The greeks had a concept called thumos. It roughly meant spiritedness, passion, or righteous anger. It represented the drive and inner fire that pushes people toward excellence and standing up for honor.

Others had similar concepts.

The Romans had Virtus. Vikings had Drengskapr. Arabs had Muruwwa. The Japanese had Bushido.

I often wonder if America has our own word. Or if our very nature is thumos itself.

And I often wonder if in becoming anesthetized with the luxury and comfort that has flowed from the bounty we secured by acting with thumos we have slowly turned our backs on the very characteristics that have gotten us here.

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18% of Americans use GLP1 drugs. This number roughly doubles every year and a half. Its not just for food:

It seems we may have invented a drug that kills desire:

What do we lose when we lose desire?

Surely the person that has struggled and labored to channel their desire into productivity, or at least overcome it via force of will, is worthy of more adulation than one who merely suppresses it with a drug?

Is not the measure of a man his ability to subdue his desires and harness them into a positive force?

Is the artificial suppression of desire and subsequent lack of physical manifestation of the inability to control it, obesity or drug degeneracy, an achievement?

Perhaps for the scientists which created the medicine, but not for the patient.

For the patient it is a capitulation. It is a refusal to engage with the human experience.

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I spent about 15 years in basement MMA gyms in cities all over this country.

The same thing would happen again and again.

A guy would come in and demand to join the session with all the pro and semi pro fighters.

Whoever was at the desk would go through the motions of trying to convince them to do some skills classes for a few years first but it never worked.

We’d sit indian style like children against the cage watching him sign his waiver and struggle awkwardly to put on gloves for the first time.

And then we’d kick the shit out of him.

After 10 minutes the guy would throw his gloves down and claim that martial arts are gay actually and in the real world he would beat us up and then he would slink out.

But like 1 out of 20 guys would just keep getting up again and again and again?

Every time he would say something like ‘good stuff, thanks man’ and do some little bow and try to hug us or shake our hands?

After like 45 minutes of this you just had to like the guy.

And these guys always came back! Every day! Within a few months you forgot that they were the new guy.

I remember a Brazilian with a neck tattoo who barely spoke English told me these guys had a ‘martial spirit’ and I would do well to treat them with respect.

I don’t fight anymore but its some of the best life advice I’ve ever gotten.

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One of the things that whigs me out most about YC is that its very common for people to brag that they only quit their straight jobs once they were accepted?

What kind of entrepreneur applies to found a company?

Its preposterous. Its insulting.

Commentators will say its just the professionalization of the space. There is a playbook now. Pedigree matters. Those who take wild and violent swings are no longer the only ones who will win. Or at least those that never could take a wild and violent swing are now sometimes a fit? I don’t know man.

Look at this picture:

You can’t convince me that this isn’t a scheme by a boomer to trick 1000 tiger mom’d children into grinding on derivative slop until one of them maybe hits a 100x.

90% of the kids in that photo have parents who demonstrated the ultimate thumos by abandoning everything they knew and coming to this country with nothing.

And now their children apply for the privilege of some British guy to give them permission to work on b2b SaaS slop.

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I think about this guy a lot when I think about where we and our national history of thumos.

He would probably love my little article so far. ‘Hell yeah brother’ I imagine him saying while shaking a Zyn tin.

But this isn’t thumos.

This is what happens when we give 15% of children drugs to suppress their spirits.

They act like children when they become adults.

When I was a kid, if I told my dad I was going to the movies he would pull a roll of cash out of his pocket.

$3000 in tens and twenties. He’d peel off $20.

By the time I was born he mostly rolled finance guys at house games on the side.

Before that, amongst other things, he made his living gambling.

Which he called being a ‘professional sportsman.’

There is a distinction.

He never went out to win money, he went out to take it from someone else.

He never played slots, or roulette or baccarat. He never played the horses.

Bridge, backgammon and poker are the skill games.

The key is to make sure you are playing against someone less skilled than you.

‘Remember’ he’d say ‘if you sit down at a table and you can’t make the rube, you are the rube’.

The first rule.

…

States that legalize sports betting observe the following:

— 30% increase in personal bankruptcies

— 25% increase in credit card delinquencies

— 27% increase in auto loan delinquencies

— 300% increase in divorce rate amongst consistent gamblers

— 300% increase in suicide rate amongst consistent gamblers

…

Sports is not the only way to gamble against people that are more skilled than you.

…

Before I knew what the second rule was I broke it when I founded my first company.

I couldn’t get an interview at Whole Foods to stock shelves.

I was doing hoodrat jiu jitsu matches at VFW halls for $200 in prize money.

I sold used socks to sexual deviants on eBay until they shut me down.

I founded the company because I had no other choice.

When I first got a desk at a co working space I would wait until everyone went home and I’d fill my backpack with the free snacks.

…

I’m not the only one…

… that gambled from a position of weakness:

If you have no other choice, you have to bet it all, which makes you a gambler not a sportsman.

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I lived in New York for a brief period and trained at a jiu jitsu gym in Korea town.

Anthony Bourdain trained there.

We were usually paired together because we weighed the same.

I was a restaurant tech founder and we never discussed restaurants. He never commented on my food themed tattoos. We did not have a friendship.

The only conversation I can remember having was one time he said ‘I like this sport because I can always tell exactly how good I am relative to everyone else at any moment.’

Which seemed insane to me because it implied he couldn’t tell how good he was at other stuff and he was my and everyone else’s hero and seemed so good at everything.

Shortly there after I was eating ramen in Harvard square with a rich and powerful vc you’ve heard of and he just stared out the window at the commuters and said ‘I don’t even know if I’m good at this.’ I can assure you he has returned billions.

The third rule. Never assume you are good.

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I have founded a company that has gone to zero. I have invested in many more that have done the same.

If you find yourself in these situations, I recommend this. Hope is a wonderful thing to be addicted to.

I have founded startups that have worked out. I have invested in others that have done the same.

When you find yourself in these situations, I recommend this. America is not a country, its just a business.

There are, in fact, only two types of people in the world.

Those with agency and those without.

…

All of history is a battle between them.

What was true then...

… is still true now.

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Frequently, agency fails to correlate with intellect.

This further enrages the fact-checking class.

Agency is the most potent weapon against credentialism.

…

Modern politics is much less confusing when you realize that agency, not wealth, is the dividing line.

The upwardly mobile underclass and the true elite are united by their agency in the same way the downwardly mobile elite and the perpetual underclass are by their lack of it.

Hector and Sundar largely care about the same things and vote the same way. So do April and Jake.

Misunderstanding this is why people lose their minds at stuff like this too:

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This is not a transgressive idea.

Every great cop movie makes this very point.

The criminal mastermind and the genius detective united by a shared agency, all the other characters merely NPCs, extras to be shot during the robbery or to drive squad cars.

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Technological revolutions lower the bar to possessing something like ‘minimum viable agency.’

That is, every time we invent something new, what qualifies as high agency is easier and less risky.

High agency used to mean getting on a boat and coming to America and half your family died, if you were lucky.

High agency in 2016 was quitting your well paying wage cuck job to found a startup.

AI is the same thing, just more.

No one is coming to save you.