DOGE and Smart Men

Feeling a little rage-y today, how about you?

Dear Friend,

Welcome back to another week in the hellscape. I am not doing well despite my somewhat failed attempts at tuning out the news. I am going on a little vacation to Canada soon and will happily tell you about that, but for now it’s winter and I’m stuck in our little mountain paradise and I can only write about skiing at our local mountain so much.

As I listen to Pod Save America or read the headlines on NPR or CNN (which is very bad - when did it get so bad and where are we getting news these days?), I am not surprised by much. Trump is doing what he promised, what Project 2025 outlined. He’s doing it perhaps more swiftly than anticipated, but here we are in the shock and awe. I think about all the consequences of all the actions, many of which will (hopefully, thankfully) need to make it through the courts. Recently, I learned that my state will lose access to $200 million of federal wildfire prevention funding. No one deserves to have their land or homes or forests burn unnecessarily, but it’s food for thought that the adverse impacts of this measure will impact primarily Trump voters as the Eastern side of the state is wildfire-prone and largely red.

Tariffs and other blunt force tools will impact everyone except the super-rich. Loss of government jobs and lack of funding for seasonal federal jobs will cause unemployment for many, including many people I work with seasonally at the ski resort. Trump’s team is “sticking it” to us all. It is not targeted in any way. And I keep thinking “for what?” and “why?”

Perhaps it is really Elon Musk’s government, at least in part. And every time he comes up I want to scream into the void that the man is not actually that smart. He’s never been the ideas guy. He just made a couple lucky investments with family money rooted in apartheid-era South Africa. We have to stop idolizing Elon Musk and Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and the myth of the self-made man.

Some of these men may be sort-of smart, but none are actually all that smart. I about lost it after hearing of tweets praising the coding ability of one of the DOGE bros who for some reason deserves unfettered access to sensitive data. So many people are good (or even great) coders. It’s actually not that special. There are a lot of smart people and different ways to be smart. We keep imbuing successful people with this halo of genius, but I think it’s getting things mixed around. They’re not successful because they’re smart, we think they’re smart because they’re successful but there’s a whole other set of factors at play.

I learned this the hard way sitting in rooms with self-important men while working in Private Equity. I was on the lower-class side of the table. I wrote the checks to the smarter people. The qualified and well-connected. I learned so quickly that they don’t have to be that smart, they just have to know people. They just have to have been born into an ivy league legacy family or attended the right prep school. Sure, there are a few that got there another way, but they weren’t a whole lot smarter than me or the other people on my side of the table. Often notably less so.

A partner at a venture firm I worked for would, almost daily, pronounce the word “pique” as “pick-you.” And he said it with the arrogance of an english-speaking person who likes to think they are pronouncing “croissant” correctly when they return from their European vacation. No one told him he was wrong, because you can’t be wrong when you have the power and the money and the pedigree. Part of any success I had in finance was learning to keep my mouth shut at least some of the time. Even when I knew I was right, even when the men had terrible ideas, even when it was supposed to be team-led or I was hired for my expertise. Women and people of color and other under-represented groups in these fields were often hired as trophies. Their expertise was something to print on a website for the team to claim they had, but no one would listen to them over someone like the pick-you guy. Ever. Now they won’t even get hired for those reasons thanks to the anti-DEI blowback.

When I tell you I have been in rooms with some of the biggest names in investing, some of the “best” CEO’s and I have heard some of the dumbest things uttered with sheer confidence, it is not an exaggeration. The number of stories I have would fill a book. Invariably, people fall in line with even the most asinine things. I once asked a Morgan Stanley analyst why more people weren’t concerned about the Boeing 737MAX crashes in 2019. He said “new rollouts always have problems.” I was right about Boeing, but he leveraged his role into high-level corporate finance gigs and I work front line at a ski resort - so who really wins and does being smart or good at things matter at all?

I don’t know what’s next or what the tech oligarchy has in store for all of us in this haze of government gutting and simpering at the feet of Trump’s apparent deity, but please can we at least agree that they are not that smart? While there’s bound to be a few good things in and amongst it (like stopping production of pennies), there’s something about stopped clocks here that one of these men has undoubtedly misquoted in a meeting while everyone nodded and smiled.

I think it’s probably too late, but I wish we would stop giving more power to people born powerful. Stop assuming they deserve it or earned it. It’s been one of the great lies of the American story. I hope we get to write a different chapter next.

See you down the road,

Jamie

Programming note - There won’t be an LFTR podcast this week due to a series of events including all the water freezing in our house. We’ll be back (and hopefully showered) next week!