➺ Friday - Sept. 19, 2025
Dominance Display
| The first “alpha male” wasn’t a grindset chad. He was a chicken. In 1921, the Norwegian zoologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe introduced the term when describing the “pecking order” in a flock of barnyard hens. A few decades later, it was common parlance. A few decades after that, the chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, who died yesterday at the age of 90, complicated what the phrase meant – at least in regards to primates. Unfortunately, not all primates got the memo. |
| For Goodall, alpha was a position of power, not a form of posturing. As such, being the alpha didn’t require acting like an alpha (puffing your chest, baring your teeth, hawking creatine on a podcast). In The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986), Goodall told the story of Figan, a wiry male who rose to become alpha of his Kasakela community at Gombe in the mid-1970s with the help of his polio-crippled brother and a clever political strategy. Rather than challenging Gombe’s reigning alpha, Humphrey, mono a mono, Figan used coordinated two-on-one opposition. At first, he opposed Humphrey with his brother, then he engaged in grooming behaviors with middle-ranking males and recruiting them to oppose Humphrey as a group. From there, they went after other high-ranking “sigma” males acting independently, effectively flipping the social structure. Humphrey never lost his alpha mindset; he did, however, lose his position. |
| Goodall’s work still resonates not only because she was a masterful storyteller with stories worth telling – a kind of scientific Kipling – but because she had a broader point about domination and dominion: The ability to inflict yourself on others is not an accurate measure of power. Not for chimps. Not for men. Not even for mankind. |
Private Eye-Drops
| “Bureaucratic procedures,” David Graeber wrote in The Utopia of Rules (2015), “are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence….” It’s that Weberian critique of modern American paper pushing which animates Hollywood’s sharpest (and most underrated) sub-genre: stoner noir. Movies like The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, Inherent Vice and One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Andersen’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, follow losers whose dropout status turns them into epistemic outsiders with the distance to see the *whole picture, man*. These men are unable (or unwilling) to differentiate socially legitimized abuses of power from socially stigmatized abuses of power and they’re not down with either. |
| Pynchon understood (and understands, judging from his new book) that stoner paranoia is both funny and a deeply worthy subject because the devil is not, in fact, in the details. The devil is obscured by the details. In Vineland, Pynchon describes this phenomenon: “Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible, regardless of the names in power.” To see the real conspiracy, you must look past the details. Stoners, as anyone who has spent time with them can attest, have a knack for this. Drunks too. As Philip Marlowe puts it in The Big Sleep: “I’m a romantic. Facts don’t interest me.” Facts interest serious men. But seriousness is – more often than not – a mask for complicity and ambition. Dropouts can see that. They know it’s not the rules that tie the room together. It’s the rug. |
T-800 Model 101
| Wealthfront, the robo-advisor platform that emerged like Arnold in T2 from the apocalyptic chaos of the Great Recession, has announced plans to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker WLTH. Its investor pitch? Monetize distrust. In its S-1 filing, the company argues that Millennials and Gen Z – whose wealth is projected (per an Oxford study funded by the company) to grow 11.3% a year, from $12 trillion in 2022 to $140 trillion by 2045 – don’t trust financial services professionals because they saw them try to destroy the world. The model is simple. According to its S-1 filing, about 75% of Wealthfront’s revenue comes from sweeping client deposits into partner banks and splitting the interest spread – a move that allows investors to keep more of the yield. Another chunk comes from a flat 0.25% advisory fee on investment accounts, a fourth of the 1% traditional advisors charge for wearing quarter-zips to meetings and offering bad tickets to the U.S. Open. Wealthfront also offers margin loans, letting clients borrow against portfolios without triggering taxes – like rich people. The whole thing has a fintech gloss, but it’s very garage rock. At 330 employees, Wealthfront is also somewhat garage-sized. In fiscal year 2025, revenue will hit roughly $309 million (up 43% year-over-year). That’s pretty small company to go public, but the big bet is on automation, a word repeated in the filing document over 100 times. In many ways this is the first anti-finance IPO, a punch thrown at J.P. Morgan by a generation that hasn’t forget. Should be fun to watch. |