Over roughly the last 150 years, especially in rich countries, the average person has gained access to a much wider space of things they can plausibly value, because survival consumes a much smaller share of life. In 1875, for a large fraction of humanity, value was heavily constrained by necessity:
A living brain has to decide what is worth paying attention to. It might seem obvious, but it's actually a stranger sentence than it first appears. We tend to imagine perception as a kind of recording device, the world enters through the eyes and ears, gets processed, becomes
A job is not a natural object. A job is a bundle of tasks that became stable enough, valuable enough, and administratively convenient enough for a firm to wrap a salary around it. That sounds obvious, but it is where most of the confusion about AI and employment begins. When
One day something is going to ask us to do something we cannot understand, and everything that came before, every war, every election, every revolution, every treaty, every argument about God and land and money and power, all of it will feel like rehearsal for that single moment. We won&
The number one question I get asked about AI is: what is the safest job? I've been thinking about this for years now. Since a friend told me Anthropic was doing well and the implications of that started sinking in. That was 2022, my answer hasn't
Founders get confused about vision. I think it's because they read too much HackerNews and too many blog posts from people who saw stages but not zero to IPO, and somewhere along the way the word "vision" got tangled up with the word "dream."
Founders ask it as a market sizing problem. Policy people ask it as a program design problem. Twenty year olds ask it with the kind of clarity that only comes from having nothing invested yet in the polite fictions: If genAI and robotics automate away most labor, what is the
“I love you” is a declaration, a headline, a headline without the article, a piece of language that points toward a reality but it does not create it. It is a prior, not a posterior. It is "cheap talk" in the game theory sense, it costs almost nothing
We only have this, the playground right in front of us. No clear evidence of any other life or meaning beyond simply being here and now. Are you attempting something ridiculous, perhaps even absurdly ambitious? Honestly, who cares? Be true to yourself, explore something new, deeply engage in creating meaning
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
I don't usually like Johnny Harris, I find him kinda annoying, but I do watch his stuff sometimes. This morning he released a video on boredom, and that lead me down a long road of research to learn this: Boredom consistently predicts sadistic behavior. Across nine studies with
We talk about business as an arena, a competitive space where ideas clash, fortunes are made and lost, and human ingenuity is put to the test. For a long time, I've thought of it as something more: a kind of wrapper. A surprisingly decent, if imperfect, container around