than I can.

Some lost knowledge is trivial—like shifting gears in a car—but other losses are far more consequential. Tribal peoples long ago possessed deep, hard-won knowledge of plants and animals, refined over generations because their survival depended on it. Much of that knowledge is now gone. We can visit the home and garden department at Home Depot, the drugstore, or the zoo, but these are poor substitutes for lived, generational understanding of the human relationship to plants and animals.

There is another, deeper layer to this idea of lost knowledge: the apparent loss of the techniques required to build massive structures, and perhaps the loss of understanding their original purposes as well. Our current explanations, at the very least, appear incomplete. There are massive structures around the world about which our knowledge remains speculative, both in terms of how they were built and what they were for.

For example, there is something beneath the pyramids in Egypt that has no settled explanation. This is not speculation; it has been confirmed by multiple sources. There are chambers and subsurface features beneath several pyramids for which there is no obvious purpose, and these must be considered in the context of the pyramids themselves—structures built with astonishing precision and durability. Humanity could not construct an identical pyramid today under the same constraints, or perhaps at all.

A similar pattern appears in Mexico at Teotihuacan. These structures were not built by the Spanish after their arrival, nor by the peoples living there at the time of the Conquest. Indigenous accounts state that the city predated them; the Aztecs did not know who built it, for what purpose, or why it was abandoned. Likewise, the Egyptian pyramids were not built by the direct predecessors of the region’s modern inhabitants, who themselves were unable to construct even the Suez Canal without substantial outside assistance.

Even considering just these two sites—Egypt and Mexico—we see the same shared pattern, and no clear explanation:

• Both feature surface monuments paired with subsurface spaces—clearly intentional, not accidental, and not structurally required. If these were merely religious structures meant to bring people closer to a Sun God, a common explanation, nothing underneath would be necessary.

• Both exhibit cosmic alignment to stars, solstices, and cardinal directions. This indicates a highly sophisticated understanding of the Earth’s movements and its relationship to the stars.

• Both required extreme labor investment, far beyond what would be necessary for any “practical” building. I have been to both sites, and they beggar description. There is no building or monument in the United States—or any I am aware of from the past 500 years—that is as large.

• Both leave us with a profound knowledge asymmetry. No clear explanation has been handed down to us; either that knowledge was restricted or deliberately withheld. The form and function are not obvious, not transmitted, and not easily inferred.

Of course, there is wild speculation surrounding these buildings and many others, along with a great deal of fake “evidence” available in every form. Whole industries and movie genres have been created around alternative histories.

That evidence of the past is sometimes fabricated should surprise no one. I belong to several online groups that share historical photographs, often from World War II. Despite the existence of tens of thousands of authentic images from that conflict, I regularly see photographs that are clearly AI-generated presented as genuine. Why? Because the person posting them derives some benefit—attention, status, or engagement. Finding something new is exciting.

Fake archaeology and forged artifacts have a long and well-documented history. The holy-relic industry was once fully supported by the Christian Church, and many towns had their local favorites. At one point, there was said to be enough wood from “the one true cross” in circulation to build a bridge from Paris to Jerusalem. That most of this wood could not possibly have come from a single cross was of little concern, given what it symbolized. But if our goal is to reconstruct the past in order to recover genuine ancient knowledge, such fabrications are not harmless—they are consequential. It is exceedingly difficult, when discussing something thousands of years old, to separate signal from noise.

Still, it is clear that mysteries exist in the past, and that these mysteries represent lost knowledge. Thousands of people were involved in the construction of these structures. They saw them. They understood them. They helped build them. Tens of thousands of people must have been involved while they were in use, whatever that purpose may have been. And now those people are gone, their cultures have radically changed, and the knowledge is gone as well.

What if we could regain and reuse some of that knowledge—not through mysticism or fantasy, but through better tools? For the first time in human history, we are approaching a way to preserve understanding across generations without relying entirely on fragile cultural transmission. The internet, and now artificial intelligence, offer something no previous civilization possessed: the ability to store, cross-reference, and retrieve human knowledge, independent of memory, lineage, or tradition.

Civilizations have always known more than they could keep. Knowledge decays when it is not practiced, when it is no longer economically useful, or when the people who hold it die. Writing slowed that decay. Printing slowed it further. Recrodings have slowed it even further still. But all past tools still relied on continuity—on people caring enough, generation after generation, to read, teach, and transmit. When that chain breaks, the knowledge breaks with it.

Artificial intelligence changes that equation. For the first time, knowledge does not merely survive as static records but can be actively interrogated, recombined, and tested against new information. Techniques can be reconstructed. Patterns can be rediscovered. Lost methods can, at least in principle, be inferred rather than merely admired.

This does not mean AI is wise, or that it replaces human judgment. But it may serve as something no civilization has ever had before: a durable memory—one that does not forget because it does not age, migrate, die, or lose interest.

Perhaps one day we will be able to understand what our deep ancestors were capable of, and why. As it stands, I am not entirely convinced we have retained enough institutional knowledge to recreate everything we achieved just in the past 100 years—let alone progress beyond it—without difficulty. But with better tools, we can learn without forgetting.

This was at Teotihuacan, and this is just one of the massive pyramids.

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Marc Andreessen is a constant source of insight and, in my view, at least as compelling and intelligent as this generation’s Thomas Edison, Elon Musk. Andreessen often remarks on the extraordinary benefits artificial intelligence is bringing to people around the world, and he recently made an observation that struck me as particularly insightful.

It has long been understood that expertise in one domain—say, the law—does not confer expertise in others, such as economics. And yet we are regularly subjected to the opinions of people with clear authority in one field who are remarkably uninformed in others, and these individuals often find their way into public life. There are the obviously foolish examples—actors and musicians lecturing the public on legal or economic policy—but there is also a subtler phenomenon: scientists weighing in confidently on politics.

The example Andreessen offered was Albert Einstein.

On the subject of physics, Einstein was one of the most gifted scientific minds of all time. His theories of relativity and his advances in our understanding of the physical universe are unparalleled. Only a tiny fraction of humanity can confidently understand and explain his theories and proofs. The world is a better place because of the work of Albert Einstein.

On the subject of politics, Einstein was not a pioneer. His views are well known, as he published many letters and articles on political subjects, and he believed it was both proper and appropriate for him to do so—though his views were already widely available and shared by millions of others, including the leadership of the Soviet Union. Similar views were also held by Mao in China, who was then rising to power and had yet to subject millions of Chinese to grinding poverty and early death through starvation. His Why Socialism? letter, published in 1949, begins:

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Early on, he lays out his reasoning for socialism, and it is born of two contradictory beliefs: first, that humans are predatory; and second, that some other breed of humans will restrain this predatory nature through socialism.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

This contradiction carries on throughout the rest of the essay and remains, to this day, an unresolved issue within camps that believe government control is the solution to individual “selfishness.” He writes that humans are simply incorrigibly corrupt:

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay.

Here, his view is not only that humans are fixed and immutable, but that technological and demographic “realities” are fixed as well. He immediately adds the idea that the past pastoral model was ideal:

The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

So, humans are fixed and immutable, and we are technologically stuck and demographically expanding—so the problem is:

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

The whole thing can be found here.

Like Andreessen, I find this essay comically inept and not in the least insightful. Any college campus in 1949—or today—had plenty of students and professors who would have made the same points for the same reasons, and they would have been wrong about much of it. At least in 1949, much about the true nature of the Soviet Union was less well known, and socialist China had not yet used socialism to “address” the predatory nature of humans in ways that would later end millions of lives.

Most liberals and pro-government advocates today recognize that private markets and capitalism allocate resources far better than centrally planned socialist economies, though they still want the heavy hand of government to redistribute the resulting prosperity more evenly. Fair enough. But Einstein was advocating for a political system that was already known to fail—and is even more clearly so now. His physics have stood the test of time; his politics did not withstand even the mid-20th century.

Artificial intelligence does not suffer from this problem. It is a domain expert in everything, even if it has not yet redefined physics or any of the sciences. But that day is coming. And we no longer have to listen to experts in one domain opine confidently in another and assume they possess expertise in far-flung fields. We now have a domain expert on call 24 hours a day.

There is one caveat I would note. In many instances, you have to dig with AI—ChatGPT, at least—to reach that expertise. It took several attempts on my part to get ChatGPT to link to the 1949 article, and along the way the AI did a good job of defending Einstein against what it described as “some views” regarding his left-wing politics. As I have noted here, AI systems, as of now, tend to defend the status quo in most instances, and you sometimes have to dig a bit to reach uncomfortable material about politics—and perhaps other subjects as well.

Still, dig you can. And if you use the prompts and tools correctly, AI is an incredibly powerful and wonderful advancement of human knowledge.

I admire Einstein in physics—but on politics, he earns a big, fat F, and I don’t have to listen to him about anything other than what he’s expert in.

A lost romance is probably the most common theme in all of country music, aside from whiskey drinking. The two often go hand in hand.

One song about lost romance is Same Old Lang Syne, by Dan Fogelberg, about two former lovers who run into each other and go out for a drink. It’s a depressing song, and I never much liked it. Even when I was much younger, I knew that looking back was a bad habit—though I certainly did my share of it when it was my turn.

The story is about a man who runs into an old lover at the grocery store.

“Met my old lover in the grocery store
The snow was falling Christmas Eve”

They make some small talk and decide to go out for a drink. Because it’s Christmas Eve, nothing is open, so they buy some beer and sit in her car catching up. She’s in a loveless marriage, and he’s a successful musician who spends much of his life on the road. It’s not an encouraging setup. And the chorus sets the tone perfectly:

“We drank a toast to innocence
We drank a toast to time
Reliving in our eloquence
Another auld lang syne”

There’s no story here of a rekindled flame—which would be a far less interesting song anyway—and then, predictably, it ends poorly:

“The beer was empty, and our tongues were tired
And running out of things to say
She gave a kiss to me as I got out
And I watched her drive away

Just for a moment, I was back at school
And felt that old familiar pain
And as I turned to make my way back home
The snow turned into rain”

Wow—thanks for nothing, Dan Fogelberg. Except for the lesson that it’s not a good idea to revisit old loves. What’s lost is lost.

The Okie band Turnpike Troubadours seems to have taken the same lesson I did about the poor wisdom of running into old lovers in the grocery store and chatting with them. In their essential and deeply moving song “7 & 7,” vocalist Evan Felker tells the story of a grown man thinking back on an old love from when he was seventeen, when life was simpler and less burdened.

He and this girl—and likely others—were running wild, drinking Seagram’s, and playing dominoes. Now she has moved on, and he has not. And then, like Fogelberg before him, he sees his old love in the grocery store.

“Well, that old scene is always comin’ to me, I
I see you standin’ with your husband and your child
And you’re a picture of strength, and grace and beauty
And me, I’m just a fool in a supermarket aisle

Well, I, well, I know hello would surely end up awkward
I never had the knack for talkin’ anyway
You’re not the kind for bendin’ over backwards
Smile and turn my shopping cart around and walk away”

This young man, for reasons unnamed, can’t grow up, and the mothers of the girls he dated back then knew he would come to nothing:

“Well, I had no clue, I’d be the boy who
Your mama warned you about
Well, I had no clue, I’d be the boy who
Your mama warned you about”

And now, he’s alone, out there on the road, a trucker perhaps, but clearly not a successful musician:

“And I still do my share of sleepin’ on the floor
I’m not sure if anybody knows me anymore”

As sad as this is, it’s still better than inducing an old love to badmouth her husband and then watching her walk away as the snow turns to sleet. This man may be lonely, but he kept his dignity throughout. As far as old flames and grocery stores go, I find this to be a far better outcome. Enjoy!

The human understanding of the human body is moving forward at a fantastical pace, and better technologies for measuring and improving the body are already on the market or in the pipeline. It is an exciting time to be a bio-hacker, as the term has developed—or, more accurately, a home-brew doctor. I’m an enthusiastic participant in my own health and highly recommend this practice to everyone else.

Make note: you just can’t trust the medical establishment with your health. Full stop. You can’t. They have their own driving priorities—regulatory, legal, financial, and institutional—and your health is not the number-one priority. It just isn’t. That doesn’t make doctors evil or stupid; it makes them human actors inside a system with incentives that often diverge from individual flourishing. If you care deeply about your health, you have to take ownership of it yourself.

A core piece of background information for understanding how to care for your body is recognizing just how much of your body isn’t you. You are not a single, unified biological entity. You are a stack of biologies, layered and integrated by evolutionary forces to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

I first encountered this idea a long time ago, back when I still listened to NPR. I was washing my car, half-distracted, when a story came on about something called a “fecal transplant,” which was exactly what it sounds like. It was gross and disturbing, but the story was about someone whose life had been saved by transferring stool from one person into another via a suppository. The treatment worked because it restored something essential: a healthy gut ecosystem. It was in that moment that I first heard about the gut microbiome, and something fundamental about how I thought of the human body shifted.

Those who are skeptical of the theory of human evolution tend to sneer at the idea that humans evolved from apes. But the story told by the gut is far more unsettling. Taken over the long view, the evolutionary picture is deeply humbling: we evolved up from mere bacteria, and, in fact, we are still a massive stack of cooperating microscopic organisms that collectively generate behaviors motivated by pure self-interest. Seen through this lens, what constitutes the existential “us” becomes far more complicated.

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Years passed. I stopped listening to the radio as podcasts took over my audio life, and my curiosity about what we are deepened. Much of that came from listening to the Dave Asprey podcast, where one recurring theme is the vital importance of the mitochondria inside each of our cells. The mitochondria are the so-called powerhouses of the cell, but that description understates their significance. Asprey often describes them—accurately—as ancient bacteria that were incorporated into our cells long ago through a process known as endosymbiosis.

These mitochondria are conversion factories. They take inputs like food and oxygen and turn them into usable chemical energy. Without the billions of mitochondria operating inside us every second, we die. And each mitochondrion is the descendant of a once free-standing organism with its own evolutionary history. They are not incidental machinery; they are the bedrock of what we are.

Another recurring focus of Asprey’s work, echoed by a growing body of mainstream research, is the gut microbiome. Within each human live trillions of bacteria that play a vital role in digestion, immune function, hormone regulation, and even neurotransmitter production. There are so many distinct species involved that if you were to line up all the unique DNA strands in the gut microbiome and compare them to the DNA of the human host, the bacterial genetic material would win by a wide margin. We do not even make up the majority of the DNA that lives inside our own bodies.

So if each of our cells is powered by a collective of once-independent organisms, and those cells themselves rely on another vast ecosystem of microscopic life that outnumbers us genetically, the obvious question becomes unavoidable: what are we, exactly?

It gets stranger. There is mounting evidence that the gut microbiome exerts a profound—possibly dominant—influence on mood, cravings, decision-making, and even personality. These organisms want to live, and it is not unreasonable to assume that their collective survival strategies register as impulses in the human brain. If the gut environment becomes hostile because of poor diet or stress, that imbalance may manifest psychologically as anxiety, depression, or compulsive cravings. A sudden longing for sugar or a visceral aversion to certain foods may not originate in conscious choice at all, but in microbial signaling traveling up the vagus nerve to the brain.

Some researchers now suspect that certain forms of mental illness may originate in the gut, or at least be amplified there. This is still a young field of inquiry, but it already makes earlier debates about human evolution—man versus ape—seem quaint. Apes, after all, are in the same existential boat we are. They, too, are stacks of cooperating organisms governed in part by the legislature of the gut.

In fact, all of the animal kingdom works this way. Cats, hippos, lemurs, frogs, and hawks all carry entire ecosystems within them—creatures along for the ride, doing their part like carnival barkers on the great biological midway of life.

None of this presupposes the existence or nonexistence of a God of creation, at least not in my mind. The universe looks less like a clean, top-down design and more like a series of overlapping experiments in how to organize matter into life—each strange, improbable, and contingent. Perhaps we are stacks of cooperating bacteria. Jellyfish manage to survive without brains. The deepest trenches of the ocean teem with bizarre adaptations. Saturn has rings; Jupiter does not. A single meteor strike can reset the biological clock of an entire planet. What a glorious mess.

My assumption is that life is everywhere in the universe, gathering complexity, breaking down, and rebuilding again. It is a process with a purpose we are unlikely to grasp with our limited perception and brief window of awareness. Humans may be the penultimate creatures of this planet, but we are still in a primitive stage of understanding who we are, where we are, and what we are made of.

With our ancient bacterial origins and our bodies full of separate but essential fellow travelers, we look through a glass darkly—and will for a long time to come. When you become your own doctor, you must always keep in mind how many patients you actually have. The number is not one.

To keep you healthy, you must also bear in mind what your fellow travelers are doing and what they are signaling. Antibiotics, for example, may destroy the bacteria that are making you sick, but they also kill organisms you need. Some of those can be replaced; some take a long time to recover.

What lives on your skin or in your hair that is useful, and need not be washed and stripped away? Is excessive use of hand sanitizer quietly eroding your ability to ward off infection? Some “dirt” is not a bad thing.

Even this area of investigation—the idea that we are too clean, and that many autoimmune diseases may stem from an excessively sterile environment—is relatively new, and it may prove to be one of the more promising avenues for understanding modern illness.

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The jury is still out on the long-term health effects of GLP-1 agonists on those who take them. Certainly, many people lose weight, which is obviously a good thing. Obesity is not an aesthetic preference, and no one is simply “fat” by choice or by birth. Natural selection would bias strongly against a chronically obese phenotype, at least in the modern sense of obesity. The health effects of massive “overfeeding,” as the literature calls it, are well documented.

The broader fact is that the overabundance of calories should be recognized as a tremendous step forward for humanity and a triumph of human ingenuity. The first order of business for any human society is securing enough calories to survive. Today, for most people in most places, that problem has been largely solved. There is plenty to eat, and the first pillar of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy — basic physiological survival — is within reach for nearly everyone.

Abraham Maslow was born in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He initially studied law before turning to psychology, where he began with research on primate behavior. He later taught at Brooklyn College and Brandeis University, emerging as a central figure in the Humanistic, or “Third Force,” movement in psychology, which emphasized human potential, creativity, and healthy functioning rather than pathology alone.

Maslow observed that the two dominant, non-religious models of human behavior that had preceded his generation — Freud’s theory of dark repressed desires and Skinner’s behaviorism, which treated humans as elaborate stimulus-response machines — failed to account for the higher, more aspirational parts of the human personality. Some people genuinely seemed to strive to grow, to learn, and to do well in the world. What explained this phenomenon? Maslow set out to answer that question.

As a first observation, he noted that hungry people cannot aspire to much beyond getting something to eat, and incredibly, as noted, that basic need has now been universally met. Where it remains expensive to procure food in adequate quantity, one can be sure the constraint is political rather than agricultural or scientific. Scarcity is now an artificial choice.

Of course, man does not live by bread alone, but the other requisites at the base tier of Maslow’s hierarchy are also widely available. This first pillar includes food, air, water, sleep, warmth, and shelter. If we set aside air and sleep — which require no capital, no expertise, and no supply chain — it becomes clear that food, water, clothing, and shelter constitute the core material requirements for human life. On all of these fronts, conditions have dramatically improved: they are cheaper than ever, widely available, or — in the case of food — limited only by political or regulatory barriers rather than any real scarcity of production.

With the physiological layer largely conquered, what comes next? Maslow’s second pillar consists of physical safety, predictability, law, order, economic security, health stability, and protection from chaos and predation. You could collapse this entire list down to “law and order,” which is where civilization begins. You cannot have philosophy or art if bandits or warlords are tearing through the countryside every six months. Health stability itself depends on legal institutions capable of settling disputes without violence — matters that, in earlier eras, would have been resolved by bloodshed. Nations rise or fall on this pillar.

Most places on earth now possess at least fragments of these institutions, though unevenly and subject to constant fluctuation. Still, relative to the past, there is now more law, more regulation, and more enforcement than ever before. One may dispute what constitutes justice — China and the United States offer two wildly different examples — but there is nearly universal agreement that rules and adjudication are superior to chaos.

Once survival and security are in hand, the human organism wants community. This is Maslow’s third pillar, and it manifests as friendship, romance, family bonds, group membership, and social intimacy. Here we find that the abundance of Pillar One and Pillar Two can work against Pillar Three. Yet, as with so much in the modern world, the bottleneck is not scarcity but habit. Many people have replaced in-person community with virtual community, but this is a choice, not a necessity. By modern standards, hundreds of online “friends” have replaced three actual friends — a kind of malignant abundance. Yet the existence of bowling leagues, book clubs, church groups, gyms, and dance halls testifies that the requirements of belonging are easily satisfied if one bothers to show up. Most people still have extended family. Romantic belonging is equally abundant; the dating apps have seen to that. There is no shortage of sexual opportunity on the internet.

Once food, order, and a community of some sort, the next desire is to matter within it. Maslow’s fourth pillar includes status, achievement, mastery, reputation, respect, and dignity. Again, the abundance of the lower pillars creates a surplus of opportunity here — though not always of the healthy kind. Nevertheless, if one wishes to achieve mastery over a subject, there has never been a period when more material, instruction, and training were available. Information is now effectively free. A person can build a reputation, gain respect, and recognize his own dignity in ways that a serf, slave, tribesman, or frontiersman never could. One can learn a subject, achieve mastery, and broadcast the fact of that mastery with greater speed and efficiency than in any prior era.

Which brings us to Maslow’s crowning intellectual insight into human longing: the fifth pillar, self-actualization. At this level, the human animal seeks not merely to be effective but to be authentic — to pursue personal growth, creativity, meaningful work, and the fulfillment of potential. This is the layer at which Maslow believed the species was “half-finished.” In his view, most humans never reach it because lower layers perpetually yank them back down. Even in free and wealthy societies, actualization is rare, just as independent thought and virtue have always been rare.

Yet the ability to reach the top tier is now available to more people in more places than at any point in history. We are poised to reap the cumulative benefits of centuries of progress. Law, economics, culture, and technology have placed humanity in the best position it has ever occupied to produce self-actualized individuals at scale.

When Maslow conceived this hierarchy, the world was far less abundant and was engulfed in the most destructive, life-devouring war in history. Yet in 1954, just nine years after end of the bloodletting of World War II, he published Motivation and Personality, which formalized the hierarchy of needs. The lower tiers have never been easier to fulfill; the higher tiers are now within reach to all.

The agricultural revolution that began millennia ago provided calories and nutrients in unprecedented abundance. The industrial revolution replaced human labor inputs to a degree that no slave system could ever match, spreading the benefits of manufacturing along with rights, wages, and leisure. And the digital age has provided education and information in such quantities that no subject, technique, philosophy, or event is beyond the reach of nearly anyone on earth.

All of these positive trends must be considered beneficial even before the next wave of technology arrives. What artificial intelligence, robotics, new forms of energy, incredible breakthroughs in health, and massive reductions of friction in the world monetary system will deliver will be at least as transformative. Millions will use these revolutions to climb higher on the hierarchy of needs. Others will use the same tools to sabotage their own progress — and sometimes the progress of others. Still others, like the terror networks that use the internet to coordinate mass attacks, will seize these tools in an attempt to impose their narrow visions on the world. If history is our guide, the schemes of the world’s most malignant rarely succeed in the long run.

This brings us to the final phase of development that Maslow articulated later in life. He added a sixth pillar: transcendence. This is the level at which the individual seeks experiences that are spiritual, devotes himself to something beyond his or her own ego, and experiences moments of unity, awe, faith, and truth. At this level, we may return to the ancient pattern in which humanity gazes with wonder at the universe and — even with full knowledge of how it works — marvels at its beauty and coherence. Here Maslow converges with the mystics of many religious traditions, including Buddhist, Christian, and Taoist contemplatives. Our advances will, according to Maslow, lead us back to our starting points, but with far greater knowledge. It won’t be just the priestly caste that reaches a transcended appreciation for the beauty of this world.

Because the path to the higher levels of human experience is so much easier to reach, there has never been a greater moment to be alive. The potential of humanity has never been more expansive than it is today, and billions of people now enjoy opportunities that no one possessed even a century ago. The time to celebrate and embrace what we can become is now. Humans created this world of abundance, and it is humans as well who obstruct its proliferation. Yet the last obstacles can be overcome, and we can advance faster and further than at any time in human history. Actualization and transcendence are possible for billions of people who need only embrace their higher nature to make their lives and the lives of so many others better than ever.

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Part 9: Circumspection spans the long, unsettled arc from 1969 to 2016—a period when American confidence gives way to American self-questioning. From the triumph of the moon landings to the killing of Osama bin Laden, nearly half a century of ambition, anxiety, and consequence unfolds.

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This is the age of Nixon’s fall and Carter’s rise—and fall—followed by Reagan’s Morning in America, when optimism briefly returned, even as its foundations quietly shifted. It is the era of Clinton and the full arrival of the Baby Boomers into high office, governing a nation they once promised to remake. Then come the shocks of September 11th, the long shadow of terrorism, and a series of wars that end not in victory, but in fatigue and doubt.

The story closes with the rise of Barack Obama—a moment freighted with hope, symbolism, and unresolved tension—marking not an end, but a pause. A moment to look around.

Through music, speeches, drama, and tragedy, Circumspection traces how the United States—once brash, certain, and outward-looking—comes to realize that the world is not as yielding as the continent it once conquered. Power proves costly. History resists control. And confidence, once lost, is not easily reclaimed.

This is America learning to hesitate—sometimes wisely, sometimes too late.

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This episode runs from 1945 to the epoch-making year of 1968 and recounts one of the most volatile, hypnotic stretches in American history—an era when the nation exited World War II triumphant yet weighted down with the responsibilities of global leadership. It’s a mythic period that shaped the present because so much of our 21st-century world was hammered into form during these years.

We start with a country bursting at the seams: factories roaring, the GI Bill sending young men into colleges that had never seen such crowds, and suburbs sprouting up everywhere. And in those new neighborhoods came the most seismic population wave in history—the Baby Boomers—children raised with postwar optimism, television, and a belief that the world was theirs to remake. We dig into what this tidal wave of youth meant for culture, politics, and expectations. A society built by wartime parents was about to be inherited—and challenged—by kids unscarred by the Depression and war.

But beneath that glow, the Cold War introduced a permanent state of low-level conflict. Korea became the first hot war of the new geopolitical order: a conflict Americans were asked to fight but not decisively win. The battle lines froze and a negotiated settlement followed, setting the tone for decades.

At home, something else was changing. Mass media—radio, television, and Hollywood’s golden-age glamour—began manufacturing celebrity on an industrial scale. Elvis and Marilyn weren’t merely stars; they were cultural weather systems. Americans learned to live with a constant hum of fame and fantasy, and Boomer teenagers fed that machine with unprecedented cultural power.

But the era darkened as well. The assassinations of JFK, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King Jr. shattered the illusion that American progress was inevitable. This episode focuses particularly on JFK: the charisma, the promise, and his sudden end in Dallas.

By 1968, the country was moving in two directions at once. The left veered further left, but the electorate still chose a GOP stalwart, Richard Nixon. This set the stage for the next round of national battles—and the Boomers, now coming of age, were poised to redefine everything in their path.

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Chapter 7: Crash moves through the giddy optimism of the Roaring Twenties and into the greatest calamities the modern world had ever known. We begin with jazz, speakeasies, and the glittering world of The Great Gatsby. Americans believed prosperity was the new normal and that technology would lead us only upward. Then the good times crashed on Black Tuesday in 1929, bringing that glittering decade to a sudden end. The Great Depression brought breadlines and dust storms to the country, replacing confidence with desperation. Franklin Roosevelt stepped in with bold experimentation — the New Deal — though not without critics who suspected government power was creeping too far into private life. Meanwhile, a dark storm was gathering abroad. Totalitarian regimes — Stalin’s Soviet Union and, most chillingly, Hitler’s Germany — rose by exploiting fear and national humiliation. Pearl Harbor thrust the nation into the conflict, shattering any illusions of isolation. The war was savage — from the beaches of Normandy to the jungles of the Pacific — but Americans pressed forward in every direction. And then, as if racing toward some terrible crescendo, science delivered a power so vast it seemed ripped from myth: the atomic bomb. When the blasts lit the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, they forced Japan’s surrender and sealed the defeat of the Axis powers. The chapter ends not with celebration, but with a sober recognition that humanity had crossed a threshold. We had survived a global depression and a world war, yet we stood staring into a new and uncertain age where the ability to annihilate ourselves might now be our most defining achievement.