The Rise of the Shaman Bro (and his eventual demise)

If you go to a sceney party these days in New York City, you will encounter guys – grown adult men - who dress like wizards.

They wear colorful capes and tunics and crystals. They are surrounded by beautiful women who pulsate about as a DJ pumps trance music set to a tribal African chant.

I realized the other day that this new breed of adult males was becoming a recently formed species in the anthology of American bro types.

They are the Shaman Bros. And they are becoming the apex bros.

Let me explain.  

When I first got to NYC, the Finance Bro reigned supreme.

The coolest thing to do in the year 2007 was to have a job at a bank or better yet “the buyside” – a hedge fund or PE firm. You got tables at Marquee and downed Vodka red bulls while bragging about how many hours you worked to some girl who just graduated from an SEC school and worked in fashion PR.

Then the Great Financial Crisis happened and banks stopped being cool places to work – and the Finance Bro was replaced as the apex bro by a new species – the Tech Bro.

The Tech Bro had much better hours than the Finance Bro and much higher upside. He didn’t brag about his bonus – he looked down on the simple W2 earners with their unfavorable tax rates – he bragged about his equity in a new unicorn start-up.

In the great tech boom of 2010 to 2020, that equity was becoming worth multiples of whatever a finance bro could make.  In fact, the king Tech bros like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page were becoming worth more than the entire market cap of major US banks. Software ate everything and if you were apart of the apparatus that made it, you sat atop the bro pyramid.

But alas, no bro species lasts forever on the top.

The Tech Bro disrupted everything, including himself.

The Tech Bro made it possible for people to essentially not have traditional jobs.  

You see during the reign of the Finance Bro – and for the entire duration of white-collar working history – the Apex bros worked in things called offices. They dressed in suits and had working hours and were part of hierarchies. Every morning they got off the train at Grand Central Station before trekking to a nearby office tower where they toiled at a desk for several hours before eventually heading back home to experience the malaise of Suburban Connecticut. That was called winning the American dream.  

The Tech Bro didn’t care for that.

He wanted to work wherever he felt like working at whatever time he wanted in whatever clothes he chose to wear. And he also wanted nothing to do with a hierarchy.

Employers had no choice but to kowtow to Tech Bro’s demands and thus began the rise of the amorphous life style.

Then a little thing called COVID happened – and the amorphous life style went from being something that tech bros enabled and enjoyed to something that everyone was a part of.

And this is where the Shaman Bro could step in and take over.

It is important to know a few additional things about the Shaman Bro.

You see the Shaman Bro evolved from an earlier bro species called the Promoter Bro.

Back in the day, Finance Bro and Promoter Bro had what evolutionary biologists call a symbiotic relationship – Finance Bro made money and Promoter Bro took the money and used it to acquire girls for Finance Bro’s table at the Chelsea night club.

Promoter bro lived in high style but it was very amorphous– he didn’t have a steady income and relied mainly on the good graces of Finance Bro to make sure he got a free room in a Hampton’s share house. When you asked what he did, he didn’t have a good description – his life was in a word nebulous.

When Finance Bro collapsed, Promoter Bro looked to Tech Bro – but Tech Bro wasn’t as good a host species.

So the Promoter Bro spent some years in the pejorative desert – where he attended a festival called Burning Man. There he dropped acid and communed with dead spirits of an ancient Mesoamerican civilization and discovered that he wasn’t just a glorified pimp hustler without a real job or career prospects but was actually instead a tribal mystic of some sort endowing the world with community. 

When the world collapsed with Covid and everyone adopted the amorphous life style – one that the Promoter Bro now reincarnated as a Shaman Bro had thrived in for years – he all the sudden found himself the king bro. His world of grifting and not really working had now become everyone’s world.

You’re a Tech Bro who wants to go work in Tulum for a month – well you need the Shaman Bro to help you with that.

You’re a Finance Bro who wants to know where the underground party in Tribeca is – well Shaman Bro will tell you.

You’re a hot Estonian model who wants to heal her chakra energy - well Shaman bro is happy to pour oil over your naked body while you take his molly (he’ll insist that to be fully healed you must commune with him physically).

Shaman Bro is the “it” bro.

But already we can see that his reign will come to an end soon.

You see Finance Bro while he was licking his wounds from the utter annihilation of his world is slowly evolving into a new species called the Crypto Bro.

The Crypto Bro sees that this amorphous lifestyle which everyone is enjoying today is actually being funded not by actual work – which people have forgotten to do – but by the Federal Reserve printing money and the government doling out free incomes. The whole thing will all come to an end at some point and probably in horrific manner.

And when it does – the Crypto bro will step in as the new ruling bro.