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49 - What Can We Learn From Globocorps?
3.3k Plays2 years ago
Author Johann Kurtz relates his experience at major tech companies, and why he thinks dissidents under the value of these companies as a launching point for their ambitions. We discuss:
- What megacorps know that online dissidents don't
- Getting into Big Tech without a STEM degree
- How to prepare for a highly competitive interview
- Finding friends & allies without revealing your power level
- The horizons that open up after a few years undercover
You can read the article that inspired this conversation on Johann's Substack, Becoming Noble.
Recommended
Transcript
Understanding Liberal Organizations
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett, joined today by Johann Kurtz, author of the Becoming Noble Substack.
00:00:25
Speaker
He wrote an article entitled, Dissidents with Elite Potential Must Join Liberal Organizations.
00:00:32
Speaker
And that, he had a fascinating take on why that was important.
00:00:38
Speaker
The argument that I usually hear is, oh, we got to
00:00:43
Speaker
get inside and infiltrate and subvert.
00:00:45
Speaker
And I've always felt like that's stupid.
00:00:48
Speaker
You're not going to subvert Amazon as a project manager.
Tech Industry Insights
00:00:54
Speaker
But he had a novel take that the purpose of infiltrating or just joining these organizations was essentially to learn how they do what they do.
00:01:06
Speaker
And we had a conversation.
00:01:09
Speaker
I actually brought it to the exit full group call two weeks ago.
00:01:15
Speaker
And, you know, some of the guys were infuriated and some of the guys were interested.
00:01:21
Speaker
And so I wanted to take some of the questions we had in that conversation and run them by Johan.
00:01:26
Speaker
So, Johan, welcome to the show.
00:01:28
Speaker
It's a real pleasure to be here.
00:01:29
Speaker
Thank you for inviting me.
00:01:32
Speaker
Great to have you.
00:01:33
Speaker
Okay, so in the interest of your security, I want you to give me as much information as is prudent about your background and where you come from.
00:01:45
Speaker
Yeah, sure.
00:01:46
Speaker
I mean, I don't think we have to be too cagey.
00:01:49
Speaker
I'm sort of out of the game.
00:01:51
Speaker
But briefly, the relevant pieces, I think, to this discussion are that I spent a long time working in and around tech.
00:01:59
Speaker
companies that you'd be familiar with, you know, think Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, sort of tier companies.
00:02:07
Speaker
And yeah, exactly as you said, I attempt to bring this perspective to discussions within our sphere, which highlights what I think were the values of that experience.
Benefits of Joining FANG Companies
00:02:18
Speaker
And I think exactly as you said,
00:02:22
Speaker
Really, if you set out with the goal of, quote unquote, infiltrating these organizations, you're setting yourself up for a directly antagonistic relationship with the organization, the people in it, in a fight that you simply can't win.
00:02:34
Speaker
These are very large corporations.
00:02:36
Speaker
They're not going to change direction because of your influence.
00:02:39
Speaker
And indeed, for reasons that I think you outlined very clearly in a previous episode of your podcast in which you introduced the episode group,
00:02:47
Speaker
I think you did a wonderful job of explaining all of these structural factors that bring pressures upon these companies to move continuously in a progressive direction.
00:02:56
Speaker
And because of that structural reality, it doesn't matter if you go into one of these corporations and you very subtly maneuver and then you advocate for a particular ideological perspective, which is different to the one they currently have, they're simply not going to come around to you.
00:03:09
Speaker
So then the question becomes, is there a different reason to join these companies other than subversion or infiltration?
00:03:16
Speaker
And I think the answer is yes, for reasons we can get into.
00:03:19
Speaker
But broadly speaking, I think that these companies offer fantastic advantages in the financial domains and in the self-development domains.
00:03:28
Speaker
For those who are willing and able to spend a period, not their whole careers, not their whole lives, that would weigh you down, but a period perhaps of a few years to a decade to learn from them, to grow in that context with a lot of elite performers.
00:03:44
Speaker
and to develop the financial resources to bring to bear against other problems.
00:03:48
Speaker
Yeah, so tell me a little bit about what you think there is to learn from FANG, Big Five Management Consulting, VCs, Big Law, Big Accounting.
00:04:00
Speaker
What have you taken away or what have you seen others take away that was useful?
00:04:04
Speaker
So I think, you know, a lot of guys in our sphere are quite bright.
00:04:08
Speaker
And...
00:04:09
Speaker
They leave school and they leave sort of normie existence with the perspective that they are very, very smart because they are able to sort of peer behind the curtain and perceive reality for what it is.
00:04:20
Speaker
They reject kind of normie NPC type messaging.
00:04:23
Speaker
And they think, you know, they think, well, I'm sort of educated.
00:04:27
Speaker
I have the...
00:04:29
Speaker
the intellectual instincts to learn outside the box, to sort of critique the system as a whole, to place where we are in history.
00:04:35
Speaker
And they can do that because they're smart.
00:04:37
Speaker
And, you know, we've all been there.
00:04:38
Speaker
I think a lot of people in our sphere had sort of smart child syndrome where they were aware at school, at least that they were probably one of the smarter guys in the room that continued in university because frankly, you know, the performance of even, uh,
00:04:51
Speaker
Average students at top university programs now is pretty mediocre.
00:04:55
Speaker
And so you can go, you can do a very strong undergraduate degree or master's degree in theory and realize that a lot of people in the room are pretty mediocre.
00:05:04
Speaker
When you join a really elite team at a top company, you'll realize that actually you're not the
00:05:10
Speaker
you're not as smart as you thought you were.
00:05:13
Speaker
These companies do a great job, at least when it comes to male, Asian and white
Learning from Elite Teams
00:05:18
Speaker
applicants, of selecting for really excellent people in terms of pure capability in technical and managerial domains.
00:05:25
Speaker
This is not a sort of broader comment about they're better than you in every way.
00:05:28
Speaker
They're certainly not.
00:05:29
Speaker
But they are, along particular lines, really excellent at what they do.
00:05:34
Speaker
And, you know, these firms are much more selective than even top university programs.
00:05:38
Speaker
You know, if you try to study
00:05:40
Speaker
politics at Harvard or PPE at Oxford or whatever, it's about an order of magnitude more difficult to get into top engineering teams at, say, Google.
00:05:48
Speaker
I'll just use Google as a consistent example in the discussion today because I'm relatively familiar with it and your listeners will be too.
00:05:57
Speaker
It's an order of magnitude more difficult to get onto a top engineering team at Google.
00:06:01
Speaker
And that's not, by the way, to say it's an order of magnitude more difficult to get into Google as a whole because there's actually a lot of fat at these organizations and there's certain teams that
00:06:09
Speaker
bear the Google brand that aren't particularly exceptional in any way now, which wasn't true sort of 10, 15 years ago, but it is the case now.
00:06:17
Speaker
But the people you'll work with, frankly, if you manage to get into one of those teams, and really what you should be thinking about is not what's the average capability or IQ of the people on these teams, it is what is the ability of, say, the top 10% of these teams.
00:06:30
Speaker
You know, if I'm able to identify and get close to the elite performers within the elite teams at the elite companies, you will realize very quickly that you are not as smart as you thought you were and that you have a huge amount of growth and refinement in your clarity of thought and your technical ability and so forth.
00:06:46
Speaker
ahead of you.
00:06:46
Speaker
And that's a very invigorating thing to realize.
00:06:48
Speaker
I think for people, certainly like me, it really crushed me at first.
00:06:52
Speaker
And I think that's healthy.
00:06:55
Speaker
And I think a lot of people in our sphere could frankly grow a lot if they were subjected to the pressure of competing against and working alongside very, very smart people on very ambitious projects, projects that demand sort of total reconceptualization of what's possible in technical domains and in socio-technical domains and regulatory domains and so forth.
00:07:15
Speaker
thinking in this very innovative way under tremendous, tremendous pressure alongside very smart people.
00:07:20
Speaker
And some of these people really are, again, this is not to say they're fantastic in every way.
00:07:24
Speaker
I don't idolize them.
00:07:25
Speaker
And as I said, I've, I've left these companies now, but, um, some of these people really are astonishing in their ability.
00:07:32
Speaker
It's, it's quite a privilege to work alongside them.
00:07:34
Speaker
Uh, they, the value they generate, the ambition they bring to the table, their creativity, um,
00:07:39
Speaker
Their calmness under extreme pressure, you know, if you're responding to an emergency outage and so forth, it's quite astonishing what some of these teams are capable of doing just because they've got so many reps in over so many years under the most high pressure, high stakes situations.
00:07:55
Speaker
They're quite calm.
Experience vs. Theory
00:07:56
Speaker
They're very good at triaging, et cetera.
00:07:58
Speaker
And they'll teach you fundamentally how to act.
00:08:00
Speaker
I think one of the great things about our sphere is that we have very rich intellectual discussions.
00:08:06
Speaker
You know, if you look at Spengler or James Burnham or whatever, they're making these grand sociological commentaries on the arc of history and our place in history and so forth.
00:08:15
Speaker
And I think that's really exciting and it's motivational and it's fantastic to grapple with.
00:08:20
Speaker
But again, if you're smart and you're reading smart things, you have this idea that you can do anything because you're smarter than everyone else.
00:08:27
Speaker
But actually, if you've not
00:08:28
Speaker
got any experience in action, right, in building very large, complex organizations and executing very complex projects alongside very smart people, you're leaving a lot of value on the table.
00:08:38
Speaker
And I think especially early in your career, straight out of university, if you want, you can just conceptualize it as a particularly well-paid extension of your education.
00:08:46
Speaker
I think that that kind of environment is very healthy for young guys.
00:08:50
Speaker
And again, you know, I
00:08:53
Speaker
This is not to say at all that there are not drawbacks to working at these companies and perhaps that's something we can discuss.
00:08:58
Speaker
I'm not going to pretend that the spiritual environment is rich.
00:09:01
Speaker
It's not.
00:09:03
Speaker
It's often antagonistic to a sort of spiritually healthy person.
00:09:07
Speaker
I'm not going to pretend that the products you're building are necessarily great for the world and you've got to be selective.
00:09:14
Speaker
There are companies, frankly, that would pay me a lot of money that I never would have worked for.
00:09:19
Speaker
I guess I won't name them here because then you can start sort of reconstructing my CV.
00:09:22
Speaker
But, you know, I would hate to go into work every day knowing that I was building something that along the lines that I believe
00:09:30
Speaker
was actively making the world worse.
00:09:32
Speaker
But frankly, there are a lot of sort of value neutral projects going on in infrastructure, these kind of lines that are fascinating, they're important, they're challenging, they're renumerative.
00:09:44
Speaker
And, you know, if you're just focused on the work, you can shield yourself from a lot of the spiritual malaise that you might imagine sits at the heart of these companies and
00:09:53
Speaker
Yeah, I wanted to address that.
00:09:56
Speaker
So I think you're right that most of us are used to hiding out in rooms where like, even if you could have the conversation about like what you really believe about the world, it would be a very boring conversation because it would just be sort of playing tennis with the wall.
00:10:18
Speaker
And I wonder
00:10:22
Speaker
My thought of being in a room like that with very, very smart people is that they'd be able to smell it on me in a way that maybe a sort of lower level corporate environment would not be able to smell it on me.
00:10:42
Speaker
Did you feel like you had to obfuscate more carefully in a room full of very smart people who were ideologically disaligned from you?
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question.
00:10:53
Speaker
The answer is basically exactly as you say, I think Dave, the distributors calls this the ant smell, right?
00:10:58
Speaker
And I think you're right to identify it as something you need to think about quite carefully what your strategy is going to be.
00:11:05
Speaker
Frankly, you know, I'm pretty comfortable operating in liberal environments, as you might tell, given my background, but I would never suggest going like deep cover, don't even pretend you're a bit conservative, because then you'd lose your mind very quickly.
00:11:19
Speaker
Within the company context, I make no
00:11:22
Speaker
Um, I make no apologies for the fact that I'm clearly a conservative.
00:11:27
Speaker
I don't talk about conservatism.
00:11:29
Speaker
I don't talk about politics at work, but it's very clear from who I am.
00:11:32
Speaker
You know, she took a look at me, how I dress, I work out.
00:11:36
Speaker
Um, I have a large family.
00:11:38
Speaker
I go to church.
00:11:39
Speaker
Everyone knows these things.
00:11:40
Speaker
I take, I take holy days off work.
00:11:42
Speaker
it's in my work calendar, like you can tell a lot about who I am dispositionally from the office.
00:11:48
Speaker
But I would say two things.
00:11:50
Speaker
One is be aware of what the red lines are.
00:11:54
Speaker
And those red lines definitely exist, you know, in the same way that you probably wouldn't bring up that, you know, I don't know if you've got a liberal family.
Navigating Liberal Environments
00:12:00
Speaker
I certainly do.
00:12:02
Speaker
There's a lot of issues, frankly, I'm not going to bring up over the dinner table when we all get together at Christmas.
00:12:06
Speaker
And that's not because those aren't important issues.
00:12:08
Speaker
That's just because fundamentally that is not the time to debate them.
00:12:11
Speaker
You're supposed to be doing something else.
00:12:13
Speaker
And it's just going to make everyone's lives worse.
00:12:14
Speaker
If you turn it into an argument, then you're not going to convince them anyway.
00:12:17
Speaker
And that's kind of how I think about work.
00:12:19
Speaker
The second thing I would say about that is, is frankly, um, the ant smell thing is real and people can tell you are who you are.
00:12:28
Speaker
But if you make every effort to project the best things about your identity, and here I would include
00:12:36
Speaker
the wholesomeness of traditional family life.
00:12:38
Speaker
I would include physical fitness, dressing nicely, but not ostentatiously.
00:12:44
Speaker
You know, fundamentally just projecting yourself as a nice, healthy guy that is easy to get along with.
00:12:49
Speaker
That's not going to be a problem.
00:12:50
Speaker
That's not looking for a fight.
00:12:51
Speaker
And frankly, no one wants to fight with you anyway, because at the end of the day, if their personal lives are saturated with like, you know, degenerate stuff, they know it's degenerate.
00:13:03
Speaker
They're kind of embarrassed about it.
00:13:05
Speaker
If you're healthy, if you're a grown up, if you work hard, if you're a great performer, if you never bring these things up, you can just kind of coexist with them.
00:13:12
Speaker
And honestly, like if you don't trigger certain fault lines, like there are certain subjects and you might imagine what they are, I never discuss at work.
00:13:19
Speaker
If I can get away with it, obviously sometimes the corporation forces it on you and we can discuss how to navigate that if you're interested, but you know, I just never bring these things up.
00:13:27
Speaker
And, uh,
00:13:29
Speaker
And if that's the case, if you come across as a healthy, nice guy, and you're not triggering these people, a lot of people that believe the most insane things, if you're just talking to them about, you know, a piece of work or what they saw on the news yesterday or whatever, as long as it's not related to those, those trigger lines, um, they can be very pleasant.
00:13:46
Speaker
And frankly, I have like a lot of people I would count as, as friends just because I've kind of sandboxed my relationship with them.
00:13:52
Speaker
I know what's game to talk about and I know what I would never talk about them with.
00:13:57
Speaker
And, uh,
00:13:57
Speaker
It's pleasant, honestly, that it's fine.
00:14:00
Speaker
There's certain people within these organizations, as you might imagine, aren't radicalized in this way, and you can have totally normal conversations with them.
00:14:08
Speaker
Again, I'm not suggesting you start chatting about your power level or whatever, but, you know,
00:14:13
Speaker
these organizations are very large.
00:14:14
Speaker
Like if you look at Google, they hire tens of thousands of white and Asian males, maybe hundreds of thousands.
00:14:20
Speaker
And within that, you know, there are frankly like conservative fathers that just want to get on with their job.
00:14:24
Speaker
There are a good number of them.
00:14:26
Speaker
There are parent groups, there are, there are religious groups, like people that are Christian and so forth.
00:14:32
Speaker
I mean, admittedly, it's probably a fairly progressive interpretation of the faith, but
00:14:36
Speaker
I'll tell you a story.
00:14:36
Speaker
I know you're, you're a LDS.
00:14:39
Speaker
Um, I'll tell you a funny story.
00:14:41
Speaker
I once went on a business trip, um, with a couple of guys from my office and we went to a different city and, uh, this trip had to span the weekend.
00:14:50
Speaker
And I just took a little duffel bag type thing, a few t-shirts, you know, whatever.
00:14:54
Speaker
And, uh, and an LDS guy that, that I used to work with, he bought this huge suitcase.
00:14:58
Speaker
And I was like, uh, why, why did you bother, man?
00:15:01
Speaker
I mean, you had to check that in.
00:15:02
Speaker
It's just a casual set of meetings.
00:15:04
Speaker
We just need to be here for a few days.
00:15:06
Speaker
And he said, well, you know, I guess you call it temple.
00:15:08
Speaker
He was like, I have to go to temple on Sunday and I want to make sure that I've got my best suit and so forth.
00:15:15
Speaker
I was like, damn, it's showing me up.
00:15:17
Speaker
I went to the effort of identifying where the nearest Latin mass was in this new city, but I didn't pack an excellent first-class outfit to attend.
00:15:27
Speaker
So these people do exist.
00:15:28
Speaker
And this is in the context of what is overall a very progressive institution, but there isn't uniformity within the institutions.
00:15:33
Speaker
And if you just have the right discussions with the right people, it's painful, it's annoying.
00:15:39
Speaker
You won't be able to be exactly who you are in your own mind in certain contexts.
00:15:45
Speaker
But frankly, I think
00:15:46
Speaker
There isn't one of us that moves in this sphere that is unfiltered all the time.
00:15:51
Speaker
Like if you have beliefs that are outside the mainstream, you're always slightly playing this game of calibration to a discussion.
00:15:58
Speaker
And yeah, perhaps this is a slightly more extreme version of it, but it's not like categorically different to frankly how we live anyway.
00:16:04
Speaker
That makes sense.
00:16:05
Speaker
I wonder, I would like to talk about what happens when the conversation is sort of
Handling Workplace Discussions
00:16:12
Speaker
required of you and how you navigate that.
00:16:15
Speaker
Yeah, that's always fun.
00:16:16
Speaker
As you might imagine, that's always fun.
00:16:19
Speaker
Again, it happens less often than you might think.
00:16:23
Speaker
I've only ever had to do one subconscious bias, what do they call it?
00:16:27
Speaker
Implicit bias or whatever training.
00:16:29
Speaker
And that was when I took over a fairly large recruiting pipeline.
00:16:35
Speaker
So that was mandatory for me.
00:16:37
Speaker
Honestly, I went into it mostly just interested what it would involve as a kind of entertaining experience.
00:16:44
Speaker
I was pretty confident that they wouldn't be able to, you know, Clockwork Orange style reprogram me from the inside out.
00:16:51
Speaker
And it was, you know, this is interesting.
00:16:53
Speaker
It didn't do anything for me.
00:16:55
Speaker
It was far less radical than I thought it would be.
00:16:57
Speaker
It was mostly like, you know, think about what you're doing or whatever.
00:17:00
Speaker
But these discussions do get forced on you.
00:17:03
Speaker
For me, the only issue where I've really had to compromise, where I haven't been able to avoid the discussion entirely, because in most of these discussions, honestly, you can just remain silent and wait for it to be over and focus on your work and they don't actually come up
00:17:14
Speaker
that constantly.
00:17:15
Speaker
The perception you get from the outside is that these conversations are going on all the time, right?
00:17:19
Speaker
Because like, it's only really the horror stories that like penetrate out of the organization to like, you know, Fox News or like discussions in our sphere or whatever.
00:17:30
Speaker
Most of the time, honestly, people are just working inside these companies.
00:17:32
Speaker
There are two issues.
00:17:34
Speaker
One,
00:17:35
Speaker
It's just a personal thing.
00:17:36
Speaker
I hate the art style.
00:17:37
Speaker
I really can't stand the art style.
00:17:39
Speaker
It is so painful for me.
00:17:41
Speaker
Walking around these buildings, they are bloody hideous in every company.
00:17:44
Speaker
For some reason, the combination of bare bricks with, I've forgotten what they call it.
00:17:49
Speaker
It's like new modern or something, corporate modern.
00:17:52
Speaker
But you know the Google art style, they're like block colors and everyone's smiling psychopathically.
00:17:56
Speaker
So that's one thing.
00:17:57
Speaker
The other thing is pronouns, right?
00:17:59
Speaker
You frankly, you can't get away from using people's preferred pronouns.
00:18:03
Speaker
That's something you just got to eat because people really get annoyed if you don't do that.
00:18:08
Speaker
And then you have to explain why you don't want to.
00:18:10
Speaker
And then very quickly, you're in dangerous territory with people that are very unsympathetic to you.
00:18:14
Speaker
So you got to eat the pronouns issue.
00:18:15
Speaker
But, you know, if
00:18:19
Speaker
I am sympathetic to people that say I would never do that because that is reaffirming, uh, an unhealthy entire epistemology that I fundamentally reject.
00:18:31
Speaker
And I am fundamentally compromising my beliefs.
00:18:34
Speaker
Every time I reaffirm those pronouns, um, you know, frankly, I sympathize with that.
00:18:41
Speaker
If for me, I never lost track of who I was and what I was saying and why.
00:18:47
Speaker
and the advantages of working for these corporations, the advantages for my family, for my career, for how I was able to help other people.
00:18:56
Speaker
And, and, you know, I can, I can break into that if you want, um, just like radically out, out matched the, like, I guess one time a week or whatever I had to use, cause I didn't work particularly closely with it, with anyone that had unusual pronouns, um, one time a week when I had to compromise on that issue.
00:19:14
Speaker
So,
00:19:15
Speaker
It's a tough one.
00:19:16
Speaker
I guess you've got to know if you can eat it or not.
00:19:17
Speaker
I could eat it.
00:19:18
Speaker
I didn't like it, but it is what it is.
00:19:21
Speaker
Was it mainly just calling a he or she, or was it like Zs and Xers?
00:19:27
Speaker
No, none of the really weird stuff.
00:19:29
Speaker
They is, you know, non-binary is common as well, but that's about the extent of it.
00:19:36
Speaker
I never came across any neo-pronans, I believe they're called.
00:19:39
Speaker
I think it's a lot easier for guys like us to imagine...
Achieving Financial Independence
00:19:46
Speaker
tolerating something like that if they had a clear notion of where the exits are.
00:19:53
Speaker
And I wonder if you have thoughts on like.
00:19:57
Speaker
How do you it's it seems to be the case.
00:20:01
Speaker
And this is sort of the the the criticism of this this essay that I found the most
00:20:10
Speaker
persuasive was one of the guys was like, well, if this is a workable path to power for our guys, like where are the guys who did this?
00:20:20
Speaker
Where are they now?
00:20:21
Speaker
Like, like why, why aren't they, you know, well, like why aren't they funding my screenplay or what, you know?
00:20:29
Speaker
So like there's, there's that element of like, you know, maybe you haven't heard of these people because you just haven't risen to that, you know, uh, level of visibility yourself.
00:20:37
Speaker
But, but like,
00:20:41
Speaker
Is there a Shangri-La, a hidden valley in the mountains where all of the exited right-wing former Google guys live in peace?
00:20:55
Speaker
You know what I'm saying?
00:20:58
Speaker
Or do these guys really get kind of sucked into the machine and just stay there because the money's... I get what you're saying.
00:21:05
Speaker
So if there's a closed room
00:21:08
Speaker
with a bunch of rich ex Google guys that are super right wing.
00:21:11
Speaker
I haven't found it.
00:21:12
Speaker
That's certainly true.
00:21:15
Speaker
But there is, you know, and this is a journey I'm on myself and I can, I can take it back to the beginning of the journey.
00:21:22
Speaker
There are signs of this though.
00:21:24
Speaker
I mean, you know, when mold bug put out the call to fund Lomas's project and delicious tacos film and these kinds of things, a lot of money was put together very quickly.
00:21:34
Speaker
And,
00:21:35
Speaker
you know, Moebuck really came out of the rational sphere, which was primarily a tech phenomenon.
00:21:40
Speaker
And that gives me the idea that there are more guys out there.
00:21:43
Speaker
Now, whether they're specifically networked, I never tried to do that.
00:21:47
Speaker
I've always tried to like have a strong separation between my career.
00:21:51
Speaker
And I can talk about the kind of exit process of that career.
00:21:54
Speaker
And then my beliefs, my personal life and so forth.
00:21:57
Speaker
Because the more you muddy those waters, the more uncomfortable you get at least early on, but when you're still really in the thick of it, I think,
00:22:05
Speaker
With regards to the process of exit, one thing I really like about your platform is that clearly the way that you conceive of exit is not this binary, right?
00:22:14
Speaker
It's not like the moment when you set off into the woods to forge your homestead or whatever.
00:22:19
Speaker
Although, you know, that's not to say that that couldn't be a viable path for some people.
00:22:23
Speaker
I know there's a rich history of that in America.
00:22:27
Speaker
But exit is more of a sort of spiritual disposition and it's more of a journey and it's a more multidimensional thing.
00:22:33
Speaker
that involves all kinds of subtle but gradual advancements in one's independence and in the kind of radical decisions that you are increasingly able to make as a result of the prudent steps that you've taken before that.
00:22:50
Speaker
So if you look at the process of exit for me, maybe I could give you a sort of brief overview of when I moved to sort of very dependent on the system to now I would say radically less dependent on the system, which is why I'm a bit more comfortable having these conversations now.
00:23:03
Speaker
You know, when I was young, I asked myself, if I believe these things that I believe, what is the most meaningful and sustainable contribution that I can make?
00:23:12
Speaker
As someone that was born into a liberal city family, that had liberal friends, you know, that didn't have, as you say, this kind of Shangri-La to attach to immediately.
00:23:22
Speaker
And I figured, you know, my immediate priorities, I'm not going to change the world.
00:23:27
Speaker
I'm a 20-year-old guy, but I can make some very prudent steps within my immediate circle of people that I know.
00:23:33
Speaker
And establishing a strong career early on allowed me to get married young.
00:23:37
Speaker
It allowed me to take advantage of those family benefits that these companies offer.
00:23:41
Speaker
It allowed my wife, who I met when she was in college, to just marry me outright after she graduated with a single income household right from the beginning.
00:23:51
Speaker
It allowed me to have children young.
00:23:53
Speaker
As I said, it allowed me to develop intellectually.
00:23:57
Speaker
And so I was really laying the foundation for what I would consider to be a healthy, robust life along the lines of what we would believe is a good life quite early on.
00:24:08
Speaker
Now, again, you have to make your peace with certain compromises in the professional domain, especially in that early stage.
00:24:15
Speaker
I didn't post anything online.
00:24:16
Speaker
I was able to listen in my evenings, my spare time while I worked out.
00:24:20
Speaker
And I have for a long time to people in our sphere.
00:24:23
Speaker
Um, I sort of made my piece with being clear built in this way.
00:24:26
Speaker
And I decided, okay, that's kind of the initial step.
00:24:29
Speaker
That's the first few years.
00:24:31
Speaker
And it was testing the water somewhat.
00:24:33
Speaker
I had to be brutally honest with myself.
00:24:34
Speaker
If I had the mental fortitude to remain loyal to those beliefs, I never built a, an online presence of any kind.
00:24:41
Speaker
So at that stage I was, you know, being very cautious.
00:24:44
Speaker
As you begin to achieve those fundamental goals, very important to avoid complacency and think I've got it all.
00:24:50
Speaker
Because like, frankly, at these companies, you know, I remember when I was single at these companies, I was making a lot of money.
00:24:59
Speaker
I thought, ah, I'm untouchable.
00:25:01
Speaker
Like, as long as I keep sticking this in the bank, I'm going to be independent in no time.
00:25:05
Speaker
Then I got married, getting married costs a little bit of money.
00:25:07
Speaker
Then you have a wife to support as well.
00:25:09
Speaker
And I started having children.
00:25:11
Speaker
And all of a sudden, you're actually earning in real terms far less than you thought you were.
00:25:16
Speaker
And so your finances take a hit at that point.
00:25:17
Speaker
So early on, you're still not fully independent.
00:25:20
Speaker
And so you need to have this vision of the consecutive sequence of steps that you're going to take to achieve both greater independence and greater ability to support wider and wider networks of people.
00:25:30
Speaker
So at that early stage, you're still supporting a fairly small business.
00:25:35
Speaker
group.
00:25:35
Speaker
But you should always be increasing your financial independence.
00:25:38
Speaker
Your ratio of earnings to expense is very important not to live the lavish tech lifestyle.
00:25:45
Speaker
Well, I was about to say that your colleagues live.
00:25:47
Speaker
I don't know what some of these guys do with their money.
00:25:49
Speaker
I know senior engineering leads that are making really a lot of money.
00:25:53
Speaker
And then you go or you see their house in the background of their calls and it's like a mattress on the floor.
00:25:58
Speaker
I literally don't know what they're doing with their money.
00:26:00
Speaker
It's bizarre in some cases.
00:26:02
Speaker
But you can sort of move, maneuver between companies, between teams.
00:26:08
Speaker
There are companies, even in the elite tech world, that are known as a bit more mercenary, a bit less woke, like a little bit less radically ideological for the sake of being ideological.
00:26:18
Speaker
Mostly, you know, they have the HR people, they follow the processes, but it's not saturated deep into the culture there.
00:26:24
Speaker
So you can find those companies, you can find those teams.
00:26:26
Speaker
If you focus on niche tech skills with a talent shortage,
00:26:29
Speaker
You make yourself a little bit less replaceable.
00:26:31
Speaker
So you're just like gradually strengthening your position financially and in terms of your career.
00:26:36
Speaker
Make yourself as irreplaceable as possible to a company that has as little incentive to replace you as possible.
00:26:42
Speaker
Get your family aligned with the mission at that stage.
00:26:44
Speaker
So, you know, my wife, and I think this is true of a lot of good women in our sphere,
00:26:49
Speaker
She's never been particularly political.
00:26:50
Speaker
She sort of, before I met her aligned to the sort of general consensus of our age.
00:26:55
Speaker
But I think over the years, as I evidenced the fact that I was able to lead the family in a positive direction and build a good lives for ourselves, she's fallen very naturally and she's sort of absorbed by osmosis.
00:27:07
Speaker
And I'm sure you've observed the same thing in your own life.
00:27:11
Speaker
My beliefs stand to a level that often surprises me, like things I have never explicitly discussed with her.
00:27:16
Speaker
she will be aligned right out of the gate because she sort of senses who I am and that I am able to build these sort of stable foundations for our family.
00:27:25
Speaker
Well, no, do you want to jump in?
00:27:27
Speaker
No, I was just going to say, yeah, absolutely.
00:27:29
Speaker
That's been my experience.
00:27:30
Speaker
I think that's almost a, not a universal, but a very common experience with our guys.
00:27:39
Speaker
And it's, you almost wouldn't want
00:27:46
Speaker
her to be like really intensely political before you, before you met.
00:27:55
Speaker
Just because it sort of selects for some, some strangeness.
00:28:00
Speaker
And I think if people underestimate the, the, the likelihood of being able to find like a normal girl and just sort of be, be charming and persuasive.
00:28:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right.
00:28:16
Speaker
I mean, I think the ability, you know, a lot of guys, I think Sam Hyde has that quote, but a lot of guys like want a woman that like right out of the gate is on board with everything.
00:28:26
Speaker
But the truth is, is that if you come from a radical intellectual perspective, being a radical intellectual, like a self-formed radical intellectual is quite a masculine position.
00:28:34
Speaker
And
00:28:35
Speaker
So you'd then be selecting for really quite a masculine wife.
00:28:39
Speaker
And, you know, some of these women are very impressive.
00:28:41
Speaker
They're very smart, but like, I'm not sure I'd want to marry someone who's like fundamental position.
00:28:46
Speaker
The reason that I was marrying her was a fundamentally masculine trait.
00:28:50
Speaker
I don't think that's a setup for success.
00:28:51
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, my experience is like there are deeper indicators as to the spiritual health of women.
00:29:01
Speaker
women that you should marry.
00:29:02
Speaker
Frankly, like this is just, and again, nothing over the top, no like performative trad wife stuff, but like she dresses modestly.
00:29:09
Speaker
Her instincts are good.
00:29:10
Speaker
She's very polite.
00:29:11
Speaker
She's graceful.
00:29:12
Speaker
She's kind, you know, she's pretty.
00:29:14
Speaker
These kinds of things are like, it like, you can, you can tell it's a bit more subtle than like, Oh wow.
00:29:20
Speaker
I love Julius Evele too.
00:29:22
Speaker
Let's get married.
00:29:23
Speaker
You know,
00:29:26
Speaker
So, um, I'm, I'm interested in this question that you raised about securing an interview without affirmative
Securing Tech Interviews and Jobs
00:29:34
Speaker
action.
00:29:34
Speaker
You, you, you mentioned that as, as one of the things that you'd like to, uh, to talk about.
00:29:39
Speaker
I, I, because that is, I think, I think a lot of people have this sense that like, there's just no hope for me.
00:29:44
Speaker
Like I'm a white guy.
00:29:45
Speaker
I don't get to work at Google.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:48
Speaker
Well, that's just to put it bluntly.
00:29:50
Speaker
Like the problem is not that you're a white guy and
00:29:57
Speaker
That is, you know, I can say that with confidence, not because it's not extremely hard to get into a senior engineering role at Google or a junior entry-level role or whatever it is, but they hire like thousands, maybe tens of thousands of white guys a year into those roles.
00:30:09
Speaker
Like, that's just a reality.
00:30:12
Speaker
They're not hiring like scores and scores of like Native Americans or whatever.
00:30:16
Speaker
So there are a lot of white guys at these companies.
00:30:20
Speaker
If you're a white guy and you think you have the sort of intellectual jobs to take that on, I absolutely suggest going for it.
00:30:26
Speaker
Um, the, you know, there's really three paths into these companies that I've observed.
00:30:33
Speaker
Um, the first is, uh, you know, kind of going through the front door, right?
00:30:40
Speaker
So this is like, if you're, this is a kind of the normie route or the route that you're supposed to acknowledge is the way you're supposed to do it.
00:30:49
Speaker
So, you know, this is like going to an elite college, studying computer science at one of the top programs, or maybe studying maths or physics at a push and doing a bunch of like impressive projects in your spare time and, you know, so on and so forth and being involved in all your societies and then getting recruited after Google comes to speak to your society and then you stand out and that's kind of going in through the front door.
00:31:14
Speaker
That's, that's possible.
00:31:15
Speaker
I mean, like a lot of people do that every year.
00:31:17
Speaker
They're hungry for talent.
00:31:18
Speaker
That's why they send these recruiters into into these institutions.
00:31:21
Speaker
If you're able to stand out in that way, you can get through it.
00:31:23
Speaker
It's bloody hard.
00:31:25
Speaker
Let me tell you, like, the competition along that route is fierce.
00:31:29
Speaker
Like, everyone is good.
00:31:30
Speaker
Some great candidates fall short, because the interviews are brutal.
00:31:33
Speaker
There's a lot of them.
00:31:34
Speaker
So that's, that's tough.
00:31:36
Speaker
But that's the kind of default route.
00:31:39
Speaker
First of all, you should never be applying to these positions unless you have some kind of referral.
00:31:44
Speaker
And you can manufacture a referral if you need to by using your kind of social skills and by reaching out to the right people online.
00:31:52
Speaker
So again, either you should go to a university event where one of these recruiters is coming in, or if you don't have that option, you can reach out to people on LinkedIn that work in particular teams that you have a particular interest in that look like they might be sympathetic to you.
00:32:08
Speaker
just send them a message and be like, hey, I'm really interested in this.
00:32:11
Speaker
You know, this is my background.
00:32:13
Speaker
Can we have a quick chat?
00:32:15
Speaker
And then at the end of that, you know, you can go like, wow, you've convinced me.
00:32:19
Speaker
I'd love to apply to Google.
00:32:20
Speaker
You know, would you consider referring me?
00:32:22
Speaker
And often they'll just do that even if they're not like blown away by the conversation you've had because they have a financial incentive to do so.
00:32:29
Speaker
Like Google pays thousands of dollars for every successful referral.
00:32:32
Speaker
So they, you know, they won't do it on a whim because basically like,
00:32:38
Speaker
If you refer too many dodgy candidates, Google will intervene, basically.
00:32:43
Speaker
But as long as they have moderate confidence that you could make a strong candidate, they'll be happy to refer you.
00:32:50
Speaker
And that guarantees that a recruiter will at least look at your CV.
00:32:53
Speaker
It won't just get thrown straight in the trash.
00:32:55
Speaker
So leveraging those kind of soft social skills and bonds and coming across as this healthy, dependable person that's going to do well in interviews can kind of get you in the front door that way.
00:33:07
Speaker
I won't give you a ton more detail about how to construct a good resume and all that because I think there's plenty of information online.
00:33:13
Speaker
But maybe I'll give you one or two more kind of dark art stuff that Google isn't going to put into their own advice.
00:33:21
Speaker
The second thing you want to do, right?
00:33:22
Speaker
So like now maybe you've got at least the eye of a recruiter, like they're looking at your CV with some degree of seriousness.
00:33:31
Speaker
If you don't have like a first class CV already, like you've gone to MIT or Stanford or whatever, then you want to basically leverage the fact that what a recruiter is doing fundamentally is far less structured and sophisticated than you might imagine.
00:33:50
Speaker
They are basically scanning.
00:33:52
Speaker
They look at so many CVs.
00:33:54
Speaker
They're scanning over a CV in like five seconds and they are measuring the emotional response it generates in them.
00:34:01
Speaker
And the emotional response in my experience will be the same if you have keywords on that resume, whether they're in places that make sense or not.
00:34:12
Speaker
Right.
00:34:12
Speaker
So like, for example, let's say I went to MIT and I studied electrical engineering or maths or something.
00:34:19
Speaker
and I've done these great projects and now I'm applying, that's going to be treated with seriousness by the recruiter.
00:34:25
Speaker
However, if you have not been to MIT and you're at some more second-rate university, that sounds dismissive.
00:34:30
Speaker
That's not meant to sound dismissive.
00:34:32
Speaker
If you're not one of the main universities, what you might consider doing is something like, if you go onto MIT's website, this is something one guy I saw did with great success.
00:34:43
Speaker
You can't just do an MIT master's degree.
00:34:45
Speaker
That's like a hassle.
00:34:46
Speaker
It's long.
00:34:47
Speaker
It's expensive.
00:34:47
Speaker
You've got to apply for it.
00:34:49
Speaker
MIT has things they call micro-masters degrees.
00:34:52
Speaker
And there's no application needed.
00:34:54
Speaker
You can just buy your way in.
00:34:55
Speaker
It's not that expensive.
00:34:56
Speaker
It's a few hundred dollars, I think.
00:34:58
Speaker
And it's a kind of six-month commitment, like 20 hours a week.
00:35:02
Speaker
And if you do it, by the way, the quality is probably pretty good.
00:35:04
Speaker
I think it's called a micro... The one I saw was called a micro-masters in mathematics and data science or something.
00:35:09
Speaker
If you do that, you can then put that into the education section of your CV.
00:35:14
Speaker
And the recruiter will have the same emotional response,
00:35:18
Speaker
not fully so, but like something like it, as if it was actually like you had a master's degree from MIT, just because they've seen the keyword.
00:35:26
Speaker
Now, if you do that a few times, right?
00:35:28
Speaker
So let's say you go into Google, Google has courses, you can do like data science professional or something, it's called something like that, which is a moderately long course.
00:35:37
Speaker
And you can put that one in your certifications part of your CV, right?
00:35:42
Speaker
And then in your professional experience, maybe you could volunteer for an organization, like some kind of open source thing or whatever.
00:35:48
Speaker
As you start layering these things up, a lot of these are very easy to get.
00:35:51
Speaker
Like it's not that many hours work.
00:35:52
Speaker
It's not that expensive, whatever.
00:35:54
Speaker
It's not a massive commitment.
00:35:55
Speaker
There's no triaging.
00:35:55
Speaker
Like it's not difficult to get in through the door.
00:35:57
Speaker
You do that with four or five things.
00:35:59
Speaker
The recruiter is going to feel emotionally like they have to pass the CV on to a particular team to check out.
00:36:04
Speaker
Because like you can't just throw a resume in the trash that has like Google, MIT, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:36:09
Speaker
It doesn't make any sense, right?
00:36:11
Speaker
Because you kind of hacked it and you've transparently hacked it.
00:36:14
Speaker
But you've kind of like found a way to get through to the next level.
00:36:17
Speaker
If you can secure an interview by doing this, and the one other thing I would say is you can maximize your chances by pursuing weird paths.
00:36:27
Speaker
So if you're going for pure software engineer in the general open pipeline for the whole of Google, that is a bloody competitive space to be into.
00:36:37
Speaker
However, if you find some more niche area and, you know, at the moment, for example, like LLMs, the whole large language models are like the thing of great furore at the moment, you could find perhaps some smaller team that relates to some specialist implementation of LLMs.
00:36:58
Speaker
And you could reach out to someone on that team on LinkedIn and have a discussion about that and then construct your CBA against that and then make a proactive suggestion about like,
00:37:06
Speaker
why you could send this to the person in an email and ask them to pass it on to their boss, why a candidate of your profile might really make a strong contribution that is perhaps unanticipated, some kind of weird intersection of your experience and that technical domain.
00:37:22
Speaker
Maybe it's regulatory, maybe it's communications, maybe it's project leadership.
00:37:28
Speaker
So that's a bit of a simplistic example.
00:37:31
Speaker
It's vague because
00:37:33
Speaker
I could do a better job of this if I was speaking to a particular candidate with a particular background, but like that kind of, to pull yourself away from the herd will also help.
00:37:41
Speaker
The final thing is, um, interviews.
00:37:44
Speaker
Like if you can use these like little tricks, um, to like get an interview,
00:37:50
Speaker
then, then that's a, that's a whole new domain.
00:37:54
Speaker
And I've got like advice for interviews as well.
00:37:56
Speaker
If this is interesting, this might be too much detail and this might be getting away from what you're interested in.
00:38:00
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:38:00
Speaker
No, no, I'm, I am interested in, in, in the interviews and yeah, yeah.
00:38:04
Speaker
Say more about that.
00:38:06
Speaker
Cool.
00:38:06
Speaker
So, well, the first thing is like, just to give you some hope, I know this sounds like a lot of work, but if you can manage to land a first position in one of these elite companies,
00:38:17
Speaker
it gets immeasurably easier.
00:38:18
Speaker
Like from then on, you will have recruiters from the other companies chasing you.
00:38:24
Speaker
That in itself is a kind of weird thing because I have not observed a ton of people moving from like second tier software engineering companies into first tier.
00:38:34
Speaker
For some reason they're like,
00:38:36
Speaker
you'd have to ask the recruiters why they do this, but they're like biased to recruiting either from other tech companies that are on the same level or from like new grads or from like people from really weird backgrounds.
00:38:46
Speaker
Like, uh, they had a failed startup, but it was ambitious or like they came from like, uh, uh, I know a lot of guys that were doing like applied physics work and then in like a totally non-software related field.
00:38:58
Speaker
And then they managed to land like an entry-level software engineering job, these kinds of things.
00:39:02
Speaker
it's less common, like Microsoft is kind of the cutoff, the lower bound for like the prestigiousness of a software engineering institution, after which it's pretty difficult to just like get a job at a second tier and then get into the first.
00:39:14
Speaker
But anyway, I do address.
00:39:16
Speaker
So basically what I'm saying is if you want to follow the path I'm describing, your ambition should be high if this is what you want to do and you should aim to get into that top tier straight away.
00:39:25
Speaker
So like
00:39:25
Speaker
Let's say you've hacked your way into an interview using, you know, using some of these tricks.
00:39:30
Speaker
And by the way, these, these fundamentally only work, right?
00:39:32
Speaker
Like there's only so far this kind of hacking will get you, like you have to have a pretty good CV and I'm kind of putting that on, on your listeners.
00:39:39
Speaker
You have to be, you know, vaguely qualified to work there.
00:39:43
Speaker
You can't hack your way all the way in and these interviews are tough.
00:39:45
Speaker
Right.
00:39:46
Speaker
But if you manage to get an interview, you have a real chance.
00:39:50
Speaker
You have to genuinely shine and be genuinely exceptional.
00:39:53
Speaker
but you have a real chance.
00:39:54
Speaker
And this means radical preparation, like a lot of preparation.
00:39:59
Speaker
So let me tell you, within the last few years, I've gone successfully through, and I won't say whether I took the offer or not, but I have passed successfully through Google recruiting pipeline at a senior engineering level.
00:40:13
Speaker
And for that process, I probably spent 50 hours of work on preparation for that specific set of interviews.
00:40:22
Speaker
even though at that point I had five years professional experience in a highly related domain.
00:40:27
Speaker
Um, so it's like a lot of work.
00:40:30
Speaker
Uh, this is like radical preparation.
00:40:31
Speaker
So I, I had for that, for that series of interviews, I think I had 90 pages of hand type notes on Google's general engineering philosophy in that particular subdomain I was applying to a few pages of breakdown of each of the main classes of technology they deploy, especially where this related to like technologies that I wasn't familiar with that I hadn't worked with before.
00:40:52
Speaker
a technical breakdown of each of the consumer facing products they offer in this domain, every permanent failure or misstep they've made in the last five years that's tangentially related to this domain and why, 20 most likely questions to come up in the interview stage, suggested answers.
00:41:07
Speaker
And the thing I would say here is that like you can really spin your wheels in an unproductive way if you don't know where to look for information.
00:41:15
Speaker
So for example, Substack is like determined that I subscribe for whatever reason.
00:41:20
Speaker
I don't know why it does this.
00:41:21
Speaker
to a Substack newsletter called AI Supremacy.
00:41:23
Speaker
I guess it's one of the biggest tech newsletters on Substack.
00:41:27
Speaker
I say this with no hate to the author, but he clearly doesn't work in the field and he doesn't know what he's talking about.
00:41:32
Speaker
And he writes every day at length about AI issues and it's untethered to reality.
00:41:38
Speaker
And so you can read a lot of this stuff and think, wow, I'm getting so educated.
00:41:40
Speaker
I'm devoting a ton of time to AI or whatever.
00:41:43
Speaker
And you're really not learning anything.
00:41:45
Speaker
There's a lot of nonsense out there and worse, it gets kind of repackaged and then sold as more nonsense, even from fairly prestigious places, right?
00:41:52
Speaker
So like even academic papers, because a lot of academics have spent their whole lives in academia, like untethered to the applied realities of this technology, especially if they're not highly technical themselves.
00:42:01
Speaker
They're more commenting about like the future of AI.
00:42:04
Speaker
I see like whole books being published about how AI is going to change the world.
00:42:07
Speaker
And it's fundamentally like not recognizing a tool limitations of the classes of technology that they're talking about.
00:42:13
Speaker
It's just like pure science fiction.
00:42:15
Speaker
Um, and this stuff gets picked up by like major newspapers and stuff.
00:42:18
Speaker
And so there's this whole circulation of bad information.
00:42:20
Speaker
You need to cut through that or you're going to waste a ton of your time.
00:42:24
Speaker
So what you need to do in my recommendation, this is what I find the most productive and it's kind of got me through every round of interviews at every major juncture in my career.
00:42:35
Speaker
I go, I, my starting point is always the blogs released by the companies in this domain, even if they're not particularly detailed, because they will tell you what they're thinking about, what their perspective is, at least at a high level, you can read those.
00:42:47
Speaker
And then you can read every single, every single thing they cite.
00:42:50
Speaker
Right.
00:42:50
Speaker
So like they will link back often to technical papers or pieces of regulation or like these kinds of things, read those as well.
00:42:57
Speaker
Now you have at least some kind of accurate,
00:43:00
Speaker
aligned perception of the world with the institution that you are grappling with.
00:43:07
Speaker
You have some confidence that you haven't wasted a bunch of time in totally theoretical land that is actually totally wrong.
00:43:13
Speaker
And I see people do this.
00:43:15
Speaker
it's very painful when they do this.
00:43:16
Speaker
Uh, people have read things in the news about companies I've worked for when I was interviewing them and they think they know what's going on.
00:43:23
Speaker
Cause they read it in like the New York times or whatever.
00:43:25
Speaker
And they're just like completely wrong.
00:43:26
Speaker
Cause the article wasn't very good.
00:43:27
Speaker
And then, you know, there's something lost in translation there as well.
00:43:29
Speaker
It's like a waste of time.
00:43:31
Speaker
So start there.
00:43:34
Speaker
Then, uh, you want to like,
00:43:37
Speaker
Start reading white papers, the company and your particular team has released.
00:43:40
Speaker
Often, like if you want to see examples, there are a bunch released over COVID about like different anonymization methods and how, you know, COVID apps are going to work.
00:43:49
Speaker
They release these kind of things.
00:43:50
Speaker
Check them out.
00:43:52
Speaker
Academic papers from team members, often like individuals, engineers at these corporations will continue to make contributions to like academic papers that we cited.
00:44:01
Speaker
at least as a minority party on academic stuff from the institution they used to study at.
00:44:06
Speaker
You should read user documentation on the products that they develop.
00:44:10
Speaker
You should read documentary documentation on any tools they've made open source.
00:44:15
Speaker
And then as you start to build this up, this is easier once you're actually in the industry, but you'll notice that there are actually a few sources of commentary that are fairly sophisticated.
00:44:24
Speaker
Um, that come from outside these institutions from a critical perspective and you should read those.
00:44:29
Speaker
So like, that might be like, um, regulatory rulings against them, these kinds of things.
00:44:36
Speaker
Like, so you, you at these balances out somehow, if you do this and you go like that ham on an interview process.
00:44:44
Speaker
Genuinely, the interviews themselves will be relaxing because you are really well prepared.
00:44:48
Speaker
Like you're insanely well prepared.
00:44:50
Speaker
This was particularly easy in COVID because like the interviews were all remote.
00:44:54
Speaker
So you could just have these like crazy note thing that you built open on another screen and just kind of read from it.
00:45:00
Speaker
I mean, I had like, I got to the point where in several of my interviews, well, in one of my interviews, I corrected an interviewer who misunderstood their own question because they were just reading from like a list that Google had made mandatory.
00:45:12
Speaker
By the way, the Google interviewing process, like people think it's this crazy thing from like 15 years ago where they're like trying to drill down to your IQ or whatever.
00:45:20
Speaker
Actually, now these companies are so large, they have like totally standardized recruiting processes with totally standardized questions and like mandatory procedures and all that.
00:45:28
Speaker
So it's like, it's far less intimidating than you might imagine.
00:45:32
Speaker
Um, and then at least twice they gave me like a decomp case studies on stuff.
00:45:37
Speaker
I already knew back to front.
00:45:38
Speaker
Like I already knew all the answers I had them written down because I kind of anticipated like
00:45:42
Speaker
okay, they're going to ask me what's the problem with this, what does this mean, et cetera, et cetera.
00:45:46
Speaker
And I had like my answers written out.
00:45:47
Speaker
So like if you go in at that level, then you are starting to get to the place where you are kind of undeniable, right?
00:45:54
Speaker
Like, yeah, you might have a dodgy background.
00:45:56
Speaker
Yeah, your resume might clearly have been like padded a little bit.
00:46:00
Speaker
Yeah, you know, you're not from the really desirable sections of society.
00:46:04
Speaker
You're not from some kind of underrepresented group.
00:46:07
Speaker
But you are like,
00:46:09
Speaker
Charming because you can be relaxed in the interview.
00:46:11
Speaker
You know, once you've, once you've done this, you clearly know your stuff, you speak with confidence, you have good social skills, you present well, you're someone they would enjoy working with.
00:46:21
Speaker
Um, and, and you just like, you're, you're an all round impressive figure.
00:46:25
Speaker
And that way, like they, they can't mark you.
00:46:28
Speaker
Like, so the way it works on the inside in a company like Google is they have like different tiers of mark.
00:46:33
Speaker
They can give you like, they can give you a, you know, you must hire, don't hire, whatever.
00:46:38
Speaker
they literally can't put you into the don't hire bucket if you're performing at this level.
00:46:42
Speaker
And so you can just kind of slip by level to level without ever like anyone having reason to discount you.
00:46:48
Speaker
And if you sort of make it to the end, your recruiter will have a motivation to make sure you get hired because that's how they have financial incentives.
00:46:56
Speaker
So you'll have at least one advocate and you'll have no significant detractors.
00:47:01
Speaker
And you can kind of just like slip in through the back door in that way.
00:47:04
Speaker
So,
00:47:05
Speaker
It's a pretty interesting process to go through anyway.
00:47:07
Speaker
Honestly, I'd recommend it because you realize how crap a lot of the commentary on tech issues is in the mainstream media.
00:47:13
Speaker
Once you've been through something like this, you realize you basically just don't know anything from the stuff you've picked up in the general sphere.
00:47:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I think what you've revealed here maybe is that
00:47:30
Speaker
There's a clear path to learning a lot from these people in the STEM domain as a software developer, as a technical guy.
00:47:43
Speaker
And I think maybe some of the, certainly some of my anxiety or sort of hopelessness about being involved in the corporate environment was that
00:48:00
Speaker
I'm definitely like a word cell.
00:48:04
Speaker
So I was just sort of had enough cycles or enough horsepower that I was able to get a data science job at a defense contractor.
00:48:15
Speaker
But like I was never, I'm not an elite level data scientist and I never would be.
00:48:24
Speaker
By the way, I'm not, I'm not, I'm like, my background is not
00:48:27
Speaker
technical.
00:48:29
Speaker
And I'm, although I've had engineer in my title for most of my career, I'm like, as a raw engineer, I'm pretty terrible.
00:48:36
Speaker
So I can, I relate very much to that.
00:48:40
Speaker
Well, okay.
00:48:41
Speaker
So maybe this, maybe this exposes a path that people don't realize is like, cause you, you, you had a, did you have a humanities undergrad or some kind of a, what was your, what was
Policy Background in Tech Roles
00:48:53
Speaker
your undergrad?
00:48:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:54
Speaker
My undergrad and my graduate degree were both in a field within public policy.
00:48:58
Speaker
And I can speak a little bit about that trend if helpful.
00:49:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:03
Speaker
So, I mean, yeah, how did you sell yourself as, was it just sort of these hacks that you've already discussed?
00:49:14
Speaker
Or like, I guess, how hard is it to make that transition?
00:49:19
Speaker
So I...
00:49:22
Speaker
I did study a public policy background and at the time I was doing that, there were various technical innovations in the works and sort of product innovations in the way that, you know, you might imagine the last 15 years of tech has been quite disruptive along several lines, different classes of technology.
00:49:44
Speaker
I identified a
00:49:46
Speaker
technical subdomain that I was very interested in that had a lot of disruptive force.
00:49:53
Speaker
Apologies, had a lot of disruptive force within the broader economy and within social contexts.
00:49:59
Speaker
So this
00:50:04
Speaker
This technical field basically was implicating as it advanced all kinds of regulatory concerns, all kinds of communications concerns, public policy concerns, social concerns, ethical concerns, et cetera, et cetera.
00:50:17
Speaker
And I did everything I could alongside my master's degree to learn the reality of the technology from the applied perspective as I previously described.
00:50:31
Speaker
And that allowed me to synthesize an approach to several companies where I reached out directly to a senior team member.
00:50:39
Speaker
And I said, basically, I've looked at your recruiting pipelines.
00:50:42
Speaker
I see that you're recruiting for pure developers at the moment.
00:50:45
Speaker
But I think that I could present to you a skill set that is very unique, that really you'd never attempt to recruit for because it's too niche a profile and getting these pipelines set up is a lot of hassle.
00:51:01
Speaker
Um, but I can directly offer my services to you.
00:51:06
Speaker
I would hope that you would consider at least interviewing me for initially a non-technical role, uh, that attempts to insert me into and leverage, um, my background in helping you navigate these increasingly mounting issues that are distracting you from your work.
00:51:27
Speaker
Um,
00:51:28
Speaker
And eventually I was able to convince them to do that, to take me on as an intern.
00:51:32
Speaker
So I, I like, um, they weren't making an irretrievable commitment to me.
00:51:36
Speaker
I did a, an internship at moderate length, uh, during which I worked flat out trying to impress them.
00:51:42
Speaker
And, and, uh, there's another thing actually we should return to here in a second, which is like how you should act once you go into these companies as an untechnical person and your relationship to the tech, which is very important.
00:51:54
Speaker
Um,
00:51:54
Speaker
But, but yeah, and ultimately, like I was, I was able to do that.
00:51:59
Speaker
And then the later in my career, I was able to do a similar kind of thing where I approached another company that did not have a team of the kind that I specialized in that I had my background in.
00:52:12
Speaker
And I approached the CTO directly who I had a relationship with from a previous company.
00:52:17
Speaker
And I said, Look, I've written up a proposal for the formation of a new team at your company.
00:52:23
Speaker
I'm hoping that you will take it to your senior leadership and you will advocate for it, knowing that he would be sympathetic to the proposal I had written because we had a similar background and I knew him somewhat.
00:52:35
Speaker
And that led to a series of interviews with their senior leadership.
00:52:37
Speaker
Ultimately, I pushed it over the line and I was made the offer to found this team at a company which was growing very quickly, which is very exciting because it like catapulted me at a young age into a relatively senior position within the company.
00:52:49
Speaker
So these kind of like outside the box techniques from non-technical backgrounds are very possible.
00:52:56
Speaker
Not always like I've had, I don't want to lie.
00:52:58
Speaker
I've had a lot of applications of this kind of fail because the infrastructure is not necessarily there.
00:53:02
Speaker
Like some of these corporations are operating like along very set lines, very difficult, like even in terms of their internal compliance procedures to set up like a random role or a random internship.
00:53:15
Speaker
So you're going to get a lot of rejections, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
00:53:18
Speaker
And if you're doing a bunch of Java applications anyway, working at these companies is pretty fantastic.
00:53:27
Speaker
And I'd recommend at least trying if you have some kind of coherent thesis as to why you actually might be useful.
00:53:32
Speaker
I mean, this whole thing is kind of contingent upon you being able to advance a compelling argument as to how they're understaffed in some particular domain and how you could help that.
00:53:41
Speaker
It can't just be a purely speculative exercise.
00:53:44
Speaker
I do think a lot of guys who don't have a specific technical domain that they're expert in, they have a really hard time articulating or maybe even understanding what their value is to an organization like this.
00:54:01
Speaker
And maybe can you color that in a little bit?
00:54:08
Speaker
What did you argue was like, this is how I'm going to make you money.
00:54:13
Speaker
uh, without being a code guy.
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:18
Speaker
So like these companies are subject to, um, tremendous external pressures, particularly along the lines of, um, regulation and depending on whether it's a business to business company or a B to C company business to consumer company.
00:54:33
Speaker
things like public perception, things like attracting negative attention from particular activist groups, things like a reputation with media partners, government affairs and so forth.
00:54:46
Speaker
There's a whole constellation of concerns that are directly relevant to these companies' abilities to bring a product to market successfully that really have nothing to do with coding.
00:54:57
Speaker
And you can observe situations in which you have the most talented coders in the world within the companies that have been assigned to build a product that are completely paralyzed from actual technical development because they are vaguely aware
00:55:11
Speaker
that there is this whole set of socio-technical concerns that they're going to have to integrate into their proposal that they are in no way equipped to like individually make decisions about.
00:55:21
Speaker
And these concerns are so great that like the interventions, the risk mitigations, the way that you've convinced the regulators that you're compliant with whatever they want you to do have to be reflected not just at a policy level, but at a technical level.
00:55:34
Speaker
So there are quite specific decisions that need to be made about like, I don't know, depends on the class of technology, but like,
00:55:40
Speaker
particular data flows, particular access structures, like whether you need to break this off into a separate part of the organization, whether you can or can't bring it to like different geographies, like all of these concerns are very significant.
00:55:53
Speaker
And what is extra valuable, like there are a million public policy guys out there.
00:55:59
Speaker
There are not a million public policy guys or lawyers or whatever that are so literate with the technology itself that even if they're not directly developing it, they can absolutely sit desk side with an elite developer and help them on a line-by-line basis, rapidly navigate the concerns about system design, user interface, data flows, et cetera,
00:56:25
Speaker
that they find paralyzing because they're not really sure what they're supposed to be doing.
00:56:28
Speaker
Like they can, they can absolutely do it once they know what they're supposed to be doing because they're the best engineers in the world.
00:56:34
Speaker
Uh, even if it takes, you know, considerable thought to, to, to develop something really innovative, but they don't have this kind of sinking, um, feeling that like, I'm not even sure what direction I'm supposed to be setting off in.
00:56:45
Speaker
And that, that extends as you move up the company to like project management and senior project management and like, um, taking ownership of particular verticals and, and, and so on and so forth.
00:56:55
Speaker
It's really about finding that particular slice of, okay, I am very well versed in a socio-technical, in a public policy or whatever domain that is directly relevant to the bottom line of a technical organization.
00:57:11
Speaker
And I have gone to the effort to really be so literate with the technology that even if I'm not a true software developer, I'm not intimidated by direct interactions with the technology and direct guidance as to how the technology should be intimidated.
00:57:24
Speaker
And to round out a point that I started earlier, if you do successfully pull off this route and you get some kind of tentative position at a company that you want to turn into something real, you will be faced with this moment where you're like, okay, I know what background I come from.
00:57:40
Speaker
I come from the public policy background.
00:57:42
Speaker
Therefore, I should lean on that as hard as possible.
00:57:44
Speaker
I'll become the public policy guy within the company.
00:57:47
Speaker
If you do that, unless you're like exceptionally valuable in some demonstrable way,
00:57:52
Speaker
you're kind of dead in the water because you've immediately, you get like a period when you first join the company when you're allowed to not be demonstrably generating value because you're still getting up to speed.
00:58:04
Speaker
You should use that period, that grace period, to like do a thing that you're going to be useless at at first, which is interacting with the technology, and you should dive in, even if you're intimidated, straight away.
00:58:16
Speaker
You should find developers.
00:58:17
Speaker
You should ask them stupid questions.
00:58:18
Speaker
I mean, that's another good thing about working with these companies.
00:58:20
Speaker
Like,
00:58:21
Speaker
If the guy sitting next to you is one of the best engineers in the world in their technical subdomain and your friends, you can just ask him technical questions.
00:58:29
Speaker
So it's like having the best tutor in the world, like right there about any particular issue that you need to understand more about.
00:58:34
Speaker
You should be doing that from day one so that
00:58:37
Speaker
you can act fully as this bridge between the technical domain and the social domain that is fully literate on both ends.
00:58:45
Speaker
And you build out this connective tissue that is really necessary to the correct functioning of an organization.
00:58:51
Speaker
If you just like lean on your strengths and like you're, I'm a public policy guy.
00:58:56
Speaker
You won't have the direct attachment to the engineers that the engineers require to be given the fine grained applicable guidance that they need to move as fast as possible.
00:59:04
Speaker
And you'll be less valued paradoxically to the company that's hired you.
00:59:07
Speaker
So don't be intimidated, dive right into the technical level and set yourself on a journey of ever increasing technical literacy and demonstrable passion for the technology itself.
00:59:18
Speaker
So you mentioned that you're exited from that corporate world
00:59:24
Speaker
And I've known guys who've sort of taken their bag and started a business or bought something else, some other revenue generating thing.
00:59:34
Speaker
And I'm interested in your take on like, number one, how did you do that?
00:59:39
Speaker
And then in general principles, how have you seen that done?
00:59:44
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a great question.
Transitioning to Startups or Investing
00:59:48
Speaker
There's no one answer.
00:59:49
Speaker
So like what I observe a lot of guys doing about seven years in,
00:59:53
Speaker
is founding some kind of startup.
00:59:55
Speaker
And that's very attractive for guys of our disposition because the smaller your company is, the less regulatory concerns and that sort of human resources domain are brought to bear against you.
01:00:07
Speaker
And the more power you have to build up a small group of guys that you're sort of really aligned with, you get on well, you have a lot of control over who you work with without regulators stepping in and being like, okay, you need to do X, Y, and Z.
01:00:21
Speaker
So especially if you can find some kind of startup that is not intended to be some kind of hyperscale, a huge business within five years, but is actually like a niche product that has direct application quite quickly with a team that can remain small, that's a very attractive route.
01:00:35
Speaker
So I know some guys that have done that.
01:00:38
Speaker
Risks there, especially for a guy with a family, you need to think very carefully about how much money you've actually made and how you would survive if that startup doesn't succeed.
01:00:49
Speaker
Because like, frankly, you can have
01:00:51
Speaker
the best pedigree in the world when it comes to your background and the colleagues you bring with you on that journey.
01:00:57
Speaker
A lot of those startups, even founded by really elite guys, fail, like a decent percentage of them.
01:01:03
Speaker
And if you've got a family to provide for and you've only worked in the industry for like seven years, you know, you probably don't have massive savings.
01:01:10
Speaker
Like you've probably got like
01:01:12
Speaker
You've earned consistently good money and you're really at the beginning of like a takeoff.
01:01:18
Speaker
Um, but you don't have a huge bag.
01:01:21
Speaker
Another thing a lot of guys do is they just kind of like quiet quit.
01:01:25
Speaker
Isn't quite the right word.
01:01:27
Speaker
They'll stay within large companies, but they'll kind of niche themselves off.
01:01:30
Speaker
They'll intentionally be like, okay, I know this isn't going to, um, increase my pay as much this year.
01:01:36
Speaker
I'm not going to go for like the biggest value thing I could be doing.
01:01:39
Speaker
Instead they'll say to the company, Hey,
01:01:42
Speaker
You know, now that I'm in a good negotiating position, because I've proved my value over many years, I'm kind of irreplaceable.
01:01:47
Speaker
Maybe I could start remote work in exchange for not getting a huge salary increase this year.
01:01:53
Speaker
Or maybe I could, you know, form a new team that just does some small niche thing where I don't really have to answer to anyone, like very directly.
01:02:01
Speaker
Obviously, you'll have to answer to someone, but maybe that's someone very senior that doesn't have a lot of time, that has a lot of reports, and they just kind of trust you to get on with your own thing because you've established your position.
01:02:10
Speaker
That's another route.
01:02:11
Speaker
The third route, if you've made a lot of money, is like angel investing, some kind of venture capital participation.
01:02:19
Speaker
Those kind of firms take a lot of top talent from the top firms after guys have been in for like 15 years.
01:02:24
Speaker
So if you look at the roster of A16Z, which is one of the big Andreessen Horowitz,
01:02:31
Speaker
venture capital firms that makes a lot of moves in Silicon Valley.
01:02:33
Speaker
They have a lot of guys on their books that are not just founders, but were like senior employees of various companies.
01:02:38
Speaker
Some guys go on the board of other companies, which is great because they pay you a lot of money and you really don't have to do a lot of work and you don't really have to answer to anyone.
01:02:45
Speaker
You just have like a few days of work a year.
01:02:48
Speaker
Uh, I mean, there's a lot of parts.
01:02:50
Speaker
Once you have a strong CV and a lot of money, you can kind of do a lot of things.
01:02:52
Speaker
There's no one answer and it'll depend on where you live, what your interests are, what your level of separation that you want to achieve is.
01:03:00
Speaker
Um, there are kind of risks and drawbacks to each one.
01:03:03
Speaker
Like the, the nice thing about being in the companies is that they provide a lot of stability and you know, you'll have good benefits.
01:03:09
Speaker
You can go to the gym.
01:03:10
Speaker
They'll give you three meals a day.
01:03:11
Speaker
They'll pay you a lot of money.
01:03:13
Speaker
One of the problems with these companies now is that the risk-reward of doing a startup, if you're able to work at the top end of a fan company, it really doesn't make a lot of sense.
01:03:23
Speaker
Your company has to do incredibly well, and you have to be a sole founder to secure the bag so that when you sell your shares, you're making more money than you would have made before.
01:03:37
Speaker
if you'd, if you just stayed within the company, um, that, that like runway on those is pretty insane.
01:03:43
Speaker
Now you can check out some calculations there, but I saw someone like break down.
01:03:46
Speaker
I don't know how accurate it was, but someone broke down.
01:03:48
Speaker
Like if you founded a company with five, with four other co-founders and you took that company to a hundred million valuation when it was sold and you accepted venture capital through two rounds of seed funding along the way, and therefore you had diluted your holdings within the company.
01:04:07
Speaker
then you would essentially likely be in a position where you would perhaps have 20% of 1 10th of the company by the time it went, you know, it was sold, which equates to about 2 million, which is obviously a lot of money, but your opportunity cost of having earned, like lost maybe three, four years of earnings at the top end of a fan company outshines that.
01:04:34
Speaker
And so you can see that you have to build like really exceptional companies if your goal is to like hyperscale them and take them public to outweigh that.
01:04:41
Speaker
Anyway, that's that's a distraction.
01:04:43
Speaker
Basically, what I'm saying is you have a lot of options if you have if you have significant financial resources and a very strong CV.
01:04:51
Speaker
The one thing that I would note is that if you want to go down this route, it takes longer than you would think.
01:04:56
Speaker
to build a bag that you can just fully rely on.
01:04:59
Speaker
Like you probably need to be in for like 10 to 15 years to have like total financial independence and just be able to sit your money in some kind of like, like passive investing type setup.
01:05:12
Speaker
Because like taxes are brutal, you know, especially given a lot of the places you have to live.
01:05:18
Speaker
So you can like theoretically earn a very high salary, but like actually not be able to save that much every year.
01:05:23
Speaker
So it's not like a panacea.
01:05:24
Speaker
You'll have to be in it for like the moderately on hold.
01:05:26
Speaker
But like if you're like largely independent after 10 to 15 years, in my mind, that's a pretty good outcome.
01:05:32
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:32
Speaker
And we've talked a lot about the how, and I think it's a good time to talk about the why, which is you mentioned wanting to, or you basically suggesting that this was a necessary thing for our guys to do so that they can accomplish monumental things.
Building Communities and Family Values
01:05:51
Speaker
And yeah,
01:05:53
Speaker
I'm interested in your take on like, well, first of all, like what, what are you in it for?
01:05:59
Speaker
Like what, what's the what's the big dream that this this course enabled you to accomplish or that you're working on now?
01:06:07
Speaker
So still a work in progress, but I have a particular vision, which is essentially
01:06:13
Speaker
I like my model of not attempting to change the whole world at once, but instead building up deliberate communities around me that gradually extend as I am able to bring more resources to bear.
01:06:26
Speaker
So I've got a relatively large family now, which is nice.
01:06:31
Speaker
I own some property, which is nice.
01:06:33
Speaker
It's in a good area, which is nice.
01:06:35
Speaker
But now what I'm increasingly doing is I'm bringing in employees that are
01:06:42
Speaker
I've made the calculation that this is not the lowest cost employee that I could hire, potentially not even the most qualified employee I could hire.
01:06:49
Speaker
But they are coming from a perspective that I really share.
01:06:56
Speaker
And so I'm able to employ a few people that I think themselves are on very healthy life courses.
01:07:03
Speaker
I'm able to pay them well.
01:07:05
Speaker
And that's sort of one admittedly very small way that I'm sort of projecting this ambition out into the world.
01:07:12
Speaker
But I think there's more you can do there.
01:07:14
Speaker
I mean, you know, I'm currently not in the US, so the homeschooling setup is a little bit different where I am.
01:07:22
Speaker
But you can do some kind of like pseudo homeschooling where you can pay for a couple of really good tutors to come in and you can get together with a few people that you know that you're perhaps able to offer
01:07:35
Speaker
less expensive fees to because you're covering the bulk of the teacher's expenses.
01:07:39
Speaker
And you can get your kids co-educated with theirs.
01:07:44
Speaker
So it's like a kind of mini school type thing.
01:07:47
Speaker
You know, I'm able to participate and donate to my church, which is nice.
01:07:52
Speaker
And so, you know, I think there's more to come.
01:07:54
Speaker
I'm certainly not done in my professional career.
01:07:57
Speaker
I want to sort of like, what I've just described is really,
01:08:01
Speaker
very pleasing to me, but it's still admittedly very modest.
01:08:04
Speaker
But I think there's sort of future layers to this, which is funding, as you alluded to earlier, larger creative projects, artists in our sphere.
01:08:11
Speaker
I've started doing that in a very small way, just commissioning pieces of art for my house and so forth from guys that I find in our space online, which is very nice.
01:08:22
Speaker
But it's something of a gradual movement.
01:08:25
Speaker
I won't pretend that I have some
01:08:27
Speaker
radical plan to sort of change everything and achieve our goals all at once.
01:08:33
Speaker
But I have a certain amount of satisfaction in the wholesome, self-reliant network of good people that I've been able and blessed to sort of gradually build up around myself.
01:08:47
Speaker
Yeah, honestly, I think you probably wouldn't be...
01:08:53
Speaker
on this side of things, if you did have, I mean, like, I don't know, I think most of our guys do not have a radical social program.
01:09:01
Speaker
Like that's, that's sort of against the grain of what we're trying to accomplish anyway.
01:09:06
Speaker
And I think, yeah, for, for most of the guys that I talked to who have their heads screwed on, right.
01:09:13
Speaker
It is something like a patronage network.
01:09:16
Speaker
It's something like they're, they're trying to, they're trying to build
01:09:20
Speaker
a kingdom or, uh, you know, they, we, you can use like sort of modern terms like intergen or generational wealth or, you know, uh, uh, affinity groups or something, but essentially it's, it's, uh, sort of a rebirth of feudalism.
01:09:39
Speaker
And, uh, that, that gets, uh, if you say that, it sounds, uh,
01:09:46
Speaker
Icky to some people, but I think actually the rebirth of feudalism would be a dramatic improvement over our present situation.
01:09:52
Speaker
And and we have we have conversations about that in the group about like, how do we how do we build a great house?
01:10:01
Speaker
How do we how do we become influential in this way?
01:10:04
Speaker
And I think.
01:10:05
Speaker
probably the the icky step that that a lot of these guys do not want to take is you need to go get your patent of nobility from the from the existing uh structure that grants patents of nobility which is basically um these elite institutions
01:10:28
Speaker
I think, I mean, like, so it's kind of too late for me, right?
01:10:33
Speaker
I'm pretty burned as far as taking that course.
01:10:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:38
Speaker
But I do think about my kids, and I think maybe this is a good place to conclude.
01:10:44
Speaker
Like, with my kids, it's very important to me that I provide the opportunities for them to become elite.
01:10:56
Speaker
Like, if my kids are not able to...
01:11:02
Speaker
to be independent in that way and powerful in that way and to have the sort of exciting challenges that exist at that level, then I will feel like I have missed the point of all this.
01:11:18
Speaker
At the same time, I struggle with how much do I want them inculcated in this culture and how early do I have to start getting them ready
01:11:34
Speaker
in order to accomplish that.
01:11:35
Speaker
And I wanted to get your take on like, how do you thread that needle?
01:11:41
Speaker
How do you like expose them to enough of this stuff that they can be fluent and have the right ant smell, so to speak, without them getting completely lost in the sauce?
01:11:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a tough question.
01:11:56
Speaker
My kids are still very young.
01:11:58
Speaker
Um, I think it's, it's possibly the most important question you could have asked.
01:12:01
Speaker
So I'm glad you did.
01:12:02
Speaker
Uh, still thinking about it.
01:12:04
Speaker
I mean, at the moment, what I am really working on is with my eldest, my son, just making sure he's like really physically healthy.
01:12:16
Speaker
Like we play a lot of sport.
01:12:18
Speaker
He eats a lot of good food.
01:12:19
Speaker
Um, I make sure that, you know, my wife has the time to cook really good home cooked meals.
01:12:24
Speaker
We go to church.
01:12:26
Speaker
And I know this is something of a trite answer, but I do think that like, if you're making sure that your kids are not fundamentally dispositionally or physically compromised in some way, like they have no reason to be resentful or to feel unloved or to feel weak or to feel vulnerable, like they project a certain strength, a certain love of life, and just kind of like basic virtues.
01:12:50
Speaker
I think they're naturally a lot more resistant to, um,
01:12:54
Speaker
a lot of the kind of nonsense that pervades our, our sort of zeitgeist at the moment, because I think dispositionally, like a lot of that messaging, that kind of progressive messaging is predicated on, um, basically preying on people that due to their circumstances or their disposition would not have had power or influence or respect in a traditional setting.
01:13:19
Speaker
And so are very attracted to,
01:13:21
Speaker
revolutionary modes or ideologies that suggest that everything should be turned on its head to accrue power and respect to those people instead.
01:13:30
Speaker
And if you make sure that your children have no reason to inhabit that mindset, that they're healthy, they're happy, they see everything that's great about the world, they love their lives, they love their family,
01:13:45
Speaker
Their family are just obviously doing things that are designed to make them happy, like taking them on the trips they want to go on and making sure there's lots of physical playtime and showing them the good, exciting movies that you're not supposed to watch anymore.
01:13:59
Speaker
They're just fun and healthy and vital and robust and so forth.
01:14:04
Speaker
I think, I mean, my hope is that a lot of this will just wash off them and they'll be able to navigate.
01:14:09
Speaker
I mean, this is what worked for me.
01:14:10
Speaker
It's what I observed worked for a lot of my friends at university, the kind that run sports teams and so forth.
01:14:16
Speaker
The pressures from wider society are what they are.
01:14:19
Speaker
They're inescapable if you want to live in an urban setting and participate in the networks that I've described.
01:14:24
Speaker
But if you're fundamentally healthy and robust as a person, I really do think it's limited the extent to which they can affect your soul.
01:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true.
01:14:32
Speaker
I think even though it's our whole deal, sometimes in our rhetoric and the way we approach these problems, we sort of forget the extent to which these problems are biological and psychological and the way that these political narratives are not really persuading people on the merits but meeting a psychological need.
01:15:02
Speaker
And yeah, if you can raise kids who don't have those bleeding psycho-spiritual wounds, it's probably a lot easier to inoculate.
01:15:17
Speaker
I mean, I'm finding with my kids, like, their sort of natural disgust response to...
01:15:25
Speaker
Like I, maybe it's too spicy to give a specific example, but like my daughter independently learned of a particular lifestyle arrangement and was just fulminating about how gross that was and how repulsed she was by it.
01:15:47
Speaker
And I had never even broached that topic with her.
01:15:53
Speaker
Like I was not, it's not this like woke eight-year-old thing where I had like coached her and fed her some things.
01:16:00
Speaker
She had this very natural reaction to it.
01:16:03
Speaker
And
01:16:05
Speaker
I was almost in this position of like, whoa, whoa, hang on, slow your roll, just for the sake of not wanting her to get in too much trouble at too young of an age.
01:16:19
Speaker
But yeah, I definitely think that we have people's natural, healthy responses to these things on our side.
01:16:34
Speaker
And we can probably trust that a little bit more.
01:16:37
Speaker
Yeah, amen to that.
01:16:40
Speaker
Well, this has been a great conversation.
01:16:42
Speaker
Johan Kurtz on Twitter, two N's and a T in Kurtz.
01:16:47
Speaker
You can find his Substack at becomingnoble.substack.com.
01:16:51
Speaker
I'll post the link to the article that spurred this conversation in the show notes.
01:16:56
Speaker
Anything else?
01:16:57
Speaker
Any other place we should send people, Johan?
01:17:00
Speaker
No, Substack's the place I care about.
01:17:02
Speaker
becomingnoble.substack.com.
01:17:04
Speaker
And I was just tremendously grateful to be invited on.
01:17:06
Speaker
So thank you so much.
01:17:08
Speaker
Great to have you, man.