CHASING GREATNESS

Let me tell you a little about how last year went for me.

I began 2025 with a short piece called “Markets and Morality” that set the tone for my thinking throughout the year. I argued that markets depend on moral foundations they can’t generate themselves. Without people who believe in something beyond profit, capitalism corrodes into pure extraction. Soon after I published it, Timothée Chalamet’s SAG speech went viral—“I want to be one of the greats,” he said, “I know people don’t usually talk like that”—and outside of tech circles, I was surprised to see people calling him arrogant. He was aiming high and making his goals clear. What’s the harm in that?

I spent the rest of the year writing about agency, trying to work out what it actually means to be agentic. Hint: it’s not “just doing things,” which became clear when I kept seeing people advocating for agency while clearly not thinking about what they were doing. Agency is about alignment: what you do matches what you believe, and you believe in something worth acting on. The writing on agency led me to be really critical of startups and investors who serve the interests of slop, and it pissed a lot of people off, but it also attracted the right crowd for the work we’re doing at Native.

Then, like every other yuppie in America, I watched Marty Supreme over the holiday break. The film is interested in what it costs to chase greatness, and whether the cost we typically accept is actually necessary. In hindsight, that was the question running through my entire year. I’m not the first to write about the movie, or the speech that kicked off this whole discourse. But for me, Marty Supreme was the finale, the closing statement on a year of watching Chalamet become the face of a question most of America still doesn’t know how to answer: what’s the right way to pursue greatness?

A couple weeks ago, Kasurian Magazine published an essay called “Democracy Will Not Survive the Age of Consumption.” Ahmed Askary argues that society divides into productive and consumptive classes. The productive class builds wealth-generating capacity: entrepreneurs, workers, investors, professionals whose work augments the common stock. The consumptive class draws upon that wealth through various claims—not just benefit recipients, but also the financialized elite whose wealth derives from asset appreciation rather than enterprise, the managerial layer whose compensation bears no relationship to value created, and the compliance industries that exist to navigate complexity they themselves generate.

He concludes that democracy may be structurally incapable of arresting the dynamic by which the consuming majority extracts from the producing minority. The productive class is shrinking through quiet disengagement: exit, withdrawal, early retirement, and preference for leisure over income. Each decision is rational given the incentives. In aggregate, they represent a society slowly consuming its own productive base.

Today’s startup culture reflects the other side of this coin. The a16zs of the world position themselves as the productive class. Keep building! American Dynamism! And superficially, they are building. They’re even funding hard tech: defense, manufacturing, infrastructure… the “real” stuff. But the philosophy underneath is still one of extraction. The language romanticizes the frontier, but when you ask “to what end?”—when you look at what’s actually being built and how capital is actually being allocated—very few companies are truly productive. The same rot runs through AI: countless companies exist solely to arbitrage attention, founded by people who optimize for metrics that don’t require a worldview. Having a worldview would require believing in something, and believing in something might mean some exits are off the table.

Toward the beginning of the movie, Marty tries to convince his boss, “It’s good for the Americans if I win.” He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t really care about the Americans. He’s putting up the facade of doing it for others because that’s what the situation requires, the language of contribution without the substance. This is what tech as an industry has become known for.

The productive class is shrinking because the stories we tell about production have become indistinguishable from the stories we tell about extraction. Vague notions of “acceleration” and “progress” aren’t enough. It doesn’t matter how many manifestos get written about optimism if no one can describe what they’re optimistic for. And when the language of greatness gets hijacked by people who don’t actually believe in anything, the people who could be great either check out entirely or join the extraction economy themselves. So what does actual greatness look like?

The greats—the people we look to for inspiration, for ways of seeing and doing—are great because of what happens when we look their way. Their stories activate something within others. Greatness, in this sense, is generative. It creates agency.

Max Weber traced the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant work ethic, “work as worship.” Tocqueville saw it from another angle: “Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot.” A free society requires citizens who believe in something beyond their own accumulation. Without that moral foundation, freedom corrodes into extraction.

This is why I keep coming back to founders, and why I believe Native’s work matters. In the absence of functioning institutions that generate shared meaning—a responsibility that government and universities have largely abdicated—founders are the ones who have to author new visions. We need genuine beliefs about what should exist and why. We need companies that export philosophies that produce greatness.

Agency is preached. You must persuade people to take responsibility for the future by giving them an idea worth believing in. That’s what we’re asking founders to do now.