Clinton Foreign Policy, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, and the Foundations of the Internet

This post is about how relationships, emotions, and incentives drive real-world outcomes over reason, ethics, lawful behavior, and market forces.

Foreign policy is guided by sex and approval

In 1995, Bill Clinton had a very public affair with Monica Lewinsky. In response, Hillary Clinton did not speak with Bill for many months due to the affair and the second-order effects of his infidelity.

The re-commencing of their relationship and the eventual forgiveness by Hillary is claimed to be traced back to her strong-arming her husband to bomb Serbian villages: [1]

Bombing Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, “I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?” A biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Gail Sheehy and published in late 1999, stated that Mrs. Clinton had refused to talk to the president for eight months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. She resumed talking to her husband only when she phoned him and urged him in the strongest terms to begin bombing Serbia; the president began bombing within 24 hours. - Source

The primary source here is shaky at best. But is something like this really beyond the realm of possibility for one of the most ambitious and socially intelligent Western female leaders with a long history of hawkish foreign policy tendencies? Hillary’s love language could very well be acts of war.

Founding stories are a psyop

Early-stage startups run on secrets and secrets often spread like wildfire. NDAs are only as good as the ability to enforce them. Your favorite application (Facebook, pump.fun) has a much more complex founding story than is publicly available, likely with some questionable espionage-esque behavior as a core propellant to reaching their heights.

Most participants understand this social contract and end up contributing and extending in-group dynamics. This includes connected individuals carefully crafting narratives for public consumption.

The founding stories of successful companies including Paypal, Flexport, and Notion are well-documented and leveraged as lore to attract customers and prospective employees. How much of these stories reflect reality versus a curated Girardian story to persuade others of their divine purpose?

Verkada God mode

Verkada is a security camera company founded in 2016 and is currently valued at $4.5 billion. They offer a full-service physical security solution to institutions, installing and managing the logistics of their security camera operations.

Clients include the Los Angeles state government, prisons, Tesla factories, Equinox, healthcare systems, and leading biotech firms.

It was reported that Verkada has a God mode – exposed by hackers – enabling anyone with the password to access every security camera in the Verkada network. As is typical in startup land, shortcuts were taken, and God mode was gated by a single hard-coded secret with rudimentary security practices. [2]

Trump and Melania memecoin launch

At midnight of January 18, during his inauguration ball, Trump released an official memecoin. The token achieves virality in hours, reaching a total valuation of over $70B. Trump re-ignites himself as the main character, kicking off his upcoming term with a soon-unlocked infusion of financial capital, and once again cements himself as the most powerful man in the world.

Melania, who cannot stand her husband on a personal level, and is driven by envy that her husband is one-upping her, decides that she wants to launch her own memecoin. She gets in contact with one of the most extractive token-launching cabals and launches $MELANIA 43 hours later.

She then delivers the knockout punch to cement her social dominance: a retweet from the president’s official X account. This legitimizes her token, and more importantly, transforms her persona from the socially submissive tradwife to a culturally adept individual who demands our respect in the attention economy:

Tweet

Within days, billions are extracted from retail participants worldwide – including via siphoning liquidity from Trump’s own token – by insiders to satisfy Melania’s insecurities. [3]

What should we be cynical about now?

Embryo selection for the powerful is underway

One can make a good argument that universities, institutions, and churches are wrappers around assortative mating. The incentive stems from many traits being highly hereditary.

Assortative mating – i.e. picking a partner – has historically been the only lever you can control. However, with the assistance of modern medicine, you can take this one step further with embryo selection.

Embryo selection and modification are likely already well underway today, but it is hard to determine the extent and state-of-the-art technical capabilities. It is typically categorized into two groups: disease prevention and enhancement.

Disease prevention is concerned with eliminating the likelihood of negative qualities that affect quality of life (e.g. HIV) and traits that typically put a strain on the public welfare system. This is generally less controversial of the two.

Enhancement means specifically selecting for or modifying genes to increase traits such as athleticism and IQ.

When one of the leading experts is ostracized for ethical transgressions, this should provide some clues that incentivize powerful groups to at least understand the technological capabilities.

Is this something Elon would consider? How should we model the next generation of powerful kids against the empirical evidence of some level of mean reversion in intelligence and ambition amongst families?

Elliptic-curve cryptography has always been broken

Elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) underpins much of the internet today including public-key cryptography, digital signatures, and pseudo-random number generation.

Government, Russia, Mathematics as Propaganda, and other resources can all be used to piece together a more likely origin story for the foundational primitives and incentives of the early internet.

Bitcoin

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The world is a museum of passion projects, stewarded by the powerful to serve their wants and needs. It has never been better to be a billionaire or similarly powerful person.

As a recovering efficient markets enthusiast, the base case that you are being adversely selected against by a group of well-connected and smart individuals is a good assumption in theory but incomplete and naive in practice. [4]

The truth is closer to: reality is path-dependent, messy, littered with incompetence, and guided by human relationships and emotions.

[1] The whims of the powerful are now felt worldwide via mechanisms including cryptography and drone strikes.

[2] Uber had a similar well-documented God mode, paying a paltry $20,000 fine for a tool used to spy on reporters and key individuals in a position to negatively affect the company.

[3] This is not meant to imply that Melania has unique insecurities but rather she has her own ambitions and desires to be viewed as a certain kind of person.

[4] Powerful individuals are increasingly interconnected. Previously, this meant physical colocation, living in the same country club, and frequenting the same events. Now, the world runs through networks of individuals who aren’t necessarily co-located, aligned by ideologies or shared goals. Group chats rule the world.

There’s a graph from Tim Urban that I think about often:

It never ceases to amaze me that you can literally see all the weeks of your entire life on a single sheet of paper. You have a very finite number of weeks in your life. [1] Every decision matters.

Time is the one scarce resource that affects everyone equally. Regardless of your background or socioeconomic status, everyone plays by these same constraints. [2]

However, reality is even more pernicious than what this graph shows. As you cross off each week of your life, you falsely believe that you are operating in a linear regime where each week is an equal proportion of your perceived life. In reality, your perception of time in life is better modeled on a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one.

At age 5, one additional year is another 20% of your life. At age 50, one additional year is only 2% of your life.

While our perception of time is not perfectly logarithmic, talking to people older than me leads me to believe that this heuristic is at least directionally true.

What should we do about this? How can we maximize our ability to get what we want in our lives?

Career implications

As early as possible, you should develop a thesis for what you want to do given your risk profile, work/life balance, and skillset. Your thesis can and should evolve as you grow older.

Intelligence is getting what you want out of life, and most people complain they aren’t getting what they want without any evidence of even a modicum of effort. You can get ahead of basically everyone in any field by putting in an ounce of effort. No one is even trying.

Don’t spread yourself too thin, but realize that there are unexpected returns to being a polymath and deriving cross-pollination insights. Choose 2-3 areas to do ten times as much in life. Deliberate practice over 2-3 areas for even a few weeks will put you at a massive advantage over the vast majority of the population. Compounding is still greatly underrated in practice, even though everybody knows about it.

Assuming you have some basic education, you can learn most things rewarded by the free market in a very short period of time. Most people dramatically underinvest in “temporal leverage points” – where small investments of time can radically alter the trajectory of your life. Examples include: spending time really understanding how the talent system works in your given industry, learning the basics of probability theory, having lunch with someone 30 years older than you in your field, or starting a podcast. All can be done within a week with unbounded upside.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely stressing too much about exactly what you’re working on. There is such a thing as decision paralysis. Anecdotally, it’s much more important to be able to let the compounding effects occur and reach the frontier of a given field than to always be jumping around and never coming close to the frontier.

Personal life implications

The standard YOLO advice about seizing the day fundamentally misunderstands time perception. The real arbitrage opportunity is doing things that seem boring to others but have massive long-term returns. Learning Portuguese or exploring the Dark Forest on a new chain might seem like wasting your precious weeks, but these detours can yield the highest returns through unexpected recombinations.

Most arguments boil down to different time preferences. Understand your temporal discount factor and find others that match it.

By age 18, you will have spent 93% of the actual time you'll ever spend with your parents. On a logarithmic perception scale, you’ll have experienced 98-99% of your perceived time with them.

Location decisions become increasingly sticky as we age, as social and professional roots grow deeper. The optimal time to experiment with living in different cities or countries is often earlier in life when our perception of time is more expansive (and our commitments are more flexible).

Hobbies and personal interests should be cultivated deliberately, as they often provide the texture and meaning that make our finite weeks feel richer. Starting a creative practice or learning an instrument at 25 means you could have decades of enjoyment ahead, while the same decision at 45 comes with a different psychological weight.

Health investments made early can have large exponential returns. The good habits we build in our youth compound over decades.

[1] I have seen no evidence that immortality efforts such as Bryan Johnson’s will increase your lifespan by more than ~20%.

[2] Sure, billionaires can buy time by flying private, having personal chefs, etc. but they still age at effectively the same rate as the rest of us.