It's a bit past midnight. I should probably go to bed but I have been sitting on something that feels like a realization of sorts and I need to try and write it down. Apologies if this ends up reading like a stream-of-consciousness. It's not really for anyone else but me. I'm not entirely sure why I would put it on my blog besides the fact that this blog is the only really longitudinal record of my own writing that I have, and the thing I've been thinking about feels like it could be some kind of important moment of introspection in my life (sorry Marc Andreesen).

At some really core level I hate feeling sorry for myself. It's honestly such pussy shit to jerk yourself off so much thinking about how hard your life is and if I had gone to college in the 1950's like my grandpa and not in the 2010's I would have rightfully had the shit kicked out of me for sitting around feeling bad that life was hard, because not having the shit kicked out of you for stuff like that is how you'd end up getting shot. But unfortunately America lost the Vietnam War and so generations of college students have had to hold their nose and swallow this idea that men should cry.

I also realized in the last few years I started developing that kind of face and body where the contact autism from living in the Bay Area slowly turns you into a kind of fluffy brainfogged asexual. I started regularly going to the gym again and it's embarrassing how out-of-shape I am compared to three years ago.

Okay. So here is the stream-of-consciousness realization that I have come to, slightly after midnight, while my wife and baby are asleep in the other room. The basic problem in my life right now is that I am not enacting my will on the world.

That thing that happened last year. It was a multi-part failure. A train crash in slow motion from the beginning except that I kept ignoring what was going wrong because I thought I could will my way through it. And I do think I got pretty far with that strategy but with startups a lot of things you do early on like forgetting to suck the wrong guy's dick¹ at the right time basically end up coming back to fuck you later on when that guy, who knows fuckall about how to actually make money building something great and more often than not burned a shit-ton of money building something mediocre and forgettable the one time he actually tried, texts everyone in his groupchat who did suck his dick at the right time saying something slimy, like the wet noodle he is.

There's a reason everyone else in that groupchat has terrible returns.

Okay, rereading the above probably makes this sound like a crash out. I assure you (or myself, or whoever the target audience for this is) that I already went through that a year ago and to the extent that it can be processed, it's processed. Most of what is left is just ordinary fire and I was basically like this before.

Back to the original point. Enacting my will on the world.

Why did I quit Facebook? Why did I rage quit Tesla when some fucking Eastern European senior staff guy kept politicking his shitty code? Why can't I just be happy securing the bag for my kid? I'm literally a white guy who can scrap his way into literally whatever he wants to do by turning my brain off and just grinding until it works - why can't I just force myself to suck it up and start moneyball-maxxing?

Answer: I honestly don't care if OpenAI wins. I do believe it is better the world for OpenAI or Anthropic to win than Elon, but I didn't care if Facebook won when I was working there, or Tesla, or Google, or Amazon, and since I now feel that the marginal return for me having another big tech company name on my resume is zero (i.e., there isn't anything in it for me anymore) I really can't bring myself to put in the effort to try and climb the ladder. In truth, it's always just been cool problems to keep my brain happy and logos to put on my resume to make up for the fact that I didn't go to a good college.²

Doing K-Scale was the most alive I've felt. The first few months of 2024 when we were living in a garage and building robots, and the few months from November 2024 to around April 2025 when stuff was starting to work. Before a bunch of investors passed for the third time and my YC partner started ghosting me. Not his fault - it was pretty retarded for me to do YC in the first place, and I mean just have like a 5 minute conversation with him, he's a metrosexual with a British accent whose grand achievement in life was convincing the Coinbase guys to give him pro rata. Lesson learned. If you're going to dilute that much to someone it should only be to people who both want you to win and who can help you do so.³

Why did I feel alive?

First. It wouldn't have existed without me. As evidenced by the fact that when I had a baby and stopped living in the house it basically fell apart. It's kind of funny how startups are like that. You're basically making a cult, and the central message of the cult is that everyone is building this thing together because that's how human (mostly male) psychology works, but then you fire someone because they suck at their job and the cult kind of just rationalizes it and moves on, and if you're a good enough cult leader then that guy lives the rest of his life reminiscing about when he was in the cult and pretending that he mattered because the cult mattered, like how the Tesla cofounders keep giving interviews where they pretend to be relevant.

Being the guy who started the cult is a weird feeling though because you also automatically get all the blame when the cult fails, especially by the people who kept telling you to share the credit when they thought the cult was going great. Same human (mostly male) psychology. Wet noodle types love sophistry for the same reason they love conspiracy theories and grand narratives, because it makes them feel good about themselves, so when they go to bed at night and their brain briefly remembers that they're going to die one day they have something to tell themselves.

Second. It was mine. Same reason I don't like renting or eating out at expensive restaurants or letting other guys fuck my wife. I think I finally internalized that this is an out-of-distribution psychological characteristic because more than one person has accused me of "extreme narcissism" when I've just said what I actually think about the world, which is why I mostly don't talk about it that much, but come on, who are we kidding. And anyway the best people to work with are the ones who secretly think they can do things better than you and resent the fact that they're working for you and not the other way around, because they force you to be good. Really it's just basic animal (mostly male) psychology. It's fun to feel a bit like you're being hunted.

Actually. I should pay someone to just follow me around and randomly try to attack me, or my wife and child when I'm around. Or if I could somehow trigger that part of my brain to be more activated at baseline through other means, ideally without also triggering other negative stress responses. I think that sense of animal groundedness is missing from modern life for a lot of people and it probably contributes to low population sperm count.

Okay. So what now.

I'm tired of pretending like I don't want to start a humanoid company. Most of the people who told me (explicitly or implicitly) that it was a bad idea are the kinds of people who thought Physical Intelligence and Skild were good ideas (talk about wet noodle companies). That's my will. Now the question is how to enact it.

I doubt I can raise money from investors. Henry Ford didn't try to raise money from venture capitalists though so I don't see why I should either. I don't particularly like or respect most robotics investors since basically none of them have actually made that much money, either through investing or through their own companies.⁴ The exception would be people who made a bunch of money investing in SpaceX or Tesla early on but I think I got on the wrong side of the Elonverse - I mean, the Elonverse only permits one Elon.

There's a lot of other people with money besides Silicon Valley investors though. And unlike probably 95% of credible AI researchers, I am a straight white American Christian guy which is a mega cheat code in basically every other city in America, and when I stop suppressing it I'm pretty good at just being like 4-sigma committed to winning, which in every other city in America means making your customers really happy with a product that you can make great margins selling.

So it's actually pretty easy then. I need to get $10 million in high-margin revenue selling something which is on the critical path for making my own humanoid company, and use that money to bring my own humanoid to market, and just run it profitably. There's basically two options - actuators and chips. Actuators are too low-margin and the customers all want weird things but I'm quite sure I can find chip customers. And that'll probably actually be a good thing to build because VCs all assume it's too expensive to make your own chips and you have to be a genius, and so if I raise money after I've already done it then they won't care that I don't have a cofounder and that I basically am just rinsing and repeating the same thing I tried before.

Ok. I suppose that's the game plan then. It's now 1:31 in the morning. I need to wake up at 7:00 tomorrow, so it's a bummer that I'm not going to get more sleep, but I feel better for having writteh this down. For like months I've been thinking I needed to write down what I want from life, and I kept sitting down to write something but then I would get too introspective and try to rationalize rather than just saying what I felt, because for the last ~year I've been telling myself that wanting what I want is wrong or irrational or something like that.

Fuck that.