Silence

Given the times, I was sent this by a friend.  Jessica Livingston penned it in 2017.  It’s truer today than it was then.  I don’t know her, but she has an extremely compelling personal story.  My assumption is we wouldn’t agree on politics but I agree wholeheartedly with this blogpost.

The Sound of Silence

I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I’d heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years.

But I can’t tell you what it was.

There’s too much downside in sharing any opinion that could easily be misinterpreted online. Even facts are dangerous to share if they don’t align with what people want to believe. 

There’s a lot of concern about “fake news” lately. That is a real problem, but there’s also the opposite problem: true things that aren’t being said.

Some of the most useful things I’ve learned about startups over the years are also things I’d never share publicly. Not because the ideas are necessarily controversial in their own right, but because anyone could twist them to seem controversial if they were sufficiently motivated to. And when that happens I immediately regret having said anything. It’s a massive distraction. I have two young kids, and I have hundreds of startups to keep track of. I don’t have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me.

Not surprisingly, the juiciest targets for this sort of willful misinterpretation are organizations and people who are successful. They have power, and power makes them both interesting and envied; I teach founders they all have to be prepared for this as their startups grow. 

In my blog post, “Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls” I said:

       You can’t prevent yourself from being a target. It’s an automatic
       consequence of being successful. So the best you can do is react
       in the right way when people attack you. To some extent you have
       to resign yourself to letting people lie about you.

The problem with this is, the most successful people in an industry tend to have some of the most valuable insights about it. So you lose a lot when they are silenced.  And also, if they keep those insights to themselves, it makes the powerful more powerful. It means useful information remains amongst insiders, like me, for example.

Another downside of friction in sharing ideas publicly is that we lose the conversation they would have generated. Before Twitter et al, and before the media were so reliant on page views, Paul wrote an essay called “What You Can’t Say.” In it he said:

       The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that
       you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads
       to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to
       have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to.

Thirteen years later, that’s my default plan. There’s just too much downside for me to get distracted with others’ opinions of my opinions. [1] It’s not that I’m afraid of expressing my opinions. I just think, “Why bother?”

It’s great that technology has given more people a voice on the internet. But that doesn’t necessarily mean less friction in sharing ideas, because some of those voices are shouting down the others.

How do we solve this problem? I don’t know, but I hope there is a solution. I hope we’re just in the social media 1.0 phase, and that technology will eventually bring us a social media 2.0 where one can speak more openly. [2] 

I’m horrified at the prospect of the most insightful people in their fields thinking, “That’s something I should comment on. Nah, what’s the point? Too much downside.” 

That’s what happens now, and we don’t even know how much, because how do you measure the sound of silence?

As a society, have been at her last sentence for a while.  In the past year, it’s gotten worse.  Jim Crow hasn’t gone away.  It just found a different enabler and a different target.

The people that are administering and acting out the new Jim Crow are sanctimonious.  They are truly evil people bent on destroying 254 years of American culture and the American Experiment.  They are twisted.

I am going to be shutting down this blog for a while.  In 2008, I wrote a piece for Pajamas Media that had to go through an editor.  It was on how Hank Paulsen bailed out his cronies on Wall Street which turned out to be true.  I originally started it because I didn’t want to have to work to go through a bunch of hoops at online publications.   I also wanted to speak truth to the fallacy of Dodd-Frank given the experiences I had. A blog seemed a lot easier and if people picked it up so much the better.  From there it has been all over the place.  Howard Lindzon and Phil Pearlman made me part of their Stocktwits network and I thank them for that opportunity.  Townhall used to reprint it all the time until I decided not to let them since I preferred it to be a personal blog someone found.  Plus, Townhall was making the money off clicks and I wasn’t getting any.  I didn’t start this blog with the idea of making money.  It was my own public forum. Sometimes, I have seen where I influenced a debate or moved a topic forward.  I have never apologized, and will never apologize for my politics.  I was out of the closet from the get-go.

I am considering shutting down all social media, specifically Twitter.  There is more to lose than there is to gain.  That’s the vision of the world the Jacobin mob wants.  One hesitation I have is giving in to the mob.  I have never been like that and guys that traded with me know.  Feel free to chime in down by the comments if you are able.

I loved trading and I loved floor traders because they were direct and honest.  They stood up for what they believed in.  You might disagree but at least you knew where you stood.  When you get out in the real world, you meet precious few stand up people.

In the past several months we have seen center-right and center-left people canceled, jobs lost, and careers ruined.  Fortunately for me, we are at the end of our fund with no plans to raise another.  I am 58, and while I don’t particularly want to retire I certainly am able to.

I am not unique.  A lot of Americans have similar stories.  But in some ways I am unique.  I went to public schools where 50% of my high school didn’t attend college. Turns out, my high school from 1975-1980 cranked out a lot of great people.  Co-founders of public companies.  3 Star generals.  Playwrights and directors.  Scriptwriters.  I went to a community college before going to a public Big 10 university.  I was a middle-class kid who’s father grew up extremely poor and became a PhD in Education, teaching his whole life.  My father was the first person in his extended family to graduate from college.  His mother was the first in her family to graduate from high school.  My mother was middle class and her father earned a Masters’s degree in the early 1930s when few went to college. I was lucky to be born into a two-parent family that stayed together and college was never an afterthought in my home.  I was blessed with some athletic talent that got me scholarship offers to lower-tier D1 schools.  But I didn’t have “privilege”.  I worked my f–king ass off.  I sacrificed.

When college teammates and other athletic buddies I had were playing grab ass all over campus, I was in class.  I never missed a college class and I always took 8AM classes every day of the week.  They had the exact same opportunity in front of them that I did but they didn’t seize it.

To be clear, at age 24 I took a huge individual risk and worked my ass off to make it pay off.  Not a lot of people would have done what I did.  I have continued to take risk my entire life.  I networked. I have failed a lot.  I have had some success. I did some things that 90% of the people in the room would have thought audacious or impossible to do and yet they happened.  I was part of a group that changed the face of American exchanges forever.  I have been put out of a job by robots.  I went through depression and recovered.  In one year, I lost two-thirds of my net worth and because of how my wife and I chose to live prior, survived.  I represented the United States at the first-ever i7 held in Torino Italy.  I was the leading force behind Hyde Park Angels and jump-started the entire Chicago entrepreneurial ecosystem which was stuck in neutral until we arrived.  America was founded on taking risk and I learned that in school and life.

I stand very firm in my beliefs and have a very extensive empirical academic root to them I am confident of.  Over the past several years, I have lost opportunities because of them. I have been actively discriminated against because of them.

Friends of mine who were conservatives have been ousted from jobs and have left the venture business because of their beliefs.  The tech community is not tolerant.

Blogposts on this blog have been cited on three occasions as a point for active discrimination.  A couple that I will chat about here.  One of my early blog posts showed how Oprah lost half of her audience when she became overtly political. It was an early lesson that I passed on to companies about being overtly political.  Personally, it’s okay—but not for a company that is trying to cast a wide net of customers.  A person who I thought was a friend of mine, a classmate, told a publication that I was racist.  This person has not led a successful life.  He is “all hat and no cattle”.  He doesn’t know until right now that I know it was him that approached the publication.  The reporter told me.  I punched back twice as hard and that’s what you have to do when you are accused of something like that.  Especially if it’s not true which it isn’t.  The second had to do with investing.  I wrote a post that showed how the minimum wage creates unemployment and brings disadvantages to the people it is designed to help.  This is a basic microeconomic fact empirically proven again and again.  Any good microeconomics professor worth their salt will teach it in the first few classes.  A person that was going to work with me decided not to because he couldn’t work with Republicans.  I told him it was his choice to discriminate, but I don’t do that.  I never have.

Here is what I know.

Free market capitalism is the only way to raise standards of living.  Freedom of choice, individuality, and property rights make that system go along with access to education which doesn’t have to be a government-administered union administered education.  Ideally, it probably would not be.  The first principles of the Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers, the US Constitution are some of the greatest documents written by men. All of the previous are not racist, nor are they limiting.  They are a great way to build a free society.

Our society doesn’t work without competition.  Competition is essential to spur innovation and development.  Competition makes sure market niches are filled.  Competition raises standards of living.  Those marching in the streets for Marxism are against competition.  They want everyone to get a trophy and we know that doesn’t work.

Creative destruction and entrepreneurship combined with limited government to make room for the innovations that ensue are essential to a functioning capitalistic society.  Freedom for capital to move is also essential.  I know Democrats don’t sign up for that, and I also know some Republicans that aren’t on board either.

The government is like any other entity with its own economic incentives.  The downside is when the government actively pursues and succeeds in fulfilling its economic incentive, it degrades the freedom and bursts the limits of government.  We see that at every level of government in my home state of Illinois.

I understand the differences between closed and open networks and have blogged about it.  In business, they are strategic in different ways but our discourse that leads to opportunity today in many parts of America, especially places like Chicago, have become closed networks.  Closed networks allow riots to happen.  Closed networks see fit to release criminals on the street and to ignore criminal activity in the name of grabbing more power for themselves.

The academic canon put forth by Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Ronald Coase, Merton Miller, and George Stigler along with the rest of the Chicago Boys is the way to put these economic concepts to work in society. Their academic rigor supports capitalistic free markets, competition, and gives roots to the beliefs I have.   However, I am not sure that today’s “Chicago School” remember or believe in them.  Certainly, many colleges and universities are participating actively with the Jacobin Mob to squelch debate and the free flow of ideas.

When I asked leaders in the startup movement if they were okay with discrimination, they were. They are enabling cancel culture as well.  I have seen many of them actively discriminate.

When you throw around the word Nazi, Fascist etc casually and imply that anyone who doesn’t think exactly like you represents that image, you degrade and insult the memory of the people that actually suffered under those regimes.  It shows a lack of intellect.  A lack of depth of thinking.  A lack of character.  A lack of primary historical knowledge.  By the way, every Republican President has been characterized as one of the flavors since Barry Goldwater ran for office in 1964.  The current governor of Illinois has characterized opponents as Nazis.  He ought to know better.  The Illinois senator up for re-election this year characterized American troops as Nazis.  He ought to know better.  He also characterized a political opponent offensively this year as a “token”.

Recently, I canceled my subscription to the Chicago Tribune for what they did to John Kass. I will never subscribe again.

I found out yesterday that a left-wing venture capital attorney from Chicago was harassing my daughter on Twitter.  I don’t mind if you come after me but stay away from my family.  I have worked with this attorney on a couple of deals in the past, but since it’s okay to discriminate now I will never send him business nor do any business with any company or firm he is involved with.  If you are so low class that you harass my family on social media, you don’t deserve the business.

There is zero doubt that I am moving out of Chicago, hopefully, by the end of this year.  I don’t know where exactly yet but the income tax rate will be 0%.  I used to tolerate all the stuff in Chicago because I grew up there.  It’s a great food city.  The people were generally pretty great.  Not only is Chicago not safe, but it is not safe for people that think differently.  A lot of the people that used to be great aren’t so great anymore. It is a totalitarian place. Heavy on the discrimination.  It is not tolerant. The Chicago media is enabling and won’t investigate nor will they report on the corruption until after the fact so they get clicks.  Chicago proves out David Horowitz’s statement that inside every left-wing politician is a totalitarian screaming to get out.

I know many of the readers of this blog are in financial services and cannot comment due to regulations.  Thanks for reading.  I receive a lot of private email and messages from people that read this and agree with me, yet they must stay locked behind a closet door for a lot of reasons.  On the other hand, there are some people that are just chickenshit.  Grinfuckers. I don’t have time for them.

Frankly, I don’t give two whits what people think.  I have been individualistic my entire life and I am not going to change now.  I was self-employed at age 24. It’s been on me to make something of my life ever since.  I am not wealthy enough to embrace socialism, and if I ever become wealthy enough I promise you I won’t.

I might blog from time to time.  It’s been a daily morning habit since 1/12/2010. In the early days, I blogged multiple times a day but eventually settled into a cadence.  I will leave it lie for now and might take it up again.  Currently, the opportunity cost is not worth the cost.