Reflections on a Quarter Century of Life

A Belief in the Individual

I have no shame in quoting this song.

“I am unwritten

Can't read my mind

I'm undefined

I'm just beginning

The pen's in my hand

Ending unplanned

Staring at the blank page before you

Open up the dirty window

Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find

Reaching for something in the distance

So close you can almost taste it

Release your inhibitions

Feel the rain on your skin

No one else can feel it for you

Only you can let it in

No one else, no one else

Can speak the words on your lips

Drench yourself in words unspoken

Live your life with arms wide open

Today is where your book begins

The rest is still unwritten”

- Natasha Bedingfield

Introduction

I’ve now been on this earth for 25 years. A quarter century. I’m no longer sure if I’m young or old. When you’re young, you feel that the world is big and difficult to understand. As you get older, you can make more sense of it and your place in it.

It is oddly difficult to understand who you are and the world. However, I think that makes it all the more important. Many people navigate life in a random walk. If you had a clear and determinate understanding of the world, you could navigate it with decisive ease and directness.

While it is very difficult to map the complexity of the world and our minds, humans are distinguished by their ability to do so. Where computers can map determinate space with significant data, humans should recognize that their remaining advantage in the world is to think for themselves and navigate ambiguity in complex domains. I propose Politzki’s Law as a principle to live by over the next quarter century.

What this song represents is that in an over-structured world that removes the need to think, we lose sight of the fact that these structures were often set arbitrarily. Questioning them is what makes us human. Just as the author who lets their subconscious genius flow by letting go of imposed restrictions, we should release our inhibitions. No one can think for you. You can continue to scaffold all of the structures of the world. Atop the highest mountain of the tallest existing structure, you can only come to the realization that you need to scaffold your own. Recognize this early, question all the structures, form your individual belief system. When it makes sense to do so and you trust it, live by it unapologetically. What makes us human is not our ability to fit into structure but to create our own.

One of the problems I aim to solve through Irreverent Capital is to destigmatize irreverence. In a rapidly changing and continually adapting world, we need to question existing structures and morality. What was true yesterday is not true today.

If I think about my life, the most meaningful things I have done were against the grain and along the path less traveled. In a world of infinite opportunity, abundance, and possibilities, why are we all barking up the same tree?

After looking inward and coming to these realizations, I ask us to look outward at the abstract cultural level. Why do you do the things you do? Are your decisions the result of comfort and ease, or are they the product of taking your destiny into your own hands, believing in the self, and striving for individual achievement. I believe in the individual in an over-abstracted, over-structured, and over collectivist world.

A Year of Complexity

I adopted writing as a way to think about many of the complex problems I was facing in my life and make sense of the chaos in early 2022. Holding all of these ideas in your head simply isn’t possible. At the end of 2023, I tried something new and summarized every essay that I had written up until that point to further distill these ideas into the big learnings.

To my surprise, this exercise was one of the most personally valuable things I had ever done. I was able to compress all of the complexity I had charted through 2023 into a personal belief system. You start to see recurring patterns in the way you think about things, there are hidden gems that get projected through your subconscious writing, and you can make novel connections between the essays’ themes.

At the time, this took me 2-3 full days of focus to do, which I spent printing out all of the writing, annotating, holding it in my memory, deriving the common threads from the synthesis of it all, and coming to new realizations about what I believe.

I decided to do that again this year, and I will probably make this a routine that I will do every year. However, this year it is proving to be a much larger exercise. As the amount of complexity I have mapped in 2024 has grown, so has the cost of forming these connections and synthesizing all of my beliefs and learnings. My essays themselves have gotten longer as I now see the world with increasing nuance.

Forming novel connections comes from the Default Mode Network (DMN), a part of the brain that I have become closer with as I turn 25. Recapping writings between 2022-2024, I see how it all comes together.

My miscalculation was in thinking that by doubling the size of my writings, that would double the amount of focused time that this would take. The reality is this there is a quadratic relationship between the amount of complexity and the cost of creating meaning from the chaos. In one of the machine learning projects I was working on some months ago, my program used a covariance matrix to compress the complexity. I find that this directly mirrors the problem I am facing editing this essay.

If you have 10 key ideas, that's 100 possible connections to consider. But if you double to 20 key ideas, you now have 400 possible connections.

In 2022, I was learning about startups for the first time and viewing these ideas from only my perspective, with some initial seeds being planted in viewpoints and self-understanding. In 2023, I dove deeper into ideas of self-understanding and connected them across new literature, while forming new beliefs relative to the world of finance and culture in NYC. In 2024, my experiences were extremely broad, connecting these individual beliefs and generalizing them across experiences, cultures, companies, people, structures. In 2025, we will double down on this more defined belief system and use it to navigate the ambiguity of life and entrepreneurship.

Early Life

Young Children

I’m not a father, but I imagine it's inspiring seeing your child witness the world for the first time in awe and wonder, before children become ingrained into existing structures and systems.

Young children naturally express their thoughts, desires, and creativity without the filters imposed by society. This unbridled expression allows children to explore their identities and understand the world around them.

There is a point in early adolescence where a child senses pressure to fit in. Peer pressure becomes more real. Teachers enforce rules. It’s no longer as funny to be running around making messes. Children likely begin to develop a natural desire to be loved and to fit in, conform, and respect authority. This phenomenon is seen in many coming-to-age movies.

It seems that this trend becomes more intense as you get older. It feels that it was at its most intense in Junior High. For instance, I remember getting made fun of for wearing high socks. What’s even funnier is this phenomena doesn’t appear to have just been local at Cary Junior High School.

Today, if you wear ankle socks, you look old. Human desire to fit in repeats over time in a flat circle of fashion.

My Very Early Age

It’s obviously very difficult to remember what you were like as a young kid, but you can get some insight from your parents and foggy memories.

I probably broke a lot of rules and was a bad kid at times. I used to go around kicking my dad’s friends in the nuts, and was encouraged to do so. But at the same time, I was probably a pretty good kid. I wouldn’t want to spend my grandfather’s money on games at the restaurant, because I felt it was more valuable in his pocket and it felt like it was the right thing to do to not take it. With the money I did get, I saved it rather than spent it. Like sour patch kids, sometimes we’re sour and sometimes we’re sweet. I get the sense that I had both low and high inhibitions in different ways. I think there’s probably something big to unpack there eventually.

I was probably a pretty insulated and introspective kid. I spent a lot of time reading. I also really enjoyed games that had a level of growth involved in them.

The Books I Read

• The Ranger’s Apprentice

• Among the Hidden

• Ender’s Game

• The Hunger Games

• Goosebumps

• Primers on psychology, economics, and neuroscience

• Etc.

There were constant themes of overcoming oppressive authority, science fiction, truth, trust, individuality, the importance of mentorship, strong values, small overcoming big through intelligence and stealth, growth through training rather than innate skill, and some practical areas of study that interested me.

The Games I Played

• Roller Coaster Tycoon

• Need for Speed

• Minecraft

• Fishy

• Grand National Racing Game

• Fallout

In all the games that I played, many of them had a common theme of growth. You start as the little fish and by eating the bigger fish you level up and can eat even bigger fish. There’s something very core to the human mind about growth. Even the games that weren’t only focused on growth, like the racing game and Minecraft, drew me in from the angle of getting better cars through trading them around, and Minecraft by plundering other factions, building a better base, engineering better mining infrastructure, etc. I prioritized intelligent growth. I remember choosing the traits of my character in Fallout, I chose 0 for everything and maxed out intelligence as high as I could.

There is a meme that Roller Coaster Tycoon inspired the private equity giants of today.

In summer camp and elementary school, I built trading empires and amassed a collection of mechanical pencils and Pokemon cards. Starting out with a few cards and pencils, and through ruthless trading strategies, I built the greatest mechanical pencil empire Maplewood Elementary had ever seen. I knew what the hottest pencils, grips, and erasers were and you were going to need to pay up to get them.

I supposedly drew a lot and wasn’t bad at it. That’s surprising today, as I struggle to read my own handwriting.

Classes

This was around 10 years old. I was in advanced math class and stuff like that, but I cheated a lot and didn’t pay attention. It probably didn’t seem like there was a big point and wasn’t very engaging. I used to be the class clown type, which is also hard for me to understand today. Somehow, that got extinguished and I became increasingly stoic, for better or worse.

At 10 years old, it still feels like you are following your natural inclinations and don’t have a looming expectation of fitting in.

Interests

The iPod was out by this time, and I remember being drawn to videos about high-dimensional space and quantum physics, somehow foreshadowing my interest in complexity and vector embeddings. I obviously didn’t understand any of it, but I was drawn to it when no one else was. I remember seeing videos of Martin Shkreli, and I perhaps took the wrong lesson from them. It was inspiring that he was doing big, interesting things at the intersection of biopharma and finance at such a young age. I would find myself working at the investment bank that he worked with and running into him in NYC a decade later in my life. It’s funny how things like that work.

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Around this time at this age, I remember wishing that there was a way to find out about these emerging technologies before they got big, like bitcoin. What were the magazines I could read? Where could I find them? It felt like these interests were alien at the time and like I was alone in wanting to learn more about them.

My family liked games like football, bands, racing, concerts, and other things that didn’t interest me. I was more drawn to ideas and would read instead.

Teenage Years

I don’t think there’s that much interesting insight to be drawn from these years. Still was not very engaged in school and spent most of my time with my friends playing football and basketball.

At around 12 years old, I became really addicted to playing soccer. I feel that this may have been the activity that captured my inner drive to grow, like in the fish game. My friends and I played every day. If they couldn’t, then I played alone. I still sucked, but I got a lot better.

Still at this time, where I was once a riled up, energetic, rule-breaker, I started moving away from activities like that. I had higher social inhibitions and risk aversion. It feels that this is part of the walls of societal rules closing in on you. Still went ding-dong ditching when the cops came and chased the kids around the block, but I never put myself in a position where you would get caught. We played a lot of night games like cops and robbers and ghosts in the graveyard, and those were good years. I wonder if kids still do stuff like that anymore. That was a world before we had flip phones, and that was probably a good thing.

I started becoming more solo as a person. I somehow didn’t conform in the same way that others did. Whereas before, I would always get off the bus and immediately play football with kids on the block, it became more true that now I would only go after finishing my homework. That seemed logical to me and was probably encouraged by my parents but for some reason that seemed odd and didn’t make sense to others.

I was a bit awkward, but not crazy awkward. I was friends with most groups in the school. Everyone gets made fun of in these years and I don’t think I got made fun of any more or less than any others, but the response to this was different. I learned to just go in another direction. If you get rejected and not picked for 5s in basketball, well simply play a different game or start a new team. This feels very logical once again, but you notice a lot of people got upset and really tried to climb uphill against these things. These days continued to reflect a developing playbook of what to do in terms of rejection by a system. Where the majority would either not play basketball in the face of rejection or would get upset, it did not upset me. I believed I controlled my own destiny. I have an instinctual disregard for the gatekeepers and rules of life. These are faint instincts in your early years and you still feel slight rejection.

I had lived in many places by this point, as we moved around a bit. That may have had an impact on how easy it is for me to pick up and move today. I don’t need much and am pretty adaptable to different environments.

High School

My life took a pretty hard right turn in high school, and I made a buzzer beater decision to turn my life around. I remember it was when I got a C on my freshman year Honors Geometry test. Something about that horrified me. After looking at schools like Yale’s admission where I was basically already out of the running scared me to hell, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

At this moment, it wasn’t that I believed in the high school system, or even the university system–I didn’t. But these tests mattered. It felt this was a system that if I got rejected by, it mattered. There was no changing it. I have an instinctual disregard for systems, but I’m not an idiot. There are some fights you can’t win. I got As after that point. In systems that didn’t matter, I used the same playbook from my earlier years. My guiding quote was Robert Frost’s in taking the path less traveled.

Where a child is usually given the freedom to explore their interests, this feels like the first time the walls start closing in on you, and you are forced to play the game. It seems like a bad system since it floods everyone towards the same path and doesn’t give them much choice in what they pursue other than the classes you can take. Everyone is competing on GPA and test scores. Life is much broader than these metrics. This was my first realization that the world is over-structured and that somehow acts as a plug replacing students’ need to think for themselves. I always questioned other students' seeming lack of questioning things.

In retrospect, I was noticeably very drawn to complexity. I got better grades in the harder classes than I did in the easier classes. I get bored by the lack of complexity. I was drawn to abstract literature heavily loaded with symbolism like The Scarlet Letter and Crime and Punishment. I overloaded my course schedule and took every AP class I could, with a focus on objective, truth-bound, STEM classes. I was also able to get an exception and replace my gym class and lunch class with even more classes. I worked harder in my sophomore year of high school than any other year of my life.

I learned that the more responsibilities I piled on myself, the more I was able to accomplish. It somehow forced you to be more productive. I joined the chess club, played soccer, tennis, basketball, was on the board of the National Honor Society committee, and maintained social relationships. I wasn’t the top of my class, but I was up there. In retrospect, I suppose that kind of makes sense though. I was constantly sleep deprived and was somehow unaware that those around me weren’t taking the course load that I was. I studied more chess than I did for classes. I stretched myself extremely thin, but I still ended up in the same schools as them, although I was more well-rounded. I didn’t fit in any boxes and fit in all of them at the same time. I wrote in a sophomore essay that I should start narrowing my focus even then. But my teacher left a comment in red ink, “not yet.” I thank him and think he was right.

I was always weirdly chaotic. I was the little kid with a 500 pound backpack that was doing his homework while running through the hallways at mach 5 in a frantic mess. I could back this up logically. Running is more efficient. It’s faster and you get a workout in at the same time.

There were early patterns of distinctive ways of thinking about things. I’ve written before that I was a very instinct-driven and aggressive chess player. I disdained simplicity. I was drawn to complexity and crazy sacrifices. This was in direct contrast with friends who preferred theory and simple methods of playing. I followed Mikhail Tal as an inspiring chess player, known for his creative, chaotic style. This isn’t actually a very effective strategy in chess, keep it simple stupid, but I still enjoyed these games more. In soccer, I seemed to have enjoyed nutmegging people, rather than actually being any good at the game.

“To play for a draw, at any rate with white, is to some degree a crime against chess.” - Tal

Another extremely core trait that I always remember thinking was odd was that it seemed no one around me was doing anything for themselves. We learned about intrinsic motivation in psychology class. And it felt I was the only one in the class who would read the textbook out of genuine interest. In my senior year, grades mattered less, so I would purposefully not study for my calculus tests. I enjoyed solving math problems from scratch, rather than memorizing processes, which the education system seemed to prioritize.

I never really thought much about it, but it is a pretty cool accomplishment that I did so well in chess. Many of the people I played with had been playing their entire lives. I taught myself chess in my freshman year of high school and went undefeated in conference every year and placed 3rd in state at my respective table.

I’m not very good at blitz chess. I always found that I was a more patient, disciplined, thoughtful, and calculated player. System 1 thinking is blitz. System 2 is standard play. I’m more of a system 2 thinker throughout most of my life probably. I had the patience and ability to really think through positions and see around corners back then.

State chess was one of the highlights of my life. There’s something about the pure analytical nature of chess. Competitive and grounded in truth and if you take it seriously is the highest form of eustress I’ve found in my life. I found it extremely fun, and I enjoyed crushing my opponents. I made 2 or 3 kids cry and nothing has brought me such joy since. There was another moment that foreshadowed irreverence. I was playing the best player I had ever played in state and I was playing an accelerated attack against the sicilian. He knew the line perfectly and was also probably better than me. Before I was about to lose,

I asked, “what’s it called when it’s not a win or a loss?”

“Draw? He replied.”

“I accept.”

He cried, the coach erupted, and I got unsportsmanlike conduct. Supposedly, everyone was talking about that–glad I could leave my mark on Illinois Chess. I don’t regret it at all. I can’t remember which kid he was, but it was one of the kids in the orange.

Best finish in CG history

Family Grounding

I sometimes think about whether I was overly entranced with ideas and intellectual pursuits. I didn’t want a car, because I didn’t want to have to deal with it. I didn’t want to get a job so I could focus on school. I didn’t want to take out the trash. I was too bratty about those things. I didn’t care about money. My friend who worked the bag room at the golf course I caddied at worked every weekend and made 15k over the summer, and I figured that was a waste of time and peanuts in the long run. Honestly, I was right.

But in retrospect, I probably should have worked more and would have still been fine and that was me being a brat. I worked as a referee at 12 years old and a caddie at 14+ and several internships through my college years. I was never good at any of these jobs. I didn’t care and didn’t see the point. Money never really interested me, and I valued my own time too much. I may have been right. It’s crazy to me that I used to carry someone else’s bag for 4-5 hours in the heat and make $30 from some cheap old guys. I never really did find a job I was good at or liked.

I think my family was right in humbling me. Probably thinking “who do you think you are? Take out the trash.” But sometimes I think that you should really value your time highly and question what you are doing. I’m not sure who was right here. Maybe the early midwest manual labor is what humbles you into realizing the importance of hard work and intelligence over brute force. One should likely have gone through early days of manual labor to appreciate the value of money and hard work. One without the other is where you are lost.

Progression and the things I tended to do

If I look back on these days, you can begin to see these patterns of instinctive disagreeableness, high openness to experience, extreme interest in ideas, high energy, curiosity, high ambition, competitiveness, and what I feel to be most distinctive–intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is likely a loaded trait, and one that empowers calculated irreverence and thinking for oneself. However, even in middle school I viewed it to be my most valuable trait. Why did others around me not have this trait?

These faint signals of character have become more concrete as I’ve aged. While I have an instinctual irreverence for existing systems that I feel to be arbitrary and oppressive, I also have a strict seriousness in how I approach truthful, trustworthy systems that are logically grounded or too big to change. I’ve always felt like I somehow got that sternness from my german side and the more light fun energy from my cuban side, and that those two are somehow really rare in combination, and I find myself going through odd polar phases of each.

If you are only an aggressive and intuitive chess player, you will never win. You need to be default calculated and simple, but opportunistically aggressive. I will be loyal until I no longer trust the system. If a system rejects me, it is often the system that is wrong and I simply build a new and better system.

It’s not that I didn’t like structure. I am fine with structure, but it has to be my own structure. This is a lesson that recurs throughout my life.

Early signs of odd individualism

It’s also very helpful to view these individual traits relative to the environment you grow up in. Some faint signals of character were very uncommon and unique in the midwest, so they were suppressed. Like a kid getting told the rules by a teacher, you absorb what other people think is interesting.

My faint signals for ambition, curiosity, complexity, growth, creativity, science, and technology were very odd growing up. But I would later end up in environments where they were more common, and those cultures would embolden those aspects of my character. My life has been a series of stages of development like that. In addition, there were certain traits that I learned in the midwest like authenticity, genuineness, trust, humility, and just seeing people as people, that I can’t seem to find on the coasts, and that I carry with me to this day and refuse to budge on. I’ve recently tied this to the idea of cathexes, where you disentangle and combine these unique characteristics into a belief system and how you view yourself. Once you have an organized idea of who you are, you can make better decisions on how you should operate and what environments you should put yourself in. That is the point of this essay.

In addition to these natural proclivities, there was always a tendency for me to either operate under my own intrinsic motivation (i.e. learn something because I found it interesting) or to follow only just enough of the rules to get by. I was neither a kid who would blindly follow the instructions of my teachers and parents or who would follow none of the rules at all. Society wants you to be the first category of rule-followers, but as I’ve gotten older, and environments have become more ambiguous, where there are no rules, I’ve found this characteristic to be increasingly valuable. Irreverence towards arbitrary rules. The importance is being able to identify arbitrary structures and make decisions based on your own personal belief system. There has always been a dance between following the rules and knowing when to break them. This is slightly coupled with the comfort in my own belief system and skin. I have no expectations about my life. I have little desire to be understood.

I notice a trend of divergent thinking. The education system punishes divergent thinking and rewards convergent thinking and multiple choice questions over open-ended responses, so this was a disadvantage. There’s always this saying that the B students work for the A students and the C students run the companies. I think this is partially true, but the generalist A students who can think for themselves run everything. In collectivist, determinate, and structured environments, individualism is not helpful–you want stability. But cultures of growth demand individualism and freedom of thought.

Individualism is super problematic in structured environments. I feel like I need to question and understand everything in my own view of the world. I’m really bad at asking for help and communicating. I overthink things. I don’t fit in anywhere, etc. I am always itching to diverge from the trodden path.

Chess was a microcosm of my individualism. I taught myself everything and got good enough to beat everyone around me. The kids that had classes when they were younger weren’t intrinsically motivated to get better. Chess is harder to learn when you are older, but I beat them regardless. Still, it would have been valuable to have a consistent coach to help me break through plateaus in tandem with my inner drive to grow. But like many things like this, it feels that people adopt coaches as a band aid and replacement for thinking for themselves, and that is what hurts them.

College

Similarly, I thought college was a stupid idea–I didn’t want to go. I considered jumping straight into business. But I also thought that college was still that same unbreakable force that acted both as an insurance policy against failure and somehow a necessary stamp of approval for others. It was probably the right decision to go, but who knows? 4 years and tuition is a big opportunity cost.

Before college, and even early in high school, I remember being extremely deep in the weeds planning several years out. I questioned what my life would be like in medical school. I questioned whether I had what it took. In high school, it feels like you can succeed by just having a high IQ and many around me floated by. Would it be like that again? I thought I might fail out if I tried to become a doctor. There has been a repeated cycle of similar questions that I’ve had in my life of whether I had what it takes. They are very important questions to ask, however, I never realized at the time that I was one of the few people who really cared to ask those questions deeply, and that that was actually the trait that would set me apart. I have another friend who just finished medical school. We were both weirdly neurotic and obsessive about these questions and planning around them. In the years to come, I began to learn that the world is not an IQ test. The world is run by people who actually do the thing and work impossibly hard at it.

College marks many peoples’ first step into adulthood and indeterminacy. I found that my intrinsic motivation and independent thinking was increasingly valuable in this unstructured environment that you had more freedom to explore, experiment, poke, and alter. I saw that many of the people who had little intrinsic motivation in high school sputtered out. Or those who only broke the rules similarly didn’t do well. Like most things in life, you need to straddle the line and think for yourself to grow at the fastest rate possible in the system.

I’m pretty sure that the University of Illinois was the only school that I applied to as a business major, because their business program was harder to get into and I figured I could just switch out. The rest of the schools, I applied as a chemistry or biology major. The plan was to study accounting pre-med. Because business is a more unique (and easier) major, it would be easier to stand out in the med school application process and allow me to have more free time to explore interests on campus. It would also provide me with the language of business when I believed I would ultimately open my own practice. Unknowingly, I have always been optimizing for business in the back of my head. I chose the University of Illinois, because they provided me with great scholarships, and I liked the idea that you could make a big school small but not the other way around–another good decision. My family suggested the option to do a community college for the first two years or a cheaper college. I didn’t do that because I wanted to learn from great people and think that was also a good decision. College was surprisingly front-loaded.

My first semester of college paralleled my first semester of high school. I didn’t pay attention, maybe partied too much, and ended up with a lackluster GPA. Again, I told myself I wouldn’t let that happen again, and I did well again. I set my sights on the Investment Banking Academy. At my school, if you were in business, you were basically tracked towards consulting or accounting. I tried both and hated both. The students who went into investment banking were seen as the most impressive in the school. I wanted that. This was realistically an availability bias thing. I was still interested in technology and innovation. I was selected into the school’s Hoeft Technology & Management program, which combined top students in engineering and business. In both cases, I did enough to get in the door. I got my internship in banking in a more competitive and ambitious NYC in an innovation focused bank and mostly disregarded school after that. Once again, I didn’t really fit in anywhere, yet fit in everywhere. I would use the rest of the time to make sure I got a return offer and focus on my interests entirely–another good decision.

I started two organizations. One was a quantitative investment org, Quant, and another was a software-as-a-medical device startup, Nephra. I bit off more than I could chew and mostly left others to work on Quant, while I focused on Nephra. These were the activities that defined my interests and belief systems, not my classes. These experimentations showed me what I truly found interesting, how to build things, and early signs of what my skills were–bringing people and ideas together in new ways.

College Startups from First Beliefs

Studying in high school, I would often try to solve a problem first by myself, before seeing the answer or the best practice. I found trying to start companies in college was a similar experience. It was the most amazing thing I did in my life, because I was able to see what I believed from my own mind, while having access to the resources and diverse talent in university. Often I was wrong, but when I jumped into corporate structures, it provided me with a personal belief system to reference against.

This experimentation likely wouldn’t have been possible after I graduated when people’s time is much more expensive. By not having money, it created an uphill battle learning how to inspire employees. But in some sense, that was a very powerful learning experience. You learn that management can be transactional or inspirational. Transactional is just paying people to get something done, and their heart won’t be in it. If you can pay someone and inspire them, their work product will be exceptional.

You see that in a world where people no longer think ideas matter, they do. Clear vision is everything. You realize that the few really great people outweigh the many mediocre people. You learn that you don’t know anything but no one else does either, even the professors, and you need to learn the science yourself. You learn that the world is malleable and you can shape it. You learn that you can teach yourself anything with a long enough time horizon. You learn focus matters. You learn again that few people have genuine intrinsic motivation but that you should value them heavily, especially if they’re aligned with you.

Failure

Through failure, you are humbled. But having that experience as context in the back of your head for the years to come was extremely valuable. I still have a chip on my shoulder from it. Failure is destructive and you should avoid it, but it guides, sharpens, and teaches you.

The last two years of college showed me how much I could accomplish and learn by myself in the free world. Like in high school, I wanted to not have to work after college. I wanted to make the venture successful so I didn’t need to work a job in banking. I could see far enough into the future that banking doesn’t actually get you anywhere–I wasn’t really sure I wanted to work in private equity or an investment fund or anything like that. Even those paths 10 years out seemed like they were a sort of risk mitigation technique or delayed life plans. I wanted to do exactly what I was interested in and just be successful at that. I had a strong desire to make the venture successful. This extreme level of intrinsic motivation and ambition was obvious to me, but I couldn’t find anyone else on campus who felt this way–everyone wanted the job at Google, not questioning what it led to. It was frustrating that I couldn’t push forward and succeed. Even in the startup community, there was a sense that people would crave for structures like accelerators and startup competitions to nowhere. People mistook movement with progress. In a race to raise money through external validation, people lost sight of the fact that the whole point of this was to build a business that makes money.

I found it so difficult to find good people who truly cared that I basically had to do it all myself. This actually proved to be extremely good. By seeing all lines of work of a company, you are exercising true ownership and individualism. This was something I never truly learned in school–you could always skate by to some extent and didn’t have to own long-term consequences of actions. But now, where there was a bottleneck, there I was. I realized the importance of engineering and learned the foundations of machine learning. No one will ever be there to save you in the early days of any new thing and this was a pure lesson in that.

I started Politzki Ventures. I now knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. Where I couldn’t work a job and like it in high school or even college internships, this felt more attuned with my nature. In some ways, it probably feels like a form of self-expression, learning, and growth. It was something I was intrinsically motivated to do, so work felt natural. Even if I didn’t make any money in those years, I liked that you had equity. Salaries feel domesticating.

Banking

Once again, banking paralleled my experiences in my first semester of high school and college. I feel that I started with one foot out the door. Which was actually problematic and made me not the best analyst. Truthfully, I loved the work and the people. I was overly curious and too opposed to structure, but there were strong lessons about execution, finance, and cultural ambition that I took away from my time in the city.

It felt that if I was going to be an entrepreneur, it wouldn’t be possible in biotech. The industry culturally looks down on outsiders without PhDs and the massive regulatory burden creates impenetrable barriers to entry to young entrepreneurs, which I witnessed first hand working on Nephra. My instinctual irreverence would find this industry deeply frustrating and depressing.

Sometimes in banking, however, it felt like you were training to be the best email sender or learning the companies’ powerpoint template. These didn’t feel like skills I authentically cared about. Furthermore, they were arbitrary. Someone created them and a lot of time it comes down to personal preference of the MD. Pitch decks weren’t rooted in truth, they were rooted in sales. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not exactly the most likable person or smoothest talker.

I really enjoyed calls with management and seeing how they were thinking about their business and learning about innovative, bleeding-edge science. However, that felt like it was only 5% of the job. Once again, I asked myself how I could achieve my individual interests in a much more direct way. I don’t care about money. Why am I here? I was once again working a job for someone else, which I instinctively hate.

It felt that in the hyper-transactional and competitive culture of NYC, people no longer knew why they worked. Even at the level of an investor, you are abstracted away from providing value to the world and are more of a money provider or oiling the machine. Providing value to the village, a core part of human instinct, had been abstracted into money. People worked to live, not the other way around, and I felt that was off. Once again, what is value and how can we achieve it through a more direct means? Banking is a team sport, and I don’t really work well with others. I still couldn’t communicate my thoughts well and needed to see the big picture to function, rather than being slotted into creating materials that I didn’t have an idea of the bigger picture for.

Banking paid really well. I made more money than I knew what to do with. NYC felt like a machine that was impossible to afford and a lot of the money was still spent running in place with the rent. My 2016 rent in Champaign, IL was $350/room. I was paying $2400 for a small 1BR in NYC. I was working so much I didn’t get to enjoy the city. The math didn’t make sense if I wasn’t going to do it forever. I’m a simple guy.

The thing I miss deeply about NYC was the energy, competitiveness, and collective ambition of the city. The people I worked with were sharp. Ambitious people didn’t seem to exist in the midwest and finding people who emboldened my own ambition.

Shaper

Shaper Capital felt like it was the best job that I had to date. In banking, I had come to the internal understanding that I wanted to work a job that was more natural and purely aligned with my human instincts. Heavily inspired by The Genealogy of Morality and Zero to One, I wanted to make money while providing value to the world by doing something that would not get done but for me, that I wanted to do, and that I was philosophically aligned with. I still maintained many of my beliefs from college that the world is incredibly inefficient and that there were many problems to solve, but few people solving them. I also maintained that most investors don’t have any true internal convictions. The best way to win the deal is one of individual agency and to create it.

I remembered from college how many people are itching to join exciting new things but how few create them. That seemed to still be true, but it mattered that people who joined had individual agency.

One of the unforeseen realizations that I had from Shaper was that where banking pushed you into a box and into conformity with the expectations of your supervisors, startups encouraged curiosity, growth, learning, and creativity when helpful.

In fact, I had never been in an environment where curiosity was considered good in my entire life. It always felt like the instinctual odd outlet I had. Once again, super talented people, and I learned a lot.

Another surprising realization from startups that pulled a memory from my college days was that no one is going to solve your problems for you. In the early days of a company, you are charting new territory. There are no answers. There can be no right answers and there can be multiple right answers. You don’t really ever fail until you decide you have failed, and I will get more into this point later. There is only intrinsic motivation, following your instincts, and thinking for yourself.

Where there was little ambiguity in high school, a bit more in college, some in banking, being the first employee at a company shows you what raw ambiguity looks like. The biggest mistake that I made was in not trusting my own instincts. No one really knows what’s going on in startups, it’s chaos, and that’s okay. It’s freeing in some sense.

I value trust, autonomy, and communication. I learned more and then decided it may make sense to pursue my interests more directly again, a decision I am proud of. One thing that seems to recur in my life is that I don’t like people doing things for me, and I can’t explain why. This is usually not helpful in collectivist cultures, where you are working as a team, but in starting a new, unlikely thing, it can be valuable in thinking for yourself at a time where there is no one who can think for you.

Different Cultures

Most of these experiences came together to help me ultimately understand myself. In order to understand the outside world, you necessarily need to first understand yourself, it is your relative basis for everything.

When leaving structures and cultures, you necessarily need to create your own. You need to understand what you believe and create that for yourself. Extract the best parts of the structures and cultures you have been a part of.

People, ideas, and your environment compose culture, which I now believe to be the strongest, most important, yet hidden force of the world. Culture manifests in cults, organizations, societies, generations, companies, institutions, and any time you group people together.

Now that I’ve lived across geographies and cultures. I’ve been able to reflect on the differences between them. On one hand, I’ve been able to pick apart the beauty of each culture and what I’ve loved. On the other hand, you can see the faults and what goes against your personal beliefs. Similar to how I once falsely believed self-actualization had an end state, I falsely believed that I would one day find the perfect culture and integrate myself into it. While you can get close, the reality is that I both love and hate every place I’ve lived.

• I love and miss the collective ambition of NYC, but I hate the pessimism and how much of a transactional machine it was.

• I love and miss the humility, honesty, genuineness, and trust of the midwest, but I hate the lack of ambition, technology, and curiosity.

• I love and miss the interest in ideas, optimism, heterogeneity, and tech-focus of San Francisco, but I hate the delusion and noise over signal.

San Francisco is probably the closest thing that I can find to an aligned culture. The city generally feels like my bratty younger self, which I think is the one problem I have with it. It’s like the people haven’t had a midwest humbling and are solving problems that don’t exist. An engineer who has never done laundry in his life trying to cure cancer with genetically modified xenobots. Something about that feels disastrous.

People in San Francisco are defined by their differences. It is a heterogenous city and that is celebrated. It’s the big tent filled with spiky people. I think where I feel most out of place is that I’m a generalist at heart. I will never be the best typescript programmer in the world, nor do I want to be, and it does feel hard to stand out. Theoretically, this city should contain more people who think for themselves. Instead, people have identified the archetype of the visionary founder, mimic their behavior, raise money, and throw parties. It’s deeply annoying seeing these people run around and their antics actually work on investors.

In conversations with these people, it does feel that their spikiness is too volatile, they have too many blind spots. Like my high school teacher reminding me not to narrow my focus yet, it feels true that generalists run the world.

Coming home to the midwest, you reconnect with what life is like for the average person in this country. These are the people you are often supposed to be solving problems for. In an over-abstracted world, the buck always stops with the human at the end of the line.

Within the different companies in Shaper, each had its own culture. You see what you align with. You find there are some people who are so smart you may never ever catch up to them. You find that everyone has their weaknesses. Travis once said his business philosophy was generally to “own the gray.” I like that.

Strengths and Weaknesses in Clear View

I also saw some of the same weaknesses sprout up that were real in my youth. I hate structure. I hate process. I hate politics. I hate arbitrary structures. I hate salaries. I value my own time and working on things that I am intrinsically motivated to pursue. I like authenticity. I like genuineness. I can be lazy so I need to humble myself and keep myself grounded.

I may be pretty decent at systems level thinking. Where some people’s mind works more as a framework, mine is more of an optimization function, where I chew on a problem for an extended period of time and output a singular, non-linear solution. Others are better at optimizing said solution.

I am really good at jumping into ambiguity and learning a lot really quickly about anything.

I am incredibly drawn to novel, non-linear innovations that really push the envelope for humanity. It has to be extremely difficult, while pushing me to learn and grow.

Proud Decisions and Values

Sometimes you can make a decision and be misunderstood. The hardest decisions to stand by your values are ultimately the most important.

There’s never a better time than now to jump into the deep end. No one is going to climb your mountain for you. If the path before you is clear, it’s not your path. What separates the leaders from the followers is having a clear vision.

Convictions, Instincts, and Self-Faith

It has always been difficult to understand why I’ve never done well in structure. I always thought I was just really bad at following instructions. Research on LLMs makes it easier to understand as you see decreasing performance as you begin to limit the activation of certain features. Understanding requires having access to all the information and seeing the big picture, while operating in tune with your belief systems.

I thought about the difference between writing a paper in school on a topic you were interested in and an argument that the teacher chose for you. It is always much more difficult to fit yourself into another person’s structure or view of the world.

The most pure form of writing is when it comes from the heart. A stream of unconsciousness that you don’t need to think about, it just pours out of you. This is something only you can do. You come to find the value in this type of writing. When you are writing authentically about something you believe, it gives your writing an almost superhuman power to be smarter than even your conscious mind.

If that is true in our writing, then it can also be true in our own lives. We should never bow to our internal belief systems, no matter the cost. In communist Russia, Mikhail Bulgakov writes,

“not being allowed to write is tantamount to being buried alive.”

Human expression is something so core to our innate needs. We need to protect it no matter the cost. Our unconscious minds are the only people in the world who truly understand us, our needs, and our desires. A creator needs to create, no matter the cost.

What the starving artist teaches us is that true creators value their ability to create more than money or basic comfort. I am someone who was one second away from being a starving artist. I made some decisions that put me in a position to not need to starve, and I need to remember how fortunate I am to have that.

I am trying to remember how cheap I was in my youth. My goal should be to protect my time and focus. Stay lean, stay hungry. Keep yourself agile and flexible. At the same time, I need to balance this with an economic principle I saw Javier Milei talk about,

“Explanation: The paradox of thrift states that when everyone in an economy tries to save more money, it can actually lead to a decrease in overall economic activity and potentially lower total savings due to reduced spending, which can harm economic growth.”

Per usual, there is no right answer, the world is one of nuance, and you need to straddle the line. Operate in high conviction and make big, correct, calculated bets.

Doubling Down on my Belief System

Where we start out our lives expressing ourselves with unbridled freedom, the walls slowly close in on us. Often arbitrary societal and moral structures tell you what you should and should not do. This structure is burying us alive and we don’t even acknowledge it.

Release your inhibitions and abide by your own structure. You can keep climbing every scaffold of structure in the world. The only lesson you will learn is that they are all imperfect and set forth by humans just as imperfect as you. You need to move through the world with the wonder, awe, and questioning of a child.

Don’t just navigate your way through the world, you should float through it with the lightness of the child. If you start noticing that your instincts and beliefs were correct, you should begin to lean into them. Just like a writer who uses his unconscious flow to create art that exceeds his own human potential, you should be unwavering in living your life by your own belief system and maximizing the potential of your human instinct.

Everything good that has ever happened to me has been a result of following my own instincts.

Walking around the dilutive atmosphere that is modern collectivist culture, humans have an innate bug where they gravitate towards conformity and structure. In isolation, we reconnect with ourselves. Look back on your life and how you approached different situations vs how the rest of the world told you to approach it. Where were they right? Where were they wrong? I have noticed a trend of my instincts getting proven right. In that real case, it has taught me to double down on them, as an investor doubles down on their winning strategy.

Some things I am going to try to do in 2025:

• Be more irreverent than you think you can be. Question more.

• Take on more risk than you think you can. Question whether it is true risk.

• Trust your instincts more than you think you should. Still vet them.

• Move faster than you think you can (this is the one that I find difficult to come to terms with staying lean).

• Be more selective/focused than you think you can.

• Be more ambitious and aggressive. Do the big thing. When you know what you’re doing, have confidence, when you don’t, have faith.

• Be more curious, let yourself learn more and follow your natural curiosities.

• If 2024 was marked by defining a belief system, 2025 will be marked by trusting it.

• 2024 asked the question, what is your defining difference? 2025 answers it. Irreverence--your truth is best set free.

• If 2024 defined your belief system in the individual, 2025 groups it into a structured culture in the abstract.

• If 2024 was a year of following the rules, 2025 will be a year of breaking them.

• Talk to more people, map out, and define the problem.

• Don’t compromise on your values.

What I would like to accomplish is I would like to gain a clear, determinate, optimistic, vision and simple run towards it. Learning and understanding are necessary here but you need to do this with a bias for action in ambiguity. This is a tough, tough thing to do in the early days.

The Large Problem With Global Culture

When I look at the world today, and when I remember my time at the University of Illinois, the problem was a cultural one. People are comfortable with comfort. There is no drive to grow and excel. There is no intrinsic motivation.

It is always hard to identify these things in the abstract. It is easier to look around you as a sample size. It seems to be the thing most people aren’t talking about because no one thinks about it. People are comfortable ignoring their own comfort.

When I talk to my friends, they are always dumbfounded how much of the employees in their company are lemons that provide zero value and don’t actually do anything. When you put 2 and 2 together, you realize that the entire world is like this.

The incentives are off. People are too comfortable. Salaries are domesticating. People are working inhuman, overly structured, uncreative jobs. If they are ambitious, they are working jobs that don’t solve new problems and are making big law firms more money. They aren’t questioning where this all ends.

Why are they working the jobs they are? Why do they want money? What is the meaning of their own lives? These questions are not asked. In 50 years, they will die with regret.

It is hard to think for yourself. But it is important and high leverage, so you should.

Individual Values of Growth

Thinking for yourself and intrinsic motivation are rare for many reasons.

Thinking for Yourself

1. Time horizons are too short

It takes time to wander in isolation and do new things to create your own belief system. The world today is one of process, no breaks, short vacations, where people are shuttled from one treadmill to the next.

If you are working a job, your boss often doesn’t have the bandwidth to invest in you so you can learn a new computer programming language. However, if that is in your best long-term interest, you will need to question your boss.

Even our financial system prints money, which causes inflation and a higher cost of capital, leading to short-termist investing.

2. We are too comfortable

People in the world today have zero desire to think for themselves, because it is hard. The Matrix introduces us to the concept of the red pill. It seems that in our world, no one wants to take the red pill. It is easier to settle into our lives of mediocrity.

We leave colleges with mountains of debt and many without the skills to pay that debt down. We are forced into risk-aversion.

3. Society is over structured

Structures are almost always optimized for an existing process or function. In a world where people believe life is just a series of finding structures to fit into, they no longer create any. These structures were set arbitrarily and they are run by imperfect humans. Structured environments only contain likely things.

However, the future will be built with unlikely, non-linear things.

It may seem like the structures you build your life in have the answers and the path, but they are just growing you to serve a function within them.

The education systems, which are structured to teach us all the same, likely processed information to memorize, rather than critical thinking or diverse learnings promoting true diversity of thought.

The objectives of the American education system converge on getting into college, which is itself an imperfect institution. These paths, however questionable, have no competing alternatives and are rotting from the inside out.

4. The media

The media has no truth, it feeds likely information.

Independent Thinking is a surprisingly rare trait when sampling the global population. Those who do, often have at least one of the following traits.

• Fundamentally different way of processing social/sensory information (neurological)

• Breaking everything down to fundamental truths and rebuilding (heavy technical training)

• Necessity of creating own framework when standard social inheritance is disrupted (immigrants, outsiders, etc)

• Empirical validation of personal judgment over conventional wisdom (earned confidence in convictions)

• Intense Curiosity (drive for truth seeking)

• Intense Creativity (drive for self-expression, often paired with novelty seeking, especially when suppressed)

• Unique developmental environment (i.e. homeschooled)

The interesting thing about these paths is that they often interact and reinforce each other. For example, someone might start with neurological differences, which leads to social isolation, which creates space for developing first principles thinking.

We live in a highly structured world, where information is often standardized, that doesn't encourage creativity, that doesn't encourage irreverence.

Intrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic motivation is a loaded trait. It likely contains the characteristics, including maintaining a strong belief system. There are some other traits that are likely important here.

At our core, humans are evolutionarily wired for conformity and stability, not innovation and independent thought. Our ancestors survived by following the tribe, respecting authority, and sticking to proven paths. This made perfect sense in a world of scarcity, where deviation from the norm could mean death. We are naturally uncurious, reverent, and unambitious because we are optimized for survival, not for exploring the infinite possibilities that today's world of abundance offers. Like pigs in cages on antibiotics or sheltered dogs, we've become comfortable in our constraints.

This biological foundation is then reinforced by modern society's structures. Our education system teaches memorization over critical thinking, our workplaces optimize for process over creativity, and our lives become a series of predetermined checkboxes rather than genuine exploration. The pressure starts early - schools reward following instructions, not questioning them. By adulthood, most people are conditioned to seek structure rather than challenge or create it.

Financial realities lock people down even more. Burdened by student debt, people lose the freedom to take risks. Paychecks domesticate, dulling our natural drive to create and explore. It's far easier to follow the well-worn path than to forge a new one. Most people choose comfort over growth, difficulty, and the ambiguity of independent thinking.

Modern life's short-term focus also kills intrinsic motivation. Everything demands immediate results - quarterly earnings, yearly reviews, constant metrics. There's no space for the kind of wandering and interactive exploration that genuine creativity requires. We're too busy responding to Slack messages to pursue authentic interests. There is a sense that having the world’s information at your fingertips paradoxically removes the need to think for yourself. This is the bear case against Chat-GPT.

Culture completes the suppression. From an early age, our natural curiosities get stamped out. Independent thinking is seen as troublesome, divergent interests as weird. It's easier to absorb others' passions than develop our own. Those who maintain their intrinsic motivation usually have some combination of natural resistance to conformity, space to develop their own interests, confidence in their judgment, and a burning drive for truth-seeking that overcomes these headwinds.

Most importantly, critical thinking requires self-understanding and developing your own framework requires sustained mental effort. Most people, comfortable, never question their constraints or imagine different possibilities. We've built a society that optimizes for stability and predictability, not for the kind of individual agency and creative destruction that drives breakthrough progress.

Once you realize all of this, you also need to have the courage to be misunderstood.

Ambition

True ambition - not the desire for money or status, but the drive to create something meaningful - has been systematically bred out of us. Our educational system teaches us to aim for good grades rather than real understanding, to secure a comfortable job rather than change the world. We're taught to think small, to be "realistic," to trim our dreams to fit conventional paths. Like laboratory mice trained to run the same maze, we've forgotten how to imagine other possibilities.

The modern workplace continues this conditioning. Corporate cultures celebrate incremental improvements and stability while real innovation is seen as risky and disruptive. People mistake movement for progress, confusing busy work with meaningful achievement. We've created a society where most "ambitious" people are simply competing for higher rungs on predetermined ladders rather than questioning whether those ladders lead anywhere worthwhile or using their strengths to create new structures entirely.

Social pressure further dampens ambition. Our peers often react with skepticism or hostility to truly ambitious goals, unconsciously trying to pull others back to their level of comfort. The result is a kind of trained mediocrity, where people learn to limit their aspirations to what seems "reasonable." This collective lowering of expectations becomes self-reinforcing, creating a culture where real ambition feels not just rare but almost forbidden.

Irreverence

Irreverence - the willingness to question established systems and challenge accepted wisdom - has been systematically suppressed by our institutions and culture. From early childhood, we're taught to respect authority unquestioningly. This reverence for existing structures becomes deeply ingrained, making it increasingly difficult to recognize arbitrary constraints, let alone challenge them.

Our educational and corporate systems are designed to punish irreverence and reward compliance. Those who question too much are labeled as troublemakers or "not team players." The message is clear: success comes from fitting in, not standing out. Even in supposedly innovative fields, most people's irreverence is performative rather than genuine - they play at being rebels while carefully coloring within the lines that matter.

The few truly irreverent individuals often face significant social and professional costs. They're passed over for promotions, excluded from opportunities, and sometimes openly ostracized. This creates a powerful selective pressure against irreverence, ensuring that each generation becomes more compliant than the last. We've created a world where the most valuable trait for progress - the willingness to question and challenge existing systems has all but died.

The rarity of these four traits - independent thinking, intrinsic motivation, true ambition, and genuine irreverence - isn't accidental. It's the predictable outcome of over structured, entrenched systems designed to persist, creating compliant workers rather than independent thinkers and creators. Until we recognize and actively work to counteract these forces, these vital qualities will remain exceptions rather than norms.

It may not be possible to change many core personality traits. However, it feels true that by giving people the ability to understand themselves empowers them to think for themselves, which will save the modern over-structured world and more efficiently allocate what is the scarce resource on planet earth–human focus.

The Problem Irreverent Stands

I want Irreverent to be a beacon for people who think for themselves. I want to shift the culture where we can get people to believe in themselves and their unique differences and strengths. I want society to move away from collectivism and towards the belief in the individual, where we can change the world we were given.

I want to prove to people that another way is possible. First, I want to logically prove it. Then, I want to do it in the real world and encourage others to follow.

Logical Proof

It is easier to live your life and to not question existing structures. It offers itself as a simple heuristic. Just do what the person next to you is doing, but do it better. When we get shuttled through schools and jobs, this is exactly what is happening–you are adopting an existing, likely structure.

This is availability bias. The world is not zero-sum and these structures were once charted on a piece of paper for the first time. There is infinite and exponentially increasing pie to go around at the expanding side of the fractal of technology and innovation. And I can prove this mathematically. We are entering a new world. It is unnatural to our culture. But we need to make it natural. Calling all curious, ambitious, who fare well with white space.

Information Theory of Startups

In early human existence, ideas were not that helpful, aside from the rare invention blue moon, like the wheel and the creation of fire.

We are still evolutionarily adapted to this world. Our genetic characteristics and personality traits do not change at the same pace that technology does in the modern, industrial world. In the world today, the main bottleneck of progress is technical innovation and novel, unlikely creation.

Our instincts tell us to grasp for structure and likely things. But in a world where the surface area of the fractal of new technology grows at an unprecedented pace, the opportunities on the edges are infinite.

It seems that ambitious people are all competing for scraps in jobs like law and finance in the center, which don’t move the collective needle. The competition has whittled the alpha away. Furthermore, software ate the world and computers are mapping more of the existing data on likely structures–they mapped the complexity of chess and are going to continue climbing the chain of likely, determinate things.

In the world we are entering, competition is for losers and repetition is for computers.

Chaos Theory of Startups - Politzki’s Law

But the world has not yet come to an end, and there is no easy telling how long the twilight of the modern age will endure. Computers may be better than us in well-charted, narrow domains. However, we remain masters of the universe in our ability to command chaos.

Not only are we smarter than computers and still able to use our raw human instinct in navigating chaos, we can choose our own optimization function–our own “why.” The world is not purely rational. The universe only has the meaning that we provide it.

For the next 25 years, humans will still differ from computers by harnessing our generalized intelligence and instincts to navigate ambiguity and arbitrariness.

We should run towards areas of complexity where there is little to no data. Or towards arbitrary structures and morality where we can reorder it in light of our human beliefs.

In order to capture this, I propose Politzki’s Law.

Politzki’s Law

The variables in question are those in which human capability differs from machines. We know from the Bitter Lesson that:

“general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.”

Despite what Sam Altman sells you, this is still a long time away. Machines mapped out digits, pictures of dogs, chess, and only recently have begun to map out human language and some understanding of the world by extension. Mapping complexity is not the same thing as true understanding. Yann Lecun tells us that this is an off-ramp en route to superintelligence. I say this with the caveat that it is unclear to me what the progress is on the reasoning front.

Humans, with our 86 billion neurons, excel at navigating complex and ambiguous environments using intuition and creativity. In contrast, chess engines are designed to master narrow, well-defined tasks with high precision but lack the ability to handle the vast, unpredictable challenges of the real world.

As technology and societal issues grow more complex, there are more opportunities for innovative solutions. Computers are best at managing and optimizing within specific, narrow domains, while humans should focus on addressing intricate and ambiguous problems where our instincts and adaptability can drive meaningful progress. By combining our natural abilities with technological tools, we can effectively tackle the most pressing challenges of our time.

What distinguishes humans is largely our ability to navigate chaos:

1. Identify, break, and reorient arbitrary structures.

2. Choose our own optimization function and “why” not solely grounded in reason

3. Navigate complexity with limited data

So, to maximize our human ability, we should put ourselves in complex environments, where there is ambiguity and little data, and follow our own internal belief systems. That, or we should identify, break, and reorient arbitrary structures. In simpler terms, humans stand above machines in our ability to think for ourselves.

Let’s formalize the logic here. Using Data, Complexity, and the generalization factor of the problem solver (for either man or machine) in determining whether the problem is best fit for being solved by a human and as guiding logic for where you should spend your life’s work. As data on the problem increases, it becomes easier to solve. With complexity comes exponentially more difficulty in creating order from the chaos. Where there is lots of data, generalization is less helpful. Where there is little data, human generalized intelligence is more useful.

Politzki’s Law - Formalized Logic

Politzki’s Law suggests when problems become more complex and have less available data, humans gain an advantage over machines. In domains with high complexity and limited data, human creativity and intuition outperform computational approaches. Consider three variables that shape whether a problem is best suited for human or machine problem-solvers:

C (Complexity): The dimensionality, ambiguity, and openness of the problem space.

D (Data Availability): The amount of reliable, relevant information available.

G (Generalization Factor): The ability to apply insights and solutions across domains.

When complexity (C) is high and data (D) is low, humans dominate. Our capacity for holistic thinking, pattern recognition in sparse environments, and reimagining constraints gives us an edge. On the other hand, when data is abundant and complexity manageable, machines can methodically sift through patterns and optimize solutions at scale.

Thresholds (C*, D*) mark a tipping point:

If C > C* and D < D*, humans outperform machines because the problem demands creativity, lateral thinking, and flexible generalization that computers lack.

If C < C* and D > D*, machines can surpass humans by efficiently leveraging large datasets and established patterns.

Practical Implications:

To leverage your uniquely human strengths, seek out domains of high complexity and low data availability. Focus on challenges that defy easy pattern-matching, where human insight and adaptability are essential. By doing so, you position yourself in the part of the landscape where human potential remains unmatched, ensuring that you thrive in a world increasingly automated and optimized by machines.

While Politzki's Law is presented in a simplified form for practical application, several important nuances should be acknowledged:

Exponential Complexity

• The relationship between complexity and problem difficulty is actually exponential rather than linear

• In high-dimensional spaces, the number of possible connections grows exponentially (e.g., 10 dimensions create 100 connections, 20 dimensions create 400 connections)

• This "curse of dimensionality" makes truly complex problems exponentially harder for machines to solve

Data Sparsity

• As dimensionality increases, data becomes exponentially more sparse

• This compounds the challenge in high-complexity domains

• Humans' ability to generalize becomes increasingly valuable as data points become more distant in high-dimensional space

These considerations reinforce the core insight: humans maintain decisive advantages in highly complex, data-sparse domains where generalization and intuition matter most.

Human Optimization Theory

Most humans are spending their time on low leverage activities. Human focus is the most valuable resource on planet earth, yet it is also the most misallocated. We can all come to an agreement on what the most complex problems are that have the least amount of data, however, it matters that people are solving different unique problems.

Humans should run away from competition and repetition in order to provide the maximum utility to the world. This necessitates removing yourself from structures, living life on your own terms, and maximizing the impact of your human instincts.

This necessitates creating your own “why” and optimization function. You need to think for yourself.

My Proof

By making Irreverent and our first company successful, I will close the loop and show that it is possible. I am no different than others, and ask their hand in joining me to think for oneself, break the existing structures, and strive for individual achievement, rather than grasp for mediocre structure.

Irreverent will ultimately be a vehicle for proliferating this philosophy and unleashing human potential on solving unlikely, non-linear, and novel problems in the world that matter.

We will start by proving that this is possible at the singular level, starting with me.

The Importance of Not Missing Your Mark

There is a hidden secret of the universe. Romulus and Remus teaches us the importance of not missing your mark and success. Rome is named after Romulus. Remus’ name is lost in the wind.

While I generally believe people should work on new things and move away from competition, I also believe that one day you will need to compete and people will catch on to your progress across the S-curve of technological adoption. It matters that you win. It matters that you claim your place in history.

If I am going to be successful, Irreverent will need to be successful. If Irreverent is going to be successful, Jean will need to be successful. If Jean is going to be successful we need to get this thing off the ground. In order to get this thing off the ground, we need to get customers. We need product and clarity of vision.

The early days are rough and sparse, but these are the days that count.

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning."

The point is you need to believe you are wheat, and you need to be right. You need to log your belief system and live by it.

When you look at true animal and human nature, you see that life is disgusting and unforgiving. What matters is winning, eventually. Business is a knife in the mud, grizzly bears grappling. We are comfortable because our lives are no longer on the line. While it doesn’t seem like it, because we are the apex predator, we need to fight for ourselves in this world.

Initial Interests and Gravitations

When you wander, you inevitably fall off-track. I think about my initial interests. What about them drew me in? What is unique about me? It doesn’t appear that others introspect this much.

What initially drew me in was the promise of self-understanding. I am constantly drowning, trying to understand myself, the world, and my place in it.

It feels that this is oddly difficult. Why is it so hard to understand ourselves? It feels that I am chipping away at this problem over time. I have allocated so much time to it. Yet, it also feels so core and so important and like this could be the first time in history that we can solve it. LLMs are beginning to understand us through our writing.

I went through my own writing and unearthed the common themes. These themes, I found, were helpful in organizing my belief system. That belief system has since been incredibly useful in navigating the world and my unique place in it. What do I think that others don’t think? What are my blind spots and weaknesses?

I can’t help but look back after the fact and think that others should have access to this same guiding philosophy that I do. We’ve never been able to understand ourselves throughout history. In recent times, psychiatrists have become more popular, yet ultra expensive.

If they did, it could urge them to think for themselves, question the world, and allocate their human focus more efficiently.

Vision

My vision is to do just that. At the Irreverent level, I hope to create a cultural and philosophical vehicle for people to question existing structures and systems, and create their own structures from their own belief systems. I want people to leave likely, structured systems and gather faith in themselves to solve unlikely, creative problems that really move the human race forward.

Through Jean, we will do this by allowing those with data, mostly deep written data that is a projection of their minds, to understand themselves more deeply.

Human focus is earth’s most valuable resource.

Human focus is earth’s most misallocated resource.

We are helping people understand themselves so that they can allocate their limited focus more efficiently.

Honing in on a Wedge

The wedge is the first practical question we come across in this journey. What crisp mission do we create for ourselves to start?

I run into the question of business viability, and squeezing things together that scale with network effects, virality, a focus on B2B, etc. In contrast, I wonder if we can somehow just focus on the people we are aiming to help, as I’m grounded in the midwest.

Angles:

• Wallet/Fashion Personalization

• Solving the Cold Start Problem for e-commerce businesses

• Replacing or supplementing onboarding flows

• Connecting Siloed Embeddings

• B2C tool to understand yourself through your writing

The Plan - Irreverent

Irreverent will be an investment vehicle that leans into company formation. We have maintained extremely high returns to date. We will use those returns, alongside liquid capital gains, to grow the fund and raise capital. This necessitates Jean being successful and returning well.

The Plan - Jean

Jean is the main focus. We are going to hone our vision into one of the above angles for the initial wedge. Then, we will get initial customers with our product and prove out the market. We will stay lean and mean before pure PMF.

With validation and clear vision, we will push harder than we think we should. We will grow faster than we think we should. We will raise our first round and build a highly dense team.

Reflexivity

When Jean is successful, Irreverent will be successful. When Irreverent is successful, Jean and other future portfolio companies will be successful as the fund reinforces the companies.

The culture will reinforce the culture and we will attract the brightest, most irreverent minds in the world.

We will unleash human focus and shift the culture into one that thinks for itself and solves important problems.

My Structure

My structure will be minimally viable and is purposefully built to maximize the potential of my human instinct and unconscious beliefs. Mapping enough complexity to continue forward.

My minimum viable structure for the year ahead is anchored in the essential while leaving room for instinct and exploration. Each day starts with focused work on Jean during peak mental hours - building product, talking to customers, and refining vision. But afternoons remain flexible for learning, writing, and following intellectual curiosities that could lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Weekly reflection sessions will help process learnings and adjust course, while monthly deep dives into writing will ensure I'm building and refining my belief system rather than just executing blindly. Structure exists to serve creativity and growth, not constrain it. The focus is on maintaining intellectual honesty and pushing forward with conviction while staying lean and agile. No arbitrary processes - just enough scaffolding to turn chaos into progress while preserving the freedom to think independently and pursue non-linear paths and serendipitous opportunities. The goal is to create an environment where both structured execution and wandering exploration can coexist, recognizing that breakthrough innovations often emerge from the interplay between the two. This is my system, built for my nature, designed to harness rather than suppress my natural inclinations toward complexity and independent thinking.

Conclusion

Understanding myself made it more feasible to understand others and the world. Culture isn’t easy to change, but I feel that it is important to try.

In an over-structured world, we should question more. Often, questioning outward necessitates self-understanding first. When you understand the self, you can better understand others and make more direct and clear decisions.

Irreverence is an under-looked value in our culture today. If anything, Irreverent Capital stands to be a cultural vehicle. Over the next quarter century, I will have succeeded if we have played a role in shifting the culture towards belief in the individual.

What it means to live a human life is to own discomfort and ambiguity on your own terms. You should run towards complexity and ambiguity and create unlikely things in a world of people doing likely things.

Drench yourself in words unspoken

Live your life with arms wide open

Today is where your book begins

The rest is still unwritten.

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2024 Essays

Last year, we went through our essays in the middle of the piece and recounted each. I find that was an incredibly distracting technique. This time around, we will place the essays in their own section at the end of this piece. The flow will be uninterrupted and will focus on capturing the essence of the year we grew within.

1. ∆ - Everything I know Now

This piece was the first definitive essay that I had written forging my own belief system. The general theme was that you can’t connect the dots looking backwards. Our life is random but it does have meaning. We first learn the factual nature of the world. Our values and belief systems spring from this foundation.

The most important point from this essay is just the act of writing it and how most people never do, and are living their lives in a random walk without having a guiding philosophy. I contend that the meaning of life is to grow and express oneself in alignment with their belief system.

In this sense, our lives aren’t simply a matter of fitting into a system. It is always a matter of overcoming systems. The way to do this is by owning your unique differences, rejecting comfort, having convictions, and focusing on step functions of growth.

Since most people don’t do this, their human focus is misallocated. I contend that if you abstract this across society, and understand the value of human focus, you realize focus is earth’s most misallocated resource.

2. Culture

The main advantage of writing down my belief system was in knowing it and being able to reference it when working with others. By having an internal framework of the world that you believe, you are able to protect it and validate it over time. You also develop a sense for the type of person you want to work with.

I came to the obvious but somehow difficult to realize conclusion that culture is the most important force of the world, since culture is just the collection of people with belief systems, and they are often arbitrary and misguided, as they are made up of imperfect humans.

As a young person working under more seasoned adults, you immediately assume that the adults are correct. However, you start to reflect on different experiences and realize that maybe your framework was actually better. Or maybe it wasn’t worse, it was just your style, and that it matters to be in the right culture.

And the importance of finding the right people who align and how rare they really are. The importance of aptitude and attitude and cults.

The most important realizations of this essay were from connecting my experiences to Joel Mokyr’s, A Culture of Growth. Irreverence, while stigmatized, is a necessary value for growth. You need to question existing systems. I realized that maybe there was value in my irreverence after all. And learning and individualism are necessary for growth on the frontier. And that optimism about growth and the future are important, as well as trust and many other features. Culture is the passive investment vehicle of the leader.

3. Project Delta ∆

If you think about the essay on Culture being a period of comparing myself to others, this essay dove back into the importance of self-understanding. Why is it so hard to know yourself? Can we use LLMs to understand our unique personality?

I came across some interesting work that sparked my curiosity into how we can use LLMs to understand ourselves in ways that modern companies. The actual angle of this work was in predicting next words against baseline, which was less interesting than this project’s full potential.

4. Information Theory of Startups

I was reminded of a book that I read by Richard Hamming. I realized something that is clear from my chess days. I like unlikely, non-linear, and surprising things. I am not interested in doing things that other people can do. I’ve always taken the road less traveled.

I believe that as technology’s fractal grows exponentially, so too will opportunities. Humans are caught in the past and don’t realize this yet. We are all competing for scraps and there’s an open fridge in the other room. Focus on innovation and growth. Having a clear vision is what sets the leaders from the followers.

5. Entrepreneurial Risk

There is a sense that people view taking a jump into entrepreneurship as a big risk. However, I think that risk is misguided. It is human instinct to overstate downside risk and understate opportunity. What is the time horizon of your risk? In startups, there is a real sense that you can stay small and just not die.

There is something very fundamental here about indeterminate vs determinate risk. Chess, actuaries, and hedge funds can plot determinate risk with all the data they’ve got thrown into their computer models. That’s cute, but the world is open-ended and infinite. There’s many ways to win, find one.

Create a general baseline plan but follow your instincts and natural curiosities. These subliminal tugs are superhuman and will guide you in the right direction. Leave space for wandering and learning.

6. Deep Learning’s Future

Practical and theoretical principles of deep learning based on Ian Goodfellow’s Deep Learning. This book plots out general principles that are helpful for navigating the ambiguity in AI right now.

7. Project Delta ∆ (cont.)

This dives even deeper into the importance of self-understanding and navigating chaos using a personal belief system. Instead of diving into next word prediction against baseline, my deep understanding of interconcept space and the manifold made my work much more clear how to actually implement it.

It makes the point that writing is a projection of the mind. This was an important realization that I had at the time. The next logical step is that LLMs understand writing so they understand us.

This contained the first version of Project Delta that actually worked. This software would take in writing and relay the “Things Things You Return To.” This was inspired by the same exercise that I am doing now.

8. Return

There is a certain sense from this essay that the real value from this exercise is unearthing the “Things You Return To.” These things indicate who you are at your core. They are the constants in your character. These are the things that are helpful to know when planning your life or making decisions, and even understanding your own decisions and actions.

It forays into my past work. How can I combine this work with my old work? Specifically, data currencies.

It feels that the data currency model is indeed very powerful and I shouldn’t forget the limitations and messiness of other methods.

9. Launching Irreverent Capital

Irreverent Capital was launched. This essay is a call for Americans to look around them. There are more problems than people solving them.

The essay calls for people who are curious, industrious, and with personal agency to solve them and that they won’t solve themselves.

This is ultimately a call for individualistic culture in America. America today faces a cultural problem. It calls out several problems for people to recognize that there are many problems in the world, but takes an optimistic view on these problems in how we can solve them.

1. It discusses the need for people to spend their limited human focus on problems that matter.

2. It calls out the VC model for being misguided. We need individual agency and conviction.

3. Entrepreneurship risk calculus is off. It's a false risk.

4. The world is over-structured. This limits the human mind and the freedom of creativity and the potential of human instinct.

5. Salaries are domesticating.

Irreverent aims to be a personal vehicle for the next 50 years. I want it to be my life’s work. If that is the case, I should win.

10. General Personal Embeddings

This was the culmination of the work that had been leading up to that point. It is a logical proof that now is the first moment in history we can use computers to understand ourselves in written form that explores the following ideas:

1. Humans don't understand themselves and that’s a giant problem

2. Lack of self-understanding stems from complexity

3. Computers map complexity and any abstract concepts with precision

4. They understand the world. Not just the world though, these models were trained on human patterns of thought as expressed through data.

5. This directly parallels how humans map concepts (features:cathexes)

It essentially closes the loop saying that humans don’t understand ourselves. The reason is we aren’t good at complexity. We saw that machine learning models can map out chess.

Perhaps the essay focuses too much on embeddings. The real point is if you believe these models will continue growing and becoming more abstract, then you can imagine that they will eventually understand everything, including our minds through our thoughts. In fact, I think we are already there.

The true essence of what we are aiming to solve here is that we can use this technology to understand ourselves.

But at the same time, understanding ourselves is only helpful for making better decisions.

Yet it dives into a business model afterwards, and that business model veers in another direction. It goes towards B2B. Maybe that is misguided? The true vision, the true problem is self-understanding. However, the incentives are dual-lined. People want personalized software and self-understanding in a safe and secure way. Businesses want deep user understanding.

11. “Google, Tear Down That Wall”

This was a similar proof-like essay. The general gist was that large technology companies farmed data on their users through their platform. With simple, predictive ML models and heavy data, you could predict what your users would buy in a very narrow way.

I made the argument that this will change.

12. Deep User Understanding From Day One

An ultra-succinct overview of how this might be used from the perspective of a company. Solving the cold start problem.

13. People, Structure, and Chaos

This essay went in a different direction. I found myself sputtering out. I wasn’t really sure why, but as I started writing, I began to uncover some reasons for this.

After you jump into the world with fresh eyes. You have a lot of ambiguity to chart. For many this might be daunting, but if you are someone drawn to complexity and ambiguity like me, you love that.

After I wrote this essay, I realized that where I had too much structure before, and I jumped off the plank and into mass ambiguity, I was now drowning in my lack of structure. When you leave structure, I found, it is important to create your own structure and make sense of all the chaos. It is not the case that you just absorb it all. You need to organize it effectively.

But you can’t put too much structure on yourself. You have to maintain flexibility so you can maximize the genius of your own instinct and curiosity, which hold subconscious powers.

Eventually, if you want to get anywhere, you need to make decisions and execute. That should come through minimum viable structure.

Ultimately, this essay states that there are no perfect structures for you. You need to unearth and build your own structure and take the stand that there are no shortcuts. Any shortcut is a band aid in place of critical thought.

I’m pretty crippled by structure. I explore how we can learn from the structures we’ve partaken in through our lives and make the right one.