Billionaire venture capitalist Doug Leone once underwent a root canal without Novocaine -- deliberately putting himself through the excruciating procedure to find out whether he was really a "badass."
Page A2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 1 September 2026
Billionaire skips anesthesia to prove toughness; tech industry's AI future actually depends on blue-collar workers.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened: a Silicon Valley billionaire had a dentist drill into his tooth with no numbing agent, on purpose, to find out if he was tough. That's the whole story. Not an accident, not an emergency, a choice, made by a man with access to every anesthetic on earth, because he wanted to know if he could take pain like a normal working person takes it every day without a choice in the matter.
Meanwhile, the actual answer to who's tough enough to build the future came out the same week, in a much less interesting sentence: turns out Big Tech's AI boom needs blue-collar labor. Somebody has to run the cable, pour the concrete for the data center, wire the cooling systems that keep the servers from melting down under the weight of the industry's own ambition. That's not a metaphor about toughness. That's guys with tool belts doing the physical work that makes the fantasy possible.…
…(cont) You see the arrangement, right? One guy pays out of pocket to simulate discomfort as a personality trait, a hobby, a story he gets to tell at dinner. The other guys don't get to simulate it. They show up, they do the job, hopefully somebody showed up to check the wiring too, and their toughness doesn't get a magazine profile — it gets a paycheck, if they're lucky, and maybe a mention in a trend piece about how essential they've suddenly become to a boom they'll never own a share of.
That's the tell. When the guy at the top wants to feel something real, he goes looking for pain on purpose because his life doesn't hand him any. When the guy actually doing the dangerous work needs something, it's usually a raise, or better conditions, or someone to notice the job at all, and somehow that's the harder ask to grant. Nobody's writing a magazine profile about him. He's just supposed to be grateful the AI future needs him, right up until it doesn't need him anymore, and then somebody else's root canal becomes the story instead.
“A billionaire pays a dentist to skip the numbing shot just to see if he can take pain, the same week the industry admits its AI boom runs on blue-collar labor that never got offered a choice about pain on the job. One toughness test gets a magazine write-up, the other gets a hard hat.”
“This root canal story is a private health choice, entirely unrelated to labor trends in tech — the blue-collar workforce piece is simply a market signal about demand, not a — okay, not a comment on who actually carries the risk, I hear how that sounded, moving on.”
The receipts
We are living through some interesting times. Not even two years ago, I would have said one of the fastest-growing white-collar job industries for college graduates was Big Tech. The giants, such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft, were not at all concerned about hammers, nails, plumbers, and electricians.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.