Sergey Brin's Unretirement

I wish he'd brought back "Don't Be Evil" to Google, as well as himself.

I took a moment to participate in an ARIN (https://www.arin.net) call. They drive policy for IP addresses that run the Internet. Anyway, one thing that stood out to me was during a portion of the conference the organization was holding elections for open seats. The seats are open to anyone, I'm pretty sure.

There were a bunch of people, from across the country, MANY in retirement, trying their best to sell themselves that they are the right candidate.

Sergey can just make a phone call and he gets to build Gemini and run a billion dollar organization and have meaning in old-age. This is what wealth buys you. The rest of us, I guess, we will be arm-wresteling for the few open oppertunities to make an impact.

Do you think he can still spend time on his $450 million yacht or is he too busy writing prompts?

Snark aside, good for him. Absolute non-news though, as is any extraordinary individual action during and contributing to a bubble. It'll be interesting to see what stays when, or if, the bubble ever pops.

I was semi in retirement.

Actually just jobless, but I was doing side projects here and there

Retirement gets boring fast —- and you lose connections to the rhythm of society fast.

For the vast majority of humans, an idle mind is depressing and destructive

Hard to believe he did it "out of boredom".

It lines up with the AI arms race kicking into overdrive around ChatGPT's triumph in late 2022. Brin pops out of hiding right then, admitting Google "messed up" and starts coding, analysing losses, and basically playing dictator with his super-voting shares to shove the company back on track.

Rivals like OpenAI yanked him in and now he's in the office daily because the "trajectory of AI is so exciting" - translation: his ego couldn't handle watching his empire get outpaced, and with those voting rights, he can bulldoze through bureaucracy to keep the throne.

Ultimately, it's less about some profound quest for purpose and more about a control freak safeguarding his legacy and billions as the tech world burns. He never really let his kingdom go.

Grandfather in village still farms at 90+.

Retirement is a scam. Figure out what you want to do and do it until you drop.

I too would very happily do just the bits of my job that I like, when and how I want, and have any requests or comments or complaints I make get immediate attention and responses.

All in the knowledge that no one is going to be time-tracking me or doing performance reviews, and I can just not do work at any moment I don't feel like it or have something better to do that day, like go to my private island or take my private jet to burning man etc (or as it turns out do a talk at Stanford). All while you have so much money that the price of anything from clothes to cars to houses is just some arbitrary number that has no meaning to you it is so absolutely tiny number... not that you actually buy anything yourself any more, mainly your team of personal staff deal with that grubby reality.

As for the rest of us, well we need to pay the bills while playing "the game" and politics and cowtowing to keep the money coming.

Reminder: Sergey Brin is a creep who believes in hiring women so he can sleep with them.

The fact he's allowed back inside Google means Google still has a massively unresolved workplace sexual harassment issue.

Retirement wasn't as interesting as a role at the company you founded where everyone looks up to you, doing whatever you feel like with no expectations or defined responsibilities? Shocker

Seriously, I'm glad he came back and found something he's interested in. I bet his role has grown some responsibilities, too.

What a horrible promo-article - in particular when we look at the damage caused by Google in total. I actually think it would be better if the two original Google guys would, while shamefully admitting to have failed, stop working altogether. Others can fix the problems Google caused.

> "Going back to work just for fun might sound like a uniquely billionaire move."

Ah yeah? Can be boredom too. I fail to see why this article wants to promote this.

> Like many people, Brin had a relaxing vision for his post-working life. “I was gonna sit in cafés and study physics, which was my passion at the time,” he told the Stanford audience.

Any why would anyone take this at face value? How many of the guys there were paid to go there by the way?

PR-piece for the Epstein thing, isn't it? Just in time. Brin also likes them young, the nounce that he is, and no legal entity in the US is going to do shit about it.

Imagine if they locked Serg out of the protected quantum research he loved reading as it was department employees only and the only way he could continue his access was returning to work at a senior enough level to cross read. Imagine.

The problem with famous people unretiring and doing something different is they are kind of the nepobaby children of their former career arc selves. I both feel bad for him but am glad he's happier now.

Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)

I really don't buy his explanation. Here's one of the world's smartest guys, with more money than Smaug, and he really couldn't come up with anything better than going back to Google to work on Gemini?

What's the point of all that money if you won't even hire someone to help you find hobbies.

So many STEM universities have online courses. The art world froths itself mad over smart people with stupid money. Local projects beg for angels like him.

Hell even just doing the AI schtick but for free open source or as a pet startup.

My mind reels with ideas. Why didn't his?

> Having given so much of themselves to their careers, they often felt unmoored and purposeless when they left their jobs.

That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.

My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.

I was kind of retired, earning passive crypto income for several years after 2019 throughout COVID. Best time of my life. I was living on a Mediterranean island, splitting my time between snorkeling and open source work.

Then I got cheated out of my position in the crypto project. Literally scammed by the project founder with the full support of government regulators who are supposed to be preventing this stuff and lost all my income overnight. The regulators literally facilitated fraud instead of preventing it... And I had the pleasure of being gaslit about it while also being gaslit about COVID by a different set of regulators. I became a conspiracy theorist during this time! Now I'm forced to work again...

It's especially infuriating in this age of perma-bailouts where the system is basically bailing out everyone with assets.

I figured out that the system is a scam. I can prove it to anyone in excruciating detail, with citations. If anyone should be bailed out, it should be me. I shouldn't be forced back in the hamster wheel. It's hard to compete against others who think the system works a certain way and don't realize how the hamster wheel works. I shouldn't have to compete with delusional fools who think that their effort spent on the hamster wheel is going to yield any rewards.

Anyway it drives me nuts how the only people who can afford to retire, choose not to... And those who are desperate to retire, can't! This is so pervasive, it feels like a psyop.

Living as we do in a society where basic needs are not guaranteed without a giant pile of money, most humans don’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a place where you don’t base your life decisions on financial well being. Thats very limiting; it isn’t that surprising that someone who has achieved that is now looking for meaning in other things. Besides: if you’re Sergey Brin, I imagine you can get to talk/work with whatever at Google interests you most and hand off the gruntwork to minions all the while being treated with deep reverence. It’s not exactly hard to see why he might like it.

One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.

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Should of moved and signed up for physics classes on the East coast or Europe. No wonder they got pulled back into the valley bubble.

This article reads like propaganda to keep the worker bees slaving away until they die. But I have a few things to say about this and Sergey Brin in particular.

In the early days, many considered Sergey Brin to be the soul or the conscience of Google. He was reportedly the driving force in Google originally pulling out of China rather than capitulating to the censorship regime [1]. This was also after the apparent state-sponsored hack of Google in China [2] so perhaps the motivations were mixed? I don't know.

But Sergey I think is a good example of someone for whom his creation outgrew him. I'm reminded of an old Jeff Atwood blog post where he quoted Accidental Empires [3]. Sergey was a commando. By 2010 Google needed an army. Now? Police.

GoogleX has Sergey's playground but if you look at the track record, possibly the only success I think is Waymo. Glass (mentioned in the article) was not a success and his affair with a subordinate also destroyed his marriage [4].

To me it felt like Sergey was drifting many years before he stepped away. His stepping away felt more like formalizing something that had already happened.

I'm not a billionaire. Not even close. Honestly, I think I'm glad about that because it seems like despite being surrounded with unimaginable wealth, many such people end up isolated and rudderless, desperately dsearching for meaning and connection. Or maybe that's just cope (from me).

The article mentions Gates and how he keeps busy with his philanthropy. Well, there's another piece of common ground between Gates and Brin: Jeffrey Epstein [5]. That's not intended as an implicit or explicit accusation of child predation by Gates or Brin or even of either having knowledge of such malfeasance, to be clear.

But even with a fraction of the DoJ's documents disclosed as well as from the Epstein estate, we can begin to paint a macabre picture of the connections between rich and powerful people that for some reason always seem to have Jeffrey Epstein at their nexus and that means something though we don't really know what.

Has Sergey had a substantial impact on Gemini? Will he? I have no idea. I do wonder if someone worth $100 billion really has the perspective and drive to move something like this. Google has a deep bench of talent and one thing Google is very good at is optimizing code that runs at scale by making their own networking, servers, racks, data centers, data center operating system (ie Borg) and code and efficiency is going to be a huge deal in the LLM space for the foreseeable future.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704266504575141...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11920616

[3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/

[4]: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...

[5]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/lolita-passports-and-m...

How about finishing off that Ph.D., Mr. Brin (alas, you would need to find yourself a new supervisor, given Prof. Motwani's tragic drowning)?