The Curious Engineer

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Erik Torenberg

eriktorenberg.substack.com

Explorations and inquiries into my curiosities: culture, politics, tech, business, and human nature. Click to read Erik Torenberg, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalTech news / industrySociety / politics / economy

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
179 from 26 Jul 2020 to 2 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (6 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/feed

2026 5

  1. Introducing Cosign
  2. Introducing Horowitz Andreessen Academy
  3. Announcing Monitoring The Situation
  4. AI's Oppenheimer Moment
  5. 2026 Scheming

2025 7

  1. My Art of Accomplishment Retreat
  2. Joining a16z
  3. 35
  4. Dispatches from the Group Chats, Inauguration Edition
  5. Contra Paul Graham on Wokeness
  6. Dispatches from the Group Chats, Vol 5
  7. "I am rich and have no idea what to do with my life"

2024 16

  1. Dispatches from the Group Chats, Vol 4
  2. Marc Andreessen on His Intellectual Journey
  3. Dispatches from the Group Chats, Vol 3
  4. Dispatches from the Group Chats Vol 2
  5. David Sacks' Intellectual Journey
  6. Memes about Luigi Mangione
  7. Dispatches from the Group Chats vol. 1
  8. Contrasting Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman
  9. My Hoffman Process Experience
  10. On Nonviolent Communication
  11. Tech's Return to Meritocracy
  12. Reconciling Effective Altruism and E/acc
  13. The Rise of Anti-Heroes
  14. Thoughts on Mental Health
  15. The Most Interesting Ideas of 2023
  16. 2024 Scheming

2023 50

  1. Take the Clearpill
  2. Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
  3. People are Different
  4. Happy Thanksgiving
  5. How Communities Die
  6. Build Nuclear. Frak. Drill.
  7. A Schism in The Current Thing
  8. Group Narcissism
  9. Fukayama and Capital H History
  10. Reintroducing Stigma
  11. Modern Morality Prioritizes Avoiding Evil
  12. The Matching Problem in Dating
  13. What Does The Gray Tribe Believe?
  14. America the Oligarchy
  15. What are the Limits to Growth?
  16. The case for and against Liberalism
  17. Communism with American Characteristics
  18. The World Moves Left
  19. Turpentine's newest VC podcast
  20. New Rousseauism, Post-Modernism, and Moral Primitives
  21. The Ancient City
  22. What is left? What is right?
  23. The Economic Case for Trade
  24. The Case for Immigration
  25. Brief Reflections on Affirmative Action
  26. More People is Better
  27. Optimize
  28. Introducing Turpentine
  29. Faith over Logic
  30. The "Coming Apart" Case for Less Entitlements
  31. The Right Mindset at the Right Time
  32. The Techlash That Never Happened
  33. The Evolution of Liberalism
  34. The Problems of Equality and Universalism
  35. Why Liberalism Leads to a Big State
  36. The Limitations of Freedom
  37. Different Scopes for Different Folks
  38. Examining Balaji's Bet
  39. Dataism (and a new podcast, first episode w/ Marc Andreessen)
  40. The Necessary Nihilism
  41. Nietzsche on Slave Morality
  42. How Slave Morality Won
  43. Does Evolution have a Direction?
  44. Wacky Beliefs are the Point
  45. Why Religion is Metaphorically True
  46. Our Deglobalized Future
  47. Money Crypto vs Tech Crypto
  48. When Delusions Serve Us
  49. There is no Self
  50. On Celebrity

2022 38

  1. 2022 Roundup
  2. New Podcast episode with Marc Andreessen
  3. Kill Your Identity
  4. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, by Robert Pirsig
  5. Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  6. Essays on Robert Pirsig: An Introduction
  7. Tradition is Truer than Truth
  8. Oikophobia: American Self-Contempt
  9. Religion, Rationality, and Religious Rationality
  10. There's Just Too Many Damn Elites
  11. How Status Signaling Evolved
  12. Class Divides and Political Realignments
  13. How Elites Abandoned the Masses
  14. Twitter, Elon, and the Challenge for Free Speech
  15. DAOs and The Iron Law of Oligarchy
  16. Burnham, Elon, and The Revenge of Entrepreneurial Capitalism
  17. The Hypocrisy of Elites
  18. Status, Vulnerability, and Status Vulnerability
  19. Beliefs are Fashions
  20. Justice Eats The World, Part 2
  21. Justice Eats The World
  22. The Current Thing, Part 3
  23. The Current Thing, Part 2
  24. The Current Thing, Part 1
  25. Reconsidering Career Optionality
  26. Navigating Career Transitions
  27. How do you know when to leave a company?
  28. Escaping the Great Stagnation
  29. On Longevity
  30. Startups Save The World
  31. Productizing Venture
  32. Removing Bottlenecks to Starting Companies
  33. The Career Education Paradox
  34. How to Grow The Startup Economy
  35. On Meritocracy
  36. On Ambition
  37. On Hustle Culture
  38. Will the United States be forced to use inflation to reduce its debt?

2021 40

  1. An Intro to Market Monetarism
  2. Announcing: ODX
  3. On Solitude
  4. The Hunter Economy
  5. Reputation Markets
  6. What Happens When Software Eats The World?
  7. Markets are Eating the World
  8. Signaling on the Internet
  9. What Makes Silicon Valley Work
  10. Software is Eating the World, Revisited
  11. Truth, Status, and Tribes
  12. Silicon Valley in the Cloud
  13. Living on the Internet
  14. Why Libertarians Lose
  15. The Marketplace of Ideas is Rigged
  16. The Case for Rational Compassion
  17. A Primer on Prediction Markets
  18. The Tautology of the Elites
  19. We're More Christian Than We Know
  20. Where Did The Future go?
  21. Let's talk about Luddites
  22. Better Aligning Value Creation & Value Capture
  23. Whoever Generates the Demand Captures the Value
  24. The Death of The Middle
  25. Why Are Institutions Failing Us?
  26. How the Internet Ate Media
  27. On Cost Disease
  28. On Economic Growth
  29. What's On Deck for On Deck?
  30. The World According to Glen Weyl
  31. The World According to Rene Girard
  32. On Humor
  33. The Devaluing of the U.S. Dollar
  34. The World According to Peter Zeihan
  35. Book Summary: The Courage to Be Disliked
  36. The Rise of Therapy Culture
  37. Reality is up for Grabs
  38. Markets and Communities
  39. Best Books I read in 2020
  40. On Deck 2020 Recap & Looking Ahead to 2021

2020 23

  1. Opportunities in Education
  2. The Higher Education Bubble Pt. 2
  3. Opportunities in Consumer Social
  4. An Ode to Podcasting
  5. Decentralizing Venture Capital
  6. Building and Investing in Marketplaces
  7. Frameworks for Startup Ideas
  8. How to Find a Co-Founder
  9. Frameworks for Hiring
  10. How to Break into Startup Investing
  11. Why We Need More Founders
  12. See your Career as a Product
  13. How to Build Curation Businesses
  14. Take Asymmetric Bets
  15. Build Personal Moats
  16. Life Capital
  17. The Sovereign Individual Investment Thesis
  18. The World According to Peter Thiel
  19. The Rise of Positive-Sum Thinking
  20. The Promise of Peer-to-Peer Credentials
  21. The Higher Education Bubble
  22. How Free Speech Leads to Moral Progress
  23. Starting a Company is Less Risky Than You Think