The Frontier Versus the Core: A Discussion with Maxwell Meyer

Maxwell Meyer is the founder of Arena Magazine, a beautiful collectible magazine that harkens to my beloved Monocle magazine but whose topic is more optimistic American propaganda as he calls it. The magazine is beautiful, the images standout, the writing is awesome. A throwback as everything else becomes more digital. He is a thinker and observer of America and its culture, stating that “Risk Tolerance is an American advantage” which is very true. 

But one of his most important ideas is that of the Frontier versus the Core. You need both to work together but they are very different. He talked about it in a podcast with Jackson Dahl.

“The root question is, how do we export more of this? Clearly, people are thinking about exporting this to government. There's no new founder in the government. There's no new founder of Kodak or a big, dumb, slow company.

People even say Satya Nadella refounded Microsoft, and that's what has enabled him to be so effective. You could say that Microsoft is a bit of a Theseus's ship that's been rebuilt. What are they still doing that they were doing back then? They still make Windows. Excel. They make Excel. Excel is probably the through line. They have the cloud business. They did the foray into phones; it totally blew up and didn't work at all.

By leaving that, the joke ended up being on Apple because Microsoft built this other huge business that Apple wasn't even paying attention to.

The point about a Kodak, or why government is different from Silicon Valley and why some Silicon Valley people misapprehend how the government works, is related to this idea of an engineering culture. Concrete things are easier to prove or disprove.

Just look at the data. This is also tied in with the idea of the frontier, where you're really testing out whether things are or are not working. Joe Lonsdale and I have written about this conception of the frontier in American history, trying to connect literal cowboy culture and the spirit of technological experimentation. Some people will be skeptical of this connection, but I'll try to persuade them.

On the old frontier, if you don't have your wits about you, you get shot, you get scalped, you get eaten by hyenas. There are lots of things that happen. Adventurers, if they survive, turn out stronger on the other end. The ideas that they're proving out on the frontier tend to be very resilient and very long lasting.

They tend to be people or ideas that can solve new types of problems. Maybe there's a connection between the fact that California is this Pacific frontier. It's over the mountains, there are these valleys, there's this coast. It's the energy of the west. 

The other idea that Joe and I talk about is that the opposite of the frontier is the core. In any empire or civilization, you have a core and a frontier. It's a dialectic. They're both very important. You need the core to set the laws and give cohesiveness and unity, and you need the frontier to push it. It's like pace layers—the fashion and the culture or the natural layers. It's a dialectic, and they need to remain in balance. 

A country or a civilization or some other organization can drift a little bit more toward the frontier. For example, the United States from 1789 when Washington became president all the way until 1861 when the Civil War started. It was just expand, expand, expand, expand. Then it was a little too "frontier-y," and we forgot the core was on fire—Civil War, et cetera.

One of the arguments that we'd make right now is that America has been a little too heavy on the core. Washington, D.C. is now the richest place in the universe. The suburbs of Washington are the wealthiest place in the world. It's the craziest thing. You have all these laws piling up, all these federal employees, all this bureaucracy, and that is clearly not being battle-tested like things are at the frontier. 

There's no possible way for government programs to go away naturally. There's no natural churn. Where's the natural churn? They're not forced to fight for their survival. If you can apply these principles of competition, the frontier, and the Karl Popper idea of falsifiability—if something's not falsifiable, it's not science—we should be trying to be more scientific or have a more engineering mindset. There are some things that were more political reforms rather than implementing an engineering culture. But one thing the critics of DOGE got wrong is that they were never going to accept any cuts. As soon as the cuts got concrete, it was going to be on the attack.

Karp does not talk about DOGE in the book. The book was actually written before 2024. It's the example of: can we apply this mindset? Joe Gebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb, has just been announced as the Chief Design Officer of the United States.

They're clearly going to implement these ideas in various areas of the government, in a way that may not be less offensive to political objectors.

Is there objectively a better way to design a website? The government says, "No, let's pay someone to do it." Silicon Valley says, "Yes, there's an objective way to do it, and this is why we have $70 billion and you don't." There was something provably, falsifiably true about it. You would know if we were bullshitters because it wouldn't work. 

In the government, there's no such competing pressure. There are no hyenas, there are no Comanches coming to rip your hair off. You don't have the paranoia of the frontier. The paranoia of the frontier.

This is closely connected to Elon's erratic personality, in that he's repeatedly taken these things to the utter limit, to the edge of the abyss. That is where you can learn.

It goes back to how blowing up the rocket was more valuable to Elon than the people in the core could possibly know because he was testing something at the edges of what's possible. That is where you get to falsifiable results. Is this working or not? That's the engineering culture.

There were political reasons why Elon was unpopular with some of these people.

Could there have been a DOGE without some of the more partisan elements? Yes, and maybe it would have worked better. But part of the reason for the hatred of DOGE, the idea of it, and the hit pieces on the young men working on it is that there will always be a negative reaction from the established set if it threatens them.

That's a natural human emotion, and I'm not necessarily attacking it. Sometimes there's a pendulum swing, and people need to accept it.”

A bit of a long one. But it’s so helpful to understand what happens in the empire and where you belong in it (and for those who don’t think America is an empire, not sure what to say). I’d go insane if I lived in the core. Don’t mind visiting the core but I'm a frontier kind of guy. And a big part of any success in life is knowing where you belong and where you can thrive.