He listens to podcasts at 2.5x speed.
He eats Sweetgreen slop at his desk.
He responds to Slack messages within 12.8 minutes.
He’s experimenting with “smart drugs” called nootropics.

He’s consistent.
He’s not unhappy.

He’s generally in shape and isn’t the worst person to have a beer with. 

On paper, he’s completely unremarkable. 

But Spencer represents one of the most fascinating species in modern America: the optimized professional.

Watch how he lives and you can see the direction of the professional class and, to a degree, the direction of America.

Let’s call him Spencer.

Spencer went to UGA or Georgia Tech. He grew up in Johns Creek or Vestavia Hills. One parent’s a doctor, the other in real estate. They all own Vanguard index funds. 

He works in consulting. Or finance. Or at a SaaS company. 

You can’t quite remember.

Spencer has a nice modern townhome. A Peloton. A Labrador with an Instagram account.

He wakes at 5:45. Coffee. Slack. Email. School drop-off. Zoom.

Because if winning is the only way you know how to live, there’s no such thing as enough.

His job largely consists of regurgitating what company executives said on Zoom earlier in the day. By afternoon it’s six slides and a Slack post with a megaphone emoji.

Somewhere between meetings, Spencer gets on the treadmill-desk, walking with a Zyn pouch stiff in his upper lip.

10 years ago, he tracked steps with a FitBit and put butter in his coffee. Then he dipped his toe into the meditation app waters. Now he’s experimenting with cold plunges and saunas. 

He lived for the happy hour when he got out of school in the early 2010s. But today, he largely abstains from booze (all bets are off on the upcoming trip to Napa with his wife).  

He’s not building things. Not exploring things. But he plays by the rules. 

He’s the modern optimized professional. 

I’ve spent the bulk of my career working in the tech industry—riding the waves of Silicon Valley for 10+ years now. First at a startup, backed by Sam Altman’s Y-Combinator, that folded in two years. Then at enterprise software giants Oracle and Salesforce. Now at a PE-owned AI company as the industry reaches maturity.  

Before Spencer and optimization culture, Silicon Valley was populated by a very different species.

Freaks.

Not corporate climbers and MBAs.

But eccentric hobbyists who believed computers might change the world.

When American commerce sharply declined in the 1970s, these fearless freaks out West kept our economy roaring. And it’s the reason it hums to this day. But it's more than that.

For the past several decades, as the space race and manufacturing dominance faded, Silicon Valley has represented the last bastion of traditional American values. 

A place where our brightest minds believed that, by working together, they could solve impossible problems that changed the world. A place that conjured the spirit of the Wild West; pioneers exploring the unexplored. A place that fostered self-made wealth and the American Dream for those with talent, grit, and balls.  

Today, Silicon Valley is a highly optimized machine. Perhaps an AI demon to some.  

But the original Valley looked more like a frontier town. 

Let’s explore the gunslingers that populated the old school Silicon Valley—from the hobbyist era to the founder era and first internet boom: 

There was no demand for personal computers in the 1970s. They were basically expensive toys, like jet skis for geeks. But these geeks laid the technical groundwork and built a community. Notably, the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, CA. 

The computer hobbyist community had a strong anti-big brother, counter-culture ethos in those days. The belief that computers were a way to fight the man sparked the passion and energy to turn this hobby into something much bigger.     

Then, around 1975, a turning point in the cost of microprocessors made the personal computer market viable. Steve Wozniak could now afford to build a prototype Apple—which he showed ot his friends in the Homebrew Computer Club in 1976.

In attendance that day was Wozniak’s friend, Steve Jobs. 

Jobs was a Reed College dropout who hung around the halls for a year immersing himself in calligraphy. He’d left his job at Atari for a year to find his guru in India. They gave him his job back when he returned. He had a room in his home for the purpose of taking LSD. Steve Jobs thought different.   

Jobs pitched investors the vision that every household would have a personal computer someday (a wild underestimate in hindsight). Yet almost nobody bought into this vision. Others questioned the need for personal computers at all. 

Not even the most visionary early tech adopters could have known then that the PC (and related products like smartphones and ATMs) would change everything. 

At first, Apple’s ads didn’t even tell you what a personal computer could do—it asked you what you did with it. Awarding prizes for the most creative responders. 

Nobody “needed” a computer. So early startups like Apple and Sinclair had to sell consumers hard on the idea of it. 

They were symbols of experimentation and creativity. They were rebels.

Hobbyists like Woz paved the way for another rebel who would give us the internet: Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape.

Clark grew up, in his words, “in complete shit.” He got a PHD and eked out a respectable career in academia. But then at age 37—he got divorced, lost his job, and decided while burying his dog in the backyard to change everything about his life. 

So he did. 

Clark moved to the Valley hellbent on doing whatever it took to be successful.  

Michael Lewis chronicled him in The New New Thing, a criminally underrated book that few have read. It chronicles the first tech boom in the 90s, and the characters like Clark who populated the early valley. Featuring hilarious culture clashes between East Coast Wall Street and West Coast Tech. 

No one took note of computers in the 1970s. They weren’t adopted at mass until the 1990s. 

But in 2026, technology dominates every aspect of our lives—and AI is all we seem to talk about. 

DISCOVER: THE NEW NEW THING BY MICHAEL LEWIS →

LONG-FORM READ: THE EDUCATION OF THE BROLIGARCHY →

If you watched baseball in the 1990s, you’ll remember the home run race between Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa. The muscles were bigger. They hit the ball further. 

We now know this as baseball’s “Steroids Era.” An arms race where more and more players went on the juice for fear of falling behind. 

For today’s white collar professionals like Spencer, cognitive enhancing drugs have become the equivalent of steroids in baseball. 

The reason? 

Elite knowledge work demands something our brains did not evolve to do: 8 hours of sustained attention directed at screens, spreadsheets, and Slack threads.

Emails. Decks. Slack. Excel models. Repeat.  

Adderall.

Modafinil.

Zyn. 

Call them white-collar PEDs.

You’re either disciplined, optimized, and focused. Or you’re falling behind.

But it’s more than just doing a good job. Productivity has become a moral category inside elite professional culture.

So when Spencer is popping Vyvance, sweating in saunas, and listening to Huberman at 2.5x speed—he’s doing it not only to maintain his edge, but to signal that he’s a good person. 

This fascinating piece below is about White Collar PEDs. Part science experiment, part exploration into how we got here. 

It should be relatable to readers under 40 or so. Those of us in the so-called “adderall generation” who worked at Booz in the early 2000s, Amazon in the 2010s, and are trying like hell to exit this train in the 2020s.  

Read it, and try to keep your clean in the open floor plans.  

READ: WHITE COLLAR PEDs →

John Updike, one of the best writers of the 20th century, wrote about golf for five decades. 

Reading him reminds me why we love this game. It has nothing to do with scorecards and status. It’s a place for camaraderie, connection to beautiful nature; the joy of that post-round beer with your buds…when you're a little sweaty and tired, yet satisfied and energetic. Your sweat mixes with grass and dirt, and the laughs come easy. 

Something inherently very difficult mentally and physically, and you enjoy that it pushes—yet it can never be fully mastered, and you accept it because that’s life. A game that can’t be won or lost, only played. So why not enjoy the people around us, the splendor of the land; getting slowly better over time and at peace that nobody makes it out of this alive. 

In Golf Dreams, Updike writes about golf in beautiful prose. A collection of his most memorable golf pieces, it illuminates why we love the game.   

The Swing is the Man 

Updike Writes: “Only after the fetters of youth have been flung aside can golf enter. Only then can the man know the folly of his adolescent belief of the swing answering to the man and perceive the joy and the truth of the complete man answering to the swing. And … the even greater joy is realized when he stands in the bright sunlight of complete fulfillment and comes to realize that the swing is the man.” 

The Natural Beauty 

Updike Writes: “[H]ills, valleys, trees, a gleaming lake in the distance … the whiffs of air — pungent, penetrating — that come through green things growing, the hot smell of pines at noon, the wet smell of fallen leaves in autumn … the lungs full of oxygen, the sense of freedom on a great expanse, the exhilaration, the vastness, the buoyancy, the exaltation …. And how beautiful the vacated links at dawn, when the dew gleams untrodden beneath the pendant flags and the long shadows lie quiet on the green…”

DISCOVER: UPDIKE’S WRITINGS ON GOLF →

Drive an hour south from Silicon Valley and the world resets. 

The PCH winds through cliffs and fog towards Big Sur. The glass offices of Sand Hill Road disappear, and so does the mindset. In sharp contrast to the hyper-optimized tech machine, this is a refuge for escaping the machinery of modern life. 

One summer I drove down from San Francisco with a friend who worked in investment banking. For the first 30 minutes he worked on Excel models in the passenger seat. 

Then the cliffs appear. 

The waves from the vast Pacific crashing against the rocks of Big Sur. 

He put the laptop away. 

Hunter S. Thompson lived here in the 1960s. Just a young writer trying to get his break, experimenting, and pushing boundaries. Big Sur was the perfect place for Thompson. And he was proud to live in a writer community here. 

He wrote an essay, published in Rogue, that perfectly captures the mystique, raw beauty, and state of mind that remains today. Here’s an excerpt: 

“In reality, Big Sur is very like Val-halla—a place that a lot of people have heard of, and that few can tell you anything about. In New York you might hear it’s an art colony. In San Francisco they’ll tell you it’s a nudist colony, and when you finally roll into Big Sur with your eyes peeled for naked artists you are likely to be very disappointed…

Every weekend the owner of the local store is plagued by people looking for ‘sex orgies,’ ‘wild drinking brawls,’ or ‘the road to Henry Miller’s house’...Some of them stay as long as a week, just wan-dering around…wandering off, com-planing bitterly that Big Sur is ‘noth-ing but a damn wilderness.’

Most of it is. The geographic boundaries of Big Sur are so vague that Lillian Bos Ross, one of the first writers to live here, once described it as ‘not a place at all, but a state of mind.’ “ 

READ: HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S ESSAY ON BIG SUR (1961) →

In a world of digital work, having physical objects in your office just mean more. 

A well-made pen. A statement art piece. Your grandfather’s wood desk. 

Not necessary. But that’s the point. 

✷ Grovemade — Inspired Workspace Design “Made the Hard Way” 

I’ve had Grovemade’s laptop riser for five years and its saved my neck. They make their stuff by hand in Portland, with high-quality wood. The founder even reached out personally because he genuinely wants to improve his craft. 

SHOP: GROVEMADE LAPTOP RISER

✷ Stoberi — The Calder Brass Pen  

If pens aren’t your thing, I get it. But I encourage everyone to have at least one object—a typewriter, for example—that reminds you some things are better done slowly and intentional. 

SHOP: STOBERI CALDER BRASS PEN

✷ Buy Local Art on Artist Collective 

Having meaningful art and photographs in my workspace makes my day better. I like art, and finding local art that speaks to you is even better. But I’m not in the gallery scene these days. So Artist Collective is a solution, letting you discover local artists from Atlanta, Charleston, Nashville, and other cities. 

SHOP: LOCAL ART 

Written from the American South.