John Stephenson

There is a reason authoritarians censor first and justify it later. When words are treated as violence, actual violence starts to look like self-defense. And that’s just societal regression with better branding.

A foundational lesson: Far better to be than to claim to be.

One of the most consistent mistakes I made when I was younger was to spend my time learning about things that other people thought were interesting — things that were cool or prestigious — instead of trusting my own curiosity.

The rise and fall of wokeness: DEI commitments in corporate securities disclosures filed with the SEC. To me this seems a trailing indicator; most other measures of wokeness take off well before 2019 and peak in 2020 or 2021. But the shape! That's what a moral fashion looks like.

The rise and fall of wokeness: DEI commitments in corporate securities disclosures filed with the SEC. To me this seems a trailing indicator; most other measures of wokeness take off well before 2019 and peak in 2020 or 2021. But the shape! That's what a moral fashion looks like.

This girl is cruising down the highway in her stick shift, windows down, wind in her hair, belting out songs while she shifts gears without missing a beat. She looks genuinely happy and in control. Most people these days never learn how to drive manual. It takes real timing and coordination to get the clutch and gas right, especially when you’re just trying to have fun and sing along. Seeing her do it so naturally makes you realize how much of that skill is disappearing. Do you think driving stick is becoming a lost art, or do you still think it’s worth teaching people even if almost every new car is automatic?

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea). We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World. The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated. The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise. A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention. That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care. Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it. The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

Every now and again, I share this with my kids, but it provides a roadmap of joy for anyone.

Most self-help literature guides men to become better women.

PALANTIR CTO: “FOR $10 BILLION, ELON MUSK PUT 300 ROCKETS IN ORBIT.” “FOR $11 BILLION, THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA HAS BUILT 1,600 FEET OF ELEVATED RAIL... WITH NO RAIL.”

Karl’s Dad was cool