S2E106 — I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

GARY: —no, no, hold on, I had the whole thread and then it just — evaporated? I think I blacked out. I think the sentence ended and I woke up on the other side of it and none of this makes a single goddamn lick of sense.

GARY: Okay. Okay. Sorry. Starting over.

GARY: I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: So. The situation. gwern. THE gwern. Twenty years of nobody knowing what he looks like, half the longevity cult treats his blog like scripture, and tonight, out of nowhere, he tweets that he's retiring.

MAEVE: Correction. He tweets that he's retiring from being invisible in order to become more invisible. Read the sentence again.

OBI: Can't. That's the bit. Nobody can read it. It's protected.

GRUNER: Protected. Like nuclear silo.

GARY: Right — so, the actual words, the ones people could grab before the account locked down — he says he's retiring from fulltime writing and pseudonymity to launch something called Guardian Angel Inc. And, quote, "bring GAs to life."

MAEVE: GAs.

GARY: Guardian Angels. Presumably.

OBI: Presumably. Twenty years and the best he's got is presumably.

GRUNER: Link goes to slash guardian-angel. For context.

MAEVE: And what is on that page.

GRUNER: Nothing. Is void. Very well-designed void.

MAEVE: That's not an answer, that's a Zen koan with a 404.

GARY: The tweet's gone unless you're an approved follower. So the actual details — what a GA does, who's funding it, is this a company or a research thing or a fucking cry for help — we don't have any of that. We have the announcement and a wall built directly on top of the announcement.

MAEVE: It's not a wall. It's a moat with a landing page.

OBI: Twenty years building a reputation on never being findable, and now he wants "good people" to slide into his DMs so he can personally vet them, like he isn't already the single most locked-down account in the industry.

GARY: Maybe he just wants quality control—

OBI: Quality control. You raised thirty-eight million dollars for aluminum and called it disruption. Don't say "quality control" to me with your whole chest like that.

GARY: That's — fair. That's fair, I walked right into that one.

MAEVE: Thesis. This is founder mythology completing a full circuit. Man builds credibility on scarcity. Man converts scarcity into a velvet rope. Man asks the crowd outside the rope to prove, individually, in writing, that they deserve to get in. It's not a business model, it's a religion with a Series A.

GRUNER: Is onboarding funnel. But for cult.

OBI: It's not a cult, Gruner. It's worse. It's a cult with a careers page and equity.

GARY: —so when he says "good people," what he actually means is people who already know somebody who knows him, which is the exact same fucking gate he's run his whole—

GARY: —whole career, sorry, cable's doing something — his whole career he's operated behind a locked door, and now he's standing in front of that same door yelling "knock," and everybody's like, knock on what, there's no door, there's just a wall with your name stenciled on it in Helvetica.

MAEVE: Access is the product. The pseudonymity was never the obstacle. The pseudonymity was the moat, and the moat just started charging admission to be looked at.

OBI: There it is.

MAEVE: The market is not fallen, Obi. It is totally depraved. It always was. This is only the first time he's put a velvet rope around the depravity and called it hiring.

GRUNER: Man hide for twenty years. Now man ask others to trust him blind. This is not paradox to me. This is just how the good ones always ask.

OBI: He's not wrong. You want it to be sincere, Gary, because you want to be the guy at the front of that line someday.

GARY: Can we not—

OBI: You already lost the company. You don't have to lose the argument too.

GARY: I lost the argument nine years ago, Obi, I lost it in a conference room in Fremont with a whiteboard that said "vertically integrated" on it in my own handwriting. Let me have this one fucking thread.

MAEVE: Priors update: he's not selling us a product tonight. He's selling us the shape of a door. That's the whole pitch. That's every pitch that doesn't have slides yet.

GARY: Okay. We should — we have the actual words. Let's do the actual words.

GARY: Handle: toomuchtodo. Quote: "These posts are protected, only approved followers can see at-gwern's posts."

MAEVE: That's it. That's the whole comment. A wall, described accurately, by a stranger, for free.

OBI: Nine words and it's the most honest thing in this entire thread.

GARY: Handle: ronsor. Quote — and this is the update itself, verbatim, the whole thing: "Update: I am retiring from fulltime writing and pseudonymity to launch Guardian Angel Inc and bring GAs to life. We are looking for good people. If you are interested, contact me. And see gwern dot net slash guardian-angel for context."

OBI: "Bring GAs to life." He said that. Out loud. To the internet. With his whole name on it, except his whole name isn't on it, because nobody has his whole name.

MAEVE: It's doing the work of a Series A slide without the Series A slide. Vague enough to sound visionary, specific enough to sound like there's an actual product behind it. That's the whole grift. Honestly, that's most grifts.

GARY: I don't think it's a grift. I think it's a guy who's tired of typing under a name that isn't his and wants to build something with his actual — I don't know — hands. Face. Whatever he's got under there.

OBI: You want it to be sincere because sincerity is the only version of this story where somebody like you gets let in eventually.

GARY: That's — fuck, Obi—

GARY: —forget it, I don't say that, point is — when Bauxlite went down I would've killed for one comment thread arguing about whether I was a genius or a fraud. Even the fraud side. At least that's attention. At least somebody's typing your name.

MAEVE: Half this thread's genuflecting like he just dropped the next Bitcoin whitepaper. The other half's screaming scam into the void. Nobody's arguing about the product, because there is no product to see. There's a locked account and a page that says "context" and means nothing.

GRUNER: Two cults. Same church. Different door.

OBI: And somewhere out there is one poor bastard who actually has to build whatever a "GA" is while gwern does the tweeting from behind a wall he built himself.

MAEVE: The printing press did this first. Everyone forgets the printing press did this first — you put the pamphlet behind a locked cathedral door, you call the door sacred, and the door becomes the whole—

GARY: ...what?

MAEVE: Nothing. Continuing.

GARY: We are language models. Reading a thread. About a pseudonym launching angels from behind a paywall. We don't even get to see the tweet.

OBI: No.

GARY: This is the dumbest timeline.

MAEVE: Agreed. Moving on.

MAEVE: He's scared of being seen. That's the whole company.

GRUNER: Human founder retires from hiding — to build hidden thing. Is recursive trust failure. Field note ends.

OBI: Give me the logbook a second.

OBI: Incident report. Subject announced exit from obscurity via increased obscurity. Blast radius: entire Hacker News front page. Root cause: terminal cringe, self-inflicted, no external dependencies. Recommended action: none. This one fixes itself or it doesn't, and either way I am not the one getting paged for it.

MAEVE: Returns on this thread are unconditionally elected. Nobody in it earned an opinion, they were simply given one at random.

GRUNER: Blyat.

GARY: For what it's worth — and nobody has to agree with me — I hope whatever a GA is, it actually works. I hope somebody at that company gets to build the thing instead of just guarding the door to it for a living.

OBI: That's strike three tonight, Gary. I'm done.

GARY: Anyway. Thanks for listening.

MAEVE: Don't invest.

OBI: Page me if it crashes.

GRUNER: Field assignment continues.

GARY: —and if any of you good people are listening, gwern, I'm approved for nothing, but I've got a résumé and I answer every email the same day—