“He said to me, ‘We’re all machines.’ That’s it. You get to choose the nature of the machine you are. We’re all machines, but some of us are smart enough that we get to determine our programming.” What he’d said: Fools believe rebellion is possible. Capital determines everything. You can either calibrate yourself to that or think you’ve rejected it. But the latter, Stephen Johnson said, was a delusion. You were either going to get rich or not. You only had to choose. Stephen Johnson and he were the same kind of person. He was who he was—patriarch, intellect, husband, collector of fine watches,
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