Jensen Huang's admission he doesn't know his ZIP code sparks 'The Test' essay
A widely shared blog post argues Huang's, Altman's, Andreessen's and Nadella's odd public confessions of ignorance reveal wealth-driven detachment, likened to a loyalty test.
What to know
- Jensen Huang told Ezra Klein's podcast that skills like long division and remembering one's own address or phone number no longer matter.
- A blogger, tante, links Huang's remarks to similar odd admissions from Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman and Satya Nadella as a pattern among tech elites.
- The essay frames such statements as a 'test' where public acceptance signals detachment from ordinary life driven by extreme wealth, comparing it to cult loyalty rituals and Trump's 'Lake America' rebranding.
- The post spread from Mastodon to Hacker News within 24 hours, with at least one reader endorsing its explanation.
Jensen Huang NVIDIA CEO
Ezra Klein Podcast hosttante Blog author
Marc Andreessen Venture capitalist
Sam Altman OpenAI CEO
Satya Nadella Microsoft CEO
How it unfolded 3 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump posts
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Reader endorses tante's 'loyalty test' framing
A Mastodon user reposts the essay's core line, saying it correctly explains why tech executives make such statements.
“Tante hits the nail on the head in his explanation of why tech execs make these wild statements…”
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"These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit. Why would techbros do that? Constantly." (Article title: The Test)
2 more of the top 3 · 21 posts in this stretch
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If this is not just about the wikipedia quote here, what do you mean? Because its rather silly trying to apply it such that all these CEO guys in these instances are Kant's scholars, making "public use" of their reason. Rather than, you know, the pastors and unenlightened monarchs of the essay using their reason privately!> He thereby extracts for…
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“The Test” https:// tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/ > Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing. Tante hits the nail on the head in his explanation of why tech execs make these wild…
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Essay picked up on Hacker News
The post 'The Test' is submitted to Hacker News, spreading discussion of the essay beyond Mastodon.
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Blogger tante publishes 'The Test' essay on tech elite detachment
tante writes that Huang's remarks, alongside similar admissions from Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman and Satya Nadella, reflect how extreme wealth abstracts the rich from everyday friction, and argues public acceptance of such statements functions as a loyalty test comparable to cult behavior and Trump's 'Lake America' rebranding.
“Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.”
— tante -
1 outlet The Test
first by HN Frontpage, 1d ago
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I had a few thoughts on why techbros always say these embarrassing, weird things
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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The Test Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein's podcast. Now I don't really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It's painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening ... kinda like using a…
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background
Jensen Huang tells Ezra Klein basic skills 'don't matter' — On Ezra Klein's podcast, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says forgetting long division and multiplication tables doesn't matter, and admits he doesn't know his own address, ZIP code, or telephone number.
What people are saying 18 voices from 2 sites · best of 23 · verbatim
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The Test von tante... sollten alle lesen die nur # KI zu tun haben 👌
- Yesterday
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Do you really think your world would be any better? Big corporations would still act under the same incentive structures as they do today (and in fact would continue to do so even if you forced them all to become workers’ cooperatives), you’d just find that these companies’ owners just try a little harder to hide their assets.Complaining about…
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So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free. Even worse, you have downside.Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper…
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billionaires are a flaw in the system. it's an obscene amount of wealth for one person to have. A million is a lot for most people but a billion is 1000 of those.
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As others have said: this was not a good faith discussion. Huang was using the interview as an opportunity to “talk his book”, and Klein was using it to sell his own Serious Interviewer brand. Both were getting something out of this.Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of…
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I don't think it's unreasonable to limit a person's total wealth to, say, 100x the median person's lifetime earnings. In America, the median income is about $50k/yr. So 40 years as a wage earner means $2 million. With compounded interest, inflation, and wage growth, it's still under $10 million. So if we capped individual net worth at 100x that…
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So many truths in this post… With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam. Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the…
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I think the reality is even simpler: Huang, Altman and Amodei are in the end of the day head salespeople of their respective company… and they use these social platforms to sell their products.Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
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The idea of "the test" sounds plausible. I wonder if there is evidence that this happens regularly. However, I kinda have a hard time taking arguments seriously which rely on judging certain people to be "weird".
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I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.He passed the test.People need to get a lot more comfortable…
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"The Test" This article is about tech ceos, but the point about cults is directly on target, and I say that as someone who grew up in the Jehovah's Witnesses. Their door to door service, the blood abstinence, the birthday and holiday rejection -- all things that explicitly flag them as outside of normal society -- those are quite literally the…
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"'Huang said we don’t need those skills', 'Altman said Intelligence is something we can just rent from OpenAI', 'Amodei said AI might kill [us] all'. Weird & dumb shit that needs to be challenged. "We can’t save those broken men.... We have way bigger tasks in front of us...pushing back on those claims, pointing out how fucking weird [they] are…
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This post resonates with me but for reasons not given in it. It calls to mind Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" Where he says this:> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its…
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The Test Link: https:// tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/ Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9843550
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Counterpoint: the person who understands how do to a task without the tool often winds up being the more capable user of the tool.
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A tech bros proud of the fact he doesn't know where he lives, the women is his life manage that. Misogynistic losers who can't even find their own house, and world leaders are in thrall to them? https:// tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/ # JensenHuang # TechBros # GenAI # AIHustle # AIBubble
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I'm always surprised by statements about "things we don't need to learn anymore" with AI.It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it…
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Kluger Artikel über die Weltfremdheit der Tech-Bros und das Kultische, das sie damit hervorrufen -- oder in den Worten von William Gibson: "(...) the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human"