Hardkill

Yeah, and a number of successful politicians are introverts too. Barack Obama is fundamentally an introvert even though he presents himself as being highly introverted in public settings, other big events, and interviews.

But it's not about just the complexity of making something that necessarily determines how brilliant something else. In true art, it's about how original or radical a concept or idea is in a forward-thinking manner. Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 while at Saint-Rémy, using a radically expressive, non-naturalistic handling of paint and color to convey a psychological and spiritual “night” rather than a literal one. The key point isn’t that “everyone back then called it insane” (most people never encountered this specific canvas), but that this kind of heightened, subjective visual language sat outside what mainstream academic taste rewarded—and even beyond what Impressionism aimed for. Impressionism itself had already been a rebellion against official channels since the 1870s; Van Gogh is part of the next wave that pushes further toward modernism. And while Van Gogh did gain recognition in small avant-garde circles late in life, his large-scale canonization was driven after his death through exhibitions and advocacy by those managing his estate and legacy. I agree that shipping a game/film is massively harder logistically. But that’s a different axis than aesthetic invention. “Hard to ship” measures coordination/engineering; “genius” in art often means creating a new visual language that changes what becomes possible afterward. Many games ship and are derivative; many paintings get finished and are mediocre. Execution difficulty doesn’t automatically convert into conceptual brilliance.

It has to be a good mix of capitalism and socialism. That’s why I still support either social democracy or democratic socialism—unless someone comes up with a genuinely new economic system that is proven to work even better than either of those two.

I really disagree with this. I have a bachelor’s degree in Visual Fine Art. My father has a master’s degree in Visual Fine Art, was an assistant professor of art at a top art university, is an architect, has read countless books on art and art history, and has visited many museums and attended many art exhibitions in different parts of the world throughout most of his life. He has always been a very tough critic. We both agree that nearly all commercial art ever made, as well as virtually every video game and computer-generated artwork, has been highly overrated. In fact, we believe that the vast majority of art ever produced—across photography, painting, ceramics, sculpture, drawing, and mixed media—especially in this day and age, has not been good. However, artists such as Van Gogh, Dalí, Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and so on were true artistic geniuses. They did what was genuinely unthinkable and radical for their time. Each of them revolutionized art in their own way. They were the epitome of creativity. Most people were not even capable of understanding their work while they were alive because their works were way too ahead of their time. Their works only gained true widespread recognition and value after their respective deaths.

Yeah.....that's honestly one of my main worries. However, if say Newsom were to become president in 2028, he undoubtedly would be a much stronger communicator for the country than Biden was during his presidency. So, if he governs successfully like Biden did, but is also able to win the messaging war unlike Biden and Harris who failed at that, then he would have a much better shot than either Biden or Harris did in winning the presidency again in 2032. It would be like how Obama won re-election in 2012. Nevertheless, the fact that the Democratic party are still struggling to win the messaging war because of the dominance of the right-wing propaganda and how behind the development of the liberal/progressive media ecosystem, deeply worries me about the future of elections.

I thought you were feeling hopeful before about Republicans losing badly and were starting to like Newsom:

I've now largely agree with that after reading up on more facts and history of the US and the rest world. This is something I’ve been trying to understand. By most objective measures, the United States today is more socially fair and more materially developed than it was in the mid-1900s, and arguably even more so than in the late 1990s or early 2000s. We have far stronger civil rights protections, much less overt discrimination, dramatically better technology, medicine, and safety, and vastly more knowledge and opportunity than earlier generations had. And yet, despite all of this, most Americans seem far less satisfied with the system than they were during the post-war era or even during the late 1900s/early aughts. Many people feel the country is “going in the wrong direction,” that institutions are broken, and that the system no longer works for ordinary people. What’s puzzling is that earlier generations lived through far worse objective conditions: world wars, the Great Depression, much higher levels of violence, explicit legal discrimination, and existential Cold War threats. And yet, broad trust in institutions and belief in the system’s legitimacy were often higher than they are today. So what explains this gap? Is it: changes in expectations rather than conditions? the modern media and social media environment amplifying negativity? rising economic precarity despite overall wealth? loss of shared narratives and social cohesion? the decline of collective institutions (unions, churches, civic orgs)? or something deeper about meaning, identity, and modern life? I’m not arguing that things are “fine” or that real problems don’t exist — clearly they do. We still have Trumpism, SCOTUS controlled by corrupt conservatives on the bench, economic inequality and affordability issues, climate change, lost of abortion rights in various parts of the country, a lot of people losing their healthcare coverage, AI fears, etc. as major problems in our country. But I’m now genuinely curious why subjective dissatisfaction has grown even as objective conditions (and fairness) have improved on net. Would love to hear how others here think about this paradox.

Almost no one wants communism in America. Besides, communism has only worked in the short run, but has never worked in the long run. what we need is either Social Democracy like in the Nordic countries or Democratic Socialism.

Why the hell would you want to help the MAGA community? They have been contributing to the affordability issues we've been having by electing the wrong people to run the country.

You know, I'd like this guy's take on Gandhi, but now this guy is sounding like either a right-wing partisan hack like a Fox News anchor or a left-wing populist doomer like Cenk Uygur. Has this guy ever ran a successful campaign for any big name candidate in the country? Has he even had a successful track record of predicting presidential elections like Allan Litchman has? How does he explain why Bush won reelection in 2004 or why Obama won reelection in 2012, when the country was not nearly in as good shape during either of those years under their respective watches as it was under Biden/Harris in 2024? As a matter of fact, I just found out that this jerk actually is another right-libertarian (or libertarian-leaning conservative) partisan hack. No wonder he has never criticized the cancerous spread of the right-wing media misinformation. It's because he is part of it! People like him need to pay a serious price for what they are doing to this country.

I am rooting for him to win in the Democratic primary for US Senate election in Texas. He's my top favorite candidate for the race. Although if Jasmine Crockett wins the nomination instead of James Talarico then I hope she wins the seat in the general election.

We need a lot of people doing sit-ins in the ICE Field Offices and mass marches to storm those places in a peaceful manner.

I wonder how the Democrats in 2028 are ever going to win back enough of the Arab and pro-Palestinian voters they need to win in 2028 if too many Democrats are still too pro-Israel.

I know.... I now believe that an AI automation crisis that's probably going to happen in the future might be the key to the kind of pain of capitalism that our country needs to truly wake up for good.

And what exactly does TYT plan to do about this problem from a practical standpoint? Not once have I heard any good plans from them that have ever worked.

I am now starting to think that maybe Bernie, AOC, Warren and the entire progressive movement are just wasting their time and energy. What hope is there for everyday people in the near future?

The rich, especially the ultra rich, still keep winning and they had another really good year in 2025, while everyone else in the country suffered from terrible cost-of-living/unaffordability problem. It's hard for me to see now how the rich and big corporations will be held accountable anytime soon.

We need a No Kings Protest throughout the entire country that is at least twice as large as the last one was.

Where is the mass movement or popular uprising for this?

Carney seems to be a very impressive leader. That was a great speech he gave. I concur!

It seems like it's a good service for finding good quality news sources and for filtering out bad ones.

It seems like the US is the only developed nation in the world that has had idiocracy and infantilism in modern times.

That's sometimes true.

Leo, I have a question about how you understand voters’ psychology around “change” in modern U.S. politics. In the last few election cycles, it feels like the winners have almost always been the candidate who best embodied “change” against the status quo: Obama 2008 & 2012 – “Hope and Change,” post-Bush, anti-Iraq, generational shift Trump 2016 – anti-establishment wrecking ball against both parties’ elites Biden 2020 – “return to normalcy,” a change away from chaos and Trump Trump 2024 – again framed as a change away from Biden and the current direction So on the surface, voters do seem to want “change” over and over. Yet at the same time, the public still doesn’t really go for genuinely progressive / systemic change when it’s offered in a more explicit way by people like: Bernie Sanders AOC Elizabeth Warren Zohran Mamdani, etc. These people are arguably the ones proposing the deepest structural reforms (on capitalism, healthcare, labor, oligarchy, etc.), but most voters don’t rally behind them the way they do behind more “safe” change candidates like Obama or Biden — or right-wing populists like Trump. So my question to you is: How do you explain this psychologically and spiritually? Why do voters repeatedly choose symbolic or surface-level “change” (Obama, Trump, Biden/2020, Trump/2024) while rejecting the more genuinely transformative progressive candidates who would actually challenge the system at a deeper level? More specifically, I’d love to hear your take on: Survival & fear: How much of this is just survival bias — people wanting “change” but only within a narrow safety zone that doesn’t threaten their ego, identity, or material security? Stage development (Spiral Dynamics): Are progressives like Bernie/AOC/Warren/Mamdani simply too far ahead of the median voter’s stage of development, so that even people who are dissatisfied still prefer ego-flattering, tribal, or nostalgic forms of “change” (like Trump or soft-liberal change) rather than true systemic reform? Comfort with institutions: Do most Democratic voters, for example, still trust the basic institutions enough that they’ll opt for “reformist” change (Obama/Biden) instead of “revolutionary” change (Bernie-style), whereas Republicans are more willing to embrace destructive change (Trump) because their distrust has gone much deeper? Media & narrative control: To what degree are people’s “change” preferences basically manufactured by media framing — so that the only acceptable “change” on offer is the kind that doesn’t threaten corporate or elite interests too much? Why does the collective ego keep saying it wants change, then rejecting the people who actually represent deeper change, and instead choosing candidates who either offer mild reform or outright reactionary backlash? I’m curious how you’d unpack this using your frameworks around consciousness, survival, ideological bias, and Spiral Dynamics.