founder YouTube channel Hoog & ruis former cofounder of YouTube channel fern
Joined May 2026
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Storonsky is one of the better examples of European alpha. Americans are spoiled by easy liquidity and cheap debt. European immigrants who win run on resentment of grandiosity. If only tall poppy syndrome pushed Europeans to take down incumbents rather than never start anything at all.
Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky says easy money makes soft founders:
“A lot of founders think money is free, which it almost is in California because you can raise so much money at ridiculous valuations and then just spend.”
“There is a different culture of trying to solve problems with money rather than with your brains.”
Hoog retweeted
We’re all in this together. Don’t build AIs smarter than you are if you want to stick around.
Great to talk to Niek and the rest of the Hoog team for this one.
I sent my friend, who knows nothing about AI, to interview the people who think AI will kill us. He didn't know who they were or what to ask.
Featuring @So8res, @JeffLadish, @AISpecies, Kristian Rönn, and Felix Choussat.
Full video below:
I sent my friend, who knows nothing about AI, to interview the people who think AI will kill us. He didn't know who they were or what to ask.
Featuring @So8res, @JeffLadish, @AISpecies, Kristian Rönn, and Felix Choussat.
Full video below:
The eyes, Chico. They never lie
Hoog retweeted
I think we should stop AI progress now, first unilaterally by key AI companies and then scaling up to more US companies and then China via international agreements. The reason for now is not that current AI models are the ones that could kill everyone, but because the coordinate steps take time. Immediate action means we have more time for the second steps.
When I tell this story to AI company folk, the typical response is "Yes pausing is good, but we should wait until the last minute when the very next model will be dangerous, and stop then."
What I realized recently is that this is being implicitly way more optimistic about government speed than I am (and I joined the UK government and was happy there for 2.5 years). They are imagining a world where, the moment the danger is imminent, a bunch of international coordination can happen on a dime.
Which is entirely inconsistent with their actual views about government! I'm the one that is more optimistic about government; why am I the one advocating for more time cushion to let the government story play out?
Hoog retweeted
I’m speaking at the launch of Wij Willen Groei, the Dutch pro-growth movement, next week Thursday. If you’re in Amsterdam, you should join us.
We beginnen op donderdag 29 oktober, precies een jaar na de verkiezingen, vanaf 19.00 uur in Amsterdam. Zorg dat je erbij bent en praat mee met o.a. @jortkelder, @LawrenceNewport en @PieterGaricano. Bouw mee, pionier mee: wijwillengroei.nl
Hoog retweeted
Some big personal news: I'm moving to join Works in Progress as executive editor, starting next month. I have been hoping for an opportunity to work with @bswud and @s8mb for more than a decade, and I'm incredibly excited to finally have one.
WIP is expanding on every front right now. We'll soon begin coverage of business and finance, as well as putting out more reported features. To that end, we'll be hiring more writers and reporters in the year to come. I'm planning to remain based in the US to help build out our presence here.
The print edition of WIP has existed for less than 12 months, but sometime in the next week or so we will reach our 10,000th paying print subscriber. It's a group that now includes people who've been at the highest echelons of government and who run the world's biggest public companies. We’re already on track to 3x that number next year. We'll be in store at Barnes & Noble, Hudson News and independent newsagents next week too.
I think WIP is providing something that people are craving from physical media right now: fewer, extremely well-crafted pieces in a beautifully designed form. Issues now feature an amazing group of columnists, including Tyler Cowen, Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin. Each edition is better than the last.
You'll see us in more and more places next year too. In January, our new weekly documentary films will launch on YouTube. We're expanding into the events space, with a new series in North America. The sky is the limit from here on out.
Hoog retweeted
There are some tech people who think that most humans are basically trash. But I don't expect this attitude to last far beyond 2026, as godlike AI forces them to realize that the difference between themselves and a 70-IQ poor person is actually pretty minuscule.
Hoog retweeted
actually nyc should annex Long Island, bulldoze it to the ground, and build high rises as far as the eye can see. there must be 50 million new Yorkers. few are brave enough to say this
Hoog retweeted
This Blakeman attitude is exactly why so many young people have turned against "capitalism" (i.e., the status quo economic system)
slowboring.com/p/to-save-cap…
Hoog retweeted
This is one of the reasons CA and NY struggle in housing. It's not just that many Dems have NIMBY tendencies. It's that the Republicans there are actively worse!
Hochul deserves praise for her push on this, even though, as she says, much more is needed.
Hoog retweeted
What's the cause of the housing crisis: high migration or low housebuilding?
The UK has the second fewest homes per 1,000 of any Western European country and is now 6.9 million homes short of the average.
Despite building 1.1 million homes between 2020 and 2025, England's homes per 1,000 people actually decreased, which indicates a housing shortage that is getting worse due to record migration.
Had net migration stayed in the tens of thousands since 2020, house prices would be roughly £15,270 lower in England. And if net migration had been kept to 100,000 a year since 1997, about a third of that 6.9 million home shortage would disappear.
But high migration is only one side of the story. Our chronic failure to build enough homes explains the rest.
Since 1982, England has built on average only 178,000 homes a year. If England had just matched France's building rates since the 1980s, half of the housing shortage would have been eliminated. France has consistently built homes faster than its population grows, while England has stagnated since the mid-2000s.
Combining building an achievable number of homes with sustainable migration levels would have effectively closed most of the housing shortage.
You can read the full briefing here: cps.org.uk/research/the-uks-…
Hoog retweeted
you're going to see a nonstop deluge of esteemed professionals saying 'well yes it frees everyone from pointless labor & dramatically increases the quality of services available to the average human but it also means I have to lose status so who can say if it's good or not'
Hoog retweeted
Alcohol, being disinhibiting, allows people to build trust between and have fun with each other when they wouldn’t be able to do so soberly. It helps to temporarily level status hierarchies and allows more social risk-taking, which is why people often meet future lovers when they’re drinking and drink when building relationships. People can be silly together when drinking, and people who aren’t ever silly are to my mind more prone to collective fanaticism.
There is a time and place for sobriety - work and time with children especially - but alcohol underpins a lot of the social interactions that make trust-based civilization possible.
Hoog retweeted
I’m very glad we have a cocktail column in Works in Progress. The rise of teetotalism in places like San Francisco is dangerous to civilization; this feels like a small stand against it. Hopefully we will add non-pretentious writing about wine at some point too.
The new issue of @WorksInProgMag both looks and feels fantastic (they are now using a matte paper instead of glossy).
Featured cocktail in this issue: Hanky Panky
Actually still just the difference between European status and American status.
The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.
worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:
- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.
- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.
- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.
- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.
- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.
This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.
Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.
