The Common Thread of All Technology: Monitoring the Situation, Ep.1

We're excited to do our first episode of Katherine and my new podcast series with a16z, where we run through the stories of the internet. Eddy, thank you for being our first guest. I thought an appropriate topic to begin with, since we have you from the crypto team, would be to do more of these mashup episodes with people from different teams.

One thing we see a little bit, Katherine, is that some people say, “How is a16z coherent when they really are leaning into the American Dynamism brand with our Art Deco and all of our investments?” But on the other side, I see all these consumer investments. How does that make any sense? More seriously, how should one think about the variety of what we do and how it is coherent and cohesive—to do something as serious as American Dynamism, but also to do consumer internet, for example?

Yeah. Well, I always get the question, or someone put on the internet maybe a week ago, “How do games have anything to do with American Dynamism?” I always answer that question with one word, which is Palmer. Anduril would not have happened if not for Oculus. Oculus would not have happened if not for Palmer’s obsession with gaming, right?

There’s so much continuity in the world of tech that I sometimes think people silo things almost because we silo things, right? We’re very different worlds, and we have very different types of expertise in terms of what we’re looking for as investors. But the continuity of what is building and what is technology spans all sorts of realms. Frankly, it spans every industry and every realm of human life, so to say that games have nothing in common, or crypto has nothing in common, or these people have nothing in common—

It’s all one boiling mass. It’s all interconnected. GPUs still internally use all the logic of showing things on a screen. You buy a GPU for a data center; it still has little ports on the back to connect a monitor to it. They’ll never be used, right? It’s all deeply intertwined.

Every piece of technological progress can be reapplied somewhere else. That’s the whole beauty of software. That’s the whole beauty of computing. I don’t even understand the question, Erik. I don’t even understand the question.

Well, I always say, Erik, I’ve been begging you and telling you we have to have The Techno-Optimist Manifesto on the front page of our website, right? Because to me, that is the coherent thesis of what all building is. It’s the thesis of every founder’s journey, right? The founder’s journey is pretty universal across every sector. It’s sort of a universal story arc in terms of what they experience, even if they’re building in different realms.

I think the sort of Atoms and Bits playful battles between our founders are actually more of a humorous thing versus something that’s really grounded in philosophy. At the same time, everyone’s going through the same thing of building, and no one can predict. You can be directionally correct about where you believe the future is headed, but no one can make predictions. No one would have ever looked at Palmer in his motor home, living outside his parents’ house while he was trying to build Oculus, and said he was going to remake American defense. I don’t even think Palmer would have said that about himself, right?

There’s something about the hero’s journey and the building journey that is very universal, and that brings all of these categories together. Tech should be aligned on these things and shouldn’t necessarily have infighting or think of these categories as very different. I know, Eddy, we’re going to get into the unique—I don’t know—philosophical overlaps between American Dynamism and crypto, which I actually think there are many, including similar personality profiles among the founders who are attracted to these categories.

But if people question how you can do it all, or what the unifying force is between all of these categories, it’s like, go back and read Marc’s The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, right? Because that, to me, exemplifies how all of these things are really on the same hero’s journey.

Yeah. I think, to riff on Chris Dixon’s great line, everything great starts looking like a toy. Toys or games can inspire so much beyond that; they can be a playground to experiment with new technologies that can then be the inspiration for something way bigger or very different. To your point, it’s all a boiling pot.

But I also think the toys, games, or platforms themselves are underrated just as is. I remember Thiel’s famous line: “We wanted flying cars; we got 140 characters.” Turns out 140 characters is way more impactful than flying cars. These toys, games, or products are underrated just on their own merits, separate from their being inspiration for other things.

I actually have a great story—a very timely story—about this. We were just in Washington, DC, with Marc, and a senator, who I won’t name, was in the meeting and was talking about what could be very valuable for the defense world. He was talking about how, basically, in Ukraine, just-in-time manufacturing feeds into building things in the trenches very quickly, and about doing this iteration live with people who are then using the products and changing the products every few days.

His question was, “Why can’t we do this inside the defense industrial base?” Marc actually responded to him and said, “Well, we do this with toys. This is how we build hardware. Toys, of course—we can do this with hardware in America, because this is how any type of toy is built, and any type of hardware is built. You iterate very rapidly, and you can iterate in the field. It’s only in defense where we don’t do this, because there’s infrastructure that makes it impossible for us to do this. But it is very possible, and we do it in consumerland.”

I thought that was a very interesting thing. You could kind of see the light bulbs going off: “Oh, American Dynamism actually does exist in various categories, and you can bring some of those learnings from consumerland into defenseland, and it will be incredibly impactful.” Clearly, that’s what the Ukrainians do.

Yeah, so let’s segue to the crypto–American Dynamism interplay. Eddy, I remember we were at a retreat a few years ago, and someone smartly asked, “How do we think about the fact that, on the one hand, we’re trying to strengthen American power, strengthen the dollar, and strengthen our influence globally, while on the other hand, crypto seems like it could be a threat to that to some degree? How do we think about how American Dynamism and crypto are interlinked, from a philosophical or practical level?”

Yeah. The trick here is that “American whatever” is kind of hiding what values are underneath it, right? I think of crypto as freedom-promoting technology. Now, in the horrible case—and I don’t think that’s the case today—where America becomes not freedom-promoting, then you could see crypto as a hedge.

That’s kind of what Satoshi meant when he was talking about the banking system failing, right? He wanted to create this technological option. I think of him as trying to create, in software, a way to represent those same values that was, in some sense, immune to whatever the states happened to be doing at the time.

So I don’t think that they’re necessarily replacements. I think that they’re complements, right? They’re trying to get at the same underlying value system: the same concepts about freedom to move capital, property rights for individuals, the ability of capital to flow freely, payments to flow freely, and for people to be able to own things—just 2 different mechanisms for putting them in place.

I don’t think that they’re replacements by any means. There will be states for the foreseeable future, and there will be the internet for the foreseeable future. How do you want them to actually represent these things? I think they can be incredibly complementary, right?

If you think about it, there’s another spin on it, kind of connecting to what we were talking about now: experimentation. It’s about being able to experiment with the means of ownership and the means of morphing and moving around capital. That’s hard to do because you have to do it in the construct of the state, and the state has certain degrees of freedom that it can take, right? It has to be very, very careful and very protective of these things for totally good reasons.

If you can allow those types of experiments to happen in a totally open-source and visible way out in the public for everybody to scrutinize, in a way that doesn’t give anyone outside the state asymmetric power, then you allow for those exact types of experiments, right? I mean, another way to put it is: Does the state really want someone outside the state to have all the power and to make all these experiments? I don’t think it does.

I think that what the state would like to see, if the state is freedom-promoting—and in America it certainly is—is people doing these experiments in a way that's totally visible and legible, right? And that's exactly what crypto does. So I see there being profound conceptual overlaps. We haven't even talked about privacy. We haven't even talked about ways that consumers can be actually protected. I have a whole riff on how the point of crypto is actually to protect consumers from software developers, right? And that's really what it is. But anyway—

I mean, the things that I've anecdotally seen the connection on—and again, I'm not a crypto person. I consider myself kind of a normie—but things that I've picked up on over 10 years of investing is really the philosophical alignment between the types of founders who start crypto companies and the types of founders who start American Dynamism companies. So much so that some founders that we have backed—I will not out them without their permission—but some founders that we have backed that are now leading unicorn companies in American Dynamism were toying with the idea: “Do I want to start something in crypto, or do I want to start something in American Dynamism?”

People would say, “That's crazy, right? One's hardware, one's—these are completely different things.” But from a philosophical level, the conversations we were having about what America needs and what the biggest problems are for our generation—these people are very aligned on what the problems are.

100%.

And I think that's probably where there's the most alignment, right? You can come to different results. I always say Balaji and I have a ton in common. We come to completely different ends on where we end up in many cases, but we have a ton in common on what we agree is the problem, right? And so I think in some ways there's a unifying philosophical connection between the people who operate in these ecosystems.

And then the other thing that I always point out, that's an anecdote too, is the first time that The Sovereign Individual—and sort of the canonical books that led to people really investigating this as a category—all of those people who introduced those books to me 10 years ago, when I first moved to the Valley, were all American Dynamism hardware, early SpaceX investors, and early Palantir investors, right? These people have a lot in common philosophically.

And when you look at even just the way I describe myself as an American Dynamist, I always describe myself as a federalist, someone who is in deep favor of—

I thought you said you're a normie.

I'm a federalist, rather. Yeah, right, but I believe in federalism. That's why I live in Florida. I believe in the federalist experiment. I think that's something that's under-discussed about what makes America extraordinary and unique, and where decentralization is most prominent in the tech community. It is in the crypto world, right? That's where you actually use those words, and it's very much aligned to, I would say, a strain of political philosophy that really focuses on the federalist experiment as the unique part of America—not necessarily the other parts that people always point to as what makes America great.

So in some ways, I think there's a ton of alignment between how people view why it's so necessary to build for America in a startup versus why anyone could go into government or use other means to serve their country. But I think there's a lot of philosophical alignment between why you need American Dynamism companies and why decentralization is important in tech.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I put the bluntest point I can put on it: it's incredibly obvious that crypto is American, culturally. The crypto ethos is a uniquely American cultural phenomenon.

I didn't know if we were allowed to claim it. I'm glad you do.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of things that people don't appreciate are really American that feel like they're global now, but—

As is the startup. The startup is an American concept. Totally. The founder is an American concept, right? Why do we call them founders? We don't use the French term. We don't use “entrepreneur.” It is a very American thing, what we do—not what I do, but what the people we support do.

It is interesting how ironic it is that China got an early lead on some of this open-source AI stuff. Going back to Katherine's mention of some of the meetings in DC, one of the things senators were asking Marc is just about the US-China AI race and what we should do. Marc has this phrase: “Are we going to win by being more like them, or more like us—more like our values—and leaning into what made us so great?”

I found that a really compelling phrasing, and it is just interesting as we're at a time where AI policy is going to be litigated and then set in terms of how we compete. Maybe let's use that as a segue into the stories of the day. There's been a lot of stories of the week. There's been a lot in healthcare this week. We had Dr. Bhattacharya on the day of the autism announcement.

We were joking that the administration has previously been so friendly to Silicon Valley startups, but now with this work in reducing autism, it seems like a grave threat. No, on the surface, Katherine, what struck you about some of the health-related news of the week?

One of the things that I've been reflecting on a lot—and again, I know we're going to talk about Eddy's new arrival to his family. I'm going to have my third child in just a few months. But there's something about the way that this generation understands medicine that I actually think comes from the internet being your doctor now, right?

Maybe 10 years ago, there was a lot of fear around that. There was a lot of, “Oh, you can't trust the internet. You can't trust information sources that are not reviewed by government and aren't passed down by experts.” And I think we're just living in this completely different reality where the people who are having children now, who are sort of entering their 30s and 40s and are really vocal around a lot of these topics, grew up in an age of completely distributed information, particularly around things like medicine. And they follow the wisdom of crowds.

I've just posted about the history of OxyContin, right? There was a whole decade where they were preparing class-action lawsuits against Purdue Pharma before 2013, when the FDA took the drug off the market, and it had been on the market for 20 years as a miracle drug.

So I think what you're seeing from this generation isn't skepticism of experts. It's not how it's portrayed. The New York Times had this big exposé maybe a week ago where they were like, “You can't trust these internet quacks,” right? And it's like, Gwyneth Paltrow has been selling us weird stuff for 15 years. It's so part of our DNA now that you can't call it quackery. You kind of have to call it wisdom of crowds.

I've got a lot of doctor friends, a lot of people I grew up with who are in the medical community. The way that these doctors practice medicine now is they realize that you're not just practicing it in the doctor's office. You're competing with all of these different information sources and all of these different backgrounds. People are a lot more open with their questions.

I'm having my third child. I joke that it's my ChatGPT baby because I upload every single medical diagnostic, every blood report, everything to ChatGPT, and it gives me a ton of data that the doctors don't have time to give me. I share it with my doctors. They think it's cool. We're just in this totally different generation where people are a lot more open-minded. They expect things to swing faster than the Purdue Pharma case, which was a 20-year issue where it went from, “This is a miracle drug,” to, “This is terrible for you.” And I just have expectations of speed.

Yeah. My wife has been the same. She's a total expert on all this stuff. I would frame it—and I'm really channeling this through the lens of seeing my wife really spend so much time on this—as just a higher information standard. It's a higher epistemic standard.

It's not just skepticism of experts. It's maybe resisting the idea of accepting, unchallenged, what the first expert you talked to said, right? That's how I'm seeing it. We see doctors, but we come to the doctor now informed by a bunch of research, and that's also not taking for granted even what ChatGPT says, to be honest.

I'll send the same thing to ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Grok at the same time, force them to fight against each other, and then end up with just a list of interesting sources that I put in front of the doctor, right? That's the feedback loop now.

And I think that’s far better. Of course, it’s funny when people say LLMs make mistakes. Of course they make mistakes, but so do human doctors. So what’s the answer? The answer is obviously a more rigorous standard of information: more information sources, uncorrelated channels of information.

How do you do that? How do you do more information processing? Well, computers and the internet, and AI models. It’s all actually not that complicated a way to see the world. It shouldn’t be so miraculous to see it this way, yet it is. Right?

Totally. I was having this exact conversation with my phlebotomist at Labcorp. I asked him, “How often do you see people come in and talk to you about what they’ve uploaded to ChatGPT?” He said, “All the time.” He said it’s one of the number-one use cases.

No one just goes to the doctor, comes here, gives their results to the doctor, and has them read them out. Everyone is putting them into ChatGPT. Everyone is having some sort of additional analysis, and it’s been eye-opening for people.

In some ways, I feel like we should feel really good that America is adopting this—questioning and wanting more information. This is a good thing. In some ways, I feel like when people were always talking about WebMD, it was like, “Yeah, maybe that was 1.0, but here we are now,” and people really want more information.

What people are worried about, I think, is when they imagine that someone just picks the cheapest, lowest-IQ LLM and then accepts the first thing that it says uncritically. That’s what people imagine, and that’s what they’re worried about.

Yeah.

But that’s the same thing if you go to a terrible doctor who you just happen to get. It’s kind of the same effect, to be honest.

I’ll make this as short as possible, but a few years ago I was kind of worried about my cholesterol. I had a new GP because my old GP retired, and the first thing this candidate GP they put in front of me said when she saw my cholesterol was, “Uh-oh, I think you should probably eat fewer eggs,” which was totally based on a discredited, 60-year-old study on rabbits. It’s completely wrong as a way to think about serum cholesterol and dietary cholesterol.

She was in her 30s. I was just like, “What? Where did you get this?” I pulled up ChatGPT and said, “See how this is not a thing.” She was shocked—mind-blown.

I don’t think all doctors are like this. I don’t think people should assume that all doctors are incompetent by any means. But the point is that we have more tools at our disposal. So I totally agree with that, Katherine.

Totally. Autism rates have significantly increased over the past couple of decades. I want to segue this to ADHD in a second, but do we have a pet conspiracy theory on why, or is it just purely a diagnosis thing?

Well, I want to get to ADHD. I actually think—let’s move to ADHD, because I think that one—

I’m more familiar with it. I’m not going to say personally, but I’m more familiar with the data, right?

I have sons, so I’m preparing myself for the inevitable ADHD diagnosis. That’s even a weird thing to say, right? I have a 4½-year-old and a 2½-year-old, and just looking at their energy levels, I always joke that I have to run them before they go to school. If I don’t get the energy out, like a dog, before they go to school, something will happen in school.

I can already kind of see it, and I don’t blame teachers for this. I don’t blame doctors. These are more like systemic issues. If you have an energetic boy—it’s mostly boys, right?—I think the New York Times exposé that came out a couple of months ago basically said that 23% of all 17-year-old boys have been given an ADHD diagnosis.

That’s 1 in 4 boys in America. There’s something wrong with them, right? You can say, “Okay, there’s clearly something wrong with all these boys.” Or you can say, “Okay, we’re medicating boyhood.”

What is it about this? Why is it incentivized for doctors to give them this diagnosis? Why is it something that teachers, in some ways—I don’t want to say encourage, but it is sort of this strange thing where, if you have a child who is very energetic in pre-K, they sort of say, “Well, next time at their 4-year-old checkup, maybe talk to them about some of these behavioral things,” right?

My son is like an angel now. He’s grown up a little bit, and they’re like, “Oh, he’s doing great in school.” But for a year, we were like, “Oh, he clearly, clearly is just a high-energy boy.”

The incentive systems around a lot of these things are that parents, for one, want these ADHD diagnoses. The reason parents want them is because they give you extra time and extra resources. You can then opt your kid out of certain things in school. It makes school more manageable for high-energy boys.

The reason the school wants it is because they get more dollars from the state if they have special-needs students, across a variety of different special needs. Everyone knows this. The schools will tell you this, right? It’s better if they have a student who needs additional attention, or in their words, needs something special, for them to get the diagnosis from the doctor. Again, the diagnosis is not something that anyone stigmatizes anymore, and then the school can get more dollars from the state.

What that means is that both parents and teachers are incentivized for a number of different reasons. That’s especially true if you’re like, “Wow, my kid’s about to take the ACT, and I want them to have an extra hour so that they can perform higher than the other 25% of children who have this diagnosis.” There are systemic reasons why people are actually asking for the diagnosis.

What I’ve joked with both of you is that it takes a very disagreeable, sadly principled mother to be like, “No, I’m not getting my hyper-energetic boy a diagnosis for life, and I’m definitely not going to put him on drugs because I realize the incentive system that’s set up.”

A couple of years ago, if you talked about this, you were an absolute quack. Then this piece comes out in the New York Times in April, and it’s like, “Oh, yeah, actually, the medical community kind of agrees that this ADHD Adderall pill-mill thing might be a huge problem.”

I think there’s something about, if you look at Purdue Pharma, if you look at ADHD, and if you look at our generation’s experience with the medical community, it’s this consistent experience of all the incentives of large systems that go beyond individuals pushing you toward one thing. Years later, you might find out, as Erik has found out, you didn’t need Ritalin.

Right?

You’re just an energetic guy.

Yeah. Same. And there’s no downside to a diagnosis. That’s the thing. You have total optionality on whether you want to take the medication. We can identify the pathologies in students. We want to help students.

We have tools to help them.

And so there’s no downside to identifying them or misidentifying them. So let’s just generously hand these out, right? I see it. I see nothing but good intention, totally.

I was the same. We were talking about this before. I also had an ADHD diagnosis when I was—I forget how old—8 or 9 years old, whatever. In retrospect, I think it was totally nonsense, right? I mean, not for everybody necessarily, but in my case, I think it was nonsense.

It was just that my behavior was not fitting within what they believed was the proper mold, and they wanted to help fix me, right? That’s how they thought of it. I hated Ritalin. I tried Concerta, Dexedrine, and all the stuff—Vyvanse. I tried them all. I hated them all.

It turns out that just a little bit of guilt and discipline was what you honestly needed.

Yeah. In my case, at least. More specifically, connecting to that, and to some degree to autism—although I don’t have as much personal experience with that—one of the issues is that the diagnostic criteria can shift, right?

As people want to identify these cases and see very little downside in identifying them, they may broaden the criteria. In an effort to precisify the diagnostic criteria, they may broaden it. I’ve heard that as a plausible explanation for the rise in ADHD and autism cases.

It can be rising, or it can just be that you’re moving down the curve of diminishing marginal precision and identifying more and more cases, with the hope that you can treat the issue at very little cost.

And so that alone can explain what appears to be an increase in prevalence.

Yeah. They sort of told me I had ADHD because I wouldn’t focus in school and just did whatever I wanted. But that’s because I just hated school.

I could actually focus on things I was super interested in. I think it's an interesting segue to Alpha School, which is getting a lot of attention right now. And I know, Eddy, with just having a newborn, you're thinking about future schooling. Obviously, Katherine, you've thought quite a bit about it. Alpha School is interesting because one of their main KPIs is: Do kids love school?

My school was—I don't know about you guys, but mine was like a prison. I didn't have any inspiring teachers in elementary school or middle school. It was so boring. It's exciting to see different models, and I have parent friends who are starting to homeschool their kids and think about alternatives. Eddy, how have you been thinking about it?

I feel like there are 3 branches now, right? There’s the traditional school system, and by that I mean both public and private schools—the conventional school system. There’s this somewhat growing alternative school system. I think Alpha School is a really cool example that I’d love to learn a lot more about. I saw this fantastic interview on Next a couple weeks ago about it.

And then the third is something that I’ve heard people talk about, but maybe doesn’t exist yet. Maybe that actually ends up merging into branch 2, which is the AI tutor world, where every kid gets a Socrates. That’s the line. I think they’re all so interesting.

What has really leapt out to me about Alpha School, and even the Socrates option, is that with all this great development in software, we can put an infinite treadmill in front of kids of things they can learn, at a low cost—an infinite treadmill where they can just train and learn whatever they want to arbitrary depth. Designing something that is rigorous enough, gives them strong enough feedback, and encourages them to really maximize that seems like the educational challenge of the 21st century to me.

You couldn’t do that before, right? You couldn’t do that 30 years ago, when you had to put them in a space with specific teachers who had specific strengths and had to get specific, expensive books and stuff. Now it’s just an unbounded road ahead. I’m very, very excited about the prospect of being able to give arbitrary depth to whatever interesting, challenging topic is available to my son.

What’s interesting about our children versus how we grew up is that arbitrary depth couldn’t be nurtured when we were kids around random things, right? You would have to go to the public library and see if there was a book on septic tank installation, which my son was into about 6 months ago—deeply into septic tanks. Now he’s into garbage disposals. There is no book in the public library that has anything on garbage disposals and how they work.

Absolutely not. Of course not.

But there are hundreds of YouTube videos on how to install your own garbage disposal, how it works, diagrams—all the things that he’s interested in as a kid who’s obsessed with garbage disposals. That’s so cool.

In some ways, our kids’ play comes before they go to school, and their play is so hyper-specialized. Their entertainment is so hyper-specialized. If you’re a very hands-on parent and your kid’s like, “I want to learn about septic tanks,” you help them learn about that in a way that parents before couldn’t. Unless you knew a lot about septic tanks or had a friend in that business, how were you going to educate your kid on how that works?

Some people may react by saying, “What’s the point of your kid learning about septic tanks?” Or garbage disposals, right? The thing is, it’s so obvious to me that if you really learn a lot about how a garbage disposal works, you really get into it. You see one cut in half and a diagram, and you see the pipes and learn about how it works. There are so many proximate or adjacent things to that that end up generalizing.

Yeah. I promise you that a kid who becomes an expert in just how a garbage disposal works—a little kid—they’re so primed to learn about other mechanical systems, other hydraulic systems, and the manufacturing of bespoke appliances. There are so many cool things next to that.

I just think of when I was a kid and I was learning those types of things as much as I could, which is not nearly as much as you could now. You end up applying and reapplying that knowledge. The compounding nature of knowledge is maybe its most interesting part. If you can really allow a kid to lean as deep as possible into that thing, just go as deep as you conceivably can, I think the benefits are unbelievable.

I’m excited to find how to do that for my kid. I don’t know yet. I’m really excited about Alpha School and weird stuff like that. I do wonder, though—to put the other spin on it—how much of that is a selection effect, right? The incredible results of Alpha School, I actually believe them completely. I totally believe these positive results.

I just wonder to what extent those results are crazy-ass parents who did a ton of work and have infinite resources at their disposal to jam them into this obscure school. These are obviously not normal families that are doing it, right? I want to do both: I’ll exploit every tool at my disposal, obviously, for my kid, but I’m also thinking about what kinds of things we can learn and apply to all kids.

Totally. And the other thing that’s really interesting is that I am not—I’m very sympathetic to the homeschooling movement. I’m not a homeschooler for obvious reasons. But you can do a lot of the homeschool stuff on the weekend.

One of the things that I’ve become much more sympathetic to now that I have kids who are exhibiting their own passions and their own personalities is that there is probably something good about being a slightly weird kid in a school. I remember that experience of being kind of bored or slightly weird and being in a normal school around normal people. That was a very good thing. I look back on it and think, “That was probably very good for me.” It’s probably very good for kids.

There’s one school of thought where you have a bright kid or a weird kid or someone who’s really interested in something, and you put them in Alpha School and let them go down the rabbit hole, which again I think is awesome. But then there’s the other thing: boredom is actually good. A lot of our life is pretty boring. It is important to learn how to work in big systems. It is important to realize that not everyone’s going to entertain your weird rabbit hole.

There is something about getting that lesson early and having that sort of, “I’m bored. I hate school. I’m going to figure out how to make it interesting for me,” that could be very valuable for kids as well. I’m always on the fence. I feel like you can dabble in different things and, on the weekends, teach one thing, during the week teach another, and the outcomes are probably going to be the same no matter what.

It’s good that there’s choice, right? It’s good that there’s a lot of choice now, so parents who know their kid can be like, “Clearly, my kid’s going to thrive in an individualized, personalized environment,” or, “Actually, I have this kid who’s the ham of the group and loves being in school. Put them in school. It’ll be great.”

Yeah. I think a hybrid is interesting. There’s certainly a lot to be learned from navigating social hierarchies and all these different types of people. I’d say maybe there are diminishing returns after learning those skills.

Those skills, Erik, you did.

Yeah, exactly. One thing that’s interesting about Alpha School is that they customize the lesson plans based on what the kid is interested in. As a kid, I was obsessed with basketball, but I didn’t like school. I remember writing a note to my math teacher being like, “What’s the point of math? Help me understand why I need to learn math, because this just doesn’t seem relevant to my life.” They just didn’t give a compelling answer.

But you could imagine a world where it’s like, “Okay, you love basketball. You want to be the GM of this team. Figure out the salary cap, or figure out which players to pursue based on statistical analysis.” There are so many ways they could have made it super relevant to my interest.

100%. I love that.

Totally. Eddy, I want to hear how fatherhood has been. I always feel like the first few months of becoming a new mom or dad, you have all these weird insights that are partially driven by sleep deprivation and then partially driven by just new, important experiences that happen in your life. I’d love to hear the high-level takeaways while they’re fresh.

Yeah, that’s a great question. So much has crossed my mind. It is crazy. I would say the thing that has struck me most—I’m only a month in, right? So am I a father? I don’t even know if I’m a father, right? I have this little guy who’s around, but am I a dad? I’m no different, right? So I’ll say that.

But I am struck by how obvious it is, how totally helpless they are. They are functionally blind and deaf. They’re a little ball of nothing. It’s ridiculous. It really struck me.

This is such a dorky thing to have observed, so I almost regret it, but it’s just so obvious how human intelligence is the reason why they are allowed to be so pathetic when they’re born, because we’re so capable of extremely specialized caregiving.

Yeah.

They would never have survived without it. Their helplessness is the mirror of our capability, and we should really lean into that. That is what human beings are, to some degree, specialized for.

Mhm.

I feel that so intensely. I also feel incredible empathy for people who don’t have maternity or paternity leave or don’t have resources, because my God, if I had to—I took a couple of weeks off, and my wife is still on maternity leave, and it’s great. Without that, it would be incredibly difficult.

It makes it very obvious to me why, in some sense, fertility is declining, because the opportunity cost of this suffering is massive. It’s a massive cost. Now, it’s totally worth it. I know the hackneyed thing you hear from parents all the time: It’s horrible, but it’s also great. Do it. That’s the thing you always hear, right? I heard the same thing, and I’m going to repeat exactly that same thing.

But it highlights for me that the more opportunity you have and the more things you could be doing—which is obviously the case in light of progress, like general technological progress—the more you’re giving up when you do it. I think people find that choice in advance very daunting and very scary. I would encourage them to take the leap, but I understand why it’s daunting when you hear all these stories. That’s very fresh in my mind.

Totally. That’s one of the things I always point to: the rise of cheap airfare and international travel becoming a widespread middle-class phenomenon. It’s not like you have to be wealthy. When we were growing up, if you knew someone who went to Europe, you were like, “Seriously? How did you do that?” It was a very luxurious, elite thing to do.

When you look at that, it’s like—if you’re fortunate enough to go to university, you can travel abroad anywhere, right? Universities make that a possibility. Life has become so much more interesting, as you said, with opportunity costs across a wide degree of sets, where you are having to think through: You might have the most interesting life; you might get to go to brunch.

I don’t get to go to brunch anymore, but you might get to go to brunch, and that might be an enjoyable thing you do every Saturday. That is definitely, I think, a huge part of it.

The other thing that I’ll point out is my experience. I’m fortunate enough to have my mother live with us, and she has been a godsend in holding these babies as they cry, for those of us who are working and that sort of thing.

There used to be a sort of familial unit that took care of children. I mean, it’s only been the last—the nuclear family.

That is so apparent to me.

Yes.

Yeah.

Especially if you don’t have it, you’re like, “How do two people do this?” It used to be a tribe. Only with the postwar nuclear family did we really move to suburbs and separate multigenerational family units from each other. Then you had one mother doing this all alone, which of course was the big complaint—the loneliness in the 1950s and 1960s of these housewives.

Even though they didn’t work, it was this extreme loneliness that had never really existed because you were constantly surrounded by siblings, family, multigenerational relatives, and that sort of thing. There is something about that aspect, too, where, if you’re in a city, it’s almost impossible to have the experience of having a multigenerational family.

There are so many trivial questions that come to mind when you have a baby, especially the first one: Is this normal? Is this weird? How do I fix this problem? Those questions come up so much. It’s so obvious to me how many of those questions, once you get the answer, are easy—you figure them out pretty fast.

So many of those things would be obvious if you were growing up around a family where there were already a lot of children and a lot of people who had been caretakers of children. You would just have absorbed it, either through osmosis or through a benign observation by your mom, dad, grandma, or grandpa. They would have just said, “Oh yeah, we do this thing,” and there would be nothing to it.

Whereas now, I’m sure you have many parents who, through totally understandable neurosis, worry about the most trivial thing and go to the doctor, and it becomes this entire rigmarole. We forget that little thing that was lost—the benefit of having the family around. Many little things are lost.

It’s interesting because there’s sort of a left-wing and a right-wing critique of the nuclear family these days. The right-wing critique, or the critique from the right, is similar to what we just said: “Hey, it used to be that you had much more support. We’ve sort of lost that support, and we need that support.”

From the left, it’s kind of the opposite. It’s like, “Don’t you dare assume that people need 2 parents at home to raise a kid. Don’t you dare assume that not everybody’s gay, bisexual, or polyamorous. Don’t assume that this is the default.” It leads to the nuclear family being critiqued from all sides for almost opposite reasons.

Yeah. I think—I would hope there’s large-scale agreement that people need help.

If you see someone in your life who is having a baby, help them. They need help, no matter who it comes from or what form it takes. It is definitely not something to be done alone, in a vacuum. Whether it’s friends, whether it’s family, or any other form, people need help.

So, I want to segue to another topic I wanted to talk about. It’s related to the Charlie Kirk assassination. We released an episode that Katherine did on Bari Weiss’s podcast, Honestly, which was a beautiful commentary on the assassination and Charlie’s martyrdom. We had the funeral the other day, which was one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen.

Eddy, we were talking offline, and you talked a little bit about how the reactions to the assassination, as they played out on the internet, demonstrated a bit of a gap between Zoomer culture, internet culture, and the rest of the population. Why don’t you share that reflection?

Well, something that really stuck out to me was how—I think there was a pervasive, well, there was a belief, maybe, that as the internet became mainstream, internet culture would become mainstream, right? In some sense, the line between so-called internet culture and mainstream culture would dissolve because of its mainstreaming.

There’s a lot of truth to that. A lot of people are part of the normal mimetic and cultural milieu that is internet-based. But I was really struck by how what I considered—because I’m kind of a normie here in these kinds of settings, Erik. On a podcast, I’m a little bit specialized, but whatever. In real life, I have a Discord of a bunch of my friends that I’ve been running for about 8 years, and I play video games. My brother and I met on the internet.

Yeah. No, no, I know it’s crazy. In person, it’s uncanny.

Yeah, that’s true. But there’s this whole universe that I’ve been in, and most of my friends are in it. Even crypto culture—part of why my crypto network in the Bay Area started very online, whatever.

I was struck by how, when they shared a lot of the memes and references that this shooter was engaging in, and the kind of culture he was in, it was a culture I’m very familiar with. It was just Discord, gamer, online, Zoomer culture. There are many concentric circles. I’m not so much in furry culture, but it’s adjacent to cultures that I’m in.

All the references—even the Helldivers 500-kilogram bomb arrow sequence—were things my friends and I knew. It was obvious to me. When I saw a lot of people on my Facebook—I hardly check my Facebook, my big blue Facebook—I saw so many people speculating about the meaning of these things, and they were so off. They were just unbelievably off.

It was like they were scrutinizing an alien culture. It really struck me that although there have been elements of internet culture that have mainstreamed.

We have managed to create isolated pockets that will just permanently remain separated. Let me try to put a really fine point on this one thing: because the internet is so open by default—anyone can make an account anywhere—I think there's an assumption that it's all accessible, right, and therefore should permeate.

But we have managed to create new gradients and new selection methods to create isolated little corners of the internet. Like gamer culture: you can't learn those things unless you play games. You have to play a bunch of video games and know a bunch of people who play video games to be a part of that.

Despite things being more connected than ever, there are still these distant branches and rabbit holes. It got me really thinking about the diversity of online culture, and what leads to the proliferation of many diverse online cultures and their mutual unintelligibility.

I love that you brought this up, Eddy, because I had a conversation with my best friend, a normie—throwing that out. I am a creature of the internet, clearly, but I was having a conversation with her at one point last week, and I explicitly remember saying to her, “Your Insta is not my X.”

We were in totally different worlds. What she was saying, from her takes on things on Instagram last week, was wildly different from what I had seen on X. Right? I think there's something about—I actually think X is sort of a unifying platform from all of the different pockets that you talked about, because if you're a power user of X, a lot of the early data that was coming out on anything—I mean, not just Charlie Kirk's assassination, but on anything—you get to X early. People really do the investigative work early.

Last week I was saying, “It probably—I don't know if the FBI or intelligence agencies actually have people...” There's that whole meme of the show that was just taken off the air, maybe for a variety of reasons, with people looking at the internet and saying, “What's going on here? What are these kids talking about?” But there is probably some truth to the fact that it's so siloed from what just real-world law enforcement or real-world government officials—the worlds they live in—that the information gets to them late.

There's an information lapse. You really want to know what's going on with anything, whether it's a tragic event or even the election. I talked to a lot of people about the election in 2024, and I said, “The meme ‘X is not real life’—no, X was the only place. If you were spending time on X, you knew exactly what was going to happen.”

I feel really strongly about this. I check so many sources: Reddit for many years, Bluesky occasionally, Instagram, Facebook. I can honestly say with total conviction that although there's, of course, a lot of misinformation on X, as there would be on any rich, complex, and highly engaged system, there is misinformation in your PTA group, right? The PTA shares misinformation all the time.

If you want to find the ground truth, and you do the legwork, follow the right people, and really look for it, the answer is probably on X in a way that is unlike other places. I really struggle with that. I wondered whether that's a cultural thing—that it has to do with the type of people on it, its roots as a journalistic outlet, and so on—or whether it's something technological.

Does it have to do with the fact that it's an open graph? Quote tweets and correcting people are part of the norm in a way that is just totally absent from Facebook or Instagram. They even lack that technical capability, right? In other words, is it the product features that lead to this sort of dialogical conflict that often ends up with the truth, or is it just the people? I don't know, really, but it's an interesting thing.

I think it also could be generational. I haven't really thought through this fully, but I said something on X a couple of weeks ago that resonated with people: I feel like there's this elder millennial cohort that is really good at translating across the entire living existence of humanity right now.

We remember what the world was like before the internet, and that's 1980 to 1986. We have deep memories of landlines and car phones. We remember the 1980s, but we also remember the 1990s. There's something about remembering the shifts, while also not being digital natives but having grown up with the internet.

We understand the pace of change. There's something about—I look at AOC, who is maybe a little on the cusp of this cohort, but JD Vance is in this cohort. A lot of our political leadership, I think, is going to come from this cohort that remembers but is also very fluent. I'd say we have the first poster-in-chief and the vice president, right?

There's something about X that maybe captures a generation that's really good at amalgamating across different platforms. You spend a lot of time on Discord, but there are a lot of people who also spend time on Facebook and Instagram who are on X. They're able to move across those spaces. There's something about it being not just the global town square, but a translation layer.

The other thing that I often tell people, because people will say horrible things back to you after you post, is, “Does it bother you?” And I'm like, “No, it's actually great,” because it gives you a theory of mind for people you otherwise would not have a theory of mind for. There's something about the pseudonymous accounts on X that actually do a really good job of giving you a full picture.

I agree so strongly with that. In fact, that exactly has been my big argument for why it matters that you're engaging with real people on certain networks, not on all networks.

On TikTok, for example, I don't think it matters whether content, if it's just for entertainment, was specifically produced totally by a machine. It could be literally produced by TikTok itself through a data center, and it wouldn't matter because it's for entertainment alone. But because of the dialogical components of X, where you're really trying to develop a sense of what people think, and you're getting pushback and the anons are fighting you, it's actually kind of important that they're people.

It's not exactly like a poll. No one would pretend that your comment section is a scientific poll, right? But you are filling out your theory of how others may view or interpret such a thing. It matters that they're people on different social networks. I think it will matter whether they're largely human or not. But anyway, yeah, totally agree with that.

This is my argument, too, for why more people should post, because it becomes a personal thing if it's your idea and then anons are engaging with you. It resonates more, where you're like, “Oh, I hadn't really thought about how that would be insulting to this group,” or, “I hadn't really thought about how half the country would perceive this thing that I thought was innocuous.”

You learn a ton and get the feedback loop if you're posting. Whereas if you're just looking at other people's—which is also fun—you're lurking, but it doesn't resonate the same way with your core or allow the idea to evolve.

Every tweet is a focus group on some idea, in a way. I remember this funny anecdote where Yann LeCun got so frustrated at X that he started posting on LinkedIn. He would respond to people on LinkedIn, and someone quote-tweeted him and was like, “Come to X and fight me like a man, you coward. This is where the actual arena is.”

What's the arena?

Yeah.

One thing that's interesting more broadly is that the internet has become, even just since COVID, more fragmented and more intellectually diverse. I remember Mike Solana was complaining—or was sort of observing—the activism on Instagram around BLM, and he was like, “Instagram is the butt app. Why are you bringing the current thing? Twitter is the word app. If you have ideas, go here. What is the point of Instagram?”

But just around BLM and Ukraine, I remember when Marc had the “current thing” discourse, there was a lot of legible unification. Dissent was in the group chat. Dissent was private, and it didn't seem to be this public place for dissent in the same way that things like October 7 and the Charlie Kirk assassination are current things, but the response to them is not unified across X or across the forum.

I wonder, is that a response to social media fragmenting in a different way, whereas Bluesky is seen as way more legitimate than Gab ever was, or Parler or something?

Or if it’s just that these issues are something. The vibe shift is—I don’t know, to Eddy’s question—if it’s technological or if it’s an actual shift.

Well, I don’t think what makes Bluesky Bluesky is technological, really. I always thought the AT Protocol, the underlying protocol, was interesting. The effort was to be a more decentralized, open, sort of censorship-resistant network.

I think what makes Bluesky Bluesky today has to do with the people who seeded it in its early days, right? And then later, the people who kind of exodused to it in reaction to different things on X and so on. It’s interesting how important that is, right: the seeding culture.

That ends up leading to the downstream culture.

One quick comment: an old Curtis Yarvin idea is that he would say, “Hey, Jeff Bezos can take over The Washington Post; The Washington Post isn’t going to change. You can take over The New York Times; it’s not going to change. You can take over X; it’s not going to change.”

I think the last few years have disproved that idea in a number of ways, but Elon taking over X actually did change the whole makeup of the platform. It just requires an owner who’s willing to do what it takes.

Yeah. Yeah.

You could also make the argument, as a former Postie, that Jeff Bezos taking over The Washington Post and infusing it with limitless capital actually did change The Washington Post.

It changed in the opposite direction of where people would have thought, right? But if you have a struggling business—part of the reason I left The Washington Post was because it was about to go into bankruptcy—and if you have a business that’s actually forced to rethink its views based on competitive dynamics and where the market wants it to go, if one of the richest people in the world buys it, infuses it with cash, and doesn’t have a strong opinion of where it’s going, you could make the argument that this is part of the reason why The Washington Post took so long to normalize.

I would argue it’s now normalizing to where its readership was when I was there, which is still left of center but not nearly what it was. It had been in “Democracy Dies in Darkness” land, and there’s an argument that the actual infusion of cash was the thing that radicalized it—something most people don’t talk about when they talk about these media properties and their growth.

Sure.

Yeah, this is kind of an incomplete thought related to what Katherine’s saying, but every network, when it’s developed, has sort of selection pressures for the participants in those networks, right? If it’s a highly politically polarized group, then to get a lot of engagement, you need to play to that gradient, right? Because those types of people are around it.

Certainly, unlimited money that comes with a few strings attached allows things to develop one way or the other. On the other hand, as Elon did, scrapping 80% of the staff and ripping out a lot of the prior discourse-guiding apparatus, which he allegedly did, certainly changes things.

But perhaps even more importantly, in Elon’s case, there was this shift where certain people felt more comfortable returning and certain people wanted to exit it. And so the makeup of the graph changing led to different types of behavior because you’re catering to a slightly evolving audience, right?

The ways that the graphs evolve are maybe very complex. So I don’t think that it’s simply that they can’t be changed or are trivial to change. I think it’s kind of the type of influence overall that’s important in determining how they can change.

Totally.

Yeah. Can I go back to something you said about the group chat?

Please?

I’ve slightly mourned the death of the group chat.

As a person who looks back fondly on those years and the friends we made, in some ways it’s probably how some people view summer camp.

That was the group chat era.

It’s definitely a good thing that the group chats are no longer siloed, are no longer necessary. I do think a lot of the really interesting conversations have moved to X, and that is a good thing. But there’s also something about—I don’t know—there was something special about that moment that I think all of us will always miss.

Well, there’s peacetime social networks and wartime social networks.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes. It’s unclear which time we’re in right now, but—

Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say I’m not sure.

One other comment I want to make is, you were talking about The Washington Post finally normalizing. It’s been interesting how the media class and the political class have become so much more extreme than the people they purport to represent. And I think that’s another sort of—it’s going back to Eddy’s point about the opportunity cost as it relates to parenting.

There’s also the opportunity cost as it relates to going into media or going into politics. The opportunity cost of going into media or going into politics has just become so much higher that, in order for people to want to do that, they have to be irrational. They have to have some irrationality. Sometimes it’s a form of principle and nobility, but other times it’s a form of chronic status-seeking via some sort of activism.

Not to be too cynical, but Eddy, thank you for being our first guest. We’re excited to continue the series.

My pleasure.

Thanks so much, Eddy.