I’m literally a brain in a jar
Boston, MA
Joined July 2010
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Brain in a jar retweeted
Charlie Munger’s no bullsh*t advice on giving money to your kids:
"You give them the money."
"Why?"
"They'll resent you if you don't. And what's the point of building a relationship with them and making all this money, and then at the end of your life your kids hate you?"
"Yeah, but won't that make them less ambitious?"
"Yes. Some of them have a few hundred million and they're not as ambitious. So what?”
🤖 Made with AI
Brain in a jar retweeted
Sylvester Stallone says his daughter's expanded role on "Tulsa King" Season 4 is "of course" the result of nepotism:
“First they go, ‘Nepotism is terrible. I said, ‘Oh please, you’re not a good parent if you haven’t performed a little nepotism.' Then obviously you don’t care about your kids, because they come first. Of course it’s nepotism, you idiot. That’s why we’re parents. We want the best for our children. So obviously, we let them have every advantage."
variety.com/2026/tv/news/syl…
Brain in a jar retweeted
A reality show of boomers applying for basic entry level jobs today would be a dark comedy.
Brain in a jar retweeted
Boomers are pulling a generational dine & dash:
Running up a $40 trillion tab, then sticking their own children with the bill.
Brain in a jar retweeted
In 1978 boomers became the majority voting bloc in the country. The first 18 year olds to be able to vote. They held this title until 2016. They were the majority in the house until last year, and the majority of the senate until 2023.
In that time they have radically changed the demographics of America by supporting immigration policies. They were the first generation to embrace no fault divorce and half of them broke their children’s homes. One third of my generation was aborted. They created a legal and corporate system hostile to their sons. But the worst thing they did is destroy the economy.
They were handed one of the most prosperous economies the world has ever seen, and they created untold levels of debt. The modest expansions in gdp are overshadowed by the ballooning debt. Their social programs were all paid for by the taxes of their children and grand children. 50x fold increase in debt, 60x increase in unfunded liabilities, 30x increase in interest payments which now exceeds national defense. Less than a 1/3 of boomers plan to leave an inheritance. The belief that the young should sacrifice even a dime more to pay for their retirements is absurd.
But hey, at least they’re apologetic and conciliatory about it.
Brain in a jar retweeted
Jensen Huang: “Now, if they say [that their models aren’t safe] … then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down.”
Brain in a jar retweeted
You would be amazed how a man standing up and saying "No, that's fucking ridiculous" can cause a belief failure cascade through an entire extended female network.
Brain in a jar retweeted
"We do have socialism in America - it's all these entitlement programs ... that are benefitting older generations."
Good. Keep the pressure on. Never relent. Defund the idle, elderly rich.
Brain in a jar retweeted
Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from
“I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.”
“Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.”
“Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.”
“‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’”
“And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.”
“It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”
Brain in a jar retweeted
I absolutely love this sentence - “It's not winter that defeats you. It is your insistence on summer.”
Hint (this goes well beyond seasons):
Brain in a jar retweeted
research shows that anxiety is caused by your inability to tolerate uncertainty. in repsonse you unconsciously try to regain control through overthinking, overplanning, overchecking, and overdoing. these are all attempts to create a false sense of certainty. but that just signals to your brain "we're not safe. stay alert." the goal is to build your nervous system's capacity to feel safe in the unknown. this happens by thinking "i don't know what will happen, but i trust i'll be okay."
Brain in a jar retweeted
If I hear another Boomer conservative bitching about Gen Z ordering DoorDash I’m going to become a communist. It’s true their grandparents always cooked homemade meals. But that’s because grandma stayed at home and grandpa had a union job and nobody could reach him after 5. They had a house with a full kitchen and 3 kids by 25. Meanwhile half of Gen Z men are forced to compete with the entire population of South America for some 12 hour long shift HVAC job that barely pays the rent. They’re 30 and nobody cooks for them because they can’t find any women who’ll marry them when they can’t even afford a starter home in the ghetto. The other half of Gen Z men are busting their ass competing with the entire populations of India and China for some 70 hour a week powerpoint job that asks them for updates on the slides at 3AM. They can’t find anyone to cook for them either, because every women around them is convinced that being a mother and cooking for a man is beneath them because they’re gonna save the world when they become VP of Marketing at MegaCorp in 20 years.
Brain in a jar retweeted
The same people telling Zoomers to suck it up over food prices would never ever tell retirees to get a job instead of draining payroll taxes from young people to pay for their "entitlements."
Brain in a jar retweeted
Believe it or not, some unhappy people have unlimited money simply because they are unhappy and don’t know how to be happy so they chase infinity money forever.
The vibes in SF feel pretty frenetic right now. The divide in outcomes is the worst I've ever seen.
Over the last 5yrs, a group of ~10k people - employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, Meta TBD, founders - have hit retirement wealth of well above $20M (back of the envelope AI estimation).
Everyone outside that group feels like they can work their well-paying (but <$500k) job for their whole life and never get there.
Worse yet, layoffs are in full swing. Many software engineers feel like their life's skill is no longer useful. The day to day role of most jobs has changed overnight with AI.
As a result,
1. The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.
Everyone's trying to align with a new set of career "paths": should I be a founder? Is it too late to join Anthropic / OpenAI? should I get into AI? what company stock will 10x next? People are demanding higher salaries and switching jobs more and more.
2. There’s a deep malaise about work (and its future).
Why even work at all for “peanuts”? Will my job even exist in a few years? Many feel helpless. You hear the “permanent underclass” conversation a lot, esp from young people. It's hard to focus on doing good work when you think "man, if I joined Anthropic 2yrs ago, I could retire"
3. The mid to late middle managers feel paralyzed.
Many have families and don't feel like they have the energy or network to just "start a company". They don't particularly have any AI skills. They see the writing on the wall: middle management is being hollowed out in many companies.
4. The rich aren’t particularly happy either.
No one is shedding tears for them (and rightfully so). But those who have "made it" experience a profound lack of purpose too. Some have gone from <$150k to >$50M in a few years with no ramp. It flips your life plans upside down. For some, comparison is the thief of joy. For some, they escape to NYC to "live life". For others still, they start companies "just cuz", often to win status points. They never imagined that by age 30, they'd be set. I once asked a post-economic founder friend why they didn't just sell the co and they said "and do what? right now, everyone wants to talk to me. if i sell, I will only have money."
I understand that many reading this scoff at the champagne problems of the valley. Society is warped in this tech bubble. What is often well-off anywhere else in the world is bang average here.
Unlike many other places, tenure, intelligence and hard work can be loosely correlated with outcomes in the Bay. Living through a societally transformative gold rush in that environment can be paralyzing. "Am I in the right place? Should I move? Is there time still left? Am I gonna make it?" It psychologically torments many who have moved here in search of "success".
Ironically, a frequent side effect of this torment is to spin up the very products making everyone rich in hopes that you too can vibecode your path to economic enlightenment.
