Sarah Drinkwater

Forget what they say—instead look at who they marry.

This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.

This choice tells you about their own

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In-group Cheems is the reflexive cynicism of advice-givers (whether that advice is solicited or otherwise) about someone’s dreams or ambitions.

But truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together. Information, on the other hand, is centrifugal, with very destructive effects on social cohesion. If we want to comprehend what kind of society we are living in, we need to understand the nature of information.

Roelof Botha brought up this same topic in a recent Invest Like The Best episode in an even more poignant way: "Imagine the venture business in a decade, and Sequoia is gone. We presided over the decline of Sequoia, this team, the people here in this room, it was us. What happened? What did we not do?"

Advertising has successfully used these strategies to accelerate identity formation/dissolution and, by extension, consumer capitalism. There is no reason that radical groups could not use similar methods to challenge capitalism and develop alternative collective identities.