Welcome back to the Stove Top weekly newsletter. As usual, each edition has a few brief (or in this case, one) stories and finishes with a mix of interesting links, hot takes, and good reads.

Going forward, this newsletter will come out on Fridays instead of Thursdays. I’m changing it because I want to go to Philly’s center city sips on Wednesdays, and I don’t want to have to write and edit this thing drunk.

Enjoy

Generation Hustle

Some dude named Tim Kempton sent Twitter into a frenzy this week:

As you can probably guess, poor Tim got absolutely shit on. Not like he’s complaining. All he really cares about is getting that sweet sweet social media dopamine rush.

One of the more popular responses came from Jack Raines, and I think it nicely sums up the hostile reactions to Tim’s hot take:

This is the party line for Gen Z, which goes out of their way to preach the benefits of work-life balance. They tell us that you don’t need to listen to those (admittedly unbearable) grindset sigma males to make it in life. After all, there’s a bunch of super successful people who reached the top without being insufferable.

For example, let’s go back to Jack:

If Steve Jobs, Jim Simons, and Phil Knight can do it, why can’t you? Uhhh because those are three of the most talented people ever1, and you’re….probably not. And young people know this. Because even though they wax poetic about not working too hard, Zoomers are actually hardcore hustlers:

• 91% of Gen Z small business owners work outside of 9-5.

• 81% of Gen Z small business owners work on vacation, compared to 62% of small business owners in general.

• 48% of Gen Z have multiple side hustles. 47% of Gen Z has 3(!) jobs.

So much for the work-life balance generation, huh?

As your resident Zoomer, I’ll break down what’s going on here:

• It’s uncool these days to appear like you're trying too hard at anything, and that’s especially true with work, where it’s accepted that being overly ambitious is basically a mental illness (which I agree with).

• But, the days of being able to get good grades, go to college, and coast to a good job are over. The world is now stupidly competitive.

• So society engrained in us to work extremely hard from the womb.

• But remember, it’s not cool to look like you're trying too hard, so we grind in silence.

That’s how you get a generation that loves to talk about not grinding but goes and does it anyway. And they are right for doing so. Why?

To illustrate this, I’ll go back to Jack, not to pick on him, but because he’s a Zoomer who's written on the topic. Jack is one of the most successful 20-something bloggers on the planet. His friend that he referenced, Connor Gross, is in his words “in the top 0.1% of 25-year-olds in terms of crushing it”. These are not normal people. They can afford to chill on the grinding2 a bit because they are special. Most people are by definition not special.

Just like the annoying hustle boys get sucked up in their “don’t date in your 20s” schtick, the Jacks3 of the world get lost in the “you can achieve whatever you want” mindset:

The idea that getting rich after grinding for a decade is 1) the default outcome and 2) not impressive is naive at best and elitist at worst. But it makes sense for Jack to think this way. He writes a finance blog. He goes to Columbia business school. He hangs out with the 1%4. That’s his people, and as his original quote says, those who work their assess off are just coping for their lack of talent:

Yeah dude you’re exactly right lol. Columbia is not real life. Twitter is not real life. Finance, entrepreneur, and tech Twitter is definitely not real life. It’s easy to forget how many people are struggling, despite how hard they work. Most people5 have to put in a hell of a lot of pain to be financially successful.

Instead of shitting on them or using them to boost your hustle porn (looking at you Tim), let’s put our brains together and start thinking about how we can build a society so that future generations don’t have to go through the same struggle6.

Extras

• My latest reading list dropped.

• OpenAI is attempting to keep AI out of politics. This is good, but isn’t going to last. The cat’s out of the bag.

• Section 230 is safe, which is great news for anybody who likes the internet. This ruling isn’t really a surprise. Watching terrorist videos doesn’t mean you will turn into a terrorist. Even if you do think what we see on the internet should be moderated, how do you decide what is allowed and what isn’t allowed? It’s a slippery slope straight to censorship dystopia.

• Developing country voices are being locked out of the UN plastic talks, which doesn’t make much sense.

• Microsoft’s CMO had the stupidest reply of all time to the employees complaining about their lack of a raise this year: “Improve our stock”. So dumb, especially when the CEO’s compensation keeps going up.

• Quantum computing is awesome…and terrifying.

• Wars are now fought between drones. It can’t be long until they start regulating drones like they regulate guns and bombs.

• Speaking of war, Biden is now giving F-16s to Ukraine. Two things. 1) If you’re going to eventually give them the weapons anyway, why not just give it to them all at the start? Why do you have to haggle over it for months? 2) Waging financial war on Russia was still incredibly stupid and shortsighted and will go down as an all-time blunder.

• Prison labor is modern-day slavery.

• I feel bad for people graduating from college this year. I guess if everybody moves into STEM, then even STEM gets saturated? But do not despair, there are jobs to be had in finance. News flash: finance is a waste of your talents.

• China-US relations are looking awfully bad. It’s well past time to launch that piece of spyware to Valhalla. Oh, and Berkeley is secretly funded by the Chinese lol.

• People are lonely, could AI chatbots be the answer? I don’t know if I want them to be to be honest.

• Lot of China this week, but they are also bankrupting poor countries.

• Noncompetes were banned in Minnesota. Rare Minnesota W.

• Remote work is killing the value of NYC’s offices. Can it kill the value of NYC rent too? Maybe then we can swap out the corporate stooges that currently infest Manhattan for the cool hippies who used to live there.

• Greedflation is real, which sucks because we are getting used to high inflation. 

• We might now have a cure for paralysis.

• People these days are really wondering if they are gay. 

• The student loan payment pause just led people to…take on more debt. Lmao.

Until next time, ✌️

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