Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett, joined today by Johann Kurtz, author of the Becoming Noble Substack.
Speaker: He wrote an article entitled, Dissidents with Elite Potential Must Join Liberal Organizations.
Speaker: And that, he had a fascinating take on why that was important.
Speaker: The argument that I usually hear is, oh, we got to
Speaker: get inside and infiltrate and subvert.
Speaker: And I've always felt like that's stupid.
Speaker: You're not going to subvert Amazon as a project manager.
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.
Speaker: And we had a conversation.
Speaker: I actually brought it to the exit full group call two weeks ago.
Speaker: And, you know, some of the guys were infuriated and some of the guys were interested.
Speaker: And so I wanted to take some of the questions we had in that conversation and run them by Johan.
Speaker: So, Johan, welcome to the show.
Speaker: It's a real pleasure to be here.
Speaker: Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker: Great to have you.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: I mean, I don't think we have to be too cagey.
Speaker: I'm sort of out of the game.
Speaker: But briefly, the relevant pieces, I think, to this discussion are that I spent a long time working in and around tech.
Speaker: companies that you'd be familiar with, you know, think Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, sort of tier companies.
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.
Speaker: And I think exactly as you said,
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.
Speaker: These are very large corporations.
Speaker: They're not going to change direction because of your influence.
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,
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.
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.
Speaker: So then the question becomes, is there a different reason to join these companies other than subversion or infiltration?
Speaker: And I think the answer is yes, for reasons we can get into.
Speaker: But broadly speaking, I think that these companies offer fantastic advantages in the financial domains and in the self-development domains.
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.
Speaker: and to develop the financial resources to bring to bear against other problems.
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.
Speaker: What have you taken away or what have you seen others take away that was useful?
Speaker: So I think, you know, a lot of guys in our sphere are quite bright.
Speaker: And...
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.
Speaker: They reject kind of normie NPC type messaging.
Speaker: And they think, you know, they think, well, I'm sort of educated.
Speaker: I have the...
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.
Speaker: And they can do that because they're smart.
Speaker: And, you know, we've all been there.
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,
Speaker: Average students at top university programs now is pretty mediocre.
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.
Speaker: When you join a really elite team at a top company, you'll realize that actually you're not the
Speaker: you're not as smart as you thought you were.
Speaker: These companies do a great job, at least when it comes to male, Asian and white applicants, of selecting for really excellent people in terms of pure capability in technical and managerial domains.
Speaker: This is not a sort of broader comment about they're better than you in every way.
Speaker: They're certainly not.
Speaker: But they are, along particular lines, really excellent at what they do.
Speaker: And, you know, these firms are much more selective than even top university programs.
Speaker: You know, if you try to study
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.
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.
Speaker: It's an order of magnitude more difficult to get onto a top engineering team at Google.
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
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: ahead of you.
Speaker: And that's a very invigorating thing to realize.
Speaker: I think for people, certainly like me, it really crushed me at first.
Speaker: And I think that's healthy.
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.
Speaker: thinking in this very innovative way under tremendous, tremendous pressure alongside very smart people.
Speaker: And some of these people really are, again, this is not to say they're fantastic in every way.
Speaker: I don't idolize them.
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.
Speaker: It's, it's quite a privilege to work alongside them.
Speaker: Uh, they, the value they generate, the ambition they bring to the table, their creativity, um,
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.
Speaker: They're quite calm.
Speaker: They're very good at triaging, et cetera.
Speaker: And they'll teach you fundamentally how to act.
Speaker: I think one of the great things about our sphere is that we have very rich intellectual discussions.
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.
Speaker: And I think that's really exciting and it's motivational and it's fantastic to grapple with.
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.
Speaker: But actually, if you've not
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.
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.
Speaker: I think that that kind of environment is very healthy for young guys.
Speaker: And again, you know, I
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.
Speaker: I'm not going to pretend that the spiritual environment is rich.
Speaker: It's not.
Speaker: It's often antagonistic to a sort of spiritually healthy person.
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.
Speaker: There are companies, frankly, that would pay me a lot of money that I never would have worked for.
Speaker: I guess I won't name them here because then you can start sort of reconstructing my CV.
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
Speaker: was actively making the world worse.
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.
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
Speaker: Yeah, I wanted to address that.
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.
Speaker: And I wonder
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.
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?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker: The answer is basically exactly as you say, I think Dave, the distributors calls this the ant smell, right?
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.
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.
Speaker: Within the company context, I make no
Speaker: Um, I make no apologies for the fact that I'm clearly a conservative.
Speaker: I don't talk about conservatism.
Speaker: I don't talk about politics at work, but it's very clear from who I am.
Speaker: You know, she took a look at me, how I dress, I work out.
Speaker: Um, I have a large family.
Speaker: I go to church.
Speaker: Everyone knows these things.
Speaker: I take, I take holy days off work.
Speaker: it's in my work calendar, like you can tell a lot about who I am dispositionally from the office.
Speaker: But I would say two things.
Speaker: One is be aware of what the red lines are.
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.
Speaker: I certainly do.
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.
Speaker: And that's not because those aren't important issues.
Speaker: That's just because fundamentally that is not the time to debate them.
Speaker: You're supposed to be doing something else.
Speaker: And it's just going to make everyone's lives worse.
Speaker: If you turn it into an argument, then you're not going to convince them anyway.
Speaker: And that's kind of how I think about work.
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.
Speaker: But if you make every effort to project the best things about your identity, and here I would include
Speaker: the wholesomeness of traditional family life.
Speaker: I would include physical fitness, dressing nicely, but not ostentatiously.
Speaker: You know, fundamentally just projecting yourself as a nice, healthy guy that is easy to get along with.
Speaker: That's not going to be a problem.
Speaker: That's not looking for a fight.
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.
Speaker: They're kind of embarrassed about it.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: And, uh,
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.
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.
Speaker: I know what's game to talk about and I know what I would never talk about them with.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: It's pleasant, honestly, that it's fine.
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.
Speaker: Again, I'm not suggesting you start chatting about your power level or whatever, but, you know,
Speaker: these organizations are very large.
Speaker: Like if you look at Google, they hire tens of thousands of white and Asian males, maybe hundreds of thousands.
Speaker: And within that, you know, there are frankly like conservative fathers that just want to get on with their job.
Speaker: There are a good number of them.
Speaker: There are parent groups, there are, there are religious groups, like people that are Christian and so forth.
Speaker: I mean, admittedly, it's probably a fairly progressive interpretation of the faith, but
Speaker: I'll tell you a story.
Speaker: I know you're, you're a LDS.
Speaker: Um, I'll tell you a funny story.
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.
Speaker: And I just took a little duffel bag type thing, a few t-shirts, you know, whatever.
Speaker: And, uh, and an LDS guy that, that I used to work with, he bought this huge suitcase.
Speaker: And I was like, uh, why, why did you bother, man?
Speaker: I mean, you had to check that in.
Speaker: It's just a casual set of meetings.
Speaker: We just need to be here for a few days.
Speaker: And he said, well, you know, I guess you call it temple.
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.
Speaker: I was like, damn, it's showing me up.
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.
Speaker: So these people do exist.
Speaker: And this is in the context of what is overall a very progressive institution, but there isn't uniformity within the institutions.
Speaker: And if you just have the right discussions with the right people, it's painful, it's annoying.
Speaker: You won't be able to be exactly who you are in your own mind in certain contexts.
Speaker: But frankly, I think
Speaker: There isn't one of us that moves in this sphere that is unfiltered all the time.
Speaker: Like if you have beliefs that are outside the mainstream, you're always slightly playing this game of calibration to a discussion.
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.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: I wonder, I would like to talk about what happens when the conversation is sort of required of you and how you navigate that.
Speaker: Yeah, that's always fun.
Speaker: As you might imagine, that's always fun.
Speaker: Again, it happens less often than you might think.
Speaker: I've only ever had to do one subconscious bias, what do they call it?
Speaker: Implicit bias or whatever training.
Speaker: And that was when I took over a fairly large recruiting pipeline.
Speaker: So that was mandatory for me.
Speaker: Honestly, I went into it mostly just interested what it would involve as a kind of entertaining experience.
Speaker: I was pretty confident that they wouldn't be able to, you know, Clockwork Orange style reprogram me from the inside out.
Speaker: And it was, you know, this is interesting.
Speaker: It didn't do anything for me.
Speaker: It was far less radical than I thought it would be.
Speaker: It was mostly like, you know, think about what you're doing or whatever.
Speaker: But these discussions do get forced on you.
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
Speaker: that constantly.
Speaker: The perception you get from the outside is that these conversations are going on all the time, right?
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.
Speaker: Most of the time, honestly, people are just working inside these companies.
Speaker: There are two issues.
Speaker: One,
Speaker: It's just a personal thing.
Speaker: I hate the art style.
Speaker: I really can't stand the art style.
Speaker: It is so painful for me.
Speaker: Walking around these buildings, they are bloody hideous in every company.
Speaker: For some reason, the combination of bare bricks with, I've forgotten what they call it.
Speaker: It's like new modern or something, corporate modern.
Speaker: But you know the Google art style, they're like block colors and everyone's smiling psychopathically.
Speaker: So that's one thing.
Speaker: The other thing is pronouns, right?
Speaker: You frankly, you can't get away from using people's preferred pronouns.
Speaker: That's something you just got to eat because people really get annoyed if you don't do that.
Speaker: And then you have to explain why you don't want to.
Speaker: And then very quickly, you're in dangerous territory with people that are very unsympathetic to you.
Speaker: So you got to eat the pronouns issue.
Speaker: But, you know, if
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.
Speaker: And I am fundamentally compromising my beliefs.
Speaker: Every time I reaffirm those pronouns, um, you know, frankly, I sympathize with that.
Speaker: If for me, I never lost track of who I was and what I was saying and why.
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.
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.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: It's a tough one.
Speaker: I guess you've got to know if you can eat it or not.
Speaker: I could eat it.
Speaker: I didn't like it, but it is what it is.
Speaker: Was it mainly just calling a he or she, or was it like Zs and Xers?
Speaker: No, none of the really weird stuff.
Speaker: They is, you know, non-binary is common as well, but that's about the extent of it.
Speaker: I never came across any neo-pronans, I believe they're called.
Speaker: I think it's a lot easier for guys like us to imagine...
Speaker: tolerating something like that if they had a clear notion of where the exits are.
Speaker: And I wonder if you have thoughts on like.
Speaker: How do you it's it seems to be the case.
Speaker: And this is sort of the the the criticism of this this essay that I found the most
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?
Speaker: Where are they now?
Speaker: Like, like why, why aren't they, you know, well, like why aren't they funding my screenplay or what, you know?
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.
Speaker: But, but like,
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?
Speaker: You know what I'm saying?
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.
Speaker: So if there's a closed room
Speaker: with a bunch of rich ex Google guys that are super right wing.
Speaker: I haven't found it.
Speaker: That's certainly true.
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.
Speaker: There are signs of this though.
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.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: you know, Moebuck really came out of the rational sphere, which was primarily a tech phenomenon.
Speaker: And that gives me the idea that there are more guys out there.
Speaker: Now, whether they're specifically networked, I never tried to do that.
Speaker: I've always tried to like have a strong separation between my career.
Speaker: And I can talk about the kind of exit process of that career.
Speaker: And then my beliefs, my personal life and so forth.
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,
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?
Speaker: It's not like the moment when you set off into the woods to forge your homestead or whatever.
Speaker: Although, you know, that's not to say that that couldn't be a viable path for some people.
Speaker: I know there's a rich history of that in America.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Speaker: And I figured, you know, my immediate priorities, I'm not going to change the world.
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.
Speaker: And establishing a strong career early on allowed me to get married young.
Speaker: It allowed me to take advantage of those family benefits that these companies offer.
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.
Speaker: It allowed me to have children young.
Speaker: As I said, it allowed me to develop intellectually.
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.
Speaker: Now, again, you have to make your peace with certain compromises in the professional domain, especially in that early stage.
Speaker: I didn't post anything online.
Speaker: I was able to listen in my evenings, my spare time while I worked out.
Speaker: And I have for a long time to people in our sphere.
Speaker: Um, I sort of made my piece with being clear built in this way.
Speaker: And I decided, okay, that's kind of the initial step.
Speaker: That's the first few years.
Speaker: And it was testing the water somewhat.
Speaker: I had to be brutally honest with myself.
Speaker: If I had the mental fortitude to remain loyal to those beliefs, I never built a, an online presence of any kind.
Speaker: So at that stage I was, you know, being very cautious.
Speaker: As you begin to achieve those fundamental goals, very important to avoid complacency and think I've got it all.
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.
Speaker: I thought, ah, I'm untouchable.
Speaker: Like, as long as I keep sticking this in the bank, I'm going to be independent in no time.
Speaker: Then I got married, getting married costs a little bit of money.
Speaker: Then you have a wife to support as well.
Speaker: And I started having children.
Speaker: And all of a sudden, you're actually earning in real terms far less than you thought you were.
Speaker: And so your finances take a hit at that point.
Speaker: So early on, you're still not fully independent.
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.
Speaker: So at that early stage, you're still supporting a fairly small business.
Speaker: group.
Speaker: But you should always be increasing your financial independence.
Speaker: Your ratio of earnings to expense is very important not to live the lavish tech lifestyle.
Speaker: Well, I was about to say that your colleagues live.
Speaker: I don't know what some of these guys do with their money.
Speaker: I know senior engineering leads that are making really a lot of money.
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.
Speaker: I literally don't know what they're doing with their money.
Speaker: It's bizarre in some cases.
Speaker: But you can sort of move, maneuver between companies, between teams.
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.
Speaker: Mostly, you know, they have the HR people, they follow the processes, but it's not saturated deep into the culture there.
Speaker: So you can find those companies, you can find those teams.
Speaker: If you focus on niche tech skills with a talent shortage,
Speaker: You make yourself a little bit less replaceable.
Speaker: So you're just like gradually strengthening your position financially and in terms of your career.
Speaker: Make yourself as irreplaceable as possible to a company that has as little incentive to replace you as possible.
Speaker: Get your family aligned with the mission at that stage.
Speaker: So, you know, my wife, and I think this is true of a lot of good women in our sphere,
Speaker: She's never been particularly political.
Speaker: She sort of, before I met her aligned to the sort of general consensus of our age.
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.
Speaker: And I'm sure you've observed the same thing in your own life.
Speaker: My beliefs stand to a level that often surprises me, like things I have never explicitly discussed with her.
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.
Speaker: Well, no, do you want to jump in?
Speaker: No, I was just going to say, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: That's been my experience.
Speaker: I think that's almost a, not a universal, but a very common experience with our guys.
Speaker: And it's, you almost wouldn't want
Speaker: her to be like really intensely political before you, before you met.
Speaker: Just because it sort of selects for some, some strangeness.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's right.
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.
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.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So you'd then be selecting for really quite a masculine wife.
Speaker: And, you know, some of these women are very impressive.
Speaker: They're very smart, but like, I'm not sure I'd want to marry someone who's like fundamental position.
Speaker: The reason that I was marrying her was a fundamentally masculine trait.
Speaker: I don't think that's a setup for success.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, my experience is like there are deeper indicators as to the spiritual health of women.
Speaker: women that you should marry.
Speaker: Frankly, like this is just, and again, nothing over the top, no like performative trad wife stuff, but like she dresses modestly.
Speaker: Her instincts are good.
Speaker: She's very polite.
Speaker: She's graceful.
Speaker: She's kind, you know, she's pretty.
Speaker: These kinds of things are like, it like, you can, you can tell it's a bit more subtle than like, Oh wow.
Speaker: I love Julius Evele too.
Speaker: Let's get married.
Speaker: You know,
Speaker: So, um, I'm, I'm interested in this question that you raised about securing an interview without affirmative action.
Speaker: You, you, you mentioned that as, as one of the things that you'd like to, uh, to talk about.
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.
Speaker: Like I'm a white guy.
Speaker: I don't get to work at Google.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's just to put it bluntly.
Speaker: Like the problem is not that you're a white guy and
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.
Speaker: Like, that's just a reality.
Speaker: They're not hiring like scores and scores of like Native Americans or whatever.
Speaker: So there are a lot of white guys at these companies.
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.
Speaker: Um, the, you know, there's really three paths into these companies that I've observed.
Speaker: Um, the first is, uh, you know, kind of going through the front door, right?
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.
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.
Speaker: That's, that's possible.
Speaker: I mean, like a lot of people do that every year.
Speaker: They're hungry for talent.
Speaker: That's why they send these recruiters into into these institutions.
Speaker: If you're able to stand out in that way, you can get through it.
Speaker: It's bloody hard.
Speaker: Let me tell you, like, the competition along that route is fierce.
Speaker: Like, everyone is good.
Speaker: Some great candidates fall short, because the interviews are brutal.
Speaker: There's a lot of them.
Speaker: So that's, that's tough.
Speaker: But that's the kind of default route.
Speaker: First of all, you should never be applying to these positions unless you have some kind of referral.
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.
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.
Speaker: just send them a message and be like, hey, I'm really interested in this.
Speaker: You know, this is my background.
Speaker: Can we have a quick chat?
Speaker: And then at the end of that, you know, you can go like, wow, you've convinced me.
Speaker: I'd love to apply to Google.
Speaker: You know, would you consider referring me?
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.
Speaker: Like Google pays thousands of dollars for every successful referral.
Speaker: So they, you know, they won't do it on a whim because basically like,
Speaker: If you refer too many dodgy candidates, Google will intervene, basically.
Speaker: But as long as they have moderate confidence that you could make a strong candidate, they'll be happy to refer you.
Speaker: And that guarantees that a recruiter will at least look at your CV.
Speaker: It won't just get thrown straight in the trash.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: The second thing you want to do, right?
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.
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.
Speaker: They are basically scanning.
Speaker: They look at so many CVs.
Speaker: They're scanning over a CV in like five seconds and they are measuring the emotional response it generates in them.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like, for example, let's say I went to MIT and I studied electrical engineering or maths or something.
Speaker: and I've done these great projects and now I'm applying, that's going to be treated with seriousness by the recruiter.
Speaker: However, if you have not been to MIT and you're at some more second-rate university, that sounds dismissive.
Speaker: That's not meant to sound dismissive.
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.
Speaker: You can't just do an MIT master's degree.
Speaker: That's like a hassle.
Speaker: It's long.
Speaker: It's expensive.
Speaker: You've got to apply for it.
Speaker: MIT has things they call micro-masters degrees.
Speaker: And there's no application needed.
Speaker: You can just buy your way in.
Speaker: It's not that expensive.
Speaker: It's a few hundred dollars, I think.
Speaker: And it's a kind of six-month commitment, like 20 hours a week.
Speaker: And if you do it, by the way, the quality is probably pretty good.
Speaker: I think it's called a micro... The one I saw was called a micro-masters in mathematics and data science or something.
Speaker: If you do that, you can then put that into the education section of your CV.
Speaker: And the recruiter will have the same emotional response,
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.
Speaker: Now, if you do that a few times, right?
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.
Speaker: And you can put that one in your certifications part of your CV, right?
Speaker: And then in your professional experience, maybe you could volunteer for an organization, like some kind of open source thing or whatever.
Speaker: As you start layering these things up, a lot of these are very easy to get.
Speaker: Like it's not that many hours work.
Speaker: It's not that expensive, whatever.
Speaker: It's not a massive commitment.
Speaker: There's no triaging.
Speaker: Like it's not difficult to get in through the door.
Speaker: You do that with four or five things.
Speaker: The recruiter is going to feel emotionally like they have to pass the CV on to a particular team to check out.
Speaker: Because like you can't just throw a resume in the trash that has like Google, MIT, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: It doesn't make any sense, right?
Speaker: Because you kind of hacked it and you've transparently hacked it.
Speaker: But you've kind of like found a way to get through to the next level.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
Speaker: Maybe it's regulatory, maybe it's communications, maybe it's project leadership.
Speaker: So that's a bit of a simplistic example.
Speaker: It's vague because
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.
Speaker: The final thing is, um, interviews.
Speaker: Like if you can use these like little tricks, um, to like get an interview,
Speaker: then, then that's a, that's a whole new domain.
Speaker: And I've got like advice for interviews as well.
Speaker: If this is interesting, this might be too much detail and this might be getting away from what you're interested in.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: No, no, I'm, I am interested in, in, in the interviews and yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Say more about that.
Speaker: Cool.
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,
Speaker: it gets immeasurably easier.
Speaker: Like from then on, you will have recruiters from the other companies chasing you.
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.
Speaker: For some reason they're like,
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.
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.
Speaker: And then they managed to land like an entry-level software engineering job, these kinds of things.
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.
Speaker: But anyway, I do address.
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.
Speaker: So like
Speaker: Let's say you've hacked your way into an interview using, you know, using some of these tricks.
Speaker: And by the way, these, these fundamentally only work, right?
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.
Speaker: You have to be, you know, vaguely qualified to work there.
Speaker: You can't hack your way all the way in and these interviews are tough.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But if you manage to get an interview, you have a real chance.
Speaker: You have to genuinely shine and be genuinely exceptional.
Speaker: but you have a real chance.
Speaker: And this means radical preparation, like a lot of preparation.
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.
Speaker: And for that process, I probably spent 50 hours of work on preparation for that specific set of interviews.
Speaker: even though at that point I had five years professional experience in a highly related domain.
Speaker: Um, so it's like a lot of work.
Speaker: Uh, this is like radical preparation.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: So for example, Substack is like determined that I subscribe for whatever reason.
Speaker: I don't know why it does this.
Speaker: to a Substack newsletter called AI Supremacy.
Speaker: I guess it's one of the biggest tech newsletters on Substack.
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.
Speaker: And he writes every day at length about AI issues and it's untethered to reality.
Speaker: And so you can read a lot of this stuff and think, wow, I'm getting so educated.
Speaker: I'm devoting a ton of time to AI or whatever.
Speaker: And you're really not learning anything.
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?
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.
Speaker: They're more commenting about like the future of AI.
Speaker: I see like whole books being published about how AI is going to change the world.
Speaker: And it's fundamentally like not recognizing a tool limitations of the classes of technology that they're talking about.
Speaker: It's just like pure science fiction.
Speaker: Um, and this stuff gets picked up by like major newspapers and stuff.
Speaker: And so there's this whole circulation of bad information.
Speaker: You need to cut through that or you're going to waste a ton of your time.
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.
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.
Speaker: And then you can read every single, every single thing they cite.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: Now you have at least some kind of accurate,
Speaker: aligned perception of the world with the institution that you are grappling with.
Speaker: You have some confidence that you haven't wasted a bunch of time in totally theoretical land that is actually totally wrong.
Speaker: And I see people do this.
Speaker: it's very painful when they do this.
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.
Speaker: Cause they read it in like the New York times or whatever.
Speaker: And they're just like completely wrong.
Speaker: Cause the article wasn't very good.
Speaker: And then, you know, there's something lost in translation there as well.
Speaker: It's like a waste of time.
Speaker: So start there.
Speaker: Then, uh, you want to like,
Speaker: Start reading white papers, the company and your particular team has released.
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.
Speaker: They release these kind of things.
Speaker: Check them out.
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.
Speaker: at least as a minority party on academic stuff from the institution they used to study at.
Speaker: You should read user documentation on the products that they develop.
Speaker: You should read documentary documentation on any tools they've made open source.
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.
Speaker: Um, that come from outside these institutions from a critical perspective and you should read those.
Speaker: So like, that might be like, um, regulatory rulings against them, these kinds of things.
Speaker: Like, so you, you at these balances out somehow, if you do this and you go like that ham on an interview process.
Speaker: Genuinely, the interviews themselves will be relaxing because you are really well prepared.
Speaker: Like you're insanely well prepared.
Speaker: This was particularly easy in COVID because like the interviews were all remote.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: So it's like, it's far less intimidating than you might imagine.
Speaker: Um, and then at least twice they gave me like a decomp case studies on stuff.
Speaker: I already knew back to front.
Speaker: Like I already knew all the answers I had them written down because I kind of anticipated like
Speaker: okay, they're going to ask me what's the problem with this, what does this mean, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: And I had like my answers written out.
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?
Speaker: Like, yeah, you might have a dodgy background.
Speaker: Yeah, your resume might clearly have been like padded a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah, you know, you're not from the really desirable sections of society.
Speaker: You're not from some kind of underrepresented group.
Speaker: But you are like,
Speaker: Charming because you can be relaxed in the interview.
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.
Speaker: Um, and, and you just like, you're, you're an all round impressive figure.
Speaker: And that way, like they, they can't mark you.
Speaker: Like, so the way it works on the inside in a company like Google is they have like different tiers of mark.
Speaker: They can give you like, they can give you a, you know, you must hire, don't hire, whatever.
Speaker: they literally can't put you into the don't hire bucket if you're performing at this level.
Speaker: And so you can just kind of slip by level to level without ever like anyone having reason to discount you.
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.
Speaker: So you'll have at least one advocate and you'll have no significant detractors.
Speaker: And you can kind of just like slip in through the back door in that way.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: It's a pretty interesting process to go through anyway.
Speaker: Honestly, I'd recommend it because you realize how crap a lot of the commentary on tech issues is in the mainstream media.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think what you've revealed here maybe is that
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.
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
Speaker: I'm definitely like a word cell.
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.
Speaker: But like I was never, I'm not an elite level data scientist and I never would be.
Speaker: By the way, I'm not, I'm not, I'm like, my background is not
Speaker: technical.
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.
Speaker: So I can, I relate very much to that.
Speaker: Well, okay.
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 your undergrad?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: My undergrad and my graduate degree were both in a field within public policy.
Speaker: And I can speak a little bit about that trend if helpful.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, yeah, how did you sell yourself as, was it just sort of these hacks that you've already discussed?
Speaker: Or like, I guess, how hard is it to make that transition?
Speaker: So I...
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.
Speaker: I identified a
Speaker: technical subdomain that I was very interested in that had a lot of disruptive force.
Speaker: Apologies, had a lot of disruptive force within the broader economy and within social contexts.
Speaker: So this
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.
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.
Speaker: And that allowed me to synthesize an approach to several companies where I reached out directly to a senior team member.
Speaker: And I said, basically, I've looked at your recruiting pipelines.
Speaker: I see that you're recruiting for pure developers at the moment.
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.
Speaker: Um, but I can directly offer my services to you.
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.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And eventually I was able to convince them to do that, to take me on as an intern.
Speaker: So I, I like, um, they weren't making an irretrievable commitment to me.
Speaker: I did a, an internship at moderate length, uh, during which I worked flat out trying to impress them.
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.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But, but yeah, and ultimately, like I was, I was able to do that.
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.
Speaker: And I approached the CTO directly who I had a relationship with from a previous company.
Speaker: And I said, Look, I've written up a proposal for the formation of a new team at your company.
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.
Speaker: And that led to a series of interviews with their senior leadership.
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.
Speaker: So these kind of like outside the box techniques from non-technical backgrounds are very possible.
Speaker: Not always like I've had, I don't want to lie.
Speaker: I've had a lot of applications of this kind of fail because the infrastructure is not necessarily there.
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.
Speaker: So you're going to get a lot of rejections, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
Speaker: And if you're doing a bunch of Java applications anyway, working at these companies is pretty fantastic.
Speaker: And I'd recommend at least trying if you have some kind of coherent thesis as to why you actually might be useful.
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.
Speaker: It can't just be a purely speculative exercise.
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.
Speaker: And maybe can you color that in a little bit?
Speaker: What did you argue was like, this is how I'm going to make you money.
Speaker: uh, without being a code guy.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
Speaker: And what is extra valuable, like there are a million public policy guys out there.
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,
Speaker: that they find paralyzing because they're not really sure what they're supposed to be doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: I come from the public policy background.
Speaker: Therefore, I should lean on that as hard as possible.
Speaker: I'll become the public policy guy within the company.
Speaker: If you do that, unless you're like exceptionally valuable in some demonstrable way,
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.
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.
Speaker: You should find developers.
Speaker: You should ask them stupid questions.
Speaker: I mean, that's another good thing about working with these companies.
Speaker: Like,
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.
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.
Speaker: You should be doing that from day one so that
Speaker: you can act fully as this bridge between the technical domain and the social domain that is fully literate on both ends.
Speaker: And you build out this connective tissue that is really necessary to the correct functioning of an organization.
Speaker: If you just like lean on your strengths and like you're, I'm a public policy guy.
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.
Speaker: And you'll be less valued paradoxically to the company that's hired you.
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.
Speaker: So you mentioned that you're exited from that corporate world
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.
Speaker: And I'm interested in your take on like, number one, how did you do that?
Speaker: And then in general principles, how have you seen that done?
Speaker: Yeah, so that's a great question.
Speaker: There's no one answer.
Speaker: So like what I observe a lot of guys doing about seven years in,
Speaker: is founding some kind of startup.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: So I know some guys that have done that.
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.
Speaker: Because like, frankly, you can have
Speaker: the best pedigree in the world when it comes to your background and the colleagues you bring with you on that journey.
Speaker: A lot of those startups, even founded by really elite guys, fail, like a decent percentage of them.
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.
Speaker: Like you've probably got like
Speaker: You've earned consistently good money and you're really at the beginning of like a takeoff.
Speaker: Um, but you don't have a huge bag.
Speaker: Another thing a lot of guys do is they just kind of like quiet quit.
Speaker: Isn't quite the right word.
Speaker: They'll stay within large companies, but they'll kind of niche themselves off.
Speaker: They'll intentionally be like, okay, I know this isn't going to, um, increase my pay as much this year.
Speaker: I'm not going to go for like the biggest value thing I could be doing.
Speaker: Instead they'll say to the company, Hey,
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.
Speaker: Maybe I could start remote work in exchange for not getting a huge salary increase this year.
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.
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.
Speaker: That's another route.
Speaker: The third route, if you've made a lot of money, is like angel investing, some kind of venture capital participation.
Speaker: Those kind of firms take a lot of top talent from the top firms after guys have been in for like 15 years.
Speaker: So if you look at the roster of A16Z, which is one of the big Andreessen Horowitz,
Speaker: venture capital firms that makes a lot of moves in Silicon Valley.
Speaker: They have a lot of guys on their books that are not just founders, but were like senior employees of various companies.
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.
Speaker: You just have like a few days of work a year.
Speaker: Uh, I mean, there's a lot of parts.
Speaker: Once you have a strong CV and a lot of money, you can kind of do a lot of things.
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.
Speaker: Um, there are kind of risks and drawbacks to each one.
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.
Speaker: You can go to the gym.
Speaker: They'll give you three meals a day.
Speaker: They'll pay you a lot of money.
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.
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.
Speaker: if you'd, if you just stayed within the company, um, that, that like runway on those is pretty insane.
Speaker: Now you can check out some calculations there, but I saw someone like break down.
Speaker: I don't know how accurate it was, but someone broke down.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Anyway, that's that's a distraction.
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.
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.
Speaker: to build a bag that you can just fully rely on.
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.
Speaker: Because like taxes are brutal, you know, especially given a lot of the places you have to live.
Speaker: So you can like theoretically earn a very high salary, but like actually not be able to save that much every year.
Speaker: So it's not like a panacea.
Speaker: You'll have to be in it for like the moderately on hold.
Speaker: But like if you're like largely independent after 10 to 15 years, in my mind, that's a pretty good outcome.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: I'm interested in your take on like, well, first of all, like what, what are you in it for?
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?
Speaker: So still a work in progress, but I have a particular vision, which is essentially
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.
Speaker: So I've got a relatively large family now, which is nice.
Speaker: I own some property, which is nice.
Speaker: It's in a good area, which is nice.
Speaker: But now what I'm increasingly doing is I'm bringing in employees that are
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.
Speaker: But they are coming from a perspective that I really share.
Speaker: And so I'm able to employ a few people that I think themselves are on very healthy life courses.
Speaker: I'm able to pay them well.
Speaker: And that's sort of one admittedly very small way that I'm sort of projecting this ambition out into the world.
Speaker: But I think there's more you can do there.
Speaker: I mean, you know, I'm currently not in the US, so the homeschooling setup is a little bit different where I am.
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
Speaker: less expensive fees to because you're covering the bulk of the teacher's expenses.
Speaker: And you can get your kids co-educated with theirs.
Speaker: So it's like a kind of mini school type thing.
Speaker: You know, I'm able to participate and donate to my church, which is nice.
Speaker: And so, you know, I think there's more to come.
Speaker: I'm certainly not done in my professional career.
Speaker: I want to sort of like, what I've just described is really,
Speaker: very pleasing to me, but it's still admittedly very modest.
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.
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.
Speaker: But it's something of a gradual movement.
Speaker: I won't pretend that I have some
Speaker: radical plan to sort of change everything and achieve our goals all at once.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, honestly, I think you probably wouldn't be...
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.
Speaker: Like that's, that's sort of against the grain of what we're trying to accomplish anyway.
Speaker: And I think, yeah, for, for most of the guys that I talked to who have their heads screwed on, right.
Speaker: It is something like a patronage network.
Speaker: It's something like they're, they're trying to, they're trying to build
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.
Speaker: And, uh, that, that gets, uh, if you say that, it sounds, uh,
Speaker: Icky to some people, but I think actually the rebirth of feudalism would be a dramatic improvement over our present situation.
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?
Speaker: How do we how do we become influential in this way?
Speaker: And I think.
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
Speaker: I think, I mean, like, so it's kind of too late for me, right?
Speaker: I'm pretty burned as far as taking that course.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I do think about my kids, and I think maybe this is a good place to conclude.
Speaker: Like, with my kids, it's very important to me that I provide the opportunities for them to become elite.
Speaker: Like, if my kids are not able to...
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.
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
Speaker: in order to accomplish that.
Speaker: And I wanted to get your take on like, how do you thread that needle?
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?
Speaker: Yeah, that's a tough question.
Speaker: My kids are still very young.
Speaker: Um, I think it's, it's possibly the most important question you could have asked.
Speaker: So I'm glad you did.
Speaker: Uh, still thinking about it.
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.
Speaker: Like we play a lot of sport.
Speaker: He eats a lot of good food.
Speaker: Um, I make sure that, you know, my wife has the time to cook really good home cooked meals.
Speaker: We go to church.
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.
Speaker: I think they're naturally a lot more resistant to, um,
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.
Speaker: And so are very attracted to,
Speaker: revolutionary modes or ideologies that suggest that everything should be turned on its head to accrue power and respect to those people instead.
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,
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.
Speaker: They're just fun and healthy and vital and robust and so forth.
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.
Speaker: I mean, this is what worked for me.
Speaker: It's what I observed worked for a lot of my friends at university, the kind that run sports teams and so forth.
Speaker: The pressures from wider society are what they are.
Speaker: They're inescapable if you want to live in an urban setting and participate in the networks that I've described.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's true.
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.
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.
Speaker: I mean, I'm finding with my kids, like, their sort of natural disgust response to...
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.
Speaker: And I had never even broached that topic with her.
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.
Speaker: She had this very natural reaction to it.
Speaker: And
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.
Speaker: But yeah, I definitely think that we have people's natural, healthy responses to these things on our side.
Speaker: And we can probably trust that a little bit more.
Speaker: Yeah, amen to that.
Speaker: Well, this has been a great conversation.
Speaker: Johan Kurtz on Twitter, two N's and a T in Kurtz.
Speaker: You can find his Substack at becomingnoble.substack.com.
Speaker: I'll post the link to the article that spurred this conversation in the show notes.
Speaker: Anything else?
Speaker: Any other place we should send people, Johan?
Speaker: No, Substack's the place I care about.
Speaker: becomingnoble.substack.com.
Speaker: And I was just tremendously grateful to be invited on.
Speaker: So thank you so much.
Speaker: Great to have you, man.
