Radical Contributions
This is not a newsletter. It’s a treatise, composed of serialized essays.
The core of the treatise is simple: BUILDING GREAT THINGS.
Individual essays touch on the intersection of Wealth, Culture, Technology, Business, Finance, Policy, and History.
Some essays may delve into global economic data sets. Some may be discussions of cultural phenomena that play a part in causing success…or failure. Some may be reviews of other relevant work.
My hope is that you can read a few of these essays in order and import a sufficiently complex version of my own worldview to compare against your own, make predictions, and reinterpret historical & current events in a novel way.
Most Radical Contributions
My mini magnum opus describes a multi-layer model of geopolitical economic development: The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier?
American Zaibatsu: Macroeconomics for Tech Employees — which is, on the surface, about how powerful national economies are built, and below that, about how the very best companies are built across all ages, and below all of that, about the natural limits to the power of central bankers. Best read after The Full Stack of Society.
My popular essays exploring one specific economic topic:
The Uncharity of College: The Big Business Nobody Understand
The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth: How the Average American’s Savings Disappear
My cultural piece on the tragic nature of Moloch and existential battles: Moloch is Our God: AI, Mankind, and Moloch Walk Into A Bar — Only Two May Leave
My political piece on the fundamental philosophical natures of “Right” & “Left”: Ouroboros Theory: Describing The Nature of Right vs. Left
My social theory piece on the link between aggregate crime and Elite selection processes in societies across different eras: Escalation Theory: Compliance, Violence, and Overachievement in Society
Who Even Reads These Crazy Long Essays?
People who like long-form content and are adjacent to writers like Scott Alexander and Alexey Guzey
People who invest money into Tech companies and work at places like Andreesen Horowitz and Founder’s Fund
People who write for media entities like The Browser, TechCrunch, and CNBC
If you’d like to be included in this list, shoot me an email or just link to one of my essays and I’ll probably see it show up in the referral traffic!
You should subscribe if…
…you care about learning how to build wealth at scale for groups & institutions you belong to…
…you’re interested in both the hard quantitative & soft cultural factors driving outcomes…
…you aren’t satisfied with quick 10 minute reads that claim to explore ideas in depth…
…you can juggle multiple opposing worldviews and explore their intersection…
…you want to talk to me about something…
…you’re a nerd who likes data…
…you’re just a really cool person…
You should NOT subscribe if…
…you want another way to engage in the Culture War…
…you need a new post every week, or even every month…
…you’re better looking than me, and have a bigger bank account balance, and got a higher SAT score, and are better than me at League of Legends & World of Warcraft…
Why all the essays are free
“Once you start charging for writing you corrupt the quality of the writing”
I gave my spiel on why think tanks, paid opinion writers, and democratized substack authors compromise their intellectual integrity at the end of my podcast with Lorenzo, Swarm #14, listen in here:
On the other hand, my previous email provider was charging me a not-insignificant amount of money to send my essays out to you all. “Art is suffering”, but I much prefer VCs pay for these emails instead.
My attempt to avoid hypocrisy here is to promise that all my essays will be free, in their entirety, forever. If you’d like to subscribe to a paid tier, your support is greatly appreciated — but it’s not a commercial exchange. These are my ideas I’m sharing, imperfect, messy, and rather long. I write because I have something to say, not to fulfill commercial obligations.
I’ve also set the paid subscriber tiers to strongly incentivize Annual subscriptions over Monthly, since I will not be publishing once a month in the near term.
About Me
I currently work in Tech, live in New Hampshire with my wonderful family, and have friends in SF, NYC, Boston, LA, Portland, Chicago, Austin, San Diego, and Montreal.
You can read all about me and my ~professional background here, or go really off the wall and read some fiction I wrote here.
My primary intellectual interest is — per the first section on this page — the full suite of factors that help people, companies, and countries become wealthy.
My other hobbies include: motorcycles (Duke390, Daytona765), videogames (WoW, LoL, Eve Online, AAA RPGs, Halo 2/3), reading (less than I used to), card games (magic/yugioh), painting (miniatures), and exploring ideas with friends over alcoholic beverages.
To the extent that I get into something as a “consumer”, I try really hard to also get into it as a “producer". These essays are of course the most visible example of that, but I’ve also dabbled in producing, making, publishing content about, or otherwise tinkering on: motorcycles, videogames, and epic fantasy.
