Letters to Leland

October 27, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about Europe.

For most of my lifetime, Americans influenced by socialist ideas have proposed that America become more like Europe, which, these advocates correctly pointed out, had (and has) a more generous social safety net. Most commonly, these proposals center around healthcare. Many countries in Europe have nationalized healthcare systems, paid for by taxes rather than America’s admittedly strange combination of taxes, employer subsidies, and personal contributions. But suggestions that America gravitate further toward the European model extend beyond healthcare: people often advocate America adopt Europe’s more generous unemployment benefits and maternity leave, to take just two further examples. Taken together, these arguments rightly point out ways in which the European system is more generous, at least in terms of government-provided or mandated benefits. Whether or not America should adopt the European model is of course more complicated than just which version is more generous; there are also questions about whether said programs are affordable, or whether they lead to desirable outcomes. The outcomes generated over the course of my lifetime strongly suggest the American model is vastly superior to the European model, to the point I’m frankly surprised Americans are still having that particular conversation. Strangely, however, American public awareness has been surprisingly slow to catch up with the changing times, and to adjust expectations based on real-world results.

Before we dive into the data, I want to dig into why I suspect Americans have been slow to adjust to reality. I’ve always sensed Americans believed Europeans were (and are) more civilized. America’s impulse to look to Europe for inspiration and guidance regarding civilized society probably has deep roots. America was born out of European nations after all, and for many years descendants of European immigrants made up almost the entirety of the American citizenry. American colonies naturally looked up to their mother countries. After America gained its independence and became a sovereign nation, Europe remained the continent hosting the wealthiest and most powerful nations on earth; of course America would continue to look to Europe for signs of civilization and wealth. Not until after WWII did America become a true superpower, and only over the last 80 years did America surpass almost all European nations in per capita income. Class status is sticky, and tends to outlast the underlying wealth and hard power that eventually lead to status. I suspect Americans still look to Europe for guidance on status and class out of habit as much as anything.

To my eyes, looking to Europe for guidance on how to direct America’s future makes absolutely no sense. By any number of measures, America is flat leaving our European counterparts economically behind. Back in the 1980s, when these arguments took root (at least in my awareness), the argument made more sense: most of the economies in Western Europe* were, on a per capita basis, similar in size to the US; some were larger, some were smaller, but the US was neither substantially richer nor poorer than Western European countries. When our economies were similar in size, it made intuitive sense to compare ours versus Europe, and wonder whether America should aspire to be more like Europe, with higher taxes, more social services, more government spending, and an economy tilted further toward socialism than the American system.

*[By Western Europe I’m focusing on the big three of UK, Germany, and France, along with Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I’m leaving out Mediterranean countries, partly because they have always been poorer than their northern counterparts. I’m also leaving out Ireland, Luxembourg, and Iceland, partly because they are small and partly because they all have individual peculiarities that require otherwise unnecessary explanation. I’m also excluding Austria, for no particularly compelling reason other than Austria doesn’t really change the picture. The primary reason I focus on the countries identified is subjective: these are the places whose systems I specifically remember folks suggesting America should emulate.]

Without the historical context and elite cultural biases, it’s hard for me to imagine Americans would look to Europe for inspiration today. The past four decades have, to my satisfaction anyway, laid bare which model was superior. It’s not hard to imagine Americans looking to aspects of the European system and wondering whether America could incorporate those elements, but it is much harder to see the entirety of the European model as a source of inspiration for how to manage society going forward.

Let’s start with economic growth and wellbeing. Again, as mentioned above, America was quite similar to Western European nations in 1980, at least in terms of income per capita. Since then, the story shifted dramatically. The average American makes 60-80% more than their French counterpart, versus almost identical incomes in 1980. Former industrial powerhouse Germany fared slightly better, with Americans going from 10-15% richer in 1980 to 40-50% richer now. Even Scandinavian countries, long seen as potential role models for wealthy countries with robust welfare states, got surpassed. The average American used to make about 10% less than the average Dane and about a quarter less than the average Swede; now Americans make about 10% more than Danes and about a third more than Swedes. [Norway is an exception in being a Western European country that remains higher earning than the US; Norway’s economic success is at least partly driven by its oil wealth, even relative to the US: oil revenues accounted for about a fifth of GDP and between a quarter and a third of state tax revenue.]

The numbers look even more stark when you compare various European countries to US states. France would rank 51st – dead last – among US states in terms of GDP per capita. The UK would rank either 50th or 51st, with per capita GDP roughly on par with Mississippi, America’s poorest state. Germany and Belgium would rank 47th, right around Alabama. Sweden would rank 42nd, around Montana, New Mexico, and Kentucky. The Netherlands would rank around the middle, around a cluster of states including Kansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. I would wager a lot of money the average American tacitly assumes these European countries are much, much richer than they are, and would be shocked to consider where they rank among American states.

Here is why income and economic growth matter: the American government (when we combine federal, state, and local) spends more per capita than France. For all France’s famed social welfare, America spends more. America can afford to spend more per person than France while imposing a much smaller taxpayer burden because Americans are so much richer than the French.

In fact, the American tax system is more distributive than given credit for. The American system tends to focus more on transfer payments to the poor and less on free services. I think transfer payments are a more efficient way to help the poor, and I think America does that adequately. America actually redistributes a larger share of the national income to the poorer half of citizens than most European countries, and the gap in income equality between America and Europe shrinks substantially once transfer payments are factored in. The bottom half of American earners take home a smaller percentage of national income, even after transfer payments, but they can afford to own and consume as much or more than their counterparts in Nordic countries, and materially more than their counterparts in France. Free services compress the gap, but private consumption and housing quality points to a higher standard of living among America’s relatively poor.

Even some of Europe’s perceived benefits, relative to the US, are overstated. Americans think pretty much all Europeans have free healthcare. While most Europeans do receive a baseline standard of care for free, that baseline is often below American standards and what I anticipate Americans would tolerate. In fact, Europeans commonly supplement their healthcare coverage with private insurance and other add-ons that make their system less advantageous than commonly understood. And that’s before we factor in certain restrictions on coverage, most commonly in the form of extended wait times. Americans can get most needed procedures completed in less than a month; Europeans often wait several months for the same procedures. I have a hard time imagining Americans developing the patience needed to suffer with a known, diagnosed condition, knowing the only thing in the way of relief is a bottleneck in the system due to a lack of funding.

Unfortunately, Europe has no obvious path out of the current situation. European companies, from my vantage point, seem to be falling behind in terms of technological innovation, competitiveness, and growth. Of the top 10 companies in the world based on sales, 7 are American; none are European. Of the top 50, almost half (23) are American versus 10 European. Zooming out to the top 500, the gap narrows (141 American companies versus 123 European), but the European companies are concentrated lower down the list.

Looking at companies by market cap is even more stark. We can think of market cap as a discounted estimate of future earnings. The ten most valuable American companies are worth close to $30T, and the 100 most valuable are worth a combined $45-55T; by contrast, the ten most valuable European companies are worth ~$3T, and the 100 most valuable companies are worth $8-12T. If we take all companies listed on a stock exchange, American companies are worth a combined ~$80T, versus European companies, which are worth ~$20T. I’m only including listed companies for ease of use, but adding unlisted companies doesn’t improve the outlook for Europe. While Europe does have large, privately held companies, America has a large number of venture-backed companies (think late-stage startups) worth trillions of dollars (the ten largest are worth close to $3T).

As far as I can tell, European innovation is being strangled by regulation, a cultural aversion to success, and a cultural reliance on the state. Examples of European overregulation abound; my personal favorite is that when German companies are purchased, the buyers and sellers must sit in front of a notary, who reads the entirety of the sales agreement aloud to both parties. Unfortunately, instead of revisiting the degree to which overregulation appears to be strangling innovation and economic growth, European leadership seems determined to impose its draconian regulations on the rest of the world. It’s rather stunning to see.

A cultural aversion to success is hard to prove; I’ve heard startup founders make different versions of the complaint and have seen firsthand commentary that seems consistent with the thesis, but I’ll acknowledge possessing limited hard evidence that would convince a skeptic. The cultural reliance on the state is easier to demonstrate. France is currently well into its second month of protests and riots. The unrest began as a nationwide set of protests demanding more school funding. On the surface, demanding better funding for schools seems laudable; taken in broader context, the French protests strike me as self defeating to the point of economically suicidal. French government spending accounts for well north of half of GDP; the statistic I hear most commonly is 57%. Whatever the exact figure, there just isn’t much room for the French state to grow. The French economy does, by contrast, have plenty of room to collapse. French public debt is more than 100% of GDP, and its deficits are running at greater than 5% of GDP. French private debt, mostly held by corporations, also exceeds French GDP. For these reasons, the cost of debt in France is rising rapidly, with 10-year yields increasing by about 1.5 percentage points in the last year, of which almost half a percentage point came over the past month. France just doesn’t have a lot of room to increase public spending; if anything, it will likely need to either decrease spending in the near future or default on its debt.

For an American, it can be a little jarring to watch a European country which ostensibly has all the things left-leaning Americans suggest we should want – free healthcare, a robust social safety net, and a combination of worker protections and regulation that ensure the work-life balance of the French – taking to the streets demanding more. Given the degree to which France in many ways pushed reliance on the state to its furthest potential boundaries, the French unrest agitating for more government largesse suggests that the healthier answer is to avoid growing the state in the first place. At the very least, we should not grow the state at the expense of the economy, because economic growth is the engine that enables social spending. But I’m even beginning to double down on my previous skepticism that the state was best suited to solve problems such as retirement and healthcare in the first place.

I worry about Europe these days. My read of history is that humans need to feel a sense of optimism for the future. Europe has stagnated economically and culturally for so long that I don’t see how its citizens could feel any real sense of optimism. Just to pick, again, on France: multiple artifacts have been stolen from the Louvre in just the past year or so. If the state cannot even protect the nation’s most precious cultural artifacts, how are its people meant to believe in their future? The most reliable way to demotivate a child is to tear apart their work once it is complete; watching cultural artifacts be stolen by gangs surely must have a similar impact on the French public psyche.

I am European by ancestry. I grew up in a nation born out of European ideals. European history and thought dominated my education. I bring this up just to suggest my life experience biases me toward a favorable view of Europe. I feel a connection and debt toward Europe. I’ve been to Europe on a number of occasions, and eagerly look forward to taking you to visit the museums and experience the culture and food.

Regardless of my bias, I firmly believe it is time Americans stop looking to Europe for inspiration and guidance. Europe is struggling, and in some places may even be failing. Europe may well need America’s support, and under the right conditions (namely, a newfound European willingness to stop pursuing self-defeating, suicidal policies) we should provide it. But it is perhaps also time for America to grow up a bit, to recognize that ours is currently the place at the head of the table. America may be born out of Europe, but that does not mean we should continue looking to Europe for guidance. Europe appears to have lost touch with the capacity to lead, to innovate, and to create. America needs to do all those things, and we’ve proven the capacity to do all of them. Perhaps losing Europe as our cultural inspiration means losing our sense of operating with a safety net, but such is the journey: at some point we must mature and strike out on our own.

My hope is that Europe can reinvent itself, but that is for Europe to decide. We live in America, and Americans must decide our own fate. Such is the age in which we live. As I type, I find the message of Matthew 10 resonating. Truth be told, that passage haunts me of late. I think we’re in an era of turmoil, and of increasingly rapid change. I think the great opportunity ahead of us is to release some demons and live a freer, fuller, more fulfilled life. The risk is that we cling to our attachments, and let them drag us down into a pit of despair, such that we lose all hope of ever becoming free. As Matthew 10 implies, I think this will be an intimately personal choice, such that it will divide families.

I may well come back to the topic of Matthew 10 in future letters. For now, I apply the lesson just to say that I hope Europe, or at least a substantial number of Europeans, might wake up to current realities. In the meantime, Americans are also adjusting to a rapidly evolving landscape. I fully anticipate the near-term journey will be harrowing. I do think the opportunity on the other side of this journey is immense, and greater than our wildest dreams can imagine. I anticipate the costs of clinging to our demons will be catastrophic. And so, to Americans, and Europeans, and anyone who will listen, may I counsel: wake up!

I love you both. May we navigate the coming challenges with strength born of wisdom, and a connection to the almighty. May you be the judge of how we did.

Love,

Dad

October 23, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about capitalism.

I realize I’ve spoken briefly about capitalism in missives regarding billionaires and Marxism, but I’ve never really given my thoughts about capitalism itself. Truth be told, I tend to take capitalism for granted: I majored in economics in college, and viewed the world through an economic lens ever since. I guess I assumed everyone else had a similar journey as I.

What I’m learning, however, is that most people didn’t have the learning trajectory I did. Many people I encounter demonstrate little or no understanding of our economic system, and I’m beginning to appreciate how few people have ever been exposed to a basic understanding of economics. My initial reaction to economic illiteracy was general frustration; now I’m starting to realize those of us who understand economics have an opportunity to educate and influence others. So, this letter serves to organize my thoughts a little. Hopefully by the time you read this, we will have discussed all the contents, everything will be old news, and this merely serves as a reminder, or a snapshot in time of what your dad was thinking about when you were kids.

Capitalism reminds me of the Winston Churchill quote regarding democracy: democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms. This is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, of course: neither democracy nor capitalism are terrible; the point is to acknowledge that capitalism has flaws, reflecting the flawed people who practice it. Herein lies the rub: every system is flawed precisely because people are flawed. Capitalism’s brilliance lies in its ability to align incentives between individually flawed people and societal interest as a whole.

Let’s define capitalism briefly. I previously argued that capitalism just means that individual people get to own stuff (as opposed to the state owning all the stuff). Actually, that definition is incomplete. A capitalist system requires not only individual property rights, but also free markets. By free markets I mean the right to trade goods and services with minimal governmental interference. Examples of government interference preventing or restricting free markets could include laws prohibiting certain types of transactions, excessive taxes or subsidies, or price controls. Capitalism is unique as an economic system in that it allows you, the individual, to own land and tools; from there, you can sell the land and tools if you so choose (at a price to be determined by you and the buyer), or you can use the land and tools to produce goods or services that you might then sell to customers.

Humans have attempted many varieties of economic organization since the advent of agriculture. Until the adoption of capitalism, these systems dramatically restricted individual freedom in various ways. Some systems tied people to the state by requiring them to work the land in manorial or feudal systems, while other economies were built on a small number of relatively free individuals supported by large populations of slaves. Some systems limited property rights via state owned, granted, or chartered monopolies. And some systems restricted free markets from forming and operating, either by directing production outputs, exerting price controls, and/or imposing heavy tax burden on transactions. These restrictions were not mutually exclusive; growing up in many eras one might lack the right to move freely, the right to own property, and the right to engage in market transactions. To be clear, no society has ever been fully capitalist, nor has any society ever been fully socialist or feudal: for as long as humans have organized into nations, the state has exerted some measure of control over property and transactions while free market transactions occurred, at minimum, away from the watchful eye of the state. When we describe a nation as capitalist or socialist, we are describing a matter of degrees. As a result, it’s a little difficult to define when (and which) societies first leaned into capitalism. Broadly, I’ll submit the precursors were the 17th century Dutch and British systems, which led to America’s adoption of capitalism and, in parallel, a spread of capitalism through most of Western Europe. Over the last 100 years (and especially the last 40), capitalism spread to more countries, particularly in the east. And I submit the results have been nothing short of astounding, bordering on miraculous.

Over the last 200 years, practically every quantifiable measure of human wellbeing improved dramatically. The number of people living in what we consider extreme poverty declined from somewhere between 70-90% (estimates vary) to below 10% today. Child mortality (the share of children who die before the age of 5) decreased from roughly 40%+ to less than 4%. Life expectancy increased from less than 30 years to more than 70. The share of children required to work to support their families declined, though to what degree is hard to measure (global records don’t go back that far). Adjusted for inflation (pegged to 2011 $), one estimate shows GDP per capita increased from ~$1k to almost $17k in 2022. The accuracy of any of these numbers, particularly from two centuries ago, is debatable; regardless, the direction and magnitude of the changes are consistent and difficult to deny.

Most of the gains in income and poverty occurred in the last 40 years or so. Such is the magic of compounding growth. In that time, GDP per capita more than doubled. The share of global population living in extreme poverty plummeted, from above 40% to below 10%. Also in the last 40 years, literacy rates increased, and the death rate due to a lack of access to sanitation or clean water plummeted. By virtually any measure, the world is a much, much better place for the median human than it was two centuries ago, and for most of the world things are dramatically better than they were a mere four decades ago.

Why do I think the conversion toward capitalism is causal, and not merely correlated with these improvements in global wellbeing? Because the data is pretty compelling. For one thing, the nations who first leaned into property rights and free markets were the first economies to experience explosive economic growth and the rise of a middle class. For another, a huge number of countries (China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, and most of Eastern Europe) experienced explosive economic growth (and accompanying improvements in the other metrics outlined above) precisely when (and to the degree) they adopted capitalist reforms. Perhaps my favorite argument is that we have multiple controlled experiments: in both Germany and Korea, we have examples of nations that split, whereby one part became relatively capitalist and the other became communist. In both cases, these were one people, one culture, and one language. And in both cases, the capitalist nation (West Germany and South Korea) thrived while the communist nation (East Germany and North Korea) remained mired in, or in the case of North Korea increasingly backslid into, poverty. Germany even gives us a before-and-after, where the reunification of East and West Germany led to the rapid economic growth and wellbeing for the people living in the former East Germany. The data supporting capitalism’s positive impact on humanity is compelling and robust, to a degree that I’m shocked how many people fail to understand and appreciate the miracle we’ve produced and experienced.

To be fair, and as mentioned before, capitalism is imperfect. Many people argue capitalism fosters and rewards greed. Personally, I think this misunderstands the human condition. Greed is universal, and every economic system gets corrupted by the greed of the powerful.

What distinguishes capitalism is the degree to which it aligns incentives between the greedy and the rest of humanity. All systems reward value capture: the powerful have extracted value from the powerless across eras, societies, and economic systems. Capitalism separates itself from other systems in the degree to which it incentivizes and rewards value creation.

Value creation is sometimes a difficult concept to understand, but it’s critical to thinking through the choices facing humanity right now. Value creation supposes human activity can create value that didn’t previously exist. When a farmer grows crops more valuable than the cost of production, when a chef cooks a meal more valuable than the cost of ingredients and equipment, or when Apple sells an iPhone more valuable than the myriad components and equipment used to manufacture, these are all examples of value creation.

Value capture is more intuitive. If I steal something, I have captured all the value in the transaction, without creating any. If an autocratic nation takes all the goods produced at a factory without remuneration beyond the cost of manufacturing, value was created and entirely captured by the state. In most free market transactions, by contrast, value creation is shared between the buyer and seller. The seller sells because they are able to retain some measure of profit, and the buyer buys because the good is worth more than the money they pay. How much value is created is hard to measure, because it’s hard to quantify how much the buyer would have paid. But we do know that, for the most part, buyers only buy because they get value from a transaction, and thus the profits companies produce are some percentage of the value they created.

We intuitively become a little queasy when we perceive companies are extracting too much of the value they create. This most commonly happens in monopolies, when customers don’t have choices, and the monopoly can restrict supply in order to drive up prices and generate exorbitant profits. This phenomenon does happen: examples are easy to come by, and the data is pretty robust. As a result, governments have developed a set of tools for preventing the creation of monopolies, restraining them once they do come into existence, or breaking them up if necessary. We should remain diligent in protecting humanity from monopolies, but I am fairly confident we will so long as those monopolies are privately held.

Except when created by monopolies, I submit huge profits are mostly a good thing. They suggest a company has created huge value for humanity. And while I appreciate the concern that companies might be using large profits to abuse humanity, I tend to argue the other way. As Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s founder) famously said, “your margin is my opportunity”. If a company is making huge profits, those profits send a compelling signal to others to enter the industry and capture some of those profits. The larger the profit, the larger the incentive for others to enter. When others enter, supply increases and prices come down, and more of the value moves from the producers to the consumers.

Sometimes governments decide profits are too high, or the potential for abuse too great to ignore. In these instances, the government steps in to regulate an industry, attempting to protect customers. Ironically and counterintuitively, these attempts typically backfire, providing the incumbents protection from competition and ensuring their ability to make excess profits. We call this phenomenon regulatory capture, and it can be seen most obviously when companies call for government regulation of their industries. This phenomenon is currently happening in the AI industry, where AI companies are often the loudest in calling for government regulation. While some of the motives are no doubt pure, it’s also true that the incumbents stand the most to gain from regulation: as established companies, they have the resources to weather the costs of regulation, whereas aspiring entrants mostly will not. Thus, regulation of the AI industry would have the counterintuitive impact of protecting the existing players from new competition, thus protecting their profits at the expense of the public.

The industries currently causing the most consternation in public discourse, and thus the loudest clamoring for government regulation, are health care, housing, and education. Socialists, or capitalism’s detractors more broadly, point to these industries specifically as the obvious examples of the failures of capitalism. The problem with the socialist argument: these are the least capitalist industries in America!

Let’s start with health care. Intuitively, the idea that a doctor or hospital might price gouge a desperate family attempting to save a dying patient strikes us as both plausible and repugnant. And so, we regulate the health care industry. Fair enough. The problem has been the implementation. A fair form of regulation, adhering to free market principles, would be to ensure prices are publicly available and consistently applied; this would mostly protect desperate patients from gouging providers. Instead, the American government set up a byzantine set of regulations, creating an overwhelmingly and needlessly complicated industry that strays pretty far from the free market principles fundamental to capitalism. The complexity and regulation serve, again, to protect incumbent players, to add enormous cost in the form of adhering to the regulation, and also to create opportunities to exploit the complexity for profit that wouldn’t exist without the regulation. The result is an industry that consumes almost a fifth of American GDP not because of capitalism, but because of the overwhelming restrictions on capitalism.

Housing suffers from two socialist-influenced infringements on capitalist ideals: zoning and public approval. Zoning laws assert local governments’ rights to restrict what we can develop on the land we own. When the government interferes with our ability to do what we wish with our private property, we begin to sway away from capitalism and toward socialism. On the margins, zoning limits the amount of housing (and development in general) built, which restricts supply and leads to higher prices. Public approval, at least in some states and municipalities, grants the public the ability to weigh in on proposed developments. The process of securing public approval can lead to comically inefficient activities. California created environmental requirements, ostensibly to ensure developers didn’t wreck the environment in the process of development. In practice, these regulations grant the public a tool to restrict development, raising the prices on artificially scarce homes. Developers can be required to spend exorbitant sums of money demonstrating the minimal environmental impact of their proposals, only to be told to do more environmental studies. These studies raise the cost of development substantially, and result in innumerable projects never getting proposed (much less developed) for fear that the approval process will prove too costly and time consuming. These practices restrict the number of housing units built, and increase the cost of producing the units that are built. Restricting supply and increasing the cost of production invariably lead to increasing prices, which is precisely why the American public is so frustrated with housing costs.

America’s education system might be the least capitalist of all. To talk about education, we really have to split into the K-12 primary through secondary education system and the higher education system. Let’s start with K-12. For starters, most schools are publicly funded and operated. The land, buildings, and equipment are owned by the local governments, and the teachers and administrators are government employees. What I just described is plainly not capitalist. Private schools do exist, and people do have a right to pay for private education. In some states, private and charter schools are allowed to compete with public schools for state and local tax dollars; these innovations introduce some capitalism into the K-12 educational system, but only some: teachers unions and socialist-leaning voters fight these so-called “voucher” systems tooth and nail everywhere they are proposed for as long as they exist, despite pretty robust evidence that they improve education outcomes to the degree they introduce capitalism into our educational system.

Higher education is more nuanced. Public schools exist and serve a significant number of students, but private schools abound. Unlike K-12 schooling, students have a right to select whatever school will accept them. As a result, schools compete not only for students, but the highest quality students they can attract. Unfortunately in order to become recognized as an institution offering higher education, a school needs to become accredited. Herein lies the rub: the accreditation board is made up of the existing body of member schools. What incentive do these schools have to approve more competition? None. Thus, how many new schools have become accredited in the last 40 years, despite exploding tuition fees (thus, profit opportunities)? Shockingly few. Higher education is more capitalist than K-12 education, but still not particularly capitalist.

So far, the public solution to each of these industries has been to subsidize demand. But subsidizing demand is socialist! Or, at the very least, subsidizing demand shifts an industry away from capitalism toward socialism. In health care, we provide government assistance via Medicare and Medicaid, pumping huge amounts of federal dollars into our health care system. More recently, the Affordable Care Act (colloquially known as Obamacare) pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into providing Americans health insurance (thus increasing access to health care); this law had the effect of spending lots of public money, increasing prices, and increasing supplier profits…with rather modest impacts on longevity and health outcomes. To be fair, some studies show low-income folks, those who might not have been able to afford health care otherwise, did see measurable impacts on longevity. My understanding is that this was the only cohort with any meaningful impact, and that the effect was not large enough to increase national life expectancy noticeably. Successfully enabling low-income folks to afford life-extending health care is a worthy goal; that we apparently achieved said goal is laudable. My submission is that the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve spent are an outrageously expensive and inefficient way of achieving that goal.

In housing, we allow people to deduct mortgage interest and property taxes from their income when paying federal taxes. Families are able to exclude hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital gains when profiting on the sale of their home. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy the vast majority of mortgages on behalf of the government, and guarantee these purchases from lenders; these purchases have the impact of reducing the interest rates homeowners pay. We subsidize rent for low-income housing. Some states provide incentives for first time homebuyers. Each of these initiatives might be morally defensible; for now I merely point out that each of these are various methods of subsidizing demand for homebuyers.

In education, K-12 is almost entirely government funded already, so no need to focus on additional demand subsidies. In higher education, there are several. The federal government provides below-market-rate loans to students. We grant tuition assistance on perceived basis of need. We let people deduct myriad higher education expenses for income tax purposes. We created investment accounts that allow people to save for college without paying capital gains taxes on the amount used to pay for higher education. Again, my point is not to critique the morality of these initiatives, but to point out the various ways we subsidize demand for higher education.

The problem with subsidizing demand while restricting supply – which, as demonstrated, we do in each of health care, housing, and higher education – is that, combined, these lead directly to higher prices. The effect of subsidies in these industries isn’t to help consumers, but to enable the providers to enhance profits. Thus, socialist-influenced proposals to solve these problems (like making Medicare and college free for everyone) is likely to exacerbate the very problems they propose to solve – either by raising costs, reducing quality, or both.

My point is that capitalism, for all its faults, has proven over and over to be vastly superior to the directionally socialist counter proposals offered to date. Whether we zoom out and look at historical trends, make side-by-side comparisons between nations, or examine specific industries within America, I find the same results wherever I look: capitalism laps the alternatives.

Socialists are right to suggest that our ultimate goal can’t be to have a small number of outrageously rich and a large number of hopelessly poor people within the same society. Where I disagree, fundamentally, is with all the proposed solutions. The socialist solutions I’ve heard range from seizing the means of production (either in the form of wealth taxes or nationalizing industries like health care) to imposing more restrictions on what people can do with their assets (in the form of more regulation of industries) to price controls to further demand subsidies. All of these ideas are terrible because they distort incentives and restrict value creation.

What do I propose instead? In an ideal world, we would deregulate the industries I’ve noted above. In health care, we would remove restrictions on the number of doctors medical schools graduate each year, we would remove regulations on the services that need to be provided by doctors (as opposed to nurses or physician assistants, for example), we would unwind distorting effects of company-provided health insurance, we would unwind the byzantine regulations that attempt to micromanage what doctors can prescribe and when, and finally we would require price transparency for all health care providers. In K-12 education, we would foster more competition expanding voucher systems and removing barriers to voucher programs. In higher education, we would allow new universities to become accredited, accompanied by a gradual but drastic reduction in tuition subsidies. Finally, we would remove zoning restrictions and basically all restrictions on one’s right to build on their own property. These changes would gradually reduce some of the crushing burden families face paying for what feel like the fundamentals of life.

At a national (and international, where others choose to join us) level we would continue to pursue economic gains via innovation (read: value creation) and trade. We would see the potential for an explosive growth in energy demand, and start unshackling human potential to harness energy. This means allowing more cultivation of oil and gas, more refineries, reducing friction in deployment of solar (which is rapidly becoming the cheapest source of energy available, a trend I expect to continue as costs come down via scale and learning curves), and authorizing a diversified set of nuclear power plants to develop.

In other words, my recommendation would be to double-down on capitalism.

In parallel, we would recognize that socialist-influenced proposals offer the wrong solutions (restrictions on property rights and free markets) to the right problems (inequality, corruption, and the abuse of power). I submit that inequality, corruption, and inappropriate behavior cannot be legislated out of existence. These problems are spiritual at root, and ultimately need spiritual instead of regulatory solutions. The way to eliminate inequality, corruption, and bad behavior is to address our spiritual shortcomings.

We address our spiritual shortcomings, first and foremost, at the individual level. I’ve come to believe, fervently, that we can only help others heal spiritually to the degree that we ourselves have healed. As we heal ourselves, and allow and enable those around us to heal, we should recognize those perhaps most in need and want of spiritual healing by recognizing those most interested in imposing their worldview on others. I’ve come to believe that a need to impose my will (or worldview, or behavioral desires) on others directly broadcasts my own spiritual shortcomings out into the world. We would do well to highlight these shortcomings on those who, unconsciously, are asking for our help. The help might get rejected, but I think we have to start by telling the truth to those who, unconsciously, are asking to hear it.

Healing, I submit, would enable us to move into a world of abundance instead of scarcity. From a mindset of abundance, we can pursue a global GDP per capita well above today’s ~$17k per person. From that place, we don’t have to forcibly take money away from the rich in order to give to the poor (scarcity mindset) because we will trust we can produce enough for everyone (abundance mindset). We can trust ourselves, and our neighbors, not to hoard (scarcity mindset), but to share (abundance mindset). We can trust that God, as encountered in our fellow man and the entirety of the world we encounter, will provide for us. When Jesus counsels us to pray “give us this day our daily bread”, I think he was encouraging us not only to surrender to God’s will, but also to develop an abundance mindset.

If humanity merely matches recent trends of doubling GDP growth every 30 years or so, we could go from making ~$17k to $34k to $68k for every man, woman, and child on earth within the span of your lifetime. That would be a truly remarkable global achievement.

Remarkable as it is, it might understate the potential. GDP growth grew faster over the past 60 years than it did the prior 60, or the 60 before that. In other words, growth might not just be compounding (which is powerful enough), but accelerating. Global GDP growth accelerating from ~2.3% (doubling every 30 years) to ~3.5% (doubling every 20 years) would mean you would see global GDP double again, to $135k per capita, within the span of your lifetime. We can’t comprehend what that type of abundance would look like, but that’s kinda the point: I think we have to trust and just, well, go for it.

And so, more capitalism.

My guess is by the time you read this, global transformation will be well underway. Either we will be rapidly accelerating toward a world of global abundance, or we will have backslid on a path of authoritarian control resulting in increased poverty. In that world, you might not even have the freedom to read this letter. Let us hope it never comes to that. Perhaps more importantly, let us start to build the safeguards to ensure that never happens.

Here’s to building the safeguards for your future. I may succeed or fail in my attempts; just know that I am committed to doing my part.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

October 19, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

I want to talk about Elon Musk, because as much as Elon is in the news these days, I don’t think people appreciate what is coming with Elon’s companies.  That topic happens to sit at an intersection of places of particular interest, and perhaps even expertise, for me.  I’m no technology expert, but I follow technology trends and have for several years.  Tech company strategy, moreover, is something near and dear to my heart.  Almost all MBAs fashion ourselves business strategy experts, and these days tech company strategy is the sexiest, most interesting sector.  Of course, residing in Silicon Valley surrounded by tech companies, having worked for one of them, and knowing people who work for several, increases both my level of interest and my familiarity.  Finally, Elon’s companies are somewhat unique in the tech world in that his companies not only operate in the world of “bits” (e.g. pure software), but also “atoms” (e.g. hardware).  Apple, my former employer, is of course also a hardware company.  But outside of Amazon, most other tech behemoths are purely software.  Think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the AI companies:  these are companies that primarily make digital products rather than physical ones.  The physical world changes things dramatically, in ways software folks often underestimate. The practical effect is that developing a capability to produce hardware typically takes years, and once a company develops a capability in the world of atoms it typically takes aspiring competitors years to catch up. Given the size of Elon’s companies’ head starts, it’s inspiring and a little daunting to think about the type of impact his companies might have on humanity going forward.

Elon is CEO of four companies.  The least interesting of these right now might be the Boring Company.  I still find the company fascinating, if only because the Boring Company is, by far, the cheapest and most efficient company in the world at digging underground tunnels.  They have built several operational tunnels successfully, most notably a tunnel that facilitates traveling from the Las Vegas airport to various parts of the city rather efficiently.  Elon’s vision for the company was to dramatically enhance traffic efficiency by adding underground tunnels to the transportation network; unfortunately he needs municipalities to engage, and uptake has been disappointingly slow.  Still real, but slow.

I hesitate to call Neuralink the second most boring of Elon’s companies; perhaps it’s more accurate to call it the company with the least capacity for broad societal impact in the near term.  For the niche of people it serves, the impact looks to be very big indeed.  What Neuralink does (particularly what it hopes to do) is somewhat hard to describe.  For now I’ll stick with what it does:  within the last few weeks Neuralink enabled an ALS patient who was losing the capacity to talk (he had become hard for loved ones to understand) the ability to “speak” via a computer interface.  Neuralink placed an implant in his brain; that implant, after some training, is able to read his brain signals for speech and relay them to a computer interface that “talks” on his behalf.  His first words, spoken to his wife, were “I love you”.  Neuralink, like all Elon companies, has audacious ambitions; for now I think what they are pulling off is promising enough on its own.

I’m not sure which of Elon’s companies will be the more transformative, but I’ll talk about Tesla next.  After many years of ogling, I finally purchased a Tesla almost exactly two years ago (to your delight: you both love that car).  What finally convinced me to pull the trigger (purchasing a vehicle for only the second time in my life) was the self-driving technology.  I couldn’t believe how well it worked.  Don’t get me wrong, there were still plenty of hiccups.  The car particularly struggled with pedestrian traffic (thankfully, erring on the side of caution), and every few miles just made mistakes that required me to override.  What I did not anticipate was the pace of improvement:  every month or so Tesla rolled out updates; each of these noticeably improved the self driving, and reduced the number of times I needed to intervene.  Now I almost never intervene, other than because I prefer to take a different route.  At this point I say with some confidence that Tesla self-driving is a better driver than I, which is saying something because I consider myself a pretty good driver.  About the only thing I consistently do better than Tesla these days is anticipate uncomfortable bumps from road damage like potholes…and my understanding is that Tesla is working on this specific problem as we speak.

On some level, Tesla’s pace of improvement makes sense.  It took years for Tesla to write enough code to get the cars to work most of the time in self-driving mode.  Once they got over that hump, however, things began to snowball.  Better functionality convinced more people (like me) to use self-driving.  More people using self-driving allowed Tesla to gather more data.  In particular, Tesla was able to focus on instances where drivers overrode the self-driving, taking each one of these as an opportunity to improve.  They were able to contrast what the car would have done with what the driver wanted (as evidenced by the override), and using a neural net (a type of AI that tries to mimic how humans learn, less by being prescriptive and algorithmic and more by compiling contrasting examples of success and failure, and allowing the processor to infer which actions are most appropriate dynamically), consistently improved precisely the situations where drivers like me were most likely to take over.  And so, now, like I say, the car is an excellent driver.  I recently drove my Tesla to San Francisco and back for a dinner reservation your mom and I had with friends.  I drove out of our neighborhood (I enjoy neighborhood driving, for whatever reason) and set the self-driving before I got on the freeway (less than half a mile from our house).  The car got on the freeway, drove ~40 miles on the freeway, exited, then navigated residential and then downtown San Francisco until we pulled up to the restaurant where we were eating (at which point I intervened because I didn’t want to pay the exorbitant parking garage fees).  Coming home, same phenomenon:  I backed out of my parking space, turned on self-driving as I made my first turn, and then let self-driving go, uninterrupted, until we pulled into our neighborhood.

Tesla’s self-driving advancements allowed the company to start producing CyberCabs, a fully self driving car that lacks even a steering wheel.  The idea is that customers can use CyberCabs for their own purposes, rent them out like Ubers (or, more accurately, Waymos), or do some hybrid of both.  CyberCabs are now hitting Austin, and reviews sound pretty positive.

You both are already familiar with Waymo, but for context:  Waymo started in San Francisco, and has become quite popular there.  Waymo is a startup incubated at Google; they too have created self-driving cars.  Unlike Tesla they’ve never offered anything other than self-driving cars, and my understanding is that they own the fleet of cars (rather than selling to customers, like Tesla intends with CyberCab).  By all accounts Waymo is quite effective at self-driving; truly, customers kinda love it.  The problem I see is intrinsically related to what people have long perceived as Waymo’s greatest strength, which is its reliance on LiDAR.  I forget what the LiDAR acronym stands for, but it basically sends out rapid pulses of laser light, and then uses the reflection time and angle to compile a remarkably accurate view of its surroundings.  LiDAR is far more precise and sophisticated than the simple cameras Tesla uses, and so people long assumed Waymo would “win” based on the superior technology.

The problem with LiDAR is the cost.  The basic equipment is expensive, and retrofitting a vehicle to incorporate the cameras even more expensive.  My understanding is that older Waymos cost something approaching $200k to build.  Precise estimates are hard to find, but current production costs might be in the $100-150k range.  A newer model is apparently in the works that aims to cut the cost down to ~$75k/vehicle.  The problem is that the $75k is the cost to build, whereas Tesla says people will be able to purchase CyberCab for $30k (and that includes Tesla’s profit, which isn’t incorporated into the Waymo $75k cost).

What about Tesla’s inferior camera technology?  Well, Tesla decided that they could use software to decipher imperfect camera images in much the same way humans learn how to decipher imperfect images with our eyes.  Humans develop all sorts of tacit algorithms for how to deal with darkness, the glare of sunlight, or blind spots.  Tesla realized they could just mimic those same learning behaviors, and even improve upon human processing by using software to constantly monitor several cameras at once, without suffering from fatigue or lapses in concentration like a human.

So now, think about it:  you will soon be able to purchase a car (Tesla says for ~$30k, but I won’t be surprised if they start more expensive before costs come down with production volume) that you can either use for yourself or defray the costs by renting it out to others when you are not using it.  Teslas require less maintenance than cars with internal combustion engines (they have far, far fewer parts, and don’t require oil changes, new spark plugs, or really much beyond tire maintenance), so the cost per mile of owning (or renting) a Tesla becomes far, far cheaper than any vehicle on the road once people start sharing them.  Waymos, for all their virtues, generally cost more than renting an Uber or taking a taxi; Cybercabs will cost far, far less.

And then there are the robots.  Tesla is currently building humanoid robots called Optimus.  The idea is that Tesla will use neural nets, like in the cars, to allow humans to train Optimus in a manner similar to how we train humans.  Basically, we will demonstrate what it is we want Optimus to do, and then correct mistakes.  The difference between Optimus and a human:  once we teach one Optimus how to do something, we will have (with some time lags) effectively trained every Optimus with an updated software package how to perform the same activity.  So, much like with Tesla’s cars, I anticipate Optimus will learn and adapt rapidly, becoming a remarkably useful tool surprisingly quickly.  Supposedly, Tesla is building robots for use in their own factories first, and then will roll out for public sale later.  Elon pitches the Optimus as an in-home helper, capable of cleaning and cooking and doing laundry.  Personally, I think Optimus is far more interesting as a factory worker.  Right now we primarily use Chinese labor to build the products we use because Chinese labor is cheaper than American labor.  Well, Chinese labor isn’t as cheap as robot labor.  So, pretty soon, I think it will make more sense to build products closer to home and save the shipping costs than it will be to build those products in China.

Before I get to SpaceX, Tesla and SpaceX are actually working on a collaboration called Terafab.  You guys are probably too young to know that chips are a bottleneck in all types of products these days, and in fact contributing to cost increases on a wide variety of product lines.  Everything from iPhones to cars (all cars, not just self-driving cars), and even most appliances, are built with chips these days.  Complicating matters is an explosion in demand for compute capacity from AI data centers.  This explosion in demand is reestablishing a bottleneck in silicon chip manufacturing.  Chip manufacturing is insanely capital intensive, requiring multi-billion dollar facilities that take years to build before chips can be manufactured at scale.  Understandably, chip manufacturers are careful about how much capacity they install, lest they spend tens of billions of dollars that go wasted due to an economic downturn leading to depressed demand.  So these bottlenecks could last for several years.  Elon’s solution is Terafab, where the companies aim to dramatically increase global chip capacity – potentially even doubling global chip supply if they pursue and achieve their most ambitious targets.  Doing so will allow Tesla and SpaceX to secure the chips they need for the foreseeable future, and may well enable them to sell off excess capacity to other customers.  The result is likely a decrease in chip prices, and thus the goods that use said chips (roughly, all electronics we buy).  Looking at company valuations already attached to chip design (NVIDIA is worth roughly $5 trillion) and cutting edge manufacturing (TSMC is worth $2 trillion) starts to put Terafab’s potential scale (and, indirectly, impact on humanity) in perspective.

Which brings us to SpaceX.  The first thing to understand about SpaceX is that they are approaching 90% of global payload.  Meaning, if you add up NASA, China, Russia, and all other competitors combined, they collectively account for 10-20% of global payload capacity to SpaceX’s 80-90%.  With Starship coming online, SpaceX capacity is likely to increase dramatically in the near future, which means they will meaningfully increase global payload capacity going to space (and, presumably, increase their market share to or even above 90%).

SpaceX achieved this feat by figuring out how to make (and recover) reusable rockets.  Every other entity launching rockets (at least until Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin solves reusability), uses a rocket one time, and then disposes of it after a single use.  Reusability dramatically decreases the cost:  imagine how expensive air travel would be if airlines scrapped each airplane after a single flight.  As a result, SpaceX is able to relaunch rockets over and over, at dramatically lower cost than anyone else in the industry.

Lower prices and increased payload changes the calculus of what can get launched into space.  Historically, entities like NASA focused maniacally on mass and volume, because each gram and cubic centimeter increased the cost of a mission astronomically.  As SpaceX lowers the cost of space travel by 90% and more, more entities can afford to launch items into space, and become more experimental with what they launch.

Rather than wait for the industry to decide what they might do with the increase in capacity, SpaceX came up with their own solution.  For years SpaceX has put satellites into space that now allow basically global high-speed internet without meaningful dead zones.  Now, timed with the much larger Starship, SpaceX is launching its next generation of satellites into orbit.  In the first launch, SpaceX deployed 26 satellites which mark the beginning of a deployment whereby SpaceX aims to more than double global bandwidth over the next year or so.

Perhaps more interesting, SpaceX purchased additional spectrum bandwidth that will enable the company to offer cellular service.  Pretty soon (and perhaps as soon as next year) customers will be able to choose SpaceX as their cellular provider instead of Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile.  Unlike those other carriers, SpaceX will offer cellular service without towers and, presumably, without the corresponding dead zones.

Some of SpaceX’s most audacious goals have to do with AI.  Despite starting long after industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic, SpaceX has mostly closed the gap in performance with their Grok AI engines.  And while the AI arms race continues, SpaceX is taking some novel approaches.  First, they target to leverage their launch capabilities to build data centers in space.  Data centers in space should be quite a bit cheaper to maintain than data centers on earth (cooling will not be an issue in space, and solar cells should be more efficient outside earth’s atmosphere).  If they work, they could give SpaceX a cost advantage.  But the bigger bet seems to be in compute.  SpaceX appears to be betting that one of the key bottlenecks to AI will be compute capacity.  OpenAI and Anthropic outsource compute to companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and (counterintuitively) Oracle.  SpaceX appears to be betting either that those companies are not installing enough capacity or, if they are, that SpaceX can do so more cheaply by way of vertical integration.  I’ll be totally transparent, I’m not totally sure I understand the strategy nor the implications, primarily because I don’t understand the direction of the AI industry very well.  All I know is that, like Elon’s companies do in all other industries, SpaceX is making a bold and potentially differentiating bet in AI such that, if it pays off, they are likely to have a huge competitive advantage in a hugely valuable industry.

Which starts to get at the complication I see for Elon.  His companies are already worth something like $4 trillion combined.  If I am right about the direction those companies are headed, they are likely undervalued and headed toward much larger values.  Their products are likely to impact us to a degree we’ve rarely experienced and amass more concentration of value than we’ve perhaps seen before.  Having any one person become so rich and, by extension, so powerful and influential is enough to make even Elon’s fans a little queasy.  And Elon already has lots of enemies, to the point where lots of folks instinctively dislike Elon’s companies and his companies’ products just because of their association with Elon.  I anticipate the backlash to Elon to become much, much more visceral and vitriolic, to the point where I hope Elon is traveling with a fair amount of security these days.

Of course, that perhaps leads us to X, the social media platform that now sits under the SpaceX corporate umbrella.  I perhaps have the least to say about X, only because it (so far anyway) seems the least revolutionary to me.  Elon appears to have a vision for X to become something like America’s answer to the Chinese app WeChat.  WeChat serves as a social media platform, but also incorporates financial transactions, product sales, and games, such that it becomes almost something of its own operating system (such that Chinese users can spend more time in the WeChat ecosystem than they do in the rest of their phone app ecosystem).  Elon may have grander ambitions for X than I appreciate, but mostly X ownership appears to be something of a defensive position for Elon.  So many media and social media outlets are hostile toward Elon that owning X grants Elon a platform to appeal to humanity directly, without media filtration or social media algorithmic manipulation.  All I can say, as a user, is that I’m glad Elon purchased it, because X is much more enjoyable to use now than it was before his purchase.

Oh, and of course then there’s DOGE, where it appears Elon spearheaded an effort that survives without him.  That effort apparently reduced the size of the federal workforce by ~12% while also reducing contractors and outsourcing costs, without obviously collapsing the federal government’s capacity to function.

Elon is just a remarkable human being.  He’s already all over the news, and will continue to be so.  If anything, his footprint in our awareness will increase over time rather than decrease.  When you read this, you can be the judge of how my predictions played out. Perhaps more valuable, you can see a snapshot of how things looked (at least from my vantage point) in a way that puts what happened next in context.

In the meantime, I expect the coming years and decades will be a wild ride as a result of technological change, in no small part due to Elon’s companies. Buckle up.

Love,

Dad

September 21, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

I’m just going to come out and say it: I think consciousness begets matter, and not the other way around.

Who knows: perhaps by the time you read this, this letter might seem blasé. As I write, we view things quite differently. I’ve mentioned this before, but so far as I can tell, the dominant worldview, in both the scientific community and public perception, is that material reality somehow begat consciousness. I say “somehow”, because we still – after several decades – don’t have a plausible understanding for how consciousness came into being.

There are some academics arguing on behalf of the primacy of consciousness. Donald Hoffman and Annaka Harris come to mind: both conclude consciousness is fundamental, with Hoffman going further in suggesting what we take for the physical world is more like a user interface than a direct view of what’s underneath. But, so far as I can tell, these voices are influencing neither the broader scientific community nor public awareness in a meaningful way.

I should probably pause here and admit I don’t have a full working theory for how consciousness is fundamental to the universe, nor what the full implications are. I hope to explore some of that while writing. First, it might help if I outlined my personal journey in terms of how I came to this understanding. Because, until very recently, I assumed consciousness stemmed from material reality, though I’ll admit I never really gave the topic much thought.

The first concept that rocked my sense of grip on reality had to do with atoms. We’ve long understood that atoms are mostly empty space, with protons, neutrons, and electrons occupying a relatively tiny amount of the space in an atom. Here is the thought exercise that really confused me: if my human body is made of atoms that are mostly empty space, and my table is made of atoms that are mostly empty space, why doesn’t my hand pass through the table unimpeded and unaltered? Why do I experience the table as solid? When I press my hand against the table, why do I perceive that the matter in my hand is pressing against the matter in the table?

As far as I can tell, the atoms in my hand never really make contact with the atoms on the table. Turns out the atoms in my body form something of an electromagnetic field, and the atoms in the table do the same. So when I press my hand against the table, the electromagnetic field around the table resists against the electromagnetic field around my hand. What I perceive as mass pressing against mass is really energy resisting energy. What I just described might seem obvious or trivial to you; for whatever reason, I found this mind-bending: reality and my perception were different in important and non-trivial ways.

Extending this idea further, we’ve long known humans have a limited capacity to perceive reality, but I’m not sure how much we’ve really internalized that idea. We know, for example, that humans can only see a certain spectrum of light, and can only hear a certain range of sound. Light other animals can see is invisible to humans, and sounds other animals can hear are silent to us; we know because we’ve developed tools that can identify both. We also generally understand that the color brown isn’t necessarily defined by the way humans perceive it, but rather humans have adapted to interpret light reflected at a certain wavelength in the way we perceive brown. Point being: we know our perception of reality is limited at best. Yet I submit we often get stuck assuming our perception of reality is, in fact, reality.

The second experience that really messed with my understanding of fundamental reality relates to the double-slit experiment. Shine light through two slits onto a screen that records where the light lands and you get stripes, reflecting a wave pattern. Fire the particles one at a time and each lands as a single spot, but the spots, once enough particles are fired, build the same stripes. Record which slit each particle used, and the stripes vanish: two piles result instead. I cannot comprehend why recording the path should change the pattern. Typically, we assume measurement records a snapshot of something already decided. Here, how we measure seems entangled with which facts show up. To be clear, that is not proof that consciousness begets matter; it is proof that the old picture — finished objects sitting out there, mind as a spectator — does not survive contact with the data. I can’t quite explain why the double-slit experiment rocked me the way it did when I learned about it. But, like the hand on the table, it really messed with my understanding of fundamental reality.

Undoubtedly I was influenced by the fact that these thought exercises were befuddling me during the time I was having mystical experiences. Prior to those experiences, I assumed we could only know things we derived rationally. Things we could measure, things we could prove demonstrably, and things that we could logically deduce – those were things we could know. Suddenly, however, I was having experiences I couldn’t explain, but seemed to be teaching me things I would come to understand on a much deeper level than anything I could explain with logic. I would never be able to prove those experiences carried any meaning to a skeptic or materialist, but there were things I learned from those experiences that I just know, like “know it in my bones” kind of know. These letters often capture the things I’ve learned from these experiences.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I eventually began looking for others having mystical experiences. From my church and through Spiritual Stew, I’ve learned that there are more people than we realize having mystical experiences, but they tend to be reluctant to share lest their sanity be questioned. I’ve gravitated toward learning about others having mystical experiences via reading or podcasts as well. I’ve come to suspect telepathy, mediumship, and near-death experiences are all in some way related to the types of experiences I’ve had. To be clear, there are lots of charlatans who profess to have certain skills, but the existence of charlatans does not negate the possibility these skills can be real. For me, I’ve noticed I get a sense of expansiveness around certain people. This sense of expansiveness reminds me of my own mystical experiences, and tends to guide me in whether I trust others sharing their skills or telling about their own experiences. Not everyone will have that capacity for discernment, and I don’t assume mine to be foolproof, but it seems to be working for now.

Anyway, the idea that consciousness begets matter raises all sorts of questions. Like how did the earth and the stars and the solar system and the elements on the periodic table all come into being? I won’t pretend to have many answers, mostly more questions of my own. Humans experience time as linear, but I think we are realizing time isn’t fundamentally linear. Is the human condition more like the quantum aspects of a photon, with a superposition of possible outcomes all present until we experience them? Is history fundamentally in the past, and known or knowable, or do we impact history as our lives progress? In some ways we clearly impact history: the way we remember and tell stories evolves to fit the problems we face as society at any given time. But I even wonder whether we somehow impact the archaeological discoveries we make by virtue of our consciousness; as in, do we will certain historical facts into being? That might be too big a leap even for me, but I’ll admit these are the things I ponder these days. By extension, I think it goes too far to suggest we willed the universe into being; but I do think our consciousness shaped the universe we’ve experienced. Our scientific discoveries are us allowing new experiences and knowledge to come into being as much as they are genuine discoveries.

The reverse is true too: experiences that were once common have mostly now vanished. A world open to the idea of miracles experiences miracles. Not that long ago in human history, people generally credited the divine for unexplained phenomena. Having a deeper understanding for why things occur is, of course, wonderful progress. But by rejecting the possibility of the miraculous, we restrict the miraculous and, when miracles do occur, we tend not to notice.

To give an example of how remaining open might affect the outcomes in our lives: the law of attraction is an old idea that suggests what we think about is what we attract. Hypnotists, mystics, and self-help gurus have long taught that we should imagine the things we want. Jesus even seems to have promoted the idea: in Mark 11:24 he counsels “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours”. I’ve personally had some success with the practice, such that when I ask for what my soul truly wants, I find the universe starts bending in ways to help. There are some elements of the law of attraction that seem pretty straightforward: e.g. when we condition ourselves to seek a certain outcome, we are more likely to notice the opportunities that might help us achieve that outcome. Personally I think the law of attraction can extend further, where we really can begin to bend reality over time. These outcomes are often explainable in retrospect, with myriad little nudges resulting in the desired outcome. But as we experience them they can seem profound, like the universe reaching out to help and support us. Skeptics will tell me I have too active an imagination, to which I merely respond that I’d rather believe in miracles, and our ability to manifest in connection with the Divine, than not.

If that sounds like wishful thinking, at least it is old wishful thinking: the historical record is thick with reports from people who purported to see the world bend. Perhaps the most thoroughly reported stories about Jesus and the early apostles present them as healers. The apostles’ capacity for healing is often cited as a major reason why people joined the early church. In the period since antiquity, Catholic saints are recognized as saints in part because they performed miracles like healing, levitation, bilocation, or prophecy. We tend to assume the people reporting these miracles were tricked or misguided, but these miracles were often thoroughly and meticulously researched. The Catholic Church continues to canonize saints today, reporting rather diligently on miracles (two demonstrable miracles are required for canonization) before declaring someone a saint.

During the Reformation, Protestants posited the Cessation of Miracles, which argued that divinely inspired miracles ceased in the early centuries of the church. Interestingly, some Protestants argued magical mystical experiences continued, but that these experiences were the work of the devil. During this period lived some of Catholicism’s most notable levitators, like St. Joseph of Cupertino and St. Teresa of Avila. The Catholic Church, wary of accusations that such miracles should be the work of the devil (and no doubt filled with skeptical monks and priests besides) diligently researched these purported miracles, and deemed them true, accurate, and evidence of a special connection with the divine.

Documented stories of miracles are not confined to Catholic tradition. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam all tell stories of levitation, to take just one example. Of course, levitation is but one type of potential miracle, and I use it just for the sake of illustration, to suggest the idea of miracles spans cultures across most of history. Only in the last century or two have we broadly stopped believing in miracles, or in the presence of the supernatural in everyday lives. One reason why we stopped believing in miracles is that miracles don’t answer to the scientific method. In science we demand experiments be replicable. Miracles don’t work this way, so they aren’t supported using scientific experimentation; as a result, as our society became more scientifically driven, we increasingly came to reject not only miracles but even the idea of the divine. What I have come to realize is that miracles don’t obey the scientific process because 1) miracles occur when we open ourselves up to the divine, and 2) the divine brings forth what it wants, not what our egos might want. The results are unpredictable and non-replicable, and thus non-scientific, but I’m coming to believe in them anyway.

My thesis is that by denying the presence of the divine, we restrict the presence of the divine, and limit the potential for the divine to enter and work in our everyday lives. The result is a world more limited, more dull, more lifeless, and less loving than it could be. My ultimate argument is not only that consciousness is fundamental (and thus begets matter), but that adjusting our understanding accordingly might allow us to lead fuller, richer lives filled with more love and more impact than we currently imagine.

I am not trying to convince you of the primacy of consciousness. We each retain the right to determine what we fundamentally believe, and I have no desire to deny that right even if I could. But I do want to share some of what I believe, particularly because what I believe runs so counter to the times in which I live. From there, I merely encourage you to think about what it is you believe; my hypothesis is that we each form our belief systems, and it is up to us to decide whether those belief systems are tacit and unexamined. From what I can tell the unexamined belief system causes us to sleepwalk through life, subtly ceding the tools to manipulate us without recognizing we’re doing it.

For what it’s worth, watching the two of you navigate childhood only reinforces my belief in the primacy of consciousness. I genuinely believe Everett has some mystical abilities that are likely to get buried under a layer of insecurity that so many of us (and perhaps especially the mystically inclined) experience. And while Leland likely thinks he is governed by his rational mind, I know that to be only partly true. I only know how to explain using an anecdote. When Leland genuinely wants something, he is able to summon a force of will that bends almost everyone in his orbit accordingly. Your mom and I, your Uncle, all your grandparents…all of us typically play the role of authority figures with you. By authority figures I mean to say that we typically tell the two of you what to do, and not the other way around. To be very clear, all the authority figures in your lives try to grant you as much leeway as possible to enjoy your lives and explore and discover who you truly are. But we also set boundaries, and use certain unspoken algorithms for when we say yes or no to requests. Leland hacks those algorithms in a way I can’t describe, but I suspect almost any of those closest to him would intuitively recognize: when Leland truly wants something, he articulates that want with an almost undeniable power and force. My coach calls this “acting in alignment”, and Leland exemplifies this better than most people I know. My point is just to say that Leland, in my telling, is letting his consciousness shine through, whether he recognizes it or not.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

September 8, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about China.

It’s hard to overstate how much China has changed over the course of my lifetime. When I was born, China was astonishingly poor and mostly isolated from the world. Chinese and American citizens had very little to do with each other. Now, America and China have become both economically intertwined but also geopolitical rivals to the degree some wonder whether the two nations entered a Thucydides trap, such that China’s ascendency sufficiently threatens American hegemony to provoke war between the two nations. My understanding is that China openly promotes a theory that America (and the West more broadly) are in decline while China is on the rise. This idea seems to be taking hold, explicitly and implicitly, in the American psyche: Americans are at something of a nadir in terms of self belief and confidence, and seem to find Chinese confidence inspiring. It doesn’t hurt that the Chinese government’s communist roots lend credibility to the idea that Marxism is not only ascendant, but the attractive and inevitable future. The idea that China is proof Marxism works is bunk, but it’s an idea that appears to be gaining steam in the zeitgeist.

Americans used to credit Nixon with “opening up China”, which almost certainly overstates American influence and understates Chinese agency. China was almost certainly ready to move past famine and poverty and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, looking for a way to grow the economy in order to support their people. Eventually, China landed on a hybrid model, creating economic zones governed by different laws than the rest of the country. These economic zones were, by Chinese standards anyway, surprisingly laissez-faire, allowing the companies operating within these zones relative freedom to make the decisions necessary to compete in the global economy.

Prior to the establishment of these economic zones, behemoth “state owned enterprises” (SOEs) dominated the Chinese economy. These SOEs were owned by the government and run by party operatives. They were wildly inefficient and ineffective. The SOEs remain in operation and still dominate some sectors, but their impact on the economy shrunk. The companies operating in free trade zones, conversely, became proof of concept for other types of economic liberalization, which became the primary economic driver and a transformational economic engine in the country.

The economic zones started modestly enough. But as the world globalized and international trade volumes exploded, China’s vast population of poor potential workers attracted investment. American companies, to take just one example, could close local manufacturing plants and move sourcing to China, where labor was multiple times cheaper and environmental and labor laws more relaxed. Eventually American companies learned they could purchase products from outsourced manufacturers without employing the factory workers needed to build those products. American companies were able to shrink the size of their workforces (and the associated risks and complexities) as well as the size of their balance sheets, shifting huge amounts of capital to Chinese companies; shifting these assets to Chinese manufacturers made American companies seem more impressive, particularly when analysts measured profits relative to assets in attempts to quantify capital efficiency.

These Chinese factories, borrowing learnings from Taiwanese forebears, learned how to pool production capabilities. At one point in time I worked with a Chinese factory who built computers on behalf of my company. So far as I can tell the factory cross trained workers such that they could build computers for one brand one day and another brand the next. As a result, the entire supply chain became more efficient, with the Chinese factories able to minimize the amount of time labor and capital sat idle precisely because they were able to use one factory and labor force to build products for multiple brands.

American companies leaned into these trends, but so did the American government. America even supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, a group that attempts to ensure all participants played by a shared, agreed-upon set of rules when it comes to global trade. Our thesis (or at least the thesis sold to the American public) was that helping China become wealthy would encourage the country to democratize; I genuinely thought China would become freer as it became wealthier.

For a long time, things seemed to be working. The more China participated in the global economy, the richer the country became. The richer the country became, the more the citizens appeared to demand freedoms at home. And the government appeared, albeit slowly and reluctantly, to be letting go of control of more and more aspects of Chinese life. As far as I could tell, China really did seem on the way to becoming a rich, successful, democratic nation. What I missed: while China liberated economically, the CCP retained an iron grip on political control. Personally, I genuinely thought growing wealth and income would force China to liberate politically; so far I have been gravely mistaken.

I travelled to China a lot between 2008-2015. Particularly in the later years, it’s hard to overstate the buzz I felt when visiting. People clearly felt a sense of pride, energy, enthusiasm, and optimism for the future. My sense was that people were proud of how far the country had come, and felt a real sense of optimism and bullishness about where the country was headed. Just a generation or two removed from abject poverty, young Chinese people were beginning to consume conspicuously, flaunting wealth and status wherever possible. Those were heady times in China, and probably even a little manic.

I won’t pretend to know China well enough to know precisely where things went wrong. In fact, for the most part, I suspect the problem lay with my own expectations more than Chinese actions. So perhaps a more relevant question would be how I came to awareness the thesis of liberalization was playing out differently than I anticipated. Donald Trump’s antagonism toward China in his first term accelerated my awareness that not all was well in America’s relations with China. Trump blamed America’s trade with China on the demise of the American working class. Trump’s accusations held some merit: competition with Chinese manufacturing absolutely hurt working class wages in America. But China wasn’t alone at fault: America and American companies cheered these developments all along, and I along with them. To be clear, China engaged in unfair practices. Chinese companies, or other operatives, were notorious for stealing American trade secrets. While welcoming export-driven manufacturing, China restricted access to local markets: through tariffs, licenses, ownership limits, and informal barriers. The Chinese government continued to subsidize or protect Chinese companies from international competition in ways that pretty blatantly violated WTO rules, but suffered few penalties for doing so; at the very least, the WTO proved too slow adjudicating unfair trade practices. But all of these things had long been understood, so in many ways Trump’s behavior seemed odd, given the degree to which America had either been tacitly complicit or explicitly supportive to date.

China’s response to Trump’s antagonism surprised me, and seemed to awaken Americans to a geopolitical rivalry I – and I think much of the American public – didn’t previously realize existed, or at least whose existence we hadn’t yet internalized. Looking back, I realized China demonstrated they had no intention of continued political liberalization. Later China even started rolling back some of the economic freedoms I assumed would eventually lead to political freedom. Xi began to bring Chinese companies increasingly under state control (or at least state guardrails and influence). The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems insistent on remaining in firm control over not just the political future, but also the economic future of the nation.

Increasing geopolitical tension between American and China over the last decade brings us to a point where America and China appear to be offering the world two competing visions for the future. China’s vision is more clearly articulated: a world led by China instead of – per their telling – dominated by America. American confidence is so low that the competing vision isn’t particularly well articulated these days. In fact, I think there are competing American visions, one perhaps better articulated than the other. The older American vision relates to an earlier letter on secular nirvana, and basically argues that the world should continue integrating until all nations are democratic and find frameworks to work together peacefully in perpetuity (with America playing the lead role). As more of us realize the fundamental flaws in the old vision, we’re in the process of articulating a new vision. Personally, I’m not prepared to lay it out with any precision. As a guiding principle, I believe we are headed toward a world of more freedom, not less, and so any proposals that limit human freedoms should be viewed with skepticism. Relatedly, I suspect we’re headed toward a world where more decisions will be made locally, in contrast to most of the last century, where decisions increasingly got made nationally or internationally. Nations are likely to survive, at least for awhile, but with less power than they’ve known recently. I anticipate we’ll unlock more human creativity and, in the process, unshackle ourselves from some of the chains that have limited or even controlled our actions over the last few decades.

With this in mind, I think those who are bullish on China and bearish on America are being shortsighted and cynical. Of course, our egos love the idea that a totalitarian nation might be right after all, and that we will all eventually live under totalitarian rule. Of course, they might be right. But our egos fail, time and again, to understand one of the core things that makes America great: America’s ability to unleash our citizenry on a problem without much in the way of overarching control or direction might seem chaotic, but is a source of far more strength than weakness. America’s capacity for reinvention and renewal is unrivaled, and I submit we’re going through our latest period of reinvention and renewal. To the extent America is willing to resist our own totalitarian instincts and lean into the freedoms that made us great, I find it inevitable we will find our way around whatever problems China poses toward our future capacity to live free, thriving, meaningful lives. My sincere hope is that China comes along for the ride. As of now I’m not optimistic, but if we are wise we will offer plenty of chances to change course.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

September 1, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about higher education.

College education has become something of a flashpoint in American politics. In the previous administration (when Democrats were in power) the federal government undertook to forgive college debt. In Democratic presidential primaries candidates often talk about how we need to make college education free for everyone. Now that Republicans are in power, they have managed to shift the tone of the discussion, slinging accusations at universities ranging from discrimination to incompetence to ideological capture. I’m less interested in taking sides in the debate, and more unpacking how I think we got to where we are today.

My original assumption (and I think the default American assumption) was that attending university taught us skills directly applicable to our future careers. However, I was frequently advised not to worry too much about picking my future career too early – and, by extension, worrying about picking the right major to prepare me for said career. Examples abounded of people who found meaningful careers in fields completely unrelated to their degrees; the common thread seemed to be that their degrees taught them valuable skills regarding how to think or write, which proved to be enough to figure the rest out on the job. So I went into college assuming that the primary objective was to get a degree directly related to my future career, but understanding that folks often navigated meaningful careers thanks to the indirect skills developed while getting their degree.

My current understanding of higher education is broader. I still believe people get degrees in order to learn information or skills relevant to future careers; the difference is that I now understand skill acquisition to be merely one of three reasons for going to college. And I kinda suspect skill acquisition is the least important of the three.

When I was in business school, a professor introduced a hiring theory of higher education. This theory suggested that universities provide something of a filtering function for prospective employers, making it easier for employers to identify a pool of qualified applicants. The extensive work universities do to screen highly qualified applicants becomes something employers leverage.

As a hiring manager, I came to experience the value of university filtering firsthand. Most paths toward identifying qualified applicants proved time intensive. When my team posted jobs, lots of people applied, but the overwhelming majority of these applicants proved unqualified, or at least a poor fit. Internal recommendations proved the most reliable way to hire: when someone working for the company understands the job requirements and recommends someone from their professional network, these recommendations succeed at a remarkably high rate. But the second most efficient method for hiring qualified candidates came from identifying select university programs where we experienced track records of hiring success. In our specific case, we discovered MBAs (and particularly MBAs with backgrounds in finance, consulting, or engineering) generated the highest yield. With some schools I venture we had hiring rates approaching 10% of applicants, which was orders of magnitude better than online applications. So, hiring at these programs saved us enormous amounts of time and energy in identifying and hiring quality candidates.

The third reason people go to college is for what I call the “country club benefits”. Nominally, people join country clubs for access to the amenities; really, people join country clubs for access to a society of high status individuals. Similarly, people nominally go to college to learn relevant jobs skills, but really go to college for access to high society. There are multiple layers to the country club benefits. The first layer represents the relationships one develops at college: these tend to be lifetime friendships with people who help us navigate the world the rest of our lives. Forming particularly close relationships with high caliber people is enormously valuable. The second layer represents access to polite society more broadly. Lots of jobs require a college degree – even when, again, the degree isn’t directly applicable to the scope of work. College degrees play such a filtering function in our society that lots of college graduates hardly interact with non-graduates in any meaningful way, and vice versa. This social segmentation between graduates and non-graduates represents a huge change within the scope of my lifetime: relatively few people in my parents’ and grandparents’ generations went to college, so when I was growing up graduates interacted with non-graduates regularly. Nowadays this segmentation means college graduates have access to better information, more impactful social networks, and more high-paying job opportunities by the mere fact of having earned a college degree.

On some level, I think colleges figured out how critical they were in terms of bestowing access to high society, and undertook to extract as much value in the exchange as possible.

When I was an undergrad at a small liberal arts school in Texas, I was struck by the caliber of student the university recruited from all over the country. I later came to realize that most of these high caliber students were on scholarship. I also observed a substantial population of private school kids from big cities, particularly nearby Houston and Dallas. I later came to understand these students were often less impressive, and their parents were usually paying the full cost of tuition. At our most elite universities, what I have come to understand is that the same dynamic plays out in a more concentrated form. Elite universities compete fiercely to attract the nation’s best and brightest across a litany of fields. Elite universities also allow our nation’s most connected to compete even more fiercely for the opportunity to attend the university at full cost (or sometimes even well above full cost – with extra donations required to secure a space for less qualified legacies). While this arrangement is not commonly understood, and would likely be unpopular if it were understood, I do find some merit in the arrangement: the nation’s best and brightest benefit by gaining access to the nation’s most connected, and the nation’s most connected benefit by gaining access to the nation’s most capable and talented. Together, the talented cohort and the connected cohort help the university graduates achieve more success than either cohort could achieve independently.

We’ve seen the nominal cost of tuition skyrocket over the last 40 years. The real cost of tuition has increased faster than inflation, but more slowly than the nominal cost. That’s because most students don’t pay full tuition. Most students qualify for scholarships or financial aid; universities keep raising prices in part to maximize how much they are able to charge the richest prospective students.

Even still, real tuition costs rose faster than GDP continuously for decades. Interestingly, those increased costs didn’t go to teaching: teaching costs remained roughly fixed in real terms. Instead, administrative costs exploded. Universities now employ many, many more administrators than they did when I attended. What value these administrators bring is unclear to me. My hunch is that they are meant to justify the increased tuition costs charged by providing extra services.

By definition, no industry can grow faster than the economy forever; if it did, the industry would eventually become the whole economy. Thus, higher education costs eventually have to stop growing, and some signs suggest they may have already peaked. Indeed, universities now face some interesting headwinds. For one thing, the population of college age students is shrinking, thus shrinking the pool of American candidates for college. Interestingly, the percentage of American kids attending college appears to be shrinking as well, and a shrinking number of young people combined with a shrinking percentage of young people attending college implies a shrinking overall demand for college education. One way colleges appear to be responding is by recruiting more international students: whereas there were roughly half a million international university students (undergraduate + graduate) when I graduated around the turn of the century, that number has roughly doubled since. International populations provide universities an opportunity to attract more of the world’s best and brightest, and also more of the world’s willing to pay full tuition costs.

Even still, university attendance is down from an all time peak in the early 2010s, and the implied dynamics will be interesting to watch. Will universities be able to convince more American’s to go to college? Will they continue to increase international enrollment? Will they be able to offset declining enrollment by increasing tuition costs? I don’t know the answers, but the implications could be profound.

Of course, like with so many industries, AI will have a huge impact on higher education. I anticipate AI will impact not only what we learn, but how we learn. Sometimes techies anticipate the impending doom of higher education because they anticipate learning becoming much more efficient. Personally, I find these mental models oversimplified, for the reasons outlined in this letter: tech optimist / higher-ed doomers are focusing on the skill acquisition element of higher education, but ignoring the hiring benefits and country club aspects. Before anyone can truly disrupt higher education, they must first figure out how to either help employers surface high quality candidates efficiently or disrupt the country club benefits of higher education.

The most likely path forward, were I an entrepreneur looking to disrupt the field, would be to focus on the highest caliber students. These should be the easiest to empower, the easiest to teach new skills, the easiest to help demonstrate their potential worth to prospective employers, and the easiest to help find other ways to gain access to connected society (high society is always on the lookout for fresh talent). Once the highest potential candidates begin eschewing higher education, the whole edifice begins to break down. The second tier of talent will begin to follow the path laid out by the most talented; eventually, the wealthy and connected students will begin to understand they are no longer paying for access to the best and brightest, and will presumably reduce their willingness to pay accordingly. I won’t make any precise predictions, only that I do expect some disruption to higher education in the coming years.

Which is probably a good thing. I don’t like the degree to which a college degree has become a dividing ground between the haves and the have nots in America. I don’t like how the division has been, at least in part, self-reinforcing: lack of a degree starves an individual of access to other talented people and potential jobs, thus permanently reducing job prospects. Once upon a time I saw college as a great equalizer, granting folks from different socio-economic backgrounds equal opportunity to earn their way in the world. I’m not sure whether that mental model was ever true, but these days I see college as a tool that appears to be solidifying a caste system of sorts, with graduates and non-graduates occupying separate and distinct places on the social hierarchy.

One thing that will be interesting to watch is whether AI increases or decreases the value of intelligence. Intelligence appears to be a huge differentiator in career outcome: it strongly influence which students get into elite institutions, but also appears to influence how much those who graduate from elite institutions earn (a business school professor once told the class he ran regressions to understand what factors influenced future income, and the strongest predictor by far was the score on the entrance exam). On the one hand, AI will be smarter than all of us, so perhaps will dramatically reduce the value of raw intelligence by leveling the playing field. On the other hand, perhaps AI will turbocharge the capacity of the intelligent while the less intelligent struggle to take full advantage of AI’s potential. I honestly don’t know. Either way I expect AI will shake up higher education, and to the extent that means disrupting the formation of castes, I think that’s a good thing.

Of course, the two of you are only a few years away from making your own decisions regarding higher education, and by that time the disruptions will become apparent. A hiring manager at Google recently told me he’s increasingly using AI to write the code he used to assign to entry-level engineers. What I realized from talking to him: our educational system is designed to teach students how to *do* things: write code, draft a document, summarize research, or build a model to simulate an outcome, among others. As AI overtakes our capacity to do these activities, I think we need to start leveling up our students such that they think less in terms of producing something, and more in terms of how to edit the thing. Typically in a workforce the entry level staff produces the first version of the thing, and then their manager or supervisor helps modify or edit the thing into its final shape. Executives then help the team shepherd the output through to adoption. My suspicion is that all levels of the stack will need to “level up”. Entry level workers will need to develop a capacity to assign work to an AI engine and then refine the outputs until it is ready for public consumption, and then managers will become responsible for shepherding the output through to adoption. That shift will require a dramatic rethink in terms of how we teach. We need to teach you how to work with AI to create things that are ready for public consumption. Interestingly, the best way to do this will be with real world experiences: classroom simulations are likely to decline in value while we increasingly test out real world applications in monitored settings. As we demonstrate competence for producing work of real value, students will find their own paths away from the learning environment and out into the professional world. The lines between classroom and real world are thus likely to blur. All of this seems interesting and promising, at least to me.

What this means for higher education, I don’t know. I anticipate there will always be institutions dedicated to cutting edge research, and I anticipate there will always be students interested in learning from those doing cutting edge research. But I think the future of education is far less lecture-based, and far less everyone-does-the-same-homework driven. I think people will learn at their own pace, directed by their own interests and abilities, and classes will increasingly become geared toward solving real problems (or, in primary and secondary education, at least simulations of real problems).

The two of you are likely to be caught somewhere in between: as of today you are mostly learning using legacy methods. By the time you finish high school and (presumably) enter college I anticipate AI job disruption will be rather fierce. So you are unlikely to have grown up in AI-native classrooms, but are likely to encounter a job market significantly disrupted by AI. We have some time to gauge which way the winds are blowing and try to react proactively. We’ll see how we do.

In the meantime, I anticipate higher education will remain something of a political and cultural flashpoint for the foreseeable future, for the very reason that the tool we’ve long relied upon to train us for the future may longer be able to do so.

I love you.

Love,

Dad

August 25, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about billionaires, and particularly billionaires in America. My last letter covered, at some length, my thoughts around inequality. Billionaires are part of that discussion, but felt like they deserved their own separate treatment.

Billionaires dominate headlines and political discussion these days. In my dream world, these discussions would be behind us by the time you reach adolescence and college (and begin wrestling with your own understanding of the world around you); unfortunately, we seem sufficiently far from achieving any sort of consensus regarding billionaires that I suspect they will continue to be a hot topic as you begin to explore current events. By the time you read this, you will be able to evaluate not just my comments on the topic, but likely your own personal journey regarding the evolution of your own beliefs.

Just to establish my current understanding of things, let me provide the types of arguments I see folks making. The most common, by far, is some version of “if billionaires just paid more taxes, we could fund x”, with x presumably representing the claimant’s preferred form of redistribution. I often see claims like “billionaires shouldn’t exist” or, more recently, “every billionaire is a policy failure”. Less commonly but still often I see folks attempt to make the argument that billionaires only exist due to some combination of greed, corruption, and outright theft. Generally I find these arguments bewildering; they strike me as seductive, to be sure, but blatantly populist, oversimplified, and directionally unhelpful. What has disappointed me is the degree to which these arguments have taken hold amongst Americans with college degrees – precisely the type of folks I once assumed were inoculated against conspiracy theories. To be clear, I don’t assume one need be a conspiracy theorist to object to extreme (and increasing) levels of wealth inequality; in practice, however, these arguments seem pretty clearly meant to appeal to our emotions rather than our intelligence.

I’m not particularly interested in directly refuting the claims outlined above, I include them just to provide a backdrop against which to compare my understanding. After I outline how I think of billionaires, I can add a few thoughts regarding what might be driving the current backlash.

First of all, let me introduce the fundamental building block of the economy as well as wealth creation: the individual transaction. When someone buys a good or service from another, I submit that 1) the purchaser values the good or service more than the money they pay for it, and 2) the seller values the money more than the good or service they are selling. Thus, I submit value is created in the individual transaction: the buyer experiences value by owning, consuming, or experiencing something worth more to them than the cost of the purchase, while the seller experiences value by receiving more money than the good or service was worth to them. When buyers and sellers transact willingly (e.g. not at gunpoint), these transactions add value to both the buyer and seller.

The American economy is effectively an accumulation of these individual transactions. In most of these transactions, because both the buyers and sellers benefit, so does society as a whole. There are exceptions; for example, we’ve all experienced buyer’s remorse. Moreover, while we might not be familiar with the term externalities, we are familiar with the concept: if a company pollutes while making a product, the buyer and seller might benefit while society as a whole suffers. There are other examples, but broadly I submit that individuals and societies adapt to curtail the frequency of transactions with negative social consequences.

If we can agree that, on balance, individual transactions create value for both buyers and sellers, doesn’t that suggest billionaires become rich because they provide lots of goods and services to lots of people that create lots of value? Yes, but with some caveats. Imagine a scenario: you see a flower in a park, and want to pick the flower to take home with you; someone standing between you and the flower learns you want the flower and decides to pick it and sell it to you. Assuming you decide to pay the person, you have still receive value from obtaining the flower (otherwise you would not pay for it), but did the person who picked it really provide value? You were there, you were willing to pick the flower yourself, and indeed intended to pick the flower. In this scenario, society benefitted (because you got the flower you wanted), but the seller doesn’t appear to have contributed much value that might justify their compensation. “Positional advantages” refer to situations where sellers earn excess profits by virtue of their location or some form of unearned preferential treatment. Personally, I tend to think of wealth accumulated this way, whereby someone becomes rich more because they leveraged positional advantages and less because they created value in the world, as “extractive wealth”.

Inheritors of billions are not necessarily extractive, but they represent another subset of billionaires that hardly seem to have earned their riches. My point is not to demonize inheritors of wealth; I’m simply interested in exploring the differences between what I will call “earned” and “unearned” wealth. Earned wealth, under this definition, is generated by creating products worth more to buyers than the cost of producing them; unearned wealth would be of the extractive or inherited variety.

I mean not to suggest unearned forms of wealth are evil, but merely to suggest a healthy society would look to tilt incentives toward earned wealth and away from unearned wealth. To this end I have, at times, attempted to form common cause with the anti-billionaires I encounter, because I see lots of room for policy improvements that might discourage unearned wealth. Closing the carried interest loophole would at least stop the practice of letting financiers pay taxes at capital gains rates rather than marginal income rates. Strengthening (rather than our multi-decade practice of weakening) inheritance taxes would limit the amount of unearned wealth we pass from generation to generation, hopefully preventing a type of aristocracy from forming. Finally, when someone borrows money against shares in a company, they should get charged taxes on the money raised to offset the capital gains taxes avoided.

I get little traction with those who hate billionaires when I recommend solutions like those outlined above as a way to find some common ground (and, thus, generate meaningful policy wins that might reduce inequality and make our tax policy more fair). My sense from those conversations is that my proposed solutions are insufficiently punitive, and have begun to wonder whether those who rail against billionaires are as motivated by a desire to punish as they are a desire to create a more fair and just society.

For one thing, conversations around taxing billionaires started with implications that we needed to increase the tax rates on their incomes, whereas lately those conversations are increasingly shifting to an argument that we need to be taxing billionaires’ wealth itself. The idea of taxing wealth chills me, because it seems to me to intimate that the state asserts the right to take people’s stuff, which strikes me as a terrifying precedent to set. For another, I sense that billionaire vilification represents a type of “othering”, where we define a certain group as inherently different and inferior from the in-group. Most people don’t know any billionaires, and for most of us it’s hard to imagine becoming a billionaire, so it’s perhaps easy to convince ourselves that billionaires are somehow uniquely evil and damaging to society.

Most concerning, at least to me, are the reactions I get when I try to draw distinctions between earned and unearned wealth. When I try to point out that some of our billionaires have pretty clearly made our lives better by building companies that meaningfully contribute to our wellbeing, I often get shut down. People can usually accept the idea that certain transactions create value for both buyers and sellers, but surprisingly often cannot make the leap to accepting the idea that some billionaires became wealthy by aggregating a huge volume of transactions that improved the lives of their customers. As far as I can tell it seems to be a mental block, because I haven’t encountered a particularly cogent counterargument. Perhaps most instructive of all, in my conversations people seem to reserve their greatest vitriol precisely for the types of billionaires who created value for their consumers and not the ones who amassed unearned wealth.

All of this leads to me the sobering possibility that people are angry precisely because billionaires have amassed earned wealth. I am starting to suspect that unearned wealth can be forgiven, because at least I can dismiss that wealth being unavailable to me. Perhaps earned wealth is more difficult to accept precisely because it brings my own shortcomings into stark relief. If I am a college graduate suffering under a load of debt while working a job that doesn’t require a college degree…perhaps the idea of taking accountability for my life situation and the consequences of my own actions is more than I can bear.

I am uncomfortably reminded of the story of Cain and Abel. In the story, Adam and Eve had two sons. Abel, the oldest, offered the choicest outputs of his ranch as a sacrifice to God. Cain also made an offering, but apparently withheld the best outputs from his farm. We are told God approved of Abel’s offering, but not Cain’s. Cain became angry and sulked. God confronted Cain, intimating that he should choose to do well, otherwise sin was lying in wait wanting to master him. Rather than master the sin God encouraged him to confront, Cain instead killed his brother Abel.

Think about the potential parallels in this story: a group of billionaires brought the best of their inherent gifts to offer. As such, God rewarded them with riches. Another group of folks did not offer the best of their inherent gifts and were thus not rewarded. Seeing the rich rewarded while they were not, the other group became bitter and sulked. And rather than confront their own inadequacies and adjust accordingly, they seem more interested in punishing the rich in an apparent attempt to eliminate the rich from existence.

To be fair, I do not mean to suggest that billionaires are more morally righteous than the rest of us. Indeed, I suspect it is very difficult to become so wealthy without becoming sufficiently attached to our wealth as to create false gods around money and riches. But I tend to think of that as being between the billionaire and God, and not really my business so long as the billionaire isn’t actively impeding on my ability to lead my life.

I’ve mentioned before that Marxism seems to fill a religious need for its adherents. I suspect this gets at another possible reason why folks object to billionaires. I find the anti-billionaire rhetoric tends to be laced with Marxist ideology. This might also explain why attempts to find common cause have failed: because the real goal is to eliminate earned wealth and the economy built on the individual transactions that create earned wealth. The presence of earned wealth, and the overwhelming evidence that individual transactions create prosperity not only for the rich, but also the majority of participants, might start to confront the (in effect) religious belief that capitalism leads to poverty and suffering. Perhaps the vicious rhetoric toward billionaires responds to a perceived threat to tightly held (de facto) religious beliefs. I hope I’m wrong, because history suggests people can go to great lengths (including horrific levels of violence) to protect their most tightly held beliefs in the face of contrary evidence.

I really, really don’t like to be in the business of attempting to peer into the hearts of others and divine their intentions, particularly in these letters. But I would be disingenuous if I pretended these observations and thoughts hadn’t occurred to me. What I do think is true: when people get this angry, the anger is typically the result of some genuine, unrecognized, unmet need combined with an ugly, confused, convoluted attempt to blame others for a surface frustration only tangentially related to the real problem.

What occurs to me as I write is that I don’t have a clear sense of the real unmet need behind the anti-billionaire sentiment (and, to the degree they are connected, the Marxist sentiment more broadly). This is an area where I want to spend some time going forward. Because my experience tells me that once we understand the real unmet need, we can begin to appeal to the better angels within the anti-billionaires, and hopefully redirect energy currently pointed in darker directions. Wish me luck.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

August 21, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I want to talk about inequality.

My mental model is that global income inequality shrunk over the course of my lifetime, while American income inequality rose. I think these phenomena are interconnected. But I seem to be the only one who sees things this way.

In terms of why I think global income inequality has shrunk…well, it just seems obviously true from my perspective. Just this century more Chinese have moved into the middle class than there are people in the United States: depending on how you define middle class, China has seen somewhere between 300-700 million people join the ranks. Globally, the middle class grew by something on the order of 1.5-3 billion people since the year 2000. Think about that: somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world population joined the middle class in about a quarter century. More than half the world population is now middle class or wealthier (vs roughly a quarter of the global population in 2000); in fact, some estimates suggest more than half the global population is middle class today, without accounting for wealthier classes.

In even better news: the global share of people living in extreme poverty shrunk from nearly half in 1980 to a little over a quarter at the turn of the century to somewhere below 10% today.

Given those astronomical improvements in poverty and middle class status, how could global income inequality not have shrunk? A quick Google search tells me that global Gini coefficients (a measure of income inequality) have indeed shrunk (albeit modestly), thus corroborating my mental model. Taken together, these are not ironclad arguments, but the data seem sufficiently compelling to convince me global inequality shrunk over the course of my lifetime.

And yet, income inequality in America increased over these same time horizons. Some measures show that the bottom earning half of Americans saw their wages stagnate over a 30-40 year time horizon. Those bottom 50% of earners have seen their wages grow faster than the top half over the last decade or so, but not enough to put a meaningful dent in American inequality. In fact, American income inequality matches all time highs. Previous eras – namely the Roaring 20s and the 1870s (the early part of the Gilded Era) – matched current Gini coefficients, but these are hardly eras most Americans want to emulate.

This increase in inequality upended American politics, almost certainly leading to the election of Donald Trump and the populist-leaning MAGA movement taking over the Republican party. On the Democratic side, we’ve seen the party lurch left overall, and seen a surge in openly socialist and Marxist candidates, activists, and voters. It’s important to understand not just the policy solutions both sides are proposing, but the motivation behind those proposed policy solutions.

At this point, I need to provide some personal background in order to explain how my understanding of the political landscape, at least when it comes to inequality, evolved.

I majored in Economics and during college came to identify as libertarian. Libertarians believe in minimizing government intervention, whether said intervention be directed toward free markets or the private lives of citizens. As a guiding principle, libertarians seek the least government intervention possible. In practical terms, being libertarian meant often aligning with Republicans on fiscal policy and Democrats on social policy, as well as trying to influence whichever party was in power.

Over the course of my life, the libertarian viewpoint influenced American politics a great deal. In 1980 the top marginal tax rate approached 70%; since 1990 top tax rates fluctuated between 30-40%. Globalization soared: in 1980 international trade accounted for a little over a third of global GDP; that number peaked above 60% in 2008 and mostly hovered between 55-60% since. Deregulation allowed a number of industries to innovate and flourish. Migration increased, both within the US and internationally. As a libertarian, I cheered all these developments.

Then Donald Trump upended American politics. Suddenly a Republican administration wasn’t particularly interested in the virtues of migration and free trade, and preferred to erect border walls and antagonize America’s largest trading partner (China) instead. Libertarians began to realize we didn’t have safe quarter in the Democratic party either: the Obama administration started out deferring to perceived economic experts, but the 2008 financial crisis – and particularly how those steering the economy handled things – appear to have led to instinctive distrust. Libertarians have been thus been politically homeless for the past decade.

For me, the experience led to some soul searching. For one thing, I was completely blindsided by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. I was far from alone in my shock: most Democrats, libertarians, and even a lot of traditional conservatives felt the same way. My personal response to that shock was to attempt understanding what happened and why. I don’t think attempting to understand what happened made me unique, as it was a natural response to the shock so many of us felt. In fact, I don’t know what part of my journey since election night 2016, if any, is unique. What I do know is that I seem to have arrived at a pretty different place than almost anyone I know.

For one thing, it was hard to escape the overarching conclusion that Trump’s election was an explicit repudiation of the libertarian message. Here was a candidate elected on a platform explicitly opposing trade agreements and immigration, two things I firmly supported. More sobering, Trump was elected as a Republican, representing the party that traditionally aligned with libertarians on fiscal policies. To me, Trump’s supporters seemed to be issuing a clear rebuke of the financial stewardship for which I had cheered for nearly two decades.

Personally, I found Democratic responses, and proposed solutions, uninspiring. Democrats argued that Republicans were racists and insisted what people really wanted were things like free healthcare and free college tuition, all while raging against corporations and billionaires. I didn’t sense that Democrats were really listening to what Trump voters were trying to tell us, which made coming to a clear understanding difficult.

My earliest interpretation (and I forget what I read that influenced my thinking) was the election of Donald Trump amounted to throwing a metaphorical brick through the window, an attempt to be heard by America’s decision makers, and an expressed preference to burn it all down – if that’s what it took – rather than continue the course. Eventually I became exposed to the work of David Shor. Shor (a data scientist, self-identified socialist, and former wunderkind forecaster for the Obama campaign) argues that left-leaning and right-leaning coalitions are shifting all over the world, with education serving as the primary differentiator in party split. In his telling, Republicans (and their right-leaning counterparts in other countries) are becoming the party representing folks without college degrees, while Democrats (and their counterparts) are becoming the party of college graduates. Personally, I found this reframing helpful, in part because it seemed both intuitively plausible and consistent with polling data I had seen. If Shor was right, I began to wonder, why would Americans without college degrees be coalescing into a party? What frustrations would cause them to, in many cases, switch party allegiance and vote for so polarizing and unconventional a candidate?

My conclusions were not comforting to my self image.

Over the course of my lifetime, globalization led America to shift millions of jobs from American workers to counterparts in other countries, particularly China. The lower wages paid to foreign workers allowed companies to lower prices while increasing profits, which allowed American consumers to save money, which allowed companies to expand the number of products built in China, which allowed those companies to further increase profits while consumers expanded the number of products they could afford to purchase. The American economy grew at steady, healthy clip and unemployment mostly stayed low, implying that the jobs lost to foreign competition were mostly offset by new, better jobs being created. I cheered all of these developments as they happened.

At the same time, America’s relaxed immigration enforcement allowed millions of people to enter the United States without documentation. I considered it an open secret that these immigrants worked in construction, on farms, in restaurants as cooks and busboys, as janitors and landscapers and housekeepers and warehouse staff across any number of industries. In each of these industries, I understood that the undocumented immigrants lowered the cost of producing these goods and services, thus benefitting consumers. With some reservation, I cheered these developments as they happened: I wished America would amend it’s immigration policy to allow more people to enter legally but, barring that, I was perfectly content continuing to allow people to enter the country illegally, believing they contributed more to American society than the costs they imposed.

What we now know is that Americans without college degrees are disproportionately those who have seen their wages stagnate over the course of my lifetime. My understanding its that whether or not someone has a college degree serves as the primary differentiator between those who have seen their wages stagnate and those who enjoyed substantial wage growth. To me, this makes intuitive sense: Americans without college degrees (I’ll use the term “uneducated” going forward; it’s impolite, but easier to type and read than “without college degrees”) have been competing with the Chinese (among others) on wages in industries like manufacturing that could be outsourced abroad, while competing with illegal immigrants on wages in industries like food preparation and construction that must be performed locally. Increasing labor supply, in the absence of offsetting increases in demand, inherently lowers prices. Uneducated American workers have thus been competing for jobs against workers from all over the world in a manner that just wasn’t true fifty years ago. Educated workers faced some of the same competitive pressure, but not nearly as much: educated folks generally don’t immigrate illegally, some number of white collar jobs need be done close to headquarters, American innovation continues to increase the number and size of those companies to be supported by educated American workers, and American universities attract talent from all over the world – which seems to both support American innovation (creating jobs) as well as prepare most graduates to compete on the job market commanding high salaries and wages. Yet while educated Americans seem to avoid the downsides of increased competition for jobs, we benefit from the lower costs of housekeeping and food and construction costs provided by wages suppressed due to a glut of illegal immigration, in addition to the lower cost of goods produced abroad.

Most sobering of all is the degree to which I directly participated in all of what I just outlined. I spent the bulk of my career working for an American company that once assembled products in the United States. By the time I joined, that manufacturing had all moved to China. I worked in the supply chain, and so saw the evolution relatively close up. The short version is that my company spent a huge amount of energy teaching folks in China how to build our products, imparting a tremendous amount of skill along the way. Thus, not only did I cheer globalization in principle and benefit from cheaper goods in practice, I earned outsized compensation in part by directly participating in making it all happen.

When I put it all together, I come to the conclusion that America’s uneducated workers decided they were tired of feeling left behind. They got frustrated watching wages rise seemingly all over the world except for within their own families and communities. They were mad a people like me for enabling it to happen. They were frustrated by the belief they have something to contribute, and they felt ignored, gaslit, or patronized by the dominant American narrative. So they decided to change the narrative.

American media, and the educated folks with which I interact, tend toward disgust when facing arguments put forth by the MAGA movement. I respond to MAGA differently, and in fact use the two of you as a proxy for how to think about things. For me, Democrats (and the educated folks with whom I interact more broadly) are more like Leland (and older siblings more broadly): more mature, more capable of clearly articulating wants and needs, and more capable of compiling a more logical and rational argument for why they are on the right side of an argument. MAGA Republicans (and the uneducated folks they represent) are more like Everett and younger siblings: less mature and skilled with prose, but with an intuitive understanding of fairness, and thus prone to arguments that don’t make intuitive sense but backed by clear emotional power. I treat MAGA arguments much like I treat Everett’s outbursts: requiring clear boundaries, but worthy of unpacking to understand what sits underneath. And with both MAGA and Everett, I find what sits underneath is worth understanding and addressing for a more complete, thorough, fair solution to a problem.

[I’m unintentionally being condescending toward MAGA, at least in its current form. Indeed, like Everett, MAGA matures rapidly. Today, MAGA is generally able to articulate itself pretty effectively, albeit often after an immature, attention-grabbing behavior. A decade ago, MAGA was less mature, less fully formed, and thus less articulate.]

And so now, how do we proceed? I certainly don’t have complete answers, but I’ll offer some proposals, along with some suggestions on where to look (and where not to look).

For one thing, I think America’s workers have a point that we should not allow immigration to go unchecked. In retrospect, our border policy prior to Trump reminds me of what happens when siblings play competitive games with each other: the older sibling manages to subtly shift the rules of the game to ensure they win; the younger sibling doesn’t necessarily know how, but they come to recognize they’ve been cheated somehow. Eventually (and especially if the younger sibling continues to lose due to shifting rules), the younger sibling responds with an emotional outburst. I just don’t think what we were doing pre-Trump is sustainable, for the same reason it’s not sustainable to let the older sibling continue to manipulate the rules of a game to ensure they always win; eventually the younger sibling will flip the table over. People seem to assume reforming our immigration laws is politically impossible, whereas I think it’s our only viable solution. To get there, I suspect we’ll have to 1) increase the number of people we allow in legally (because there really is strong demand for international labor above and beyond what Americans can supply, and also because America benefits from the renewal of perspectives and ideas immigrants bring); 2) develop and maintain tight controls over how many people are allowed in; 3) allow for some level of dynamism in terms of how many people are allowed to enter the country legally (as opposed to waiting for Congress to change the laws every time it makes sense to adjust immigration levels); and 4) have some hard conversations regarding what types of people we want, and in what numbers. There are those who believe we should sharply curtail all immigration, while there are others who believe all immigration is good. I tend to believe there are certain types of talent we clearly want to attract in maximal quantities: something like a fifth of the current Fortune 500 includes an immigrant cofounder, and we should want to allow the types of people who can create new jobs or new academic breakthroughs into the country at a mostly unfettered pace. At the other end of the spectrum, I think we want to continue to allow immigration amongst uneducated and unskilled immigrants, but I think this will need to be tightly managed and weighed against the potential impacts said immigration levels might have on existing workers.

Writing has helped me uncover something I previously couldn’t see: the people in that bottom 50% of earners who do in fact have college degrees. Interestingly, they have been something of a blind spot for me. Well, that is not entirely true: I am aware there are college graduates who do not earn a great deal. But I perhaps underestimate the degree to which they drive Democratic political discourse despite their relatively small numbers. From there, it occurs to me that I should likely treat this group much like I treated MAGA: like a tantrum-throwing child, worthy of hearing out while setting clear boundaries on acceptable behavior.

Looking this up, I see that something on the order of half (I see numbers ranging from ~40-50%) of recent college graduates work in jobs that do not require a college degree. The data show huge variation across majors, with some majors showing underemployment well above half, while other are substantially less than 25%. Given how much college tuition costs have soared, and that we no longer allow graduates to discharge education debt in bankruptcy (a policy I loathe), I can see how this would lead to a deeply frustrated cohort of Americans.

On one hand, I am deeply sympathetic: growing up I internalized a message that everyone should go to college, and I assume many recent graduates internalized a similar message. On some level, these kids did everything we told them to do: go to college, get a degree, and figure the rest out later. Unfortunately, while that message worked for prior generations, it no longer holds universally true today.

On the other hand, there is some evidence of recent graduates having made poor choices. The degrees with the highest rates of underemployment are in fields I did not pursue at least in part because I did not think they had viable job prospects. And while I went to a private (and modestly expensive) university, my family and I were pretty conscious of the costs involved, so I took a bunch of actions (applying for and securing scholarships, serving as an RA to pay for housing, etc) to ensure my college education was reasonably affordable. I think everyone should be allowed to discharge debt (including education debt) in bankruptcy, but I also think high school graduates need to be prepared to start taking ownership of their actions. I’m not putting this all on the young graduates: as a society, we need to do a better job of teaching our kids of the consequences of their actions; that includes guiding kids toward the right schools and the right degrees and the right financial decisions (i.e. how much aid to take on, how to secure other forms of financing, etc.) and, in some cases, means directing kids away from college entirely.

Regardless of my frustrations, the subset of low-earning college graduates is now too large to ignore. Even if I wanted to ignore them, that option is no longer politically viable. Even as I write, I am coming to realize how much this group is currently driving Democratic political discourse. Free healthcare really helps if you are underemployed and don’t have company-provided healthcare. Free college tuition sounds awfully attractive to those who struggling to pay off college debt. Punishing billionaires (perhaps a topic for another day) might sound more attractive than taking ownership of my perceived underachievement.

Part of the problem I have hearing from educated youth is that their messages are too often filtered through older generations still trying to fight old battles. Another part of the problem is that underemployed college graduates are a lot more like me than struggling blue collar folks. One of the ironies of the human condition is how our greatest enemies are often the folks who look most like us.

Complicating matters, I strongly suspect part of the reason underemployment (which I am using as shorthand for financial underperformance more broadly) flies under my radar is precisely to hide from some of the root causes. We don’t want to face the degree to which academia, and society more broadly, have failed swaths of our younger generations. For that matter, we don’t want to face how we ourselves – their parents, siblings, advisors, etc. – failed pockets of young adults. We really don’t want to do the hard work of cleaning up the mess we’ve created, and really want others to let us off the hook for allowing such a mess to take hold. The problem, of course, is that we will not be able to properly address the mess unless we deal with it at its source. But that is a topic for another day. For now, figuring out how to listen to, empathize with, and help underemployed young graduates is a task for me to take on going forward.

Thus far in the letter, the only concrete solutions I’ve offered are to reform American immigration policy and some vague handwaving about fixing higher education. Truth be told, I don’t have too many solutions to offer. In fact, I strongly suspect inequality will shrink regardless of any purposeful actions we might take. For one thing, some of the headwinds American workers have faced are likely to turn into tail winds. The Baby Boomer generation created a glut of workers that only now is retiring and leaving the workforce. Chinese wages have skyrocketed since manufacturing first moved there; companies are shifting production to countries with cheaper labor, but will never again find such a homogeneous source of cheap unskilled labor. Moreover, populations are shrinking around the world, such that young folks entering the job market are likely to face decreasing competition on the global job market.

The huge caveat to all of this is AI. AI is coming for jobs, of that there can be little doubt. Worse, AI appears to be coming for precisely the type of jobs – those currently performed by newly minted college graduates – we probably need most (from a political perspective anyway) right now. New technologies consistently come along and eliminate the need for certain jobs; these new technologies invariably cause consternation and small-scale panic. So far, new technologies seem to create more jobs than they eliminate, such that we’ve never faced an unemployment crisis created by technology.

The optimistic case for AI is that humanity will solve existing problems more efficiently, freeing up resources to tackle new problems. The pessimistic case is that AI will eat jobs faster than it creates them. Even for me – an eternal optimist – it is not at all hard to imagine AI creating even more extreme wealth inequality than we see today. AI is too big a topic to adequately cover in a discussion around inequality; I flag here only to acknowledge that, however we decide to address inequality, AI will almost certainly become either a material constraint or a material aid.

One final thought before I depart. For one, you will notice that I have not set any sort of target level of equality. That is on purpose, because I think the target sits unhelpfully somewhere between American levels today and perfect egalitarianism. Some might argue in favor of perfect egalitarianism; personally, I find that target foolish and naive. For one thing, I don’t think any society ever has maintained perfect egalitarianism. Communist countries might have seen suppressed Gini coefficients, but I submit the hidden perks enjoyed by party elites resulted in vast under-appreciated inequality (and that’s without considering the crushing burdens of poverty and authoritarianism communism placed on the common worker and society as a whole). Even chimpanzees live in hierarchical societies, where status confers benefits like more mating partners and priority access to nutrient-dense food; measuring chimpanzee inequality might be difficult, but the phenomenon is real enough.

Like with chimpanzees, I anticipate human inequality (whether measured or obscured) will persist for as long as humans themselves persist. Also like chimps, humans retain the capacity to depose ineffective leaders and install new social hierarchies. How chimps reorganize is complex, and so it is with humans.

One thing I can say with some confidence: we are undergoing a reorganization of social hierarchies within the US. There will be winners and losers. If we are lucky, America can navigate the changing landscape without total war, and ideally even with minimal violence. But the losers are unlikely to go down without a metaphorical fight, and so I anticipate political rancor and unrest may well continue for at least a few more years.

That’s not a happy note on which to end, but hopefully by the time you read this whatever acrimony you experienced in adolescence is well behind us, allowing you the opportunity to feel the joy and inspiration of building for a new era. May the current generations of adults start cleaning up the mess we’ve made before we hand the reigns over to your generation. Wish us luck.

I love you both.

Love,

Dad

August 18, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

This morning overwhelmed me a bit. I mostly stuck to my typical routine: drop you off at school before heading to the gym where I exercise, stretch, and sauna and then stop by the grocery store to pick up a few staples on the way home to eat lunch, meditate, and write. The primary change to my morning routine today was that I didn’t listen to a podcast. I typically listen to podcasts on any number of topics while I work out. Today I decided to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, but not had the guts: to exercise without additional stimulus. Partly I did this because I was excited to write today, and wanted to think about what I might write. What I found was that ideas came flooding through faster than I could process or hold them. I seem to be genuinely excited about this project, to a degree where I am worried I might not be up to the task of honoring it. Alas, so it is with the things we care about. Onward.

Today I want to talk about Adam and Eve. This is a topic I’ve touched on several times before, so part of me is loathe to retread old ground. I’m tempted to say this will be the last time I will cover the topic; truth be told, I don’t think I can make that commitment: I’ve been fascinated by the tale of Adam and Eve for a few years now, and find myself revisiting its themes often. What I do hope is for this letter to serve my deepest dive into the topic, covering all the themes I notice (including several I’ve not mentioned to date), such that in future letters I can point you back to this one, and merely underscore (or add to) previous observations.

The story of Adam and Eve has been told for thousands of years; that alone seems worthy of interest. For one thing, people seem to have a deep seated need to understand “how it all began”. Even today, while we no longer look to Adam and Eve (and the book of Genesis more broadly) to define how humanity came to exist, we do have a modern genesis story: The Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang, so we believe, explains how the universe came into being, how the earth formed, and how humans evolved in that timeline. Without taking a side in the veracity of either of these genesis stories, it’s important to understand how badly humans seem to need a story that explains how the world, and humanity, came into being.

I wanted to be a little more precise in terms of defining how many years humans have been telling the story of Adam and Eve, but that is tricky to nail down with precision. There is a Creationist view that believes one can literally follow the timeline of events outlined in the the bible and calculate that Adam and Eve date back 6,000-7,000 years old. Personally I never felt the need to assume the events of the Old Testament are meant to be understood literally, so don’t think it safe to assume the story dates back that far. The first evidence of the story of Adam and Eve being written down dates back nearly three thousand years. But we broadly understand that humans are a storytelling species, and that there likely existed an oral tradition that predates any written records, though by how much we really don’t have any way to know. The story of Adam and Eve has significant overlaps and echoes in The Epic of Gligamesh, a Babylonian story first written close to four thousand years ago with an oral history that would likely extend centuries earlier. Whether the story of Adam and Eve was adapted from The Epic of Gilgamesh, influence by it, or somehow derived independently, it’s not crazy to suggest the story of Adam and Eve has roots extending back more than four thousand years.

Consider the evolutionary pressure the story must have faced. Oral storytellers need to captivate their audience, so would have refined the story over time. Extraneous detail would have been discarded, leaving only the truly captivating elements to survive over time. And while the story almost certainly isn’t meant to be taken literally, it’s worth considering what deep truths must have been encapsulated in order for the story to have survived over the millennia, such that it not only survived the oral storytelling era, but also that we still tell the story to this day.

Genesis 2 mostly talks about how Adam and Eve came to be. Perhaps because we now assume humans evolved into being, this is not the portion of the story I find interesting. I’ll gloss over this portion of the story for today, and merely reserve the right to find inspiration and dimensionality in this part of the story later. I often find deeper meaning in biblical stories after a discovery in my personal spiritual journey. So it may be with Genesis 2, or maybe not.

The one element of Genesis 2 that sets up Genesis 3 (the focus of today’s letter) is that God supposedly put Adam in the Garden of Eden to work and take care of it, telling Adam he was welcome to eat fruit from any tree in the Garden except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. First off, it’s worth observing how deeply our belief that humans hold an obligation to look after the natural world runs: we’ve been telling ourselves we were given that mission by God for thousands of years. For me, it’s crazy to think that modern environmentalists, conservationists, and climate activists – though typically quite secular in professed beliefs – share a sense of mission with humans who have professed it was ordained by God for millennia.

Picking up in Genesis 3, a snake appears, and takes up the “bad guy” role in the story. The snake informs Eve that the cost of eating the forbidden fruit is not death (as God supposedly warned), but merely knowing good and evil “like God”. They eat the fruit, realize they are naked, and sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. God proceeds to find out that they have eaten the forbidden fruit, and assigns punishments. The snake is condemned to crawl on its belly and be cursed to live in a state of deadly enmity with humans. Eve is condemned to experience pain in childbirth and be ruled by her husband. And Adam is condemned to never-ending toil in order to secure food. Lest Adam and Eve live forever, God expelled them from the Garden and placed a cherubim and flaming sword to guard the tree of life.

The punishments attempt to explain why humans still struggle in ways that still ring true to this day (I don’t know why, but I find this fascinating):

• Humans feel shame being seen in our natural (naked) state.
• Humans evolved a deep seated and visceral fear of snakes.
• Women, seemingly uniquely in the animal world, suffer during childbirth.
• Agriculture is hard work, and a seemingly constant battle to survive (more on this thought in a moment).
• Men have (or until very recently had) power over women.
• Man continues to suffer in separation from God and an inability to live in harmony with the natural world.

Of these supposed punishments, only a fear of snakes seems to make much sense once you really stop to think about them. Why would humans feel shame being seen naked? Why would women suffer during childbirth? Why should humanity seem to suffer more anguish than other species in the struggle for survival? (To be clear, plenty of other species appear to have more difficult battles for survival than humankind, but humans seem to suffer mental and emotional anguish in ways that are uniquely human, despite our relatively secure lot in life). And why should men have historically held so much power over women?

My next point will retread some prior observations, so I want to take a little detour.

A year or so ago I learned about a recent academic study. The author was exploring the reasoning behind a phenomenon with which I was unfamiliar: that humans invented agriculture in at least seven different parts of the world independently. Five of these locations (the Fertile Crescent, northern and southern China, modern day Mexico, and in the northern Andes region of South America) invented agriculture within a couple thousand years of each other, which hardly seems like it could be entirely coincidental given human history extends back 300,000 years or so. The paper hypothesized that agriculture might have developed in response to relatively sudden changes in weather patterns, creating an incentive for humans to get more proactive about cultivating (and storing) food. The author identified changes in the earth’s orbital patterns (like axis tilt) that apparently led to increased temperature extremes across seasons (e.g. summer vs winter in the northern hemisphere) and precipitation extremes in areas with wet and dry seasons. The theory goes that humans, no longer able to rely on predictable food availability in the cold winter season (or dry season), learned to cultivate and store an excess of food in the hot/wet season.

As I read about the study the thought hit me: “this is the story of Adam and Eve”. For 300,000 years humans lived in relative harmony with their environment. They developed tools to obtain and secure food, but they relied on their environment to provide the nutrients they needed. As seasonal weather patterns became more extreme and unpredictable, peaking around 12,000 years ago, people decided to take a more proactive approach to food security.

To me, the crux of the story of Adam and Eve is man’s elevation of his own image to that of god. We decided we no longer needed to live subservient to God, nor in harmony with our natural surroundings. We felt (and continue to feel) a responsibility toward the natural world, but we came to believe the world was ours to manipulate and control as needed to ensure our survival. We stopped trusting that God or nature would ensure our survival, and decided we needed to take proactive control of ensuring our needs were met. In the process of deciding we would grant our evolved brains primacy, we elevated ourselves – and our egos – to god status, no longer living in harmony with nature. Within our beings, we put our brains in charge, pushing our emotions and spiritual selves into subservience. These actions inherently put some separation between us, nature, and God. Ever since, we’ve felt a dull ache, a desire to return “home” to some unknown and undefined location or state.

This desire to return home is so eternal that it’s captured in the monomyth, also known as the hero’s journey. We tell stories where the hero starts at home, gets called to adventure, is guided by a (sometimes magical) mentor before venturing into the unknown on a series of adventures. In at least one of these adventures, the hero must go alone to face some manifestation of his deepest fear. In another of the adventures, the hero must face the deepest of temptations. Eventually, these adventures transform the hero into a fully realized version of himself, and (partly thanks to the transformation) the hero is able to secure victory in whatever the objective of the original quest. Finally, the hero returns home, bringing his newly transformed self into integration with the life he previously left behind.

The hero’s journey provides the framework for the original Star Wars trilogy. One can find the outline of represented in The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Odyssey, and many (most?) of our favorite epic tales.  We keep telling the same story over and over again.  Why?  

I submit the monomyth holds so much power over us precisely because it outlines what we most want: transformation and reintegration. We want to be transformed, and we want to integrate the transformed self into the life we temporarily left behind in order to secure the transformation. The monomyth is ultimately describing a spiritual journey. Fascinatingly, it provides something of a roadmap. Following an invitation away from the confines of the familiar in order to grow and develop new tools, before facing a series of adventures and crossing into the unknown to face fears and temptations, in order to achieve a transformation…describes my spiritual journey to date. I would place myself at some point in the return home and integration portion of the journey as of today. Via spiritual stew, I’ve had the good fortunate to hear about many spiritual journeys, and find while the specific adventures vary wildly from story to story (much like the adventures vary wildly between Star Wars and Harry Potter), the underlying themes and patterns show remarkable overlap.

The hero’s journey, I submit, offers individuals something of a solution to the problems presented in Adam and Eve. We separated from God and we yearn for a return. Our original path is closed off (as symbolized by the cherubim and flaming sword), so we must find a new way home. The hero’s journey provides clues for how to find our way home (as do the world’s religions; potentially more on this topic another time), suggesting our paths are unique to each of us (which is consistent with my personal observations). Unfortunately, while the hero’s journey serves as an inherently resonant guide for each of us individually, humanity continues to struggle with our collective separation from God, in a manner that takes on a pattern. The Old Testament documents the pattern I’m describing: people sin and so are allowed by God to be conquered and oppressed by their enemies, at which point they cry out for God’s help and are rescued. Personally, I think this pattern continues to play out in modern times, though I would frame the pattern slightly differently.

Every 80 years or so America enters a new epoch. We enter the new epoch with a clear understanding of mission: we know the purpose of the new epoch, and are motivated to set about building this new world (and preventing the calamity marked by the end of the old epoch). Eventually, we overextend the building mission of the epoch, and shift focus toward utilizing (vs building) the tools we’ve developed. Eventually, we start to abuse the tools we’ve built. Finally, we start to realize the tools no longer seem to solve our problems, and because no one alive remembers a time without these tools we face an identity crisis. Eventually, we set about deconstructing the old epoch and then, eventually, begin building anew.

In spiritual terms, I believe the transitions between epochs are divinely inspired. We move into the new epoch joyful for the seemingly endless opportunities we see in front of us (God’s gifts). Eventually, we begin to take God’s gifts for granted, and begin to assume the we ourselves built this new epoch (increased separation from God). Separation from God inevitably leads to a world of decay (a world where our tools dominate us instead of us utilizing them), at which point we undertake to deconstruct. In the chaos of deconstruction, we begin to search for a connection with God again. Enough of us establish connection with God to navigate a (previously unseen) path out of the chaos and destruction and into the hope and promise of a new era. And then the cycle repeats.

Distilled all the way down, man oscillates back and forth between connection with God and separation from God, eternally tempted to elevate man back into the role of God but always willing to cry out for God’s help in our darkest hours.

The story of religion, too, is the story of oscillation between connection to God and separation from God. Our religions convince themselves they understand the will of God, attempting to force God to shrink to fit our capacity to comprehend. Our leaders convince themselves they need to assert increasing authority over their flock…and perhaps their spiritual enemies as well. These small-minded behaviors, born of an attempt to stuff God in a box whose dimensions we understand (and can thus manipulate), in effect elevates man back to the status of god and leads to tremendous suffering. Eventually some devoted and inspired folks attempt to reestablish a more genuine relationship with God. By opening themselves up, these individuals receive inspiration that leads the religious body into a new era.

I also wonder if the story of Adam and Eve plays some misdirection on humanity. The story clearly tells us that Adam and Eve, by eating the forbidden fruit, came to know good and evil. I increasingly wonder whether humans genuinely do possess the ability to discern good from evil. Recent evidence suggests to me that evil (or what we have traditionally considered evil) increasingly hides in plain sight while folks struggle to notice. Actually, that’s not entirely true: folks are quite adept at observing the evil emerging over there (in our spouses or parents or kids or siblings or, especially these days, in the other political party), but shockingly blinded to the evil overtaking us in here (in my own being, tribe, or political party).

Whether humanity possesses the ability to discern good vs evil or not, I increasingly wonder whether that’s even the right paradigm. I’m deeply torn on this one. On the one hand, warning against evil (and the evil one, or Satan) is a theme that runs through both the Old Testament and the New (including in Jesus’ teachings), and permeates our modern stories and belief systems. On the other hand, I find little evidence of either good or evil in my own spiritual pursuit. I find evidence of light and shadows, love and fear, truth and lies…but not good and evil. I’m open to the possibility I’ve just been blocked to evidence of good and evil. In the meantime, I find myself drawn toward what I perceive to be the polarities of love and fear. What we traditionally label good and evil I am coming to think of as “actions born of love” and “actions born of fear”. The polarity of love and fear I do in fact think we have the capacity to discern. I submit two people could take the apparently exact same actions, yet we could instinctively, viscerally understand which person was acting from a place of love and which was acting from a place of fear.

I submit that the two of you already have shown this capacity for discernment. Being children, you make mistakes often. As your parents, part of our job is to guide and correct your wayward behavior. You can tell the difference between when your mom and I set loving boundaries versus when we attempt to correct your behavior from a place of fear. Our words might differ only slightly, but you can feel and sense the shift in tone and energy. In my experience, you both respond positively to boundaries set with love (even when those boundaries sting), but respond negatively to corrections relayed from fear. You are even developing the capacity to articulate your observations, in order to give your mom and me feedback when you believe we’ve crossed into fear (and thus no longer providing constructive boundaries or direction).

[You two are not wholly unique in your ability to discern love and fear, and your positive reactions to love and negative reactions to fear. But I will say that a person’s ability to sense the difference, and respond appropriately, is impacted by the degree to which that person is trapped in fear. Whether temporarily or more deeply possessed, the degree to which we are trapped appears to dictate our capacity to discern fear and love, and to respond appropriately. Metaphorically, I think of fear as represented by shadows. As such, fear is deeply resistant to light, and will do whatever possible to avoid the light; that includes hijacking our actions in order to frighten the source of light or, failing that, running away. So, we have the capacity to respond positively to actions born of love, but only to the degree we have not been hijacked by fear.]

I said I would return to God’s punishment of man, specifically consigning man to the toil of agriculture in order to secure food. I mean only to point out here how humanity often seems to be trapped in a mindset that no longer seems relevant. Thankfully, humanity seems to have mostly solved the problem of how to feed the planet. While a large number of us work toward that food security, and while those farmers presumably continue to toil painfully, the percentage of us who continue to cultivate food is small and shrinking. And yet, from what I can tell we generally continue to worry about our security in ways that no longer seem relevant. To some degree, humanity seems to be adapting slower than the world is changing. On another level, I wonder how much painful toil was ever required: Jesus chided his followers on more than one occasion, suggesting God would provide for their needs. I’ll admit: I myself struggle to internalize what these passages mean, because I cannot comprehend a world where we do not concern ourselves with from where our next meal will come; I suspect internalizing these messages will correspond with my next spiritual breakthrough.

To that point, there are those who wish humanity would return to our hunter gatherer state, presumably assuming we might return to a state of harmony with nature. I am deeply skeptical. For one thing, the story of Adam and Eve itself implies that a return to the garden is impossible. The deep resonance of the hero’s journey implies that we must find our own, individualized paths. On a more practical level, while the world proves quite capable of supporting eight billion people, I sincerely doubt it could support so many without the cultivation of food. And I think, evolutionarily, the battle between agriculture and the hunter gatherer lifestyle occurred long ago, and agriculture won comfortably.

In sum, the story of Adam and Eve seems to resonate across the millennia precisely because we 1) intuitively recognize something deeply true about the story (that humans elevated ourselves to god status, creating a separation between ourselves and God), and 2) instinctively comprehend how elevating ourselves to god status leads to our suffering.

In terms of solutions, I have many to offer the individual. I’ve offered a few within this letter, and offer them throughout these letters. I have fewer solutions to offer humanity as a whole. Perhaps we are relegated to each finding our way back individually; in fact, my experience strongly suggests this is so. On the other hand, I do sense a shift occurring that will likely enable more people to find their paths, even if those paths remain individualized.

Okay, it’s getting late. I enjoy writing these TOE letters, but find them more difficult to write than the others. And so, I need my rest.

I love you,

Dad

August 17, 2026

Dear Leland and Everett,

Today I kick off a project of sorts. I anticipate it will span several letters. The letters may be consecutive, but they may not: I reserve the right to interrupt this project to write about other topics; I also reserve the right to come back to this project when appropriate. My intention is to title letters in the project “Your dad’s Theory of Everything, part x”.

Part of me wants to spend more time explaining the project. But I am realizing that is my fear trying to get in the way, and I just need to dive in. So here goes: today I want to talk about stories.

Indulge me on a quick diversion to explain how I came to think of story as foundational human technology.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, based on a correlation between neocortex volume and group size in primate species, extrapolated and predicted humans can maintain roughly 150 stable social relationships at any given time. The thesis that humans are limited to 150 relationships at a time is referred to as Dunbar’s number. Whether Dunbar is correct in proposing that humans are limited to ~150 relationships is not what I want to explore today. Neither is whether the relationship is causal – brain size determines group size – or not. Whatever the real number and the ultimate cause, what stuck with me regarding Dunbar’s number is that there appears to be a link between brain size and group sizes in primates.

What strikes me about Dunbar’s number is that humans appear to be unique in our ability to organize in groups that vastly exceed the limits one might predict based on our brains. While our core stable relationships might be governed by the size and makeup of our brains, we are wholly unique in the primate world in our ability to organize in groups (cities, nations, religions, etc.) that are orders of magnitude larger than our brains would be expected to handle.

Why? To the extent people have examined humanity’s ability to organize groups larger than our brain makeup might predict, we typically point to the mechanisms – language, laws, culture, religion – but for me this all distills to story. Humans are a storytelling species, and I submit that these shared stories are what allow humans to organize in larger groups. Shared stories allow humans to establish a shared understanding of the world, our place in the world, and how we are meant to behave. Stories lead us to establish social norms and mores, which enable us to approach and interact with strangers without fear for our safety. Stories are foundational to religions, nations, corporations, and any other organization with a shared mission and purpose. Without shared stories, for better and worse I suspect humans would still be wandering the earth in bands of 150 or so people.

As I write, our shared stories are breaking down. Developed nations have become less religious, reducing our reliance on one traditional dimension of cohesion from story. As people migrate at an accelerating rate, we find ourselves increasingly interacting with others whose behavior is guided by different stories than our own. And we are currently reexamining the American story, as our faith in the existing story collapses.

The current American experience is, at least in part, typical. When a society begins to fall upon hard times, that society inherently looks to their shared story for clues regarding where they went wrong and how they might course correct. When a society fails to find solutions in their shared stories, the people begin to examine the stories themselves for holes, gaps, and potential modifications. Since its founding, America has seen itself as born of freedoms and inherent human rights, along with a specific brand of rugged individualism and exceptionalism. Since WWII, America also defined itself based on our institutions, seeing ourselves as global guardians of democracy, peace, and truth.

And so, Americans are reexamining our stories to see where we went wrong. Some blame immigration, others xenophobia. Some blame racism (particularly institutional racism), others blame “woke” and DEI. Some accuse America of being hopelessly inherently flawed due to a perception that it was built upon a foundation of slavery; others accuse America (and the West more broadly) of creating undemocratic institutions that increasingly dictate our daily behavior. Personally, I don’t find any of these accusations and proposed redefinitions of our shared story particularly compelling. For one thing, they all rely hopelessly on the theory of “good guys and bad guys”: that there are good guys and bad guys in the world, and that one need must first classify humanity and then proceed accordingly (e.g. reward the good guys and punish the bad guys). Personally, I no longer adhere to the belief that humans can be split into good guys and bad guys. To the degree good and evil are real, I agree with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that “…the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Beyond that, I’m coming to believe fear vs love is a more relevant continuum to explore than good vs evil. But more on that topic another time.

In my dream world, these letters would contribute to the formulation of new shared stories. More realistically and pragmatically, I am hopeful that writing these letters helps me engage with the world, in hopes we might find ways to curtail our most toxic impulses during this time of chaos.

Stories are not just what hold us together as societies. Individual human psyches organize around stories, often subconsciously. I’ve seen folks refer to “limiting beliefs” and “invisible scripts” as descriptors meant to capture this phenomenon. But it’s genuinely shocking how often we get stuck due to some invalid underlying assumption or story. Samples include “I am not good enough”, “I am unloveable”, “money is the root of all evil”, “good guys do x, bad guys do y”, “that person always does that thing I hate”, “I am bad at math” or “I am good at music”, or my current bugaboo “I can’t do x until I do a, b, and c first”.

A genuinely stunning amount of my energy over the last few years has been directed toward identifying the stories I used to define me or my circumstances before working to unlearn and discard the harmful or debilitating among them. I was unpleasantly surprised by how many stories were unconsciously buried in my thought processes and belief systems, and I was shocked to discover how much of my behavior those stories drove. In particular, I was shocked to discover just how many of the dissatisfactory elements of my life had been created by these stories.

Over time I’ve come to develop a toolkit for identifying and releasing unhelpful stories. But I haven’t abandoned the use of stories altogether. Indeed, I’ve come to appreciate not only the pernicious potential for self-limiting stories to dictate our circumstances, but also why humans find stories valuable in the first place.

For whatever reason, humans retain compelling stories. Our brains possess a limited capacity to remember information. Stories seem to provide scaffolding that allows us to organize information in dimensional ways that enable us to exponentially expand the amount of information available for us to access when needed. Need to remember a fact? Just revisit that portion of a compelling story and find the necessary data retained therein. Storytellers (authors, movie makers, etc) are deeply familiar with the power of story, and purposefully embed things they want us to remember or believe in otherwise compelling stories, in the hopes that their stories subconsciously nudge us to accept or retain whatever nuggets of wisdom they wish to impart.

Nowadays, I try to be conscious of my stories (and these letters are part of that attempt to create awareness). I also try to be purposeful about holding stories loosely, so that I might release untrue or unhelpful stories once I realize they are no longer true or helpful. Finally, I’ve developed some tools to help me identify when I am unconscious of the stories driving my behavior; these tools do not prevent me from allowing some stories to become unconscious, but they enable me to accelerate the process of becoming aware and, thus, taking action to release them.

Part of the purpose of these TOE letters will be to document, and thus examine, some of the stories I currently hold. Part of the purpose is to contrast my stories with what I perceive to be stories held by others. What might be unique to this project, relative to my letters thus far, is that I don’t know what I expect you to glean from the TOE letters. I just feel a need to write them, and sense that the need comes from a place I can trust.

Hopefully this project, and its value to you, becomes clearer over time. Forgive me that I cannot articulate my vision or purpose today, and please indulge me on an exploration with an unknown destination.

I love you,

Dad