Guess What’s Coming to DC?

DC is about to experience something entirely new, something absolutely unprecedented in its experience. They think the barbarians are coming. And perhaps they are. But not the kinds of barbarians they suspect. Not this time.

The simple fact is that there exists a very small group of incredibly high-function, insanely productive people. It’s the dirty secret of the world. This tiny tribe conceives, invents, and builds basically everything novel. All of it. They are not normal people. They are the 0.1%.

Unless you have worked with them, around them, or been a part of what they do, you simply lack a reference for what they are like. It’s essentially inconceivable how much such people can get done when they set their minds to it, how many rules they will disprove, break, or ignore, and how many paradigms they will upend.

DC has never seen a mob of high-function autist builders and fin warriors coalesce before. They have no fricking idea what’s coming. They cannot possibly know. But I do.

I know A LOT of these people. This is what most of my friends are like. They learn for a living. They pull systems apart, see them as functional wholes, and work 16-hour days reading arcane 1,000-page descriptions until they understand. Then they pull the underwear of whoever thought they understood this material up over their heads in an atomic wedgie and take over a space. 

It’s just what you do if you’re a person like that. It’s compulsion. It’s like breathing. These are 3 and 4 and 5 standard deviation people who have focus and talent in quantities they do not even have maps of in Washington. I keep hearing about people I know a little getting tapped for transition teams and I’m like “Ooooooh, that guy can read 100 CDS prospectuses in a weekend and remember it all,” or “Yeah, that guy thinks in algorithms and sleeps once a month. He could code when he was 6.”

“Only an insider can tackle the swamp” is dead wrong. It takes someone radically different to make a radical difference. And I am giddy realizing that they are coming. It does not matter that they do not know the terrain yet. They will. They have 3 months to learn. That’s more than enough.

Watch. Moving into novel systems or spaces and becoming better at it than the people currently there is what these people do. It’s ALL they do. It’s who and what they are.

It does not matter if it’s the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the DMV, or NASA. Same game, same result. every time.

The “insiders” are so screwed. DC has no one like this. They have never even met people like this because people like this avoid government like it is a bag of plague rats. Because it is.

But now they are interested and looking to play exterminator because the state strayed too far into our world and so now we are coming for theirs.

And wait until you see what the world’s best builders can tear down. It’s going to be glorious.

These are the same people who in 10 weeks using just sparse public data and Twitter pulled the pants down on the whole edifice of public health and revealed them as fakes, phonies, and charlatans. Then they rewrote the discipline. I will never be the same. Most of us had never even looked at epidemiology before. In a few months the “amateurs” eclipsed the experts and left them for dead.

We did this as outsiders and without any maps and with the very opposite of help.

Imagine what this gang can do with the keys to the kingdom.

It’s going to be nothing but baffled astonishment from the Beltway boffins.

“How in hell have they read and understood everything!?! They are not experts here!” will decry the people who need to pass bills to find out what’s in them. “How the hell are they producing so much output, so much impact? How did they know just where to push?”

They have never seen what 10 of these guys and three pots of coffee can achieve. I have. Mountains get relocated.

The really truly high-functioning have not come to meet the regulatasaurus before. They were busy and had better things to do.

Not anymore. “Dismantle Leviathan” is now a step in everyone’s business plan. Better, it’s public service as it was supposed to be: not a vocation, not a career. Instead, it is a task, a dirty task that needs doing so you go and do it and then you go home once it’s done.

You fricking clowns just cornered Elon and made this election and administration an existential issue for him and his empire. And an awful lot of us feel the same way. You cornered all of us. Go along to get along ended because you guys crossed the line. Welcome to reflexivity.

The pushback is going to be something for the ages.

DC is going to feel like it’s being invaded by an entire bestiary of mythical monsters with magical powers who can see through walls and huck immovable objects over the horizon. They will come from every side at once. They will replace thousands of federal employees right from the start. 

You’ll be fighting against the outside and the inside. They’re going to transfer and move those permanent staters they cannot fire. Have fun in Topeka or Guam. They’re lovely this time of year.

They are not going to play nice or play fair. They are going to get things done. And they are going to clown you while doing it, clown you like “name their agency after a crypto shitcoin that muskrat ran “to the moon” just because they think it’s funny.”

And it will be.

This is a new kind of team, a team that comes from an ethos of “Move fast and break things” and “Ask forgiveness, not permission.” They are not the GOP procedure drones of yesteryear, These are people who just walk in and do stuff and fuck your process. They have made careers of it.

The Dems have long ago figured out the “Just go do it and let the chips fall where they may” model (basically since Obamacare) but they do it stupidly and on topics where the results will be bad. 

This will be like Uber. By the time the regulators woke up and tried to move against it, people loved it too much to let them take it away. There were protests in front of every DMV in Commiefornia.

And so the world progressed. And instead of doing it donkey-style to contravene the Constitution, team effective autists will be doing it to uphold it. Look on my plans ye mighty and wet your pants. This is teed up in a whole new way on a whole new field.

They will have the swamp in knots. DC power is entrenched because it is secret and controls access and channels and promotion and most especially access to media and publicity. That game is over.

Vivek is a seriously effective guy with finance and biotech and founder chops. He speaks well and makes things. And like him or loathe him, Elon is a change (and a chaos) agent. He takes crazy, audacious swings and builds stuff. He’s a rogue and a pirate. It’s why he’s good at what he does. He asks simple questions like “What did you accomplish this week?” that you cannot hide from. But his real superpower is this: there is no human on earth today who can bring the circus like Elon can bring the circus. No one.

The man is a one-man always traveling 11-ring Barnum and Bailey show. And what an astonishing show this is going to be.

Name and shame are incredibly powerful. This will be an unending media event, a drip feed of “Can you believe they spent millions making and studying transgender monkeys?” (this was a real grant BTW) 

It will be relentless, revelatory, and invite the whole of the public to the party. There will be no escape, no off switch, no media gatekeeping: this is direct-to-consumer messaging. And hey, let’s get the Epstein list out in the open while we’re at it. Imagine how much DC cycle time THAT would eat, time in which you can get even more stuff done.

Sunlight is a powerful disinfectant. 

Let’s look at everything with new eyes. Let’s disrupt.

Get the establishment on tilt from day one and never stop pushing. Not from any side, not for a moment. Shut things down. Gut agencies like trout. Invite them to “cry some more” if they don’t like it.

Flood the box so hard that the news cycle cannot even cover it. This technocracy is not used to having to defend ground from this sort of attack. They are used to being the ones making the rules. They will not have any idea what to do.

There are these magical times in human history when the truly smart and talented and effective come together and change everything. American independence. The Manhattan Project. Xerox PARC. Apollo. Silicon Valley in the 80’s and 90’s.

Some vast project captures the imagination and worlds are moved.

I think it’s a bit early to just come out and say “This is that” but I’m here to tell you that the cabinet secretaries and the appointments to run agencies are only a part of the show and maybe not the important part.

The thousands coming with them are NOT more drones from interchangeable bureaucrat collective 2177.

These are the finance and pharma and tech bros. Not the fake ones who wear fleece vests and work in biz dev. The meat eaters. Wave upon wave upon wave of them in their hyper-motivated myriads.

And this is a new-new thing.

In the end, it’s just a gross mismatch for you, DC.

You’re smart enough to be a Washington wonk and run rings around drunk Congresscritters as they insider trade. Neat. What’s coming is smart enough to find edge trading against the Goldman arb desk and produce drugs and catch rockets.

We live where you need results, not a sinecure. And we are well and truly pissed. You people are not even bringing a knife to a gunfight. You’re bringing a dinosaur to a meteor strike.

Say goodbye to the Potomac Country Club. Things are about to change. And pardon me if I am over-effusive and over-optimistic, but if this is even 20% of what it looks like, hot damn this is gonna be fun.

Republished from the author’s Substack