7 years earlier Jonathan sat there while his Mercedes S-Class with DRIVE PILOT drove him across the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street. He had been working at Operant Capital for 10 years. The idea was simple. Predict the market, trade based on those predictions, and get rich. The implementation however, was not as simple as the idea. The market doesn’t work like physics. The market moves based on the thoughts and feelings of billions of humans, and they were all trying to do this same prediction thing. That’s what made the economy. Everyone was basically doing this algorithm on some level. And even worse, this was a Red Queen’s race, where the tactics that worked last year didn’t work this year. Everyone was predicting everyone else predicting the market. Except everyone was not as smart as Jonathan. He was a child prodigy. He got his first IMO Gold when he was 14. He graduated from MIT in 3 years. And he wanted a job where he was surrounded by other people as smart as him. He’d been working on the RPS project for the last three years. As one of the more senior people there, he got to work on the more speculative research. Operant was blessed with basically an unlimited budget; the bounties of providing a valuable capital allocation service to the market. Jonathan believed in the mission. Well, mostly anyway. Make markets more efficient. They weren’t a high frequency trading shop skimming pennies off of each transaction by being fast. They weren’t doing arbitrage. They were a market intelligence service. They knew where capital should be allocated before the market did, and in the grand scheme of things, they charged so little for their service. Most of the tricks were standard. The same run of the mill models everyone in the industry was using. But they felt that their differentiator was always remembering that the market doesn’t obey physical laws. Technical analysis is complete bullshit. This is a simple betting game played against other agents. Which is the line of thinking that led to the RPS project. RPS stood for rock-paper-scissors. A game with a simple Nash equilibrium. One-third, one-third, one-third. Deviate at all from that strategy, and your opponent can exploit you. But if your opponent isn’t playing that strategy, you have to deviate to exploit them. Shortly after MRI machines were invented, people started using them to see if they could read minds. They’d put someone in an MRI and give them two buttons, say a red and a blue. Of course the machine knew which button you would press before you pressed it. But what was crazier is that the machine knew which button you would press before you were even aware of your choice. The obvious follow up question is, how much before? Seconds was very believable. But could you know as soon as the subject walked in the room? At the time there wasn’t really a way to explore this. Aside from the 55% prior on red, there wasn’t much more to say. Rock-paper-scissors was basically the same game. Humans do have unequal priors, preferring rock at 35.4%. But is it possible that someone was a scissors type guy? Maybe you could read their social media posts and tell. Maybe you could just tell by looking at their face. The goal of the RPS project was to become perfect at rock-paper-scissors. And the results were very promising. The computer had a win rate of 86%, with a first round win rate of 54%. Once you were playing multiple games it was easy, but Jonathan was particularly proud of the first round win rate. However, 54% wasn’t close to 100%. It was better than random, sure. But this showed diminishing returns. Maybe the data just wasn’t there. Maybe you had to look inside to spot a scissors type guy. The new research direction was outfitting the room with SQUIDs, very sensitive magnetometers capable of measuring fields in the femtotesla range. The rules for the project disallowed things that were obvious and bulky like MRIs. But anything that could be put in a normal room was fair game. It was Monday and the more junior people had been there working all weekend. Jonathan had taken his wife and son camping. When he got to the office, he was ambushed as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. “You have to try it,” said Tom with the energy of a kid seeing presents on Christmas morning. Tom was 17, also an IMO Gold winner, and probably the brightest guy on the team. He didn’t go to college, he came straight to work at Operant. Real LeBron energy. Jonathan stepped into the room. He played scissors. He lost. He played scissors again. He lost. He played rock. He lost. He played paper. He lost. He went back to scissors. He lost. He played scissors again. He lost. He stepped back to take a breath. He played rock. He lost. He played rock again. He lost. He walked out the room. Tom handed him a piece of paper. At the top it had the date and 10:09 AM, and had SSRPSSRRE on it. 10:09 was when he walked into the room, and those were all the moves he played. “What’s this E?” “That’s end. It’s when you’d walk out of the room.” “So are you saying…it predicted all of this before I even played one game?” Tom shrugged, “If it knows all the predictions are going to be correct, why does it need any feedback?”

I had watched enough true crime to know that you should never talk to the police. And I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that I was different. While I felt like I knew the interrogation tactics in and out, they were repeat customers of that interaction. I wasn’t going to call. I was going to ignore it. I’m not getting Reid techniqued. Why did they ask for me? This house was owned by my mother, how do they even know I live here? Wait who am I kidding, of course they know. I went to high school here, governments have records of that kind of thing. But still, why ask for me? Another thing was odd. We lived in Brooklyn, aka Kings County. Not Nassau County. These guys must have driven all the way here on a Saturday night. I felt like I was being watched. They wouldn’t drive all the way here to just leave a business card. I felt trapped in the house. Like they were a mountain lion on a rock perch and I was the prey in the valley below. They had the high ground and I didn’t know what they could see. But this was crazy, I didn’t do anything! Should I call them? Figure out what they want? No! That’s exactly what they want. They know I feel like this. This is exactly what they are going for. Another system carefully crafted based on years and years of “user feedback” designed to manipulate you into doing what it wants. But what if I’m doing what they want right now? Maybe they don’t want me to call. Maybe the real goal is to figure out what I do next. Watching and hoping I’ll go check on the body or something. But there wasn’t a body! If I did commit a crime this would all be a lot easier, I’d know why they were here and what they wanted and could plan my next move accordingly. I opened another Bud Light, took my clothes off, and got into bed. Even though there was nobody else home, I kept the sound off on the porn. Just in case they were listening. After I finished, I felt a bit more calm. Dude get a grip, all they did was leave a business card. Coming out of the paranoid spiral a bit, I realized what it must be about. It must have had to do with my Dad’s meeting. That was in Long Island, aka Nassau County. Probably some dumb financial crap. My mother was out with her friends in Manhattan, but she’d be home tonight and maybe she knew what the meeting was. It was now twenty to nine and I texted Brian. He’s like yea bro Dave just got here come through. And you still have that case of Bud Light? I put the beers in a backpack. Is this what the detective planned? Maybe I was playing right into the plot; arrest me for underage possession of alcohol and then get me to talk about what I knew. But I didn’t even know anything! This whole thing was stupid. I thought about how I got the beers, wondering if the whole thing was somehow a set-up. Totally nonsense thought. Kids buy beer with fake IDs all the time. When I got to Brian’s everything was normal. I walked around the back of his house and opened the screen door to his basement. There were three leather couches in a U-shape, two of which were sparsely occupied by Brian and Dave. I took my place on the third empty one and put my backpack on the center ottoman. “Pretty cool, right? Yea I found it in my Dad’s old stuff.” said Brian, referring to the inflated bag atop a device labeled Volcano sharing the ottoman with my backpack. “What is it?” “Bro it’s like an old vape. You put the weed in and plug it in to the wall.” He detached the cloudy bag from the device and demonstrated. If you pushed on the mouthpiece, it let air through and you could breathe in the vaporized drug. “It’s like a bong but chill.” I inhaled. This probably wasn’t smart with how paranoid I was from the interaction earlier, but I felt safe in the basement. It was a summer night, I was with friends, I had drank beer. Life was good. Dave showed us this reel. It was a mouse in a maze, and it started from the mouse’s perspective. Kind of like a skater cam, wow these things could scurry. Then it zoomed out so you could see the maze from the perspective of the experimenter. Then seeing the back of his head looking down at the maze, cutting to sped up dashcam video of him driving home from work. Zooming out again with a sparkling line showing his route through the grid of city streets. AI has done wonders for these video transitions. Maybe this whole video was AI. “What if we’re the mouse,” said Dave in the most stereotypical stoner voice. He’d always find shit like this, in that way that when you are high the thought seems really deep. But if you think about it more it’s nonsense, like that mouse is in a maze constructed by humans, and even if it doesn’t always feel like it, the society we live in is jointly constructed by all of us. Brian showed a video of two girls at some Mardi Gras bead type event licking one ice cream cone. He told us he wasn’t a virgin but I didn’t really believe him. It was a bit after midnight and it was time to go home. I hadn’t really thought about the interaction from earlier, but I started to again when I got outside. It was a half mile walk back home; I was grateful to hear all the noises of the city. Even though I couldn’t see it, it reminded me that there was a society out there. My mom’s car wasn’t in the driveway. Maybe she met a guy. Nothing too out of the ordinary. I unlocked the door, closed it behind me, locked both the knob and the deadbolt, went upstairs into my room, locked that door, and with the blanket of those three locks, a bunch of beers, and a couple hits of the Volcano, drifted off to sleep.

I hadn’t lost my virginity yet. And it wasn’t for lack of trying; it seemed like the rest of my generation was no longer interested in sex. On some level, I understood where they were coming from, the whole act did seem kind of pointless. But after a few beers, that wasn’t how my mind was working. I turned 19 last week. Dad flew in from Idaho, and it was the first time he was in the house I shared with my mother. He left when I was 12, and it was always apparent that parenting wasn’t the top thing on his mind. There was some meeting on Long Island. That’s probably why he was there, in addition to the fact he knew mom wouldn’t make him sleep on the couch. He had many reasons to be in New York that weren’t me. My birthday was just a flimsy pretense. He’d worked on Wall Street the whole time he was around, a quant. He wrote programs that made other people rich. But something happened to him right before he left. A crisis of conscience perhaps; he was spiraling for weeks, cursing the capitalist system, calling my mother a gold-digging whore (which was mostly true), and saying things needed to change. Then he packed a single backpack and left for Idaho. I visited him out there once my sophomore year. He had a camouflaged one room cabin in the middle of a spruce forest, but instead of the hunting or fishing stuff you might expect, the walls were adorned with electrical test equipment and various things that looked like they were out of a biology or chemistry lab. I didn’t know much about this stuff and that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about anyway. He wanted to talk about “man shit” like nature and women and not being life’s bitch. I tried to act like I did, but I didn’t really listen. All I remember is how eerily quiet the night was, I could hear every animal movement outside. My dad said you get used to it. Brian was having a party tonight. Well okay, party is a lofty way to describe it. He’d replaced the fluorescent lights in his mom’s basement with blacklights, and we’d go over there to drink beer and smoke weed and sit around on our phones and scroll. And sometimes someone would laugh at something and share with the group. I had a case of Bud Light left over from the last party and drank two of them today. Hence the thinking about sex and not thinking that thinking about sex was stupid. People wouldn’t be going over there for a few more hours, so I laid in my bed, drank, and loosely beat off to YouTube. Celebrity gossip, internet gossip, speedrun videos, nothing even arousing. I liked the true crime videos about the hot female teachers who slept with their students. Yea yea yea terrible crime and they all act holier than thou about what if the genders were reversed, but the genders weren’t reversed. Maybe they just don’t want to get demonetized. There were never women at these parties. Okay maybe one or two. But nobody ever slept with them or much thought about them that way. They were the agendered mass like the rest of us. Fellow consumers, not providers. Fuck I should just go visit a hooker. I didn’t know much about that, were hookers real? I’d never met one, and there wasn’t a good way to find out about stuff like this anymore. The Internet was pretty much all “advertiser friendly” now, declawed, sanitized. Once the algorithms got good enough and it was technically easy to censor, there was nothing holding them back. It wasn’t actually censored, it would just redirect you elsewhere. And if you didn’t pay careful attention, you wouldn’t even notice it happening. I tried asking ChatGPT about hookers and it told me to call them sex workers. And this was kind of triggering. Who the fuck does this machine think it is? But then I was lost on this tangent, the algorithms got a rise out of me and I went back to comfort food YouTube. Look this guy beat Minecraft starting with only one block. The doorbell rang. This always gives me anxiety. And it was particularly anxiety inducing since I was the only one home. Normally I could just know that the door of my room was locked and someone else would get it and this would be a downstairs issue. But it was just me at home. My heart rate jumped. I waited for it to ring again, but prayed that it wouldn’t. Please just go away. But sure enough, it rang again. I went to my window, my room was on the second floor. There was a black Escalade in the driveway that I hadn’t seen before, and I could see two men at the door. They were wearing suits. I ducked as to make sure they wouldn’t look up at me, making as little noise as possible. Peering over the window sill I could see one opening the screen door, and it looked like he stuck something to the main door. My heart was beating even faster now. It was Saturday night, why were there two men in suits? And why were they here? It felt longer, but 3 minutes later they drove off. I waited another 3 for good measure, just watching the clock on my computer until it hit 6:57. I doubled checked out the window to make sure they were actually gone, and crept down the stairs to retrieve whatever they left on the door. It was a business card, belonging to a “Detective James Reese” of the Nassau County Police. And on the back of the card, there was handwriting. “John – call me” John was my name.

In my previous post, I advocate turning against the unproductive. Whenever you decide to turn against a group, it’s very important to prevent purity spirals. There needs to be a bright line that doesn’t move. Here is that line. You should be, on net, producing more than you are consuming. You shouldn’t feel bad if you are producing less than you could be. But at the end of your life, total it all up. You should have produced more than you consumed. We used to make shit in this country, build shit. It needs to stop. I have to believe that the average person is net positive, because if they aren’t, we’re already too far gone, and any prospect of a democracy is over. But if we aren’t too far gone, we have to stop the hemorrhaging. The unproductive rich are in cahoots with the unproductive poor to take from you. And it’s really the unproductive rich that are the problem. They loudly frame helping the unproductive as a moral issue for helping the poor because they know deep down they are unproductive losers. But they aren’t beyond saving. They just need to make different choices. This cultural change starts with you. Private equity, market manipulators, real estate, lawyers, lobbyists. This is no longer okay. You know the type of person I’m talking about. Let’s elevate farmers, engineers, manufacturing, miners, construction, food prep, delivery, operations. Jobs that produce value that you can point to. There’s a role for everyone in society. From productive billionaires to the fry cook at McDonalds. They are both good people. But negative sum jobs need to no longer be socially okay. The days of living off the work of everyone else are over. We live in a society. You have to produce more than you consume.

Billionaires, am I right? Immigrants, am I right? It’s going to be so painful to watch. Billionaires will go away. Immigrants will go away. The problems will continue to get worse. The problem is the unproductive. The rich unproductive and the poor unproductive. The finance middle-man and welfare recipient. The real estate agent and the person on disability. The person with a fake job. Anyone who purposefully creates complexity for others. The obstructionists. Rent seekers. Anyone who lobbies against others getting so they can have relatively more. Broken systems that elevate zero sum losers. Why can’t we all turn against them? The first step is recognizing this is the problem. I don’t know why most people don’t see it.