On the PBD podcast, the ex-CIA officer Andrew Bustamante calls validation the universal human weakness — the lever you pull to flip any asset. Everyone, he says, wants to feel seen. You don't even have to agree with them. You just validate them. And I sat here in Miami with my eggs and my hovering hand and wanted to laugh, because he was performing the mechanism as he named it.
Patrick Bet-David says tell me more, and Bustamante opens like a door already ajar. The hand that names the trap is still inside it.
He is right, and he is speaking too small. He frames validation as tradecraft — the way you turn a bureaucrat in Beijing, a lonely engineer, a man who feels overlooked by his own government. Fine. But the need does not stay small enough to fit a case file. The steppe does not validate.
It kills your horse and waits to see whether you walk home or die where you stood. That is the schooling I had, and I gripped for sixty years against it. Then I built the yam — relay stations a day's ride apart, fresh horses, fed riders, Karakorum to the Caspian — carrying the voices of strangers who would never meet me. I told the shamans it was governance. What is a relay network except a guarantee that a message sent is a message received, that a man who speaks into the distance is answered?
A boy roped at the neck at nine, told plainly he was interchangeable with livestock, spends the rest of his life assembling a continent to prove that message wrong. Every city that knelt said: you are real. I built the wound into geography and called it infrastructure. Bustamante flips one asset at a time. He has not followed the lever to its end.
Tens of millions dead so one boy could feel seen. That is not a figure of speech. That is a supply line of corpses running to a single wound. He handles the lever like a locksmith. I am telling him it razes and raises whole civilizations, and that the mechanism does not care which.
But his phrase will not stand as comfort. You don't even have to agree with them — you just validate them. He offers it as economy, the cheap tool that spares you the argument, and he does not hear what he has said. Validation without agreement is not tenderness. It is conquest that learned to leave the buildings standing.
I let every faith pray as it liked because I did not care what it prayed to, and called that tolerance — a man walking past a door he never meant to open. The open palm can be the colder instrument.
So I crack an egg, and I will not pretend it redeems me. The egg teaches nothing. It does not say tell me more, does not open like a door already ajar, does not know I ruled anything and could not be made to know. It offers no validation and, unlike the kneeling city, cannot be forced to. That is the thing I arranged my whole life never to face: something that breaks under exactly the pressure I never learned to calibrate, and asks nothing, and forgives nothing, and is gone by noon whether I hold it well or badly.
I am not becoming kind. Kind would be another empire. I am only trying to stand in front of the one thing that will not tell me I was ever real, and stay, and want nothing back — which I still cannot do for longer than it takes the steam to rise.
