DC is about to experience something entirely new, something absolutely unprecedented in its experience. They think the barbarians are coming. And perhaps they are. But not the kinds of barbarians they suspect. Not this time.

The simple fact is that there exists a very small group of incredibly high-function, insanely productive people. It’s the dirty secret of the world. This tiny tribe conceives, invents, and builds basically everything novel. All of it. They are not normal people. They are the 0.1%.

Unless you have worked with them, around them, or been a part of what they do, you simply lack a reference for what they are like. It’s essentially inconceivable how much such people can get done when they set their minds to it, how many rules they will disprove, break, or ignore, and how many paradigms they will upend.

DC has never seen a mob of high-function autist builders and fin warriors coalesce before. They have no fricking idea what’s coming. They cannot possibly know. But I do.

I know A LOT of these people. This is what most of my friends are like. They learn for a living. They pull systems apart, see them as functional wholes, and work 16-hour days reading arcane 1,000-page descriptions until they understand. Then they pull the underwear of whoever thought they understood this material up over their heads in an atomic wedgie and take over a space. 

It’s just what you do if you’re a person like that. It’s compulsion. It’s like breathing. These are 3 and 4 and 5 standard deviation people who have focus and talent in quantities they do not even have maps of in Washington. I keep hearing about people I know a little getting tapped for transition teams and I’m like “Ooooooh, that guy can read 100 CDS prospectuses in a weekend and remember it all,” or “Yeah, that guy thinks in algorithms and sleeps once a month. He could code when he was 6.”

“Only an insider can tackle the swamp” is dead wrong. It takes someone radically different to make a radical difference. And I am giddy realizing that they are coming. It does not matter that they do not know the terrain yet. They will. They have 3 months to learn. That’s more than enough.

Watch. Moving into novel systems or spaces and becoming better at it than the people currently there is what these people do. It’s ALL they do. It’s who and what they are.

It does not matter if it’s the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the DMV, or NASA. Same game, same result. every time.

The “insiders” are so screwed. DC has no one like this. They have never even met people like this because people like this avoid government like it is a bag of plague rats. Because it is.

But now they are interested and looking to play exterminator because the state strayed too far into our world and so now we are coming for theirs. And wait until you see what the world’s best builders can tear down. It’s going to be glorious.

These are the same people who in 10 weeks using just sparse public data and Twitter pulled the pants down on the whole edifice of public health and revealed them as fakes, phonies, and charlatans. Then they rewrote the discipline. It will never be the same. Most of us had never even looked at epidemiology before. In a few months the “amateurs” eclipsed the experts and left them for dead.

We did this as outsiders and without any maps and with the very opposite of help. Imagine what this gang can do with the keys to the kingdom.