With TracingWoodgrains - Journalism, Education Policy, and Political Change

'How Seven People Can Change the World'

Jack Despain Zhou, aka ‘TracingWoodgrains’, is an independent investigative journalist, education campaigner, online community expert, and internet commentator. We sat down last month to discuss evolving cultural dynamics, leadership, and how to drive reform in everything from dog control, to education, to the Democratic Party.

This episode is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

You can find a transcript of this discussion below [with notes, set out in this format].

This is the third in a series of discussions from my recent ‘Emergent Ventures’ trip to San Francisco. Over the coming weeks, you’ll see more talks with scientists, institutional theorists, and cutting-edge AI researchers. Thanks to the Wallis Family for their unwavering enthusiasm and support, Sammy Cottrell for the superlative recording studio, and my editor for putting this together.

Timestamps

(00:00) Intro
(03:03) Policy Campaigns
(09:06) Niche Online Communities
(14:53) Future Leaders
(21:00) Theory of Change
(31:10) FAA Hiring Scandal
(35:30) Driving Political Change
(44:08) Shifting Mentalities
(50:46) The Center for Educational Progress
(57:00) Alternative Pedagogies
(1:05:29) Innovation in Education
(1:09:30) Stories Worth Telling

Transcript

Adam: Today I'm talking with Jack Despain Zhou, also known as ‘TracingWoodgrains’ online, internet commentator, investigative journalist, former Mormon, former Air Force. He broke the story on the FAA's hiring scandal and co-founder and executive at the ‘Center for Educational Progress’, which is a non-profit focused on improving educational outcomes, particularly in the U.S.

Adam: Fair summary?

Trace: That all sounds right to me.

Adam: Really pleased to be talking with you today. There's an awful lot I'd like to cover. One of the things perhaps you're most known for is an exhaustive journalist into quite niche internet subcultures and so on. Some of these are available on your ‘TracingWoodgrains Substack’ - but just as a quick example for the audience, there's the FAA hiring scandal we talked about. You did an extensive piece on the Wikipedia admin David Gerard's work essentially laundering his personal vendettas into the public record. Last year we were here at Manifest, you gave a talk on the dynamics of Neopets 20-odd years on from when perhaps most millennials may remember it and social dynamics of that particular culture [today]. Do you have a general interest in the social dynamics of these niche cultures? Would that be fair to say, or is it more a particular interest in these individual areas?

Trace: Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely an interest in the dynamics of culture in general, online culture in specific, and looking in and seeing what a superficially bizarre story can tell us about broader social trends and broader culture.

Policy Campaigns

Adam: One of the things I think is under-discussed is… [On the one hand] you have the impact of the algorithm on popular culture in terms of the way that ‘sort by controversial’ elements happen with public discourse. But perhaps one thing that is under discussed is the fact that you actually, alongside that, have these almost dictatorial power schemes where a few individuals can end up controlling a vast swath of, from the population point of view, 300 million people, a tiny community, but potentially hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people engaged in some topic are under the whims of a particular individual.

Trace: Yeah. So one thing I like to say when you're talking about this sort of thing is, first off, nobody does anything. That is to say, if you are doing anything at all out of the standard bounds of whatever job you're in, whatever hobby you're in, anything like that, as soon as you are commenting online even, you are already entering something of a minority. As soon as you are doing a little bit of research into a topic, you are entering a smaller minority. As soon as you, like, read one book about something relative to almost everyone, even though in an absolute sense you're going to be a complete amateur at that thing, you're going to be an expert in that sense.

Now, how this applies to some of these subcultural dynamics: If you find in any community the two or three people who do things, then you will know the shape of that community, and the impact it is likely to have on the outside world. If you look at any news item that pops up that seems like, why is everyone suddenly talking about this? I can give a good example. Last year or so, you had a big, suddenly a big news flurry around whether the UK should ban the American Bully XL dog. The answer to ‘why are people suddenly talking about this?’, in that case, comes down to seven people who looked around, weren't professionals in it, didn't have any background experience, anything like that, but looked and were like, this doesn't make sense, this is an issue that we would like to handle, this is an issue we would like to raise the salience of. Suddenly, every time they find out about one of those dog attacks, they boost it on social media, they go to news organisations, they point out things like that.

Adam: Are these Brits we're talking about? Seven Brits? Because sometimes you could have eight Americans doing something and then an issue pops up in Australia or the UK. But in this case, it's seven British people in a dedicated campaign essentially, to try and affect this particular piece of policy.

Trace: Yes, and some of them put together a group with a name, so forth, and in general, they just started writing and talking and thinking about this. All of a sudden, everyone has an opinion on American Bully XLs and whether they should be banned in Britain. Even people who live in America, people far from it, suddenly you have all these dynamic conversations about dog breeds, and attacks, and things like that, and it becomes this heated thing for people to talk and think about. It doesn't happen without a small group of people raising the salience of this. [FYI - the campaign was successful. The UK government banned ownership of the breed without a special licence in 2024]. I don't want to cite that as an example of ‘this is a rare, isolated incidence of someone doing this’. I want to cite it as an example of: ‘almost everything that ends up becoming a topic of conversation happens because a very small group of dedicated people wants it to do so’. In general, if you look at any specific, like hyper-specific academic debate, or hyper-specific policy debate, you're going to find about five people in that policy debate who really matter, and then everyone else is echoing their opinions.

[The dynamic under discussion here is an example of a power-law distribution, in this case, the most engaged, savvy, and prolific individuals dominate the majority of the subject-specific discourse. I provide a brief overview of power-law distributions and their applicability here.]

Adam: Sure. I can also think of other examples. There was the sudden prominence of ‘r/AntiWork’, you know, which was an extremely niche subreddit, and then suddenly the moderator finds themselves on Fox News. And that’s quite an interesting case, actually, and one that's perhaps illustrative. As I understand it, that admin was an early founder of that particular subreddit, and over time the culture had sort of drifted away from the very die-hard ‘we literally mean anti work’. Suddenly this growing community finds itself in the spotlight of national news media through these particular individuals. But what I guess I'm interested in is the maybe 99% of cases when that doesn't happen, and that you're a niche culture that affects, you know, the lives of tens of thousands of people potentially involved in some small online community that are kind of affected nonetheless by the three people, the seven people, who show up and are moderating the forum and setting the standards of discourse and so on. And this is something you seem to do a lot of work in. I mentioned Neopets earlier, as I understand you're giving a talk this weekend on how this is played out with the furry community. I guess I wonder, sociologically, is that something that's… what are we to make of this, I suppose? Like, in terms of how culture evolves and the fact that these positions of power that are essentially almost entirely unexamined, that you've got almost like absolute dictatorial power within these communities with the three people that happen to show up, or happen to be there first, and it's only really you investigating them, or a few online individuals like yourself, aside from those very rare minority of cases where it becomes national media.

Niche Online Communities

Trace: Right. So I don't want to overstate the dictatorial power aspect; Yes, they have control over these communities, they direct it, but usually in niche online spaces, power belongs to those who show up. So I don't want to overstate that dynamic. But yeah, to give an idea of what I'm talking about with this, the ‘Furry Slayer’ is the story I call it, because, you're right, it is a relevant thing of this. This person was the founder of Reddit's premier quote-unquote ‘anti-furry’ subreddit, and then through a convoluted series of events and acting like he belonged, he became a ‘furry power moderator’ over a lot of very mainstream subreddits and a lot of very large places on it, and caused several major news stories, about Discord, about Reddit, it exposed a couple of pretty large scandals, and behind the scenes became incredibly influential. So yeah, what do you do about these times that the only reason I know that this person exists and that this story exists is because I ran into both of his identities in a niche online forum, and got to know them a little bit, and slowly over time started realising, holy cow…

Adam: This guy had been managing, like, eight different accounts. How does a member of, a journalist at the New York Times, possibly begin to understand?

Trace: Right, right, right. It's impossible to explain to people, like, yes, this person who has a pseudonym here has been working on all sorts of internet nonsense under this pseudonym, and then under this pseudonym they have done these things, and you can tell because, you know, you start looking at, like, (the group chats over here!) There’s that scene in Always Sunny in Philadelphia — ‘it's Pepe Sylvia, it's Pepe Sylvia’, as you're trying to explain, no, there is this connection here, there is this here, there is this here. Yeah, and it's almost completely illegible from the outside, but you have people who are willing to spend a great deal of time and attention and energy on all these things. Sometimes it's common knowledge in the niche sphere, sometimes it's not common knowledge. In this case, this one, I was one of a very small handful of people who ended up figuring out that these two people are the same person. But yeah, and what do you do about all of that? I think the main thing is just awareness that in a lot of cases, you're going to have these communities that most people don't want to pay attention to most things most of the time.

Going on to ‘nobody does anything’. Everybody loves it when something is someone else's problem. So if you have a community that's just rolling along and you have a couple of people handling it, a lot of the same people who handle communities online who have the peculiar psychological traits necessary to say: ‘I want to spend a lot of my time online wrangling some small niche space’, they're also going to be very strange people a lot of times, and you just need to accept that in a lot of these online spaces because these very strange people are the load-bearing mechanisms that keep the whole thing rolling. But whenever it gains broader cultural relevance, whenever one of these spaces that's just been chugging along under the surface, whatever, gains broader cultural relevance, there will always be skeletons to uncover there will always be like weird things going on, there will always be niche, internet-scene drama that goes for years and years and all of that.

Adam: So do we, in effect, rely on very minor social cred and maybe small financial incentives of Substackers like yourself to do the investigatory work into those spaces? There’S probably a small overlap of people in the world today who have the incentives to spend an enormous amount of time doing the exhaustive research to find out on the one hand, but also the kind of quasi-specialist knowledge, you might think of it, to properly go through the Discord servers and understand that, maybe they were using a VPN, and there's all kinds of things which, in each one of these cases is going to be potentially its own specialised series of expertise. There's some general knowledge of course of the internet and how it works that maybe younger generations might understand better - but you're talking about in your case, really quite fine-grained understanding required in order to be able to even begin to put those connections together. So is this the future of, in a certain sense, not all journalism, but of the kind of investigative journalism as the internet continues to kind of soak up more of society?

Trace: You know, I would say in the specific case of the internet, we could say it’s the future of it. In a general case, we can say it is the past, the present, and the future of writing, of history, of investigative journalism. Things happen because one curious, peculiar person is like, ‘I would like to figure out this story’, and they go and do it. Stories get written about, in even major institutions and even major outlets, because a few people care passionately about this weird niche thing and are willing to dive in and go through all the stories (Herodotus!). All of this stuff, yes, all of this is extremely expertise-constrained.

A lot of people, as beginning writers, will look around and say, ‘Oh my gosh, there is so much writing in the world. What could I possibly have to add to this mess?’ As soon as someone is feeling like that, they just need to get a little bit more specific. Like, what specific narrow things do they care about? What specific narrow areas matter? Because almost every specific narrow thing like that, as soon as you're getting into a niche internet forum, as soon as you're getting into a specific sub-policy topic, whatever, almost everything there is going to be expertise-constrained, is going to be constrained by time and effort and someone just willing to do something like that. That's just the way it is.

Future Leaders

Adam: On that note, if those spaces belong to people that show up, or more generally, you might think of the segment of any particular generation that has a certain conscientiousness on the one hand, but also power-seeking kind of tendencies in some respects. One of the things I've been interested in recently is this idea that, let's say 200 years ago, Napoleonic Wars, there’s this very stable institutionalised kind of pathway for young leaders. You're maybe in the Royal Navy, you're a midshipman in your early teens, you become a lieutenant, you're maybe ending up captaining your own ship at 25, and then in the prime of your life, you're leading the British Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar and beating the French. As society ages, we seem, the formal positions of authority and power where people can kind of learn the ropes, instead [one] maybe gravitates more and more towards these kinds of niche areas where you can exercise leadership in some respects and help build something. This sort of tendency, whether that's the kind of communities that we're talking about, could also be a World of Warcraft guild leader, those sorts of things. Firstly, is it a fair statement that next-generation leaders are probably increasingly going to be coming from that kind of background rather than a formal institutional background? I mean, do we see this in US politics at the moment? J.D. Vance bringing on [into the Republican coalition] the online alt-right, and so on.

Trace: Absolutely. I think particularly so. Right now in the United States at least, the left-wing in the United States is going to be a lot more reliant, and has been a lot more reliant, on institutions, in part because it can count on institutions, in part because the great majority of people going to college, people going to professional school, people who are in these disciplines, and thinking about these disciplines in a structured academic way are going to be at least somewhat sympathetic to their frame.
Whereas the right-wing in America...

Adam: And this is just generally as like almost a consequence of just the sorting nature, like hyper-sorting nature of modernity in some respects, right?

Trace: Yeah, you can point to some psychological traits, you can point to some traits inherent in the institutions themselves and some contingent things of culture. (Just hyper-specialisation as well, more generally?) You could look at, say, the personality type drawn to high-prestige, low-pay positions, for example, and they tend to be higher in openness to experience, which tends to lead to a more liberal outlook, things like that. You can point to that sort of thing. And so, both the right-wing and then just in general, people who are dissatisfied with the state of the institutions have had to look outside those and look around to these informal structures. More generally, I think you raised a really good point talking about, you know, someone who might have been in this core, powerful position 100, 200 years ago might be like a guild leader in World of Warcraft now. This is, I think, in fact, a really healthy thing overall.

You are not going to have everyone as a winner in the same skill hierarchy, in the same money, talent, whatever hierarchy. Some people will be winners, some people will be losers, as long as you have one hierarchy. I care a great deal about developing expertise, and I care a great deal about understanding how people can climb meaningful hierarchies, develop meaningful skills, and do things like that. If my message to everyone was, ‘you will wind up at different parts of the same hierarchy, and you will always be less than people in this, and this, and this, and this, and this’, that is an extraordinarily discouraging message.

Adam: It's a very grim society in general.

Trace: It is, it is. But the world isn't like that, and culture isn't like that. People are incredibly adept at creating all of these niche hierarchies, niche skills, niche-focused areas where a lot of people with a little bit of drive, a little bit of passion, you know, can become the best storyteller in the village of this little hierarchy, the best person to go to for this really specific combination of topics.

Adam: So you're optimistic in a sense, thinking about the future of great companies and institutions generally in terms of the training ground that this provides for people? Is that kind of where you were going?

Trace: So yeah, I think it's healthy to have this general spread of things. I also think there's sometimes this presumption that, ‘oh, people should just give this up’. That like, say for example, oh, all these young people used to get so much into power and everything, and all of these boomers in politics keep holding on to these positions until they like keel over in office, and when is it going to be our turn, type of thing. I think this sort of passivity and this blaming people for holding on to power is just an incredibly self-defeating attitude. People don't just give power up. People don't just give influence up. People don't just turn to someone new and say, ‘I've had a fun run, I've had a good time with this all, and you have a lot of different ideas to me, and you're much younger, and you're smarter, and you're cooler than me, and you're just generally better than me’ (Not once in the history of the world). So why don't you take charge?

People do need to understand, and I look at this in the education system. My non-profit wants to change a great deal in the education system and I think that, for example, education schools are deeply flawed, they're deeply broken. It would be too easy of me, a bit too pat, to just blame the people in the education schools and say how dare they teach these things that they believe in and set up the structure they believe in and do the best they can. (Adam - one needs to take positive action and agency). Right, I think that a lot of those things suck, but really I'm a lot more inclined to blame the people like me who haven't put in the time and effort and energy needed to explain it, to build the institutions that matter with it, and to actually do meaningful things with it. And I think that that's my response to a lot of these concerns about these traditional hierarchies in general - is that people just need to get better.

Theory of Change

Adam: So what's your theory of change on this? Because I recall after Trump’s election last year, you made a bit of a splash with a sort of centrist manifesto online. Your work with the Center for Educational Progress is a sort of manifestation of this. I guess I'm just wondering… let's just focus for a moment on your centrist side - essentially it's a project or an idea of reforming the Democratic Party.

Trace: Right.

Adam: To what extent is this… what's your theory of change on this? Because I would say the structural forces that are pushing politics more generally tend to be more towards satisfying the more extreme elements within any particular group. Because as we were talking about earlier, those are the people that are showing up. So how does a centrist idea, or more old-school principles that are perhaps increasingly unfashionable because they don't tend to go viral. I've been thinking a lot about the rule of law recently as something that I almost never hear talked about, and yet is one of the more fundamental aspects of the prosperity and stability we now enjoy.

How do you make a viral post about something that's broadly accepted in a wishy-washy way? Nobody [is engaged beyond] ‘oh yeah, that seems fine’. As I say, there seems to me to be a structural push towards the extremes of any particular party or organisation, and satisfying those groups. So: how do you reform the Democratic party given those circumstances?

[The excellent Scholar’s Stage article ‘Patronage vs. Constituent Parties (Or Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones’ explores the structural differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties in this regard].

Trace: Fantastic question. First off, I want to look at your question: how do you make a viral post about a wishy-washy thing that everyone sort of cares about and everyone sort of likes? Because I actually think there are really good answers here. Which are, for example, you look for: ‘why do you care about this?’, ‘why is this suddenly an issue for you?’ And usually it's because you are seeing areas where that is failing. You're seeing areas where that can't be relied on the same way. If it were a fully functioning system, then you wouldn't care. If you're noticing some of these flaws, then other people are going to be noticing some of these flaws as well. Then you are going to be usually, if you're astute, you're going to be somewhat in tune with some sort of zeitgeist with it. Then what you want to find is well, ‘what is a story that really captures this?’, ‘What is a story that really captures the essence of this?’, ‘What is not just talking about the general principle?’. Everyone can talk about general principles forever, but what is an actual event that gives people a crystal clear example of: ‘This is why I care about this, and this is what happens when you stop caring about this, this is what happens when you start caring about this, and so forth. Then you just drill that into a really cohesive, compelling, clear narrative, pointing out, basically telling people this is why this all matters, and if it's something that everyone already sort of wishy-washy agrees with anyway, people love nothing more than reading things they agree with. If someone can go in and say something where someone's like ‘oh, I have been thinking this my whole life, finally someone says it’ - those are the essays that really catch people, but you need to say it right it's not enough to say it in the same wishy-washy way that everyone else can sort of say it - you need to be just effective with it.

Adam: Great answer. I think just to push back a little bit. I suppose there are, however, a set of principles, and the rule of law is one, it's not even fair to say that they wishy-washy - they probably never thought about it at all. So there's a host of generational issues that I think are beginning to emerge, and we've talked a little bit about. You've got a host of people, maybe highly principled Silent Generation, Greatest Generation, types that held very strong ideas about all manner of things, and in some cases we've moved on from them and, consciously as a society, changed our views on particular issues, and we could call that progress. There are other cases where these were just the water that people swum in 80 years ago, and it's not the water that people swim in today, or it is they swim in it but they don't realise - I’m mixing metaphors here, but do you see where I'm going with this?

Trace: Yeah things that could be assumed as tacit knowledge in past generations and present generations have sort of degraded and been set aside…

Adam: So does this affect the thesis that you're talking about, where it's not necessarily the kind of thing that people agree with… If they really thought about it perhaps they would go ‘yeah that's important for a society’, but maybe they've just never given any thought to it at all?

Trace: Right, so I can really speak to this one actually, because I come from a very different cultural background than almost all of my peers. I was raised in an extremely LDS environment. (Mormons?) Yes exactly, Mormons, and took it very seriously until about 21, and then stepped away from it, and stepped into this world that everyone else had created and broader culture and I looked around and said ‘wow this culture is insane’. And look, Mormon culture was insane in its own ways. It was my sort of insane. I understood it, and I understood like the same a lot of the tacit stuff that you're talking about that sort of stepped away in other places, like I had that. What I found is, and what I find in my writing a lot of times, and this is one reason I write so passionately, is that a lot of times I'll be looking around a subculture around me, a general cultural trend whatever, and I will think ‘nobody gets what I am trying to get at here’. ‘Nobody gets this value that I feel very strongly about’. ‘Nobody gets one thing or another, and I have all sorts of opposition on this because nobody is talking about this, nobody is saying this in the right way’. Then, a lot of times what will happen is I will sit down and I will think about how best most effectively to convey my thoughts on one of these things and use good examples and present it in a clear way and everything and I'll go in and be sort of - not looking for a fight, but anticipating push back - and everyone agrees with me.

Adam: … It’s an open door, and then you shape the conversation.

Trace: Exactly. I go into a community, and I'm like, ‘why is nobody talking about this?’. I go and I start talking about it, and suddenly people are talking about it! I really think a lot of this is contingent on just specific people doing specific things, and people effectively advocating for, and talking about, the things they care about.

Adam: Do coming back then to this idea of the centrism in the Democratic Party, which, actually… let's just take a moment because I think within Manifest within the kind of internet subcultures that we inhabit there is a sort of broad understanding of what we mean by that [centrism]… sort of like a state capacity liberalism almost, would that be? (Yes) And really a, focus on excellence in delivery and revivifying the state in order to be able to provide, would that be a fair summary?

Trace: Yeah. I think that, within current Democratic Party trends in language, like understanding basically the ‘Abundance Agenda’. How do we effectively deliver the things that we care about?

Adam: Sure, so then coming to this question of reform, and changing the minds of the Democratic Party, or even, I suppose, the Republican. Both sides of the house, ultimately, you'd ideally want to shape the views of. Your answer so far is around shaping the world of ideas, do you see that as the primary vehicle for achieving your goals in this sense?

Trace: So let me give an example that I think really cuts to the heart of the extra-institutional versus within-institution dynamic. That is: if institutions are failing, and I think more than the Democratic Party, more than anything like that, what we are really experiencing is an age of institutional crisis. Ages of institutional crisis are bad because if you can't trust everything from the institutions, it doesn't suddenly make the reasons the institutions existed less important. It doesn't mean that suddenly you can trust everything outside the institutions. So it creates lower trust in everything, and leads a lot of people to wander into chaotic areas.

I think we're really seeing that in a lot of domains, but one specific domain we're seeing it in is journalism. The premier journalistic institution - ask pretty much anyone who has thought about it more than a little bit, and they'll almost uniformly answer - the New York Times is the best premier journalistic institution. A lot of people in my circles don't like the New York Times and don't respect it. I respect the New York Times the way I respect a tiger. It is strong, it is powerful, it knows exactly what it wants to do, and it is very good at doing it. In general, the New York Times has always had its beat. It has always had its biases, has always had its set of values and issues that it cares more about, and that it cares less about, things that it will highlight more, things that it will highlight less. Over the past decade at least, that [dynamic] really started increasing in salience. A lot of issues that would be incredibly relevant in the New York Times, so for example, when I covered the FAA hiring scandal and suddenly I as an independent…

Adam: Just for the audience, do you want to give a very brief summary of that? As we said, go check out substack. It's an incredible story, you go into really great depth.

FAA Hiring Scandal

Trace: In 2014 the FAA replaced its air traffic controller hiring test with a system that… The tool they used to eliminate 90% of candidates or more was a farcical biographical questionnaire that asked questions such as: ‘What was the lowest grade you got in high school?’ Correct answer: ‘science’; or ‘What was the lowest grade you got in college?’ Correct answer: ‘history’. With this questionnaire, they eliminated more than 90% of people: people who were qualified, people who were ready, people who had already taken the previous tests that made them eligible to join. It just threw a massive wrench into the hiring pipeline, and disrupted their relationship with the schools that they had feeders in.

Adam: So we're talking about a system that was essentially explicitly, although not publicly, but designed in order to be able to give an answer key to preferred candidates in order to hire who they wanted to hire, and not hire anyone that they didn't want to hire.

Trace: Right, so there were overlapping scandals there where an FAA employee got a bunch of candidates on a call, and started saying ‘you should answer this question this way', this question this way, and question this way’. There was that, and then there was just a general reality of what happens when all the candidates other than that get basically randomly selected, or randomly not selected for all of this. Now this was a major scandal. It was a huge issue. It is extensively documented, and was at the time. It got almost no news coverage at the time.

Adam: When you say, ‘at the time’?

Trace: Like in 2014, when it actually changed.

Adam: Everything was public, essentially, but just nobody went in to look?

Trace: Yeah. The people who were impacted were really trying hard to get people to pay attention. They get a bit of attention here, a bit of attention there. Fox Business ran an investigation, but it really touched on a lot of hot-button issues that a lot of outlets weren't keen to touch.

Adam: Equity in hiring, for example?

Trace: Exactly, like it was downstream of a diversity initiative, and that touches on a lot of sensitive things, and one way or another, a lot of outlets just didn't touch it. So suddenly I come in last year and I start writing about this I find out about the lawsuit that's still ongoing with it the class action lawsuit that at the time was Brigada vs. Buttigieg, I don't know what it's been updated to [16-2227 - Brigida v. United States Department of Transportation et al.], but generally against the Department of Transportation. I wrote about it, I documented it, and suddenly this story went incredibly viral. Suddenly, a ton of people who hadn't heard about this started paying attention, listened, cared, so forth, and it made a huge splash.

Now, I should not have gotten that scoop. The New York Times should have covered this extensively. This is something that the New York Times should have, and could have, documented very very thoroughly in their ‘massage things to fit the frame that they want, but gently tell people this is how it all happened’ style, and they didn't. What happens in a situation like that? Well, institutions like the New York Times start adapting. They don't actually like when major things start being missed, when people start distrusting them, when people start thinking we can't rely on them…

Adam: If nothing else, they want to maintain eyeballs on them, rather than you.

Trace: Exactly, and so mine can be seen as sort of a specific instance of the general principle of the Substack ecosystem emerging as this system of decentralised ‘eyeballs on them, rather than eyeballs on your [e.g. the NYT] things’ emerges. It has two beneficial effects. Number one, it has the beneficial effect of: things are getting attention that would not get attention otherwise, because you have all these passionate decentralised people looking at these things. Number two, you have suddenly a very strong incentive for the institution that had whatever flaw existed, such that this new ecosystem needed to come up, it suddenly needs to respond to, and react to, and figure out how to counter this institution. One of the ways it does that is, for example, suddenly the New York Times hires John McWhorter, who is considered like a fairly heterodox linguist, and so forth. They start looking for and reaching out to people like me to write stories for them, and they adapt. So zooming back out to the Democratic Party…

Political Change

Adam: …or institutions more generally. Just thinking about this a little further, you're essentially proposing constructing a parallel institution. (yes). I can see how journalism… you know, you decentralise journalism in some respects, and that forces the establishment to update its practices. How does this work more generally? You know, when you think about like a DMV type [institution]. You know, the Department of Motor Vehicles is like a clichéd terrible institution - long queues, and so on. How does it work in that kind of case?

Trace: Sure. So you won't be building a parallel DMV, but you can build a parallel set of… If nobody is talking about the DMV being a problem, and the DMV is a problem, you can build a set of small-scale institutions that point out [its problems]. Because things like that are often problems because they've achieved some sort of inertia.
Nobody's really thinking about how to impact them meaningfully.

[This is one area of substantial disagreement that I have with Trace. While his approach is clearly underutilised for areas of discrete policy such as dog control, curriculum changes, or selective regulatory reform, bureaucracies are often immensely complex and not so easily transformed by these sorts of (necessarily top-down) outsider campaigns. Much of my previous work here has focused on this subject, and upcoming guests discuss it in great detail too. Look forward to that.]

Adam: Maybe an acceptance almost, among the broader population that it's always going to be shit.

Trace: Yeah, and so you can pull a small set of passionate people together who think about these nuts and bolts issues, drill into the issues, come up with serious specific answers for them, and make it very very easy. This is the key: make it very very easy for people to say ‘This is our go-to for how we solve this’. Maybe you won't get the first person, maybe you won't get the first group [of decision-makers], but then you have someone else coming in looking to make a splash, looking to impress people. They're like ‘I am different from this first group, what's going to set me apart?’ Well, these guys have really cool ideas about DMVs…

Adam: They might not even necessarily mention you at all, but it's like we've got a plan, and suddenly there's some enormous political kind of mandate to fix this really niche issue in this way.

Trace: Yes. Now, zooming to the Democratic Party with this. The issue that the Democratic Party has faced is that their base, and their people who are most passionate, the people who their volunteers are drawn from, the people who their staffers are drawn from, the young educated professionals who make up the actual party elements of the Democratic Party, are far to the left of the median American. They are far more uniformly progressive, they have adopted a set of ideas that are unpopular among Americans but extremely popular among their niche areas, and made some of these things litmus tests, and so forth.

In the 2020 primary, you had an example of all of these candidates pandering to this group of people, except for one or two of them, and suddenly the old, unfashionable, moderate-seeming candidate won. But, a lot of people who voted for Biden as this moderate-seeming whatever wound up being somewhat disappointed, because he ran to the centre, and then hired all of those [progressive] staffers, and hired all of those people, and brought in all of that culture, and suddenly…

Adam: Did he even have a choice in some respects, though, given the dynamics you were talking about earlier?

Trace: In many respects no, because those are the people who are available, because those are the people who are around running things, those are the people who are passionate about things, because as the saying goes ‘personnel is policy’.

Adam: People, ideas, machines, in that order.

Trace: Yeah, yeah, you get the policies downstream of the machines of people who care about them. You can point to, for example, in education, electoral politics. I care a lot about advanced classes, and looking for ways to raise the ceiling in education. This is extremely popular among the general public. In fact, David Shor, who does a lot of polling for the Democratic Party, his group Blue Rose Research looked at a lot of questions of policy initiatives from Democrats: ‘How popular is this one? How unpopular is this one?’. The single least popular initiative in the Democratic Party was removing advanced classes. It was less popular than defund the police. So why do we keep having fights over ‘remove advanced classes versus not remove advanced classes’? Because, there is infrastructure around removing advanced classes. Because there are people who care passionately about this, who think about this, and everyone who thinks like I actually don't want advanced classes to be removed ‘I actually think it's good when people, and learn so forth’ - they're just counting on somebody else to do that work for them. They're just counting on somebody else to figure that all out, and when someone does… So, for example, in San Francisco when people realised ‘we have stopped teaching algebra to 8th graders, and we are in fact banning them from learning it, and so forth’ suddenly they start a ballot initiative with it. It is by far the most popular ballot initiative that the people who worked on it, ever worked on -talking to one of them. It passes 80% to 20% because everyone cares about this, as soon as they're made to care about it.

So what do you need to do? You need to get serious about organising for ideas that are worthwhile and effective, not blaming people who have already organised for other ideas, but just doing the work of meaningful things.

Adam: So I really love that, and I can see how your whole modus operandi over the last few years has been focused in this direction, but is that not a model though for a kind of change on the margins? Essentially, we're talking about creating campaigns to fix this particular issue, and this particular issue, under the sort of assumption that the people running the [party] infrastructure, shall we say, will continue to be this sort of hyper-niche group of ideologues. Does that need to change?

Trace: Of course it needs to change!

Adam: How does it change?

Trace: It changes… this is where it goes back to: people don't actually give power up willingly, and if someone has power, and if you're looking around, and you're saying “wow it sure sucks that a lot of bad people have power”… yeah, they're pretty glad about it. They work very hard to keep it that way, and you just need to go through the same difficult tasks of organisation, and structure, and rallying around ideas, and all of the nuts and bolts of political work. You know, I love my coalition, I love the like ‘niche-esoteric centre’ whatever, all of that. One thing that I don't love about them is that they are extremely anti-tribal, and extremely in a lot of ways politics-sceptical. There're a lot of people who just want to grill. There are a lot of people who want to work on their niche non-controversial problems and hope other things take care of themselves. At some point, you do need to be willing to just dive in, and organise, and say: “We care about a lot of these issues. We care about them together. We recognise the power dynamics in play. We recognise the groups in play, and the reasons other people are having power over these things, and we are willing to do what it takes to organise over that”.

Adam: It’s like a revival of democracy in a sort of Tocquevillian sense almost, that you’re advocating for.

Trace: Yeah, and I think that like [most] people, I used to be really cynical about the American democratic system. Like, oh you know, we have these two parties who have a stranglehold over everything and all of that stuff. I think that anyone who feels that way after A) Donald Trump completely wrenched the Republican Party to his will and B) Bernie Sanders, a socialist (which is not in fact a popular thing in America), almost wrenched the Democratic Party to his will, and then substantially shifted their platform towards his, and forced them to adapt in response to him - like at this point the politically naive take is that cynical ‘democracy doesn't work, you can't actually wrench people’. No. If you can actually persuade people — if you can actually get people on your side, if you actually have a message, have specific ideas, have things that work, and show people that it can be electorally successful — then you can in fact change things, both on a small scale and then if you [scale up]. So, as an example of hard mechanics, you get someone up on the debate stage who is like this centrist, wonky type of person, and suddenly their ideas are in the conversation. Probably they don't win in the Democratic Party primary.

Adam: Is this like Pete Buttigieg [apologies for the pronunciation here]

Trace: You know, I love Pete Buttigieg. He's more mainstream left than the sort of thing I'm thinking about. Say you get one of the Progress Studies guys up there, say, who's on the debate stage talking about all this progress studies stuff. Suddenly, that's part of the conversation. It doesn't necessarily win, but when they're looking for, ‘Who's in our coalition?’, ‘Who are we trying to include?’, ‘Who are we trying to [get to] do these things?’, ‘Whose ideas are we trying to pull from?’ — that comes in, and maybe four years later those sorts of ideas are really successful, there are a lot of people who are excited and passionate about it — suddenly it's in a position to win. That's the sort of thing that I think you need to do to gain power - just take very seriously this process.

Shifting Mentalities

Adam: So I've been thinking a lot about the incredible achievements of the state in the 20th century. We can point the classic examples of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Program, but I also see it in like the everyday, and local kind of city councils — you go up into the bush behind Auckland and there's this enormous great big concrete dam built in, I think it's 1911 [This is a reference to Waitākere Reservoir, completed in 1910] without modern machinery, without modern logistics, and there's this just towering monument to, I guess, progress (yes). So there's a whole host of problems that our ancestors, shall we say, faced of ‘how do we provide clean water to people?’, and there were whole generations for which involvement in, and working with, the state either as a contractor, or directly being involved in your local electoral commissions, the local party branch, and so on, with a mass involvement because it was really needed.

I think this dynamism, in the latter half of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st, moved quite dramatically towards the private sector. Generations now have taken state [capacity] for granted, and because there's enormous amount of inertia in those institutions —they're set up quite deliberately to be stable over a long period of time, which in part inhibits their dynamism, but on the positive side means that they're still there and largely function and aren't completely tyrannical or corrupt. But over time, and particularly over generations, as the sort of the ethos, the thinking of how change happens, and when change is required, and how you reform something is lost.

You're obviously very hopeful of a revival of that kind of mentality. There is a challenge for every generation. Ours is, at least in part, the revivification of our institutions. And we do that by showing up and making really compelling cases for niche issues, and for the things that matter. And over time, that grows into something that's broader, stronger, and more long-lasting. Is that fair?

Trace: Yeah. So one thing that I like to say is we all have always been solving the problems caused by other people's solutions. That is, a lot of times through history, you have one generation that comes up and sees, you know, this is an issue. So say in education, you had people who came up, looked around and were like, we have all these disparate people who can't really read and aren't really in this ordered structured thing. We're going to implement this mass-scale public schooling that does all this stuff. They do it in a way that has some successes, some failures, but it immediately gets entrenched as ‘now this is the way you do things’. This is the new paradigm.

Adam: In an economic sense, it completely destroys the capacity of any old system to compete because it's now all subsidised by the state. Right?

Trace: Right. You know, it was solving real problems, and then you look and say, OK, now this solution caused this and this and this. Then a new generation comes along and they're like, you know, there are these problems that are all… Yeah. Yeah. They were the solutions to other problems. But one thing that you see in connection with this, right, is that we’ve been really going in circles in the same policy conversations for at least three generations now. You look at the policy debates that we're having in 2025… A.I. is new. You know, that's different. But a lot of things around like race equality, around like state capacity, around like this ‘liberty versus equality’ tension, so forth. Some of the specific things, the affirmative action debate is a good example. So many of these debates, you can go back to 1960. They were having exactly the same conversations that we are now.

Adam: And this isn't necessarily a bad thing in some respects. There are swings of adjusting over time. The terrain changes a little bit as, you know, people shift, and economics change, and people shift to the cities and so on. Just the natural maintenance of a state is ultimately corrections and inevitable [overcorrections].

Trace: Yeah. And if you look at like.. I don't think there was ever a golden age. I'm not going to look around and say there was this period in the past where everything was working well and everyone was satisfied. And you won't see people in those times say there was a golden age either. But there are times where there is more or less progress towards the things I care about, [or] at least heading in the right direction. And I think that to get to those times, you know, I can make an argument that, like, say, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, before people became really scarred by the world wars and really just like seemed to shrink into themselves, there was the sense that we could do everything — that we could build. We were conquering the natural world, we were understanding our dynamism, our technology, our world — all of that can change everything.

Adam: Le Belle Époque.

Trace: Exactly. Then the world wars hit, and we realised all the downsides of all this power that we had been cultivating, all this mastery of the natural world, and so forth. And we just sort of shrank into ourselves. You know, you can point to those things. You can make those cases. But the lingering message for me with it all is that each era wanders into its own problems, and then people each time, more or less, come to the same conclusion, which is: who else is going to fix this? Like, we're running into this, and a lot of it was caused by previous eras. Sure. A lot of it was caused by, like, failures to maintain, a lot of it's caused by whatever, whatever causes you want to identify. Ultimately, the solution is almost always the same. Which is people responding to those problems and taking them seriously, understanding the cultural forces of their day and working within that to do something meaningful.

The Centre for Educational Progress

Adam: I really want to dive into some of your work at the ‘Center for Educational Progress’. You've previously written a lot about this idea that there's a myth out there that ‘top students can take care of themselves’. They don't tend to be problematic, like an obvious problem in a classroom, yet the system is failing them and this is quite clear in the academic literature that we're not providing anywhere enough opportunity for these people to extend themselves, and as a result they're behind where they they should be, and society as a whole is worse off as a result of that. On the other hand, although the literature is clear on objective questions, as soon as you get into even the opinions of the researchers themselves, let alone society as a whole, any kind of sense of shared narrative falls apart. “What do we make of this?” - that kind of descends into partisan politics. How we change the view on that, how do we shift the view? Would that be fair to say that's a large part of what you're setting out to achieve?

Trace: So that is absolutely a large part of what I'm setting out to achieve. Could I get a sense of what you mean by this narrative collapsing?

Adam: Well, I’m actually referring to a post that you made online several years ago where you looked at a host of academic research and so on, and then you repeatedly saw that, whatever the research ended up saying, people's takes on it were wildly disparate.

Trace: Right, right. So on separate specific questions people will agree, and then they will zoom out to broad narratives and they will… (immediately) Yes, absolutely. So that happens for a very understandable reason, which is that people care about different things. So a lot of disagreements that appear to be very direct policy disagreements —people saying this thing works, or that thing works — are really just people saying ‘I have these values, and you have those values’. So you wind up disguising a lot of these values debates as evidence debates, because everyone wants to be able to say the evidence is on my side, and no one wants to say ‘this is just where my values are’.

One example of the way this plays out around specifically ability grouping and helping advanced students: you can look at two meta-analyses in the 1980s, or two sets of meta-analyses, because these researchers were very passionate and each did multiple [studies] touching on different things about whether ability grouping works. One of them, Robert Slavin, was an extremely committed egalitarian educator who was sceptical of ability grouping from a standpoint of, ‘he felt like it was inegalitarian’. What he found was that if you grouped students heterogeneously versus homogeneously by ability and did not change the curriculum, then it had basically no impact on any of the students. Whereas, if you say did subject-specific ability grouping in reading, you would have some impact. Basically, his broad narrative that he zoomed out to with this was ‘ability grouping doesn't work, or it doesn't have a positive impact, and because it is inegalitarian, we should default to not doing it’. It wasn't ‘it has a negative impact’, but it was because we can't find a clear benefit in this frame, and it is inegalitarian, let's knock it off.

On the other hand, Chen-Lin and James Kulik looked at the same body of studies, and then pulled in a few studies that also actually changed the curriculum. This is what you're actually supposed to do with ability grouping. You're not just supposed to say, ‘put the smart kids together, they'll help each other in the same curriculum’. You're supposed to tailor the curriculum to the level of the student. So they did that, they pulled in a few gifted programs, things like that, and suddenly they found a pretty dramatic impact for top students with all of this stuff. So their takeaway was: ability grouping helps this set of students pretty dramatically, and it hurts nobody. Therefore, because we value excellence in education, we should have ability grouping.

Fundamentally, at root, it was a values debate, but everyone starts parsing it as an evidence debate. They're like: ‘it works’, ‘it doesn't work’, ‘yada yada yada’. Slavin shows it doesn't work. Kulik shows it does work. I would argue pretty strongly that the evidence is on the side of ability grouping, done right, having pretty substantial positive impacts for a lot of students, particularly the gold standard of cross-grade subject-specific ability grouping. But a lot more importantly than that, I value people pushing as fast and as far as they are capable of going. I value seeing students rise. I value the development of expertise. I value the sort of seriousness, the sort of rigor, the sort of structure, it takes to really cultivate difficult things. So, ability grouping and teaching students where they are at — looking at them, saying you are right here, therefore we are teaching you at that level. That aligns very cleanly with those values of mine. Someone who's a lot more interested in, say, bringing all students up to the same level, or a lot more invested in… and look, I care about the performance of students at every level, but someone who sees gaps between students and says we need to devote all our time and energy on the bottom ones, they're going to come to different conclusions just because their values diverge from mine.

Adam: Sure, and even leaving aside the question of values for a moment, you could see that, in general, a monolithic curriculum is going to be targeted either at the bottom for value reasons, or at the median (right), because that's where most of the students are. So for one reason or another, there's going to be a tendency to ignore that particular segment.

Trace: Yeah, if you have a monolithic curriculum, teachers will naturally help the slower students in their classrooms, and that's probably even appropriate. You want to help people who are struggling with your curriculum.

Alternative Pedagogies

Adam: Sure. So, I don't know how familiar you are with Soviet Education?

Trace: Loosely familiar.

Adam: Loosely. Okay so as I understand it, the math, and stem curriculum in general, is highly regarded. Is that ultimately reliant on the fact that there wasn’t necessarily a lot of economic opportunity for really talented people in the private sector? As a society, being able to allocate the world's [nation’s] best maths people to colleges, and then the next best math people to teaching - is that replicable, given that Baumol’s cost disease is ultimately potentially a major problem for education? Whereas [in the West] the economic opportunities at the top end for really talented people, and really great teachers are probably more in the realm of management consulting, or working in Silicon Valley or something, rather than teaching the next generation. How do we deal with that? Is it something that can be resolved?

Trace: Yeah, so that's a really good question. You're right that, in the United States, teaching is a relatively low-pay, low-prestige profession compared to some of these other things. I mean, moderate prestige, people like teachers, people respect teachers. What I'll say with that uh…

Adam: Sorry, just a bit more: it almost seems economically impossible. You could raise the social prestige of education, I think we should definitely do that, but raising wages — maybe you could make the argument we can do it by 20%, 30% — but on the whole, there's just no possible set of, I would imagine, economic incentives that could recreate a Soviet Union style quality of teaching?

Trace: Right. So let me tell you about a specific curriculum in elementary school. One that everyone has known has worked for several generations and nobody has particularly liked for several generations. This is ‘Direct Instruction’. Capital D, capital I. Lowercase ‘direct instruction’ just refers to teaching people directly. Direct Instruction refers to this pretty fascinating curriculum that involves ability grouping of students by subject, and involves fully-scripted lessons that have features like: ‘the teacher having fairly regular, like, whole-class call and answer’. The teacher says ‘this’, the students respond with ‘that’ sort of thing. It's this extremely structured curriculum compared to the standard elementary curriculum. It works radically better than the standard elementary curriculum along basically every metric you care to look at, but it clashes so much with people's instincts, and it classes so much with people's tastes, that despite people having known this for generations, ever since the initial study of it compared to other curricula where it blew all of them out of the water. They backed away from the study, and people wanted to keep funding the other curricula anyway. They didn't really care.

Adam: It would be quite like like stultifying, I imagine, as a teacher?

Trace: Well, you'd think so, and the instinct for some people is that. [However], talking to people… you know, actors, for example, repeat lines. That's one thing they do, and actors don’t feel stultified when repeating lines, that’s just part of it. Teachers who are doing this as part of their job still have the opportunity to answer specific questions, still help students in specific ways.

Adam: But the nature of the creativity changes a little…

Trace: Yeah, the nature changes, [but] in general, it's not in people's minds as the sort of thing they sign up for. That said, the reason I'm harping on this in response to this thing specifically is that it is an example of a curriculum that is extremely scalable. People don't need to be these individual wizards coming up with beautiful curricula, and coming up with everything else. It makes it very, very easy for individual teachers to succeed in that. So that's one example. Another thing that I want to touch on with this, and you're right that the economy is part of it, and [this] will never change everything, but you have a lot of people in culture who are motivated by things other than economic concerns. You have in a space like this [Lighthaven]. As you mentioned, we are at the prediction market conference Manifest, which is full of people who are who would often identify as Effective Altruists or Rationalists. The Effective Altruists in particular devote themselves not to the thing that gets the highest social prestige or the highest financial reward. A lot of times they will look and say: ‘OK, here is something that solves an important problem, and I'm going to solve it. I'm going to work on that. I'm going to devote my time and energy and attention to this, not necessarily glamorous, but effective thing that solves an important problem.’ The thing is, those groups don't really trust that education has things that can solve the problems. So they sort of siphon people who are passionate about and interested in helping people, and are interested in these sorts of ideas by saying basically: ‘education is a field where there's not really much to do, so don't worry about it. Don't think about it. It's not particularly high impact.’ That means that other people will enter the education system, and they will be the ones who determine how it goes.

Adam: Sure. So I can definitely see that [working] on your direct goals, in the immediate sense of changing views within, let's say, this crowd, those adjacent to it, thought leaders, and so on. Just coming back to the idea, though, of the teachers. Maybe it's underrated this idea, for society in general, of like ‘people want to be making a positive contribution’. Is leveraging more of that going to be useful for education at scale, or?

Trace: So I would say, yeah, you can leverage some of that. So, for example, there is a charter school in North Carolina called the Teller Institute that I'm a big fan of. This physicist came in and did the physicist thing of reimagining things from first principles and working from the basics with it. And he was like: ‘Of course ability grouping for reading and math makes sense’. Of course, you bring students in, test them and then place them in a class that aligns with their test score for the subject, like, how else would you do it? Or, of course, you use these curricula that are effective, just like phonics for reading so forth. He came in, he did all of that, and it's working well.

Adam: Is this Edward Teller? So it’s been around for a while?

Trace: No, Telra, by Ronak Bhatt. It's been around for about four years now. It's pretty new, but it's going very well so far. There weren't really any major barriers to that other than someone needed to have the idea, and go in and execute the idea. He is mentioning that he struggles to find some teachers who are on board, in-tune, and ready to teach according to their program. I don't think that's a situation caused by the U.S. not having the Soviet system and not having these resources, everything. I think it's caused by education schools just not caring about that stuff. It's caused by the institutions training people in this [other] stuff, not really thinking about, caring about, or directing people towards the things that are effective and work.

Adam: You get into teachers’ training colleges, for example, or as it scales, if that happens naturally, then a lot of those barriers are going to go away.

Trace: Or simply compete with them and say ‘it's not actually helpful for teachers to get credentials from schools that don't teach them’. So you want to change the credentialing rules for teachers and look for different degrees, things like that. So you can do that sort of thing. But, there's no rule of the universe that says education as an academic field needs to be just like worse than economics as an academic field, or mathematics as an academic field. That is not an iron law of nature. That is a contingent reality based on the way things have evolved.

There is enough funding in the education world. There is enough money, and seriousness, and so forth, that if people wanted to do useful, meaningful things in it — if people had those in mind, and built a culture around it, and were serious about it —We are not talent constrained in the sense that it would be impossible to find teachers, and to train teachers to do this sort of thing, at the economics that we have.

Innovation in Education

Adam: The obvious kind of step forward there is: does AI help this process, or is it more of a separate thing you're envisaging? DI [Direction Instruction] as a model, how does that integrate with AI?

Trace: I take a very Deng Xiaoping approach to a lot of things in education. That is to say: ‘it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice’. I will say this about charter schools versus public schools. I say this about AI versus Direct Instruction versus other models. Demonstrate that something catches mice, and I will be on board. Now there are a couple of schools, Alpha School and GT (its sister school in Texas), that are doing really exciting things with AI and education. They are pulling their students two hours a day into this personalized AI program and saying: ‘you're going to learn your core academic curriculum here’, and then for four hours a day they're in more advanced academic workshops, or school clubs, or sports, or other activities — just interesting worthwhile things that you can do with a school building. Suddenly, with these two hours a day of academics, four hours are freed up for a lot of interesting things. That seems to be, by all accounts, working well for them. That's one model that I'm interested in paying attention to. Let's see how well it develops, see how well it scales, see if it can be backed up.

Adam: I've seen a lot of work evidence around, particularly for teenagers, that they're just starting far too early. They're in lecture halls or classrooms for far too long, and they're not learning. How does that integrate with societies and the needs of parents, generally? That's why kids start when they do, because parents need to go to work. I suppose maybe the kind of new economic era that we're entering into, of more working from home, and so on, might enable more of that, do you think?

Trace: I think some of those things are possible, but start times, things like that —those can be adjusted, those can be experimented with. I don't find start times to be a particularly urgent problem.

Adam: So instead of altering start times, we just change the structure of the day and the hours that you have available?

Trace: Right, so more than like: ‘oh, we need more hours on this, or yadda yadda’, it's just: ‘how effectively are you using the hours that you have’. Whatever hours you are asking people to be in a school, are you respecting their time, during that time? Are you seriously treating them as individual agents, whose time matters, whose time should be respected, or are you dragging them through a bunch of mundane, dull stuff?

Adam: Glorified babysitting, almost.

Trace: Exactly. So, if you see an institution that respects students’ time, and uses it well to make sure they are actually effectively learning things during the hours they are supposed to be learning them, or they’re doing creative, interesting, fun, innovative things during the hours that they find for that, fantastic!

Adam: Nice one. Anything else you wanted to mention about education? It’s obviously a field that you’re deeply involved in.

Trace: I think a lot of people who are cynical about education are cynical for understandable reasons, because there are a lot of problems in the education system. But the closer you look at the field, the more you see really innovative and exciting things around the edges. People who are starting to coalesce into this awareness of ‘we want this sort of excellence in schools, we want some of these specific things, and none of this stuff happens automatically.’ I really think that there has never been a better time than right now to start really caring and working seriously towards these things. If you care about education, there are people around, there are ideas that matter, that work, and people who have been doing effective things in it. It isn't just a hopeless lost cause. There's a lot that can be done in it.

Stories worth telling

Adam: Excellent sentiment. You and I, we've been involved in various anonymous internet forums over the years. Maybe this is coming full circle on our talk a little, but what are some of the dynamics there that more people should know about?

Trace: I got my start writing on obscure online forums where I would dig up some story and bring it to a handful of people and say, ‘Hey look at this stuff”, and one of the dynamics that I think people should be aware of with that is that: things that work at small scale, work at large scale as well. The people who made interesting and engaging posts to audiences of a dozen people, many of them a few years down the line, I see them and they're making interesting and engaging posts to audiences of tens or hundreds of thousands.

Adam: In some cases, people that we've interacted with now are like in the White House on one hand, or in the Democratic Party on the other.

Trace: Absolutely. I remember someone I was talking with on Twitter, and this was a little before my time, but it illustrates things. She was talking about how someone in an obscure menswear forum that she had argued with a ton back in the day was now — Michael Anton, who is significantly involved in the Trump Administration, and has all these things out there. This is just the reality in a lot of these spaces; people are drawn to like-minded people. The people who talk about things in one space, are ultimately going to be the people who do that sort of thing in another. People who start in weird, obscure, online forums talking about niche topics because they are passionate about them, they love thinking about them, they love arguing about them, and so forth, are the same people who will broadly expand onto broader stages and do things in the public world.

Adam: There's something of a recommendation there for people to just get out and [do things], even on that smaller scale — tying back to what we were saying earlier. I am curious though, is there when has that been destructive for you? Just thinking personally, there'll be times where you think ‘oh that was really great, and that's helped me grow’. Are there other times where superficially the same kinds of things have actually had the opposite impact?

Trace: You know, it's by and large been healthy for me, I think. I could point to some specific fights or some specific drama that maybe I shouldn't have gotten caught up in. Something I maybe said wrong, whatever. I could point to some of that, but, by and large, when I am meaningfully producing and writing things online, and I think a lot of these things like have that sort of ‘generative spirit’ to them where they make it easy to do those things, I am happy. In general, they have been a positive force in my life that have led to a lot of friendships, a lot of close connections, a lot of opportunities, a lot of things that matter very much to me. It would be misleading of me… I think sort of trying to play a little bit too much into the very easy ‘internet is bad for you’ frame that I could play into with other things… like with my playing altogether too much chess, for example, online. That's destructive, but I think participating in these niche discussion spaces, thinking seriously about topics, even at a small scale, and trying to write about them has been an unalloyed good in my life.

Adam: Right. So last question then. What's the experience been like to go from essentially completely anonymous, you’re not yet a household name, but you've gone from being a complete ‘anon’ to somebody of some renown and we've had economics professors who know you, and want to talk to you. What's that experience been like, because it's happened over the course of really… a few months?

Trace: The majority of it happened from December 2023 to January-February 2024, it was like this big explosion into the public consciousness. I feel extraordinarily lucky. It's fun. It's satisfying. I never had a period where I thought nobody was reading my writing. That's because I was always writing within communities. I was always like looking: ‘here is something that this community will appreciate’ and writing to them, and turns out they did appreciate it. That was always fun. That was always gratifying. I never felt this urge to really work hard to burst out onto the public stage and everything. It just sort of happened as a natural outgrowth of really loving these topics, and loving writing, and thinking about them, and doing it in public. But in terms of what it's been like. It's fun to have people come up to me and be like ‘I know who you are’, or whatever. It's fun to talk to one of my law school professors and mention my pseudonym and have him say ‘wait I've read some of your writing’. It's just fun, it's gratifying.

Adam: But you don't get recognised on the street on the way to the supermarket or running from the paparazzi.

Trace: Although one of my friends was telling me. Apparently, on a dating app, she connected with this guy who found out she was a Temple law student, and the guy was like, ‘Oh, do you know TracingWoodgrains?’ She's like ‘Oh yeah he's a good friend of mine’. That's weird, that's surreal. I don't know that people are really built to handle that sort of thing. But by and large, I love writing, I wanted to write visibly. As I have become more visible, I've been, like, this is this is a lifelong dream for me.

Adam: So I guess a model for more people to follow? Carry on doing what you love, put yourself out there, and change will come as a result?

Trace: Something like that. Yeah, I would say specifically: look for ways you can be useful to the communities you are in. Every community, every single community, has areas where it is expertise constrained, and effort constrained, and someone who is willing to put in a little more work than everyone else to help the community out in some useful way. Even as a writer, just looking out and saying, ‘here is a story that is worth telling in this area that I know, that nobody else knows better than me’. Tell that story to your community, and it's worthwhile.

Adam: Wonderful. Okay, well, TracingWoodgrains, thanks so much for coming on.

Trace: Thank you for having me, it's been a pleasure.