Since moving to San Francisco, the question I’ve become most interested in is: where do the researchers spend their Friday nights and Saturdays?
The more serious way to frame the question is, what ideology is upstream of the people who are building these machines of intelligence that will reshape society?
A few weeks ago I was listening to Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp’s podcast Sharp Tech - it’s one of my favorite tech talk shows that feels like you’re part of a fun hang and not some over-orchestrated VC backed new media project (Acquired checks this box too). In this episode, Ben Thompson launches into what I think is the most legendary heated, under-appreciated, rant on Sharp Tech history - about the righteousness and ideology behind Anthropic’s release of Fable 5:
Everything they do, they convince themselves is for safety. And it also just happens to be perfect for their business… this is the most powerful sort of corporate brainwashing, where everything you do that’s good for your business is also good for the world.
There’s an old GM line: “what’s good for GM is good for America”. Apple is the king at this, they tell themselves again and again that “everything we do is for the user and it also happens to be great for Apple.”
And by the way, this is brilliant leadership. What is company culture? Culture is pulling people in the direction that’s good for the business in a way that people don’t feel is transactional. You convince yourself that you’re not doing this for the money, you’re doing this to save the world.
You know, people who are righteous and saving the world deserve to make money. The whole EA thing of I have to make money so I can give it to good causes like saving shrimp or whatever… it is the most hilarious thing... it is the sort of rationalization that only truly smart people can come up with. And this is why smart people are mostly insane, because they can rationalize anything.
This (Fable 5) is a beautiful example of this. They’ve convinced themselves for safety reasons that they need to collect all data.
From Five Questions on WWDC 2026, Fable 5 and Its Guardrails, What Anthropic Has in Common with Apple (it starts at 53:58)
Ben Thompson ends the rant with this iconic line that has been living in my head since then: In the name of our lord and savior, safety.
AI safety and the comeback (it never left) of effective altruism has taken on a religious quality. I enjoyed the recent New York Magazine piece on effective altruism, particularly this line that calls out the irony of where spending is going:
Ironically, the thing that many effective altruists want to do with their AI wealth to do the most good is fund organizations working to make sure AI is developed responsibly.
Assuming that Monday to Friday is mostly taken up by the demanding pressures of competing in this AI race, I have to assume that these discussions of AI safety and giving well are being held on Friday night and Saturdays. Where are these discussions happening? Who are the anointed chosen ones that we can trust to make sure AI is developed responsibly? Should it be a private company, or an influential organization upstream of the private company, the government, or a multi-national consortium?
Others have noted that there should be more boots-on-the-ground anthropological reporting around this scene – I’ve had a number of conversations about these topics over the last month, and I must caveat the rest of this post by saying that it’s heavily anecdotal and I certainly have no answers, just more open questions. If you have any answers to these questions, I’d love to chat, or even better, you should write about it.
Did you wake up a loser?
My favorite meme from this AI media cycle is from Jensen Huang’s interview with Dwarkesh. Assuming you don’t watch every 2 hour AI podcast, I’ll catch you up: Dwarkesh is challenging the premise of whether Nvidia should be selling chips to China, which can speed up China’s progress, and potentially become a threat to US hegemony in AI. Dwarkesh makes a point that Tesla sold EVs in China, iPhones sold in China, and China copied them to make great cars and phones.
Jensen rejects the premise and fires back:
The premise that even if we competed in China that we’re going to lose that market anyways…
You’re not talking to someone who woke up a loser. That loser attitude, that loser premise, makes no sense to me.
We are not a car.
It’s really an amazing sequence, I highly recommend watching the extended ~5 minutes here, starting at 1:16:13. After Jensen’s now iconic we are not a car line, it’s clear that Dwarkesh senses Jensen is irritated, and he retreats and suggests they move on. I laughed a lot more than I should have when Jensen says in deadpan: “You don’t have to move on. I’m enjoying it. Yeah. *chuckles* Yeah.”
I asked a new friend who is adjacent to some of these rationalist/post-rationalist communities in the Bay Area - can you paint the scene of what it’s like to attend one of these gatherings? They paused for a second and then said something like: “hmm.. conventional society might call them losers”. Of course, take this with a heavy grain of salt because it’s second hand, and is almost certainly too harsh and reductionist.
At Columbia, every undergrad takes a philosophy reader course called Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, colloquially known as CC. I had many enjoyable memories in CC, I think in retrospect the whole tuition might have been worth it for just that one year of class. Two fond moments from this class stick out in particular:
First memory: During the second semester, we got to Nietzsche and were introduced to the concept of an Übermensch, which in modern day terms roughly translates to a “Chad” (the ideal, transcendent, individual). I remember raising my hand in class and asking a kind of an obnoxious question: was Nietzsche a loser? Were any of these philosophers charismatic? Did they have love lives? Didn’t Nietzsche go insane and suffer mental breakdowns towards the end of his life?
I think these philosophers are very impressive, and we have much wisdom to glean from the primary texts, but my hot take is that at least some subset of them had a bit of a loser attitude. Karl Marx’s father Heinrich wrote this in a letter to his 18-year-old son in 1837:
Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word… this embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you?
Do you think Father Marx was calling Kid Karl a loser? From what I understand there was one (1) philosopher who was charismatic, perhaps too charismatic, a maybe problematic womanizer - Albert Camus. A physiognomy based evaluation of Camus would help me understand his absurdist philosophy, where his meaning making is constructed with worldly delights. Let’s play a vanity game of Hot or Not, philosopher edition:
It’s clear that the worldview of certain philosophers is shaped by how they experience the world, for example, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan was shaped by the backdrop of the dark and bloody English Civil War in 1651. By extension, it should be clear that the worldview of certain researchers or leaders in the industry is shaped by how they experience the world.
Maybe that’s why at least one of the influential organizations that have resonated with the researcher crowd leans into the visceral human experience of pleasure on demand. Maybe my poor-man’s version of effective altruism should be to get friends to spend more time touching grass.
Second memory: One of the funniest moments of my time in undergrad was in this 16 person Socratic style philosophy class, where I remember discussing Marx around a long table. In the middle of our discussion of the evils of capitalism and alienation of labor, a fellow student wearing a suit and tie quietly packed his bright red Marx reader and headed for the door, acknowledging our professor on his pre-approved class departure.
You can easily walk out of a lecture hall, but you can’t depart a 16 person class without everyone noticing. Our professor broke down laughing and called out the irony. “Jeremy here is leaving class early to go to his Bank of America superday interview”, he said while grinning. ”Let’s wish him luck, and make sure you have your Marx reader hanging out of your backpack for your interviewer to see”
In class, we critique the big corporations doing evil, after class, we schedule coffee chats with investment banks and consulting firms. The sharpest students with the best understanding of Marx (usually high school debaters) were the same ones who were the presidents of AKPsi, the leaders of the consulting clubs, those with the elite capitalist internships.
Perhaps the true value of this liberal arts education is learning to code switch to pass a certain challenging behavioral culture interview. Would you give up all your equity in the name of AI safety? The finance bros who passed this interview have got to be lying through their teeth. Perhaps we are entering the era of the performative male altruist: Matcha, Nick Land, and Ketamine.
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A quick aside: many years later I’d take a page out of the philosopher’s dating handbook, where my girlfriend Jenn still gives me shit for including a Nietzsche quote as one of the responses on my Hinge profile. Yes, it was cringe, but hey, it worked for me.
It takes a certain kind of girl to see a boy quote Nietzsche on his Hinge profile and still decide that they’d go on the first date. In my defense, I still do believe in the quote - I wrote that I believe in Nietzschean perspectivism, which is basically that there’s no single one correct view of the world, and the more angles and view points you can look at something, the more full of a view you get. Now that I think of it, perspectivism is an argument for why a multi-model world should and will always exist… Codex writes my code, Fable reviews it, and vice versa, and two is better than one.
Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their labor:
If either of them falls down,
one can help the other up.
Ecclesiastes 4:9
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I’m interested in the ideology and incentives that drive us to make life and career decisions – how do corporate firms convince students how to spend their summers and early careers? The relative prestige of different firms and institutions says a lot about what we value in society. One organization I was involved with after college proudly showcased that 25% of the Stanford graduating class had applied to their program. Is that a good thing? And no, I (unfortunately) did not work for Palantir.
Entzauberung, or The Disenchantment of the World
German sociologist Max Weber wrote in 1905 about how work took on a spiritual meaning under Calvinism, where worldly success was a sign of eternal salvation. This is where the term the Protestant work ethic comes from, where hard work and frugality was rewarded in the Protestant ideology.
There’s a word I’ve been hearing more and more amongst startup circles sharing what it’s like to work at this or that startup: “grindy”.
oh yeah, I’ve heard [startup made up of two words like Theoretical Intellect] is super grindy
Perhaps in 2026, we are living under the “avoid-the-permanent-underclass-grindy work ethic”
There’s another German word that Weber used that I think is quite apt in this time: Entzauberung, which roughly translates to “disenchantment of the world” – that modern society has replaced religious, magical and mystical explanations with rational, scientific, and bureaucratic ones. And by relying on rationality and reason rather than mystery, the world has been stripped of inherent spiritual meaning.
I think this rhymes with the motivated ideology of the Post-Rationalist. At the top, the world can look pretty woo-woo. I don’t think woo-woo is bad, but sometimes when crossed with certain cult-like practices or substances, it can get dangerous. If history has taught us one thing, we should know that fanaticism of increasingly influential and powerful individuals can take too many left turns.
AI 2040 says that the world is asleep at the wheel, and that we must hit pause on AI development, and maybe they’re right. But I think the other safety risk where we might be asleep at the wheel is the environments in which our friends and peers are spending their Friday nights and Saturdays.
In the words of Ben Thompson, all bad outcomes in history have been downstream of utopianism or smart people who think they know better than everyone else.
There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?
Ecclesiastes 2:24-25
From Leon Ware’s Why I Came to California (good song):
That is why I came to California
It’s the strangest groove that I have ever known
All the youth-seekers come to California
Following the fountain in their mind
thanks for this. laughed, thought, and everything in between. excited for more!