When you compress the carotid arteries, you cut off the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain. This causes unconsciousness in approximately 8 to 15 seconds due to cerebral hypoxia (oxygen deprivation to the brain). Globalization has expanded the economic corpus, resulting in an interconnected world and yielding huge — though unevenly distributed — prosperity. It has also formed carotid arteries the size of … wait for it … the Strait of Hormuz.

In 1984 a forgettable made-for-TV movie contemplated a Middle East conflict that closed the Strait of Hormuz. For decades, U.S. strategic simulations have explored similar scenarios. In one 2002 war game, the Red Team, deploying asymmetrical capabilities, including armed speedboats, decimated American naval forces in 10 minutes, effectively closing the Strait. Why didn’t the Trump administration anticipate this entirely predictable scenario? A: Despite a warning from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president determined that the regime would capitulate before closing the strait, and that if it didn’t, the U.S. military could reopen it. He was wrong. This may be the greatest intelligence failure since CIA Director George Tenet famously told Bush it was a “slam dunk case” that Iraq had WMD. But let’s put aside the chokepoint (almost) everyone saw coming and discuss some others we choose to ignore.

Jekyll and Ketamine

Last year, one company conducted 84% of U.S. space launches and 52% of global launches: SpaceX. Almost two-thirds of the satellites orbiting Earth belong to the company, but it really dominates in low Earth orbit, where it owns 91% of communications satellites. If you’re connecting from a cellular deadspot, going online while flying one of 30-plus airlines, out on a boat, or operating in a war zone, you’re at Elon Musk’s mercy. He recently combined SpaceX with xAI at a valuation of $1.25 trillion, registering a 43% equity stake and 79% of the voting power. This week, SpaceX filed to go public, seeking to raise $50 billion to $75 billion, meaning Musk will likely become the world’s first trillionaire. He says he’s “creating the most ambitious, vertically integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications, and the world’s foremost real-time information and free-speech platform.” In other words, a global communications and information chokepoint.

With Musk, sometimes you get Dr. Jekyll (electric cars, reusable rockets, and medical breakthroughs for treating blindness and paralysis). Other times, you get Mr. Hyde (bullying a judge, Nazi salutes, and AI porn). Is Jekyll or Hyde the real Elon? A: Yes. As author Robert Caro, who’s written four volumes on power through the lens of LBJ, observed, power doesn’t necessarily corrupt, but it always reveals. “When you’re climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims,” Caro told the New York Times. “But then when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals.” Musk is, according to the Wall Street Journal, addicted to ketamine, determined to father a “legion-level” of offspring before the apocalypse, and (no surprise) perpetually engaged in custody battles. He also sleeps with loaded guns next to his bed. Is this the person we want at the epicenter of space, connectivity, AI, and media? ​​A: No one person should have this much power.

I have no idea what Musk intends to do with his power, and that’s the scary part … he’s unelected and answers to no one, as we now live in a society where billionaires are protected by the law, but not bound by it. Even scarier, Musk may not know either (see: ketamine). To paraphrase Richard Pryor, ketamine is a helluva drug. I tried it once under therapeutic supervision. Shit got real / unreal fast. As Shayla Love wrote in the Atlantic, “Excessive use of the drug can make anyone feel like they rule the world.” For most people, the danger of that delusion is contained inside a relatively small blast zone — the addict, their friends and family, their world. In Musk’s case, his world is … our world.

Article Two

Last weekend, an estimated 8 million Americans participated in No Kings protests. The rallies speak to the moment, but the demonstrators’ concerns are as old as America. As James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, No. 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” After fighting a revolution against a monarch, the Constitution’s framers split power across three branches of government, devising a system of checks and balances to put each branch in tension with the other two. Cumbersome by design. We spent the next 230 years reassembling the king.

The Constitution grants the power to tax and regulate foreign commerce exclusively to Congress, but according to Duke Law professor Timothy Meyer, “functionally, trade policy has been dominated by the executive branch since the 1930s.” The War Powers Resolution of 1973, sold as a check on Richard Nixon after revelations that he’d secretly bombed Cambodia, actually codified a 60-day blank check for presidential military action. Meanwhile, the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force — passed one week after 9/11 — has been cited to justify classified military operations in at least 22 countries. Congress has never declared war in my lifetime — but we’ve fought many, and we’re fighting one now. On paper, our system was built to avoid chokepoints by distributing power. We built one anyway: It’s inside the Oval Office. For the past century, as we ceded powers from the legislative and judicial to the executive branch, we’ve been hoping “norms” would help us avoid strangulation. And it worked … until it didn’t.

Cloud

Last October, a database glitch in northern Virginia took down Snapchat, Fortnite, Ring doorbells, Coinbase, Reddit, DoorDash, and about a thousand other services. The culprit was a malfunction at an Amazon Web Services data center — the third major outage tied to that location in the past five years. Downdetector received 6.5 million outage reports. Three companies — Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft — own two-thirds of the cloud market. These service interruptions rarely result in clients switching providers; leaving is too costly and time-consuming. After a perfect storm of bad code and a widespread Azure outage knocked airlines, hospitals, and banks offline in 2024, one cybersecurity expert said, “This is a very uncomfortable illustration of the fragility of the world’s core internet infrastructure.” If you’re under 30, that fragility is your lived experience. That’s what makes the cloud such a potent chokepoint. It’s hiding in plain sight … until it isn’t.

Mistakes that cause outages are one thing, but attacks from malicious actors are the bigger threat. Since 2005, 34 countries have been suspected of sponsoring cyber operations, with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia accounting for a combined 77% of suspected attacks. Since the start of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, Iranian hackers have hit a medical technology company, stolen and tried to sell data from Lockheed Martin, and breached FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email. Even more chilling is the emergence of a gray zone between war and peace, i.e., permanent cyberwar. As a 2022 Atlantic Council report explained, “Without firing a single bullet, U.S. adversaries are striking at the fibers of U.S. and allied societies, economies, and governments to test confidence in systems that underwrite both the U.S. constitutional republic and the U.S.-led, rules-based international order.” In other words, everyday, unseen hands reach across cyberspace and apply pressure to our air supply. When we gasp for air, however, we demand an immediate patch, rather than insisting on redundant airways.

Chip-Point

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is demonstrating a lesson we should’ve learned watching Ukraine repel Russia for the past three years — an $82 million fighter jet launched from a $13 billion aircraft carrier is an economic Goliath facing a swarm of $20,000 to $50,000 Davids, i.e., Shahed drones. While we’re bleeding resources and credibility, China is taking notes and looking at Taiwan. “The single biggest threat to the world economy, the single biggest point of single failure, is that 97% of the high-end chips are made in Taiwan,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at Davos this January. “If that island were blockaded, [or] that capacity were destroyed, it would be an economic apocalypse.” One company, TSMC, controls 72% of the global foundry market, producing chips for AMD, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. If China invaded Taiwan, global GDP would sustain an estimated 10% hit, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

But China doesn’t need to invade Taiwan or blockade it. They just need to flex — military exercises, missiles splashing down in shipping lanes to spook maritime insurance carriers, a cyber operation that takes TSMC offline for 72 hours — and watch Silicon Valley and JP Morgan scramble to derisk. The problem is, there’s nowhere to scramble to. Despite Biden’s carrots ($152 billion in CHIPS Act spending) and Trump’s sticks (tariffs), the soonest the U.S. can expect to have meaningful backup capacity is 2030. We’ve kept China at bay with a mix of globalization, strong coalitions, and military deterrence. The bulwark of allies defending our most critical technological chokepoint took decades to build, but only a year to disable with incoherent isolationist economic policies, insults, and now a war that exposes the gaps in our armor.

The Strait of Hormuz. One man’s satellite network. An autocracy cosplaying as a government. Three cloud providers. One island. We didn’t stumble into these chokepoints, we built them. The invisible, bipartisan hand of the market has been wrapping itself around our throat this whole time. We mistook shareholder value and purity tests for resilience, finding welcome distractions in Big Tech earnings calls and arguments over pronouns.

Life is so rich,

P.S.

I think about masculinity a lot. I have two sons, and the market for good (public) male role models is experiencing a supply shock. In his new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, filmmaker Louis Theroux chronicles influencers who cosplay as alpha males, displaying their fitness and wealth while vomiting misogynistic garbage re men dominating women. Spoiler alert: These guys will die alone and forgotten.

They’re also painfully boring. “The only way for them to maintain the attention of their audiences is to ramp up their behavior,” Jessica Grose wrote after watching the film. “They go beyond slurs and conspiracy theories to filming sex acts and beating strangers in the streets.” These influencers aren’t providing a template for a virtuous life, they are shills for an attention-economy grift.

Tragically, there’s never been anyone so adept at grifting the manosphere than Donald Trump. He claims to be concerned with the plight of young men (an admirable aim of the manosphere), but peddles a loud, crass, and ultimately bogus version of masculinity in service of his own enrichment, at the expense of his marks.

In my book Notes on Being a Man, I offer a vision of masculinity that emphasizes the roles men can play as providers, protectors, and procreators. Some people have pushed back, arguing that my framing overlooks men who don’t fit easily into those categories. Fair. Here’s a simpler framework: Men should add surplus value. Give more than they take. Leave rooms, relationships, and institutions better than they found them. That’s the whole shooting match. Try to absorb more complaints than they levy, de-escalate conflict, and notice people’s lives without needing to draw attention to their own.

Another takeaway from Theroux’s work: Calm and intellect trump physicality and aggression. The documentarian is slight, awkward … and owns the room. His honest, unafraid queries are never mean-spirited, and when his subjects turn on him, he just takes it (see above), as he knows he’s right. I wish I’d learned earlier in life that being a man means occasionally absorbing a blow without responding to restore some fucked-up sense of equilibrium to the universe.

Final takeaway. Ideology isn’t what’s driving the manosphere. The icons of this realm are grifters — there’s always a supplement, a crypto course, or a trading platform that drains boys (these are boys) economically in exchange for an illusory sense of self. Their followers engage because they have a desperate need for community. The manosphere, for all its flaws, is a community of men. The left should take notice: It celebrates and funds almost every special interest group — except the one that’s fallen faster than any other group in the last 50 years, young men.

Filter

If you’re a young man trying to figure out what surplus value looks like in practice, here’s a filter: Are you optimizing for attention, or service? Attention offers a dopa hit that evaporates into the ether, sending you chasing after things that will never merit mention in your best man’s wedding speech, the story your partner tells about why they chose you, or the eulogy your children give. Optimizing for service compounds value over a lifetime.

Captain Mueller

Last Friday, we lost a great American. Rather than sharing condolences, or reflecting on Robert Mueller’s decades of service, or simply demonstrating some grace, President Trump wrote, “Good, I’m glad he’s dead.” With just five words, Trump personified the antithesis of masculinity. In contrast, Mueller’s life was a case study in what it means to be a man. He optimized for service … as a Marine infantry officer, prosecutor, FBI director, and finally, special counsel. In addition to a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, he was awarded two invaluable titles: husband and father.

Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term “role model” in 1957 while studying the socialization of medical students. He found that we learn “scripts” from role models teaching us how to behave in a specific status (doctor, leader, parent, etc.). Mueller likely had dozens of great role models, but it was David Hackett, a classmate and lacrosse teammate at Princeton, who provided the leadership script.

After learning that his friend had been killed in combat while serving in Vietnam, Mueller volunteered for the Marines. As a “Fortunate Son” — Mueller was reportedly a Creedence Clearwater Revival fan — he could’ve sought deferments (Bill Clinton), asked a doctor to write a note saying he had bone spurs (Trump), or had his family pull strings to secure a National Guard spot (George W. Bush). Sociologist Alec Campbell quantified an uncomfortable truth about the Vietnam war: Someone from the general population was 3x to 4x more likely to die in combat than an Ivy League graduate. Mueller’s decision to serve was out of step with his socioeconomic cohort, but very much in character.

“I had one of the finest role models I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the name of David Hackett,” Mueller recalled in a 2013 speech he gave as FBI director. “One would have thought that the life of a Marine, and David’s death in Vietnam, would argue strongly against following in his footsteps. But many of us saw in him the person we wanted to be, even before his death,” Mueller went on. “A number of his friends and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.”

Service

The Marines live by a code: Semper Fidelis, Latin for “always faithful,” to the Constitution and the country, to the Corps, to their fellow Marines, and to the mission. Mueller served three years on active duty before attending law school. After a brief stint in private practice, he joined the Department of Justice. Years later, reflecting on a lifetime of service, Mueller said, “I consider myself exceptionally lucky to have made it out of Vietnam. There were many who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always felt compelled to contribute.”

Mueller’s contributions read like a John Grisham novel. After rising through the ranks as a prosecutor, he oversaw cases against Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, Gambino crime family boss John Gotti, and the terrorists who bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. But it’s the work Mueller did outside the spotlight that reveals his character. In 1995, two years after leaving the DOJ for private practice, Mueller volunteered to return in a lesser role, as a line prosecutor. “One day he called me, out of the blue, and asked if I could use a homicide prosecutor in my office,” recalled the chief federal prosecutor in Washington at the time, Eric Holder Jr., later Barack Obama’s attorney general. “Our nation’s capital was a city in great distress — we were called the murder capital of the United States.” For the next three years, Mueller prosecuted murder cases, helping to bring down the city’s homicide rate.

His greatest contribution, however, was leading the FBI for 12 years in the aftermath of 9/11, restoring public trust while reforming the bureau to address the systemic failures that had allowed the worst terrorist attack in American history. Fealty to his mission sometimes put him at odds with the presidents he served. Mueller’s counterterrorism agents blew the whistle on abuses and torture at secret CIA interogation sites. Later, in 2004, Mueller, with his resignation letter in hand, confronted President George W. Bush about a secret NSA program to spy on Americans. In his memoir, Bush wrote, “I had to make a big decision, and fast. I thought about the Saturday Night Massacre. That was not a historical crisis I was eager to replicate.” Fearing others would follow Mueller’s lead, Bush backed down, agreeing to reforms that would narrow the spying program and place it on more solid legal ground. A year later, Mueller’s deputy, James Comey, told an NSA audience, “It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most. It takes moral character. It takes an ability to see the future. It takes an appreciation of the damage that will flow from an unjustified ‘yes.’”

Character

My sons are too young to remember when Trump didn’t dominate America’s politics. In their eyes, bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, using your office to enrich yourself, and calling your efforts to avoid STDs your own “personal Vietnam” aren’t disqualifying. The manosphere is teaching their generation that masculinity is performative. Mueller’s life proves the opposite. Masculinity is a lifetime practice. Vietnam wasn’t a punchline for Mueller, but a moral proving ground. As he later said, “You were scared to death of the unknown. More afraid in some ways of failure than death, more afraid of being found wanting. That kind of fear animates your unconscious.” I want my boys to know that kind of fear, to understand that men aren’t measured by social media stats, body counts, and bank statements, but by whether they do the right thing, even when it’s hard, and especially when nobody is looking. The grifters are busy counting their followers, but real influence comes from planting trees whose shade you’ll never sit under.

Should his family choose, Captain Robert Mueller will be laid to rest with full military honors: a three-rifle volley salute, folding of the flag, and taps. In attendance will be many of the 25 high school hockey players he captained, the 50 marines he commanded, the thousands of colleagues he served with, his two daughters, five grandchildren and one wife of 60 years.

Captain Robert Mueller, United States Marine Corps, was 81.

Life is so rich,

P.S. Storytelling is the most important skill you need to succeed in the modern economy. Join Prof G Media Research Lead Mia Silverio this Tuesday, March 31, at 1:30 pm ET for a subscriber-only masterclass on the Science of Storytelling. Sign up here.

Sometimes the canary in the coal mine is an early warning system. Other times, a dead canary is a false positive that causes panicked miners to stampede to the surface, crushing each other in the rush for air that was never poisoned. The panic is the poison.

Currently, global markets are pricing in the economic fallout of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for 21% of the world’s oil and 20% of global liquefied natural gas. Equity markets in the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, and the UAE have declined 8% to 17% since February 28. Oil hit $127/barrel. The VIX spiked to 42 (anything above 30 signals panic). Former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld would’ve called this a “known known” — we saw it coming, we just didn’t stop it.

But known knowns don’t kill markets. Unknown unknowns do.

September 11th wasn’t on anyone’s risk model. The 2008 subprime mortgage crisis was “contained to subprime,” until Lehman collapsed and nearly took the global financial system with it. COVID-19 was “just a flu” until we shut down the world economy for two years.

The pattern is always the same: We’re staring at the obvious threat (oil prices, inflation, recession) while the real contagion is hiding in plain sight, waiting to metastasize. So let’s talk about the market collapse scenario nobody’s pricing in — the one that doesn’t show up in Bloomberg terminals or Goldman Sachs reports until it’s already eating the global financial system from the inside out.

Oil Shock

On the Paramount+ show Landman, oil fixer Tommy Norris (Billy Bob Thornton) describes the oil market’s Goldilocks nature: “You want oil to live above $60 a barrel, but below $90. Gas gets up over $3.50 a gallon, it starts to pinch. Oil hits $100, every product in America has to readjust its price.” U.S. gas prices reached $3.70 per gallon this week, prompting fears of 1970s-style stagflation and anxiety among Republicans, as the party in power typically pays a political price in an economic downturn. Neither of these outcomes is likely to lead to additional economic shocks as the markets have already priced in these scenarios. American leadership looks out the window and sees itself, and a world that reacts as we’d hope/expect. First off, the Trump administration is just so incredibly incompetent as to not recognize, in war, the enemy gets a say. Another blind spot? A: The rest of the world. Specifically, emerging economies … where governments are already rationing fuel.

The question isn’t where oil prices peak, but how long they remain elevated. As one analyst told Bloomberg, “The biggest risk in the market is the Strait of Hormuz remaining constrained for a longer stretch and the market feeling the U.S. and its allies have a limited capacity to alter the dynamic.” Some signs that risk may be underappreciated: Last week the U.S. and other International Energy Agency members released 400 million barrels of oil from their reserves — the largest distribution in history. This week, Trump asked NATO, Japan, South Korea, and even China to send their navies to help open the strait; they declined. Turns out, showing a total lack of respect for your allies weakens an alliance. Meanwhile, Trump added shavings of shit to his shit salad by suspending sanctions on Russian oil, undermining Ukraine’s war effort. Finally, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC the U.S. is “letting” Iran continue to ship its oil via the strait to supply the rest of the world. If it sounds like Trump is flailing, trust your instincts.

Death Zone

Above 26,000 feet, the human body cannot acclimatize — it can only deteriorate. The world’s most fragile economies have been living in the financial equivalent of the death zone for years: Unsustainable debt, thin reserves, and no margin for error. When oil prices spike, energy-dependent emerging economies get hit from three directions at once. The cost of importing energy rises, their currencies weaken against the dollar — oil is priced in dollars and everyone needs more of them — and the investors who lent them money start doing the math. That last part is the killer, as dollar-denominated debt is a hidden oil bet. When a country borrows in dollars, it’s implicitly betting that its local currency won’t weaken. Oil price spikes strengthen the dollar and crush local currencies simultaneously, making the country’s debt more expensive to service at exactly the moment it’s least able to pay it. That’s not one problem, it’s the same problem expressed twice. Since the war began, oil has spiked and the dollar has hit a 10-month high. Essentially, Trump ordered the surf and turf and, when the bill arrived, asked the server to split it 193 ways.

Outbreak

It’s often said that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. For Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, this war is the equivalent of RFK Jr. dictating health policy to an unvaccinated population. A week into the war, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said his country is in a state of “near-emergency.” Domestic fuel prices have spiked 17%, the Egyptian pound has declined 11% against the dollar, and traders have sold an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion in Egyptian bonds. A Goldman Sachs analyst told Bloomberg that Egypt is “exposed, but more resilient” than in previous crises, citing the country’s $52 billion in currency reserves. But according to Khalid Azim at the Atlantic Council, Egypt holds enough economic and geopolitical importance that, “if financing conditions tighten or external shocks intensify, stress in Egypt could serve as an early signal that broader financial instability is beginning to emerge across the region.”

Pakistan may be the most symptomatic patient on the ward. Just six days after the war’s start, the Pakistani government raised fuel prices 20% to stop hoarding. Meanwhile, the country carries external debt equal to 315% of its export revenue — meaning for every dollar of value created abroad, it’s already promised three to a foreign creditor. That’s not an economy; it’s a pawn shop selling grandma’s fillings. Pakistan’s equity markets are down 21% year-to-date, while its dollar bonds are down 5% since the start of the war. Exacerbating the problem, long-running border tensions with Afghanistan erupted into war last month. As one analyst told Bloomberg, Pakistan is experiencing “the double shock of a military and an oil price surge.” According to Pakistan’s army chief, the border war could end … just as soon as the Taliban ceases to support militants. Good luck with that. None of this is new for Pakistan, however. The IMF is less a lender of last resort to the country than a permanent fixture of its financial architecture, having provided 24 bailouts since 1958. The 25th check may already be in the mail.

Sri Lanka is the ghost of Christmas future. It already completed the full cycle — dollar debt, energy dependence, currency collapse, IMF bailout, political implosion — and is being asked to absorb another generational shock before it’s recovered from the last one. The island nation is also recovering from a 2025 cyclone that caused $3.5 billion in damage. On the positive side, Sri Lanka has 1% to 2% inflation and is predicted to see GDP grow by 5% this year. Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe told Bloomberg Sri Lanka is in a “good position” to absorb price shocks from the Middle East war … assuming the conflict ends in five or six weeks. In the meantime, the country is rationing fuel.

Then there’s Bangladesh, which imports 95% of its energy. The government lifted fuel restrictions after nine days of rationing, not because the situation had improved, but to celebrate the end of Ramadan. That doesn’t make economic sense, as Bangladesh risks blackouts and the collapse of its garment industry, the source of 85% of its exports. But in a country fresh off a 2024 student-led revolution that leveraged outrage over a previous financial crisis, the political options are a choice between awful and worse: It can use the military to guard fuel depots, or placate the population and hope the crisis in Iran ends before the summer heat spikes energy demand.

Contagion

In 1997 the Thai Baht collapsed. On its face, Thailand’s economic meltdown was containable … until it wasn’t. Within months, the crisis had spread across Asia, wiping out equities by 70% and sending $80 billion in foreign capital fleeing the region. The pathogen was fear. Banks didn’t stop to calculate losses in each country, they chose instead to pull back all at once. Thirteen years later, Greece — representing just 2% of eurozone GDP — threatened the entire European economy, not because it was too big to fail, but because European banks had pledged Greek debt as collateral, packaged it with other assets, and built a financial architecture that had no firewall once the first bond was written down. The question markets asked wasn’t “how much Greek debt does Deutsche Bank hold?” It was “what else is on their balance sheet that we don’t know about?”

I believe Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka each have the potential to be patient zero. Among European banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered are most exposed. The Middle East accounts for 9% of HSBC’s revenue and 12% of Standard Chartered’s profit before tax — different metrics, same direction of risk. Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, ING, and Société Générale have limited exposure, at less than 1% of revenue. The danger, however, is one the markets can’t see. The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report, published just months before the war began, warned explicitly about “limited visibility into balance sheets and the interconnectedness of nonbank financial institutions.” Debt crises share a common feature: The threat isn’t the institution or nation that defaults first, but the opaque financial instruments that make everyone else an unwitting co-signer. The unknown unknowns aren’t the emerging economies, they’re derivatives in Zurich, London, or New York that nobody stress-tested for $110 oil.

Infection

I was a teenager during the two major oil shocks of the 1970s. Those shocks weren’t abstract basis points; they upended my mother’s household math — take the bus vs. the car, wear sweaters instead of raising the thermostat. There are hundreds of millions of mothers in Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka doing the same math right now. ​​The bankers in London and New York will be fine, but for millions of kids in emerging markets, studying will cease at sunset.

Life is so rich,

P.S. Join me live on Substack on Wednesday March 25 at 1 p.m. ET, where I’ll be discussing my latest book, Notes on Being a Man, and answering your questions about the crisis facing young men. Prof G+ subscribers can sign up here.

Sometimes, you add more value going second. Tim Cook and Satya Nadella did not found Apple and Microsoft, but each took the wheel and increased their company’s market capitalization tenfold. Last week, Dario Amodei went first in pushing back on the Trump administration, refusing to let the Department of Defense dictate the policies of a private business. But, in what may be the most undercovered story in tech, Satya Nadella may have changed the political landscape following his lead.

The flow of capital concentrates around good stories. Entrepreneurs deploy narratives that capture imaginations and capital, pulling the future forward. Narratives also work in reverse. Last month a piece of science fiction masquerading as a research report wiped out $300 billion in market value by describing a near-future scenario where AI led to 10% unemployment, consumer spending collapsed, markets cratered, and the economy was fundamentally altered. More recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, demonstrating that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste, deployed a narrative that turned a $200 million contract dispute into a branding event that added $150 billion to his firm’s valuation, while de-positioning OpenAI.

Nihilistic Weirdo

OpenAI originated as a nonprofit AI research company. Its mission sounded noble. “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” Sam Altman and his co-creators wrote back in 2015. OpenAI has since dropped the nonprofit masquerade, registering an $840 billion valuation, with Altman backfilling whatever narrative maintains its hallucinogenic 34x revenue multiple.

In 2024, Altman said ads plus AI were “uniquely unsettling,” calling advertising a “last resort” business model. Two years later, the firm is testing ads. In 2023, Altman told a Senate hearing, “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” Cut to: reports of users becoming addicted to ChatGPT, forming romantic relationships with chatbots, and experiencing psychosis, followed by multiple wrongful death lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT helped users to take their own lives. In a remarkably tone-deaf post on X last October, Altman wrote, “We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.” With safe mode turned off, ChatGPT has a new feature … porn. Between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, whose Grok is the league leader in LLM-generated porn, AI is becoming a race to the bottom (pun intended). OpenAI also has a social network, Sora. But instead of connection, Sora provides users with unlimited AI slop starring … themselves. It also serves up content starring fictional characters and dead celebrities, including Stephen Hawking dying in a skateboard accident and Martin Luther King Jr. wearing a MAGA hat. (The King video has since been removed.)

You don’t need Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money trail from OpenAI’s altruistic origin story to the uncomfortable conclusion that the most dangerous AI isn’t one that goes rogue — it’s the one run by Sam Altman. Consider his response to criticism that Americans are subsidizing AI data centers that have driven up the wholesale cost of electricity by 267%: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model — but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life — and all the food you consume during that time — before you become smart.” On social media, people compared Altman to Agent Smith, the villain from The Matrix who calls humanity a virus. I see it. But I also see Her, a movie Altman is evidently so obsessed with that he stole Scarlett Johansson’s voice for a virtual assistant. Her is a cautionary tale about human connection. Altman watched it and thought: I can monetize that. The film’s tragedy is that Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) falls for something that was never really there. The tragedy of OpenAI is the same story — and a nihilistic weirdo is getting rich off others’ loneliness.

The Hero We Need

Laddering highlights your strengths by illuminating a competitor’s weakness. Imagine if Kara Swisher, my Pivot co-host, said, “I’m the host with good hair.” It’s a branding twofer: an organic reminder that your adversary sucks and you are wonderful by comparison.

Enter Dario Amodei, the Jekyll to Altman’s Hyde. During a recent contract negotiation with the Department of Defense, Anthropic refused to remove safeguards prohibiting the use of the company’s technology in autonomous weapons and the mass surveillance of Americans, believing those applications can’t be safely and reliably performed by today’s AI. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded with a shakedown: The U.S. would brand Anthropic a supply chain risk or seize their tech via the Defense Production Act. To Hegseth, the corporation isn’t an entity, subject to a fair legal system, that creates the profits that help fund the Defense Department, but an entity that is either with us, or against us. If this movie starring man-children hopped up on steroids they buy at gas stations sounds familiar, trust your instincts. Law firms, universities, and Big Tech have bent the knee, while the rest of corporate America has adopted a duck-and-cover strategy in the face of tariffs that are both illegal and stupid, i.e., hurting others while hurting ourselves.

In contrast, Amodei stood up … for humanity, safety, and the rule of law: Companies have the right to do business with the government, as well as the right to decline, without fear of punishment. Publicly, Altman supported Amodei, but in private he did the deal Anthropic wouldn’t. The following day, after news of Altman’s deal broke, U.S. uninstalls of ChatGPT increased 295%, and Claude climbed to No. 1 in the App Store. Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue surged to $19 billion, from $14 billion just a few weeks ago, adding an estimated $150 billion to its valuation. Altman / OpenAI came across as reckless, duplicitous, and self-serving. Amodei / Anthropic came across as safety-conscious, honest, and selfless.

A year ago, I predicted the first CEO who forcefully and publicly resisted Trump could reap significant benefits, both reputationally and commercially. With its reputation for breaking barriers and the boldness chromosome in its DNA, I thought / hoped it would be Nike. But Amodei just did it … and Microsoft followed his lead, filing a brief in support of Anthropic’s lawsuit seeking to block its designation as a supply chain risk. As one of the largest government contractors, Microsoft has more to lose than almost any tech company. But as Andrew Ross Sorkin put it, “Microsoft decided the cost of staying silent was higher.”

Boycott

In 1880s Ireland, a community neutralized a ruthless land agent named Captain Charles Boycott by collectively refusing to work for, trade with, or even speak to him. Making Boycott the face of a tenant rights campaign wasn’t the right answer (British landlords were far more complicit), but his selection was effective. As historian Rutger Bregman recently wrote, the difference between past movements that fizzled and those that succeeded is simple: “They picked a single target — one that was both symbolically powerful and genuinely vulnerable — and went all in.”

We launched Resist and Unsubscribe to demonstrate to consumers that their wallets are weapons. We wanted to convert public anger into effective action and rewire the incentive for CEOs to make clear that enabling fascism carries a financial downside. Movements … move, i.e., they change course, narrow focus, and advance. We encourage everyone to participate in Resist and Unsubscribe however they choose. But going forward, our target is more focused: OpenAI.

While still dominant among LLMs, OpenAI is vulnerable. Its app’s market share has fallen from 69% to 45% in the past year, and the company is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026. In addition, QuitGPT has already mobilized 4 million people to boycott OpenAI products. Strength in numbers. OpenAI is also symbolic of fascist enablers. See: Altman’s pivot from Trump critic to sycophant just seven days after the inauguration, OpenAI President Greg Brockman’s $25 million donation to Trump’s super PAC, and the firm’s decision to enable mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons without safeguards. Finally, OpenAI is the poster child for an industry facing growing backlash, with 77% of Americans saying they believe AI threatens humanity.

$10,000

Movements build infrastructure to grow. After creating a website that made unsubscribing easy, we launched a meter to track progress. Many of you have joined the movement (welcome), and some have created additional infrastructure (thank you). My personal favorite: Risto Lähdesmäki’s Impact Calculator. If our wallets are weapons, the Impact Calculator is our force multiplier. When one person cancels their $20-per-month ChatGPT subscription, OpenAI loses $240 in annual revenue and sheds $10,000 in valuation. If you have a decent social network, your impact can easily reach six figures. Sharing impact compounds impact.

The most powerful agent in the world isn’t GPT-5; it’s a consumer with a conscience and an Unsubscribe button. Sam Altman went from “AI will save humanity” to AI porn and government surveillance tools. He’s the tech bro embodiment of that boyfriend who says he’s “focusing on himself right now” and three weeks later gets engaged to your roommate. Except instead of your roommate, it’s Pete Hegseth. And instead of love, it’s autonomous weapons. Cancel your $20/month subscription. Make him feel something other than the void he’s trying to fill with AI companions and DOD contracts.

Broken

I believe Sam Altman is broken and, worse, could break us. In life there are “tells,” moments and behaviors that provide insight into a person’s character: How they treat their pets; if they make eye contact with service staff; how they talk about their ex. Responding to a question re the energy needs of AI, Sam highlighted how much energy and effort is required to raise a human capable of critical thinking. This is the tell. He embodies what I believe is most concerning about the virus that’s infected Big Tech: For them, ROI supersedes humanity.

The whole shooting match in life is to find people and causes who will let you love and invest in them, who require and accept a great deal from you — possibly more than you’ll ever get back. For me, it’s raising children with a partner, and the reward is the absence of any ROI. It’s the opportunity to invest without the expectation of any return other than that they, someday, become agents of care and comfort for others. AI, GDP, and shareholder value are just the means. The ends are being in a position to give more than you can ever get.

Life is so rich,

P.S. In case you weren’t paying attention, Jessica Tarlov and I are live from SXSW with James Talarico — Saturday, March 14, at 3:30 p.m. EDT. Prof G+ subscribers only. Upgrade and register for the livestream here.

After six months and eight failed bids, the Ellisons made the Warner Bros. Discovery board an offer they couldn’t refuse. The potential Netflix acquisition would’ve been akin to fusing LVMH and Walmart — HBO’s prestige TV and Warner’s iconic IP, plus Netflix’s scale. Paramount Skydance buying WBD is the fusion of a dog and a car bumper traveling 80 miles an hour. Spoiler alert: It’s not going to end well.

Warner Bros. Curse

The story of Warner Bros. is a recurring masterclass in ego cosplaying corporate synergy. The company has undergone seven sales, mergers, or structural separations since 1967. The script remains the same: A new CEO decides Warner Bros. is the missing piece of their legacy, only to find they’ve partnered with a high-maintenance spouse who, after several years, leaves with half of everything the acquiring company used to own.

In 1989, Time Inc. and Warner Communications announced a “merger of equals” that would create Time Warner, the world’s largest media company to date. Things did not go as planned. First, Paramount’s hostile takeover attempt (past is prologue) scuttled the proposed stock swap and bid up the price. A year later, the deal closed at a $14 billion valuation — 13x EBITDA. To finance it, Time Warner took on $1.1 billion in annual interest payments to service $10.8 billion in debt. To avoid bankruptcy, Time Warner initiated “Project Glass,” a good bank / bad bank structure that put the company’s crown jewels (HBO, the film and television studios, and the cable assets) under a subsidiary, enabling it to receive cash infusions from outside investors. Meanwhile, the merger became a case study in clashing corporate cultures.

The Time Warner merger would provide a blueprint for future M&A disasters. Exhibit A: The ultimate destruction of shareholder value, AOL’s $167 billion merger with Time Warner. This time, the culture clash was between a legacy media company and an internet startup. The bigger issue, however, was that $167B valuation, premised on dot-com-era hallucinations. AOL’s market cap was nearly double Time Warner’s, while Time Warner had 5x the revenue. As the dot-com bubble began to deflate, news broke that AOL had been propping up its growth narrative by fraudulently inflating its advertising revenue. In the end, AOL Time Warner never came close to justifying a multiple of 25x to 30x EBITDA, and within a year of securing regulatory approval, the company took a historic $99 billion write-down. By 2003, Time Warner dropped AOL from its name, and in 2009 it spun off the unit. AOL’s value at the spin was $3B, a shadow of the $167B assigned just 10 years before.

But wait, there’s more.

In 2018 the synergy delusion struck again. This time, AT&T acquired Time Warner for $85 billion, creating WarnerMedia on the theory that its “dumb pipes” were the chocolate to Warner’s peanut butter, i.e., great content. But WarnerMedia struggled to make streaming profitable, its theatrical business was devastated by the pandemic, and once again there was a culture clash. The bigger challenge, however, was a 2.9x debt-to-EBITDA ratio, which trapped the telco in a pincer between dividend payments (a utility company’s raison d’être) and servicing the interest on $180 billion in debt. Ultimately, AT&T spun Warner, combining it with Discovery in a deal that netted the telco $43 billion — a 50% haircut.

The WBD sequel combined all the elements of the Worst Acquisition in History franchise. Another culture clash, this time between Discovery’s unscripted empire and Warner’s premium sensibilities, a wannabe mogul overpaying so he could cosplay as Robert Evans (ask Claude), and a 5x debt-to-EBITDA ratio. The good news? The sequel had a short runtime. CEO David Zaslav slashed costs, engineered a good bank / bad bank structure to spin WBD’s declining linear assets, and ultimately orchestrated a bidding war that restored shareholder value. As an operator, Zaz is Ed Wood (see: the worst branding decision in history, deprecating HBO), but as an investment banker, he’s Steven Spielberg.

Veruca Salt

What do you get a nepo baby who already has Paramount? A: Warner Bros. According to one study that tracked 3,250 wealthy families over two decades, 90% lose their fortune by the third generation. Prediction: Larry Ellison’s great-grandchildren will never forgive him for providing a personal guarantee so David could go to the Oscars.

While the deal is priced at a multiple of 8x to 12x EBITDA, the “E” is anchored to a linear TV ecosystem that’s unraveling faster than regulators can approve the deal. WBD plus Paramount = 2x the linear headache. Wall Street is being asked to pay a premium for a story whose ending everyone already knows. And if valuation is the rock, leverage is the hard place. Last year the two companies generated a combined operating profit of $11 billion, before depreciation and amortization. The Paramount-WBD combo is two drowning men clinging to each other, hoping the combined weight of their $79 billion in debt will somehow act as a flotation device. It won’t, which is why Paramount’s debt was downgraded to junk status after the Ellisons “won” the WBD bidding war. With his new toy having a leverage ratio north of 6x, David Ellison has promised $6 billion in “synergies” within three years. (Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos put the figure closer to $16 billion, after examining WBD’s books.) Synergies is Latin for layoffs. Additional “synergies” could be found by consolidating HBO Max with Paramount+ into a Franken-streamer no one asked for, merging CNN with CBS News, and going Cleopatra, i.e., selling one or both studio lots to real estate developers. (See: Fox selling 300 acres of its back lot to create Century City.)

Alderaan

In Star Wars, when Grand Moff Tarkin tests the Death Star by destroying Alderaan, a pained Obi-Wan Kenobi says, “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.” Big Tech is the Death Star, and Hollywood’s creative community is Alderaan. After acquiring Paramount, the Ellisons laid off 2,000 employees — 10% of the workforce. After acquiring WBD, David Ellison attempted to quell layoff fears among Warner employees, insisting the majority of cost-cutting would come from “non-labor sources.” Nobody believes that. It’s going to be difficult to cut billions in snacks.

While it’s not yet fully operational, but armed with a TikTok laser, the Ellisons are fixing their AI Death Star’s sights on Hollywood. For a sneak preview of coming attractions, see the credits of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The Marvel movie employed 3,000-plus cast and crew members — more people than work at Lyft or Reddit. The Ellisons don’t care if Hollywood is ready for AI. They believe AI is ready for Hollywood. Paramount / WBD is ground zero. Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and YouTube won’t be collateral damage, they’ll be the beneficiaries. The Ellisons blow up Alderaan; Big Tech inherits the Empire.

Better Off Ted

After walking away from the WBD deal, Netflix’s stock popped 14%, partially reversing a 20% to 30% drop in the share price since the deal was first proposed. As a parting gift, Netflix pocketed a $2.8 billion break up fee, equivalent to 15% of its annual content budget. During the bidding war, Hollywood cast Netflix as the white knight and the Ellisons as the villains. Remarkable, given Hollywood’s 2023 work stoppage was called the “Netflix strike.” When I was pitching a television show, the money was better at Netflix, but everyone wanted to work for HBO, which punches above its weight in cultural relevance. The Ellisons won’t just burn HBO’s goodwill, they’ll napalm it with a cocktail of AI slop and arrogance garnished with fascist flourishes. In Hollywood, reputation is currency, and the Ellisons are broke.

But perhaps Netflix’s biggest win is that it may have thrown the competition into stasis. Despite using their relationship with President Trump as a cudgel, the Ellisons must still clear EU regulatory hurdles, as well as potential litigation from state attorneys general. They’ll likely get approval, as antitrust enforcers no longer break up behemoths, just delay their agenda. Nevertheless, history demonstrates that any deal to acquire Warner Bros. has a remarkably short shelf life.

The Mouse Knows

Ted Sarandos was on the verge of a transformative acquisition … and still is. But it’s not WBD. A decent test of value is to benchmark similar assets. By walking from the deal, Ted and Co. saved $121B, and their equity value has increased $60B since putting the WBD spliff down. Add the $3B break-up fee and you have an effective $184B (opportunity) cost for WBD. So, what could you get for $184B? A: The Mouse … Walt Disney Co. ($179B). A side-by-side comparison illuminates just how talented an auctioneer David Zaslav is, and suggests the Centerview bankers who talked Ellison into paying this price have a second career as psychedelic doulas. Let’s shine a light on the unexploded IED that is WBD.

For the same price, Wall Street would have you believe that WBD was the “value play.” It isn’t. It’s a value trap. Disney generated $21 billion in operating income last year on $91B in revenue — WBD registered $11B in operating income on $42B in revenue, and half of that came from a dying linear TV business that’s shedding subscribers. But the real gap isn’t in the financials — it’s in the moats. Disney has theme parks that print $8B in operating income annually with 60%+ incremental margins. WBD has ... CNN and TBS reruns. Disney owns the IP that dominates global culture: Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, ESPN. WBD owns HBO (great) and a back catalog that hasn’t produced a billion-dollar franchise in a decade. Disney’s parks business alone — just the parks — is worth more than WBD’s entire enterprise value. You’re buying a recession-resistant, pricing-power machine with Disney. With WBD, you’re buying a melting ice cube of linear TV assets wrapped in $40B of debt trading at 5x leverage. One of these companies will be worth $300B in 10 years. The other will be sold for parts to Netflix. The second generation of wealth ensures that the third generation … isn’t. Shari Redstone, Edgar Bronfman Jr., and (now) David Ellison.

The Great Escape

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with cable news anchors who are seeing their pay fall off a cliff. My advice is always the same: Seize the means of production, i.e., start a podcast, launch a Substack, etc. We’ve transitioned from a fossil-fuel-based economy to an attention economy, full stop. If you command attention, revenue follows. The Ellisons will do to CNN what they’re already doing to CBS News. At CNN, $3M/year anchors are a cost center on a bloated P&L. On YouTube or Substack, they’re platforms with 90% margins. The smart money isn’t betting on the logo on the building; it’s betting on the X-wing fighter, the individual talent with the firepower to knock out the Death Star before it can recharge and hit its next target. I know, I’m getting carried away with the Star Wars stuff. Whatever, my Bantha (i.e., newsletter).

The Worst Acquisition in History, Again: Part II

There are only two ways to make money in the media business: bundling and unbundling. We’re in a bundling phase. The question isn’t what the Ellisons will do with Paramount and WBD, but who will acquire those assets at fire-sale prices when their AI synergy narrative can no longer provide cloud cover for their pair of overleveraged legacy media companies. My prediction: We’ll see this movie again, starring Netflix, Apple, and Amazon as bargain hunters with delusions of grandeur that involve paying a failed CEO hundreds of millions for the right to fire hundreds of thousands of their employees. In Star Wars, the good guys blow up the Death Star. In Hollywood, you just wait for it to collapse under its own debt load. Same ending, lower production budget.

Life is so rich,

P.S.

This Sunday, Kara Swisher and I will be in Minnesota for Resist and Unsubscribe. The event is sold out, but you can WATCH IT LIVE on Substack. Register here.

The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality popular among economists. Zero indicates everyone in a society has the same; a score of 1.0 means one individual owns everything. In the U.S., we’re higher than 0.8 — about the level seen when the French were separating people from their heads. The superwealthy have amassed vast fortunes without fear of mobs arriving with pitchforks. U.S. policies, turbo-charged by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that opened the gates to unlimited spending on elections, have widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots. As wealth concentrates, billionaire political spending rises higher, securing policy outcomes that further concentrate wealth. The chaser is inflation, which transfers still more wealth from earners, whose purchasing power erodes, to owners, who are insulated.  

A reckoning is underway, ignited by the mountain of Epstein documents, which are giving the public a window into the rarefied world where the 0.01% are protected by the law but not bound by it, while the rest of us are bound by the law but not protected by it. Among hundreds of names appearing in the files are three of the nation’s best-known billionaires: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates. Americans are fed up, not just with the depravity of some people in the Epstein class, but also with the massive wealth they continue to accumulate while the working class struggles. We aren’t talking about beheadings today, but modern-day guillotines are on the way: shame and taxes. 

$2 Trillion

The top 1% control almost one-third of the nation’s wealth, their biggest share since World War II. The top 0.1% increased their wealth by 40% in the last three years. But UC Berkeley researchers say the top 400 paid only an estimated 23.8% of their income in taxes from 2018 to 2020 — a smaller percentage than the average American — down from 30% between 2010 to 2017. It’s not just an American phenomenon. Last year, the world’s 500 richest people added more than $2 trillion to their collective net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Governments around the world are putting the rich on notice, hoping to address this disparity, plug fiscal holes, raise money for defense, and address the challenge of aging populations. A few examples:

• In California, a proposed tax on billionaires would require those with a net worth above $1.1 billion to pay a one-time tax equal to 5% of their assets.

• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called for a 2 percentage point increase in income taxes on people earning more than $1 million a year.

• U.K. Chancellor Rachel Reeves used the budget to shift some of the burden onto wealthier people, targeting higher-value property and investment income. 

• In France, left-leaning parties unsuccessfully pushed for a tax that would have required people with fortunes of more than €100 million to pay a minimum tax of 2% annually on their assets. Narrower measures were enacted instead.

Revolution

Wealth taxes are a tempting way to tackle inequality. They’re also an obvious means of raising revenue. In America, $5 trillion of receipts and $7 trillion in spending is (again) a transfer of wealth from earners to owners, as it’s inflationary. This isn’t sustainable. Fiscal strain in the U.K. prompted 30 economists to sign an open letter calling for a wealth tax to raise tens of billions of pounds. Voters also like this idea: Three quarters of British adults backed the idea of a 2% tax on wealth above £10 million.

But there’s a problem; wealth taxes don’t work. In 1990 a dozen OECD countries had wealth taxes. By last year, only three remained, in Norway, Spain, and Switzerland. Most of the measures collected little revenue and failed to meet their goals, sparking concerns they could stifle innovation and growth. In some cases, the superrich packed their bags and fled. 

If the megawealthy don’t leave the country, they’ll deploy accountants and lawyers to value their assets at 40% of what tax authorities believe they’re worth. How are you going to value a stake in a small business? If you don’t have the cash sitting in your bank account, will you have to sell assets to pay your bill? Wealth taxes in the U.S. would also face challenges on constitutional grounds. Targeting people’s assets may violate private property laws while creating massive administrative complexity. 

Capital vs. Sweat

Finding flaws in wealth taxes is easier than coming up with solutions. But there are commonsense ideas we should adopt to ensure the superrich and large corporations pay their fair share. One is tackling the carried-interest loophole, which allows private equity and venture capital managers to be taxed at the capital gains rate of 20%, well below the top rate of 37% for ordinary income. Taxing carried interest as ordinary income could raise about $15 billion over the next 10 years. That’s not a game changer, but it’s a start.

Capital isn’t more noble than sweat. There’s no reason someone should pay a 37% tax on their income while the wealthy pay much less when they sell stocks. In 2021 income from capital gains accounted for 39% of pretax income for the top 1%, compared with less than 1% for those in the bottom three quintiles.

Buy, Borrow, Die

If you want to climb into the upper echelons, follow a three-step strategy: Buy, borrow, die. While wages are taxed when they’re earned, assets are taxed when they’re sold. The wealthy often borrow against stock holdings and other assets, which grow more valuable over time, rather than selling them, deferring their tax liability. As long as interest rates are lower than the rate of return on the assets they hold, billionaires can spend more on houses, yachts, or even islands, while enjoying significant wealth appreciation. In 2011, a year in which Jeff Bezos was worth $18 billion, he reported so little income that he received a $4,000 child tax credit. Americans with more than $100 million of wealth held an estimated $8.5 trillion in unrealized capital gains in 2022. 

One idea: When the rich borrow and use their assets as collateral, they should pay tax on the difference in the value of that stock or property between when they originally bought it and the day it’s pledged. Treating borrowing as a taxable event could raise more than $100 billion over a decade.

IRS Tax Gap

A hobbled IRS is a massive tax cut for rich individuals and large corporations, amounting to the most regressive tax in recent history. Auditing lower- and middle-income tax returns is easy; holding wealthy taxpayers with high-priced lawyers accountable requires a lot more resources. The tax gap, the difference between the amount of taxes owed and the amount collected on time, surged to almost $700 billion in 2022. Most of the taxes owed stem from underreporting of income by richer taxpayers. 

An $80 billion increase in IRS funding planned under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (since rescinded) would have alleviated some of the pressure, netting more than $600 billion over a decade. Instead, the agency faces even more pain after losing more than a quarter of its workforce. If we want to move the needle on wealth inequality, strengthening IRS enforcement is critical.

Alternative Minimum Tax

In 1969, Congress learned that 155 taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000 had paid no federal income tax in 1966. So legislators created an early version of the alternative minimum tax, which essentially compares an individual’s income before and after they claim certain deductions and embrace all the loopholes. After a portion of their income is exempted, the taxpayer must pay tax on whichever amount is greater. Legislation in 2017 didn’t eliminate the tax, but it limited its scope, dropping the number of taxpayers affected from more than 5 million to 200,000. 

We should have an individual AMT, with people above a $1 million threshold taxed at 40% and those over a $10 million threshold taxed at 60%. I estimate this could raise hundreds of billions per year, while only affecting the top 0.2%, or 275,000 taxpayers.

More Time With Family

As the tax debate heats up, billionaires inevitably start to focus on spending more time with their family — as long as they live in a low-tax state. In 2023, Bezos announced he was moving to Miami after almost three decades in Seattle to be close to his parents. His family must have used all the face time to persuade him to sell billions in stock in a state that doesn’t tax capital gains. In 2022, Washington state imposed a new 7% capital gains tax on sales of stocks or bonds of more than $250,000.

Boiling Point

Now Mark Zuckerberg is in the process of buying a property in Florida, triggering speculation that he’s unhappy about the proposed new tax on California billionaires. You think? The Meta CEO has benefited enormously from taxpayer-funded investments in education and infrastructure in the Golden State. If he wants to peace out to Florida, fine, but when he sells tens of billions of dollars in stock, he shouldn’t be able to escape tax on the massive wealth he accrued while living in California. 

Billionaires can run, but they shouldn’t be able to hide. 

We don’t need a revolution. We need a functioning IRS, capital gains taxed as income, and the death of the carried-interest loophole. The guillotine isn’t coming, the 1040 is. At a minimum, let’s stop pretending the system is broken by accident. It’s working exactly as designed — for those at the very top.

Life is so rich,

P.S. Kara Swisher and I are coming to Minneapolis. Catch the first ever Resist and Unsubscribe LIVE event, on March 8 at 7 p.m. at the Pantages Theater. Tickets are available here, with proceeds to benefit the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.

The post The Epstein Tax appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.

After launching Resist and Unsubscribe, I needed to build awareness and turned to broadcast media. Since Feb. 1, I’ve hit every corner of the map, from Amanpour and Anderson Cooper to the Bulwark and MS Now. Our goal is to counter Trump’s assault on American values by zeroing in on what he really cares about: the markets. We’re asking people to join an economic strike targeting Big Tech and companies enabling ICE. If we succeed in turning even a small number of them into unsubscribers, that could translate into a sizable decline in subscription growth (mother’s milk to the tech companies) and market value. Only then will CEOs who’ve enabled the president push back … or at least get off their knees.

It’s understandable to feel powerless, and fair to point to the power of protests or identify the November midterm elections as the opportunity to reverse America’s descent into authoritarianism. And it’s easy to write off our campaign as quixotic: Boycotts don’t work. It’s fantasy to think CEOs will take on the president. People are too reliant on their iPhones and Amazon Prime. But the stats show our movement is working.

The Best Investment

During my 21-day, 30-outlet media tour, we’ve registered more than 1.5 million visits to our Resist and Unsubscribe website — without spending a penny on ads (the ads we tried to buy were deemed political and rejected by Meta and Google). Uploading our site analytics into ChatGPT and Claude, I asked what the cost would be to drive that amount of traffic to an e-commerce startup or political advocacy site. The range was $4.5 million to $8 million in paid ads. Our owned channels provide substantial economic firepower.  

The unfortunate learning? Arguably, one of the best investments a young person can make is to build an owned media channel every day for 20 years. In the summer of 2007, I started following 100 people a day on Twitter to get 40 follows back. The investment in content, videos, podcasts, and personnel, to say nothing of the emotional toll — I fucking hate social media and the toxicity that is the comment section — has had a huge ROI.

Some Are Better Than Others

The data provides valuable insights about the media ecosystem and what inspires audiences to act. Traditional media, podcasts, and social media accounts are all providing fuel for the campaign, generating support we couldn’t achieve on our own, but some channels are more effective than others.

Out of the gates, the reaction was mostly positive. More than 3,300 new readers joined the No Mercy / No Malice subscriber list, and 500 people commented on my Jan. 30 post outlining our call to arms. My Instagram account (if you want to spread the word you’re a prisoner to the monopolistic platform) lit up as my more than 1.6 million followers responded to my videos. Still, the wider impact was muted.

NPR

Seeking to expand our footprint, we shifted focus to some of the heavyweights of traditional media, including CNN’s Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper, PBS’s Hari Sreenivasan, and MS Now’s Stephanie Ruhle. Their networks still have influence, a halo effect that drives online engagement and interest among other media outlets.

Although Congress has slashed $500 million in funding for public media, those outlets haven’t gone anywhere. Our data show a single story on NPR’s website led more than 28,000 unique visitors to our website, behind only Instagram, Facebook, and Google.

Assuming a conversion rate of 5% — fair, given that many e-commerce sites register rates of 2% to 4%, and that paid ads aren’t driving our more intentional visitors — that’s more than 1,400 people unsubscribing. If consumers ditch two platforms on average, that’s 2,800 unsubscribes, about $700,000 of lost sales, and a $7 million impact on market cap (relying on a standard industry multiple of 10x revenue).

Hand(ler) It to Chelsea

The major media outlets have given us a bump, but the buzz is proving hard to sustain. We knew we needed other voices, providing third-party credibility, to maintain the energy. We’ve received mentions from current and former elected representatives (AOC and Adam Kinzinger), but we live in a celebrity nation. Chelsea Handler, who contacted me after hearing about Resist and Unsubscribe, posted a video earlier this month focusing on the platforms she’s unsubscribed from. The video garnered more than 128,000 likes and  inspired more than 6,000 visits, almost a fifth of the 34,000 users who’ve migrated from Instagram to our site. Applying the same math, that’s more than $100,000 of lost revenue and $1 million in market value. From just one post.

New Media

Influential voices, including Tim Miller from The Bulwark Podcast, are having more impact on their own platforms than when they appear on traditional platforms. We’ve drawn more than 18,000 people from Substack, no doubt fueled by Miller’s account, almost as many people as we’ve attracted from our own site, profgalloway.com. My conversation earlier this week with MS Now’s Nicolle Wallace on her podcast, The Best People, has almost half a million views on YouTube.

That’s aligned with the trends we’re seeing on Pivot. Data show that among the core demographic — adults between 25 and 54 — Pivot has a bigger audience than Fox News, CNN, or CNBC. While we trail Fox and CNN in overall audience size, those who tune in to Pivot have a much higher median income.

Little Steps, Big Impact

One point I’ve tried to drive home is that you have more power than you think. If you cancel a premium ChatGPT subscription, that’s $20 a month, or $240 a year in savings. Given that OpenAI is approaching a funding round that values the company at about $850 billion — more than 40 times its revenue of $20 billion — a withdrawal of $240 translates into a market cap reduction of about $10,000. 

That’s just one tech company we’ve identified as having an outsize influence over the economy and our president, alongside Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, Paramount, and Uber. While tech is the main focus, we’re also targeting companies that enable ICE, such as AT&T, Comcast, and Dell. With these companies, we aim to inflict maximum disruption with minimum impact on consumers. 

We know that slowing subscriber growth stings. Exhibit A is T-Mobile. Earlier this month it reported adding 30,000 fewer mobile-phone subscribers than analysts expected in the fourth quarter. The company shed $12 billion in market value in after-hours trading. In the tech industry, even slight misses can have a significant impact. Microsoft lost more than $350 billion in value on January 29 after sales growth at its Azure cloud division slowed by a single percentage point from the prior quarter.

Sustained Pressure

Most economic strikes do not work. Those that do are the result of sustained efforts, not one cinematic action. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a defining moment in the American Civil Rights Movement. But the Black community, led by a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., coordinated a massive carpool system (300 private cars) to boycott public buses over 381 days, costing the bus system about $3,000 per day ($35,000 adjusted for inflation). Segregation on public buses ended in 1956 after a Supreme Court ruling declared it unconstitutional. 

The struggle we face today is different, but we can find inspiration in our nation’s past. One thing is clear: Sustained economic pressure is critical. As Lucy Atkinson, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told NPR, “boycotts work when they last.” She believes it will be tough for consumers to walk away from Amazon, which dominates the e-commerce market, but cutting the number of hours spent on its tech offerings, even for a short period, could reduce consumers’ reliance on the company, potentially extending the boycott.

As an entrepreneur who’s been blessed with economic security, I don’t believe it’s my right to tell people to stop working and take the risk of getting fired. That’s why I’m not proposing a labor strike. I also don’t want to be the arbiter who prescribes exactly what steps a person should take, which products they should drop, and for how long. Our hope is that we will ignite a conversation and provide people with a resistance roadmap, showing Americans they have a weapon hiding in plain sight — they have the capacity to make a difference.

What Did You Do in the War?

We estimate our campaign has directly cost Big Tech a quarter of a billion in market value so far. That’s a promising start, even if it’s not enough to force the CEOs who have Trump’s ear to do the right thing. I’ll continue to be a media whore as long as they take my calls. But others will need to pick up the baton if we’re going to elevate the debate to the boardroom and avoid the fate of boycotts that have largely been forgotten. Remember 2018’s #DeleteFacebook campaign? Check the archives.

The nihilistic view that these are uniquely dark times is not accurate. Our nation has endured a civil war, world wars, plagues, and a Depression. In each case, Americans were equal to the challenge, and our democracy emerged stronger. That’s the question: Are we equal to the task? If, like me, you owe a debt to America, having garnered more from the nation than you’ve invested, then when do you plan to make good, to recognize the sacrifice of previous generations whose shoulders you’re standing on? What will you say at the end, when your kids ask, “Dad, what did you do in the war against fascism?”  

Life is so rich,

P.S. Resist and Unsubscribe continues. Join the movement.

The post The Algebra of Resistance appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.

Normal

Late last Thursday night, the president posted a video promoting his debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories. The clip includes images of Michelle and Barack Obama as apes. The following morning, the video drew widespread backlash, including from Senator Tim Scott, a Trump ally and the only Black Republican in the Senate, who called it “the most racist” thing he’s seen out of this White House. (Note the implication: Trump has provided other examples of racism for Senator Scott to benchmark against.) Initially, press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the criticism as “fake outrage.” Insisting he hadn’t made a mistake, Trump doubled down, calling the video “very strong in terms of voter fraud,” and adding that he was the “least racist president you’ve had in a long time.” 

Trump’s crisis management role model remains Roy Cohn, the lawyer who served as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attack dog. Cohn taught Trump to respond to criticism immediately using asymmetrical force: Admit nothing, deny everything, and always claim victory, no matter the actual outcome. I teach a session on crisis communications in my Brand Strategy course at Stern. The scale of a crisis isn’t a function of the mistake, but how you react to it. The better playbook: Acknowledge the issue in plain language, take responsibility, and don’t just fix the problem, overcorrect with force disproportionate to the mistake. 

As criticism of Trump’s video continued to mount, he moved on to other targets, calling an American Olympic skier who criticized his policies a “loser.” Next, he attacked Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance, writing on Truth Social, “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting, especially for young children watching.” Not to worry — Kid Rock performed at an alternate half-time show which felt like watching a Ford Pinto compete at F1 Monaco. Supposedly, the criteria for entrance to Kid Rock’s performance was knowing the purchase limits on Sudafed or wearing an ankle monitor.

Trump’s performative concern over bad role models — won’t someone think of the children? — is rich from a man who appears in the Epstein files 38,000 times. More times than Jesus is mentioned in the Bible; more times than the word “meth” is uttered in all five seasons of Breaking Bad (#awesome). Trump’s depraved behavior is so omnipresent it’s been normalized. Worse, it’s become the cultural context for an entire generation of future civic, business and nonprofit leaders. Trump has been running for president or in office for a decade — if 2024 was the first election you were old enough to vote in, that’s more than half your life. According to a 2018 Quinnipiac poll, 90% of Americans believe it’s important for the president to be a good role model.

Role Models

Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term “role model” in 1957 while studying the socialization of medical students. Distinguishing between reference groups (the crowd you want to belong to) and role models (individuals you emulate in a specific social role), Merton found that we learn “scripts” from role models that teach us how to behave in a specific status (doctor, leader, parent, etc.). Emulating role models, the med students engaged in “anticipatory socialization,” adopting the professional values and norms of practitioners before officially becoming doctors themselves. Building on Merton’s work, psychologists Thekla Morgenroth, Michelle K. Ryan, and Kim Peters argued in a 2015 paper that role models serve three motivational functions: acting as behavioral models, representing what’s possible, and serving as sources of inspiration. 

In her book Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin, historian Pamela Walker Laird argues that access to role models is essential for accumulating social capital and influencing the career paths of American business leaders. According to Laird, Ben Franklin, the prototype for an American inventor/entrepreneur, served as a role model to countless nineteenth-century business leaders, including Thomas Mellon, B.F. Goodrich, and Frederick Weyerhäuser. For a contemporary example of a business role model, see the Steve Jobs “uniform” — black turtlenecks, Levi’s 501s, and New Balance sneakers. Explaining the enduring popularity of Jobs-coded looks on TikTok last year, psychotherapist Eloise Skinner told Fortune, “Zoomers have expressed confusion about what to wear for work, given that many started their careers working from home in their pajamas during the pandemic.” In other words, more than a decade after his death, Jobs continues to provide a script for how aspiring business leaders should carry themselves.

Medical students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and sartorially confused Zoomers don’t choose their role models at random, however. In his 2015 book The Secret of Our Success, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich argued that what sets humans apart from other species is our capacity for cultural learning. According to Henrich, role models are “storage units” for cultural survival skills, and we’re hardwired to identify high-prestige role models. Explaining a scenario where players had the choice to contribute money (or not) to a community project, Henrich wrote, “When the high-prestige player had the opportunity to contribute money first, he or she tended to contribute to, and thus cooperate in, the joint effort, and then the following low-prestige player usually did as well. So, everyone won.” But when the low-prestige player went first, they tended not to contribute, and then, neither did the high-prestige player. In effect, high-prestige people can initiate/veto collaboration, giving them power to set a group’s agenda, whereas low-prestige people have limited veto power and often follow the lead of … a role model. 

One recent example: The “Trump dance” phenomenon. The dance dates to his 2020 campaign — the nadir of Trump’s appeal/prestige. Four years later, after Trump mounted the greatest political comeback in American history, professional athletes, the general public, and two world leaders (Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Argentina’s President Javier Milei) were emulating a septuagenarian’s Village People impression. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the authoritarian. 

Cy

Last fall, my Pivot co-host Kara Swisher and I did a live tour. The final stop was Los Angeles, my hometown. It was a full-circle moment for me, as one of my early role models was in the audience. When I was 13, I walked into the Dean Witter office in Westwood with $200 my mother’s boyfriend had given me, with instructions to figure out how to buy stocks or return the money. At Dean Witter, Cy Cerro, a good man with an irrational passion for the well-being of a child who wasn’t his, gave me my first lesson in financial markets. We decided to invest my bounty in 13 shares of Columbia Pictures, ticker CPS, at $15 3/8. Each weekday for the next two years, I’d drop two dimes into a payphone and call Cy to discuss my portfolio. He made time for me. He also made time to call my mom. Not to pitch her for business (we had no money), but to let her know what we discussed in the calls and say nice things about me. 

Eventually, I lost touch with Cy and sold the stock to fund a road trip to Ensenada with my UCLA fraternity brothers. But in 2021, I reconnected with my old broker. Our lives had moved along eerily similar paths: UCLA, financial services (both of us at Morgan Stanley, via Dean Witter for Cy); divorce, two kids, and then entrepreneurship. I’ve made a good/great living starting and selling companies. However, the bulk of my wealth is a function of one thing I’ve done since the age of 13 — invest in stocks. Unfortunately, there are three times as many women applying to be Big Sisters in NYC than men applying to be Big Brothers. In sum, we need more Cy Cerros. Note: You don’t need to be a baller or have your own family to mentor a young man. Just a guy trying to lead a virtuous life who has the most important thing to share: your presence.

Weimar

My intellectual sherpas these days are the historians Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Synder. Whenever they’re on my podcast, I’m reminded history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. After reelecting an insurrectionist grifter, America doesn’t yet rhyme with the Third Reich, but the late-stage Weimar Republic. One alarming parallel: rhetoric that dehumanizes political opponents and out-groups. In his speeches, Hitler deployed “vermin” and “parasite” to fearmonger Germans into committing mass murder. Trump calls immigrants “garbage” from “shit-hole countries,” priming (some) Americans to want to throw out their neighbors. Meanwhile, the press is the “enemy of the people,” and dissenters are the “enemy within.” A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the use of violent words in Trump’s speeches has trended upward since 2015, with an increasing focus on crime. “The growing violence of Trump’s language suggests a strategy aimed at spreading anxiety in order to boost demand for a strong leader who can combat the threats he invokes,” wrote the study’s authors, UCLA political science professors Nikita Savin and Daniel Treisman.

Cloud Cover

Another alarming parallel with Weimar Germany? Business leaders who provide cloud cover with their silence. German industrialists might’ve stopped Hitler but chose silence instead, as they wanted his help crushing labor unions. In public, Fortune 500 CEOs are silent about Trump. They prefer to wait him out, issuing watered-down press releases through trade groups only when absolutely necessary and bending the knee in exchange for tariff relief and favorable regulatory treatment. In other words, they’ve chosen the path of zero resistance, creating a speedway for an authoritarian. 

In private, it’s a different story. I’ve heard from several CEOs since we launched Resist and Unsubscribe. Their rap is always the same. Scott, I share your concerns, but my hands are tied … shareholder value. That’s bullshit coming from a cohort with a bipartisan history of criticizing presidents, especially on tax and regulatory policy. America’s CEOs aren’t acting in the interest of shareholders by staying silent about democracy and the rule of law, they’re acting out of fear. My response to them is also the same. “When the people you love are at your side by your deathbed … how will you answer the following: What did you do?” Do those of us lucky enough to have built rewarding lives and companies owe a debt only to shareholders, or to Americans who sacrificed for our rights? Are we willing to do the right thing even when it’s hard? Are we role models?

Life is so rich,

P.S. Help spread the word by sharing our Resist and Subscribe campaign on social. Use #resistandunsubscribe for visibility and tag me @profgalloway so I can boost your signal.   

The post Role Models appeared first on No Mercy / No Malice.

American Duma

Congress has the power to rein in ICE, restore the rule of law, and unwind authoritarianism in America. But to paraphrase a quote popular with self-help gurus and motivational speakers, Congress isn’t coming to save you. Last year’s government shutdown over healthcare didn’t result in a solution, but the assignment of blame. Democrats leveraged the recent partial government shutdown to negotiate for “guardrails” on America’s gestapo. Good. But banning federal agents from wearing masks and ordering independent investigations into the murders of American citizens are empty wins if the Trump administration is responsible for enforcing those policies. In addition, without true structural change — de-gerrymandering, reversing Citizens United, installing term limits — we’ll continue to endure a bipolar America.  

Democrats, playing by a rulebook that’s been incinerated, come across as neutered and voiceless. Meanwhile, Republicans are Jekyll and Hyde. In private, they say Trump is a threat to American democracy; in public, they’re sycophants, praising the president no matter what he says or does. The result? Congress is America’s answer to the Russian Duma, i.e., nominally important but functionally irrelevant. 

When I interviewed historian Timothy Synder, author of On Tyranny, on my podcast at the end of January, he said the current state of American politics is best understood as a system of competitive authoritarianism. A democratically elected leader erodes checks and balances, attacks institutions, and weaponizes the justice system against his opponents. “There will still be elections, but you don’t wait for the opposition party,” Synder said. “Instead [the people] have to push out ahead of the opposition party. You have to set the moral terms, take risks, and build a coalition of which the opposition party is a part, but isn’t necessarily leading.” Pro-democracy movements aren’t created by political parties, they’re created by people.

If We Build It …

Political parties are elected and returned to office for promising and then delivering tangible results to their constituents: good jobs, better schools, clean drinking water, etc. Political movements are graded on a similar curve, but the connection between action and outcome is rarely a straight line. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott began as a one-day protest. Despite a 90% participation rate, the single-day action achieved no tangible results. But after 13 months and a favorable Supreme Court ruling, the boycott successfully forced the integration of Montgomery’s bus system. During that long campaign, however, it would’ve been easy for onlookers to be cynical. 

Over the past decade, I’ve been a protest cynic, believing most actions, viewed through the narrow lens of the moment, are performative measures that generate selfies and make participants feel good about being right, without having any actual impact. But Timothy Snyder says my thesis is incorrect. “The main reason you protest is to tell the rest of the people who are watching you that what’s going on isn’t normal,” Snyder told me. “The second reason you protest is that it’s the gateway to doing other things.” In other words, what looks like sound and fury signifying nothing is in fact an incubator for building infrastructure and organizing further actions. Case in point: After the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott, activists, led by a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., organized a carpooling network with more than 200 cars and 100 pickup locations. That infrastructure sustained their movement, allowing them to register an estimated $3,000 hit per day ($35,000 adjusted for inflation) to the city’s bus service until their demands were met.

Infrastructure

When we launched Resist and Unsubscribe last week, we contributed some infrastructure to a political movement. Our goal is to demonstrate to consumers that they wield enormous power, as their spending accounts for more than two-thirds of the U.S. economy. Your wallet is a weapon, and in a capitalist society the most radical act is withholding your money. Deployed broadly across the economy, however, a consumer boycott is a blunt instrument that maximizes damage while diluting influence. We prefer surgical strikes to carpet-bombing. 

America’s economy has become one giant bet on AI, with seven tech companies representing more than a third of the S&P 500. The concentration of economic power in so few hands renders those businesses uniquely vulnerable to a boycott, as consumers can focus on a short target list. Big Tech’s vulnerability is further multiplied by the subscription model, as valuations for subscription companies are typically 8x to 20x revenue. One example: In 2022, Netflix reported losing just 200,000 subscribers in a single quarter, and that wiped out $50 billion in market cap overnight. (Netflix attributed the churn to increased competition and the lifting of pandemic restrictions that had kept people in front of their TVs.) The free gift with purchase? Consumers maximize political impact while minimizing household expenses. In America, 4 out of 5 adults spend nearly $200 per year on unused subscriptions. I had three HBO Max subscriptions … somehow.

Some of you have asked why we are targeting Amazon, my 2026 stock pick? Others want to know why we didn’t target Disney? A: I’d rather be effective than right. The companies at ground zero of Resist and Unsubscribe have an outsized influence over the national economy and our president. The stocks in the “blast zone” belong to consumer-facing companies we’ve identified as active enablers of ICE. Collectively, ground zero and blast zone businesses don’t represent the totality of complicity, but rather the jugular of American authoritarianism. 

For a recent example of what happens when consumers deploy their spending power against the jugular of authoritarianism, see Disney’s suspension and reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel. In the end, it took fewer than 1% of the Mouse’s total streaming subscribers to accomplish what CEO Bob Iger couldn’t — stand up to an authoritarian. (Note: According to Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist and professor at Harvard who analyzed 323 nonviolent and violent mobilizations between 1900 and 2006, when at least 3.5% of a country’s population actively engages in a peaceful protest movement, it has always resulted in political change.)

Expectations

My go-to framework for understanding the rise of fascism in America today is the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. The most chilling parallel between then and now is the relationship between business elites and authoritarians. German industrialists weren’t necessarily enthusiastic Nazis, Timothy Snyder told me, but they saw Hitler as a tool to crush unions and undermine democracy, the source of labor’s power. The most powerful American business leaders are making a similar bet, trading their support for tariff carveouts, a promise not to regulate AI, and hundreds of billions in shareholder value. 

I believe consumers can force a change in the incentive structure around American CEOs. The clearest possible proof point that the incentive structure is changing would be for Resist and Unsubscribe to show up in earnings calls. That would signal that business leaders feel emboldened to speak up and insist that democracy and the rule of law prevail. That said, earnings calls aren’t the only relevant metric. 

According to Brayden King, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who studies social movements and corporate social responsibility, and Sarah A. Soule, dean of the Stanford Business School, the typical boycott doesn’t have much impact on a company’s market cap. In their 2007 study of 342 boycotts against U.S. corporations between 1962 and 1990, they found that boycotts, on average, caused a 1% decline in a company’s stock price. “The number one predictor of what makes a boycott effective is how much media attention it creates, not how many people sign onto a petition or how many consumers it mobilizes,” King said in 2017. 

The reason media attention matters so much is that boycotts aren’t a tool to permanently destroy shareholder value, but rather a vehicle to pressure leaders to change their behavior. Some people mocked me for saying last week I was keeping Instagram despite our boycott. Fair. But be practical. Infrastructure plus the distributional scale of Instagram’s 3 billion monthly active users is the peanut butter and chocolate for a political movement. Sharing screenshots of your canceled subscriptions inspires others to Resist and Unsubscribe. Equally powerful, the community in r/ScottGalloway is sharing tips for canceling, including how to get a refund on the unused portion of your annual Amazon Prime subscription. Infrastructure begets infrastructure. Finally, in a nod to the King-Soule study, I have been a total media whore (comes easy) the last couple days, hitting CNN, NPR, BBC, MSNow, etc.  

Marker

I recently wrote that we should be deeply concerned about a world where connections are forged without friction, as we’re seeing resilience muscles atrophy, especially among young people. In my conversation with Timothy Snyder, he shared a related concern about the lack of friction in the way we conceptualize politics. “People talk about the Insurrection Act or martial law, whether they’re for them or against them, like [we’re in] a video game and you just level up,” he said. “It’s not like that.” In reality, politics is a messy, unpredictable struggle that favors the most resilient. Deploying the language of video games — “unlocks,” “cheat codes,” “speedrunning,” etc. — lulls us into believing that political change, whether in the direction of dictatorship or democracy, is a frictionless experience, achievable by pressing the right combination of buttons. 

This isn’t a game. Resist and Unsubscribe is a one-month campaign to demonstrate political power both to consumers and those we seek to influence. Smashing the unsubscribe button won’t defeat the final boss, but making that small sacrifice builds (some) resilience. It also lays down a marker for battles to come. As Timothy Snyder explained, we’re making it clear that there will be severe consequences if the regime attempts to steal the midterms. Recognizing the friction in our politics isn’t an invitation to opt for the path of least resistance; it teaches us that saving democracy requires the same things that build lasting relationships: showing up, enduring discomfort, and wielding the power we actually have rather than waiting for someone else to fix our problem. Finally, action absorbs anxiety. It feels good to do something with others — that whole community thing. Or put another way, stop doomscrolling/hectoring/complaining … and do something.  

Life is so rich, 

P.S. Resources to help you Resist and Unsubscribe can be found here. 

_____________

After the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, many people feel powerless. Praised by tech CEOs, surrounded by sycophants, emboldened by multimillion-dollar settlements, and enriched by his return to the White House, Trump marches on unchecked. Americans, however, have overlooked a potent weapon of resistance. First, we should recognize that the president is unfazed by outrage and unmoved by protests. What does he care about? A: The markets. The best strategy is to opt out. We’re asking you to join a monthlong national economic strike, a coordinated campaign that targets tech and AI companies and inflicts maximum damage with minimum impact on consumers.

Ripple Effect

Protesters are playing a critical role in challenging Trump’s war on the “enemy within” and documenting the activities of his masked, heavily-armed, and poorly trained paramilitary force. But until the Republicans lose their grip on Washington and the president’s acolytes can be held accountable — and in some cases put on trial — the opposition needs bold new methods.

We’re not talking about a labor strike. It’s easy for me to tell other people to stop working and take the risk of getting fired; that kind of walkout would only hurt small businesses and probably lead to more job losses. We’re also not urging local businesses to sacrifice sales and close their doors for a day, a symbolic but ultimately ineffective tool. We’re proposing something quieter and less cinematic than a protest that will run all day on cable TV, but much more disturbing to the Trump administration. A one-day slowdown is irritating. A one-month slump is terrifying.

With support for abolishing ICE growing and a bipartisan backlash prompting Trump to at least feign a more conciliatory approach in Minnesota, this is the moment to exert pressure. If you need inspiration before joining the movement, look at photos from the September meeting at which tech industry CEOs, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Apple’s Tim Cook, took turns fawning over the president. These are the leaders who have his ear. A modest reduction in their companies’ growth could have a substantial impact on valuations priced to perfection. Small changes in consumer behavior — starting on the first day of February — could have an enormous ripple effect, one that extends all the way to the White House.

Unsubscribe

We need to get tactical. If consumers cut back on cosmetics, reducing L’Oréal’s revenue by 2%, it’s not going to make a difference. If OpenAI’s revenue falls by 2%, it will. America’s economy is one giant bet on AI, with seven tech companies representing more than a third of the S&P 500. That means the best way to ignite positive change, without hurting consumers, is to carry out an economic strike the tech CEOs can’t ignore. 

Unsubscribing to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude are among the first steps. Although only 5% of ChatGPT’s more than 800 million users last year paid for a subscription, a pullback would sting. If enough people cut spending on AI, it could spill over to other companies, including Nvidia and Microsoft. You could also unsubscribe from a range of other tech offerings — Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Uber — and hold off on buying your next iPhone or Mac. While tech and AI are the main focus, the strike could expand to target companies enabling ICE, including AT&T, Dell, and Fedex, which have contracts with the agency. (See all the options on the Resist and Unsubscribe website.) 

Then document your decisions on Instagram — we’d target this platform, too, but we need some way to spread the message nationwide. Talk to your friends and outline what you’re not buying, adding cancelation screenshots and unsubscribe selfies. Articulate the objectives: forcing the president to end the occupation of cities by masked agents, respect the rule of law, and uphold American values. And yes, I’m participating.

If wealthy households reduce spending by 10% and middle- and lower-income households pull back by about 5% in a targeted economic strike, it will curb U.S. GDP virtually overnight, amplifying the impact while mitigating the harm to average American consumers and business owners. And just as Dry January offers an opportunity to scale back on alcohol, a February freeze on subscriptions and other purchases provides a chance for people to reset their consumption patterns. Use the month to review your subscriptions and drop the ones you don’t use. 

You may decide this isn’t for you, or conclude it would hurt innocent people. I get it. Punishing America’s economy isn’t an act we propose lightly. But pain for some U.S. tech businesses in the short term could inspire real change — a small price for restoring our democracy.

Consumer Power

Consumers, whose spending accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy, wield enormous power. Few things worry leaders more than a decrease in their purchases. Consumer spending fell 3.4% during the Great Recession — at the time, the most severe year-over-year decline since World War II — and 9.8% during the second quarter of 2020, in the depths of the pandemic. Those events sparked two of the fastest political movements in history, with the U.S. spending huge sums to escape each crisis. In the case of Covid, economic data, not the death toll, was the main driver.

Americans in the top 10% income bracket, who account for about half of all consumer spending, play an especially important role. In outlining this idea in October, I estimated that those consumers could achieve a 1% decline in GDP with a 3% cut to their spending (setting aside multiplier effects, import leakages, and substitutions).

If we want to know how Trump might respond, consider recent history. After the president unveiled his “Liberation Day” tariffs last April, the ensuing turmoil in the bond market prompted the administration to pause most of its planned tariffs for 90 days. Bond investors were getting “yippy,” as the president explained. Wall Street soon had a term for this phenomenon — the TACO trade, for “Trump always chickens out.”

Earlier this month, Trump threatened to punish European nations if they didn’t cave to his demands to give him Greenland. Then the markets threw up, and the president reversed course, announcing he’d reached the “framework of a future deal” for Greenland and the Arctic. Stocks surged on the news.

Fortune 500 CEOs need to organize to resist the president as he bulldozes the values that make America great. Understandably, nobody wants to go first or be alone on this, but it’s the right thing to do. It also presents an opportunity to reap reputational and commercial gains. I feel for businesses in Minnesota — victims of the administration’s cruel and reckless immigration policies — and collective action is the way to go. But the letter signed by 60 CEOs of companies based in the state, including Best Buy, Target, and UnitedHealth, calling for state, local, and federal officials to “work together to find real solutions,” while positive, isn’t going to move the needle.

Cowardice

Republicans could stop Trump … if they had a spine. The CEOs of America’s largest corporations could also show up, but don’t hold your breath. If you’re waiting for these leaders to overcome their fear and share-price idolatry in the face of threats from the president, you’re going to suffocate. Trump put everyone on notice last week with his lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, over allegations that the company stopped providing banking services to Trump and his businesses for political reasons after he left office in 2021. Bosses of big corporations know that won’t be the last battle the president wages, so rather than antagonizing him, they flatter Trump and keep their heads down. Without real pushback, things are likely to get worse.

You’d think that the death of Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse Trump officials accused of being a “domestic terrorist,” would have been a tipping point for business leaders. Yet on Saturday, hours after federal agents killed Pretti as he attempted to help a woman who’d been pushed to the ground and pepper-sprayed, CEOs including Cook and Amazon’s Andy Jassy attended a private White House screening to celebrate the Amazon MGM Studios-produced documentary Melania.

The courage is coming from the rank and file. Following Pretti’s death, more than 450 tech workers from Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Salesforce, and other companies signed a letter urging their CEOs to contact the White House, demand that ICE leave American cities, and cancel all company contracts with the enforcement agency. A senior executive at OpenAI, James Dyett, wrote on X that there was more outrage from tech executives over California’s proposed wealth tax “than masked ICE agents terrorizing communities and executing civilians in the streets.” Exactly.

Protest vs. Nonparticipation

As Heather Cox Richardson and other historians note, there are many ways to make a difference in dark times. She points out that Minnesotans are doing their part — patrolling the streets, donating food, helping with legal services, and looking out for one another — while organizations at the national level speak up. Voters in the midterm elections in November, meanwhile, will have a chance to dilute Trump’s power. 

Until then, the best tool we have to push CEOs to take on the president and prevent further erosion of the American brand is in our pockets — an economic strike that builds on calls for Apple boycotts that are already starting to emerge. Real change always comes from the American people, not from our political parties. But power doesn’t fear protests nearly as much as economic withdrawals. Getting off your couch, taking to the streets, and building community is important, but the most radical act in a capitalist society isn’t marching, it’s not spending. 

Life is so rich,

P.S. Resources to help you participate in our Resist and Unsubscribe campaign and maximize your impact can be found here.

American military interventions have always reminded me of the Bond films. The opening act is nothing short of spectacular: a daring production marked by operational excellence, jaw-dropping personal courage, and high-tech lethality. But too often the rest of the movie serves up mediocrity and confusion, resulting in citizens/viewers asking, “How did we get here?”

Goldfinger — the Gulf War (1990-91)

In response to Iraq invading Kuwait, George H.W. Bush assembled a 42-nation coalition. After a six-month build up, it took 43 days and fewer than 300 U.S. killed for the American-led forces to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Bush decided to declare victory and leave, vs. attempting to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. The first Gulf War was Goldfinger: There was an iconic villain (Saddam), clear stakes (oil and sovereignty), spectacular set pieces (smart bombs down ventilation shafts), public support (yellow ribbons), and a clear ending. Even the dialogue was Oscar-worthy: “This aggression will not stand.” The plot was a perfect execution of the Powell Doctrine.

Spectre — the Iraq War (2003-11)

It took just 26 days of major combat operations for U.S.-led forces to enter Iraq, destroy Saddam Hussein’s military, and capture Baghdad. The “shock and awe” of Tomahawk missiles decimating their targets, American armored units on “thunder runs” slicing through the opposition, and the toppling of Saddam’s statue were as compelling as the opening of Spectre. Unfortunately, the next eight years also resembled Spectre. Weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo-op. Abu Ghraib. There was no plan to stand up Iraqi civil society; we just imposed a democracy — a contradiction in terms. Sectarian violence followed, at an enormous human cost: 4,500 American dead, 32,000 wounded, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties. We squandered trillions of dollars — money we should’ve invested in America. Political division at home. ISIS. Iranian hegemony. 

Critics panned Spectre for wasting one of the best openings in Bond history and for desperately attempting to retroactively connect the Daniel Craig films into one grand conspiracy. (See: the nonexistent link between Saddam and 9/11, fictional WMDs, and a Neocon pipedream about spreading democracy throughout the Middle East.) W. would be one of the most liked ex-presidents — his Pepfar program was credited with saving millions of lives in Africa before Trump came for it — had he not produced an Oscar-caliber geopolitical disaster film.

The World Is Not Enough — Venezuela

The U.S. military raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was a serious flex. For months, a surveillance team observed Maduro’s every move, while special forces trained in an exact, full-size replica of Maduro’s Caracas safe house. The night of the raid, hundreds of U.S. warplanes knocked out Venezuelan defenses. In a little over two hours, American forces eliminated more than 50 Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers and captured Maduro and his wife, while sustaining zero dead and seven wounded. The ultimate Bond opener.

A month after the raid, however, America’s intervention in Venezuela is beginning to resemble The World Is Not Enough — a forgettable Bond film with a convoluted plot about controlling oil pipelines in the Caucasus. Trump’s casus belli (fentanyl and cocaine) didn’t survive the press conference; he mentioned illegal drugs just five times, while talking about oil 27 times. However, Venezuela’s black gold is heavy crude; it costs $70 to extract a barrel of oil you can sell for $58. Regime change for oil, 007? That’s like invading the Alps for snow. Cut to: An Oval Office meeting where ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told Trump Venezuela is “uninvestable.”

Where The World Is Not Enough had a bad script, Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine” doesn’t have a script at all. After the raid, Trump announced that Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, was in charge, saying she would “make Venezuela great again.” But Rodriguez struck a defiant tone, saying, “There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.” In a column for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, retired U.S. Marine Colonel Mark F. Cancian called the Maduro raid a “military victory with no viable endgame,” likening it to conquering Nazi Germany but keeping the Nazis in charge.

Quantum of Solace — Greenland

Quantum of Solace is the Bond film nobody asked for. The geopolitical equivalent? Seizing Greenland. In the film, the villain’s scheme revolves around controlling Bolivia’s water supply — a resource he could simply purchase. Trump’s motives are even more convoluted. Greenland has valuable minerals, but 80% of the land is covered in ice, making extraction difficult and costly. One Arctic expert called the idea “completely bonkers,” adding, “You might as well mine on the moon.” Greenland is strategically important, especially as the melting Arctic ice cap opens up new shipping lanes, but we don’t need to invade — we already have the right to reinforce existing bases under a 1951 treaty. Speaking of treaties, attacking Denmark would blow up NATO, the most successful military alliance in history. We walked into a Starbucks with an AR-15, locked and loaded, and demanded a grande latte for $6.46. OK, we can have that without the gun or the threats. So fucking stupid.

What’s the motivation here? Some theories. First, Greenland is 3x the size of Texas. Seizing Greenland, or bribing Greenlanders to break their ties with Denmark and join the U.S., would be a real estate deal on the order of the Louisiana Purchase, albeit with a fraction of the ROI. Second, Trump said he feels that ownership of Greenland is “psychologically needed for success.” Third, like a movie star snubbed by the Academy, Trump is mad he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize. Trump’s Greenland folly is Quantum of Solace as written by the writer’s room from Veep, directed by Ed Wood (ask Gemini), and produced by the team that brought you Ishtar.  Note: During his speech at Davos Trump backed away from an invasion (#yay).

In geopolitical terms, the audience for Quantum of Stupid was Russia and China. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the NATO concept had “discredited itself.” That’s Russian for “stupid,” i.e., the U.S. is hurting Europe while hurting itself, and we love to see it. Without NATO, Putin could take advantage by rolling up Ukraine and then turning his attention toward seizing the Baltics, Finland, and Poland. A wider European war would likely follow. Meanwhile, China will continue to expand its influence. Last week, during an official visit, Chinese leader Xi Jinping urged Canadian leader Mark Carney to chart a path of “strategic autonomy” independent of the U.S. In a speech at Davos, Carney gave an obituary for the rules-based order America once led, saying, “the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” For China, the entree is Taiwan.

In economic terms, Quantum of Stupid is already a flop. After announcing a 10% tariff on goods from eight European nations that immediately rallied around Denmark, the U.S. got a sneak preview of coming attractions. Denmark’s largest pension fund announced plans to sell off $100 million in Treasuries (it denied the move was political). Pimco’s chief investment officer told the Financial Times it was pivoting away from U.S. assets because of Trump’s “unpredictable” policies. Europe holds 40% of foreign U.S. Treasuries. As Ray Dalio said, “You could easily imagine it could simply become unpopular to buy or hold U.S. debt.” True. You could also imagine the EU weaponizing capital. “For all its military and economic strength, the U.S. has one key weakness: It relies on others to pay its bills via large external deficits,” said Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos, adding that it’s “not clear why Europeans would be as willing to play this part.”

You Only Live Twice — Iran

In You Only Live Twice, Bond fakes his death to infiltrate SPECTRE and stop World War III. The title refers to a Japanese proverb: “You only live twice: once when you are born, and once when you look death in the face.” The Islamic Republic is looking death in the face, and the U.S. has a small window to pull the plug. This should be the Bond film every American wants. The Islamic Republic caused 17% of all U.S. casualties in Iraq and armed anti-American forces in Afghanistan. It remains the world’s chief sponsor of terror, committed to a policy of “death to America.” Iran’s mullahs have a brutal human rights record, especially when it comes to women and LGBTQ people. However, the left is silent, suffering under a moral color code. When the oppressor is brown, it experiences moral paralysis.

We squandered regime change opportunities during the 2009 protests over rigged elections and again in 2022 when Iranian women took to the streets. (Call this a regrettable prequel, Live and Let Live.) Now the regime is even more vulnerable. Since October 7, 2023, Israel has systematically dismantled Iranian proxy forces. Meanwhile, Iran is facing economic collapse — the rial fell by 45% against the dollar in 2025, inflation accelerated from 33% in 2024 to 42% last year, food prices have increased by 70% YoY, and an estimated one-third of Iranians live in poverty. Protests have galvanized society. The resulting crackdown has killed as many as 20,000 Iranians, according to a UN estimate. Airstrikes could defang the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, sabotage could disrupt infrastructure, cyber could cripple regime intelligence and propaganda capabilities while boosting opposition visibility, and special forces could take out the mullahs. The question isn’t whether we’re capable of regime change, but what comes next? The answer is likely something better, or less bad. Military intervention is always a risk, and this is one worth taking.

Unserious

The tragedy of American power isn’t that it’s declining; it’s that it’s increasingly unserious. We still have the muscle, the money, and the moral case. What we lack is patience, humility, and the stamina for the boring part — asking “What happens next?” Until we relearn how to write second acts, every intervention will look the same: dazzling, destructive, and destined for a sequel no one asked for.

Life is so rich,

P.S. At Davos this week, I sat down with historian Niall Ferguson to discuss geopolitics. Listen on Apple or Spotify, or watch our conversation on YouTube.

By the middle of sophomore year, I had my first girlfriend. There were a lot of “firsts” in the relationship, but two stand out: Melanie was the first woman I was “me” around, instead of trying to be someone I thought she’d like. And we loved each other. Having an impressive person who could date other men choose and love you is profound.   

Struggling to find a romantic partner is normal. Today, however, a dangerous ideology is infecting many young men, who see their incel status as inevitable, and even embrace it, blaming women instead of trying to better themselves. Many aren’t incels, but vcels — voluntary celibates who choose resentment over self-improvement. 

Real Problems

The challenges young men face are real. In school, boys fall behind their female peers and are much less likely to become valedictorians and go to college, with the education system biased against them and girls mature faster. American tax policy increasingly transfers money from the young to the old. We’ve adopted a scarcity mindset that only benefits incumbents — and the rising costs for housing and education that result take an especially heavy toll on young men, who are disproportionately evaluated on their economic prospects. Big Tech profits through sequestration and enragement, while digitizing dating has resulted in a winner-take-most environment. 

Rather than addressing the problem, leaders on both ends of the political spectrum have inflamed the crisis. The left ignored young men in the lead-up to the last presidential election, espousing the belief that they didn’t have a problem, they were the problem. The far right filled the void with misogynistic, racist, and otherwise hateful messages, arguing that the answer was to send women and non-white people back to the 50s. But here’s the bottom line: Nobody is entitled to reproduce, nor obligated to serve another group. Women are ascending; it’s a collective achievement. Men need to level up.

How to Level Up: The Rule of Threes

Government programs and societal shifts will help, but young men should, and will, shoulder most of the responsibility — one that most are addressing but too many abdicate as they slide deeper into the darkness of frictionless online relationships.

These young men fail to recognize the agency they have to transform their lives, instead donning an incel badge to justify their sense of victimhood. My message to young men: Being an incel isn’t a burden you’re destined to bear. If you’ve surrendered, sitting at home all day watching porn, bingeing Netflix, and playing Diablo, that’s on you. 

We need to model a healthier vision. My advice: Exercise three times a week, work at least 30 hours a week out of the house, and push yourself into the company of strangers at least three times a month, even if you’re an introvert. This strategy will make you more attractive and increase your odds of finding a partner. Following this rule of threes will put you into the 95th percentile of young men. If you can stay there long enough, you’ll likely have the opportunity to be voluntarily incelibate … which is awesome.  

It’s easier to get a job than it has been for most of the last 100 years. Youth unemployment is hovering around 10%, historically low. When I was young, unsure if I could pay tuition, I took any job. If you’re reading this and living with your parents, you should, too. I’m going to Davos next week on my own plane, but I got there by waiting tables, carrying groceries, and hauling golf bags 5 miles in the humid Ohio summer.

On both the economic and social fronts, there are ways to overcome your obstacles and become a better man: Get an apprenticeship. Join a team. Go to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Develop a kindness practice. Learn how to approach people. This is harder in an age when many people are addicted to YouTube and TikTok and third spaces are disappearing, but increasing your risk appetite for the real world is essential. 

Red Pill

Adolescence, the gut-wrenching Netflix miniseries that won four Golden Globes earlier this week, stoked the debate about “incel” culture, shining a light on the threats posed by social media influencers known for their misogynistic views. The drama, which follows a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a female classmate, tackled symbols such as the “red pill,” a metaphor taken from the 1999 movie The Matrix. Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, must choose between a blue pill, which will keep him in a state of blissful ignorance, or a red pill, which will awaken him to a painful but enlightening reality. In the manosphere, people who make the latter decision have accepted the supposed “truths” about gender roles, including the idea that the world is unfairly stacked against unattractive and awkward heterosexual men. Here’s the truth pill, re sex: Throughout history, 40% of men and 80% of women have reproduced. In the U.S. today, an estimated 75% and 85% of men and women will reproduce, respectively. American men today are twice as likely to procreate as their ancestors.

Another incel conviction — fed by dating apps that separate potential partners into a small group of haves and a massive cohort of have-nots — is that most men will never find romantic satisfaction, because 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men. The bottom 80% of male Tinder users, based on percentage of likes received, are competing for the bottom 22% of women. This leads me to the same conclusion: Young men need real-world venues where they can demonstrate excellence to women, who are more discerning than they are.  

The incel movement was in motion long before Adolescence. The term emerged in the late 1990s on a website dubbed Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, created by a university student who wanted to provide an inclusive hub for people of all genders and orientations who had trouble dating. Instead, the term was hijacked as a “weapon of war,” and the community morphed into a nihilistic, misogynistic subculture.

Our society is producing far too many self-described incels who think it’s acceptable, even aspirational, to give up on relationships, and who become susceptible to biases against women and immigrants. Most will not harm others — their loathing is usually reserved for themselves. About two-thirds of incels say they’ve considered suicide. Instead of retreating amid increased scrutiny, social media accounts are widening their audience and rebranding to bypass bans. Adding fuel to the flame, the algorithms boost many female influencers whose misandry cosplays as social commentary. 

Off-Ramp

Many young men are genuinely trying to forge connections but stumbling over economic and social hurdles — struggles that Democrats are finally starting to take seriously after watching this demographic help Donald Trump retake the White House. 

With young men continuing to feel frustation and malaise more than a year into the president’s second term, the Democrats have a chance to win them back. Empathy isn’t zero-sum. The party, and society more broadly, can build on the gains women have registered over the past three decades, while also supporting boys and men. 

Young men themselves are part of the solution. Women aren’t to blame for their relationship woes, just as immigrants aren’t responsible for America’s economic problems. Men need to seize the opportunity to become better, and we need to provide an off-ramp for red-pilled men who believe the mating market is rigged against them, helping to prevent their descent into bitterness and potential extremism.

Many young men struggle with mental health — understandable given the challenges they face. But here’s a truth the manosphere won’t tell you: In the end, meaningful relationships are the only things that matter. If you’re alone and resigned to being nutrition for Big Tech, you need to reset and commit to becoming voluntarily incelibate. If you sequester from other mammals, the anxiety and depression you’ll ultimately feel will dwarf any terror about disappointment that exists in the outside world — isolation is the only danger that compounds.

Life is so rich,

P.S. This week, my Prof G Markets co-host Ed Elson wrote about the debate over California’s billionaire wealth tax … and proposed an alternative. Next week, he’ll unpack Jerome Powell’s win against Trump and what it means for our country. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter Simply Put here.

Ostensibly, the goal was to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., but there is no flow; according to the DEA, Venezuela has nothing to do with smuggling fentanyl. Trump’s real objective is oil. In a press conference announcing Maduro’s capture, the president mentioned drugs just five times, while talking about oil 27 times. Like so many things with Trump, the “Donroe Doctrine” is a noxious cocktail of greed and stupidity, garnished with calcified ideas from the past. Oil still matters to the global economy, but launching a regime change for oil is like invading Costa Rica for sand. Venezuela’s black gold is heavy crude; it costs upwards of $70 a barrel to extract oil you can sell for $58. The world power curve has been shaped by oil for decades, but a different resource is bending that curve. So, for a moment, let’s ignore that masked government agents are murdering people in American cities — and talk about the new oil. BTW, America’s very founding was an attempt to escape this type of state-sponsored depravity. But I digress.

Rare Earths

Rare earths is an umbrella term for 17 metallic elements. Despite the name, they aren’t especially rare, just difficult to extract and refine. Like petroleum, which is a raw input for more than 6,000 products, rare earths find their way into a wide range of modern technologies, including smart devices, solar panels, medical imaging equipment, and vehicles (both electric and internal combustion). Also, similar to petroleum, rare earths are vital to U.S. defense capabilities, from tanks and Tomahawk missiles to satellites. RAND estimates an F-35 fighter contains more than 900 pounds of rare earth materials in its engines and electronics. An Arleigh Burke–class destroyer requires approximately 5,200 pounds, and a Virginia–class submarine uses about 9,200 pounds. The question isn’t what do we need rare earths for, but what do we not need rare earths for? A: Nothing important.

Interests: Salt, Bird Shit, Rubber, Oil

The idea that nations don’t have friends, only interests, is a worldview variously attributed to Lord Palmerston, Charles de Gaulle, or Henry Kissinger. The maxim doesn’t capture the idealism that (sometimes) drives American foreign policy, but it does sum up how statesmen explain the logic of sacrificing blood and treasure in the pursuit of national interests. A nation that secures its interests, oftentimes natural resources, controls its destiny. 

For the ancient Romans, salt was more than seasoning, it was the backbone of commerce. In Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, historian Tom Holland views control of the salt trade as the key building block of Rome’s early wealth and military dominance, noting that Rome’s location was desirable, in part, because of its proximity to the salt pans at the mouth of the Tiber River. In SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, historian Mary Beard argues that Rome’s government saw salt as a strategic resource akin to how modern states view energy. Rome built roads to transport salt (in particular, the Via Salaria) and even subsidized salt prices to preserve domestic order. 

In the 19th century, Peru held a near-monopoly on guano (bird shit), a critical input for fertilizer as well as gunpowder. In response, the U.S. Congress passed legislation in 1856 authorizing the seizure of more than 100 guano islands. In How to Hide an Empire, historian Daniel Immerwahr notes that guano was so valuable that many called it “white gold.” As Immerwahr writes, “It was the pursuit of this ‘white gold’ that made the U.S. an oceanic empire and laid the foundations for overseas territorial conquests to come.” 

During World War II, Japan’s push into Southeast Asia cut off 90% of the global supply of natural rubber, spurring the U.S. to launch a program to mass produce a synthetic alternative. Without rubber, America couldn’t produce tires for trucks and planes, life rafts, oxygen masks, pontoon bridges, certain medical supplies, raincoats, boots, and thousands of other products necessary for waging war. In The Economic Consequences of U.S. Mobilization for the Second World War, Alexander J. Field, professor of economics at Santa Clara University, argues, “Redressing the loss of Southeast Asian rubber imports was more important than the Manhattan Project in making Allied victory possible.” 

In 1973, Americans got a crash course in the geopolitics of oil when the OPEC nations flexed their economic muscle to undermine U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The fallout from the embargo caused the U.S. to reassess our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, leading to increased domestic production and a greater emphasis on energy efficiency. Beginning in 2019, nearly 50 years after OPEC’s embargo, the U.S. is now a net exporter of oil. Though we still import some oil, 52% comes from Canada and another 11% from Mexico. Notwithstanding the Donroe Doctrine, which can be summed up as “alienating allies and comforting enemies,” the U.S. oil supply is no longer vulnerable to exogenous shocks.  

Leverage

If rare earths are the new oil, China is the new OPEC. Chinese mines supply nearly 70% of the ore from which rare earth elements are extracted, and more than 90% of the refined materials. Meanwhile, the U.S. imports 70% of its rare earths from China. This asymmetry is a strategic vulnerability. According to a 2025 report from the Center on Strategic and International Studies, China has demonstrated a willingness to “weaponize” rare earths. In 2010, for example, China cut off rare earth exports to Japan over a maritime dispute, threatening to halt its automotive production. Japan responded by importing more rare earths from Australia in the short term and ramping up domestic production long term. Since then, Japanese rare earth imports from China have fallen from 90% to 60% — still too high, but low enough that Tokyo has options if Beijing restricts access. This week, China again banned the export of rare earths to Japan over its support for Taiwan, but, notably, the ban included a far broader category of goods, suggesting China’s rare earth leverage over Japan has weakened.

It’s a different story for the U.S. In April, China retaliated against Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs by restricting the export of seven types of rare earths. Trump folded, naturally, but even after reaching a deal in October to resume exports, the U.S. remains at China’s mercy. According to a recent Bloomberg report, continued restrictions on deliveries of raw materials “hamstring” U.S. efforts to build domestic rare earth processing capacity. Meanwhile, the president’s plans to secure alternative sources of rare earths would be laughable if they weren’t so stupid, i.e., hurting others while hurting ourselves. We’re threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally, despite Greenland’s rare earth deposits being low-grade and costly to extract. We also shook down Ukraine for rare earths, but that deal could take more than a decade to bear fruit, as 40% of Ukraine’s mineral resources are inaccessible due to Russian occupation. While we flounder, China dominates. As Deng Xiaoping famously said back in 1992, “The Middle East has oil, China has rare earths.”

Bonanza?

In 2024, reports out of Wyoming suggested that the U.S. had hit a rare earth mother load at Halleck Creek. Geo Hussar, an (outstanding) influencer who focuses on geopolitics, believes Halleck Creek, with an estimated 2.3 billion metric tons of ore, 50x China’s reserves, will eventually break Beijing’s stranglehold over rare earths. But according to Karl Friedhoff, a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Halleck Creek is likely to net closer to 7.5 million metric tons of usable rare earth material after extraction and processing. Even using the lower estimate, that’s enough to catapult the U.S. from seventh to third place, just behind Brazil. Still, the objective is getting rare earths out of the ground and into the supply chain. Unfortunately, it takes American mining firms an average of 29 years to go from discovery to operations, putting the U.S. next to last worldwide, just ahead of Zambia.

Long Game

China monopolized rare earths by providing capital to its leading firms, encouraging rare earth acquisitions abroad, banning foreign companies from buying domestic mines, and eventually consolidating its industry into a few giant players, giving it leverage over prices. In other words, China played the long game. According to a 2025 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace analysis, both the Biden and Trump administrations correctly identified the need to contest China’s rare earth dominance. But to do so, the U.S. must marshal a combination of innovation, international cooperation, and long-term industrial planning. Based on our history, I’m optimistic. Based on our present, however, the good money is on pessimism / catastrophe. Cutting research funding and pursuing a xenophobic immigration policy undermine innovation. Careening from one budget crisis to the next renders long-term industrial planning nearly impossible. And alienating allies while comforting dictators squanders the soft power that made the U.S. the indispensable nation.

One of my favorite aphorisms says “old men should plant trees whose shade they know they’ll never sit in.” Our rare earths deficit developed at the speed Hemingway attributed to bankruptcy — gradually, then suddenly. Our failure is bipartisan, and blame goes to the public and private sectors alike. Rare earths aren’t rare. Long-term, strategic investment is. And the scarcest resource in America today is leaders who will invest in a future we don’t immediately profit from.

Life is so rich,

P.S. My Prof G Markets co-host Ed Elson has launched a Substack. How original. Ed’s first installment is a deep dive into the business that defined 2025: OnlyFans. Read it here.

_____________

The Most Powerful Force in the Universe

Growing up, I was drawn to novel, crazy experiences — in other words, attracted to doing a wide variety of insanely stupid shit. So were most of my (male) friends. At age 8 or 9, we would build ramps and jump with our bikes over one another’s motionless bodies. I would skateboard down Wilshire Boulevard, not on the elbow or the sidewalk, but on the actual boulevard. The third and fourth grades of our school looked like an ER waiting room — casts, bandages, crutches, eye patches.

Then I got older, my incredible maturity obvious to everyone. In high school, I distinctly remember deciding not to study for the upcoming SATs — too boring and time-consuming. That same year, my mom had to sign a release so I could play on the high school baseball team, but I forgot to give it to her, which meant I wasn’t allowed to play the first game and was eventually cut from the squad.

At UCLA, after my freshman year, I applied immediately for financial aid for the next year. I got a shit-ton, too, including Pell Grants. Then, a year later, aware that my junior year was coming up, I decided not to apply for financial aid, and, you know, whatever, take my chances.

Incredibly fucking stupid.

Other highlights from that era include never checking my car’s oil level until the dashboard screamed with yellow and red symbols alerting me that either the engine was about to explode or a comet had just collided with Earth. When this car was later towed to a city pound — encumbered under the weight of dozens of unpaid parking tickets — I thought, Fuck it, and never saw it again. Later, during my first real job, at Morgan Stanley, I was given the profoundly complex task of hand-delivering a proposal to a client. All I had to do was board an a.m. flight to San Francisco. I missed the flight. 

Among other things, the brain’s prefrontal cortex helps us get the easy stuff right. Until 25, I got more than my fair share of easy stuff wrong, didn’t take responsibility, most of the time had no ability to plan, and continually messed up.

A tendency for risk-taking, mixed with poor impulse control, renders many young men helpless against a torrent of on-demand dopamine provided by the world’s richest tech companies and makes maturity a hard sell for teen and college-age boys — at least, relative to girls and young women. You almost never hear about people named Laura and Elena eating Tide Pods or blowing off their final exams. Why?

Male and female brains are more than 99% identical. There are variations, though. Men have more than double the brain space and processing power devoted to sexual drive. The male amygdala, home to fear, anger, and aggression, contains testosterone receptors that make males lose their cool faster and more easily. But where the male and female brains diverge most sharply is in their development, especially during adolescence. By age 14 to 16, male and female brains have stopped growing, with the exception of the prefrontal cortex, or PFC. Girls attain “peak values of brain volumes” earlier than boys do — Latin for “girls get their shit together way sooner.” Basically, the female PFC matures up to two years before the male PFC does.

The PFC is the grown-up in the room, the CEO. The brain is a network; e.g., overlap is a feature, not a bug. No single brain region governs one instinct. But science agrees that a healthy PFC regulates impulse control, decision-making, good judgment, reasonableness, emotional regulation, and planning/prioritizing between the stuff you have to do versus the stuff you’d rather be doing (getting drunk or high, rewatching Family Guy).

At the start of puberty, boys are basically force-marinated in testosterone. T makes them more monosyllabic than usual. Their socializing, never strong to begin with, narrows to sports/physical activity, depending on the kid, and thinking about sex. With their thicker, denser muscles and deeper voices, boys may look impressive and imposing, but behind the forehead, girls have lapped them. By 14 to 15, girls have greater volume and complexity in their PFCs and thus, theoretically, more maturity than boys. They’re better decision-makers and problem-solvers. They can overcome their brains’ reward circuits with a good counterargument or simply by deploying common sense.

The male PFC catches up around age 25, when many young men get their act together. Until then, they’re at a huge maturity disadvantage. 

Waging war against a young man’s unformed PFC is like trying to wean a kid off salty snacks in favor of carrots and radishes. With my two boys, I do my best to illustrate the differences between the feverish, relentless dopa hits they get from TikTok and Instagram versus the slower, incremental results that are more valuable and satisfying from reading, working out, or spending time outside — slow dopa, or “Slowpa,” as I call it. If tech dopa hits are like shoving handfuls of Cheetos or Snickers into your mouth — i.e., they don’t fill you up, you hate yourself, and you want more — Slowpa is more like the salad you order that makes you feel healthier for a week. When my boys were little, we spent a fortune on Legos. If Slowpa ever hires a celebrity spokesperson, it should be Lego. Building a model out of 1,300 pieces of lightly hued plastic requires one to two hours daily, plus focus, but then two weeks later you have a really cool Millennium Falcon or Blacktron Renegade to hang in your bedroom. On weekends, Alec, my oldest, likes cooking with his mom. That’s an hour spent chopping, measuring, grating, kneading, basting, followed by another hour watching the oven. Dinner, but also Slowpa. 

Children today are overprotected in the real world and under-protected online — an observation made by my NYU colleague Jonathan Haidt. At age 13, I flew from LAX alone to visit my dad and stepmom in Ohio. Looking back, the 1970s may seem lax, negligent, and flaky, but parents were onto something. Nowadays, if, say, my 14-year-old son wants to have a party, no, I won’t go out and score a case of tequila for him, but I won’t hover, snoop, or get in the way of his plans, either.

I recently showed both boys a TikTok by some ex-finance guy. What he said was basic, obvious, and great: Success comes when you put in small, consistent amounts of effort, every day and every week; it doesn’t matter whether you’re investing, filming two minutes of video content, or lifting dumbbells. Small, deliberate, regular efforts accumulate and in time pay off. In other words, the most powerful force in the universe — Einstein knew this — is compound interest. Aka, Slowpa.

Life is so rich,

P.S. Notes on Being a Man was published in November and is available in all the usual places.

2026 Predictions

AI Stocks Correct

The question isn’t when the AI bubble will burst, but what the catalyst will be. A: China. Trump has changed U.S. tariffs on China 17 times this year. They’re tired of having a major trading partner with sclerotic decision-making and the demeanor of a raccoon on meth. Since 2019, China has decreased its share of exports to the U.S. from 17% to 10%. Meanwhile, China’s global exports are up 40%, while imports are flat. Trump’s tariff policy is the definition of stupid: hurt others while hurting yourself. It has not inspired an increase in domestic manufacturing, but a decrease in exports, as reciprocal tariffs take effect, and a rerouting of the global supply chain around the U.S.  “Higher prices, lower growth” makes for a lousy bumper sticker.

If I were advising Xi, I’d counsel him to go for the jugular by engaging in AI-dumping, a repeat of their aughts steel-dumping playbook. It’s already underway — and working. Eighty percent of a16z startups use open-source Chinese models. Same story at Airbnb. China is registering similar or better performance as the American LLM leaders, but with a fraction of the capex. Flooding the market with competitive, less-expensive AI models will put pressure on the margins and pricing power of the Mag 7, taking down a frighteningly concentrated S&P and likely sending the U.S., possibly the globe, into recession.

The Data Center Bubble Bursts

OpenAI is promising Oracle $300 billion — money it doesn’t have — for infrastructure Oracle hasn’t built. We can’t see the actual contract, but this is BS. The greatest AI hallucination yet is the assumption that in the next few years we’re going to build anywhere near the required grid and power capacity. OpenAI needs 20% of current U.S. electric capacity — equivalent to 250 nuclear power plants — at a cost of $10 trillion. There’s a five- to eight-year wait to connect a new data center to the grid. Meanwhile, China has more than twice America’s energy capacity at half the cost. Second greatest AI hallucination? Job creation. The average number of full-time employees at a data center is equivalent to the number of people working at two Applebee’s.

Nvidia & OpenAI Duopoly Comes Under Siege

Based on its valuation, Nvidia is telling the market it will add an additional $800 billion in revenue over the next five years — equivalent to the combined revenue of Apple, IBM, Meta, and Tesla. OpenAI, which has $20 billion in annual revenue, is projecting it’ll add $180 billion in revenue over the same period — equivalent to the combined revenue of Disney, Fox, the New York Times, Paramount, and WBD. Also, OpenAI’s $1.4 trillion in spending commitments exceeds Argentina’s national debt.

Meanwhile, the competition is heating up. China is putting out comparable models at a fraction of the price (see above), Anthropic has captured the lead for enterprise users, and, as I predicted last year, the empire (Alphabet) is striking back. Gemini summaries are improving, and arguably the greatest concentration of AI talent resides at Alphabet. OpenAI could be our era’s Netscape, i.e., the disruptor that enjoys a moment in the spotlight before being eclipsed by an incumbent.

Big Tech Pick: Amazon

I’m bullish on Amazon, even though it underperformed the Mag 7 this year. The collision of AI and robotics is the Champagne and cocaine cocktail fueling Amazon’s retail margin expansion, catalyzing a 2x increase in the gross merchandise value of its largest business (retail) by 2033, without adding any human workers. Just as Ford’s assembly line slashed automotive production time by 88%, Amazon’s robotics investments have reduced the time from click to ship by 78%. The rest of the Mag 7 capitalizes on the elevation of information (bits) over objects (atoms), while Amazon is leveraging bits to move atoms faster and cheaper. Notably, the market hasn’t priced this in yet; in 2025 Amazon stock traded at a P/E ratio of 33, compared to its historic average of 58. The greatest accretion in shareholder value from AI will be at companies that leverage others’ AI. Specifically, Amazon. 

Space: The Next Big ‘Thing’

When technology gets cheaper, startups form, the ecosystem attracts cheaper and cheaper capital, which spurs innovation, and so on and so on. The cost of the personal computer decreased 58% during the 15-year dot-com boom, and U.S. IT spending increased 200%. The same pattern is happening now with AI: The cost of GPU operations has fallen by 74%, while global AI funding has risen by 280%. The key metric for space? Over the past 15 years, the cost to get a kilogram of payload into orbit is down 89%, while private U.S. space investment jumped 6x.

SpaceX is dominant, registering 84% of U.S. space launches in 2024, up from 18% in 2008. If I were running investor relations, I’d position SpaceX as follows: Google owns 93% of information with search, Meta controls two-thirds of social connection, Amazon has half of e-commerce. SpaceX controls 90% of everything else in the universe. Everything is a subset of the addressable market that is space.  

Best Investment (You Don’t Have Access to): TikTok U.S.

TikTok’s success underscores the biggest mistake marketers make, believing choice is a good thing. It isn’t. Consumers spend five days per year deciding what to watch on Netflix. TikTok has only one channel, and it’s the best one you’re ever going to watch. Forty-three percent of Americans 18 to 29 get their news from TikTok. We also spend more time, on average, with TikTok (54 minutes per day) than with friends (35 minutes). When I say TikTok is our new best friend, I mean CCP spy. But I digress.

The math on TikTok’s forced sale doesn’t math, though, unless you’re one of the president’s cronies. TikTok’s U.S. ad revenue was $12 billion in 2024. Applying a 10x P/S ratio, its U.S. business has an implied value of $120 billion. Accounting for a revenue share with China, Trump’s deal values U.S. TikTok at $28 billion. But I’m a Democrat, so I’m not allowed to invest. These insider deals reduce people’s faith in the market, raising the cost of capital for everyone. U.S. economic policy could best be described as corrupt, but stupid. 

Short-Form Video and AI Meteors Strike Hollywood

Hollywood is the new Detroit, but with better weather. For creatives, the return on human capital is inversely correlated to the size of the screen. Seventy-eight percent of Americans age 10 to 24 watch TV and movies on YouTube and TikTok. The Kids Diana Show on YouTube averages between 2 and 10 minutes per episode — perfectly calibrated for young people’s shrinking attention spans. The show registers 137 million subscribers; Disney+ has 128 million subscribers. 

The other meteor headed for Hollywood is AI. What AI will do to Hollywood is what podcasting is doing to TV. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert employs 200 people, costs $100 million, and makes $60 million. When Colbert shifts to podcasting, he’ll take eight people with him and make just $20 million, but it’ll only cost $5 million to produce. The means of production are being arbitraged. There will be outrage from the creative community, who believe they’re too precious to face disruption. But consumers, much less the Ellisons, don’t give a shit.

Waymo Dominates

Automobile deaths kill 40,000 Americans annually — equivalent to prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and breast cancer combined. Autonomous driving may be the equivalent of a cure for (some types of) cancer. A study evaluating tens of millions of miles driven by Waymo found that its autonomous cars were involved in 96% fewer vehicle-to-vehicle crashes, resulting in 90% fewer bodily-injury claims, and 92%  fewer pedestrian injuries compared to cars driven by humans. 

Waymo went from 38,000 paid rides per month in 2023 to 1 million just two years later. The company is lapping the competition, logging 100 million fully autonomous miles, compared to Tesla’s 1.25 million miles with human safety monitors. The second horse to watch is Uber. It’s technology-agnostic, choosing to pour capital into the consumer experience. As former CEO Travis Kalanick said, the most expensive part of the business is the person in the driver’s seat. 

Humanoid Robots = Self-Driving Cars of 2015

Similar to self-driving cars circa 2015, humanoid robots are another Musk weapon of mass distraction designed to draw attention away from the fact that Tesla is a car company. Tesla’s market cap per car sold is 77x what it is for GM and Ford, 28x Toyota, and 24x BYD. According to Musk, Tesla’s Optimus robot will be an “infinite money glitch” that ends poverty and performs surgery. It’s as if he’s on ketamine. According to MIT robotics professor emeritus Rodney Brooks, “We will have plenty of humanoid robots 15 years from now, but they will look like neither today’s humanoid robots nor humans.” The current / future opportunities aren’t robots that mimic humans, but robots that augment / replace humans at industrial scale.  

Vice of the Year: Prediction Markets

Prediction markets leverage the wisdom of crowds. In turn, crowds supercharged by integrations with news brands create a virtual self-propulsion marketing machine. Participants may be deluded into believing they’re engaging in an intellectual pursuit when they bet on an election’s outcome, but it’s gambling, just more fun and interesting. What GLP-1s did to fast food, prediction markets are doing to the gaming business. Aristocrat Leisure, Caesars Entertainment, DraftKings, Evolution Gaming, Flutter Entertainment, and MGM Resorts are down 22% YTD, on average. Las Vegas tourism is down 8%. Nobody will be in Vegas once Vegas is on everyone’s phone.

The externalities are huge. Half the men in the U.S. between 18 and 49 have a sports betting account. Among sports bettors, 23% say they’re addicted; the share jumps to 37% for Gen-Z. One in five people with a gambling addiction attempt suicide. Personal bankruptcy filings increased by 28% in states that legalized sports betting after a 2018 Supreme Court ruling. There are also civic externalities, as prediction markets represent the mother of all insider trading opportunities. Wagering on what Musk will Tweet next, Trump’s Fed pick, the speed of a pitch, or when a candidate will drop out of a race invites corruption into every aspect of American life.   

Synthetic Relationships Take Center Stage

There’s a use case for AI companions, but it’s uncomfortable — a sad story about lonely old people. One-quarter of Americans 65 and up are socially isolated, increasing their risk of stroke and dementia by 30% and 50%, respectively. The share of the population aged 65 and older is projected to reach 21% by the end of the decade. In one year-long analysis of older Americans living alone, 95% of participants said bots reduced loneliness. If synthetic relationships can make older people less lonely and stave off dementia, that’s great.

The problem? Young people aren’t developing the skills to navigate life’s hardest / most rewarding thing: relationships. Google search volume for “how to make friends” has increased 5x since 2004, while the share of Americans who say they have no close friends increased 4x from 1990 to 2021. 

I believe synthetic companions are the next opioid crisis for young people. On Character.ai, 79% of the users are under 35; the average session is 93 minutes. In any given week on ChatGPT, 560,000 people show signs of mania or psychosis, while 1.2 million people engage in conversations that indicate they have a plan to self-harm. Unfortunately, Congress is The Walking Dead meets The Golden Girls. They see the danger from synthetic relationships about as clearly as the propaganda threat posed by TikTok.

The ‘College Is Dead’ Narrative Collapses

Some of the most successful people of our age are college dropouts — Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Oprah. You should assume your son is not Oprah. Despite the noise about employers removing degree requirements, the share of workers without a degree increased only 3.5% between 2019 and 2024, while 45% of all firms made no changes to their hiring practices. In pure economic terms, the median household income for a college graduate is more than 2x what is for someone without a degree. College graduates see better nonfinancial outcomes, too, in the form of lower rates of obesity, divorce, and suicide. On average, they also live six years longer. 

After declining during the pandemic, enrollment has rebounded. The issue isn’t value add, but value (i.e., cost). Adjusted for inflation, tuition rose 53% and 32% at public and private schools, respectively, between 2000 and 2025. Why? A: My industry is corrupt. We artificially sequester supply so we can raise tuition faster than inflation. Faculty, administrators, and alumni are drunk on exclusivity. We’ve lost the script and begun believing we’re luxury goods, not educators. 

Finally, Team Scotland will reach the semifinals of the World Cup on the back of a Pele-like performance from Scott McTominay. Hey … I can dream.

The best way to predict the future is to make it. I hope the New Year brings you the perspective and presence of mind to realize that, if you live in America, are healthy, and have people who let you love them completely, 2026 will be the best year of your life.  

Life is so rich,

P.S. Start the year off with a New York Times bestseller. (Flex.) Notes on Being a Man is available in all the usual places.

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