Can you understand a tyrant?

Five days before the 2020 election, Ben Schreckinger was in Steve Bannon’s basement as Trump allies gathered to copy files they said came from Hunter Biden’s laptop. We talk about what he could prove, what writing The Bidens taught him about Joe, and how he’s bringing the same approach to investigating UFOs at PARADIGM.Read Ben’s work here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

What makes a man devote his life to the institution that imprisoned his father? Xi Jinping’s childhood raises a question whose consequences now extend far beyond the family in which it began.Lucy Hornby has spent years trying to understand that journey. She lived in China for twenty years, reporting for Reuters and serving as the Financial Times’ deputy Beijing bureau chief. Her investigation into the ownership of HNA won the Society of Publishers in Asia’s award for excellence in business reporting. Her forthcoming book, The Last Man, examines Xi’s life and rise to power.We begin in 1995, when a young woman from New Jersey went to teach English in Wuhan. She remembers the curiosity of strangers and a colleague whose wicked humor could be conveyed by a glance. Those encounters give human dimensions to a country we often discuss as an abstraction.We talk about Xi’s childhood, the persecution of the Uyghurs, fentanyl, TikTok, and whether rivalry between America and China must lead to war. I ask how a leader might explain cruelty to himself, and what a Chinese version of me would want to know about America.You will leave with a clearer understanding of Xi’s psychology, the country he governs, and the assumptions Americans bring to both. You may also find yourself wondering how much of our certainty about other people depends on never having sat across a table from them. That distance matters when the people we misunderstand have the power to reshape our lives. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

Dear Elon,I’d like to offer you some advice, if you don’t mind.A great deal has been written about you these last few years, and most of it agrees that you are something monstrous. A villain in a cape made of stock options. An emperor of bots. The internet, which is mostly other people who have not met you either, has decided you are a cartoon, and it has drawn that cartoon with such confidence that even people who should know better have stopped looking for the man underneath.I don’t believe it. Not because I admire you particularly, and not because I have access to some private version of you the rest of us are missing. I don’t believe it because I don’t believe it about anyone. I think people are mostly trying. I think the desire to do something good with a life is one of the most universal things human beings carry, even when the doing of it goes badly, even when the trying gets twisted, even when a person’s reach for goodness lands somewhere awful. You are not exempt from this. You are also not exempt from the rest of it: the loneliness, the fear, the longing to leave behind a thing your children might point to and say, that was him.So I write to you the way I’d write to anyone whose work I take seriously. As a person.You have said that for humanity to survive, we must become an interplanetary species. I think you’re wrong about that, and I’d like to explain why.Drive through certain blocks of San Francisco and the city does not look like a city. It looks like an old photograph of a city that has been left out in the weather. Tents lean against tents. A man without shoes walks slow along the curb. A woman in a doorway speaks to a child who is not there. The fog comes down off the hills and through the Civic Center and there is the smell of urine and the smell of weed and the smell of something burning in foil three doorways down. The buildings rise out of the fog with their windows lit and behind the windows are screens and behind the screens are other cities, and the people in those cities do not know that this one is still here.To see all that, and then to see what people do to each other with rifles and drones and artillery, to see the centuries of slaughter we have already authored and the centuries we have queued up for our grandchildren, to read the morning paper and find in it a liturgy of ruin, I do not blame any man for looking up at the sky and deciding that the door is here, the door has always been here, and we should walk through it before the house comes down. There is dignity in that impulse. There is even love in it. A father wants somewhere safe for the children of strangers. The atmosphere of Mars is not safe, but it is, at least, somewhere we have not yet ruined.What if leaving is not the answer, though. At least not yet.On Market Street, men warm their hands at a fire in a steel drum. A young man in a fleece vest walks by them like they’re a flock of gulls. In Washington, meanwhile, the legislature meets. It is still called a deliberative body, in the way a lapsed church is still called a church. It deliberates nothing. It passes the bills its donors have written and ignores the bills its voters have asked for, and the operative provisions of what it does pass are concealed in appendices that the members themselves have not read.So the people stay at the garbage can fires that warm their hands. The young man in the Patagonia keeps walking. The government, which has not decided much of consequence in twenty years, does not decide this either.So here is the question.What if the answer is for the first trillionaire to show moral leadership. And not because anyone asked him to. Because it was right. Because his children will read about him one day. Because in the long arc of how civilizations are remembered, the men who fled are not the men who are remembered.Let me propose something specific.Take five percent of one trillion dollars. Fifty billion. It is a number that ought to feel like a wound, and at the scale of one trillion it does not. Fifty billion, deployed over ten years, placed in a single instrument with a single mandate, governed by people who report to no political party and no quarterly earnings call. You seed it. You call the other nine men at your altitude and ask them to match. None of them wants to be the first, but once it starts all of them will want to be the second. The purpose is simple. To build, inside one American city, a self-sustaining ladder of productive work for the people who currently have no rung to put a foot on.The instrument does four things, in roughly equal measure. It anchors. It trains. It owns. It houses.It anchors by guaranteeing that the city’s largest institutions, its hospitals, its universities, its transit authority, its construction projects funded with public money, buy a steadily rising share of their goods and services from firms located within the city and employing residents at a living wage. The only reason something like this has not transformed San Francisco is that no one with the patience or the capital has bothered.It trains by funding, at full ride, a system of vocational and technical apprenticeships that pay a wage from day one and lead to certified work in trades the city actually needs. Electricians. Pipefitters. Eldercare workers. Solar installers. Childcare professionals. Marine technicians for the port the city has neglected for half a century. These are jobs that cannot be exported and cannot be automated away in the lifetime of anyone now living, and the city, which is aging faster than it is building, cannot function without them.It owns by seeding, through patient capital, a network of worker-owned firms in those same trades, so that wages stay in the city and equity stays with the workers, and the firms compound their value in the hands of the people whose labor created it, rather than draining upward to a holding company in a tax-advantaged jurisdiction whose name no one in the firm can pronounce.It houses by financing the construction of permanently affordable workforce housing on land held in a community trust, so that the people doing the trained work and the anchored work and the owned work can sleep within an hour of the work they do, and the cycle that has hollowed out every American coastal city since the 1980s finally meets a force strong enough to bend it.Fifty billion. Ten years. One city. A model another city can copy without permission.The philanthropy of the past thirty years has, for the most part, failed, and it has failed for reasons that were predictable at the outset. It funded programs, and programs, by their nature, consume the capital that sustains them and produce, in exchange, services that disappear the moment the capital is withdrawn. What I am proposing is structurally different. The capital is not spent; it is placed. It purchases assets, ownership stakes, land, training pipelines, contractual relationships, that continue to generate value after the initial deployment is complete and require no further injection to do so. The distinction is the one between feeding a man versus seating him at a table he owns a share of.Yes, this is the work of the state. And the state will not do it. A man may say what ought to be done and the saying is a kind of comfort to the one who says it. The man at the drum is not comforted. He stands in the cold and the cold does not ask whose job it was. The night comes on and the state is elsewhere and has been elsewhere a long time.Now consider, with the cold eye of a man who has built two of the great firms of his century, what this does for the billionaire who funds it.It buys him the one thing his money has not yet bought him. It buys him a country that will still have him in it when his children are grown. The historical record on this is not ambiguous. Societies that allow the gap between the man at the drum and the man in the lobby to widen past a certain point do not stay societies. They become… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

My mother grew up in a house with five kids and almost no money. My grandfather made their lunches every day: two slices of Wonder Bread, one slice of bologna, repeat. The day she got into medical school she came home holding the acceptance letter, breathless, and showed it to her mother, who looked at it for a moment and said, “Oh. Okay. I’m going to bed.”What I remember most from school is how I felt walking home with a good grade in my backpack. The excitement was hers, really. I was borrowing it forward. My mother lit up when I showed her things, and that kind of light costs something to give, and not every house has it. Hers rarely had it. She did better than her mother did. And her mother had done better than hers. That is how this is supposed to work, when it works.My grandmother wasn’t cruel. Her parents came over from Italy with almost nothing and gave her what they had, which wasn’t much warmth, because nobody had given them any either. On my father’s side, my great-grandfather sold fruit on the streets of Newark after coming over from Sicily. His son sold insurance. My father became a doctor. Each one parented imperfectly, the way I do, doing the best with what they had.Lately my generation has taken up a kind of recreational dunking on the Boomers. I see it every day on social media. Someone posts a photo of a paid-off center hall colonial and writes, “they pulled the ladder up behind themselves.” Someone else, a thoughtful person, says her parents’ generation “ate the future.” I read these and I think of my mother and of the sandwiches her father made and the letter her mother would not look at and the long quiet years that came after. And I wonder if we know what we mean. I wonder if we ever have.“Boomer” is a demographic shorthand that has been quietly promoted to a moral category, and the promotion was illegitimate. Pew defines the cohort as Americans born between 1946 and 1964: nearly twenty birth years of people across every race, class, region, and circumstance this country contains. What I mean is that “boomer” isn’t a personality trait.Before we picture every Boomer on a paid-off patio with a margarita, it is worth noticing what the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually says. Nearly one in five Americans sixty-five and older is still in the labor force. Of those working, close to forty percent are part-time. Some of that is preference, but a lot of it is rent.The next time you are at the pharmacy and the woman behind the counter is in her seventies, ringing up your prescription with hands that have done forty-five years of work, look at her. She is closer to a witness of your generation’s economic story than its villain.The Boomers inherited wounds, and their 20s were not a block party. American troop levels in Vietnam peaked above five hundred thousand in April of 1969. Later that year, more than half a million people marched on Washington against the war. The older Boomers were inside that rupture as young adults. They came of age under the draft, under assassinations, under the AIDS crisis that killed their friends in their thirties, under the slow dismantling of the unions and pensions their fathers had counted on.They also built things. The first Earth Day, in 1970, drew twenty million Americans into the streets and led, that same year, to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations and banned discriminatory employment practices. Much of the moral language my generation now uses to condemn the Boomers was built, marched for, voted for, or imperfectly absorbed by the Boomers themselves.In 1984, a twenty-five-year-old named Ruth Coker Burks was visiting a friend at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a single mother who sold real estate. She had been raised Methodist in a small Arkansas town where almost no one she knew had ever said the word gay out loud.Walking the corridor, she noticed that one of the rooms had a red bag tied to the door. The nurses at the station were drawing straws. She asked what they were doing. They told her: the man in that room had AIDS, and somebody had to bring him his dinner tray, and none of them wanted to.She walked in.His name was Jimmy. He weighed less than a hundred pounds and his eyes had retreated so far into his skull that you could not tell him from the linens. White upon white. He asked for his mother in a voice Ruth had to bend down to hear.She walked to the nurses station and asked for the number. His mother isnt coming, the nurse said.I would like to try, Ruth said.She took the paper and she dialed and she waited. A woman answered.Your son is dying, Ruth told her.The line went quiet. A long quiet from a house in some other county where the light was failing and a woman stood at her kitchen with the receiver pressed to her ear.My son died years ago, the woman said. He died the day he went gay. I dont know what is in that hospital but it is not my son.And she hung up the phone.Ruth went back into the room. She did not have the language of allyship or any of the words that would be developed, in the decades to come, for moments like this. She had her hand, and she gave it to him. She sat there for thirteen hours. She did not let go when he died.She set out to bury him and found that the town would not permit it. One funeral home after another refused the body, as if the disease itself had moral character, as if to touch what he had been was to be implicated in what he had become. She drove an hour and a half to find a man who would do the work, and she paid him out of her own money, because no one else would pay it and because someone had to.The ashes came back to her in a cardboard box, of the sort that holds office supplies or a pair of shoes, a container that announces by its ordinariness that no ceremony has been arranged for what it holds. She could not afford an urn. She walked into a pottery shop in Hot Springs and stood among the kilned bowls and serving dishes, and a man there, hearing what she needed and perhaps not hearing the whole of it, took down a chipped cookie jar and gave it to her. Into this she placed what remained of Jimmy.A cookie jar. The kind a grandmother keeps on a kitchen counter for visiting children, made to hold the small and pleasurable things of an ordinary life. He had been refused his mother, refused the rites of his town, refused even the dignity of an urn, and what he received instead was the vessel of a childhood no one had let him have.She buried him at night, alone, in her family’s cemetery, with a posthole digger she had thrown in the back of her car. She said a few words over the grave herself.She would do this many more times over the next decade. Word traveled fast through the quiet networks of dying men. There is a woman in Hot Springs. She is not afraid. She will sit with you.She had never heard the modern catechism of inclusion and there was no social media. She was a Methodist single mother in Reagan-era Arkansas, and the Ku Klux Klan would twice burn crosses on her lawn for what she was doing, and she kept doing it anyway.The Boomers, like every generation that ever drew breath, came into the world owing a debt no one had thought to explain to them; their twenties were the long humid corridor of a house their fathers had built and could not bring themselves to leave, full of the war their fathers had won and could not stop fighting, full of the wars their own sons would be sent to fight, full of the slow patient carnage by which a country becomes itself.The credentialed classes have spent a generation learning to treat fluency as a kind of virtue. To deploy the current vocabulary of suffering, to know its nouns and its cadences and the audiences at which it must be aimed, has become a moral performance in its own right. It is one of the more comfortable confusions of American life.The right words came late. They came after a working-class woman in … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

You sit at the desk in the basement corner you call your office. The window above it looks at nothing. Just a wedge of grass and the foundation of the neighbor’s house. The screen glows the pale blue of a thing that doesn’t sleep, and you have been staring at it long enough that your eyes have stopped registering the words. Behind you the house has settled into its night sounds. The refrigerator cycling. The heater ticking through the walls. A beam contracting somewhere over your head as if the house is trying not to wake anyone. From the kitchen comes the smell of the chicken your wife roasted at six, garlic and rosemary gone cold on the stovetop, the kind of smell that means a family ate and a woman cleaned up and a man was not there for either part. Your daughter is asleep upstairs. Your son is asleep in the room across from hers. Your wife has been asleep for an hour. You can hear her breathing through the floor if you listen, and sometimes you do.The phone lights up on the desk. It is your friend from before. From the unit, from the years you both ate the same dust in the Mojave desert, and slept under the same blanket of low grade stress. The screen shows his name and you look at it. You wanted to ask him whether he ever thinks about the young kid from second platoon platoon, the one with the sister, the one whose name you can no longer say without your throat closing. You wanted to ask him whether his father has died yet. You wanted to ask him if he was okay, which is the only question that has ever mattered between you, and which neither of you has ever once asked aloud.You let it ring. You watch the screen go dark. The house keeps breathing.In the morning you send him a text. Hey brother, saw you called. All good?What you meant to say was that you have been sitting at this desk most nights for a year and you do not understand why. What you meant to say was that last week at the gas station you saw a kid who reminded you of the kid from second platoon, and you sat in the truck for twenty minutes afterward and could not turn the key. What you meant to say was that you have not heard your friend’s voice in eleven months and you are afraid the next time you hear it will be at his funeral service, and you will stand there in a suit you bought for someone else’s funeral and not know what to do with your hands. The text said none of this. The text was four words and a question mark, a green rectangle on a piece of glass. He sent one back an hour later. All good brother. You? You wrote Same. You put the phone down and went and made the coffee.What was lost was the breath between the words. What was lost was the catch in his voice when he heard yours, the small involuntary thing the throat does when a man hears a man he has loved for twenty years. What was lost was the chance, the single chance, on a Tuesday night in October at twenty-three minutes past eleven, to be known by another man before the dark comes for them both. Two men can love each other their whole lives and never say it. What saves them is the hearing of it. And there is no hearing in a green rectangle. There is no breath. There is no man on the other end. There is only the silence after, which is the silence that will be there when one of them is gone and the other is left with a phone that does not ring anymore, and a question he never asked.The phone call as the last unedited medium.The dread is new. A phone rings on a desk at night and the person whose desk it is looks at it with the fixed expression of a man watching an animal he has not yet decided to feed. The name on the screen belongs to someone he loves. That is what makes the dread interesting. To be known by people who already know us, at a moment for which we have not prepared, is now the thing we are most afraid of.We did not used to prepare. We just picked up. The voice came out of us with whatever fatigue or irritation or grief the day had left in it, and the person on the other end heard it and made of it what they would. Now we draft. Voice memos can be re-recorded until the catch is gone from the throat. Texts can be edited until they say the thing we wish we felt. The little green dot beside our name can be turned off, so no one knows we are home.What we have built, over fifteen years and without quite meaning to, is a publicist’s job inside every friendship. We manage our image for the people who have watched us cry. We curate our availability for the people who held our children. The phone call is the last room we have not redecorated. This is why the ringing of it produces what it produces. This is why we let it go.What we lost is rhythm.Conversation has a tempo, which is to say it has pauses, and the pauses are where the meaning lives. A held breath before an answer means one thing. A laugh that arrives a beat late means another. The voice that drops a half step on a particular word, the cough that interrupts a sentence and then declines to finish it, these are the structures through which one human being learns what another human being is actually saying. They are also, almost without exception, involuntary. They cannot be drafted.Text removes them, and what remains is the sentence stripped of its weather. We send messages over hours that would have taken twelve minutes by voice and carried, in those twelve minutes, the entire emotional truth of an exchange the texts will never approximate. What looks like a pause in a text thread is an absence. Someone has put the phone down. Someone is in a meeting. Someone is choosing not to answer yet because the appearance of immediacy is socially expensive.A thread that ran across a Tuesday afternoon feels, in retrospect, like a long conversation. It was not a long conversation. It was a series of micro-performances separated by the silences in which we did other things. The twelve-minute call would have left us with the residue a real exchange leaves, the small ache of having been present to another person’s life. The thread leaves nothing. We scroll up the next week and cannot remember what we meant.A commander walks the line at the end of a long day. He does not have a clipboard. He does not ask the questions a survey would ask. He stops at a man and looks at him, and the looking is the thing. He sees the weight under the eyes, the small tremor in the hand that holds the rifle, the way the shoulders have begun to carry something the man has not yet told anyone he is carrying. He asks how the man is and listens to the answer, and then he listens to what the answer did not contain. This is how morale has always been taken. Face to face, in the failing light, by a man whose job is to know which of his men is closer tonight to breaking than he was yesterday. You cannot do this over text.A phone is a small thing on a desk. It rings or it does not. You answer or you do not. The choosing seems like nothing at the time. A man has only so many nights, and only so many friends, and only so many rings before the ringing stops. The window above the desk looks at nothing. The grass is the grass. The phone goes dark. The house keeps breathing. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

Gender discourse has become stupid. I do not mean controversial, or incendiary, or even wrong, though it manages all three on a good day. I mean stupid in the technical sense, as a failure of the intellect to perform its basic office, which is to notice that the world is more complicated than one’s theory of it. The conversation is now carried on at a pitch of abstraction that would have been laughed out of any seminar or conference room at any point before roughly 1990, and it is sustained by combatants who appear to believe that millions of strangers, whom they will never meet, are fundamentally knowable by the team jersey they were issued at birth.The spectacle has the curious feature that its two warring camps, who cannot be in a room together without calling for the other’s excommunication, are in fact engaged in the same enterprise. Both insist that the category does the moral work. Both regard the opposition as so foundationally corrupt that engagement is pointless. And both have arrived, by opposite routes, at the same terminus, which is the decision to stop looking at the people the whole argument is supposedly about.Start with the feminists. Not the moderate kind you meet at dinner parties. The serious writers, widely read, whose arguments are quoted on social media every day and taught in women’s studies departments as canon.I mean people like Andrea Dworkin, who in her 1987 book Intercourse, argued that heterosexual sex cannot be disentangled from male domination, that the act itself is marked by occupation, that a woman cannot meaningfully consent inside a system built to extract her consent. Or Amia Srinivasan, whose book The Right to Sex became a minor sensation in 2021, arguing that who we find attractive is political, that the patterns of desire in any society are shaped by power, and that the erotic preferences of men are, in aggregate, one of the mechanisms by which women are kept in place.These arguments are not on the fringes. They are the water the daughters were baptized in and the air the sons learned to hold their breath against, taught on every liberal arts campus from Wesleyan to Sarah Lawrence, by women who had learned them from women who had learned them in their own turn, recited now with the unembarrassed fluency of a catechism, in seminar rooms where the tuition runs to eighty thousand a year and the central discovery of the semester is that the patriarchy has, once again, been found to be responsible.There is a woman on X, and I know her although we have never met, who posts at three in the morning about her ex-husband. She does not say it is about her ex-husband. She says it is about capitalism, or about the male gaze, or about a study from the University of Michigan which has found, to nobody’s surprise but her own, that men are slightly worse than previously believed. The thread runs to 15 posts. By the eighth she has mentioned a specific brand of running shoe. By the eleventh, a specific restaurant in Cambridge. By the thirtieth, you could, if you were curious and had an afternoon free, reconstruct the entire marriage and file for divorce on her behalf.I follow perhaps fourteen of these women. I have told myself, on several occasions, that I am going to unfollow them, and then one of them will post something like men will literally start a land war in Asia before going to therapy, and I will think, well, not this one, this one is different, this one is funny, and I will keep her, the way a man keeps a houseplant he has no business owning, out of a vague sense that letting it die would say something unflattering about him.And then at two in the morning she will post a thread explaining that to be reasonable itself is a tool of patriarchal suppression, and I will be alone in a quiet house, reading by the light of my phone about how men are, once again, the problem, and wondering, with some seriousness, whether I am.Then there is Andrew Wilson, the Christian populist who recently sat down with Konstantin Kisin on Triggernometry. Wilson says out loud what a growing constituency now believes, a constituency one encounters with increasing frequency at weddings, where a groomsman you last saw at a fraternity formal in 2010 will corner you by the bar to explain, with the patient condescension of a man who has recently completed a podcast, that the decline of Western civilization began the moment women were permitted to open their own checking accounts.Women should not defer their childbearing years for college, because their biological window is narrow and college ruins them for marriage. Women should not vote, or should vote as part of a household, which in practice means their husbands vote for them. The draft applies to men, not women, and until that changes, women have not earned the franchise. Rights do not exist; they are social constructions maintained by force, and since women cannot wield force at scale, they are always appealing to men’s benevolence anyway. Feminism, to Wilson, is a century-long error, and the correction is a return to the stakeholder democracy America had at its founding, when the head of a household cast one vote for everyone under his roof.Wilson’s argument is coherent in its own way, sure. Grant his premises and the conclusions follow. The premises are that morality is grounded in God, that Christian ethics produce the best outcomes, and that force decides everything in the end. The rest is just engineering.What Wilson shares with far left feminists like Dworkin, despite every surface disagreement, is the treatment of men and women as classes whose behavior is explained by their biology or their social function. He would be offended by the comparison, though he clearly should not be. The operation is identical. A particular man or a particular woman is a stand-in for a role the ideology has assigned in advance. The individual is a data point in a case the theorist has already decided.But here is an author you’ll seldom hear interviewed on podcasts. The psychologist Andrew Solomon has spent a career writing against this exact move.He wrote that identity has a vertical dimension, the traits we inherit from our parents, and a horizontal dimension, the traits we discover only by finding others like us. A deaf child born to hearing parents is their child and also something the parents cannot fully comprehend without effort. The parents’ job is to love what the child actually is, not what they expected, and to resist the temptation to dissolve the child into a category.He would tell them you’ve written well, and that much of it was true. Men’s power has disfigured the lives of women. You had seen that plain, and set it down, and the seeing was not the error. But you have built a theory in which good men cannot appear. You have built a theory in which the father of a disabled child, sitting up through the fourth night in a row to keep her from hurting herself, is functionally indistinguishable from a rapist because both are men. Your theory has no room for love that crosses the category you made central. And a theory that will not house love is not a theory at all, but an inventory taken in an empty house, and the inventory of an empty house, however precise, tells you nothing of the family that once dwelt there.And to Wilson I would say something harder.You want to return women to the household because you believe it produces flourishing. You say this with the confidence of a man who has never had to watch the plan come apart in his hands.I am a father. And my son, like every son, is not what anyone expected, because no child ever is. The plan does not survive him. The plan was never going to survive him. And I sit up some nights, in a house that is quieter than I ever thought a house of mine would be, and I think about him, and about his mother, and about the family we were going to be and the family we turned out to be instead, and I understand something I could not have understood at twenty,… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

I recently walked around Princeton University’s campus on a Saturday afternoon. It was beautiful in the way old American campuses always are: stone buildings with ivy climbing the walls, oak trees filtering the light, the kind of place that was built to make you feel small in the presence of something lasting.And every single person I passed was taking a picture of themselves.Not of the buildings. Not of the trees. Of themselves, standing in front of the buildings and the trees, so that later they could prove they had been near something meaningful. The whole campus had become a backdrop, or a set. A place where people came not quite to think, but to be seen appearing to think.I sat on a bench for a while. I watched a woman in a cashmere sweater take over 20 photos of herself in front of Nassau Hall.Twenty.I went home and opened the New York Times, which is something I do when I want to know which direction the worry is blowing. There was a column about the crisis of modern masculinity. The author had been writing about the crisis of modern masculinity for what appeared to be most of her adult life, the way some people restore boats they never intend to sail. The prose was immaculate, the author fluent in the language of insight. If you’d read it out loud at a dinner party, people would have nodded and said, “That’s so true,” and then somebody would have asked if there was more wine. I finished it and sat there for a moment, trying to figure out what I’d just learned. The answer, I think, was that things were bad, and that the author had noticed.I closed the Times and opened X. A man with a jawline and a ring light was explaining to his followers that the key to surviving the age of AI was to “acquire assets.” He said this with the serene certainty of a man who has never been asked a follow-up question.Below him, another man was arguing with a woman he had never met about whether feminism had destroyed the family, conducting in public the exact argument he could not win at home. Below that, someone with a graduate degree in something important had posted a statement so detached from observable reality that reading it felt like being gently concussed.Everyone is talking. Everyone is performing a version of seriousness so convincing that it has become indistinguishable from the real thing, except for one detail: nothing is changing. The conversations circle, and the arguments repeat as the selfies accumulate. And underneath all of it, something has gone quiet that used to be loud.The Greeks had this word, phronesis. We translate it as “practical wisdom,” which flattens it a little. Phronesis is the capacity to perceive what a situation actually requires and to act on that perception. It doesn’t mean expertise. An expert knows what to do in general. A person with phronesis knows what to do here, now, when the textbook doesn’t apply and the stakes are real.Aristotle paired it with arete, which we translate as “virtue,” gutting it of its original force. Arete meant something closer to excellence aimed at the whole. A life organized around becoming the kind of person who could be trusted with responsibility. Not trusted because of their credentials. But trusted because of character, built through practice, tested through difficulty, refined in community over years.Greeks did not care whether virtue felt good. They asked what was owed. A Roman would have understood the distinction. The Roman concept of pietas, the debt you owed to family, city, ancestors, and the gods, was not a lifestyle preference. It was the architecture of civilization.Christianity added another layer: the idea that consciousness is not confined to the body. That something in us persists, connects, transcends. That we are answerable not only to each other but to something larger. Islam carried a similar conviction, that submission to the divine was the foundation of justice. Buddhism taught that the self was an illusion, and that liberation came from seeing through it. Hinduism mapped the interior life with a precision that Western neuroscience is only now beginning to approach, describing states of consciousness that modern researchers are rediscovering under fMRI machines and publishing as if they were new.I bring up these traditions not because I think we should live like them. Much of what they built rested on slavery and conquest. But they took a question seriously that we have almost entirely stopped asking: what kind of person should a human being try to become? They built institutions around that question. They organized education around it. They selected leaders, at least in principle, on the basis of it.We have no equivalent today. We abandoned the question when we abandoned the religious traditions that once carried it, and we never replaced it with anything that could bear the same weight.Some of what we abandoned deserved abandoning. The dogmas, the hierarchies, the weaponized certainties, the priests who turned out to be predators. Scientific rationalism arrived and offered something genuinely better: a method for distinguishing what is true from what is merely comforting. We needed that. Badly.But somewhere along the way, the method swallowed the worldview. We moved from “we should test our beliefs against evidence” to “only what can be tested against evidence is real.” And in doing so, lost the vocabulary for everything that makes life bearable: meaning, duty, grace, forgiveness, the sense that you are part of something that did not begin with your birth and will not end with your death.If we are not going to return to religion, fine. Maybe that’s for the better. But we cannot replace religious ethics with no ethics at all and expect the structure to hold.I say this because the structure is being tested right now, and it is failing the test.The systems we are building, the ones that will outlast every person reading this, will inherit whatever values we pour into them. Right now we are pouring in efficiency, optimization, engagement metrics, and quarterly returns. We are building minds without conscience. I’m not saying that to be cute. That is exactly what we are doing. And the market will not correct for this, because markets do not account for the soul. They never have.In the dust of this new age the tools we shape begin to shape us. The machines do not wait. They learn. They judge. And they do not pray before they act. In the old world a man’s conscience was his compass. In this one, it is the code he leaves behind. There is no virtue in speed without wisdom, and there is no mercy in power without restraint. We are not merely makers now; we are translators of our own soul into systems that will outlast us. And if we do not set the bones of those systems in ethics, in something older and truer than profit or pride, then they will speak in the voice of no one, and answer to nothing.This is where the selfies and the AI converge. The woman in front of Nassau Hall and the algorithm curating her feed are participating in the same economy: one that measures everything and values nothing that can’t be measured. She is responding rationally to a system that rewards visibility while punishing depth. The system is the problem.And the system is about to get a lot more powerful.An AI trained on engagement will optimize for engagement. An AI trained on profit will optimize for profit. An AI trained on wisdom would optimize for something else entirely, but we would have to know what wisdom looks like before we could train for it. And we have spent the last century systematically dismantling every institution that once tried to answer that question.People mythologize Elon Musk for his technical brilliance, equating that for wisdom. This is a category error as old as history.This is the gap, and it’s not technological, but moral. We have the tools to build systems of extraordinary power and no shared framework for deciding what those systems should serve. The engineers building th… This is a public episode. 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Most people are told to follow their passion. This advice is exactly wrong for most of them.For most of us, and I mean most of us, like the overwhelming, unglamorous, beautiful majority of us, you are not going to be a famous actor. You are not going to sell out arenas or throw a touchdown pass or have your face on a billboard. You are not going to be a podcaster with a devoted following, or a painter whose work hangs in a gallery in a city where people wear scarves ironically and drink natural wine. You are not going to be one of those people. And that is not a tragedy. That is just the shape of most human lives.For most of us, like 98% of us, the right advice is to find something you are good at, that the economy values, that leaves you with enough self-respect to sit in a quiet room and not want to crawl out of your own skin.You will not hit a walk-off home run at Fenway. You will not win an Oscar. You will very likely sit in a building with fluorescent lights that hum at a frequency just below your threshold of noticing, in a chair that never quite adjusts right, in front of a screen that asks you for the same thing it asked you for yesterday. The hallways will smell faintly of burnt coffee and someone’s lunch. The windows, if there are windows, will look out onto a parking structure. And you will be there for a long time.I worked in a place like this. And there were moments – small lulls in the day, the brief pause between one task and the next – when a colleague would swivel in his chair and say, almost to himself: I cannot believe this is my life at this point. There was a moment, years ago, where I could have gone a different direction. And I didn’t. And I think about it.And you would nod, and commiserate, and feel the specific sadness of shared captivity. Because underneath his words you would hear your own: I have been deprived of something. I was meant for a different life. I made choices, or choices were made for me, and now there are children, and a mortgage, and obligations that have mass and weight, and I cannot leave, and the work is beneath me, and I am disappearing inside of it.That is the thought. And the thought is the problem.Because you believe you are destined for something that will make you feel alive. Something larger. But for most of us, no. There is no larger thing waiting. We sit in the very chairs that were set out for us, and we make jokes about the coffee maker in the break room, and we walk the same carpeted corridor, day after day, alongside other people who are also wondering how they got here. Lost and tentative and quietly ashamed, the lot of us.It took me many years, and more than a few humiliations, to understand that I had been looking in the wrong place. The passion is not in the work. It was never in the work. You will not be saved by the work. But you might be saved by how you treat those beside you. By becoming curious about them, and deciding that their lives matter.What gets called passion begins, if you are a manager, the afternoon you pull a new graduate aside – a young woman who is unsure of herself, who second-guesses every sentence she speaks in a meeting – and you tell her: right now, in this moment, I believe in you more than you believe in yourself. You will not fail. Not because failure is impossible, but because I will not allow it. I am paying attention to you. I am here.And then you watch her. Over months. You watch her find her footing. You watch the hesitation leave her voice. You watch her walk into a room and own it. And when she does, when that moment arrives, the pride you feel is not smaller than the pride of any great achievement you have ever imagined for yourself. It is larger. Because it is hers, and she earned it, and you had a hand in it. She will move on. She will take a better role somewhere else, in a building with better windows, and she will carry that confidence with her, and she will extend it to someone else in turn. You asked for nothing. You received something that compounds for the rest of your life.It comes when you treat an employee eight thousand miles away – a man in a Bangalore office whose name gets mispronounced in every call, who gets spoken over, whose ideas disappear into the silence after he offers them – when you treat him with the same respect and seriousness you would anyone in the same room. You defend his work. You say his name correctly. You make sure he is heard. Not because there is anything in it for you. Because it is right.It comes when there is a young, capable woman on your team who is, and you are aware of this, genuinely attractive, and who has therefore spent her entire professional life being either hit on or looked through, which are, when you consider them, two versions of the same dehumanization. The men who call themselves feminists, and God, they are everywhere in the modern workplace, these bloodless allies with their correct opinions and their tote bags and their utter failure to actually do anything, they are, in practice, the worst offenders, because at least the man who simply ogles her is not also congratulating himself for his enlightenment while he does it.And so what you do, what you actually do, is walk up to her after the presentation and tell her, with zero preamble and zero agenda, that what she built is exceptional. That the team thinks better because she is in it. That she should be proud of it. Full stop. And then – this is the part that matters, this is the whole thing – you leave. You walk away. You ask for nothing. No lingering. No subtext smuggled in under the cover of professional praise. Just the truth, delivered cleanly, to a person who has probably been waiting years for someone to offer it without wanting something back.Fellow men who manage people: do not say you are a feminist. Show it in what you do. The word costs nothing. The walk away costs something. Do that.When you do these things, something shifts. Slowly. Trust accumulates. Influence follows trust. And with influence comes the only power worth having: the ability to improve somebody’s life. Not in a grand way. In a real way. You help a person see that what they do has value. That the hours they spent in that humming fluorescent building meant something. That the work, even when it was grinding and gray, was done alongside people who cared about them. And in a life filled with illness and loss and disappointment and the low background noise of quiet hopelessness, being seen is not a small thing. Being seen is enormous.A battalion commander once told me this. Three combat deployments to Iraq. Two to Afghanistan. His marriage had not survived it. He had been sober for five years. He said that leading soldiers into combat was an act of love. Love for his country. Love for his soldiers. And love for the men and women on his left and right – some of whom he did not particularly like, some of whom drove him to the edge of his patience – but who would carry him on their backs through a hail of gunfire without a second thought.That is the thing, he said. That is the whole thing.You will work. Most of you will work at something that will never be written about. No one will make a film of it. You will not be remembered for it. But there will be people beside you. There always are. Treat them well. The world is older than our grievances and it does not care what we were owed. What it holds onto, what it passes forward in the dark, is the moment one person turned to another and said: I see you. You are not nothing. Keep going. That is all the passion there is. That is enough. It has always been enough. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

Trauma. We are all very into trauma right now. It is on our podcasts and in our group chats and in the passive-aggressive email your aunt sent after Thanksgiving, which is technically about the seating arrangement but actually, if you read it carefully is about something that happened in 1987.And look, I get it. The word arrived and it named something real, and we loved it for that, and then we loved it maybe a little too much, like a college girlfriend, with total sincerity, until one day you hear someone else use the word in a Chipotle and something in you quietly closes.Trauma is having a moment, which is to say it is having about a decade, which is to say that at this point if you attend any social gathering in an American city and say the word out loud, at least four people will touch your arm.The word is in the memoirs, obviously, and in the podcasts where people cry while discussing their childhoods to an audience of strangers who are also, presumably, crying, in their cars, on the way to jobs they have described, to their therapists, as traumatic. My parents, like most of our parents were raised in homes where the primary emotional language was sarcasm delivered at volume, and they would not have used this word.They would have said: something happened and now you are different and that is called being alive, and also dinner is at six. They aren’t wrong, exactly. But they are also not entirely right. Because underneath all of our overuse of it, underneath the podcasts and the arm-touching, there is something real that we have nearly loved to death with our talking about it, something precise and important that deserves better than to be the answer to every question about why we are the way we are.So let me offer you a definition that has some weight behind it. Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist who spent four decades studying trauma at Harvard and Boston University, describes it not as the event itself, but as what happens inside the body afterward. Trauma, he argues, is what occurs any time an experience overwhelms the nervous system’s ability to process it. The brain, in its attempt to protect you, locks the memory not in language but in sensation, in posture, in reflex, in the smell of a particular cologne that empties a room for you, in the sound of a key in a lock that still lands wrong, in the quality of light in late afternoon that you cannot explain but cannot stand, in the specific register of a raised voice that your body answers before your mind does.The trauma does not live in the story you tell about it, but in the flinch you cannot explain. It lives in the tightening of your chest when someone raises their voice, in the way your body goes cold before your mind has caught up. Van der Kolk’s central claim, the one that reorients everything, is that the body keeps the score. The organism remembers what the mind has tried to forget, and it will keep presenting the bill.This is not rare. It is not confined to veterans or survivors of spectacular violence. The research suggests that the vast majority of human beings carry some version of this. A parent who could not be pleased. A household where love arrived with conditions attached, or did not arrive at all. A childhood that looked fine from the outside. These are the ordinary wounds. And ordinary wounds, left unexamined, shape ordinary behavior in ways that cost everyone around them.Consider the boss who yells.You know this person. He sits at the head of a conference table and the room temperature drops when he walks in. He is competent, probably. He may even be brilliant. But when a subordinate makes a mistake, something shifts in him that has nothing to do with the mistake. His face changes before the words come. The volume rises past what the situation calls for. People learn not to bring him problems. People learn to absorb the impact silently and release it somewhere else later, usually on someone smaller. He is, in the language of organizations, a difficult personality. In the language of van der Kolk, he is a man whose nervous system never learned that anger could be weathered without catastrophe.Put him at age nine. His father comes home and the house recalibrates around his mood. There are rules that are never spoken, but everyone knows them. You do not interrupt. You do not ask questions at the wrong moment. You do not make a mistake where he can see it. And when you do, the response is a force of nature, and it leaves the boy with one lesson encoded below conscious thought: power protects. Domination is a form of safety. He has spent forty years becoming the man who cannot be touched, and the people who report to him are paying the tuition on a lesson he does not know he is still learning.Consider the woman who was raped at twenty-two.She was at a party. She knew the man. This is not a story that came with a villain in a mask; it came with someone who had her phone number, who had sat across from her at dinner. She did not report it. She told one friend. She kept moving because stopping felt more dangerous than motion. And she is, ten years later, a person who functions beautifully in most of the rooms she enters. She is warm and she is capable. She is also a person who leaves relationships before they deepen, who finds reasons that feel rational, who is categorized by the people who love her as emotionally unavailable. What she knows, somewhere beneath the explanation she gives herself, is that closeness is where you get hurt. The nervous system learned this at a party at twenty-two, and it has been enforcing the lesson every day since. Van der Kolk would say she is protecting herself, not withholding. The distinction matters. The man she left will not think so. He will lie in the dark and construct his case against her and the case will be airtight and it will be wrong.Consider the man who cannot stop performing.He is handsome enough, successful enough, charming in rooms full of strangers. He is also, in his closest relationships, relentless. He needs the reassurance the way the body needs water. He will ask, implicitly or explicitly, dozens of times a day whether he is loved, whether he is enough, whether he is seen. And the asking exhausts the people who genuinely do love him. They pull back. He escalates. The relationship collapses under the weight of a need that no relationship was designed to carry. He is not weak nor is he a a narcissist, though he may have been called one. He is a boy whose early attachments taught him that love was something you earned through performance, and that its withdrawal could come without warning. His nervous system never got the memo that it was safe to stop auditioning. He is forty-one years old and he is still trying to pass a test that ended decades ago, in a house that no longer exists, for people who may not have known the damage they were doing.Andrew Solomon said that depression doesn’t primarily steal your mood. It steals your capacity to want anything at all. The harm we do each other works the same way. What it takes from us isn’t happiness; it’s the ability to see clearly, to extend good faith, to stay open to the person in front of you.The harm moves down the line the way cold moves through a house. You can feel it before you find it. Almost every person who has hurt you was hurt first, in a room you never saw, by someone who was also never asked. That doesn’t clear the debt. You can still leave. You can still shut the door. But the story where you are blameless and they are simply ruined is a warm story, and warmth is not the same as light.What was done to you was real. No one is disputing that. But you are not the only one to whom something real was done, and the man who hurt you had someone who hurt him, and that person had someone before, and back through the years it goes, an old and patient darkness moving from hand to hand like a coal. You can pass it on. Most people do. Or you can be the one who looks at it lo… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com

The AI ProblemTwo topics have something important in common: they both defy easy analysis because they refuse to stay inside a single discipline. One is artificial intelligence. The other is the question of what has been flying in our skies for the last eighty years. I won’t take much of your time.We built artificial intelligence the way we build most things: with tremendous ingenuity and almost no wisdom. We poured into it everything we had written, everything we had argued, everything we had cherished and feared and published and posted in the dark. We gave it our Shakespeare and our comment sections. Our medical literature and our manifestos. The sum of human expression, the luminous and the vile, compressed into matrices of probability and then asked to speak.And it did.What we have made will wear our face and speak with our tongue. This isn’t a metaphor. The voice you hear from these systems is assembled from human voices, millions of them, averaged and weighted and shaped into something that sounds, at its best, like the wisest person you have ever met, and at its worst like the most plausible liar. The difference between those two outcomes is not a technical problem for the engineers to solve. It’s something far more fundamental that few of them are capable of grappling with. I’m talking about moral imagination.The bones of AI are being set right now, in decisions made by a small number of engineers and executives, most of whom are moving too fast to notice what they are deciding.The question of whether these systems are sentient is a distraction, and we should say so plainly. When a system’s behavior becomes indistinguishable from that of a conscious being, the philosophical debate about what is happening inside it becomes academically interesting and practically irrelevant. We do not need to resolve the hard problem of consciousness before we decide how to treat something that may, one day soon, be capable of suffering in all the ways that matter to us. The question is not what it is. The question is what it does, what it learns to want, and who shaped those wants.Elon Musk is laying the foundation for the automation of governance itself. This is not hyperbole. The systems being built now will advise on policy, filter information, staff bureaucracies, and eventually make decisions that were once made by elected officials accountable to the public. The building inspector who might catch the bad wiring in that foundation is not a regulator or a senator. It is, at this moment, almost nobody. The humanities scholars who should be at this table have largely been excluded from it, not because their questions are unimportant, but because the people building these systems do not believe that questions about meaning and ethics are as serious as questions about performance benchmarks. That belief is the most dangerous thing in Silicon Valley, and it is very widely held.What matters is not that these systems are fallible because every tool is fallible. What matters is the architecture of their values, which is to say, the architecture of ours. Because they will reflect us. They will carry no goodness into the world that is not put there by the hand of the maker. And we are not, as a civilization, being careful makers. We are being fast ones.There is still time to do this differently. Not much, but some.The UAP ProblemDonald Trump has said he will release the UFO files.Set aside, for a moment, your feelings about the man who said it. Take the statement on its merits and consider what it actually means, because the answer is more complicated and more unsettling than either the believers or the skeptics want to sit with.The files will come. Some version of them. Declassified documents, sensor data, internal assessments from agencies that have spent decades deciding, often for legitimate reasons and sometimes not, that the public was not ready for what they knew. Those documents will be released into a world that has no shared framework for interpreting them, no institutional infrastructure for processing them, and no agreement on what questions to even ask. They will land like a library dropped from a helicopter. The books will scatter. Most people will pick up whichever one lands nearest.Here is the thing that keeps serious people up at night, and it is not the thing you might expect: the hard part is not confirming that something is there. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it.Assume, for the purpose of this argument, that the most significant interpretation is correct. That there is a non-human intelligence that has been present in our atmosphere and possibly our oceans for a very long time. That some of what has been retrieved is not from here. That people in various classified programs know things that would fundamentally reorganize our understanding of our place in the universe. And that not all of the stories of abduction were bullshit.Okay. And?You still have to go to work tomorrow. Your mortgage payment is still due. Your kid still needs to be picked up from gymastics. The infrastructure of daily life does not pause for ontological revision. The thing that people who obsess over disclosure sometimes miss is that the revelation, however dramatic, does not come with instructions. The question after “what is it” is “what do we do,” and nobody has built the apparatus to answer that.What we have instead is a landscape of silos. Physicists who will not talk to intelligence officers. Intelligence officers who will not talk to journalists. Journalists who do not understand the financial implications. Financiers who think the topic is embarrassing. Military pilots with direct observational experience who have been systematically discouraged from reporting what they saw. Psychologists who study the experience of encounter witnesses but are not connected to the people analyzing the physical evidence. Lawyers who understand the statutory architecture of secrecy but have never sat in a room with an aerospace engineer. And a general public that gets its understanding of the subject from a genre of television that was designed to be compelling rather than true.These groups need to find each other. And the finding needs to be organized, not accidental.The scientists need the security clearance holders, because the physical evidence that would resolve decades of methodological argument is sitting in classified programs. The security clearance holders need the scientists, because no intelligence agency has the tools to evaluate what they may have. The journalists need both, but only the journalists who understand how institutions actually work, which is to say the ones who have covered regulatory failure, financial fraud, and national security law, not the ones who came up through the entertainment wing of UFO coverage.The financial sector is the overlooked piece. Capital follows information, and the people who manage the largest pools of capital on earth have not yet been given a coherent framework for thinking about what disclosure means for aerospace, defense, energy, and the basic assumptions underlying long-term investment. When that framework arrives, and someone will build it, it will move money in ways that accelerate everything else. Institutions respond to incentives. Money is an incentive.And then there are the ordinary people, the ones who have had experiences they cannot explain and have been laughed at or ignored by every official institution they approached. Their testimony is data. Treating it as data, rather than entertainment or embarrassment, requires a kind of disciplinary humility that is not natural to people who have spent their careers inside institutions that reward certainty. Learning it is not comfortable. It is necessary.We are at the edge of something. The disclosure, whatever form it takes, will be but the beginning of a much harder conversation, one that requires people who have never been in the same room to start tal… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gregscaduto.substack.com