Rugged Individualist. Husband, father, entrepreneur.
Ashland, OR
Joined December 2021
- Tweets4.8K
- Following1.2K
- Followers407
- Likes29.6K
Brian Hellwig retweeted
Actual progress comes from hard-to-build technology.
Which comes from competitive, creative, free-market capitalism.
Which comes from one small, precarious area and then diffuses to the rest of the world.
Snuff that out, and it’s global stagnation for an extremely long time.
Trump 2.0 was a repudiation of Woke 1.0. The Blue Wave was a repudiation of Trump. When will we start being FOR something as opposed to just against the current thing? Having something or someone to blame to retake power does not solve a thing. It makes one group feel good for a short while, and then we all come to realize that the wars don't end. The money continues to get printed. The debt rises. The middle class gets hollowed out. The elites pretend to disagree publicly and then clink champagne glasses (paid for with our money) in private as they celebrate our demise.
The right wing made massive strides under Biden. The left did the same under Trump 1 and 2. The party in power leads so terribly that it galvanizes the other side and swings the moderates away from the madness. This will continue until the country implodes.
"The right cares about power the way a wine snob cares about alcohol. The left cares about power the way an alcoholic cares about alcohol."
Anyone calling for D.C. and Puerto Rico to become states and to pack the Supreme Court so the Dems have one party rule and turn the country into California is not an American I care to share the country with. We need both sides to be functional, to create a proper amount of tension for the other side. I wish the left took a long hard look at themselves after the Kamala debacle and decided to get better. To realize that Orange Man Bad does not make the party or the country stronger. I want each party to hold their own feet to the fire and get better in service of America. Not to point fingers at the other side and never have an introspective thought or take their own inventory.
Both parties are an absolute disgrace, and We The People suffer.
This is a recipe for disaster.
Cue the absurd takes in the comments by captured idealogues with poor reading comprehension. I've come to realize that is the norm when I make such balanced posts. Leave your prejudices at the door and look in the mirror. It's getting exhausting, but I'll still keep trying to bring some common sense and pragmatism to the divided nature of our discourse.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
OK let’s imagine that! $500M would fund Medicare for exactly 4 hours. Hospital closed by lunch.
Medicare costs us $1.2T a year. Thats $2.7B per day. You people literally have no clue how anything works. You elect people who are financially illiterate, and everything gets worse.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
The only thing worse than the Republicans not understanding the repudiation that just occurred is that Democrats actually believe they won based on their policy positions.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
Yes. Temporary electoral setbacks, when met with clear-eyed strategy rather than despair, can accelerate the very renaissance of competence, tech ambition, and institutional renewal this moment demands. The "longer arc" favors those who build, not those who merely oppose.
What if last night was the best thing that could have happened to us?
I know how that sounds. Democrats just took the House and the Senate. Texas went blue. Everyone on our side is depressed this morning. But step back and look at the longer game, because I think we might be living through the beginning of a renaissance.
History has a pattern. When a party wins big, it confuses a protest vote with a mandate. And that's exactly where it starts making mistakes.
1994: Republicans sweep Congress. They overplay their hand, shut down the government, and hand Clinton a comfortable reelection two years later. 1998: they push impeachment against public opinion and lose seats in a midterm they should have won. Victory breeds arrogance. Arrogance breeds overreach. Overreach breeds backlash.
Now look at what Democrats are walking into. They control Congress, but not the White House. They can't really govern. They can block, investigate, subpoena, and posture. For two years, their entire identity will be opposition. Endless hearings. Impeachment fantasies. Shutdown brinkmanship. Purity tests from their activist wing, emboldened by a win they'll believe was ideological when it was mostly a midterm reflex.
And every one of those moves will be on full display, in front of voters who just gave them a chance and will expect results.
That's the setup for 2028. Not a narrow win. A clean one. White House, House, Senate. Full power, with a clear mandate and two years of Democratic overreach as the backdrop.
And this time, full power has to mean something different. Not just holding office. Building.
What I believe we need is a techno-republic. A state that runs like the best companies do: fast, measurable, accountable. Where public services are rebuilt from first principles with the best technology available. Where talent and merit matter more than credentials and connections. Where we stop managing decline and start building again: energy, industry, infrastructure, AI, space.
Because the stakes are civilizational. The West has spent decades losing confidence in itself. Its institutions hollowed out, its elites ashamed of its own history, its universities captured by an alliance between the radical left and political Islamism that sees Western values as something to dismantle rather than defend. Free speech, secularism, equality before the law, the idea that a civilization has the right to exist and to defend itself. None of that survives on autopilot.
A techno-republic is how we rebuild that foundation. Not through nostalgia, but through competence. Prove that a free, confident, technologically ambitious West works better than any alternative, and the debate is over.
So yes, last night hurt. But maybe this is the detour that gets us there faster. Let them win this round. Let them show the country who they really are. And be ready.
The renaissance won't come from comfort. It'll come from the moment we stopped being comfortable.
So this arrived today. Is the timing comedic? Ironic? Perhaps a sign of things to come? Whichever the case, I'm looking forward to reading it! @michaelmalice
Brian Hellwig retweeted
This one hit hard this morning….
“We spend the majority of our life, looking for recognition and validation from a world that crucified a perfect man.”
Moving towards something is key.
The big wrong turn, as I see it, was the vast cultural and spiritual shift that came of defining ourselves by our pasts, our injuries, instead of by our destinies, our potentials. The idea became to repair, repair, not to prepare and strive.
Therapy overtook destiny.
"Don't look back."
An ancient warning, ignored.
But we are not the sum of what's happened to us, as individuals or groups; we are the carriers of what is possible for us -- as we divine it and go out to meet it.
Instead of obsessing on its own roots a tree should grow toward the sun.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
this post has so much wisdom in it i thought naval wrote it
and i don't think the author even realizes why
if you understand this properly, you can explain almost all political issues we see in the world today
you can't take care of your loved ones if you can't even take care of yourself. you can't build a functioning country if your loved ones aren't taken care of. and you certainly can't save the world if your own country is falling apart. responsibility has to expand outwards.
the problem with so much left-wing thinking is that it's backwards. it starts with the most noble sounding objective imaginable, "saving the world" or "climate change" or "poor migrants", and thinks about the most nice-sounding solution, without considering if the conditions required to achieve it even exist, and that's why so many apparently well-intentioned policies end up doing the exact opposite of what they were supposed to achieve.
they sound compassionate, but completely ignore incentives, tradeoffs, or second-order consequences
clean your own damn bedroom and put your house in order before trying to change the world
you will never be able to fix the world if you can't even get the order of your own responsibilities right
Brian Hellwig retweeted
If your country sucked so bad you came to the U.S., then don't bitch about the people already here. If you consider it an insult to be told, "Go back to you country," well then, show some fuckin' gratitude.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
The trick of socialism is to make it appear like we depend on the state, when in fact the state depends entirely on us.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
“I won’t vote for the “lesser of two evils!”
Says the person who if they were on the ballot themselves would still be the “lesser of two evils” to someone.
Get over yourself.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
I regret to inform you that nobody cares. When you’re winning, nobody cares. When you’re losing, nobody cares. Stop fearing the judgement of people who were never even thinking about you. Nobody is thinking about you. They’re too busy thinking about themselves. Go do the thing.
Brian Hellwig retweeted
My brutally honest advice to someone who wants to make a lot of money.
3 things nobody told you:
1. The only way to make a lot of money is to create a lot of value.
No one hands out money. No one is going to pay you just because they like you or think you're cool.
Money earned is a direct byproduct of value created.
The only way to get rich is to create an enormous amount of value for others, and capture a small portion of that along the way.
You create value by doing three things:
- Identify problems
- Create solutions
- Scale those solutions
It's not talking about the thing, it's not brainstorming about the thing, it's not asking about the thing, it's not thinking about the thing. The only way to create value is by doing the thing.
And if you don't know where to start, look around you. Customers, colleagues, bosses, shareholders, employees. Every single one of them has a problem.
What problems can you solve for the people around you?
Figure them out, solve them, scale that solution.
That's how you make money.
2. You don't need passion, you need energy.
I still have no idea what it means to follow your passion.
You don't have to be passionate about your professional pursuits, you just need to find energy in them. You just need to feel a pull towards them. You just need to feel that spark of curiosity in them.
Passion is usually a byproduct of energy.
When you have energy for something, you'll give it your deep attention to learn more.
You’ll ask the right questions. You’ll figure it out. You’ll win.
Follow your energy. Pursue interesting puzzles. Solve them.
3. You have to demonstrate excellence in everything you do.
Your income scales proportional to the amount of excellence that you're able to demonstrate.
Strategic incompetence is a lie. You don't get to pick and choose when to show up, because the world will ignore your best and judge you for your worst. Everything matters. Every single thing.
Top performers show up with energy and enthusiasm for the little things just as much as they do for the big things.
If you're in the top-10% of performers, there's no ceiling for what you can do. But the self-awareness to identify where you currently stack up, and adapt to the honest feedback on it, is very rare.
If you're in the top-10%, you know it. If you're not, figure out why and fix it.
To my fellow Gen X'rs that are trying to figure out what happened, and how the second half of our lives won't be like the first half, here goes:
Our generation realized the game was rigged and we decided to play the money game instead of the power game. We built businesses and didn't get involved in politics. The Boomers said OK, fine and stayed in power. Schumer, Hoyer, Pelosi, all have had longer runs than Stalin. We were raised in comfort and engaged in sex, drugs, rock and roll. We were mostly coddled. Our grandfather's and fathers went to war. We went to nightclubs and concerts and delayed having families. Those chickens have now come home to roost. While we were living those fun 50 years the enemy that Joseph McCarthy warned us about took over our institutions and built systems of power and we are now just waking up to the reality that we were entertained to death.