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Ryan Levesque

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The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

Ryan Levesque

Issue #093

| The Digital Contrarianâ„¢

The “Pigs”of Silicon Valley?

The "Pigs" of Silicon Valley: Idiocracy or Ignorance? (And which is worse?...)

Ryan Levesque

10 min read

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We brought pigs onto the farm this week.
 
Three of them. Over a hundred pounds each.
 
(This photo above is the boar who fathered them – he’s over 600 pounds and looks like a Star Wars character…)
 
We drove four hours round trip to pick up these three “little” pigs (below) from a farm in the middle of nowhere.
And this all sounds pretty straightforward on paper…
 
Until you’re backing a livestock trailer down a narrow muddy driveway that wasn’t designed for anything wider than an ATV…
 
Getting these guys onto the trailer was one thing.
 
Getting them out of the trailer was another.
 
By the time we got home it was late. It was dark. And five-month-old hundred pound pigs who’ve been riding in a trailer for two hours do not want to move.
 
What followed was the kind of full-body, peak-adrenaline wrestling match that farming occasionally demands of you.
 
The kind where afterward you’re bent over, hands on your knees, vision going white, wondering if you’re about to pass out in your own barn.
 
(Farming: it’s glamorous! :-)
 
But here’s something I noticed watching these guys settle in the next morning…
 
Pigs don’t look up, ever.
 
They’re not built for it. Their entire anatomy points them toward the ground. Eyes down, nose in the dirt, rooting for the next thing.
 
As a result?
 
They never see the sky.
 
And strangely…
 
The “pigs” of Silicon Valley are built the same way.
* * *
That same morning, I drove to meet a friend of mine, Matt, who is one of the sharpest investors I know.
 
He’s the type who went all-in on Amazon and Apple when those were wildly unpopular bets, generating multi-thousand percent returns.
 
Today, roughly half his net worth is in Bitcoin. The other half in Tesla.
 
He’s at the most extreme end of what I call in Return to Real “deep convictions, loosely held.”
 
And it was during the drive to meet him that a thought I’d been circling on for weeks finally crystallized into something that I couldn’t stop thinking about…
 
It started with something that annoyed me earlier in the week.
 
And it ended with an idea that might be too big for a single newsletter issue.
 
But I’m going to try today anyway…

1 | "Zero Introspection"

If you haven’t seen the clip yet, here it is.
 
Earlier this month, Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the most powerful venture capital firms on the planet…
 
Sat down on the Founders podcast with David Senra and said the following:
 
He aims for “zero” introspection. As little as possible. “Move forward. Go.”
 
He then claimed that introspection is essentially a modern invention. A “manufacture” of the 1910s and 1920s. Something cooked up by Sigmund Freud and the Vienna Circle.
 
His exact words: “Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point.”
 
And the podcast host congratulated him for developing a “zero-introspection mindset.”
 
Now look…
 
I don’t spend a lot of time reacting to things people say on podcasts, because most of it is just theater designed to stir up controversy…
 
But this one caught my attention because of the incredible historical illiteracy…
 
The phrase “Know thyself” was carved into the stone of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi around 600 BCE.
 
Socrates told anyone who would listen that the unexamined life was not worth living. (They killed him for it.)
 
As an East Asian Studies major at Brown, in Chinese philosophy, Mencius described introspection as “seeking the lost heart”… the recovery of something innate that gets buried under the noise of ordinary life.
 
Shakespeare wrote an entire play about what happens when you can’t stop examining yourself. (It’s called Hamlet. You may have heard of it.)
 
So no.
 
Introspection was NOT invented by Sigmund Freud in 1910.
 
And the “great men of history” were absolutely sitting around doing this stuff.
 
When this is what passes for hero worship in Silicon Valley, the question becomes: Is this idiocracy or ignorance? And which is worse?

2 | The Convenient Blindfold

Andreessen is not a stupid person.
 
He co-created the first widely used web browser.
He built and sold multiple companies. His 2011 essay “Why Software Is Eating the World” is one of the most cited pieces of writing in Silicon Valley history.
 
He’s read widely. He quotes Nietzsche. He references the Italian Futurists. He is not unfamiliar with the Western philosophical tradition.
 
Which means the historical revisionism isn’t ignorance.
 
But it sure as heck is convenient.
 
Because here’s what happens when you declare introspection a weakness:
 
You don’t have to examine what you’re building.
 
You don’t have to sit with the consequences of what you’re funding. You don’t have to ask whether the world you’re creating is one that actually serves human beings.
 
You just… move forward. Go.
 
The venture capital world optimizes for exactly this kind of person. People who forge ahead without looking back. People who are decidedly not students of history. People who spend zero time in self-reflection.
 
And capitalism rewards the behavior handsomely.
 
The problem, of course, is that the people who are least inclined to examine what they’re doing… are the ones doing the most.
 
Which brings me to the idea that’s too big for my (current) book.

3 | The Force Nobody's Talking About

In Return to Real, there’s a passage where I write about how markets want to consolidate.
 
It’s a principle that came to me on the farm (the story is in the book and something I wrote about way back in Issue #017), and it’s one I’ve seen play out in market after market over the course of my career.
 
But as I was driving to meet my friend that morning, something bigger snapped into focus.
 
Market consolidation isn’t just an economic tendency.
 
The same pattern shows up at virtually every scale of life on this planet.

1: Biological

Humans and livestock now account for roughly 96% of all mammalian biomass on Earth.
Wild mammals… every elephant, whale, wolf, bear, deer, and lion on the planet… make up just 4%.
 
Our biomass is more than seven times greater than all wild mammals combined. We are in what scientists describe as the sixth mass extinction, and the diversity of life is being consolidated into a handful of dominant species: us, our cattle, and our dogs.

2: Dietary

Every banana you’ve ever bought at the grocery store is almost certainly the same variety: the Cavendish. It accounts for 99% of banana exports to the developed world.
There are over a thousand banana species in the wild, but the global supply chain consolidated around one.
 
And the Cavendish itself was only adopted after its predecessor, the Gros Michel, was wiped out by a fungal disease in the 1950s.
 
The same fungus is now threatening the Cavendish. History repeating itself. If you read [Issue #073] The “Efficiency vs. Resiliency” Dilemma back in November of last year, you’ll recognize the pattern: consolidation optimizes for efficiency… and efficiency, taken to the extreme, creates the very fragility that brings the whole system down.

3: Technological

The frontier AI model landscape is consolidating in real time. A handful of players now dominate: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI.
Rather than building their own models, the largest technology companies on earth are licensing from these few.
 
Microsoft, despite pouring over $13 billion into OpenAI, recently turned to Anthropic’s Claude to power key features in its Office 365 suite.
 
Apple is relying on third-party AI models rather than building its own frontier system. The industry is consolidating around a small number of model providers, with everyone else building on top.

4: Wealth

This chart from the Financial Times this week says it all:
The top 10% of US earners now account for nearly half of all consumer spending. The bottom 80% have seen their share of spending steadily decline for decades.
 
Wealth is consolidating into fewer and fewer hands.
 
(If you read [Issue #091] What’s YOUR “AI Barbell” Strategy? a couple weeks ago or attended the Town Hall I hosted on the topic, this is the same “Barbell Effect” we explored together.)
 
And then there’s what I saw on the farm this week.
 
There are heritage pig breeds that have been developed over centuries. Berkshire. Kune Kune. Idaho Pasture Pigs (IPPs). Each one bred for specific traits, specific conditions, specific land.
 
But unless you actively resist it… distinct breeds cross into a single mixed homestead variety within a generation or two.
 
The genetics consolidate. The diversity disappears.
 
The question I keep going back to is this:
 
Is this one force, operating at every level?
 
Is what we call “market consolidation” in business actually just one expression of something much deeper? Something biological? Something closer to a law of complex systems?
 
I don’t have the answer yet.
 
But the pattern is hard to ignore once you see it.
 
And the people who are accelerating this consolidation at the highest levels of technology and capital…
 
Are the same people who proudly declare they have “zero introspection.”
 
They’re not going to examine this.
 
They’re not even going to think about it.

4 | The Book That Doesn't Exist (Yet).

When you’re writing a book, one of the hardest decisions you make is what goes in and what stays out.
 
Return to Real has a clear thesis. A clear argument. A clear set of ideas that serve the reader.
 
But along the way, you encounter threads that pull you somewhere bigger.
 
Ideas that are too large to fit inside the book you’re writing… but too important to ignore.
 
This is one of them.
 
The closest thing I’ve found to this idea in book form is Geoffrey West’s Scale (2017), which explores universal scaling laws across biology, cities, and companies. It’s a fascinating book. But it doesn’t connect the specific dots I’m describing here.
 
Nobody, as far as I can tell, has written the book that connects biodiversity collapse, dietary monoculture, market consolidation, and wealth concentration as expressions of a single underlying force.
 
That book doesn’t exist yet.
 
Maybe it’s the one I write next.
 
I haven’t decided. I’ve got about a dozen ideas brewing. But this one is pulling at me at the moment.
 
For now, the idea lives in my notebook.
 
And in conversations with smart, strategic thinkers – like my investor friend, Matt…
 
And in moments like Friday night, standing in the barn at 8pm, catching my breath after wrestling a hundred-pound pig into a pen like an insane person wondering what the hell I’m doing.
* * *
If there’s a through line in everything I’ve been writing…in the newsletter, in Return to Real, and in whatever comes after…
 
It’s this:
 
The most contrarian act in an age of consolidation might be the simplest one.
 
Preserving what’s distinct.
 
In your food. In your thinking. In your work.
 
And yes…
 
In your willingness to sit with a hard question long enough to actually see what’s in front of you.
 
Socrates thought so.
 
Mencius thought so.
 
Marcus Aurelius thought so.
 
Marc Andreessen does not.
 
I know which side of history I’d rather be on.
* * *
Okay, that’s it for this week.
 
Back to the manuscript…
 
(More on Return to Real in the weeks ahead… including a deep dive on the art and science of book cover design that I think you’re going to love…)
 
In the meantime…
 
Remember to hug the ones you love…
 
Until next week,
 
Ryan :-)

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The Great Sea Change

The Great Sea Change diagram from Return to Real