When a billionaire tells you it’s fun to stop thinking…

I. The Boardroom and the Back Deck

Somewhere in Menlo Park, a man manages a venture capital firm that deploys billions of dollars using pattern-recognition models, fifty-page investment memos, teams of analysts cross-referencing market signals across continents, and a personal decision architecture refined over three decades of calculated bets.

He has read more books this year than most people will read in a lifetime.

He structures his days with the discipline of a chess grandmaster preparing for a tournament.

He has the brain and instincts of a high-stakes poker player.

His portfolio companies — worth hundreds of billions — are optimised through data, stress-tested through competing hypotheses, augmented by advanced AI systems, and monitored with kill indicators that would make any military operations room look modest.

Then he opens his phone and tweets: “Current status: Retardmaxxing.”

Somewhere in middle America, a man stands on his back deck with a Weber grill and a cigar. He looks into a camera and says, “Listen, it doesn’t matter. Just go to work and enjoy your life. You’re overthinking it.”

The billionaire calls this man his new life coach.

Two hundred and fifty thousand people subscribe. Millions watch. The clip circulates through podcasts hosted by other billionaires, who nod and smile and say: “This is genius.”

Hmm.. I have a Weber grill and smoke cigars. Let’s see what else could be interesting.

II. What Retardmaxxing Is

Strip the edginess, and the idea is simple: modern life is good for most people, but cognitive work produces too much analysis, too much hesitation, too much self-monitoring. Smart people overthink themselves into paralysis. The magic pill is to deliberately shut off the analytical mind, go to work , and live life.

The pitch diagnoses a real condition.

Analysis paralysis exists.

Perfectionism kills momentum.

The person who ships a rough draft beats the person who polishes forever.

Anyone who has built anything knows the feeling of thinking so much that you never start.

So the diagnosis has merit. Remember that. It matters for what follows.

The question Cotrugli would ask — is not whether the diagnosis is accurate.

It is: who wrote the prescription, and what pharmacy do they own? Or maybe even a whole factory in our case, or a piece of the world…

III. Coca-Cola Does Not Hydrate the Board

Here is a fact about the Coca-Cola Company that no one disputes, but few people think about carefully enough.

The people who run Coca-Cola do not drink Coca-Cola at strategy meetings. They have nutritionists. They understand glycaemic index, metabolic load, and the long-term effects of high-fructose corn syrup on cognitive function. They drink water. They drink carefully.

Then they spend four billion dollars a year making you feel that happiness comes in a red can. Open happiness. Taste the feeling. The product makes the consumer sweet and slow. It makes the producer rich and sharp.

This is not a conspiracy. It is structure. You do not need malice to explain it. You only need incentives. ( I just now drink Coca-Cola Zero)

Now apply the same structure to retardmaxxing.

The men promoting it, as a genius story and a new vibe, are venture capitalists, the mega-fund operators, the overlapping network of Silicon Valley capital allocators who host the podcasts and write the tweets — do not retardmax.

Their firms employ hundreds of operating partners. Their due diligence processes are among the most analytically intensive on earth. They publish multi-thousand-word strategic essays on technology, regulation, and civilisational direction. Their thesis documents run longer than doctoral dissertations. They build wealth through spreadsheet-level analysis of cash flows, actuarial models, and macro positioning.

They do not vibe. They calculate. They are opposite to Retardmaxxing

What world will this be. I called them in my book Dominions.

Just a short explanation – Imagine you are on the top of Maslow Pyramid .

In Neo Cotruglian Philosophy book, Maslow is outdated.

Now we have the NEO Cotruglian Skyscraper.

The top in Maslow is 30 flor.

They are on the 250th floor, and they are building new floors each year.

So the new word for today is Ubersmartmaxxing

So let’s go back to our story. Ubersmartmaxxing people, they go on camera and tell you to stop thinking.

They may sincerely enjoy the videos. But when a prince distributes a philosophy to the population, a merchant should ask: Does this philosophy produce better merchants, or more compliant subjects?

Interesting story: I am paying around 800 USD to be subscribed to the Substack of one of Ubersmartmaxx Dominions, and he is like Casandra very often.

IV. The Prince’s Interest in Your Simplicity

Machiavelli understood something interesting about information. In The Prince, power is not merely the capacity for violence.

It is the capacity to shape what other people consider normal.

The most efficient form of control is not the one that forces compliance. It is the one that makes compliance feel like freedom and a good vibe.

“Just stop overthinking. Just go to work. Just enjoy your life.”

Feel the warmth of that sentence.

Feel how it releases tension.

Feel how it asks nothing of you except to let go of the very faculties that would let you see who benefits from your letting go.

A population that retardmaxes is a population that does not read contracts carefully.

Does not ask who owns the platform they work on.

Does not calculate whether their equity offer is worth the paper it is printed on.

Does not question the terms of the game.

Does not build the kind of slow, boring, structural intelligence that makes a merchant success.

Most people are not stupid. But most people are already under-analytical, not over-analytical.

The diagnosis of “too much thinking” applies to perhaps five percent of the population — the founders, the academics, the obsessives.

For the other ninety-five percent, the prescription of “think even less” is not medicine. It is a sedative marketed as a vitamin.

And sedated populations are the ideal operating environment for those who remain awake.

V. What Cotrugli’s Donkey Actually Meant

Benedetto Cotrugli, writing in 1458, advised that a merchant should have the spine of a donkey for perseverance.

This image has been misread for five centuries — and the misreading is instructive.

The casual reader sees the donkey and thinks: be humble, be simple, just carry the load. That reading flatters exactly the wrong instinct. It turns the donkey into a beast of thoughtless labour. It turns Cotrugli into a medieval version of the man on the back deck.

But Cotrugli was not writing a self-help book.

He was writing the first systematic treatise on commerce in European history.

His merchant is not a labourer.

His merchant is a strategist who understands that endurance is the highest form of intelligence.

The donkey does not carry the load because it does not think. It carries the load because it has assessed the terrain, calculated the distance, and concluded that steady movement across difficult ground is superior to the horse’s sprint, the lion’s ambush, or the fox’s cleverness.

The donkey’s patience is not the absence of analysis. It is the product of analysis so deep that it no longer needs to perform itself.

This is the distinction retardmaxxing collapses. It confuses the output — calm, steady action — with the input — not thinking.

A Cotruglian merchant acts with apparent simplicity because the thinking has already been done. A retardmaxxer acts with apparent simplicity because the thinking has been abandoned.

The observable behaviour is identical. The strategic position is opposite.

VI. A Pattern Worth Recognising

There is a recurring structure in how influence operates at scale. It is worth naming precisely — not to produce outrage, but to produce clarity.

The structure: the people who benefit most from your analytical capability being reduced are the ones most likely to package that reduction as liberation.

In consumer marketing: the fast food industry does not tell you to eat badly. It tells you to “treat yourself.” The language of freedom is applied to behaviours that reduce your capacity and increase your dependence.

In technology: social media platforms do not tell you to waste your attention. They tell you to “stay connected.” The language of community is applied to architectures designed to extract attention for resale.

And now in philosophy: the retardmaxxing movement tells you to “stop overthinking.” The language of liberation is applied to a posture that disarms exactly the critical faculties you need to evaluate whether the person speaking has your interests at heart.

A person trained in careful observation does not hear “stop overthinking” and feel relief. They hear it and ask: why is this message being amplified, by whom, at what cost, and for whose benefit?

That question is not paranoia. It is due diligence. And due diligence — boring, unsexy, unglamorous — is the donkey’s secret weapon.

VII. The Cotruglian Counter-Position

The answer to retardmaxxing is not more paralysis. That would be to accept the false binary the meme presents.

The Cotruglian answer is a third position: think deeply, then act simply.

Ragusa did not survive between the Ottoman Empire and Venice by vibing. It thought so carefully about its strategic position that it could act with apparent ease — maintaining trade routes, honouring contracts on all sides, building trust as structural capital — while empires exhausted themselves on spectacle.

The Ragusan merchant appeared simple. The simplicity was a product, not an absence, of intelligence.

For the Vanguard practitioner, the application is direct:

When someone tells you to stop thinking, get curious about their portfolio. Not angry. Curious. What do they own? What do they sell? Who benefits if you follow their advice? This is not cynicism. It is the merchant’s oldest survival instinct: know your counterparty.

When a philosophy goes viral, ask who is distributing it and why. Ideas do not spread by accident at scale. They spread because they are amplified. Amplification requires resources. Resources follow incentives. Trace the incentives, and you will find the structure.

When you feel the relief of “just stop thinking,” that is the moment to pause. Relief is not evidence of truth. It is evidence of desire. The donkey does not put down the load because the path is long. The donkey adjusts its gait.

VIII. The Meditation

The modern knowledge worker is genuinely afflicted by overthinking, over-planning, and the paralysis of infinite information.

But the cure being offered is not a cure. It is a product. And like all products, it was designed to benefit the producer more than the consumer.

Cotrugli’s merchant does not need to be told to stop thinking. Cotrugli’s merchant needs to be taught to think so well, so structurally, so patiently, that action becomes effortless — not because the mind has been switched off, but because it has been trained.

The billionaire on the podcast will tell you to retardmax. He will tell you it is liberating. He will smile. It will feel warm.

Questions for Vanguards

1. When an elite operator tells the public to “stop thinking,” what is the most plausible explanation: wisdom, branding, audience capture, or incentive design?
2. Who benefits if I become less analytical, less patient, and less capable of tracing incentives through systems?
3. Am I looking at a real cure for analysis paralysis, or at a sedative packaged as freedom?
4. What would a proper ACH-style comparison say here: H1 = this philosophy helps people act better, H2 = it mainly entertains and signals status, H3 = it weakens the audience’s strategic capacity while stronger actors stay fully analytical?
5. What assumptions am I making about the speaker’s motives, and which one would hurt me most if it turned out false?
6. If I follow this advice for 12 months, do I become more sovereign, more competent, and more antifragile — or merely easier to manage?
7. What are the kill indicators? What evidence would prove that this meme is not liberation, but self-disarmament?
8. In a NEO world of networked, exponential, orchestrated competition, is reducing my analytical sharpness a path to freedom — or a path to irrelevance?
9. Am I confusing calm execution with the abandonment of thought, when the real Vanguard move is to think deeply, then act simply?
10. Before I adopt any viral philosophy, have I done the merchant’s first duty: know the counterparty, know the incentives, know the game?

The Vanguard question is never “How do I feel when I hear this?” It is: “What game is being played, who gains if I comply, and what happens to my position if I stop thinking while they keep calculating?”