Hola Libertinus!

As 2024 winds down, we’re keeping things light and sexy with a couple of dispatches inspired by two of our favorite thought leaders in the marketing sphere.

First, West takes a cue from Rory Sutherland and asks if going “crazy-lite” and tossing cultural norms in the bin is actually the sanest move you can make for your wallet… and what’s left of your sanity.

Next, Zack takes a sharp look at the history of our educational system, riffing off Seth Godin’s critique of classrooms built for a world of coal miners and factory drones. Spoiler alert: the assembly lines still haunt us.

So grab a drink, settle in, and enjoy our last dispatches of 2024. We’ll see you next year—hopefully a li’l crazier, a li’l wiser, and, as always, allergic to the status quo.

🗞️ DISPATCHES

On the Value of Being Crazy

Rory Sutherland is a legend in the world of marketing, and is presently the vice chairman of Ogilvy.

I disagree with most things he says (certainly anything he says politically), frankly, but enjoy watching him speak because he sometimes has very insightful nuggets of wisdom.

In the video above, Sutherland is topically all over the map, but I found myself latching on to something he says at the 8:35 mark.

"You need less money if you're crazy because you can spend your money more imaginatively to achieve the same effect."

What he's getting at is the idea that if you're willing to eschew social norms that require you to "keep up with the Jones’s" you can afford much more of the things you really want out of life.

You are a unique individual with unique needs and desires.

One of the most impactful things you can do for your personal finances, quality of life, and general happiness is finding what exactly these things are and pursuing them relentlessly to the exclusion of everything else.

What do I mean by this?

Culture can be thought of as an operating system that gets installed in our youth and guides our actions for the rest of our lives.

In some ways, that is a good thing.

After all, can you imagine trying to maintain a coherent society without common forms of communication or understandings of how the world works?

Culture also programs us with motivations that are reinforced and blasted at us by everything from our peers to the media.

But on an individual level, culture leaves something lacking.

How many of us have taken the time to ask if what culture has programmed us to desire resembles in any way what we as individuals actually desire?

One of the strongest motivators that culture programs into us is a desire for prestige.

In essence, the desire to fulfill culturally defined motivations so strongly that others in society look up to us.

And sure, prestige in some sense of the word probably should be appealing to us.

I certainly suspect that having the respect and admiration of those around us would lead to a better quality of life.

But we don't live in the company of "culture," we live in the company of individuals, and hopefully a fairly small group of them.

Crazy people often live by themselves.

I won't go as far as to say you should strive to be crazy, but I suspect that going "crazy-lite" is a great idea.

Crazy-lite is being crazy enough not to care about culturally programmed motivators that don't actually add much value to your life.

Crazy-lite is being crazy enough to surround yourself with other people who also don't care about what mainstream culture tells them they should.

Crazy-lite is being crazy enough to own multiple cats and, despite all common social decorum dictating that you already have far too many, still getting more (that one's for you, Zack!).

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, I believe going crazy-lite is the most reasonable and rational thing an individual can do.

People who let other people determine their preferences on their behalf seem like the irrational people to me.

Use data from your feelings and emotions, input that data into your rational thought processes, and figure out what actually matters to you.

Focus on those things to the exclusion of everything society tells you to care about, but that you simply don't.

That doesn't sound so crazy does it?

This concept of going crazy-lite will yield outsized gains in your highest expense categories.

Don't have a particular need or emotional affinity for home ownership, but deeply value nature and mobility?

As Sutherland mentions in the video, maybe RV living is right for you.

Do you derive deep satisfaction from working with your hands, and are health conscious?

Growing your own food could save you on your grocery bill and provide an avenue to living the good life.

Ever thought that you are happiest when traveling and that anything you can't carry on your back isn't a necessity?

Digital nomadism may be your calling.

Or maybe it’s as simple as feeling pressured to buy that new car just to keep up with your friends when you know that the one you have now is all you need.

On the other side of the coin, perhaps you've realized that drinking a fine wine brings you true satisfaction and every dollar spent on a vintage is well spent.

What are areas of your life that you don't feel nearly as passionately about but cost you an arm and a leg? Axe them.

As a final note to any readers who want to go down the rabbit hole further, one of my favorite books of all time "How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World," is a must read. ~West

From Coal Mines to Classrooms

A hundred and fifty years ago, child labor was as American as apple pie.

Kids as young as five worked in textile mills and coal mines, their tiny hands perfect for dexterous tasks like replacing spools, tying threads, or sitting on a conveyor belt, picking out impurities by hand.

The unions of the day were outraged!

Not because little Jimmy might lose a finger or come home to mama with black lung...

But because those kids were undercutting wages and taking jobs from “hardworking men.”

The solution? Faux moral outrage to achieve an economic power play.

That's right, in a tale old as time: unions got the government involved to give them a bigger slice of the pie.

This was the birth of compulsory schooling, a bureaucratic masterstroke where kids were pulled out of factories and shoved into classrooms.

Not because anyone cared about their education, of course, but because it kept adults employed and unions happy.

Industrialists were placated when they realized public schools offered them an incentive too: compliant workers who could follow orders and maybe even read an instruction manual.

Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention this storyline:

The Ku Klux Klan was also involved.

Yup, the same KKK that spent its nights burning crosses and terrorizing non-white communities also supported public schools, because they wanted to force immigrant kids out of Catholic schools (loyal to the papacy) and into state-run institutions, where they could be properly “Americanized.”

See the trend?

Public schooling wasn’t about learning. It was about obedience. Control.

And at the end of the day we wound up with a public education system designed to serve everyone but the students.

Unions got their jobs.

The Klan got their cultural agenda.

Industrialists got a steady supply of factory workers.

And parents?

Well, they lost control over their children’s education, with the state stepping in as the ultimate decision-maker.

And what about the kids?

They got an assembly line disguised as a classroom.

Sit in rows. Raise your hand. Follow the bell. Speak when spoken to. Memorize facts for a test.

Schools weren’t built to inspire creativity or curiosity—they were built to produce bodies that could show up on time, follow orders, and not ask too many questions.

And we could argue that system worked—for a time. A devil's bargain that admittedly raised our GDP.

But as factories are disappearing, schools are staying the same, (poorly) churning out compliance in an era that demands vision and innovation.

Seth Godin warned us over a decade ago that kids don’t need to memorize the periodic table anymore—they need to know how to Google it.

And today? In the age of AI?

What they need is something the system was never built to provide: the ability to think critically, adapt to change, and solve problems we don’t even know exist yet.

The world doesn’t need more factory workers.

It needs thinkers, creators, and leaders.

The solution isn’t reform. It’s reinvention. Let schools compete.

Teach kids how to think, not what to memorize.

Because if we don’t make a radical change, the only thing today’s schools will keep preparing kids for is a future that doesn’t exist anymore. ~Zach

That’s it for this week’s dispatches—and this year’s, too!

We hope 2024 was as enlightening, exasperating, and unpredictable for you as it was for us. No matter what the calendar says, one thing remains true: real change begins between your ears.

So keep questioning the narrative, challenging the norms, and staying just crazy enough to keep things interesting.

We’ll see you in 2025. A lot’s happening behind the scenes—stay tuned.

Sic semper debitoribus,
~ West & Zack

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