Nan

Be serious about what you do. But never take yourself seriously. In mid-May, I posted about wokeism. Over 100 million views. Picked up by a ton of media outlets. And right after, Elon Musk and Javier Milei followed me. I'm not telling you this to flex. I'm telling you because it made me look at these two much more closely. And the more I watch them, the more convinced I am that they embody exactly what entrepreneurs will have to become. First, they don't take status seriously. Elon posts memes at 2am between rocket launches. Milei campaigned with a chainsaw. You can find that ridiculous. I find it deeply healthy. Because I'm so done with guys who, after a bit of business success, give themselves an air of importance that Elon doesn't have 1% of. The grave tone. The persona. The distance. As if a fundraise or an exit turned them into sages. Second, they're driven purely by infinite-sum games. A finite-sum game is a fixed-size pie: whatever you win, someone else loses. An infinite-sum game is one where the goal is to grow the pie and keep playing. And here's what I've come to understand: in finite-sum ecosystems, people almost always end up behaving badly. Not because they're bad people. Because the structure of the game pushes them there. When the pie doesn't grow, the only way to move forward is to take someone else's slice. Office politics, rent-seeking, backstabbing, envy. This is exactly what Peter Thiel understood when he wrote "Competition is for losers." It's not a VC punchline. It's a thesis about human nature. Thiel had René Girard as a mentor at Stanford, and Girard spent his life showing one thing: we desire what others desire. Mimetic desire. And when everyone wants the same thing in a limited space, rivalry turns destructive. Competitors become so obsessed with each other that they forget what they were supposed to build. Thiel's lesson: don't fight over the same pie as everyone else. Create a pie that didn't exist. And I believe that in the age of abundance that's coming, with AI, energy, robotics, this is precisely what will redefine capitalism. We're moving from a capitalism of capture to a capitalism of creation. Those who play finite games will tear each other apart over crumbs. Those who play infinite games will build what comes next. Elon doesn't take market share, he creates markets. Milei is trying to do the same thing at the scale of a country: pull Argentina out of a logic where people fight to divide up scarcity, and put it back into a game where wealth gets created. I deeply admire them both. And I think these two qualities are connected. Not taking yourself seriously isn't just a nice personality trait. It's a competitive advantage. It's what lets you keep learning. Because the day you start taking yourself seriously, you have a persona to protect. And when you have a persona to protect, you're afraid of being wrong, afraid of looking stupid, afraid of asking the naive question. You stop listening. And you stop learning. Status is a finite game: there's only one spot at the top, and everyone's fighting for it. Learning is an infinite game. Be serious about what you do. Never take yourself seriously.

We live in a completely fake world. And that's why everything feels chaotic. Why everything around us is burning. Let's start with one number. In 1972, 7 out of 10 Americans trusted the mainstream media. In 2025, only 28% did. The lowest Gallup has ever measured in half a century. Nearly 7 out of 10 Americans no longer believe what they're told on TV. Have you ever asked yourself why? Not "because people became conspiracy theorists." Not "because of social media." The real reason is that people feel an increasingly violent gap between what they're told and what they see with their own eyes. And that gap is not an accident. It's the product of a war between two camps. On one side, those who want to preserve reality: nations, cultures, borders, heritage. On the other, the globalist camp. And you need to understand its project in full. First, a world without borders. Not just physical borders. All borders. Between nations, between cultures, between what belongs to you and what belongs to everyone. And at the end of the chain, between true and false. Second, the hybridization of every culture. They sell it to you as openness, richness, diversity. But a culture is precisely a border. A language, a memory, customs, a way of life that isn't your neighbor's. When you blend everything together, you don't get a super-culture. You get the absence of culture. A consumable, interchangeable mush with no roots. And look closely at which culture you're asked to "deconstruct." Never anyone else's. Always Western culture. Its history, its religion, its family, its heroes. The end goal of the project isn't blending. It's the erasure of the West as a civilization. Now, the point almost nobody understands. Most of the leaders carrying this project never thought it up. They designed nothing. They are products. They went through the same schools, the same universities, the same think tanks, the same newsrooms, the same dinners. The system trained them, selected them, promoted them. They recite a script they mistake for their own thinking. You don't need a conspiracy when everyone was cast from the same mold. They're puppets, but sincere puppets. That's exactly what makes them dangerous. And that mold has a history. It has an intellectual architect: Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, writes in the 1930s from Mussolini's prisons. He makes an observation: in the West, the workers' revolution failed. Why? Because here, power doesn't rest only on the state and the police. It rests on culture. On schools, universities, the press, the Church, the arts. What he calls cultural hegemony. His conclusion: you don't take the West by frontal assault. You take it through a war of position. You conquer minds, language and institutions first. Political power then falls on its own. In the late 60s, German activist Rudi Dutschke summed up the strategy in one phrase: the long march through the institutions. Fifty years later, look at the universities. Look at the major newsrooms. Look at the NGOs, the international agencies, the HR departments, Hollywood. The march is over. The institutions have been captured. And that's when you understand why the world feels fake. When the institutions that are supposed to tell you the truth become the instruments of a project, they no longer describe reality. They prescribe it. Then, in the middle of this system, one man stood up against it. Elon Musk. He understood before anyone else that the heart of the machine is control of information. So he did the one thing that could truly crack it: he bought Twitter for $44 billion. He opened the Twitter Files and showed the world how moderation worked from the inside. He gave millions of people their voice back. And that's why he backed Trump. Not out of affection. Out of strategic clarity. Because Trump isn't a program. Trump is an antibody. The immune response of a social body that someone tried to dissolve. When a civilization senses it's being erased, it produces antibodies. They're rough, imperfect, loud. But they're proof the organism is still alive. Trump is the antibody to the empire of lies. But here's the good news. This project is doomed. Not just because we'll fight it. Because it carries the same flaw as every communist system, and it will end the same way. This isn't the communism of collective farms. It's the communism of norms, cultures and identities. But the structure is identical: an elite that believes it can redesign society from the top down. And Friedrich Hayek explained 80 years ago why that always fails. Reason one: the knowledge problem. The knowledge that makes a society run isn't in anyone's head. It's scattered across millions of individuals, in millions of local situations. No planner, no committee, no elite can gather it. Markets work because prices aggregate that knowledge. The Plan fails because it claims to replace it. Reason two, and this is where Hayek becomes prophetic: traditions, cultures and moral codes are knowledge too. Compressed knowledge. Centuries of trial and error, rules nobody invented but that survived because they worked. Hayek calls it the fatal conceit: believing that the reason of a handful of men can redesign what millennia have selected. Destroying a culture doesn't free people. It erases the memory that allowed them to live together. Reason three: the dynamics of lying. When the Plan collides with reality, it can't admit its mistake. So it needs propaganda, to make people believe the Plan's goals are their own. And it needs coercion, for those who refuse to believe. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek devotes an entire chapter to this: The End of Truth. And another with a crystal-clear title: Why the Worst Get on Top. In a system that has to lie to survive, the best liars rise. That's the loop. Reality resists. You lie to hide the failure. The lie demands more control. Control produces more failure. Until collapse. That's exactly what you're living through today. The world feels fake because it is. The chaos you see isn't the end of the world. It's the noise a system of lies makes when it crashes into reality. The USSR lasted nearly 70 years. It collapsed all at once, without a war, because nobody believed Pravda anymore. Today, nearly 7 out of 10 Americans no longer believe their media. You see where I'm going with this. Reality always wins. The only question is how long we're willing to live inside the lie before we look it in the face.

Yesterday I was talking with a guy who worked at the European Commission. He told me their project was perfectly on track. That immigration isn't a problem. And what struck me most wasn't the sentence itself. It's that he genuinely believed it. That's the real issue. These people aren't lying to you knowingly. They're so disconnected, so deeply fed by the system that formed them, that they live in a parallel world. A world of reports, panels, summits and press releases. A world where reality is whatever the institutions say it is. Remember: captured institutions no longer describe reality. They prescribe it. And people like him live inside the prescription. They never step out of it. They never see the street, the town, the neighborhood that changed in ten years. And when they do, they already have the words ready to explain why what they're seeing isn't really there. That's what a fake world is. Not a lie told by people who know the truth. A lie believed by the very people telling it. And that's exactly why it's going to collapse. Because you can lie to people for a very long time. You can't lie to reality. Hayek explained it. The USSR proved it. The polls are confirming it. A system that can no longer see reality can no longer correct itself. And a system that can no longer correct itself has already started dying. The people in Brussels think history is on their side. They're living in the same illusion the Politburo had in 1985. The parallel world always ends the same way: the day it collides with the real one. So stop asking yourself if you're crazy for seeing what you see. You're not. You're just one of the people still living in the real world.