notes

quotations

One can’t fake nor cram the base. It has to come from having genuinely cared about a lot of things over a long time. Some of the best pretraining is just experiencing things without overthinking them, being shaped by something before deciding what it’s for.

Agency is underspecified. Strong habits can look productive without being agentic, where the actor may simply act under inertia. Meanwhile, a high-information diet paired with an action bias can produce someone extremely agentic who directs all of it toward a hopeless market. Another social media app without a novel perspective, another weekend project without retention dressed up as ARR. Capital without thesis, deployment without differentiation. The ability to gamble everything on Kalshi, quit a job, move across the country — but toward what?

In 1926, Mussolini’s government arrested an Italian political theorist whose writings they considered dangerous enough that the prosecutor reportedly said at trial they had to stop this brain from functioning for twenty years. Instead, Antonio Gramsci spent his last decade in a fascist prison and filled thirty-three notebooks — over three thousand pages of political theory, philosophy, cultural criticism. Sick for most of it, barely able to write. The Prison Notebooks went on to shape how people think about culture, power, and class for decades.

One of his ideas, the philosophy of praxis argued that thought without action is sterile but action without a coherent worldview is just flailing. The people who actually change things aren’t the ones with the most freedom to act but the ones whose understanding runs deep enough to know what to do with whatever freedom they have. The organic intellectual isn’t defined by credentials but by thinking that emerges from genuine engagement with the world, the ability to name what others only feel. A worldview that didn’t need freedom to propagate. Just contact with reality, which he maintained through prison walls.