The 23rd of June, 2026
Issue # 01
Time: Tuesday, June 23, 5:21 PM CST
Location: Lifetime Fitness
Welcome to the first edition of 20 minute blog post. Where I start a timer for 20 minutes and see what pops into my head. I’m 30 years old, grew up on the west coast, played college football, and have been living in Chicago working at a psuedo venture capital firm since 2022 (we’ve been out of money for 18 months). I also took a quick sabbatical for 6 months to play semi professional football before returning to work. I now see my team General Manager around the city, he’s since transitioned to be some BDR rep at one of the endless enterprise software startups with one of the top 500 most popular nouns in the English language + AI as its name. Something about seeing him around town from a distance causes a deep depression in me.
I wanted to start of this blog with a pop, something I feel is one of my more unique takes. Like Peter Thiel always says, his favorite interview question is “what is something you know to be true that not many people agree with you on?” Let me oblige and present to you the following images:
Matthew McConaughey
Chamath Palyhapitya
Saggar Enjetti
Nick Fuentes
My belief: there is an extreme correlation between high verbal IQ and an overly developed thumb joint.
Have these names ever grouped together in the history of society? Think about each person, maybe you haven’t heard of a couple, maybe you have. I urge you to look each one up. Find an interview of them speaking. (I’ll actually do it after my timer runs out and add screenshots after the fact). Listen to each person talk. Hear their eloquence. Agree or disagree with what they say, find them annoying or likeable, you cannot deny they can speak with a level of prose so smooth and confident that it evokes a sense of deep jealousy for the less verbally astute cretins of the world like myself.
What explains the connection? Is there something connecting the over development of the base of the thumb (hold on, let me look up what that actual term is), referred to in the medical field as the carpometacarpal, of course, that causes humans (particularly males) to posses this skill? My totally uneducated self has some gut belief that the extended carpometacarpel serves as a direct visual metaphor for the associated males brain functioning, they have developed fully past common, base feelings of neuroticism, doubt, hunger, fear, and have moved on intellectually into a space where they can focus solely on storytelling, persuasion, pathos, and room captivation. I have felt this way once or twice, the first time I took an immediate release adderall in 2012 at my high school lunch table Junior year comes to mind.
This is my contrarian truth. And yes, I reserve the right to declare it contrarian despite the fact that its a subject no more than 5 people in the history of humanity have ever thought of. And the ones that have, very likely were alive in the mid 1900s and were mentioned by name in a friendly neighborhood historical novel by the name of “Hitler’s Scientists”. If I ever find myself in a room with Peter Thiel, there’s a 75% chance I approach him cold with this belief just to hear his response. Which probably would consist of a silent pause for 10 seconds, 5 seconds of stuttering, followed by a “you know, actually, my riff on this is always…..”
Time Remaining: 3 min 10 sec
