CLI

[Retardmaxxing; Break up with Whoever you need to; Collect Information; Have Faith in Yourself to Deal with the Consequences; Ripping Asymmetry; Tail Risk & One Way Doors; If]

Thesis: You've already made your next hard decision, you just haven't taken the action yet.

[Retardmaxxing]

Chances are, there is some 'big decision' you need to make right now.

Chances are, you're thoughtfully analyzing it, talking about it with trusted people, and really trying to get it right.

Chances are, you already know what decision you need to make.

Chances are, you're just mentally masturbating over it and delaying actually making it far longer than you need to.

To get the outcome you want in life, hard work is very important. Call me old school, but I believe it is necessary.

At the same time, though, it's also necessary to make some particular hard decisions. Even if you are working like an absolute animal, not making these decisions will be massive roadblocks to getting what you want.

And making them, even if your choice is imperfect, will let you move further and faster than you ever have before.

Enter Retardmaxxing, an oft repeated phrase in startup circles and probably elsewhere now, too (but I wouldn't know).

It's a call to stop over thinking and start doing. It’s a call to make the decision that you know you have to.

Yes, there will be consequences. Some will be good, some will be bad. But you're already enduring consequences by wasting your life trying to make up your mind.

[Break up with Whoever you need to]

By the end of college, one of the hardest decision I ever made was parting ways with a business partner of 4 years.

Really, though, it was a decision I could've made sooner. My first reservations in the relationship came up 28 months before we ended it.

This is an obscene amount of time to spend making a decision, especially one that is so important.*

12 months before it was over, my reservations became very strong. Then, I did the right thing and started collecting the information I would need to make a decision.

After 2 months, I’m sure I had enough info to make the right decision. Regardless, I spent another 10 months over analyzing it, talking to people about it, going back and forth on it, and generally being half in and half out.

Those 10 months were so much worse than the moment in which I finally firmly asserted myself and the outcome I was going to get. And they were made much worse by a few attempts in which I was goaded out of the decision I had already told myself I was committed to.

If I didn’t have that one moment of acting with absolute decisiveness, every day that passed would’ve been far worse than that instant.

To be clear, I don't look back and actively regret the time this all took; the experience has made me a lot more decisive today. When I had a similar situation not long after, it took only 3 months between being fairly certain there was a problem, collecting information, and acting decisively to initiate the end.

Still a lot of time, but a massive improvement.

Now, my time scale for similar decisions about all sorts of relationships and hard decisions, depending on the severity and complexity, are more often at the scale of weeks or days, not months. And, in some cases, the time between resolving to take action and actually taking that action has been as short as a couple of hours.

To some extent, I'm sure I'm a better decision maker. But, way more important than that, I've accepted the fact that I will make mistakes, there will be consequences, but I will be okay.

_{*It may sound counter intuitive; while the important decisions should be made thoughtfully, they should also be made quickly, because they are often the ones blocking the outcome you want. That’s why they’re important!}

[Collect Information]

I would be willing to bet that you already have enough information to make your decision, and you're just not making it.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that you're missing something.

If that's the case, then go collect whatever missing information you need to make the decision, ASAP.

When Jack & I were trying to sell a software product to retail investors, we weren't sure if we were going in the right direction, but it felt very wrong. Still, we weren't sure.

So Jack did something very simple to solve it. He called our best users and tried to get them to pay, literally even just $1.

They wouldn't! At the same time, we had a guy venmo us $50 to customize the offering for a sales use case.

If that information doesn't make the decision that needs to be made obvious, I don't know what would!

Still, we were in a bigger organization by startup standards (5 decision makers) and it took nearly a month to jettison the original value prop and move on to the next thing.

Looking back at the opportunity cost, that month of indecision was expensive month!

To be crystal clear, collecting the information needed to make the decision took less than an hour. The rest of the time was nonsense debates and talks of ‘derisking.’

Now, I'd scream at myself, "Derisking what?!" We had no revenue, 1000 free 'users' who weren't paying us and basically didn't use it, and the damn thing was costing money to run and engineering time to maintain!

The easy part was collecting the information needed to make the right decision. The long, drawn out part was actually making the damn decision.

[Have Faith in Yourself to Deal with the Consequences]

Whenever you go to make a 'big' decision, your brain is flooded with thoughts of the consequences. Three classes of big ones are:

1. What if so and so doesn't like it?

2. What if this very unlikely but kind of bad thing happens?

3. What if this good thing happens and we have to deal with it?

The same thing is true about all 3 of these classes of consequences: yes, they might happen, but no, it's not as bad as you think.

The first one is a given; of course somebody won't like your decision! 

No matter what it is, there is a way to criticize it. When I had my second business break up, some people agreed that it was absolutely necessary and encouraged me to do it. On the other hand, others decided that their lawyers wanted to be pen pals with my lawyers and some people won't even talk to me anymore!

From DHH / Jason Fried’s book, Getting Real

Still, I know firmly that I did the right thing. And, I know that there is no situation in which you can make a decision that everyone will agree with, so stop trying.

For the second thing, it's hardly ever as bad or likely as you think. When we doubled BirdDog's price, we thought, "what if win rate goes down and people stop buying from us?" Well, that didn't happen; counter intuitively, it went up! But even if it did go down, oh well… we just could've lowered prices again!

And the last one is actually laughable a lot of the time. You're literally talking yourself out of success. These are what one of my mentors calls calls champagne problems.

"What if someone copies are startup because we tell people about it?"

This happened to us! It's flattering. It means someone thinks we have a good idea. It means the market is taking note. It also means they'll be doing marketing for our concept. And, it means they're a copy cat and damned to stay a few steps behind, or they wouldn't need to copy!

[Ripping Asymmetry]

Our smallest client became our biggest client in 2 week because of one decision.

Jack and I have integrated with a vendor in our space so our data is available in their platform. Nobody was using it, so Jack considered giving them an offer we started giving to some of our bigger clients - reduce the frequency of signals by 15x, and reduce the price by 10x. (Great trade for us)

I had some objections, one was probably in each of the three categories above. Stuff like monthly monitoring isn't as valuable as every other day, what if they don't like it, what if they don't think it's useful.

One of them was even 'what if they scale usage too fast and we can't keep up?'

What kind of dumb fucking objection is that? I was literally saying "What if it goes TOO well?"

We have a unit profitable business. If it goes that well that inherently means we have the money to scale it up.

All businesses that are doing well have growing pains. You pray for it, don't fear it. It’s your job to stay on top of it and add what’s needed to keep up.

And to be clear, we've already made this customer aware of this concern at the start of our engagement; they know our scale and our resources and where we might have to pause adding more usage from them to keep the service stable for our other clients.

Instead of wasting 3 days on this conversation and decision, I threw out all the objections at once in a 15 minute conversation. All Jack had to say, bless his heart, was, "Their customer isn’t using it right now. Real worst case is they still don't use it and give up."

And that's correct. They could've kept on not using it.

But we made the hard, scary decision, and now they're paying us more money than any other client.

[Tail Risk & One Way Doors]

While we're talking about consequences, I need to throw in a note here: if you're introducing a significant probability that something truly bad happens, like you go bankrupt or die or put your loved ones in danger… yeah, you should fucking think about it a bit more.

But that's not what this post is about--this post is about the fact that the vast majority of risk you deal with in the modern world is NOTHING like this kind of risk you're acting like it is.

For some reason, our anxiety levels around the possibility of someone not liking us are the same as what they should be about the possibility of losing an arm. And our anxiety levels about living at our parents’ house for 6 months are what they should be if you're risking marooning your wife and kids in a violent wilderness for 6 years.

Most of the things you are worried about really aren't that deep. Take a deep breath, and stop acting like they are.

And on the other hand, you might think the decision you're about to make is a one way door you can't go back through. Sometimes it is, but a lot of the time, its not. You're not revoking US citizenship; quitting your job doesn't mean you can never get another job ever again.

And when it is a one way door, like walking away from a relationship, if you're really spending this much time debating if you're going to leave, why would you want to stay on that side of the one way door, anyways? Either leave, or change your perception and stop fretting about it. If you do neither, staying will only cause you both pain.

You're letting fear and analysis paralysis stop you from doing what you know you need to do. You can analyze something forever and ever. Or, you can just do it and see what happens.

This is the spirit of Retardmaxxing: take a deep breath and do the thing you really know you need to do. The cost of inaction is so often higher than the cost of being wrong.

I write this every single Sunday with my human fingers, no ai allowed. Topics usually include startups, the ai bubble, critical thinking, and becoming the person you want to be. Subscribe if you want to read more.

[If]

I know, I know, it's so hard to do that thing you know you should do.

I'm going to be sad, though, if while reading this post you resolved to do something and then don't actually do it.

So why don't you just do it now? The faster you do it, the faster you can move on to the next thing.

Making these kinds of decision is a muscle, and having that muscle is a very, very freeing feeling

I’ll leave with some parting one liners:

• If you handle one excuse, then a second, then a third, you’re not handling rational excuses; you just are making excuses.

• “In life, we chose our regrets.” - Christopher Hitchens quoting someone else

• You've already made your next hard decision, you just haven't taken the action yet.

• Literally every line of if by Rudyard Kipling

Live Deeply,

CL

[It's Okay to Say No; No to Features; No to a Relationship; No to Politics; Default No]

Thesis: Your right to say no is stronger than their right to try to make you say yes.

[It's Okay to Say No]

'No' is the gatekeeper of your time.

Saying 'yes' to everything means that the gate is open, and your time flows out from you in whichever direction the person or thing that most recently asked for it wants to it.

This is particularly challenging when we live in a world so hyper optimized to continuously get yes's from you. Yes to watching that video, yes to paying attention to this thing, yes to looking at this new oh so super important thing-that-already-changed-the-world-yesterday-when-you-apparently-weren't-paying-attention. But hurry, pay attention now or you'll get left behind!!!

Every time you muster the strength to say no, you set a boundary and re affirm your claim on your time and focus and attention.

I say ‘muster the strength,’ because particularly if you are historically a people pleaser, saying no requires more energy than it does to say yes.

But, like a muscle, it's something you can get better at everyday.

So, this week, I'll be sharing 3 examples of ways I said no that required concentrated effort:

1. No to Features - As I'm rewriting my product, I'm saying no to a lot of features that people have asked for & I thought might be important

2. No to a Relationship - A brief romantic relationship ended after I said no to a change that was requested of me

3. No to Politics - I said no to helping someone with an issue she asserts is critical. This one was the most challenging and perhaps the most thought provoking.

This post is a reflection for myself on saying no, and is meant to serve as a reminder to you that you can say no, too.

It's critical to remember that your right to say no is stronger than their right to try to make you say yes. Put another way, your right to not care is stronger than their right to try to make you care.

I'd go as far as to say that the goal is to get so good at saying no that it's your default response to requests for your time.

This isn’t an argument against generosity; in the end, I think that saying no actually makes every yes so much more meaningful and valuable.

[No to Features]

As you may know, I've been rewriting the front end to my software product, BirdDog. As I'm engineering it, I'm rapidly making a lot of small decisions about the product.

A heuristic I'm using to help guide these decisions is asking, "Which solution is simpler?" And then, I tend to go with that!

This sounds lazy, and in someways it is. But that's a good thing!

The simpler the product is, the easier it will be to maintain and update.

I am the only developer, and we are trying to hit $1M ARR without hiring anyone else. Since we've accepted this constraint, we're accepting the implied constraint that the product must be simple and easy to maintain and extend when needed. (Contrary to what ai boosters and vibe coders would have you believe, less code is preferable to more code)

So, while you can call going with the simple solve 'lazy', I would argue that it actually takes a lot of discipline, and is, in an important way, harder than saying yes to everything, at least in the short term. It involves saying no to SO many 'good ideas' (read: ideas that myself or Jack or a customer thinks are good!).

One big thing I said no to this week was a billing model that would let agencies pool & allocate credits from one subscription across multiple clients. This is something that's been requested quite a bit and agencies think would make it easier for them to use.

But, it would add a ton of complexity to the product and billing, and there are easy ways to solve the issues that don't involve code. And, we're already doing these solves for our current agencies customers and it’s working!

Some other things that we eventually said no to in the past even after saying yes to them at one point or another:

• Letting AI generate message drafts in platform

• Finding key people and contact information at an organization

• Letting one user or customer have different lists with different signals in our UI (still available in api)

Every time we say no to a thing, the platform becomes easier to use and maintain and the value prop gets clearer and clearer.

What's not included is almost more telling than what is!

[No to a Relationship]

I was going out with a very lovely lady; our first date was in early March, and we were exclusive for the bulk of April.

This week, she asked me if I could make a behavior change for her, and it was not the first time.

The thing about the behavior change that I think we both recognized is that it wasn't a change that would make me a better or person or solve some objectively bad behavior; it was, rather, a change that would, ostensibly, make me more compatible with her.

Me making that change would've been bad in the long run; it would just mask an underlying clash that simply meant we were not entirely compatible. I’m proud of myself for saying no. Even though it was challenging, saying yes would have resulted in me compromising on something I shouldn't and created more pain and discomfort for both of us down the road.

She's a lovely person and I'm sure will find someone who is right for her, and wish her all the best.

[No to Politics]

The third time big time I said no this week was by far the one that caused the most discomfort, and is, admittedly, still bothering me a bit. I have that 'ick' feeling you get when you realize that someone violated your boundaries, and you have some regret around not shutting it down sooner.

But, you also don't want to blame yourself too much, because you told the person no more than once but they continued on about it. And, when you point out that they crossed a line, they say, 'oh, I'm sorry you feel that way' and continue crossing it anyway.

I'd be lying if I said I thought there was a constructive way to deal with this kind of person other than by limiting or removing interaction with them and entirely shutting them out emotionally.

This is a strong form of saying no that can feel unnatural and requires a lot of effort and absolute rejection; which is all the more reason that I think the 'default no' stance is something to strive for.

From a high level, this person had constructed a narrative that squarely put her as a victim that was entitled to a thing, we'll call it her 'Holy Land'.

She has, for the last two months, continuously asserted her claim to this Holy Land to myself and a couple of others. A number of times, we collectively put the issue to bed, with an excess amount of care and sensitivity given toward her emotional state. To put the issue into perspective, this was even after we had to stop her from doing something outright illegal to get her Holy Land.

Still, it has continued coming up, in a destructive way that has obstructed our ability to complete other important work.

Last week, I made the mistake of conceding on a compromise that I thought, in the moment, would not cause harm to anyone else, but give her some portion of her Holy Land, and get her to move on. However, after I agreed, it became clear that this compromise would actually cause harm to others.

So, two nights ago, I told her that I could not go through with what I said I would. I invited her to my room with one other individual, and made it clear that I only had 10 minutes before I had to discontinue the conversation.

I said my piece in 2 minutes, articulating that I felt coerced and disrespected. She gave me the classic, 'I didn’t intend to make you feel that way' before going back into the same argument myself and the other individual had heard perhaps a dozen times.

I quickly gave her my rebuttals, and at minute 10, asked her to leave. She did not.

At minute 14, I told her she was violating a boundary of mine by staying in my room uninvited. Her rebuttal was that I was violating a boundary of hers by not helping with this issue.

The other individual intervened at that point and got her to leave; whatever I was to say next would not have been good.

It's such a weird situation to think about, because she had so obviously disrespected myself and the group’s right to say no a number of times, had to be stopped from committing a crime, and would not get out of my personal space, all because she did not get what she believes is entitled to her. She was, in effect, asserting that she had some right to make me & the others agree with her that superseded our right to say no!

The point of this article is that that is not at all true: your right to say no is stronger than someone else's right to try and make you say yes.

And, in my opinion and experience, no viable decisions other than to quite strictly limit or altogether remove interactions with this sort of person. Every time that I have done so in similar situations, my life has gotten so much better.

When you don't, and the person won’t move on their position, they have a very powerful asymmetry against you, and they know it! Since they are more emotionally invested in the issue than you, they’ll keep on at it. No matter how many times you say no, they need you to just say yes, even partially, just one time. Now, your position has gotten worse: in my case, I had to go back on something, which I absolutely hate doing and try to avoid at all cost.

This is all the more reason to have a default no, and suffer no fools; any yes needs to be thoughtful and freely given, or people like this will take whatever they want from you.

If you liked this post, please subscribe, I’m hear every week about startups, personal growth, stopping the decline of the west, and betting against the ai bubble…

[Default No]

I'll say it one more time: your right to say no is stronger than someone else's right to try and make you say yes.

I really do believe that getting to the point where your default response is No is perhaps the best way to go.

It sounds crass, but think if you responded to every cold email you ever received: you'd have no time for anything meaningful whatsoever!

This gets more challenging when you are saying no to people you know; but someone knowing you doesn't give them a right to your yes. That is something that needs to be freely given by you.

This doesn't mean you need to be isolated or greedy; in all honesty, this world view enables you to be even more generous when you want to be and when you think it is worth it. If I was responding affirmatively to every single request for my time, I wouldn't have time to do the 2 hours of very meaningful volunteer work I do once a week.

And of course we can connect this back to the issue of emotion overtaking reason and logic in the west, and it's latest symptom, the AI bubble. You don't have to believe some trend or some philosophy just because everyone is spending so much time and effort in attempts to convince you that it's the most important thing ever.

You get to decide what you spend you time on and focus on.

You don't need to care about Claude Mythos or some vague fear mongered notion of ai. Guess what, you don't even have to care about AI at all! 

Post from Burial Goods, one of the few streams of content I consistently appreciate

You can just go outside and do your thing!

You are not bound to what they want you to be.

Everyone will tell you what the most important thing is; if you listen to all of them, you will go nowhere but toward madness.

You get to decide what you say yes to, not them.

Live Deeply,

2026.04.26

CXLIX

[The Tech We Can’t Shut Up About; A Practitioner’s Take; Transformers, Text Predictors in Disguise; Enter the Chatbot; What’s the Difference?; An LLM’s Memory; A Human’s Memory; Man vs Machine; And AGI]

Thesis: LLMs are still just text prediction engines & have fundamental, critical shortcomings around memory and learning that will prevent them from creating AGI.

[The Tech We Can’t Shut Up About]

It's come to my attention that I've fallen into the trap, particularly last week, of making one of my reader's 'head spin'. I think he thought the comment was something of a compliment, but it was actually an insult. I'm writing about complex things, but my I want to make sure that what I share is clear and understood.

So, this week, I'm going to unpack some of the limitations of LLMs I was circling last week, particularly around what I mean when I said they’re ‘stateless,’ and why this is a problem.

With everybody talking so much about "AI" and "Agents", it’s easy to forget that among the most vocal, there is a super varied understanding of the underlying technology powering them, LLMs (Large Language Models). The two major buckets are:

1. Have no idea what an LLM fundamentally is (most journalists, most executives, many ai boosters)

2. Have a functional understanding of what an LLM is but have no incentive to tell you / remind you (maybe Dario/Altman, AI Lab employees or engineers)

I’ve found myself in a third bucket: I have a functional understanding of LLMs and have just kind of been assuming everyone does, too.

Well, today we’re going to fix that. We’re going to talk concretely & simply about what an LLM is. And then, I’ll explain clearly where I believe their limitations lie.

I think this is very important to help understand the technology that everyone won’t stop talking about, so you can have an easier time understanding when someone is spewing bullshit about sentient machines vs when what they say could be important.

[A Practitioner’s Take]

Before we begin, I think it’s important to be very clear about what I am so you can decide how you want to perceive my writing.

I'd never claim to be an AI Researcher, nor am I a neuro-scientist. What I am in someone who:

• Spent nearly the last 2 years founding a software company with no outside funding that pays the bills and, importantly, leverages LLMs for core pieces of the functionality in the product I built

• has been building products that use LLMs as a key part of their functionality since 2023

• Has been writing (with no AI assistance) this weekly blog that often covers AI & Epistemology for the last 2, nearly 3, years.

• Has been professionally modeling the world in concrete, quantitative way when I was 18 (~2019) when I started a finance journey that culminated in launching a hedge fund at 21

• Focused in finance for undergrad at University of Michigan’s business school, and minored in math for fun at U-Mich more broadly

• Has been indirectly studying epistemology since I started reading philosophical texts around the age of 13 or 14 (~2014/15)

• Created a poetry book that was one of a kind based on user preferences at 20 (~2021); it used a startling simple AI implementation

• I read a decent amount, too

In short, I am a practitioner who has been staring at LLMs for the last 3 years, and has been thinking about modeling the world and decision making and learning for as long as I can remember. 

I am not a researcher or an academic, nor would I be interested in posturing as one.

[Transformers, Text Predictors in Disguise]

Fundamentally, everyone who is yelling about Claude & GPT & Gemini is betting the house on a text prediction engine. This, to me, seems like a very limited view of what AI can, is, and should be.

Right now, whenever you hear someone say AI, they are almost certainly talking about a Large Language Model (LLM).

An LLM is a giant neural network with transformer architecture.

Generally, you can think about a neural network as a sort of black box that takes in an input on one end and outputs something else on the other end. In the box, there are a series of “hidden layers,” which you can think about as a bunch of functions that take the input of the last function’s output.

Visualization of a neural network, but there are a lot of different ‘hidden layers’; GPT 3 had 96!

LLMs take in text, but before they pass them into the neural network, they turn the text into “Embeddings.” Embeddings are numerical representations of text. More specifically, they’re vectors with high dimensionality, often thousands of dimensions.

The LLM is trained so that given the text that is converted to embeddings, it can predict the next most likely text in the sequence based on all of the words in the sentence.

Basically, you have a massive amount of text (45TB filtered down to ~570GB for GPT 3) that you turn into these embeddings. Then, you hide parts of that text and ask the model to fill in the blank.

An example for an LLM trained on 90s / early 2000s rap lyrics would be something like:

• Input: I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of ______

The LLM will have to guesses what the next word is. The first guess could be really bad, like "some guy named Mike," or "grass".

But, since you know what text goes into the blank, you can 'reward' the model for the answer that is closer to the answer that you know is correct.

If it guesses "darkness", you might tell it this was closer to be correct than when it guessed "Sun". And then, eventually, it gets to the correct word, which is “death,” in this case. As you reward it for getting closer, that’s what is creating the ‘hidden layers’ that we talked about above.

So, you might say the ‘machine’ is ‘learning’ the equations that will give it the right output!

This is training, and this is one of the very expensive things that everyone wants to spend money on graphics card to do.

After you're done training it, congrats, you have a model! It's a bunch of equations stacked together that take in text converted to numbers and output the most likely next number that we convert back to text. You can use it in "inference" to take in a previously unseen piece of text, and, hopefully, it predicts the right next word!

If you input: “Yeah, we doin’ big pimpin’ we spendin’______”, if you trained the model right, it should output “cheese.”

This is an LLM, and it’s fundamentally what the AI everyone is talking about run on. It takes in a stream of text and, based on that input, predict the next piece of text.

After we do this, though, it’d be pretty foolish to say that the model is, in fact, Jay Z because we trained it to predict his lyrics! Just like it’d be foolish to train a model on text that includes conversations where things are asked if they’re alive respond in the affirmative, and then say that the model is alive when it responds in the affirmative!

[Enter the Chat Bots]

If you're a bit confused about how we get from a text prediction engine to a chatbot, you should be confused--getting there was actually admittedly a quite clever 'trick', if you will.

A chatbot is still the transformer we talked about above: an LLM that is predicting the next chunk of text.

The trick, though, is that the LLM is being fed in a conversation and asked to predict the next part of the conversation. So, when you're having a conversation with GPT, the real input into the model might look like this:

You are a helpful ai assistant that answers user's questions.
User: Who put the hit out that got pac killed?
Chatbot: ______________

Then, the LLM is predicting the next part of the conversation! Of course, there is a lot of fine tuning that goes into it. This means that if you want the LLM to have coherent conversations, you might want to give it a bunch of specific examples that show it what a chatbot ‘should’ respond like.

But, at the end of the day, it’s still just predicting text!

[What's the Difference?]

Now that we have a basic understanding of LLMs, I think it is a lot easier to see some very specific, fundamental limitations of the technology that I believe will prevent us from fully copying human intelligence in a meaningful way:

1. Learning & Memory: Our ability to memorize information and learn on the fly is something that sets us apart from the way LLMs ‘learn’ and ‘memorize’ entirely.

2. Reasoning: I don't believe that the 'reasoning' LLMs do is at all an analog for how we reason; rather, it's an expensive, if sometimes useful, illusion.

3. Embodiment & Multi Modal Inputs: This is my weakest and least fleshed out point, but there seems to be something very important about our learning tied to multi sensory inputs and actually existing in physical spaces that I am not convinced can be approximated by embedding video / audio, but I need to do much more research here to have a succinct argument.

Today, we’re only going to primarily focus on Learning & Memory, which on it’s own underline shortcomings that I think are sufficient to throw a damp blanket on any talk of LLMs approximating humans.

In regards to number 2 & 3, those will perhaps be other blog posts on their own.

[An LLM's Memory]

An LLM is fundamentally a stateless machine. This means that, in isolation, if you put an input into an LLM, nothing about the LLM changes after it gives you the output. If you call it again later, you will be calling the same exact system.*

A 'state' is some variable or set of information that you can 'hold on to' or pass around in between calls. The contact app on your phone has a state. If you add a person's information, that person will be there in the future.**

The chatbot or agents built on top of LLMs are stateful. But, importantly, this does not make the underlying LLM stateful.

As you have a conversation with a chatbot, it is taking some of the things you are saying and ‘storing’ them as 'memories'. An unromantic view of this is that it is taking your conversation and compressing it into what it estimates will be important context later. These are not stored ‘in’ the LLM, they’re stored somewhere else. Then, when you have another conversation with the chatbot, those 'memories' are passed into the LLM, along with the text of the conversation.

If this text was not injected into the conversation, the chatbot would not 'know' anything about you. The LLM is not the thing with memories; the application built around it is, and those memories are injected into the LLM when you ask it a question.

And, if we're to speak of agents, nothing here changes, other than the fact that it is now a system that maybe has a more sophisticated way to store and retrieve information. Although you could give a chatbot a more sophisticated way to store information, too. The 'agent' also maybe has access to other tools so it can read and navigate your code base or file system and more easily access more information.

Fundamentally, the LLM itself is not being updated.

_{*Technical Note: Someone once told me the KV Cache was a 'state.' I think this is massively misleading; it is a state stored during a call, but is not a state stored from call to call. A human with such a limitation would be an amnesiac that couldn’t recall anything earlier than a few seconds ago.
**The contacts in your phone are an example of a very visible state; sometimes, state can be more of a hidden 'side effect', and can be a source of a lot of bugs when you are propgramming!}

[A Human's Memory]

How human's learn and memorize things is in sharp contrast to how an LLM learns and memorizes things.

Most useful theories of the brain and memory claim that as we are living experiences, outr brain is being updated in real time. (See Hebbian Theory and Spike-Timing-Dependent-Plasticity as examples).

Meaning, if you burn your hand on a flame, the actual decision making machine is being updated immediately to prevent you from doing that again. Unlike an LLM, it does not require some distinct, separate database or system to be written to.

This is super, super important. A traumatic experience, as an example, can be so impactful on our brain that we literally have a negative emotional reaction that drives us away from the place where it happened or even something we were smelling.

This is contrasted sharply by LLMs.

If it does something stupid, the most practical thing we can hope to do to make it not do that stupid thing again is to store some text that in the most contrived and convoluted way possible amounts to "Don't do that again!" or whatever the day's fanciest 'prompting trick' is. Then, we feed this back into the LLM the next time we call it and hope for the best.

If you're a programmer, this should remind you of the infamous 'bug loops' that LLMs can get into - they make mistake A, and then when they fix mistake A, they introduce mistake B. You ask it to fix Mistake B, and it once again makes Mistake A, even though you just had it solve mistake A moments ago!

This is SUCH a far cry from how human memory works it’s almost laughable to compare a prompt to human memory.

We can also fine tune the LLM to avoid the same mistakes, but this is an expensive and distinct process from actually using the LLM in inference. Imagine if every time you wanted to moderately change your behavior, you had to spend 100s or 1000s times more energy and attention doing so than simply getting burnt once. That’s basically what has to happen to update an LLM.

But, even then, there’s a high chance you fuck something else up that the LLM was doing right. It’d be like if you learned to avoid fire but now might walk into the street without looking either way.

In short, I’m really hard pressed to believe that prompting can EVER fix memory or learning issues with LLMs. No matter how much you yell at a program designed to predict the next bit of text, you can't guarantee it will actually do what you want!

And as for fine tuning in a effective way, that’s all cutting edge research, not a sure bet.

[Man vs Machine]

To be very clear about the memory issue, I’ll leave you with an anecdote from experience.

When I'm doing jiu jitsu, I've trained myself to have useful reactions to my opponents movements. A lot of these become subconcious responses.

Sometimes, when you are actively trying to get better, you might articulate what you need to do in your native language. If you want to stretch, I guess you could say this is like ‘prompting’ yourself (note how generous I’m being towards people who compare us to LLMs).

I've written about the ompoplata in jiu jitsu quite a bit now. I'm so fascinated by it, because it's a really fucking weird way to break someone's shoulder. Basically, you have to get your opponent face down and chicken wing their arm in between your legs while you're perpendicular to their back. See photo:

such a natural position !

The first class I ever went to actually showed this submission, and I was so hopelessly lost during it that I thought it would be impossible to learn.

Now, when I do an omoplate, I do it without thinking about it. I'm not saying 'omoplata time!’ in my head; I’m just doing it.

To learn it, there were intentional moments of 'prompting,' if you will, where I would tell myself real time, "okay, you need to control their posture in guard, get out to your own hip make like you're going for a gogoplata if they move toward you, grab their far hip and put your weight into it as you start to break them down, flip your legs, and maybe use your free hand to mess with their trapped hand if they're doing some funny business."

All of this was once ‘actively’ going on in my brain. Now, if I go to do this motion, unless I am actively trying to improve something about my form, there is none of this. The 'prompt', the information, has updated my brain and just comes out when it is supposed to. It’s ‘natural.’

This is the same with so many other things I, and you, have learned. Using an iPhone, a computer, holding a cup, weightlifting, it goes on and on.

These things are not ‘natural’, they were learned by doing. And once you learn them, they’re there. You don’t need to keep ‘re prompting’ yourself like you do with an LLM.

If you enjoyed this practitioner’s take on AI, shoot me a subscription; I’m around every weekend.

[And AGI…]

To be abundantly clear, I don't think some notion of human like (or superior) intelligence is impossible. I just really really don't think that the current approaches everyone is talking about, namely LLMs and the systems we build around them, are the right tool to get us there.

I think the 'developments' as of late are just slightly different ways to do roughly the same thing (lots of prompting). That’s without even getting into why I think ‘reasoning’ in it’s current state is a scam.

And oh my god, I used AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in the hook to this post without defining it - it looks like I committed the same crime as fucking everyone who writes about or sells AI.

If you haven't heard of AGI, first off, bless your soul and let me come live with you in your cabin that is somehow insulated from this nonsense.

Secondly, it's this vague, ill defined term that get's thrown around to indicate some sort of AI that is as good as humans at all important things or maybe better depending on who you ask but also let's not define important things because that would be too specific. Here's an article I didn’t read about OpenAi’s definition, but you can probably drop in whatever definition you want, and I'm confident my post still stands.

Any who, there's cool research and other ideas like world models picking up steam that could move us further.

But I'm squarely of the view that making LLMs bigger / training them with more data / giving them 'tools' doesn't bring us much further than we've gotten, and it doesn't actually bring us as far as people claim we're about to be on the back of LLMs alone (re: Dario claiming half of entry level white collar work ‘could’ be replaced by LLMs in 5 years).

Building a system to approximate something as nuanced and complex as the human brain takes time. There are no silver bullets; if one exists, it's certainly not a stateless text prediction engine.

Live Deeply,

2026.04.19

XCLVIII

[Slow Optimism; Mytho(s)logical Threat; If I hear 'context' One More Time…; A Gorge Doesn't Know Anything about Water; It's Still just a Prompt; Be A Critic]

Thesis: Repeated, nonsensical claims about silver bullets are a major threat to continued progress.

[Slow Optimism]

Nonsensical and repeated claims about silver bullets are the biggest threat to continued progress.

Uncritically repeating claims like this new LLM is the end of cybersecurity or ‘context is the only moat’ chips away at our society’s rational systems and information filtration systems, and that jeopardizes progress.

I’m tempted to write an entire essay waxing poetic about how amazing and impressive both the technological and psychological achievements of humanity have been in such a short time, but it’s quite tough when there’s no point of comparison:

• How impressive is it that we’ve only had flight for a century, but already can go to and from space?

• How impressive is it that electrical batteries have only been around for a couple of centuries and we’ve already electrified a large part of the globe?

• How impressive is it that we’ve only known how to make plastic for the last 150 years, and we can already buy a little box called a 3D printer that can make anything out of it we want?

• How impressive is it that we’ve been able to obliterate ourselves with nuclear warheads for decades and have yet to do it?

That last point sounds a bit wonky, congrats, we haven’t wiped out our own species, but I really do think it’s impressive. Having the ability to do so is historically unprecedented I wonder how many human cultures in the same position would not have had the same constraint?

Again, I don’t and can’t know how impressive any of these things are; regardless, I’m in awe of them and very optimistic about what else we can achieve. Can we create abundance on our own planet? Can we colonize the stars?

I also think the biggest risk to an amazing outcome is the decay of a reason based, rational society. I'm deeply concerned about substituting logic for emotion, blindly following demagogues, and believing in silver bullets and philosopher stones that do not exist. This is a huge claim I’ve been exploring, so I’m not asking you to believe it based on one sentence.

What I’m asking from you today is to be skeptical of people who claim that there is one simple, solution to all of our problems, and they happen to have it. I’m asking you to think rationally when presented with emotionally drenched claims that when briefly examined, have little to know substance.

The more we react to emotional, unsubstantiated rhetoric and parrot claims that make us feel something without checking for any underling logical soundness or evidence, the more that others will continue to propagate emotional, unsubstantiated and hallow rhetoric.

And the more we jeopardize progress.

[Mytho(s)logical Threat]

You may or may not have heard that Anthropic created Mythos, a model SO POWERFUL and DANGEROUS, it can't release it to the public because of the unstoppable cybersecurity threat it poses.

You probably haven't heard, though, a reasoned breakdown of why it's not anywhere near as scary as they claim. (Spoiler: it might just be a marginally improved, better marketed re released of their last model, Opus 4.6)

Here's a brief summary of some points from Cal Newports' video that very calmly analyzes the overly sensationalized claims:

• Claim: Mythos found new, critical vulnerabilities in very important open source packages. Reality: Cyber security experts were able to find the same critical vulnerabilities in open source projects with open source LLMs that were a fraction of the cost and scale of Mythos and have been out longer.

• Claim: Mythos's hacking abilities are such an improvement over existing models that it can autonomously hack many systems. Reality: Even when the likely biased AISI institute tested the model directly, they saw a gradual improvement on cyber benchmarks inline with and even lower than previous jump ups.

• Claim: Now, LLMs are a geopolitical risk due to hacking abilities. Reality: LLMs have always posed a real and gradually increasing cybersecurity risk. But this has been known and discussed basically since the damn things were commercially available.

Newport's conclusion is a tight one: Anthropic is controlling the media narrative with sensationalist drivel. This allows them to keep getting off the hook for increasingly outlandish claims; forget about the data center claims or revenue numbers, look, now LLMs can do the things cyber security experts have been saying is a problem since the start!

You don't NEED to care about whatever a company and media THINK you'll have a strong, emotional response to. It's just a toxic, co dependent feedback loop - they think we'll respond more strongly to puffery and outlandish claims, we respond better to puffery and outlandish claims, so they do more puffery and make increasingly outlandish claims.

You don't have to respond that way. You're allowed to care about other things, you know, like holding Anthropic accountable for an increasingly unreliable product or how despite their super powerful Mythos cybersecurity AI they still leaked the super hackable source code to Claude Code.

All of this is without mentioning two other facts:

• Almost the exact language used to describe Mythos finding "100s, if not thousands" of bugs was included in Anthropic's Opus 4.6 release notes x months ago [see Newport’s video']

• Some users are postulating that the Opus 4.7, which was recently released as a weaker version of Mythos, is actually just the a slightly less nerfed version of the Opus 4.6 model before it got nerfed last month

While I wouldn't die on this hill, I also wouldn't be surprised at all if "Mythos" was just a more creatively marketed Opus 4.6.

some of these claims are as credible as me showing you this photo and saying I won the match (circa 2022, I’m better now lol)

[If I hear 'context' One More Time…]

Outside of the latest super honest marketing campaign, an oft repeated claim about LLMs that I believe really needs to be addressed is this idea that 'context is the only moat.'

For the mercifully uninitiated, this is a common idea in venture and startup circles that asserts that having domain specific context when building a domain specific business is going to be the only moat when building useful products now.

The whole assertion goes something like this:

This idea is particularly insidious, because one of the key underlying assumptions is very strong: the more you understand the people or the market you are building for, and the more of your understanding you build into your product, the better the product will be!* This is damn near self evidently true, and something that I whole heartedly endorse; I don't think I've met a single competent founder who would entirely disagree with this claim.

However, below this rather benign belief, there are two assumptions that I take qualms with:

1. Commercially viable software is or will soon be trivial and incredibly low cost to build with LLMs

2. Any difference between good & great software that can't be erased by the raw power of LLMs can be erased by giving the LLM the 'right' 'context'

I don't agree with number 1 for a lot of reasons. Some include:

• It ignores the risk transfer achieved by buying software

• vibe coded founder telling me that if his code was examined he'd be sent to jail for poorly handling PII

• large company with VERY competent engineering departments I've spoken with bragging about rolling their own GTM software (yes, that large company) and having the end users within the company hate it and not adopt it

• scrappy, AI first, 'build it ourselves' startup still buying HubSpot to ‘treat it like a database’ (if it was truly trivial to replace a crm with a relational database + a thin logic wrapper, they'd do that and host it on AW for pennies on the dollar compared to crm licenses)

• second vibe coded founder telling me nonsense things like his ‘backend is a python database' (I have no idea what that means) and throwing around the word 'ontology' as if it answers any questions I had

• Garry Tan's 500,000 line vibe coded slop fest

• Failed & frustrating personal attempts (as a somewhat competent engineer) to vibe code myself

• third vibe coded telling me he got a very nice email from a friendly hacker who warned him to change his openai api key because it was exposed.

• Companies like Meta using increase in lines of code as a measurement of performance increasing when increasing lines of code generally increases liability and maintenance cost (see Linus’s comments)

• Every single alleged example of positive roi being based on steeply subsidized token costs

All that aside, let’s just assume that number one is true: We have unsubsidized LLMs that reduce cost to build maintainable software by an order of magnitude or more. Funnily enough, this is the world that people think we're living in right now, anyways.

Still, context does not solve the remaining issues.

_{*See The Mom Test, Domain Driven Design, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, probably a Paul Graham essay, too}

[A Gorge Doesn't Know Anything about Water]

I don't see how a useful amount of in depth domain expertise is imparted into an LLM, an artifact that inherently doesn't 'know' things and has no way of storing additional information. The closest we can get to truly injecting it with context in even a remotely deterministic way is giving it more prompts. And calling that remotely deterministic is generous.

You need to remember, LLMs fundamentally do not know 'context' in the same way we do, if they 'know' anything at all. In this sense, they are 'stateless'.

They can 'encode' information in something like the way the answer to a math problem 'stores' information about the problem, but this doesn't mean they have any sort of inherent representation of information in what we would consider a meaningful way.*

I did an interesting experiment last year on whether or not an LLM is 'storing' probability estimates in a meaningful or even consistent way. The results kind of surprised me: the LLM seemed to have something roughly resembling the shape of a loss function in it's weights.

The more I've thought about it, the less impressed I've been: I think the LLM is storing information about the real world in the way that a mountain ravine stores information about the water that rushed down it.

Perhaps a smart person can use the rocks to determine things about the flow and force of the river overtime, but, outside of poetry, we wouldn't say the mountain 'knows' about the water in the same way that we 'know' about the water.

An LLM is an admittedly fascinating artifact that we've spent gobsmacking amounts of energy and capital carving information and echoes of sentience into.

But to build an echo chamber, and to shout "I'm alive," and be surprised when it shouts back, "I'm alive," would be the peak of absurdity. An LLM is more sophisticated than an echo chamber, but the point still stands.

_{*If you want to understand how these things work, I would recommend Deep Learning for an understanding of neural nets, or 3Blue1Brown’s video or series on it. Please shoot me a note if you would be interested in a post technically describing LLMs.}

[It's Still just a Prompt]

I can think of 4 options to improve the output of an LLM, none of which involve giving it 'context' in a way that causes it to ‘know’ that context.

1. Improve the prompt

2. Give it tools (eg, write or provide software for it to use)

3. Fine tune the model

4. Improve the architectecture of the LLM

No one I'm talking about is seriously considering number 3 or 4; they trust the oh so benevolent AI Labs too much to consider number 4. On the off chance they bring up number 3, outside of the objection that it's computational intensive, expensive, and easy to mess up (from experience), I'd bring up the same thing as I would for 4: it still doesn’t store information in the LLM in a meaningful way. You're tweaking the probability of a stateless thing giving you the outcome you want.

Most of the time, people who are talking about using context to improve the output mean 1 or 2.

2 in itself is a bit of a funny one, because tools are just giving the LLM access to software that you or an LLM write for the LLM. So if what they mean when they say 'context is the only moat' is that context is storing information in the right, problem specific software tools, then we can restate their full claim to something more akin to:

But, of course, software is cheap and easy to write now that these people won't actually write the software, the LLMs will, so we can ignore the irony of still having to write software to not have to write software (something that has been possible since or before lisp macros in the 60s). All we're left with is that the prompt will save the day:

Now, I'm immediately going get two rebuttals that are missing the point:

1. "What about Agents?"

2. "What about memories and artifacts etc?"

In regards to number 1, what is an agent other than an LLM that has a tool to call another LLM and a tool that lets it edit and grab some sort of information like a text file or rag database? So no, I'm not ignoring 'agents,' I just refuse to romanticize them.

In regards to number 2, memories and artifacts and whatever else are all literally just prompts that are stored and fed into the LLM in a sometimes clever, sometimes convoluted way.

Due to the fundamental limitations of an LLM, no matter how clever your prompting system is, and how many different calls you make to it, there is still no memory to the LLM. Maybe you can say your complex software system with a bunch of text files or better yet, a thoughtfully structured database has context stored, and maybe you can call this an “agent". But that doesn’t change the fact that if the LLM itself is making any meaningful decisions, it’s doing so based on ‘context’ stored in a prompt that it may or may not follow or consider.

Cool, now you've just built yourself a likely complex, potentially over engineered system that is more expensive to run and less reliable than a basic, well written piece of software.

Don’t get me wrong, you can sometimes build something that can be useful using LLMs!

But to act like “more context” will solve the inherent limitations of these systems is to misunderstand how the system works.

If you are pro rationality, pro progress, etc, etc, etc, or even if you disagree with me and just want to see what I write next, please subscribe below.

[Be A Critic]

What you do and say and believe might seem small, but it matters. Other people are listening to you, even if you don’t think you have a platform.

The more we believe in a simple solve someone wants us to believe, the less we invest in finding the real, incremental improvements:

Please don’t take things people say at face value. And please don’t repeat things you've heard that sound good but might not be true.

There is a really, really good chance you've been misled. And the more we tolerate bullshit as a culture, the more bullshit there will be!

And the more bullshit there is, the easier it is to take advantage of our society collectively.

I’ll leave you with a note from the phenomenal essay about software engineering by Fredrick P Brooks, No Silver Bullets:

Live Deeply,

2026.04.12

XCLVII

[Torrent of Bullshit; Fooled by a Sycophant; Fight Club but it's AI Slop; The Worst Way to Handle an OOM Error; It's Still Not Good at Engineering; Touch Grass; A Path Forward]

Thesis: With an increasing volume of noisy information, we all should be increasingly skeptical; however, we’re becoming increasingly gullible, instead.

[Torrent of Bullshit]

There is an overwhelming and unrelenting torrent of information flowing across every place we consume information. This is a problem, because most of the ‘information’ is total bullshit.

While the volume of total available 'information' goes up, the quality of that information is not going up. If anything, the quality of that information is going down.*

The abundance of increasingly noisy information should make us more skeptical, not less. But for some reason, it seems that our collective gullibility is rapidly rising. I’ve been exploring the trend away from critical thinking and rationality quite intensely. [here & here & here]

My argument today is that LLMs are only making this issue worse.

I let myself get conned by an LLM, not once, not twice, but three times this week. Keep in mind, I am a person who views himself as a cautious user of LLMs, especially when compared with 95% of engineers and founders I speak to.

Still, the ease at which I was deceived by a text prediction engine is startling.

To be clear, I take full responsibility for the errors made in each of the 3 stories I’m about to tell (albeit the second story I didn’t really make an error other than by briefly enjoying AI slop generated to be enjoyed).

The point of writing this, then, is to remind you that if you trust these things (which it’s really, really easy to do), they cause more harm than good, even if you’re generally intentional and guarded about your use. There’s probably a way to appropriately use them, but as someone who thought he was appropriately using them, I can tell you I’m still missing the mark, and resultantly, will be reducing my usage further.

_{*If the dead internet theory is directionally correct, and you believe bot content is, on average, lower quality than human produced content, the decrease in average quality of content follows.}

[Fooled by a Sycophant]

My startup, BirdDog, had an inbound meeting from the CMO of a company with >$300M in rev. On top of that, the firm is in a similar space and is acquisitive. So, for a lot of reasons, this was a very important call.

Prior to the meeting, I was reading some of the CMO's LinkedIn posts, and using my trusty sidekick Chat GPT (read: gippity) to do some research on the company.

Together, Gippity and I discovered that the firm received investment from a PE fund we’ll call PrivateCo 3 year ago. Then, Gippity and I strung together quite the logical sounding narrative in a conversation that went something like this:

I get on the phone with the CMO of the company. He's a very hot lead & has already heard about us.

In the call, however, I hinted at the thesis that Gippity helped me come up with, asking the CMO about the longer term view behind PrivateCo's investment.

He pauses, and looks at me, and says, "Who's PrivateCo?"

My heart drops. "The Pe firm that invested in you a few years ago."

"Oh, them! Yeah, we hardly hear about them."

He went on to explain that they really only ever talk about another PE firm that invested in them earlier. In other words, my narrative was completely off. PrivateCo hardly had any strategic impact on the CMO’s company.

Thankfully, the conversation ended well regardless; I was lucky he was in good spirits, already quite qualified, and used the question to further explain his specific pain.

If I would have been unlucky or more clunky and presumptive with the way I asked the question, I very easily could've come across as a total dumbass and botched the call.

To be clear, this is a pretty normal class of errors for a human: string together a narrative that's not actually real but be very convicted about it based on evidence. Taleb writes about it in Fooled by Randomness a lot.

The bit that's frustrating, the bit that I'm writing about, is how LLMs make it so much easier to believe these nonsense narratives. These machines are not critical thinkers; they're not thinkers at all!

In this case, the LLM basically functioned as an echo chamber where I could grow and compound an incorrect idea with increasing confidence.

[Fight Club but it's AI Slop]

A friend sent me an X article about 25 life hacks a guy learned last year.

I read the article, and the standards of a mid 20s male, it's for lack of better words, totally awesome. It plays into a gambit of male fantasies concurrently: it describes how you should run around like you have a bunch of money, travel all the time, look hot, go on dangerous adventures, and always be the coolest guy in the room.

But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized even though it seemed totally awesome, it was totally fucking bullshit. And that the guy who wrote it is very likely not a real person at all.

The article itself basically has no substance or anecdotes or any evidence of lived experience at all. The 'story' starts and stops with this guy drinking a criminal amount of coffee on a plane with a pretty girl next to him with some vague notion of them both having done some crime together over the last year, the craziest year of his life. That's an awesome exposition. What crime? What made the year crazy? I want to know, and I want to know now!

But literally nothing happens with the exposition. Instead, he gives 25 two or three sentence rules about acting like you're rich at airports and seeming interesting and cool while also actually concurrently being broke at the same time (apparently recklessly spending all of your money on $50 tips to airpot bartenders is a life hack). (you can read article here)

The problem with this is that even though there's literally 0 substance, you can’t help but feel AWESOME reading it. Yes, of course you want to be untraceable and run from the law in airports and on beaches in linen with a beautiful woman in a foreign country.

Then, if you click through and check out this guy's page, you can see ai generated photos of a generic but ‘ideal’ blonde haired bronzed ripped guy surrounded by women.

And if you read one of his longer articles (please, for the love of god, just skim it, as I did), it follows a classic grift pattern:

• Paints a desirable image of who you want to be with little substance but tons of emotional imagery; he's vaguely on a beach, surfing, feeling alive, with the girl of his dream, writing about how awesome and alive he feels and how ripped he is

• He then goes on to contrast this with middle aged, over weight, single men with a job they don't like (his mark). He describes them derogatorily like half men and contrasts them greatly with who 'he' is and who they want to be

• Finally, he lets them know that it's not too late! These poor bastards can transform and leave everything behind and be a WOLF like him. All they need to do is pay $50/mo to join his online community

Now, I obviously can't 'know' that this shit is a pile of AI Slop, but there's far more reason to believe that it’s AI generated than not:

• Many of the photos are obviously AI generated

• He shares no lived experience other than vagueries about being in a bar in Copenhagen or surfing at a beach

• There's plenty of telltale ai text patterns, like "This isn't x, it's y."*

One of Kendrick's Drake disses is becoming an increasingly valid heuristic for navigating the modern world:

Yes, grifts and scams existed before AI, and they will exist after. My concern is we're becoming more prone to them for two reasons:

1. We have a society increasingly trained and conditioned to evaluate information emotionally rather than rationally

2. Gen AI makes it even easier to produce pretty sounding but shallow bullshit at scale

The trouble it it’s very easy to fall into this trap.

I consider the guy who originally sent me this post to be one of the smarter and most competent people I know, and I certainly think he's quite rational and generally skeptical. Now, I’m certain he didn't fall for the actual con of paying $50 to the grifter and probably didn't even click through to the guy's website, but he, like 99.99% of us, was spending time in a space (the internet) where this kind of content abounds.

And in all honesty, without digital hermitude, it may be impossible to avoid.

*_{I'm so sick of AI written slop that I avoid that pattern like the plague.}

[The Worst Way to Handle an OOM Error]

The third LLM con that I experienced this week was when I had a critical issue on a server. There was a pretty basic Out of Memory (OOM) error, but I was in between meetings and had high cortisol, so I panicked and asked an LLM how I should solve it.

Now, if you run out of memory on a computer, there are two basic solutions:

1. You can free up some of the existing memory by deleting things

2. You can increase memory by, well, adding more memory

On a cloud machine, which this was, the second option is usually trivial, and again, in this case, it was. Going with the trivial path would've been a great option, because I would've been able to rapidly resolve the issue. Then, I could calmy evaluate WHY I ran out of memory in the first place and decide if I needed to change something engineering wise or if all was well.

But, if you can guess where this is going, I didn't add memory. Without thinking, I took the LLM's advice and ripped a command to delete some stuff to clear up memory.

Well, I deleted the environment, which was, without getting into the weeds, very much the wrong fucking thing to delete. This decision cost me about 20x more time to fix the issue than if it would’ve cost me if I just increased memory.

So, I made the class of mistake that seems to be increasingly common in our society: working myself up into an emotional state, shutting down my own reasoning, and allowing something else to make a decision for me.

Having easy access to an LLM obviously made it so much easier to make this kind of mistake: I can just stream of conscious into a text box and go with whatever it says!

That’s not to say I would’ve made the right decision without the LLM; rather, I didn’t even give myself a chance to slow down and make the right decision.

[It's Still Not Good at Engineering]

So we’ve got three instances of me buying some bullshit that came from an LLM this week. If I think I’m using these things rationally, I can’t imagine what it’s like to fully depend on these things for everything.

And since I haven’t written about it in a minute, and everyone is shouting about it from the rooftops even louder than before, I absolutely have to say it: I still don’t believe LLMs are good at engineering.

I tried, for the life of me, to be impressed by Claude when coding this week, but it didn’t do it.

Vaguely related photo of me in a waymo in austin, autonomous cars being a use of ai I am excited about

I'm undertaking a large project for BirdDog right now. We're rewriting our front end from scratch for the PLG motion I wrote about last week. It'll be server side rendered, and I have the intention of making it blazingly fast.

If you know me, I have an allergy to JS and client side logic and frameworks in general, and I'm amateur with CSS and HTML. So, I thought I would have Claude ‘One shot’ all the actual pages templates for me. To review the thorough steps I took, I:

• I spent hours thinking about the architecture of and maybe 10 hours writing out a spec

• I shared the data structure that would be fed into the front end

• I described every button and what I wanted it to

• I fed in screenshots of our existing front end for design reference, and wrote out element by element where I wanted it to be the same / different.

In other words, this LLM had the benefit of a front end refined with two years of Jack and I's trial and error and a spec that explained pretty much exactly what I wanted. It had to write some templates for some html / css / jss pages, which is very close to the thing that it’s supposedly really good at it.

Do you think it was able to one shot the whole project?

No, it wasn't even able to one shot the LOGIN PAGE. It looked like it did at first, but it did not.

Sure, in some ways the work it did was impressive, but it is such a far cry from what I’m hearing people say it can do that I feel like I’m going insane.

A couple counterarguments I'm predicting:

• "But bro, you didn't use Claude Code. It's so much better than using Claude in chat."

  • they literally use the same models

  • Even if Claude Code is “so much better” than just using Claude, the same people have been saying this have been saying that every release is a game changer for the last 3 years*

• "You’re the problem, Noah! You did too much work. Just trust in the vibes and let Claude cook"

  • Okay, and if I did this, why would I not end up like Garry Tan, who 'trusted in the vibes' and ‘coded’ 500,000 lines for a website that serves a blog, violates privacy policies, makes over 150 requests on the first load, and crashes all the time? To contrast, that, BirdDog, which includes codes for fine tuning and hosting transformers, scrapes over 100,000 pages a night, includes the entire database schema, is heavily asynchronous and multi processed, includes optimized functions in rust, has API support both for our front end and for API customers, and is about to also about to be full stack, isn't and won't be more than 75,000 lines, even after I MAKE IT FULL STACK

  • Compounding errors are real. This is not an MVP or a prototype; I am refining a much more finished product. If I let this thing run with a number of the 'decisions' it made on even the first write of the html, those decisions would have compounded complexity and errors that I quite frankly do not want to deal with

So no, I'm not going to trust in the vibes.

_{*I’m not bothering to cite someone, but an interesting project would be to track the amount of articles that claimed coding is dead over the last 3 years and see how many times it was claimed that whatever thing that just came out was the cause.}

[Touch Grass]

Listen, if I thought LLMs were completely and utterly useless, I wouldn't use them enough to have the two usage based horror stories I shared with you above.

My concern is that there is this shared delusion that these things are a silver bullet for literally everything, especially software engineering.

Quite to the contrary, they're just accelerating the problems of living in a world flooded with more and more information in which we’re concurrently getting less and less skeptical and more and more gullible.

As 'information' becomes easier to produce at scale with no evidence that it's any more meaningful than it was when it was harder to produce at scale, we should be becoming INCREASINGLY skeptical, not less.

But that's really hard when LLMs, such a friendly and easy source of information are incentivized to do whatever it takes to make you use them more, including ingratiating itself with you and making you FEEL productive rather than making you actually more productive.

And do NOT for a SECOND think that me saying an LLM has an incentive structure is me ascribing any level of intelligence or consciousness or intent behind it. This could be a post on it's own, but as Dawkins articulates succinctly in the Selfish Gene in relation to genes and memes, or like Yuval Noah Harari posits in relation to wheat domesticating man in Sapiens, non sentient entities can have incentive structures and reward functions that get optimized for regardless of their lack of sentience.

Not that this point actually matters, because maximizing LLM usage is quite obviously the incentive of Anthropic and OpenAI and just about everyone else in the LLM value chain. A value chain full companies that are hemorrhaging money and have a documented history of puffery, deceit, and outright lies.

These companies get paid for you to use the LLM more, and as I am trying to articulate with the anecdotes above, your usage of an LLM is not positively correlated with your success or the value of what you are producing.

If you also think we’re in the middle of a bubble and are concerned about the decay of rationality in the west and the world at large and like building businesses, there is literally no reason why you shouldn’t subscribe, we’re made for each other.

[A Path Forward]

I'd say that if you're going to use LLMs at all, you have to be incredibly careful. But I thought I WAS careful and I still made some pretty heinous mistakes.

As many of you know, I already won't even let AI in my IDE with something like Cursor. Instead, if I use it, I have a separate window I snap too when I have a question. Even that is clearly too easy to access, too.

I'm going to go back to something I didn't even realize I stopped doing: for at least the first hour of engineering each day, I'm not even going to let myself open up an LLM chat window. You'd be surprised at how much you can get done this way; problems you forgot were easy to solve on your own become easy to solve again. I'm actually entirely confident I will move faster this way and likely won’t even open the chat window well after that.

In regards to the issue with the AI slop post? I'm still going to continue filtering information aggressively. And in regards to the delusional research I did with the LLM about the CMO's company? I'm going to strictly use the LLM for information retrieval, and not feed it any narratives along the way, or listen to any narratives it attempta to string together.

As information becomes increasingly easy to produce, we need to be more skeptical and more rational, not less.

Live Deeply,

2026.04.05

XCLVI

[From the Fall of the West to PLG; Curing Neuroticism; Knee Capping Asymmetry; PLG; Building The Mouse Trap; Grass is Greener; The AI Bubble Short]

Thesis: BirdDog is experimenting with Product Led Growth (PLG) to double down on our advantages and short the AI Bubble even more than we are.

[From the Fall of the West to PLG]

I know I’ve been riffing on how we should get together and save the west. To contrast that, today, we’re going to zoom in a little and talk more strategically about my startup, BirdDog.

We’re at the very, very beginning of an experiment with Product Led Growth (PLG).

I’ll explain what that means, how it contrasts with what we’ve been doing (Sales Led Growth), why we’re looking at PLG… and yeah, we’re still bringing up the AI bubble, this time in the context of how PLG further levers our AI Bubble short.

[Curing Neuroticism]

A mentor of mine who built a unicorn always framed running a startup as a problem of progressive growth; if you have character flaws or shortcomings, they'll keep manifesting as problems facing your startup throughout your journey.

Dealing with those problems directly helps both you and your startup grow and thrive.

Now, this DOESN'T imply:

1. Startups are the ONLY want to self actualize (they're not)

2. Building a successful company means you've successfully self actualized (also definitely not; I would suspect that big, founder led companies are dysfunctional in a way that mirrors the founder's own ailments)

All that being said, I think it’s true that a startup tends to get stuck where it’s founders do. And right now, I think BirdDog is stuck on one of my personal flaws - I have a bit of a fear of delegating.

And I don’t mean between myself and Jack; I mean to our customers and our software. I have a habit of doing things for customers when they have an issue, rather than telling them how to do it in the software.

And since I can often times do it faster by writing a sql query or running a python function on the backend than by using our front end, we’re not putting as much of a load on the ui as we could, either.

You’d think this would be a quick fix - just stop doing things you don’t need to do!

In some ways, you should be right.

But it also depends on more narrowly defining what our software does and doesn’t do and getting over a penchant I have for people pleasing. The former is a business level design problem that touches marketing, sales, and product that I believe we basically need to solve to make PLG work; the latter is a personal problem I’m going to solve with the free therapy known as caring more about the outcome of your startup than your own discomfort.

[Knee Capping Asymmetry]

The problem with our current business model is that we’ve artificially throttled our own ability to grow and capture upside.

We’ve been doing Sales Led Growth (SLG). This means that before anyone touches our product, they talk to us on the phone and we make sure it’s a fit and sell them on it. The positives are:

• We can make sure they’re a good fit for the product

• We can charge more and sell for longer terms

• We can and do invest time in training them and configuring the system to help them get the best results

The cons are:

• We create the expectation that we’ll be very hands on with support. This feeds into and enables my neuroticism, because it means I just give them more of the attention we train them to depend on.

• Our net new revenue is limited by the number of sales calls times our win rate times price. Since time input in SLG scales with number of customers, when we get more customers, we have less time. So, we raise prices. When we raise prices, the number of calls we book and deals we win goes down. This leads to less revenue and slower growth.

• We solve more issues with support rather than product improvements

All of this together conspires to kneecap our asymmetry. Meaning, instead of being able to capture an increasing amount of value for every unit of input, we’re capturing a linearly increasing level of value.

On the other hand, a PLG approach stands to let us treat the product as even more leverage than it is now and helps us compound in a bit more of an aggressive way.

[PLG]

To contrast Sales Led Growth, Product Led Growth (PLG) means you let your customer buy your product without even talking to you. This means that product has to be intuitive and easy to use an get value from, like an AI Chat bot or a social media site.

Pros of this approach include:

• Buyers can evaluate the software for low cost and low risk and seriously low marginal effort on our part

• If built right, the product itself will be doing the upselling: meaning, if a user likes it, they will be able to pay more to use ‘more’ of it

• You don’t have to invest time in selling each net new customer

Cons of this approach include:

• Have an entire cheap and nit picky class of buyer that you can otherwise filter out with an expensive sales led process

• Churn will likely be higher

• There will be lots of support tickets, some of which will be real, others which will be total nonsense

• We need to design a system that can scale with spikes in usage (truly, a champagne problem)

These are real trade offs, but we’re making them.

[Building The Mouse Trap]

Now, quite honestly, I don’t know shit about PLG. I’m going to share how I’m thinking about building the solution, but if you have experience doing this sort of thing, and think my framework is wrong, please email / call me.

So far, the framework we’re thinking with is:

• Start with the desired outcome of the users during a session

• Figure out what decisions they have to make to get that outcome

• Design a pretty front end that makes it fun and to make those decisions

• Align incentives so that as they get the valuable outcome, they’re willing and able to pay you for more of that outcome

Outside of that, we’re learning on the fly. I’m lucky & fortunate that Jack has more of a product mind than me, but we’ll still take all of the help we can get, so seriously do write me.

Look, proof I’m not normal or good at design, I write this blog in vim, look, I use vim, did I mention I use vim? (Please help me.)

[Grass is Greener]

I don’t think that we’re falling into the grass is greener on the other side problem, but we’re aware we might be.

Outside of our draw to asymmetry, I think PLG better plays to our strengths:

• Jack’s marketing is second to none, and we get more eyes than us two could ever convert with a sales motion

• We have a unit profitable product with differentiated data, so we don’t have to worry about asymmetric loss as we scale.

• We can pretty cleanly tie usage to price and can bake in a lot of opportunities for upselling that are tied to the end user being able to “do their job”

• Our space has a lot of software that has high barriers to entry that doesn’t work; plg derisks this for the buyer

• We want to be positioned to capture market share with considerably lower effort as our “competitors” keep exiting the space (big macro point, see The Bubble Short below)

• A constraint we’re accepting is one on headcount. PLG is much more friendly to a team that doesn’t want to hire than sales led growth is.

All that being said, we’re not jumping head first into the shallow end, either. We’re testing our hypothesis over some weeks.

And it’s not a “pivot,” either. It’s really just making our software easier and more intuitive to use along with experimenting with lowering the barrier to entry.

If you enjoy my sometimes startup sometimes AI sometimes philosophy sometimes jiu jitsu sometimes writing sometimes reading related rants, give it a subscription below - I am here every week.

[The AI Bubble Short]

You might be seeing how this is starting to lean into the ai bubble thesis: I believe that most (if not all) of our ‘competitors’ have designed LLM dependent products that are losing money. 

One such competitor actually had the audacity to ask us how we made our product profitable given inference costs. Now, that’s not something you usually want to go out and answer, certainly not publicly. But I decided that it’s time to spill the beans: BirdDog is profitable because I’m autistic enough to ignore everyone’s advice about how to build a product right now while not being quite so autistic that I can’t make a convincing argument in favor of these decisions and actually execute on it. 

Being a low or negative margin “AI” business right now is actually a much more precarious spot to be in than I think most people realize. In effect, if you’re losing money and your service depends on LLM inference, you’re losing money at an inference price that the provider (ai lab) is losing money at that THEIR provider (data center) is losing money at. 

If everybody in the chain is losing $2 for every $1 being made, the total loss for $1 of revenue in the chain is $8 (2^3). Meaning, the whole supply chain needs outside money to be remotely functional. 

Either the math needs to change DRASTICALLY (which, there’s no indication that it will) or their needs to be infinity dollars. 

Otherwise, when somebody runs out of capital to burn, they have to raise prices. That will more rapidly dry up the already diminishing capital of the other members of the interdependent chain by making them somehow lose more money than they already are. Eventually, somebody else breaks, etc. 

If you’re not convinced by my three paragraphs, please just go read Ed Zitron, whose research is the biggest breath of fresh air in a space that is so far detached from earth they might as well be picnicking on mars. 

Now, for the connection to PLG: we built BirdDog in a way that’s profitable and largely insulated from the bursting of the bubble and price hikes, and we genuinely believe the product is super valuable. 

In this way, the business functions as a short: as “competitors” start going belly up as the bubble bursts, we will be there for their customers to come over to us. 

And, now, we want those customers to have as little friction as possible when they’re ready to check us out.

Hence, BirdDog going PLG is an ai bubble short. 

Live Deeply,

2026.03.29

XCLV

[The Fall of the West; Narcissistic Irrationalism; A Merciful Legacy OS; It's always been this way]

Thesis: The most valuable parts of our modern society are a product of rationality and critical thinking, which is why we must preserve and elevate them at all costs.

[The Fall of the West]

Whether explicit or not, over the last couple of months, I've been writing a lot about the decay of Western Society.

I've written about...

• The dangers of the erosion of critical thinking

• How "stretching the truth" is just lying and how rampant lying is

• How writing helps you think more critically and how verbal communication can hide lies

• Why reading books is so different (and better) than consuming short form content

• Why you should keep doing hard things even when the world tells you to spam AI

• My own journey learning to emotionally regulate in a world of vices and how you can, too

• A rant countering some intellectually lazy AI Doomer Porn

• A criticism of short form content

I actually didn't realize how much these are circling the same topic until I wrote them all out here. More or less, lately, I've been writing about (empirical and anecdotal) societal trends that push us away from a Rational culture towards an Irrational one.*

To be crystal clear about what I mean, I believe:

• The dominate cultural trends in the West are moving us away from a society that rewards rational, critical thinking and instead towards a society that rewards, irrational, emotional decisions.

• For the good of the human species, A Rational Society is preferable to an Irrational Society

These are two very, very heavy and dense claims that cannot be done justice in eight 2,000 word blog posts, let alone in a single sentence.

Still, it’s so important to me to continue fleshing out and supporting these claims over time. I believe the West to is currently our best bet at a sustained, Rational Society, and I do not want it to fall. Even if, in some ways, I believe it's already slipped away from an idealized state, it's made substantial progress towards that state in other regards as well.

I'm taking the same stance culturally that myself and some other founders take about startups: An aggressive, protective pessimism constantly analyzing risks and threats, along with an unassailable, borderline delusional optimism that the desired outcome will be achieved.

_{*To be utterly clear, I am NOT using the word 'Rational' in the way that our modern 'Rationalists' use it. A working definition for Rational is logic and science based reasoning and decision making, while Irrational is a catch all for all that falls outside of that, including emotional decision making or tribalism. I understand the latter point, tribalism, might take some work to draw a connection, but I intend on getting to it. And as much as I love Popper, I'm not comfortable fully hitching my cart to his horse either, even though much of what I'm arguing is inspired by and (I think) consistent with what he might say Rationalism is.}

[Narcissistic Irrationalism]

In some ways, I think that the behaviors of 'narcissistic' personalities that piss people off are pretty in line with the behaviors you see more of in a less Rational Society.

I’m thinking in particular of one significant interaction I had with someone whose behavior you could safely label as narcissistic, although I could bring up many such examples.

In this case, I approached an individual, we'll call him Eli, who had consistently not been delivering promised work. After a laborious conversation, Eli surprisingly agreed that he could do a better job of estimating and delivering different items, and promised he'd complete 2 tasks by the morning of the next day.

When I woke up the next day, one task was half done, and the other was left completely untouched. Of course, I noted this to Eli, bringing up the recorded conversation from the day prior.

Eli responded very emotionally by telling me that our work environment was toxic and he was being micro managed. The bulk of his argument was emotional drivel about how it was somehow unfair to hold him accountable to something he said he would do.

This was ultimately an inflection point that rapidly devolved into a drawn out, quite violent, 2.5 month break up.

In a lot of ways, this argument encapsulates a rational vs irrational world view:

• My rational world view was contingent on verbal and recorded statements and consistency within and across those. If someone said they'd do something, they ought to do it.

• Eli's Irrational world view was contingent on emotional state, how he was feeling, and his desire to use words and arguments to get his way regardless of what he had said or committed to ('might makes right').

This is not at all to say that there is no room for grace or humanitarianism in a Rational world view; to the contrary, I think there is a very strong, rational argument for it. But there are also limits: this interaction came at the end of 9 months of build up and empty promises. And it was clear that we would continue on a death spiral if nothing was done.

And, to be even more clear, this is not at all to say I behaved wholly rationally; quite far from it. There were many instances in which I made decisions that were influenced more heavily by my emotions that logic. Funny enough, it’s those decisions that seemed to have been the most destructive by slowing our approach to resolution the most.

[A Merciful Legacy OS]

In the US, we're still thankfully functioning within the bounds of a relatively rational system.

Eli, in the above example, actually attempted to wield our legal system to get his way. Since his position was largely irrational, he utterly failed to achieve that. By sending me a cease and desist letter on complex business matters from a personal injury lawyer, he did succeed in giving my lawyer a good laugh, however! (he also succeeded in giving me cause to set ablaze dollars in the form of billable hours)

Our largely rational, argument based legal system seems to be, on the whole, still intact, notwithstanding some high publicity questionable decisions.

It thrives on laying out all of the information clearly, and then having two separate arguments that are (supposedly) rationally evaluated and decided upon. In theory, jurors are picked to be as neutral as possible through a process of both sides agreeing upon them, and judges are highly educated and rational people whose biases we attempt to control with lifetime terms.

This does not always work, but it has been the bulwark our society in the US was built on. The fact that it is even partly still intact is a grand protection against irrationalism.

[The Emotional Vote]

In other very important ways, as I've written about extensively, our society is becoming less Rational and more emotion based.

Everything about short form content is emotional. There is literally no time in a 10 second reel to formulate anything resembling a meaningful, rational argument. And even if there was, you’d have no time to evaluate it, because the system pushes you on to the next thing!

Instead, the reward mechanism is totally emotion based. If watching the thing triggered an emotional state, you'll vote on it by watching it again or liking it or sending it to your friends. This vote isn't based on an objective valuation of the value of any argument in the post; it's based on how it made you feel.

Since your attention has been monetized, your "attention vote" is similar to the concept of the "dollar vote": like the goods and services you spend money on influences the goods and services that are produced, the content you watch and like and share influences the content that is produced.

Grainy photo of the “news” - a doctor discussing a new vitamin study seconds before attempting to sell you a particular line of pills

And if you're consuming and sharing content that makes you feel angry or righteous or upset or elated or like you're politically in the right, that is what will continue to be produced!

This doesn’t get us closer to truth, this propagates paper thin ‘ideas’ and ideologies on the back of emotions. In such a system, Rationality is not involved in directing resources; emotional state is.

If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe; it’s not always overtly about rationalism vs irrationalism, but it is constant theme as I reflect on and detail my life journey.

[It's always been this way]

I might sound like the classic trope of the "it used to be better" kind of guy who doesn't actually know what it used to be like... and maybe I am that guy!

But that doesn't mean there isn't a way to rationally evaluate observable trends, like decreases in literacy and attention spans and increases in political extremism (on both sides) and make a value judgement on it. And it also doesn't mean that once you've made a value judgement that you shouldn't attempt to infer cause and effect and, if the effect is negative, to directly address and attack the causes as being dangerous and harmful to society.

So yes, there are always people like myself identifying problems. Some of us are wrong, some of us are right. It's up to you to make your own judgement about which one I am.

While I use anecdotes and emotionally charged language to get my point across, I ask you to judge me less on emotion and more on the arguments I continue to make and build throughout my posts.

Finally, to make my position clear once more, I'm not saying that the world is trending down on every important axis. We live in a truly incredible time where the barrier to learning and creating is incredibly low. That should be cherished and preserved.

My fear is that there are certain trends away from rationality that not only jeopardizes our ability to preserve that coveted freedom and opportunity, but that also jeopardizes our ability to preserve all of our freedom and opportunities.

As we go on, I'd ask you to continue to do so with a critical mind. The attitude of rationality is what I believe has gotten us to such an incredible place. If protected and elevated, it can take us further than we ever thought possible.

Live Deeply,

2026.03.22

XCLIV

[Amusing Ourselves to Death; Instagraphic Society; Sicario Can’t be a Tik Tok; Simplicity Does Not Equal Brevity; The Algo Decides; Sloppification of the World; Silver Linings…]

Thesis: Short form, instant gratification content limits our ability to rationally discuss meaningful, complex ideas.

[Amusing Ourselves to Death]

By the standards of 19th century America, our societal capacity for rationally talking about complex ideas is degenerate at best.

In 1985, Neil Postman published a book called 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' that observed shifts in American society as it moved from a "typographic" society that primarily expressed itself in long from, written word towards a society that expressed itself primarily via of television programming.

It’s hard to reduce his argument to one sentence, but here’s a good one:

In addition to the insidious blending of information and entertainment to the detriment of information, he explains that the medium switch from text to television actually changed what it’s possible to communicate.

And now, his “Age of Show Business” brought in by television has given way to the “Age of Social Media.” Our primary means by which we interface with the world, ideas, and each other has once again shifted as we now live a substantial portion of our lives through social media apps, text, and email hosted on cellphones and computers. Once again, some things we could discuss and communicate in the past are now effectively impossible in this new medium.

My argument is that while the shift is causing more harm than good, it is perhaps possible to live a life that mitigates the harm and maximizes the good.

A TV or phone or laptop is a window into another world, but it’s easy to forget that it’s not the world we actually live in.

[Instagraphic Society]

I'd call the society we now find ourselves in as Instagraphic. The way we interface with the world is constrained less by a dichotomy between text and video, and more by the dichotomy between long form and short form content. Short Form is increasingly dominant, flooding us with incessant, bite sized bursts of instant gratification, regardless of whether or not it takes the form of a 10 seconds video or a less than one sentence push notification.

A Qualitative change of this Instagraphic Society is that everything from the television world is compressed even further: no longer do we have 45 second news headlines, now we have 10 second reels. Paragraphs have been reduces to single, choppy sentences.

Qualitatively, there are other important differences too:

• Your feed is entirely custom to you; this is infinitely more personalized than even 1000 television channels ever could be

• You can skip ahead whenever you want and know that the next thing will have a high chance of being really entertaining to you

• Explicit ads have been increasingly blended with organic content as commercials fall out of style

• You have immediate access to the information system anywhere anytime: on the subway, walking to the store, in the bathroom, at dinner with friends.

This last point is perhaps the most important: it is always right there, accessible via the little rectangle in your pocket, waiting for you to engage. And oh, you'll engage. After all, it's very likely closely tied to how you make money, communicate with loved ones, and how you "relax" in your free time.

[Sicario Can’t be a Tik Tok]

In this new society, some things are now literally impossible to communicate in the dominant short form format. And, other things are so disincentivized that they might as well be impossible.

It might seem offensive or extreme to say that it's impossible to communicate certain ideas in certain formats, but I'll start with the example Postman did: it would be effectively impossible to communicate a philosophical treatise via smoke signals (feel free to try).

Making it more real for you, it would be effectively impossible to recreate Sicario, a beaufitul film I watched for a second time last night, with short form content.

There are all of these slow scenes and shots that involve tense build ups and, resultantly, actions that have strong emotional payoffs. More importantly than that, as I discussed as it related to a novel a few weeks ago, each scene has the compounding benefit of every scene before it.

- LIGHT SPOILER -

The film ends with a boy playing soccer in Juárez, Mexico. We hear gunshots nearby. The boy stops. A moment later, the ref blows a whistle and he resumes.

This in isolation is an emotional scene, but it is so much more impactful when you spent 2 hours watching characters justify murder and violence by saying they're going to create order in Mexico.

And it's even more impactful when you see, just 20 minutes earlier, one of those characters murder this boy’s father in the name of that order and peace that it’s now clear was never created.

- END SPOILER -

You can’t get to that depth of payoff in a discontinuous stream of 10 second videos. It’s literally impossible.

Outside of art, the matter is far worse in terms of it's impact on our discourse. That same complexity reduction hits our ability to communicate useful information and have calm, rational discussions even harder than it does to make beautiful film.

[Simplicity Does Not Equal Brevity]

Some platforms, like LinkedIn, don’t allow for true long form content in the main feed: the character limit is 3,000. So, it's impossible for me to post this blog on the main feed in LinkedIn. And yes, I'm sure I could rewrite this to be more succinct, but if I did, I would not capture as much complexity and nuance as I am now.

You might be saying, but Noah, that’s a skill issue! The real sign of intelligence is being able to communicate complex ideas in simple terms.

And in some regards, you'd be right! But quite frankly, this notion has been taken too far out of context and blown out of proportion.

Simplicity does not equal brevity.

Take these two sentences:

• The dog ran very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very far.

• On his way home, the pernicious birddog glided over an incredible distance. 

The first sentence is simpler than the second by any number of measures (number of clauses, number of unique words, metaphoric use of 'glided'). However, the second sentence has half as many words as the first. Simplicity and brevity are NOT the same thing.

And more important than that, while communicating a complex idea simply is a sign of intelligence and mastery, it's utterly outlandish to think that you can achieve mastery by hearing a complex idea communicated simply.

I was wrestling a friend this weekend, and I had him in the quite compromised position of being behind him with both of my hands latched around his waist. He tried snatching my leg. I just pulled it back out of his way and sat him down. Then finished taking his back, to which he could not escape.

He made the observation that he’s wrestled with untrained friends but always felt like he had a fighting chance, even in a position like that. With me, he said he did not feel there was any way out!

Of course he felt that! I've been doing marital arts for 4 years now. He went to one class with me 3 years ago in college, and sometimes roughhouses with his friends.

Now, I could tell my friend a very simple piece of advice, like: "The trick is to eliminate all space between you and the other guy and load all of your weight into him.” But the thing is, no one would seriously believe that me saying that will mean that now, my friend gets all of the benefit of my 4 years of training immediately.

The same thing goes for the written word. Some ideas are inherently complex. While you can break it down into simple parts and communicate them in plain english, you'd be a fool to think that you can explain pages of nuance and counter arguments in a 3000 character LinkedIn post, or astrophysics in a tweet.

Even though some platforms have removed character limits, it doesn’t matter—the algorithms’ reward systems can be even more incentivizing than can strict limits.

[The Algo Decides]

Sure, a competent person can navigate and extract value and complex ideas from short form content. The issue is, the Instagraphic world is not conducive to that. It requires active effort to achieve that outcome. On the other hand, the Typographic world of written books is far more conducive to building an understanding of complex things, and you might even say that in some ways, it's the default of such a world.

Beyond text constraints, algorithms tend to reward posts for tactics and formatting that are not conducive to level headed, thoughtful discourse or complex ideas being broken down into simple parts and then restructured into a meaningful whole.

Back in November, I was helping Lana film a Reel for a dinner we were having. I suggested we do a 4 second shot of her walking backward through a door into the house, and do a slow pan around the room. She humored me and took the shot, but explained she would not be using it because having a 4 second long shot in a Reel was basically suicide--nobody would look at one shot for 4 seconds!

Sure, Reels / Tik Tok hasn't made that shot 'impossible.' You can still 'do it' and post it... but it's very disincentivized, which is just as powerful, if not more than strict constraints. The Expected Values (EV) in terms of views, followers, and ultimately your goal (applicants, sponsorships, customers) are likely so much higher if you don't have a 4 second shot.

The same goes for written content. Before I start sounding like I'm talking out of my ass, the below is based on my experience getting over 1M impressions on LinkedIn in one year, as well as notes from my cofounder whose gotten 4.5M impressions in one year.

So, if I wanted a post to do well on LinkedIn, there are a whole slew of things I am strongly encouraged NOT to do:

• Communicate Uncertainty: "I think this tactic was a contributing factor to getting my first customer" has such a lower EV than "I got my first customer because I did this." Nobody cares for things that 'maybe' worked!

• Have Long Sentences: My 50 word sentences in this blog simply not fly on LinkedIn. I need to break them up and reduce it down to short, punchy sentences.

• Have Continuity Between Posts: Every LinkedIn post needs to be self contained. No series allowed.

• Discuss Nuance: Midway through the post, you can add a twist and say “but here’s the truth”; beyond that, nuance will hurt you.

• Complex Hooks: My cofounder analyzed his posts and found that 93% of his top 15 posts had a 2 line or less hook. Want to put a complex idea at the top? Suicide.

• Discuss Abstract Ideas: You can talk about the abstract, but it has to be emergent from a clear, real narrative--flashy numbers and confessionals work far better than cooly recounting logically sound strategy.

None of these things are strict "rules," but they're all heuristics that, through experience, we've seen that following improves chances of 'winning' (getting impressions, booking demos) dramatically. That has the effect of making these heuristics more compelling than someone else telling us to follow them ever could be.

To be clear, I am not saying that the content that’s a product of these rules inherently bad; I wouldn’t produce it if I thought it was. Rather, I’m saying that it is less conducive to rational discussion of complex ideas, and that if it is the dominant form of social discourse, that is not good for society.

[Sloppification of the World]

The worst part about the complexity reduction (read: sloppification) is that it effects all mediums, like long form writing, film, verbal debates outside of the dominant short form mediums that everyone is primarily using.

Just like Neil Postman noted that TV brought debates from the 1.5 hour turns in the Lincoln-Douglas series down to minute long turns in presidential debates, I'd be hard pressed to think that the average person in our Instagraphic Society would have the patience to listen to one person speak for even a minute straight!

I haven’t watched enough recent films to truly comment, but based on the trailers I have seen and the incessant serialization of any Intellectual Property that does remotely well, I can’t imagine that the vast majority of cinema is anyway as sophisticated as it was even 10 years ago.

It’s no wonder—if our primary way of engaging with each other and culture is through choppy texts, short emails, constrained social posts, and 10 seconds videos, we severely reduce the surface area complex ideas have to take root, and put pressure on the mediums that were once more conducive to it, as well.

This will leave us more impoverished than ever before.

If you enjoyed this post, give it a subscribe - I’m here every weekend with my writing about how we really do live in a society.

[Silver Linings…]

I'd be delusional if I said that everything about the Instagraphic Society was bad and grim. There are some beautiful parts!

• You really do have access to more information more easily than ever before, even if you have to be incredibly on guard about what actually constitutes as 'information.'

• The leverage and financial independence you can get from harnessing the power of the Instagraphic Society creates what appears to be (without direct experiential knowledge of what it was like before) a more rapid upward financial mobility

As a direct beneficiary of both of these features, I'm incredibly grateful for them. And as tempting as it is to say the solution is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and go and live in the woods alone, I do wonder if there is a less drastic path forward…

I'm not yet entirely sold that there is an effective way to have a society that both has access to Instagraphic Vices and shows more constraint than indulgence at scale on average, but for now, I am functioning as if that is the case. The path I am currently personally following to live a more vibrant and thoughtful life:

1. Strictly limit consumption of short form content with daily periods of no digital interactions

2. Actively engage with long form content, particularly books

3. Have daily moments of presence with others (dinner with friends where I don't use or sometimes even have my phone)

4. If I create content, be honest and provide something valuable (this one can be hard and is admittedly very nebulous... perhaps warrants a full post)

5. Have weekly time set aside for meaningful and dynamic in person interactions (jiu jitsu, volunteering)

Again, I have no idea if this is the "way," but it seems that if everyone behaved like this, the societal outcome would be more positive by any number of measurements.

Live Deeply,

2026.03.15

XCLIII

[AI Doomer Porn, Post Bubble Hope, The Point of Future Histories]

Thesis: Ungrounded predictions of the future are easy to make; you might as well make it optimistic.

[AI Doomer Porn]

Citrini Research released a piece a few weeks ago, called “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” giving a description of a possible future in which by 2028, white collar labor has been nearly completed eradicated by AI and a huge swath of the US population slips into the permanent underclass.

They claim it's not Bear Porn or AI Doomer fan-fiction at the start, but that doesn't change the fact that it's both of those things. Although, I prefer the term AI Doomer Porn.*

My issue with this is that it's really, really hard to predict the future. And sure, they claim they're not predicting the future, and act like they’re exploring something under-explored scenario, but they’re really throwing gas on a panic fire without bringing any new facts or real analysis to the table.

The thing is, it's really not that hard to write a compelling narrative that sounds like anything is going to happen.

This was actually one of my biggest gripes when I was in finance: you have all of these people proselytizing these crazy predictions in eloquent sounding chains of events that completely reduce dimensionality of the situation, cherry pick the variables that help them, and ignore every variable that could serve as a counter point.

This piece by Citrini is more or less just that.

The good news, though, is that since it's so easy to write an intelligent sounding ‘scenario’ of the future, I decided I'd write one, too!

Mine's a bit more pessimistic about the short to mid term capabilities of AI, and more real about the current financial situation. But, hey, I’m more optimistic about the human spirit.

Of course, I think a future with nuclear powered spaceships and actually intelligent humanoid robots could be interesting and possibly good**, so all of those things casually make appearances in my prediction.

If I wanted, I could've plausibly included genetically modified horses that become unicorns, but I decided to keep it on the somewhat tame side.

Finally, I'd warn you that this isn't "Libertarian Science Maxxing Futurist Porn," but it basically is, so buckle up.

_{*If you are above the age of 30 and reading this, us young folk will sometimes put the word "porn" after non sexual things that are self gratifying. So "AI Doomer Porn" means content that is self gratifying in a (hopefully) non sexual way to "AI Doomers," or people who think AI will create a very bleak society rapidly or otherwise imminently end the world.}

_{**In spite of the myriad mythological warnings of Golems, the grim terminal predictions of Asimov around robots, and Frank Herbert’s ban on the Thinking Machines, I do think that any useful societal taboo around humanoid automatons will be derived from experience rather than prophetic warning.}

[Post Bubble Hope]

The Below is a future history - recounting the fictional events and trends between 2026 and the bottom of the AI Bubble in mid 2028. Note, I site appropriate sources when I refer to real events that happened before March 15th, 2026.

[Pop!; Post Listing Chaos; The Gang Learns About Efficient Markets; The Future of Work; Scientific Renaissance; A Bright Future]

[Pop!]

It's mid 2028. The analysts are saying we're on the way up from the bottom. It was a rocky year and a half, but consensus is finally coming around.

All the talk of AI this, AI that--it makes it a bit ironic that the thing that blew the bubble was the most notable AI company going public.

At the end of 2026, the Street went berserk when it saw the numbers on OpenAI's S-1, and not in a good way. Everyone knew the company was losing money… but it's one thing to hear about it, and another thing altogether to see an official report of a $30B loss in 2025 and another $35B burnt before 2026 was even over.

Anthropic was no better; the canary in the coal mine should've been when they revealed only $5B in total revenue along with $10B in training and inference costs alone in a court filing in March 2026. But, for some reason, losing at least $2 for every $1 made was overshadowed by the seemingly contradictory shouts that they had a $19B run rate sometime in February.

For whatever reason, it took a couple S-1s for the market to realize that the two companies it had been pinning it’s hopes on weren’t exactly being clear about their finances.

[Post Listing Chaos]

Still, it didn't deter either of the firms from completing the listings—as is so often the case, only death can extinguish hubris when it has such momentum. There was a big retail pump, at first. Then a pull back when the institutions didn't pile in. By the time the 6 month lock ups ended in mid 2027, the Anthropic and OpenAI were trading more like penny stocks than tech companies.

The capital in their bank accounts was drying up--revenue was still coming in, but not faster than expenses poured it out. The layoffs and price hikes helped, but not enough. Private investors wouldn't chip in; everyone who would've had already gotten burnt by private 12 figure valuations that quickly evaporated when the shares went public.

There was always talk of a government bail out, and now eyes were turned towards Washington. Relief came from a different direction, though: Microsoft tied the knot and gobbled OpenAI up off the open market. In a frenzy, Amazon stole Anthropic from Google, who everyone thought was the shoe in buyer.

By the time the acquisitions were made, it was already becoming apparent that the 'premium' being commanded by OpenAI and Anthropic for 'superior' models was at constant risk of erosion d by cool heads and mature products that treated LLM inference as a commodity. The acquisitions were closer to very expensive acquihires in an attempt for the lucky big tech companies that made the purchases to command some slight, 6 month edge on a product that was, for the first time, learning what an efficient market can do.

[The Gang Learns About Efficient Markets]

The old model of "throw money at the AI Lab and watch the model get asymmetrically better" was sliding into big tech saying "look at our AI CapEx, of course our models are better."

As the commodity pricing came to light, it turned out none of the inference providers could make more than a 25% premium on the capital and operational costs of owning and renting GPUs or even providing token inference. But it turns out, since every one of them had been burning piles of money to keep prices artificially low, even charging a 25% premium on cost represented at least a 2x increase on what the market had gotten used to spending on GPUs and APIs. Demand dropped as entire classes of nice to have "AI Wrapper" products that had already thin margins in 2026 became too expensive to justify buying in 2027.

This, of course, came along with quite aggressive consolidation in the space, with the most debt laden of the inference providers, like CoreWeave, getting acquired in face preserving "mergers of equals" or outright bought and gutted by the few PE and growth firms that still had enough dry powder to syndicate a purchase.

[The Future of Work]

In early 2027, as AI companies could no longer afford to burn piles of money to acquire customers, the productivity suite that was supposed to represent the future of work became unsustainable. The rumors of as much as $5000/mo costs to offer tools like Claude Code at $200 subscriptions came out as irrefutable fact. As a result, the cost of the subscription was going up, and the value was going down.

For corporate software teams, the calculus was looking a lot less like "Claude Code replaces a human worker for 1/100th of the cost." It was still undeniably valuable: a team with 5 juniors might be able to do more with 3 juniors + AI Coding Agents for less investment. But, it turned out that the bottlenecks were far less often individual developer productivity, and more often bloated organizations incapable of moving at lightning fast speeds, even if the machine could replace the man.

As for the other knowledge worker roles that were on their way to be certainly disrupted by AI? The public nature of the explosions of OpenAI and Anthropic, along with the dramatic increase in cost, conspired together to slow sticky enterprise adoption. To be sure, it was clear that over time, many firms with the budget to do so would be query all of their documents via a RAG database, and some would even have proactive "agents" flagging missed risks and recommending next steps. It turns out, these systems were a bit less "LLM" based than originally anticipated: traditional AI & NLP techniques were starting to be improved upon and used in conjunction with the LLMs to lower costs and improve accuracy, and to great effect. Regardless, it was now clear that the promised land of AI writing every single one of your emails and making all of your decisions for you was so much further away than anyone had thought.

On the other hand, those notorious teams at startups that outmaneuvered incumbents with superior, faster code? Well, they'd keep doing what they always did: ship faster & smarter and stay leaner, running circles around incumbents for specific use cases that continued to spiral out of some original, niche wedge, until they either were acquired or became the incumbent themselves.

Now, the gap was admittedly widening in their favor. It wasn't anything like ServiceNow losing half of it's revenue over 2 years... it was more like their market share getting slowly eroded by niche, vertical players that could more rapidly build enterprise grade softwares that replaced 3 or 4 vendors, charging less than all 4 of them combined, but more than any one of them on it's own.

[Scientific Renaissance]

All in all, the world realized that the models, as is, were good enough for most reasonable use cases--the engineering focus shifted away from some vague notion of "AGI" that was fueling 12 figure investments, and more towards efficiency. Techniques like QLora became commonplace, and even more aggressive optimization directions were being taken. Models with low latency requirements were being served on CPU.

And it seemed material science was on the way back in, too. The crunch on energy supply chains caused by the electricity demands of the mega data centers along with the added pressure of the War in Iran and the too little too late realization of the promise of Venezuelan Oil woke the West to the importance of Nuclear.

Even in 2025, reactors were coming back online, but this served more than anything to show how much inefficient red tape was strangling the industry. Partly out of perceived material necessity, partly in an attempt to boost the economy when it started taking a turn for the worst, the government eased the burden on nuclear investment and research. If there was ever any hope of an economical super intelligence, it seemed it might be contingent on harnessing the power of the sun in miniature on Earth. And, as it would turn out many years down the road, this same technology, when taken to it's natural conclusion, would finally give man the physical energy needed to make ours a truly space faring, interstellar species.

Speaking of material science, the humanoid robots that were coming into vogue in early 2026 had shipped to mixed reviews. The ancient American promise of a utopia with a faithful and loyal robot in every home was far from being realized by the end of the decade, but the experiment ultimately shed light on issues with our current conceptions of Artificial Intelligence. Namely, statefulness and learning rate: there was something unsettling about a robot 'forgetting' what you told it, or making the same errors repeatedly without learning. And, there was something decidedly unintelligent about the energy it required to make a large neural network adapt it's path ways to new information delivered on the fly.

Since the problems came to light in the context of humanoid robots, interesting and promising research directions around designing AI systems that were even more human like, aware of a slew of sensory inputs at all times concurrently, began to be explored. It was by no means an AI winter like had been experienced in the past; rather, if anything, it was a sober renaissance where new and novel methods that learned from and often included the beauty of the transformer were frequently explored, rather than being blotted out with religious zeal of by the bright sun of the LLM.

To be sure, these new methods meant to improve the humanoids were already showing promise to one day overcome the shortcomings of LLM use in all fields, not just robotics.

[A Bright Future]

Indeed, 2028 is a different time than ever before, and there are myriad problems unsolved.

But the so called great knowledge crisis never materialized in the way that was proposed, and the future looks bright in new ways. Yes, the market was particularly challenged with some sharp retractions through 2027, but the world is coming out of the stressful times with eyes on an unusually bright future. And the successful removal of a number of financial aberrations from the market without causing irreversible harm served to alleviated concern that the market has been damaged by crony capitalism beyond repair.

Now, it’s not uncommon for hope to dominate fear.

If you enjoyed my essay, it’d be cool if you subscribed. I’m here with my writing every Sunday.

[The Point of Future Histories]

While the future I just painted references specific facts and world events and takes them to one possible conclusion, it's also incredible naive and perhaps even arrogant.

The 2 hours I spent writing and editing that while downing black tea is completely disproportionate to the implications of the claims. I did literally 0 incremental research other than what was in my head. I made it end optimistically, even though I completely ignore any number of systematic issues, including the existence of the Federal Reserve. It would be disingenuous and maybe unethical for me to seriously act like this was a well thought out, likely scenario grounded in fact.

Still, I wrote it and published it for two key reasons:

1. To make it crystal clear that it's not very hard to make reasonable sounding predictions of the future. You take present day facts and trends and extrapolate them to some desired conclusion, either briefly addressing or outright ignoring any counter evidence.

2. To show that it's as easy to be optimistic as it is to be pessimistic. Sure, I threw in a recession, but I ended on what to me is a very hopeful note.

I sometimes wonder if one of the factors contributing to a tone of seemingly national pessimism is the lack of a vision worth fighting for that is plausible enough for people to buy into. Yes, there are reasons to have pessimistic future histories, dystopian futures to scare us into our senses, etc. But I don’t really know what the point of the Citrini one is, other than to get you to buy their research, maybe.

So, if I can counter balance it with one relatively optimistic and long term hopeful future history, even if it isn't so comprehensive to address every issue, it's a Sunday well spent.

Live Deeply,

2026.03.08

CXLII

[The Negative Elephant in the Room; Wannabe Bukowksi; Drowning in Type 1 Fun; Emotional Regulation; A List of Tactics; The Lifelong Skill]

Thesis: Emotional Regulation equips you to overcome negative experience without running from it.

[The Negative Elephant in the Room]

While life is beautiful, it’s really, really easy to get so caught up in running from the painful parts of experience that you forget about the beauty altogether.

I’ve had objectively amazing periods of life where all I could think about was the perceived negative parts—and I’m going to share about one such particularly crazy period, today.

And that's not because the perceived negative parts are "bigger" or more important than the good parts, even though the negative can feel like the overbearing “Elephant” in the room of your mind. In my experience, when I'm stuck viewing events and the world negatively, even when so many good things are happening to me, it's often because I haven't actually accepted & processed the negative parts.

Learning to emotionally regulate and process these perceived negative parts is one of the most important things you can do in life, because painful things will keep happening again and again. If you don’t exercise your muscle for dealing with them, you’re liable to get stuck in a cycle of having to use vices to cope with it, instead of accepting it.

These vices and distractions might make you feel better in the moment, but they don't actually solve the issue. They probably make it worse!

[Wannabe Bukowksi]

My freshmen year at the University of Michigan was a huge adjustment for me. I went from homecoming king of a small school with 28 students in my graduating class to being 1 of 8,000 freshmen from all over the world.

Naturally, I faced a lot of rejection and had a ton of new experiences that I was completely unfamiliar with. That’s normal for that phase of life, but I adjusted rather poorly. Which, in all honesty, is normal, too.

But, the extent to which I found myself behaving like a degenerate was probably a bit extreme. Below are some of my habits from the time:

• Wake up with ~ 6 hours of sleep

• Do that thing 18 yr old boys really like to do

• Start drinking a 300MG energy drink on my way to class

• Sometimes pay attention, sometimes trade options in class instead

• Use snapchat / instagram / dating apps a lot throughout the day

• Take a 100MG caffeine pill followed by a middday nap

• Do that thing 18 yr old boys really like to do

• At least a couple of days a week, I would "pregame" the dining hall dinner with a couple of shots of whiskey. Candidly, this was quite brilliant in it's degeneracy: I was making an efficient and economic use of alcohol by consuming it on an empty stomach

• Eat pretty unhealthy (lots of Mojo cookies and ice cream, putting my current Berryline addiction to shame)

• Drink many nights regardless of whether I was hanging with friends or not

• Sometimes go out on a Tuesday / Thursday (at least once on a Monday)

• Do that thing 18 yr old boys really like to do

• Black out more than once…

• Sit on my phone on social media before I went to bed

Keep in mind that the above is something of a redacted version. Regardless, it should be enough for you to still get the idea that I quite perfectly kept myself always occupied with any of a number of easy to access vices. I basically thought I was Charles Bukowski.

The most incredible part of all of this is that I was still quite competent during the whole thing. I got all A’s my first semester, I was becoming decent at options trading (barring one particular high risk mistake), I was starting a club, and meeting people.

In other words, I was behaving like a total degenerate, but on paper, I was "doing fine." Of course, it’s easy to say that without all of that, I would’ve been doing way better, just as it’s easy to say that without all of that, I wouldn’t have had a reason to grow into the person I am today.

Cereal with whiskey rather than milk

[Drowning in Type 1 Fun]

The point of me sharing all of this is to emphasize that while my degeneracy never "outstripped my competence," if you will, it was still a very bad place to be in.

I was not actually having a good time. While I had moments of uncanny lucidity and was drowning in Type 1 fun, overall, it should go without saying that I was not in a great place psychologically.

I felt alone, isolated, and sad. The craziest part of all of this is that my life did not suck at all. Plenty of great things were happening that I was too busy moping and partying to appreciate:

• I was meeting life long friends

• I was developing skills that would get me quite far in life

• I was learning what subjects I liked and didn't like

• I was reading

• I was developing parts of a world view I still value today

• I was interacting with kinds of people I never would've met back home

• I published my first poetry book

• I was writing a lot of work that I think is really strong to this day

In spite of all of that great stuff happening, my moments of appreciation towards it were rare. Instead, I was so busy running from the feeling of rejection and loneliness, or attempting to take a sort of bitter pride in it, that I didn’t really have gratitude for or focus on the nice stuff.

The pain nagged at my heart but I was too busy indulging in vices to address it.

That doesn’t mean I “regret” this period in my life, although I was ashamed of it for a while. Just like with any case of emotional regulation, I’ve accepted it for what it was.

Here's a picture of me drinking in a graveyard. Something's don't change - if one is to drink, I still think that's the most poetic place to do so...

[Emotional Regulation]

If this is the part where I'm supposed to give you some happy turn around or moment where I was like "wow, I'm acting like a dumbass," I'm sorry to disappoint: no such single moment existed. And, in all honesty, it actually got worse before it got better.

The “turn around” was a slow and painful process of growing up. It was a mix of seeing the negative impact of my actions on myself and others, a number of friends and family making comments, and a lot of slow reflection and maturing.

Overtime, with intentional practice, I began to learn to emotionally regulate what I was feeling. Rather than burying negative emotions and responses to events in a pile of empty bottles, I’ve learned more and more to address, accept, and process life events and the negative emotions that come with them. If you don’t do this, even if it is in reality a small event, the negative emotions don’t go away, they build up in a backlog.

It’s not easy to do and it’s never done, either. Even when you get through a lot of the backlog, more things will happen that you have to keep processing, over and over again as they come up.

I had something that I would call "pretty bad" happen on Friday, and the day after, I felt very similar to how I did back when I was a freshman in college. Tired, drained, etc. So I addressed it, thought about it, journaled about it, talked to someone about it, slept a bit, made sure I was actually eating enough, and caught myself when I was tempted to fall into some old vices.

In other words, it sucked, but I emotionally regulated and dealt with it, rather than spiraling. It's hard to do, and I'm still coping with this particular thing, but it's a muscle that you build. And the thing that would’ve sent you off the deep end years ago becomes a thing that you can work through in a few days.

[A List of Tactics]

Again, I am no expert or monk or zen master, I'm just a sentient (I think) bag of flesh and bones like you. So, I have no idea what will work for you, I can just shared what things have helped me deal with negative emotions in a healthy way in the past:

• It’s cliché, but accepting that the thing actually happened and that your response to it is an emotional state

• No cellphone usage for 30 minutes in the morning so I don't get into a reactive state right away and can process things that have happened

• Limited social media usage

• Journalling every night, which gives me an anchor to process emotions

• Journalling a lot more when something "big happens" to work through

• Reading daily

• Not doing that thing that 18 year old boys like to do

• Talking to friends

• Limiting alcohol use (I had maybe 10 drinks in 2025, and nothing so far in 2026)

• Not going overboard with caffeine. I still drink quite a bit, but swapping energy drinks for coffee and now a lot of the coffee for tea has slowed this down considerably from where it was

• Exercising regularly, push ups and squats almost everyday

• Martial arts: jiu jitsu for me (learning to breathe with a 200 pound man sitting on your chest and trying to break your arm does wonders for other stressful or overwhelming moments)

• Going on walks outside without my phone (Cambridge feels like it might be shorts weather today, thank god)

• Eating relatively healthy (have been struggling with this one lately, lots of uber eats right now)

Overall, these behaviors have a lot more positive impact on my ability to emotionally regulate than taking two shots of whiskey on an empty stomach did.

Note that a lot of these are daily habits, rather than things that are one off. That's because things that suck will happen a lot, and you want to be able to metabolize them regularly, rather than building the backlog.

Also note that any of these on it's own can distract you, too. You could work out so much or talk to friends so much that you don't fully deal with the issue, either. While that's way better than going on a bender, it can still be a distraction from actually first addressing and accepting the thing.

Likewise, all of this doesn’t mean that something like drinking is strictly bad, either. It just means that it was something I used in excess to avoid my problems.

And finally, one other major things that helps me process life and move me forward is having a mission. A clear goal and objective to work toward, a positive thing to build and create. For me, right now, that is BirdDog. While you can go overboard with this too, I think you might be surprised at how much working hard every day on something you care about can positively impact your mentality.

Obligatory call to action: please subscribe if you liked the post. I’d be lying if I said I have any idea what next Sunday’s will be about. But I can tell you there will be one next Sunday, just like there was one each of the last 142 Sundays.

[The Lifelong Skill]

As you get better at emotionally regulating, you'll notice more and more how many people really aren't that good at it.

And it's hard to blame them--the modern world provides so many easy ways out. To learn the skill, you basically have to intentionally "opt out" of the default of a life regulated by algorithms and other people’s emotions and abundant vices.

And you have to very intentionally opt in to emotionally regulation, and commit to it. Habits are your leverage here, because they help you put regulation in a position that's a lot more like auto pilot. But really, as with everything, there's never a free lunch.

The more you learn to regulate yourself, the more grace you'll have for others who you see are struggling and not so well adjusted. And maybe, you can be an example for them to learn from.

Live Deeply,

2026.03.01

CXLI

[Doing Hard Things; Aggressive Purple Belts; 10X Seller; LLM Hegemony; Thinking Like Investors; Incentive Issue; Intellectual Serfdom]

Thesis: Doing hard things is how to get better, and getting better still matters, even when you’re being sold that it doesn’t.

[Do Hard Things]

Breaking news: you get better at something by doing that thing.

And usually, to get really good, you have to spend a lot of time in discomfort. The less comfortable something is, the more likely it is you're getting better at the skill.

This is true for jiu jitsu, selling, and programming.

Like it's true for any skill—debating, modeling, accounting, writing, etc.

LLMs don't change that.

[Aggressive Purple Belts]

When I was rolling this week, I had a particular purple belt be quite aggressive with me.

To me, this is very flattering. I am an upper ranked blue belt, which is lower than a purple belt.

I was actually explicitly told by a purple belt that I am good enough that most purple belts will have to be aggressive and high pressure with me if they want to win, because I've eliminated a lot of the easy paths.

Two things I'm seeing used against me now:

• Camping: Putting their weight on me in such a way that I'm exerting force to keep the position stable, but they are not exerting any force

• Timing Pressure: Aggressive top pressure that increases in time with my exhale to make it harder for me to inhale

Objectively, these both suck! It makes it harder for me to think clearly and play right. But, I'm actually really happy that it's happening, not just because it's flattering, but because it's how I'm going to get better.

It shows me where I'm weak and reveals what I need to do to get better.

If I was just ripping omoplatas on players who were less experienced than me, I'd only be getting better at part of the game. Learning to defend and escape and sweep when a better player is pressuring aggressively sucks the most but is definitely the highest leverage part to get better at.

[10X Seller]

I'm not great at sales.

I'm not bad, either, to be clear.

I'm maybe good.

But with something like sales, good is really, really far from great.

I'm actually in the dangerous channel where I’m just good enough that I have confidence that I know what I'm doing, but still not high enough that I could call myself anywhere near great.

If I let sales take a mental backseat, then I'll get stuck at 'good enough.'

I don't want to stay at good enough! Jack & I still think we can make a combination of sales / product tweaks that raises our ACV by at least 2x, if not 3x or maybe even 4x! And reduce churn, too.

That would be really, really good, because it would alter our business model quite a bit positively, and positively impact our long term outcome.

Going from good enough to great is really uncomfortable, though. In sales calls, we need to ask harder, more direct questions faster, which is uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable isn't fun.

But it's really the same thing as jiu jitsu. You don't go from being a blue belt to a purple belt by only rolling with white belts.

That discomfort is where your performance increases and you get better.

[LLM Hegemony]

Nothing changes in this pattern of discomfort leading to gains when we look at programming or writing or knowledge work or anything an LLM can do, just because an LLM can do it.

Yes, LLMs give us a terrifically cheap way to do a lot of things decently well, and it really is like magic.

One of my friends used Vibe Coding to make his own investor dashboard and internal tooling for his business.

BirdDog's internal dashboard for tracking customers was built by Jack and I ping ponging a file between us and LLMs. It took us a couple of hours, most of which was us thinking about what data we actually wanted to see. The coding I did was copy, pasting, and editing a couple boiler plate functions and writing the data structure.

But the notion that we're entering some "post knowledge work society"* tomorrow is still pretty outlandish to me, and not something I would at all bet on.

_{*Yes, I am talking about that article, and yes, I know it was not a 'prediction,' and yes, I don't think it matters that it was not a 'prediction', and yes, it was still fear mongering to get you to buy their investment advice} 

[Thinking Like Investors]

Let's look at the different outcomes for LLM/AI progression and approach it like we're placing a bet. Yes, I'm focusing on coding, but you can replace agentic coding with automated therapists or LLM lawyers or LLM Consultants or LLM Accountants or LLM Bankers or whatever you want & it's going to be roughly the same.

For starters, if you seriously believe in option 1, you're not going to help your own situation by vibe coding a b2b SaaS faster than someone else.

You should probably build a self sufficient faraday cage of a bunker in a remote location where you can survive with a small group of humans to one day repopulate the Earth aeons after the AI Overlords cause a Terminator-esque Homo Sapien holocaust. Or, if you think AGI will lead to infinite surplus and global peace, then go be and artist or go outside or something.

I'm personally in between outcomes 3 and 4, closer to bucket 3 over a long enough time scale. I also don't think outcome 2 is at all impossible!

But, even if you're closer to believing in outcome 2, the recommended Course of Action in bucket 2 doesn't preclude you from playing the Course of Action in outcomes 3 & 4 in the meantime. The more people who believe in outcome 2 before it actually happens, the higher the return on XP Farming.

Meaning, if you think that Agentic Coding is ALREADY so good that we don't need programmers at all, you're not paying enough attention.** But, the more people who believe that, the higher the return for being one of the few who are actually getting better at the thing.

Again, I think this is just as true for any knowledge work that isn't coding, maybe even more so, as the CAPEX that's gone into replacing programmers with LLMs seems to far outstrip that going into replacing other people.

In short, unless you genuinely believe that complete human obsolescence of a valuable skill is happening immediately, becoming better at it is still a good bet to make.

_{*Depending on your business, this is likely something you should at least spend sometime on as a founder anyways}

_{*Cursor’s ‘browser’ didn’t work, Salesforce regrets firing so many people to replace them with ai, Anthropic’s C Complier built from ‘scratch’ doesn’t work without calling the existing GCC C Compiler…, etc etc etc. The Cursor / Anthropic ones remind me of a post someone wrote about founders and lying.}

[Incentive Issue]

All of this is without mentioning that the very companies driving the LLM obsolescing everything narrative profits from you believing that.

Where the crowd goes, I shall not

The more people that say, "Yeah, I can stop learning things now" and just goes with the flow, represents additional recurring revenue for these companies.

And again, this is not me saying, "don't use AI." I use it very frequently and wouldn't have been able to build BirdDog without it! It truly is miraculous technology.

But that can be true at the same time that it's wise to have a healthy skepticism and reluctance to depend on these systems.

AI being super valuable can be a valid statement at the same time that vibe coding is not teaching you in the same way that coding does is a true statement. Or that writing a blog post with AI is not sharpening your critical thinking in the same way that writing a blog post by hand is.

If you don't want to become an exceptional programmer, none of this matters so much.

But what does matter, is that you hear the other side of the story--there still is value to getting good at things. And getting smashed by purple belts and being uncomfortable will help you more than hitting omoplatas on white belts.

Don't give up on XP Farming because marketing dollars tell you to.

Hey hey, thanks for reading my weekly rant. If you enjoyed and want to read more about skills, deep work, creating things, founding companies, AI, and all that, please give it a subscribe.

[Intellectual Serfdom]

Imagine a world where cars and scooters and other motorized transport were used so much that everyone became morbidly obese and could hardly walk (see: Wall-E).

Since you could hardly move on your own, you'd be stuck paying your 'tax' to whoever made such devices and powered them if you wanted to do anything significant. I don't think that'd be good.

Now, imagine a world where everyone went all in on LLMs for writing code, writing english, writing books, strategizing, and even critical thinking.

I don't see that world as any less desirable than the world of people who can't walk.

Just like the benefits of staying fit even though you don't "need" to are monumental, so to are the benefits of keep your brain organ fit.

And, those benefits are only inclined to go up as more and more people give into the temptation to let their organ atrophy.

Live Deeply,

2026.02.22

CXL

[Post-Literacy; AI Scams; Emotional Manipulation; Last and First Men; Brevity is the Soul of Wit; Just Read; Fight for Democracy]

Thesis: Reading is an antidote to cultural erosion being propagated by short form content and accelerated by the wholesale creation of such content with AI.

[Post-Literacy]

After my last post, I was recommended a brilliant essay called The dawn of the post-literate society by James Marriott.

In the article, the author makes it very clear that literacy is & has been declining.

This is one of those facts that I wasn’t surprised to hear, but was still shocked when I saw the stats on paper. Vaguely feeling like literacy is declining is a lot different than reading that a study of 30 countries including the US shows that the most illiterate people are getting more illiterate. Or, seeing the below graph illustrating the decline in reasoning and problem solving skills:

I would much prefer if these lines were going up and to the right…

The post asserts that the most notable causes of the issue is the rise of the parasitic relationships most of us have with our smart phone. It then notes that a lot of current issues, including politic divisiveness and extremism are a consequence of us spending time on our phones consuming short form, addictive content, rather than reading or even doing other activities.

And, finally, it ends with a very grim prognosis of the future.

While I wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s too late & we can’t go back, I do think this is one of the most critical issues to deal with, especially with the acceleration of AI generated low calorie content designed to take advantage of people.

As I wrote in the last post, there is something about the written word that is conducive to critical thought & truth. That post focused on writing being essential to think clearly; this post focuses on the other side of the same coin: the fading art of reading.

[AI Scams]

Yesterday, someone showed me a week old instagram account. It details the transformation of this guy in his mid 50s who was overweight & balding & whose wife left him, and then in response, he got very ripped and tan and now has luscious hair.

Saying that it "details the transformation" is perhaps a bit generous, because all it does is show a montage of short before and after vids with text on the screen. Yet, already, one of the posts about the “Divorce Effect” already has over 34,000 likes.

And, of course, this one week old account is charging $20 for a number of "courses" or "secrets" on how he did it.

I don't know how much money the account has stolen from people yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was already in the thousands or tens of thousands.

Wait, did I just say stole?

Yes, I did.

This guy with the transformation... he's not f*cking real.

He's AI generated. A phantom drawn up and out of our collective digital subconscious.

And yes, I believe that's theft. People are led to believe that there is a real guy who did a real transformation and that by buying some $20 PDFs they’ll learn how he did it.

There is no real guy, and the PDFs are very likely AI generated slop.

Yeah, you can argue (as the person who showed it to me did) that it's not a scam! After all, marketers have been doing this sort of thing forever.

I don't care what marketers have been doing forever.

It's a scam if it's a before and actor photo of actors with fat prosthetics on, and it’s a scam if it's AI Generated.

The reason this is even worth writing about is because AI is making this sort of fraud more accessible.

A weight loss scam no longer takes a bunch of planning, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay actors, get a studio, write the script, shoot it, etc. It just takes someone whose good at marketing, wants to make money, and spends sometime prompting an LLM.

[Emotional Manipulation]

When you read something, you have a crystalized argument laying in front of you that you're able to criticize.

Contrast that with a 15 second clip that hooks you with a brief but incredibly powerful emotional statement, "This made my wife regret leaving me," floods you with dopamine with some pleasant music, snaps between scenes every few seconds, and shows you the transformation you want to have.

The video is literally all emotional and sensory appeals. There's no argument to criticize. It just is.

It doesn't need to convince you that you want to lose weight, the target for the video already wants to lose weight. It's just surfacing all of those emotions in one place.

All it’s doing is asking you to believe that this guy really did lose weight and stop balding, and that now he’s willing to share his secret for you for the low price of $20.

[Last and First Men]

Okay, enough AI brain rot, let’s read a book. Here is an excerpt from a phenomenal science fiction book I am reading right now, "Last and First Men" by Olaf Stapledon:

I love annotating physical books

I chose this book because it’s what happened to be on me while I was writing in my go to coffee shop this morning. Conveniently, it’s science fiction, so you can’t tell me that it’s some super inaccessible high brow philosophy or textbook.

With a modest reading speed, you can complete a first read of this passage in 30 seconds, the same as a lot of short form content. And, much like you can re watch short form content, you can re read this passage, too.

When you re read it, you start to make connections to other similar things you've read. Or, if it's a long form piece like a book, and you've been reading the entire book, you start to make connections to other parts of the book, too.

In other words, unlike short form content, if you read each passage in this book sequentially, each passage itself will have more meaning.

Here, Stapledon references Nationalism. We all have an idea of what that word means, but he gives a quite clear picture of what he means when he writes Nationalism in the 50 pages leading up to this. His view is super interesting, doubly so because he wrote this AFTER World War I and BEFORE World War II. In this way, his take on Nationalism is one that is frozen in time.

No matter how good of a writer Stapledon is, it would be impossible to attach all of the nuance he gave to the word Nationalism in just this 30 second passage. Rather, the thematic build up before this claim makes his reference to passage way more meaningful to me than to you, because I read the preceding 50 pages, and you didn’t.

In this way, a 30 second passage in long form content carries the weight of the whole book. And, not only has much already gone into defining Nationalism, but the other topics, including economic unity and man’s “burden” have both been enriched by the narrative before.

All that together can let you draw a very nuanced conclusion from the passage that both condemns nationalism and conflict while acknowledging that some sort of quick swap to a peaceful utopia would still be very unlikely to solve the main issues facing man.

In this way, by reading a long form piece, you are sort of entering this cult of deeper understanding about information and words that is impossible to achieve without it.

That doesn't mean that these complex ideas can't be communicated more concisely, but it does mean that they will lose nuance when they are. And, the reader’s depth of understanding will be lower.

This is a far cry from a 15 second clip of an AI man who “lost weight.”

And, it’s also a far cry from the vast majority of what passes for news, too.

[Brevity is the Soul of Wit]

Brevity is the soul of wit... when the brevity is the distillation of something meaningful.

In Paul Graham’s essay we discussed last week, Writes and Write-Nots, he included a quote near the end that summed up his arguments pretty succinctly:

But, if that encapsulates his main point, why didn’t he just tweet that quote instead of writing the whole essay?

The whole post together puts weight behind that quote, makes it more meaningful and believable.

There is an art to distilling information, but that doesn’t mean ideas are “good” because they are concise. Ideas are good because they are good (useful, practical, consistent with reality); making them concise can make them more accessible and useful for others.

But, that doesn’t mean that because something is concise it is good. The best lies are concise, too. You catch a liar when they ramble, not when they stay silent.

[Just Read]

We know reading is important, and we know people aren’t doing enough of it. Where do we go from here?

I certainly wouldn't count on the social media companies saving us; they profit from you staring at your phone, regardless of whether the content is ai slop or not. I also wouldn't count on the government saving us, either; they're coin operated, and there are a lot of coins owned by people not at all interested in solving this issue.

So, what's left for us to do?

Well, it's quite simple, and I hope obvious: read!

Read, read, read.

And I don’t mean the news, or tweets, or Instagram captions, or LinkedIn posts, I mean books or carefully selected essays!

If not reading is a big contributor to so many problems, then reading is a natural solution to it.

In 2026 to date, I've read long form content (largely physical books) for a total of 1,470 minutes. That's a little over 3 hours / week.

I wouldn't by any means say this puts me in the category of "avid reader." It's lower than I'd like, but given how focused I am on BirdDog right now, it is sufficient for me. I actually think it's pretty tame, and importantly for everyone, quite accessible.

Really, it's 30 minutes a day. And don't you dare tell me you don't have 30 minutes a day if you spend at least 30 minutes a day doom scrolling some app!

Maybe you'll say, "well, I spend 60 minutes doom scrolling, but it's throughout the day, not all at once!" It doesn't matter! If I have even 5 or 10 minutes between calls, I'll sometimes use that as a chance to read.

And one thing that helps a ton? I haven't strictly adhered to it, but largely, I won't let myself go on social media apps I spend the most time on (literally just Hinge) until after I've read for 30 minutes that day. That strategy works really well because it functions to automatically flag the white space you have in your day that you're already filling with social media, like meals or time in between meetings or waiting on transit.

Funny, I know, but it's effective.

A few other tactics that have helped me read more overall:

• Only reading books that are more than 5 years old. Naturally filters out a lot of trash

• Not committing to finishing reading books. That way, I don't get "stuck" on a book that I don't like or isn't very good

• Reading more than one book at once. Similar to the above and let’s me swap based on mood

• Never hesitating to buy physical books. A lot stay unread, but having them there increases my options while keeping me away from screens.

If you enjoy hearing me rant about my increasingly strong opinions and habits, please give this blog a subscribe. I’m here every Sunday!

[Fight for Democracy]

I’m still working to make the connection between reading, writing, truth, democracy, and scientific progress very clear and explicit, but this post and the last two [Writing & Truth, Lying] are getting us closer.

Now, I don't think that a literate society forces a democracy or guarantees it at all, but I do think it greatly increases the probability of having a sustainable one.

Besides the point, even if reading doesn't lead to "saving the world," I've seen first hand how it can lead to directly benefiting the reader. As an example, I'd go as far as to attribute a large portion of BirdDog's gross margin at our current feature set to one engineering textbook I read in 2024.

In other words, reading pays.

So what do you say, are you down to do 30 minutes of reading a day before going on Hinge?

Live Deeply,

2026.02.15

CXXXIX

[Truthing; Write & Write Nots; Why Do I Write?; Paper Trail; Navigating Disputes; The Truth Will Set You Free]

Thesis: Writing is the best way to think clearly, and is a weapon for the truth.

[Truthing]

Last week, I wrote about why you shouldn’t lie. And, how a lot of people do it anyways.

This week, I'm writing about truth.

I have a lot to say about Truth. I really think it's strongly related to the scientific method and, likewise, scientific progress. I also believe it's strongly related to politics & that it's very important to have a government system that protects truth.

Those are lofty topics that I hope to write about thoroughly, but they’re also hard to write about meaningfully in a 1000 to 2000 word blog.

Rather, today, I'm just going to reflect on a small part of it: the relationship between truth and writing. Both from the angle of how writing makes you think more clearly and gets you closer to the truth, and how over all, it’s really a weapon for the truth.

Science is all about truth

[Writes and Write-Nots]

Paul Graham (PG) wrote a blog post in 2024 called the "Writes & Write-Nots”.

A cornerstone of the post is that when you write things, you're really thinking. And if you don't write your thoughts, you're not thinking as clearly as you believe you are.

I certainly agree that writing makes you think more clearly: I can’t tell you the amount of times I thought I had a great idea, and then wrote it down and realized it was nonsense. And I don’t mean just writing it down as one sentence either… I mean playing with it, reasoning about it, using written words to examine it and see if you can build it into your world view.

Given this, the scary argument in PG’s post is that since now, LLMs make it really easy to get away with not writing at all, a lot of people will use LLMs in the future instead of writing. In the future, they might just be able to write or verbalize prompts, and that’s it.

If writing really is such a powerful way to think and reason clearly, this is a massive issue in the long run that will create a massive divide between the “Writes” and the “Write-Nots.”

[Why Do I Write?]

A lot of people ask me why I write a blog every weekend.

I don't have to do this. I don't make money by doing this. I'm not paid to do this.

But, I've done it for 139 weeks in a row, so I must really care about it.

And that's correct, I do care about it. II agree with PG—I think it makes me a stronger, more clearer thinker. I think it makes me more attuned to the truth.

There is something about putting your ideas on paper that really forces you to stress test them. Seeing the words in front of you, all in one place, makes you question them.

You tend to be critical towards the ideas just like you would be critical towards someone else's writing, sometimes even more so!

That's really important. It's not the same as having someone constructively criticize your thoughts or ideas, but it does make it a lot easier for you to be critical of your own ideas. And, when you’re critical of your own ideas, you can chip away the weak and incorrect parts and get it down to a strong, sturdy core that is actually valid.

And then, of course, after you have it in writing, you enable other people to be critical of it, too.

[Paper Trail]

Having a conversation about ideas can be a way to think more critically than if you think about them alone without writing them. However, it is a lot less robust way to get to the truth than exchanging writing with someone else.

The fact is, when you have something in writing, other people can be critical of it. They can point to specific things and say, “hey, that’s wrong!” Or show contradictions between line 12 and 50.

There’s certainly a place for debate, but I don’t believe it’s as easy to get to truth that way as it is by exchanging writing.

On a related note, I also think this is why when someone is doing something wrong and they know it, they'll avoid having it in writing. They don’t want a paper trail of evidence pointing to their contradictions and wrong doing.

When you have a verbal conversation with someone, at least two things happen that are unfavorable for truth:

• It's harder to pin down the counter party’s exact position, because the information is literally flowing through time without a concrete record. Even if you have an air tight memory, they can claim “I didn’t say it like that,” and it’s your word vs there’s.

• Emotions and anxieties get involved. You’re more inclined to verbally say something that you don't actually agree with, because you haven't had a chance to write it down and think about it yet; the live emotions can make it harder to be clear.

I once had a belabored argument with someone I was on an extensive project with. My argument was that our organization had a split focus, and we did not have enough time to do two things right and well.

By the end of the conversation, I was made to think and feel that this was not the problem. Rather, I myself was making a specific technical mistake that was holding us back! The solution, of course, was nothing more than me having to work harder, when the problem I broached was that I was already firing on all cylinders and we weren’t moving.

When I reflected on the conversation in writing, I realized the counter party said nothing of substance in regards to my arguments, and was mainly using emotional appeals and arguments.

Again, this sort of conversation is less like writing and more like thinking. Emotional and physiological elements of a real time conversation, along with the absence of a written record, make it a lot harder to be critical of the ideas in the moment, just like if you’re ecstatic about some great killer idea in your brain.

[Navigating Disputes]

_{NOTE: Now to be clear, I've only been in a couple of complex business disputes that involved lawyers, so I'm not a professional or even "good" by any means. I certainly have noticed, though, that there is definitely some relationship between written word and truth.}

In a dispute, if you think that the accurate representation of all of the information vindicates your position, you might drive more towards written information. On the other hand, if your strategy is to obscure fact or avoid information materializing in a structured, meaningful way, you might lean much more on 1:1 conversations than on written word.

This is precisely for the reasons above: writing is a lot more easy to criticize and drive towards truth, where as verbal 1:1s are a lot more mercurial.

On the continuum of mediums conducive to truth, you also have undocumented group conversations and completely recorded conversations. In both situations, since this happens in real time, emotional control is very important. Still, you have more recourse to go back to statements and claims that were mentioned earlier.

I was once in a documented group conversation with myself, 2 hostiles, and 2 neutrals with a tilt towards friendly.

In the conversations, the hostiles spent the entire hour trying to get an emotional rise out of me with mischaracterizations and ad hominids. It was greatly challenging, but it helped that I was sitting outside near the ocean in Oregon and could keep looking up at the sun.

My strategy was just to stay calm, not accuse them of anything, and continue asking questions. The lack of willingness to answer the questions and aggressive tenor towards me when I asked them was all that was needed.

At the end of the call, one of the neutrals reached out to me and apologized I had to deal with that.

The truth can win, even when there is active resistance to it.

But how does this come back to writing?

The 2 hostiles never would've said those things to me on paper--it would've made how little of substance they had all the clearer. They made a mistake by doing it with two witnesses, but it could’ve worked in their favor if I would’ve lost my cool.

If you enjoyed this post and are a proponent of truth, please subscribe! Even if you don’t, I’ll still be here.

[The Truth Will Set You Free]

If you want to think clearly, write.

It will help a lot.

It will put you on the side of the truth, which is the greatest weapon against lies.

Live Deeply,

2026.02.08

CXXXVIII

[Hardline; An Honest Founder; Elastic Truth; Sliding Down the Slope; Crossing the Chasm; I Lie, Too]

Thesis: The first step to a more honest society is admitting how much lying actually goes on.

[Hardline]

I've lied and I'm ashamed of it. If you've lied, which you very likely have, you should be ashamed of it, too.

This post might make you uncomfortable. You might not view some of what I’m going to call a lie as a lie.

My hardline stance really only works if I either lie and say I've never lied or if I admit I've lied, too.

So, yes: I have lied.

I hate to admit it, but I must - if I can’t even be honest enough to admit that, how dare I write about honesty?

With that out of the way, before we begin, here is the dictionary definition of a lie:

An intentionally false statement

The blurriest part is the intention.

[An Honest Founder]

The best place to start is with a collection of actual lies I've personally heard from actual founders. I don't believe in doxxing, so I've kept the details as scant as possible to keep them anonymous.

Two leading notes:

1. I don't actually know if lying is more common among founders than it is among, say, consultants, bankers, fishers, or minimum wage workers, and I'm not convinced that it actually is. That being said, founders are who I'm most familiar with. And, in a lot of cases, the lies founders tell are maybe more interesting because they have larger reaching negative impacts than the lie a McDonalds worker tells to get off work.

2. If you've never done selling, I need to emphasize something: A deal is not closed until the person actually signs the contract or pays. Buyers say yes quite often without actually buying.

Out with the lies:

• First Paying Customer: Someone I worked with on a small side project told me, "I got our first paying customer." My heart jumped: I was so happy, we hadn't gotten a paying customer after months of effort. To make sure, I said, "Did he pay yet? Or sign something?" Then: "No, not yet." To which I responded, saying he's not paying til he's paying. Funnily enough, the person never paid.

• First Paying Customer Part II: A startup whose sporadic updates I got sent a note saying, "we closed our first deal & got revenue.” Then, in the next update, when they went out of business, they mentioned that the deal never actually closed.

• Two Enterprise Clients: A founder I spoke to who raised a lot of money from a Tier 1 fund told me "Our customers are x & y," both big companies. 30 minutes later, I found out y hadn't signed anything yet and they were still negotiating. By definition, that is not a customer.

• The $250K Deal: Another founder I met who went through the most reputable incubator (yes, that one) told me he closed a deal for $250K ARR. In reality, he had a much smaller paid pilot with them for maybe $10K ARR and was 'working' on the $250K deal. When I checked in 5 months later, still hadn't closed.

• The 10x Founder: A founder told me the deals he used to close in a specific role were $1K, then three months later told me they were $10K for that same role. He was lying at least once...

• ACV x A Few Customers = $0: A founder once told me his "Average Contract Value" (ACV), or the blended average of what he charges his customers is $24K/yr. He also talked about having "customers". Turns out he had 0 customers, which means his ACV was actually just his asking price, and the 'customers' he referenced were fake.

Note that a lot of these instances deal with the blurring of definitions, usually "customers." Maybe I'm old school, but a customer is someone who is paying you something. "Closed a deal" means someone signed a contract or paid you something. Your deals can't be worth $1K and $10K at the same time.

[Elastic Truth]

The catch is, I doubt any of the people above (except maybe one) thought to themselves "I'm going to lie to Noah, now." Very likely, from their view, they were, at worst, "stretching the truth."

Unfortunately, unlike Sia's heart, the truth is not elastic.

And even more unfortunately, it's super easy to chart a path from a couple things that really aren't lying to things that literally are just lying.

Here's one very real progression from not lying to lying:

• Omitting Correction: You hear inaccurate information about you, but you let it be, often because the error is advantageous. Example: Seeing a screenshot of a client telling other people BirdDog had at least 12x the revenue we did, and doing nothing to correct it. I don’t believe this is lying by omission, because you’re not the one actively laying down facts for them to pick up.

• Cherry Picking: Intentionally construing information in a way that increases the probability of other people making errors. Example: Saying how much you charge new customers and saying how many customers you have in the same conversation, even though you just doubled your price so your ACV is 2x lower than what you charge now. Might be lying by omission, for the sake of argument not lying.*

• Truth Stretching: Making a false claim supported by some (often subtly) misconstrued facts. Example: Describing your ACV as the current price you're charging in the same conversation as you said how many customers you have. Note how subtle the difference between this and the above is...and I think that difference is enough to make this squarely a lie!

• The Outright Lie: Making something up with no attempt at justification using facts. This is actually so hard to come up with an example of because there is almost always a justification using facts. Example: My startup is a unicorn (trust me, bro).

Now, where I think a lot of people will disagree with me is that Truth Stretching is literally just lying. If this makes you uncomfortable, it should--for that reason, it's also the single most important point in this blog.

If we confined lying to just The Outright Lie, basically no one would ever lie! After all, there is nearly always a justification of some sort.

The reason I'm not just naming Truth Stretching as "Lying", which it is, is really to make sure you're paying attention--even though we might not think of ourselves as liars, we all know how easy it is to stretch the truth...

_{*While you can argue that Cherry Picking is "lying by omission,” to reach the vast majority of readers with the rest of my argument, I'm going to presuppose that Cherry Picking is NOT lying. If you think it is lying, then I think you'd actually agree with my conclusion MORE.}

[Sliding Down the Slope]

The internal monologue that goes with Omitting Correction & Cherry Picking is quite close to the dialogue that goes with Truth Stretching.

I Omit Correction a ton. You know, only one person to my knowledge has correctly guessed BirdDog's revenue, and it was only after she lived with me for 3 months. When nearly everyone else overshoots*, you start thinking things like:

• "Most people have no idea what's going on"

• “People are very inaccurate estimators”

• "People will think what they want, anyways."

These thoughts, although justified, make it a lot easier to jump to Cherry Picking, and I can see how Cherry Picking is very close to Truth Stretching. This is especially true when you benefit from people being wrong: of course it is easier to acquire new customers if our prospects think we are making more money than we are!

Reiterating the example above, the jump from Omitting Correction to Cherry Picking is as simple as mentioning total customer count in the same conversation as monthly price... if you just 2x'd price a month ago, it's very rationale for a customer to over estimate what you’re making by roughly 2x.

Here, each fact is entirely honest and true. But, together, it’s easy for the other person to draw some inaccurate conclusions on one or two bad assumptions (price == ACV).

And the fact that they made a bad assumption is lot easier pill to swallow when you've already started thinking "People will think what they want, anyways."

_{*Barring our 5th customer, who thought he was our first...}

[Crossing the Chasm]

From Cherry Picking, you’re just a hop skip and a jump from Truth Stretching, which is lying.

Go back to that same conversation—customer count and price mentioned in the same call. All it takes to go to Truth Stretching is if you say your ACV is $X instead of saying your price is $X, even though your ACV is lower.

The hard pill to swallow is that if the sales conversation was an audited financial statement without additional context, that would be fraud. By definition, ACV*Customer Count = Revenue.

If you ACV*Customer Count is less than revenue, that’s not ACV!

But, it's not an audited financial statement. It's a sales call. And it’s really really really easy to justify saying ACV here…

• You didn't specify if it was ACV across your customer base or if there was an invisible asterisk that is ACV of the customers in the last week

• It could be "ACV" before discounting

• It could be aspirational or target ACV

Again, in an audited financial statement, it would be lying if these asterisk were not mentioned. But it’s not an audited financial statement, it’s a sales conversation! I’m being such a stickler about this because the difference is so subtle to the person saying it that it’s really easy to miss altogether and not even consider a lie.

And, in most cases, it’s “probably fine.” But at the same time, saying this puts you one step closer to the person who says they have customers & closed deal when they didn’t.

If you can “stretch” the definition of ACV, how much easier is it to stretch the definition of “customer?” Remember, you really believe (and want to believe) that they will sign the contract, and a few people at the company told you they will!

The pragmatic counter argument in favor of truth is that it’s basically as easy to Cherry Pick as it is to Stretch the Truth… and one puts you further from the kind of person who lies about customer than the other does.

And, the person who lies about customers is closer to the person who gets arrested by the FBI than the person who doesn’t lie at all…

The truth is not as foggy as this window view was.

I’m here every week giving my honest take on the founder’s journey & about how we really do live in a society - if you enjoyed, please subscribe!

[I Lie, Too]

I'd be lying if I said I never lied.

Oh, how I wish it were the truth.

The reality is, I have stretched the truth. Which, by my own definition... means I have lied.

I'm not proud of it. And I don't think you should be either when you do it.

I'm not so naive and utopian to think everyone will read this post and stop lying.

Rather, the intention here is to make you stop, think, and be more honest with yourself about how honest you actually are.

This post was well worth writing if at least one person who reads it stops and thinks twice the next time they're about to "stretch the truth."

Live Deeply,

2026.02.01

CXXXVII

[Opinions are Like…; Training From a Position You'll Never Get To; Teaching a One Stripe White Belt Omoplata; The Bad Doctor; Blood Drenched Advice; 20 Questions]

Thesis: It’s really easy to give bad advice and hard to give good advice.

[Opinions Are Like…]

The more experienced I get, the less willing I am to take advice from people.

3 years ago, that sentence would have been hard for me to write. I’d be afraid of being arrogant or having a closed mind.

Now, I think it's really fair, though. Most advice is cheap--literally anyone can give you advice. Not only does it cost nothing to give advice, it also feels good to give advice… even when it’s entirely wrong!

That doesn’t mean all advice is bad, at all. Some advice is really good, especially when it comes from someone who has done the thing you’re trying to do, or is further down the road towards it than you are. And, even when someone isn’t further ahead of you, they still may be able to give good advice by asking the right questions.

This is probably true in every field, but keeping on applications I like, we’ll talk about startups & Jiu Jitsu.

[Training From a Position You'll Never Get To]

One reason that good advice is so hard to come by is because the advice that makes you sound the smartest is often not the advice that helps someone the most.

At Jiu Jitsu the other night, I saw someone who wasn't very good giving someone who was very new advice.

The person who wasn't very good, we'll call Mike. The person who was very new, we'll call Emily.

This was my first time seeing either Mike or Emily. When I walked in, Mike was showing Emily an arm bar from Kese Gatame using his legs. Something immediately felt off about it to me--this move isn't terribly complex, but I've never seen a black belt or brown belt teach it to a beginner... meaning, it's probably not actually a very good thing to teach a completely new person.

All of that is without mentioning that in over 4 years of training, the amount of times I've seen it hit live is close to 0... and it's not because it's some all powerful forbidden move, either.

Later on, I saw Mike train with a blue belt who I tap once every 2 or 3 rolls--I wasn't surprised that she submitted him half a dozen times in as many minutes.

Mike probably felt very intelligent teaching Emily that move. It's super fun and interesting to learn these cool submissions, but at the same time, it's not necessarily what will help either of them most. An uncommon low EV arm bar won’t help you anywhere near as much as learning how not to get submitted once every 60 seconds.

It's like a founder with a company making $0/mo focused on automating systems. Cool in theory, good to know about, but it's not going to move the needle anywhere near as much as getting revenue will.

If you're not careful, advice giving serves your ego more than it serves the person you are giving advice to.

If you're really new at something, you have a higher chance of accidentally take advice from someone like Mike. Because they don’t actually know what they need to do but it feels good to sound like they do, Mikes are inclined to give advice that feeds their ego rather than advice that will help you.

[Teaching a One Stripe White Belt Omoplata]

The same night I witnessed the Mike / Emily interaction, coach sent a one stripe white belt to me to help him out. We'll call him Eric.

Eric asked me about what submissions I usually get.

Just like Mike, I felt great showing someone who knew less than me cool stuff: how to go from closed guard to gogoplata to omoplata & either submit or take mount. And, that's what Eric really wanted to see!

But, that's not at all what I think was most helpful to Eric, and it’s quite difficult for a new person to do! So, I made sure I did not spend too much time on it.

Rather, I had him do some live training with me to pressure test where he was weakest*, and I found myself just sitting on top of him in mount while he breathed heavily and was was spazzing in a complete futile attempt to get out.

Does this look like a beginner friendly move to you?

This let me explain to Eric that a) he needed to breathe, and b) he could start to defend himself and build frames and get to his side to get out. In doing this, I uncovered his fear that framing would expose him to a gift wrap, so I showed him how to avoid that.

I seriously believe that this part was infinitely more valuable for him than the omoplata could possibly have been. The odds of you hitting an omoplata if you can never get out of mount are incredibly low.

Not getting submitted and then learning to escape is critical when you're starting jiu jitsu and is basically a pre requisite to hitting submissions at any meaningful frequency, but it's so much less cool looking than hitting submissions. I really think this is the same as startups: not going out of business is far more important in most cases than parabolic growth; the latter only comes if the former stays true.

But, you sound smarter and feel cooler if you talk about crushing revenue targets and dislocating shoulders than you do about not going out of business and not getting tapped.

_{*The more you train something like Jiu Jitsu, the easier it becomes to find the path of least resistance and identify where someone is weakest}

[The Bad Doctor]

All of this talk of bad advice, I'd be remiss to not bring up the more insidious side of advice: the misaligned incentive structure.

Yes, sometimes the people who give you advice actually benefit from you being in a worse position. This is where we cross into the "unethical" territory:

• The Doctor who told me I 'needed' to get a surgery to cure my sinusitis. Luckily for me, I had the faculties to figure out I could treat it naturally and did so; he would have profited from harming me with a surgery I did not need.

• The Financial Advisor who is leveraging fomo to get his clients to invest more in the market instead of paying down debt. The expected return to his clients is way more volatile, but the expected return to the advisor is way higher.

• A Partner (business or romantic) who convinces you you are not doing enough to make something work, causing you duress and anxiety; as your partner, they benefit from the gain of your superhuman efforts to grow your business or emotionally regulate them, while you deal with the cost and torment of doing so (no posts for this example, but perhaps one day)

Again, this falls into a category beyond the pale of 'bad advice': this is sometimes unethical, sometimes abusive, and always to be avoided.

[Blood Drenched Advice]

Okay, so we know that sometimes advice serves the advice giver's ego more than it is actually serves the learner. We also know that sometimes, people who give advice are actually trying to take advantage of you.

So what's left?

Really, I think it's just the blood drenched advice: the advice from the people who actually DID the thing you're trying to do.

It makes a lot more sense to take advice about scaling to $1M ARR from someone who scaled to $1M ARR than from someone who scaled to $10K ARR.

While every situation is way different, the person who scaled to $1M ARR is much more likely to have seen and overcome the challenges that you will see and have to overcome to get there. Maybe the person who scaled to $10K ARR thinks they've seen those challenges or read a book on them or was told about them, but the value of information decays as you play telephone with it and pass it from one person to the next.

In the same vein, I value the opinions of my mentors who have scaled technology infrastructure far more than I’d value the opinion of a professor who read about it in theory!

To compound the issue, it's much easier to find someone who scaled to $10K ARR than it is to find someone who scaled to $1M ARR. So, as you continue to pass more and more thresholds, the number of people who can give you advice from their first hand experience continues to decrease!

And, interestingly enough, I'm finding that the more thresholds I pass, the less inclined I am to run around giving advice about things. I think that’s true of a lot of people who keep crossing thresholds. Looking back, I think it's very likely that I’ve given bad advice about things I didn't understand through experience a number of times! That doesn’t mean I don’t give advice, I’m just a lot more cautious about it now.

To compound the issue in startups in particular, there are quite a few chronic liars. Like anyone can talk about submissions in jiu jitsu, anyone can talk about scaling in startups. In either case, not everyone can do it. And, like the fundamentals are what most people need to hear about in Jiu Jitsu (not getting choked every 60 seconds), the fundamentals are what most people need to hear about in startups (not going out of business while you're trying to make a product that people want).

The difference between jiu jitsu and startups is that in jiu jitsu, I can very quickly figure out if you're bullshiting by rolling with you, but with startups, it's not as easy to immediately tell if someone is lying.

And, in startups, lying and stretching the truth is more common than you think... it warrants an entire post, really. Now, I don't know if it's more common than in something like consulting or fishing, but I do know that it is very common nonetheless!

If you don’t want to miss my journey & maybe what I have to say about founders and lying, subscribe—I’m here every week!

[20 Questions]

So, should we all just stop giving advice and put our heads in the sand?

From what I've seen from people ahead of me, no. It seems like the safest and most helpful way to give advice is to ask a lot of questions, especially the questions that the person might not be asking themselves. In this way, you can be more of a sounding board and help someone verbalize the challenges and struggles they're dealing with.

I actually think this way, you can get advice from someone who knows even less about a particular thing than you!

But at that point though, you might call it talking to a friend more than you'd call it getting advice.

Live Deeply,

2026.01.25

CXXXVI

[Positivity is Hard; Everyone Suffers; What is a Great Thing?; Glass Half Full; Glass Has a Hole in the Bottom; One Gratitude a Day]

Thesis: You can safely overcome the fear that positivity will hold you back by being grateful for one thing a day.

[Positivity is Hard]

It's really hard to think positively all of the time. In my experience, this is particularly true for high agency, high drive people who are trying to do some “Great Thing.”

Last week, I got dinner with someone who bootstrapped & sold his company for 9 figures, and he was saying that he even after his exit, he caught himself trying to do more:

This isn’t rare, either. I don't know if I've ever met an exited founder who is "done" after they've exited. They’re still restless and want to do “more.”

Even from high agency people who aren't starting and selling companies, I hear very often about a voice in the back of their head saying they're not doing enough, they need to do “more.” And, there’s this fear that if they let go of that voice, then they will fail to do the Great Thing they’re trying to do.

Based on my content, I would guess that a lot of my readers have this restlessness and anxiety, just like I do. Well, I'd be absolutely lying if I told you that I knew how to deal with it. I certainly don't.

But, I have some observations from living in circles full of this kind of restless, high agency person for the last 6 years of my life, and from being fortunate enough to meet many such people who have "won" the game, so to speak.

The most important thing that I think we could all use reminding of is that sometimes being grateful for challenges won’t jeopardize our chances of success.

[Everyone Suffers]

Suffering is part of life. Everyone suffers.

So, I think it's a bit of a delusion to say that suffering is a necessary condition for building something great--for the time being, suffering is a given if you live on the Earth as a human. We could also say that suffering, by the same logic, is a necessary condition for drinking coffee or tea.

Still, there is definitely something different in the relationship high achievers tend to have with discomfort.

Achieving Great Things tends to take a certain level of accepting uncertainty & long hours & delayed gratification & focus, all of which are not very "easy" to do. It's Type 2 fun, as they say.

I don't think that the person who pursues these things aggressively is "categorically different" than a person who does not, but the person who pursues these things definitely has to stay in uncomfortable situations longer than would be necessary if they were comfortable with a mean outcome.

In my own life, I used to be super uncomfortable getting on sales calls. Then, after forcing myself on hundreds or thousands of them, I eventually got comfortable. If you can imagine willingly doing hundreds of hours of something uncomfortable to achieve your goal, then you really do know what I’m talking about.

And now, I do other things I’m uncomfortable with: raise prices, get more aggressive on sales calls, speak with more confidence, automate systems.

If I want to achieve my current goal, I will have to keep doing things I’m not exactly comfortable with.

I think the same is the case for anyone pursuing a big, interesting goals.

[What is a Great Thing?]

I've been vague about what a Great Thing is. That’s a problem, because I do think that picking a Great Thing, or some ambitious goal, is a really good first step to curb some undue anxiety.

Anecdotally, the high achievers who have some goal to work towards seem less anxious than the ones who don’t.

In other words, I do think a lot of anxiety can from not knowing what you actually want or aggressively pursuing something that you don’t actually want.

Last week, I spoke with a founder friends who raised $20M. She said something to me that I totally agreed with:

I whole heartedly agree with her stance, both economically and emotionally.

Economically, she's already raised $20M over 3 rounds & has 35 employees. That means she owns less of her company than I do. A $20M exit for me would mean I don’t ever have to work again, but for her it would probably not mean that.

More importantly, emotionally, she has decided she is to "IPO or bust." Selling for $20M is not an IPO, so it is, by the definition of her goal, a defacto bust.

On the other hand, I’m basically trying to earn myself a trust fund by building the RenTech of sales, either through revenue taken as profit over a number of years or via exit price. Then, I will build other things I am curious about.

My goal is very, very different than hers.

If we had our conversation without that context in mind, the conversation would basically be incoherent: if I thought she had my goal, and she thought I had her goal, we would both think the other was crazy!

For my desired outcome, it would be foolish to hire anyone at my exact stage, let alone 35 people. For her desired outcome, not having 35 employees would basically be suicide.

However, by both knowing what we are actually after, we can have a very sane and level headed conversation that is not anxiety inducing for either of us. We know that most comparisons we could do would be pretty meaningless or misleading.

On the other hand, if either of us spoke to someone who did not know what they wanted, that person might be tempted to just adopt one of our goals and compare themselves to it. Than can create a lot of anxiety on it’s own.

Of course I’m closer to MY goal than you are to MY goal! I’ve been working at MY goal for a while now.

But, there’s a really good chance you’re closer to YOUR goal than I am to YOUR goal. You won’t be able to see that if you don’t know what YOUR goal is, and you’ll just increase your own anxiety by judging yourself by my goal. Maybe you want to publish a bestselling novel or be a news anchor for a major station or start a non profit to bring potable water to Africa—judging yourself against someone bootstrapping a B2B SaaS is an outlandish thing to do.

Knowing your goal will help you move faster, make more clear decisions, and reduce anxiety. It doesn’t have to be the goal for the rest of your life—just a clear direction to move toward. Even if it shifts later, that’s okay.

(If you don’t know your goal, here is a post I wrote on doing something you’re passionate about that could be helpful)

[Glass Half Full]

Okay, so we're an anxious, high achieving person. We a) know our goal, and b) we're hellbent on achieving it. But, we're still anxious.

I see this all the time in myself and others.

Anxiety can be helpful. It can be a good driver and fuel to keep going. And among the crowd I've spoken of, there is this unspoken fear that if you lose that anxiety, you'll stop moving forward and fail.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have this fear myself. Is there a solution? I don’t know!

Regardless, something you can do that I really don’t believe will jeopardize your progress is to think with the glass half full at least once a day. In my experience, this can give you a positive boost that makes you actually move faster.

I “had” to spend 3 hours carving a leg of jamon. → I got to spend 3 hours doing something with my dad & now I have 10 pounds of vacuum sealed meat I can take anywhere

Whenever you're faced with a challenge or a task, you get to decide how you can perceive it.

Some business examples:

• "I have to push this bug fix" -> "I get to make the platform more reliable."

• "I have to deal with a customer support request" -> "My customers care enough to submit support requests."

• "I have to take 10 back to back sales calls" -> "I have tons of chances to grow my business."

You GET to overcome the challenges to achieve your goal. That’s a very, very fortunate position to be in.

I'm grateful that my co founder, Jack, is very good at this. He’s much better at it than I am & seeing him do it reminds me to do it.

It sounds simple enough... so why does it warrant a blog post? Because it's really, really easy to forget. Especially when some challenges genuinely are a waste of time and need to be removed.

[Glass Has a Hole in the Bottom]

You can only optimize for one thing, and we've already established that the number one priority is NOT having a great mood all the time. The number one priority is achieving the great thing, which requires sacrifice, and it requires action, even when we don’t feel like it.

And, a lot of the times, being hyper critical really helps.

If, for an example, you have to do some low complexity repetitive task for every user you onboard, it would be dangerous to just be optimistic about doing that. "I get to support my users, yay!"

Really, that's exactly the kind of task that you very likely should remove or automate. Training yourself to get dopamine whenever you have to do a task that should be eliminated or automated will not help you achieve your goal. Look at a task and saying, “This sucks, why am I doing it, how can I make it easier?”, on the other hand, can bring you closer to the goal.

And, it’s important to be pessimistic enough to stay vigilant against real risks to your business. This feels a lot less like “Glass Half Full” and more like worrying that your glass could sprout a hole in the bottom of it at any given time.*

_{*Jim Collins would call this Productive Paranoia}

If you like this post, please subscribe—I’m here every week!

[One Gratitude a Day]

So what the hell is the point of this post?

Be positive but not too positive? The Glass is Half Full until it's not?

What I'm saying is this:

Truly, not every single thing is a threat. Somethings really are beautiful opportunities.

If you don't see that, maybe force yourself to reframe one challenge as a positive thing per day.

It doesn't mean that you don't address the challenge, it just means you approach it with a positive attitude and as an opportunity to grow closer to your goal.

I promise that if you "fail," it's not because you were grateful for at least one thing a day.

Live Deeply,

2026.01.18

CXXXV

[Doxycycline; Not Financial Advice; Chad the Bootstrapper; Brad the Fundraiser; Cats in the Cradle; Electrolytes]

Thesis: FOMO is a weapon that needs to be aimed in the right direction. Also, don’t lie down after taking Doxycycline on an empty stomach.

[Doxycycline]

A lot of people ask me how I’ve been able to commit to writing a weekly blog without fail for over two years. I'll usually respond with something like "I just don't negotiate with myself about it. I do it"

Then, they press, as if it can't be that simple, as if there is something about this behavior of mine that makes me qualitatively different than them.

After that, I get confused--am I wrong? Is there something qualitatively different about me or my behavior?

Then, a day like today happens where I feel like absolute shit & still write the blog anyway, and I’m reminded that it really is just about doing the thing, even when you don’t feel like it.

For some background, about 8 days ago, it was discovered that I have an ear infection. In response, a good German doctor in Tampa, Florida, gave me Doxycycline.

I started taking it, and everything was fine. But, when I got to Atlanta with Jack, prior to taking the last two nights of the dose I entirely forgot the very clear rules of not laying down after you take it. So, last night, after my very last dose, I lied down and went to sleep.

I slept terribly. I woke up to hot flashes, nausea, etc. At first, I thought I was sick again, was wondering if it was the sushi I had two nights ago.

As night became morning, and I became more coherent, like a child forgetting the very clear rules around caring for his Gremlins, I realized I had simply neglected the rules around these pills. Now, my mother, as she's reading this, is kicking herself, "I told him not to lie down!" To make matters worse, mom, I took the pill a couple of hours after eating the last two nights, another violation of the rules. It's not your fault, it's mine.

Either way, I woke up this morning 30 minutes before my alarm and did terrible things to Jack's toilet, and then proceeded to go for a walk in shorts in the 20 something degree Atlanta morning weather.

And now, here we are, writing this blog before 7 am on a Sunday at a standing desk when really I want to curl up and die. I'm still running to the bathroom about every 30 minutes.

I pray that by the time I'm done writing, this evil has fully passed me.

The point of this rant? To reaffirm my answer with a little bit of color: I can commit to something like writing a blog every Sunday for years because I’m not negotiating about it, even when I feel terrible. It’s not glamorous, but it’s real. If you want to do the thing, you just do the thing.

Anyways, today we’re talking about the weapon known as Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) as it relates shill financial advisors, Brad the Fundraiser, and my own startup.

[Not Financial Advice]

I broke protocol this week and called a financial advisor unethical on LinkedIn.

If you're new here, I hate social media, but I derive the vast majority of my income from marketing on LinkedIn. Really, it's my co founder that drives most of our traffic, but there is still a clear line between my activity and money: as an example, someone commented on my post in mid-late December asking for a demo, I responded within an hour, we had a call the next day, and the proposal just got signed last week.

So, it’s not cope, I really do have at least some business related pretense to go on LinkedIn.

Anyways, I got recommended this heinous post from a financial advisor, which I refuse to link here now to prevent the shill from getting any more traffic. We'll just call the guy who posted it Jim. To paraphrase it, Jim basically said:

I was having a hard time understanding why Jim would dunk on Ramsey for dunking on online gambling… online gambling is obviously a terrible financial decision. And, if it's not obviously a terrible financial decision to some people, then it's super good that Dave Ramsey is saying that it is, so maybe they'll see it.

Either way, I am rage baited by the rage bait and engage with Jim, saying yes online gambling is bad and saying Dave Ramsey's advice is generally good.

Jim goes on to argue that by paying down debt before investing in the market, you're "missing out" on compound interest.

I waste braincells explaining to Jim that the only way his argument works is if his clients are willing to take on additional risk, which he “disagrees” with. I can get why someone who’s not a finance bro might fall for this sleight of hand, but Jim should know better, seeing as he has every finra license under the sun.

When you calculate your net worth, you take assets minus liabilities. If you have debt carrying 6% interest, this is a liability that itself experiences compound interest, just against you. So, quite logically, if you are trying to maximize net worth, you would want to pay down the 6% debt. This is a 6% risk free return; to put it in a frame of reference, the risk free rate available to the average Joe isn’t even above 4%.

And you might say, Noah, but if I invest in the market, I can return 8%, or maybe 20%, or 100%! And yes, as Jim kindly pointed out: you can.

But what Jim would NOT admit in the LinkedIn comment section was that by investing in the market, you're also taking on WAY more risk. Paying down debt is literally "risk free", meaning you will get the 6% return. Investing in the market could cause you to make money OR lose money in a given year. And, if you can otherwise pay down your debt in a few years, delaying that by investing in the market could lead to a worse outcome.

Jim, though, wouldn’t admit this. He was claiming that not investing in the market was a bigger risk than in effect, getting a 6% risk free return. This is a classic example of someone selling on fear of missing out (FOMO): “If you don’t do this thing I’m recommending, you’ll be sooo behind and regret it.”

And why would Jim market this?

Well, every dollar Jim gets his victims to put into the market rather than to pay down debt is one more dollar Jim gets to take a fee on, personally enriching himself while putting his clients at risk. All the while, he’s telling them that the “bigger risk” is to not take risk.

To be clear, I’m not anti debt, there are cases in which carrying debt makes sense. But, it adds risk, which is something that Jim is clearly hiding.

I said what I meant and I meant what I said: Jim is unethical.

[Chad the Bootstrapper]

I listened to two calls that my co founder Jack had this week.

The first was with a very cool guy who bootstrapped two companies, one to about $25M in rev, the other to about $6.5M in revenue, both of which he still owns. We'll call this guy Chad.

Now Chad told Jack about how sometimes he would talk to his competitors who have raised money (Chad did not), have 70 employees (Chad has less than 10), and have maybe a little more revenue than Chad’s $6.5M business, say $8M. They'll ask Chad for advice, and then they'll say something like, "Chad, I can't take that advice. I'm trying to build a BIG business."

They typically have their eyes set on unicorn status and are convinced that it's the only way out. They're trying to build "Generational" businesses with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Chad, on the other hand, acknowledges that monthly churn for their product category is heinous (9%) and has publicly stated that his business is "un-investable". In other words, unlike the VC backed founders in the space, he doesn't think it makes sense to try to turn the business into a unicorn. He's just trying to get to double or triple his revenue in the next few years:

Chad has a really good point. And, to see it, he had to ignore the FOMO narrative of his VC backed compatriots.

[Brad the Fundraiser]

The second conversation I listened to was with Brad. Brad is a VC backed founder in the same space as us & Chad, but with a different product than either of us.

Unlike Chad, Brad gave Jack a lot of unsolicited advice. Brad spoke with a religious fervor about how great his go to market strategy was and how BirdDog should absolutely copy him to get really incredible asymmetric growth.

The thing is, Brad started at the same time BirdDog did, raised a few million dollars (we raised none), has a team of 9 engineers (we have me), and has less than 10% of the revenue that BirdDog does.

I’m not at all saying that Brad’s advice is wrong, and I’m also not saying that there’s no chance that he won’t lap us in revenue quickly. He could totally be right. But, at the moment, it’s objectively uncertain.

The interesting thing, though, is how he seemed to really be invested in getting Jack to agree with his ideas, while ignoring the material differences in both our inputs and outputs to date.

Chad doesn't care if anyone agrees with him. He also doesn't really care if the VC founders he talks to agree with him. He is personally making more money than the a lot of them combined ever will, and is really just focused on the actions he can take to make sure that stays true.

It's fascinating, because Brad & the founders Chad mentioned all seem to focus more on their ideas than their actions. They tend to be very evangelical and preach a gospel of FOMO—if you don’t do things this way, you’re not going to make it.

Well, we’re going to follow Chad a lot more than we follow Brad.

[Cats in the Cradle]

All this talk about how FOMO can be dangerous, I'm so glad BirdDog NEVER use FOMO ever to market anything...

Wait a minute… we totally do! Chad does, too, by the way.

Well, we’re different, because we actually believe what we’re selling will have a very positive ROI for customers. But… Jim the Financial Advisor and Brad... don't they also believe that what they're selling is legit?

So, is there a difference between me, Jim, and Brad? If it’s not belief, what is it?

The only thing I can come up with is whether or not the things we’re saying our actually aligned with reality.

FOMO is a super strong strategy for marketing things... and I'm not really upset when I see something 'good' being marketed with FOMO. As examples, I’m not upset about:

• The song Cats in the Cradle using FOMO & irony to market spending time with loved ones

• Those billboards that show a family in nature with a quirky one liner like “nature, pass it on”

• Karl Popper in the “Open Society & It’s Enemies” stressing that we must fight closed societies that suppress liberty

FOMO is sort of like a gun. You wouldn't be upset about a gun if it was used to stop someone from launching a nuclear warhead on a city. You would be upset, though, if a gun was used to kill the victim of a home invasion.

So, maybe FOMO is like a weapon, a powerful tool for getting people to agree with you.

Even if you see FOMO commonly being used for negative things, like Jim’s marketing, or being used in uncertain things, like Brad’s preaching of his strategy, it doesn't mean that FOMO itself is bad. Because, you can also use FOMO for selling ideas & concepts that are aligned with truth.

Everyday, my goal with BirdDog is to cause it to fall into the latter category.

If you liked this post, please subscribe. I’m here every week, even when I want to throw up.

[Electrolytes]

Since the start of writing this post, my physical condition has improved materially for the better. My stomach is still uncomfortable and I’m somewhat nauseous, but a standing desk, cold walk, and sipping electrolytes really did go a long way.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with FOMO in itself. Just remember that it’s a tool, and if someone is using it on you, worry more about if the underlying thing they are convincing you of is true and less about the marketing itself.

Live Deeply,

2026.01.11

CXXXIV

[The Scientific Method; Secret Hitler; Alien Monoliths; The Machine Knows All; A Fight for Freedom]

Thesis: Critical Thinking is an erroneously marginalized skill that needs to be practiced to protect progress.

[The Scientific Method]

Critical Thinking is one of the most important skills you can learn. A working definition:

Critical Thinking: Objectively analyzing information to come up with a consistent interpretation of reality.

If you are able to think critically, you'll have an easier time identifying decisions that really are in your best interest in the long term. And, as you'll later see, you'll have an easier time winning the best board game ever designed, Secret Hitler.

On the other hand, if you don't know how to think critically, you're more inclined to believe lies from both yourself and others--those lies can cost you dearly. And, you'll be more likely to lose Secret Hitler.

Beyond being in your immediate personal interest, Critical Thinking is how we, as a species, perpetually build up our store of knowledge and information over time, and progress science and our understanding of the world.*

However, critical thinking takes effort, and there are a lot of traps that can get in the way of clear, critical thinking. To make matters worse, some people, either through their words or actions, would have you believe that you can and should "outsource" your critical thinking, and that convenience is more valuable than the ability to discern truth.

If the majority believed that, scientific progress would stall and any new information would build up in the hands of a minority. Historically, such minorities end up being more interested in suppressing truth than progressing it.

The good news is that the opponents of critical thinking and free thought have never succeeded in completely destroying progress. In part, because enough people do not give into the temptation of the easy way out.

_{*While it can create new risks, I strongly believe scientific progress is a very desirable thing. This post is not about that belief, but I do assert an implication of being pro critical thinking is that at the least you're okay with scientific progress as an inevitable by product of that critical thinking.}

[Secret Hitler]

Secret Hitler is a phenomenal game played by a group of 5-10 people.

A minority of the players are randomly chosen to be Fascist, with the aim of electing their candidate, Secret Hitler, to Chancellor. These Fascists are aware of who the other fascists are.

The balance of the players are Liberal, and they, unlike the Fascists, have NO information about anyone else's party affiliation. Their job is to pass a number of liberal policies before the fascists pass a smaller number of fascist policies and succeed at electing Hitler as Chancellor.

One common trap I see many players who are selected as Liberals fall into (myself included), is believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that another particular player or two are certainly also Liberals.

On the surface, it is somewhat obvious why you would NOT want to do this for two reasons:

1. You can never know who is liberal for certain

2. The Fascists are exerting effort to try to lie to you

A more rational way to play is to have adjusting probabilities that each player is or is not Fascist. While you might feel strongly that one player is Liberal, if their future actions go against that belief, your probabilities should adjust.

Still, it’s often that one or two liberals play with the incorrect belief that a fascist is certainly a liberal, and, because of this belief, lose the game.

Here are some plausible reasons this happens:

• Desire to Reduce Complexity: If you’re playing with 6 other people, and 3 of them are fascist, you make the game easier for yourself if you can eliminate altogether the possibility of one player being fascist

• Certainty vs Uncertainty: It is far easier to think in terms of certainties than probabilities. It takes more mental effort to say David is .8 Liberal, Jake is .2 Liberal, Helen is .9 Liberal, Lana is .95 Liberal, and Henry is .2 Liberal than it is to say Jake & Henry are definitely fascist & Lana is definitely a Liberal.

• Hubris: You think that YOU are harder to lie to than anyone else is, so you are more inclined to keep your beliefs once you make them

And this issue isn't much better if you wrongly label someone as a fascist, either: now, based off that assumption, you have severely lowered the perceived probability that any remaining player is a fascist. Really, since you are wrong, you’ve raised the real probability of any reaming player being fascist, compounding your error.

All of that is to say, even for a simple board game, you can see how many temptations there are to push our brain further from the truth, even when we think we are getting closer to it.

[Alien Monoliths]

When I was reading Herzog's autobiography, "Every Man for Himself and God Against All," there was a particular anecdote involving aliens, standing stones, and the power of critical thinking that stuck out to me.

In the 60s or 70s, Herzog had visited some standing stones in the North of France: these giant pillars of stone stand upright in unnatural, geometric patterns. When he was there, he ran into someone handing out pamphlets in a very official looking way, declaring that the stones were organized in such a fashion by aliens thousands of years ago.

Being a skeptic through and through, Herzog thought the notion absurd. He set about to come up with a plausible way to move the stones a few miles from their origins to where they were now and stand them upright.

With no phone or google or reference materials of any sort, he came up with a pretty realistic idea:

• From the stones’ starting position laying down, dig tunnels across it's width beneath it.*

• Insert some rolling item like a smooth or carved log in each tunnel.

• Dig out the rest of the dirt around the logs and a long, gradual ramp up in front of the stone.

• Proceed to move the stone with a mix of man power & pulleys attached to pillars in the ground when needed.

• Push the stone into a pre dug, sloped hole where you would like it to stand up right.

This idea is quite clever and also, a very plausible hypothesis for not only how these stones were moved and erected, but how other similar structures were developed. And, it’s pretty consistent with what a lot of historians believe about the stones.

Although it misses some actual bits about having to quarry the stones and only hits on one of the believed transit methods (sleds were also allegedly used), the critical thinking itself is admirable and something we can all learn from.

The point here is not that Herzog was “right”, but that he used information known to him* to come up with an idea consistent with facts that was also far more plausible than the alien hypothesis.

The conclusion not only helped him understand the world better, but the pulley system is exactly what he'd use to get a steamship over a mountain years later.

_{*A human who could command hundreds of others likely existed, ropes and wheels existed, the stones did not need to travel across a sea…}

[The Machine Knows All]

When presented with a mystery like a field of standing stones today, I think it's a lot more likely that most of us would pull out our phones and consult with Google or GPT or Claude than it is that we’d try to reason our way through it. (Since internet search and LLMs are converging towards the same thing, we'll refer to them collectively as the "Knowledge Base".)

The machine knows all

More broadly, when given a choice between thinking critically and getting an answer from another source, it is very easy to bias towards getting the answer from another source.

Truly, this is nothing new: there have always been officials handing out pamphlets about aliens, “experts” telling you to trust them on TV commercials, Priests commanding you to blindly follow their interpretation of the religious text.

Still, it feels like we are at or are rapidly approaching a critical point: it has never been easier to find evidence in the Knowledge Base to confirm the thing you want to be true with out taking the time to Critically Think about whether or not it is.

More frightening than that, I’ve heard people seriously claim you should outsource your critical thinking to the Knowledge Base.

I don't believe the solution is throwing aside the Knowledge Base altogether at all. There has never been a time when it has been possible to learn anything so quickly, which is an amazing thing.

However, I think a very simple counterforce to the erosion of our ability to Critically Think is to dedicate time each day to doing thing without any access to the internet or LLMs. This could be:

• Reading long form materials like books that don't talk back to you

• Journaling at night before you go to bed

• Meditating in the morning and writing out your goals for the day before looking at your phone

• Going on a run in silence and doing brainteasers, like how far from our original intersection is a walker the second time you intersect (assumes out and back run)

• Cognitively and physically engaging activities like martial arts and rock climbing and surfing and skateboarding with no phone access

If you liked this post, please subscribe—I’m here with human written, thoughtful content every Sunday!

[A Fight for Freedom]

If it seems that I'm being alarmist, it's because maintaining the ability to Think Critically is one of the greatest ways to ensure scientific progress and a free and open society.

To be crystal clear, I am not talking about some grand conspiracy here. Rather, I think the truth is more frightening than any conspiracy could be: we take the path of least resistance, and querying the internet or an LLM is easier than thinking critically.

The capacity for Critical Thinking atrophies like a muscle not in use. And the less critical thinking there is, the easier it is to lose Secret Hitler, both the board game and the real life game.

So, be sure your brain is hitting the gym.

Live Deeply,

2026.01.04

CXXXIII

[The Next Episode; Highlight Reel; Less Exploring, More Exploiting; Poetic Guidelines; Don't Stop Learning; 2026]

Thesis: A review of 2025 & some of the thoughts I’m taking with me to help accomplish my goals in 2026.

[The Next Episode]

2025 was an impactful year for me, and I know that Jack & I have a solid foundation which we can use to make BirdDog truly life changing.

In all honesty, I've never been more excited for a year in my life.

Our vision is solidified; while there’s still a lot of uncertainty to deal with, the future continues to become less about invention and more about execution.

In this less continuous post, I mention some highlights from 2025, BirdDog’s state at the start of 2026, some beliefs & aphorisms I’m taking with me into 2026… and a reminder that it’s not too late to learn things.

[Highlight Reel]

Here are some adventures & achievements from 2025 that I'm grateful to have been able to experience:

• Turned BirdDog into a business that can support myself

• Moved back into C House & met amazing new people

• Spent quality time with my best friends

• Visited SF Parc & Aevitas in SF

• Naturally cured myself of "sinusitis" that according to a doctor required surgery

• Learned to ski enough to go down a blue diamond in one day on a boy's trip

• Went to 2 high school friends’ weddings

• Won more business in one year than I ever have in my entire life

• Did over 35,000 push ups

• Ate at Madras Dosa another > 20 times (too few, in all honesty, but Wusong has gotten in the rotation)

• Crossed 10k followers on LinkedIn

• Saw myself in the final cut of the vampire movie I acted in 2 years ago

• Went to a reunion with some of my senior year roommates on a lake in PA

• Continued to write 1 blog post per week & crossed 2 years at it & 130 total posts

I also saw this little guy

[Less Exploring, More Exploiting]

A lot has been falling into place for BirdDog in the last couple of months.

Between crossing some revenue thresholds, releasing a very powerful case study, and securing some quite meaningful partnerships, we have a lot of validation that we're going further down the right track.

I still won't ring the bell saying we have PMF yet, but we've gotten close enough to it & are confident that at our current price point we're providing a high enough ROI for our clients that we're going to be focused much more aggressively on scaling through 2026.

While we have high revenue targets, this is the first time I've ever looked at a financial model this extreme and thought, "Yeah, those assumptions are reasonable." And, if we hit the targets, I think ipso facto we have PMF.

The feeling I wrote about in August of having derisked the business in a lot of ways has gotten significantly stronger; it’s continuing to become much less about exploring & finding what might work and much more about exploiting the current thing that does work.*

_{*If you don’t love my use of the word exploit… well, it’s a technical term}

[Poetic Guidelines]

I wrote a couple of outlooks for 2026 about LLMs & social media & surveillance states & the death of free will and all that, but I think a much more compelling and impactful piece is the below aphorisms & rules that either helped me in 2025 or I wish I thought more about last year.

A few of them are mine, some of them are from famous people, some of them are too generic to attribute. All of them will be going with me into 2026:

• 5 minutes of reading is worth more than 5 minutes (or 5 hours) of doom scrolling

• Spending 3 hours in deep work each day will be 3 of your most fulfilling hours

• Every repetition you have an LLM do for you is a lost opportunity to get better at the skill

• Walking to dinner with a friend (or friends) is a luxury to be cherished

• Don't forget to go adventures

• Even trying a new skill is an adventure

• Read old books & watch old movies

• Your days feel longer and more interesting when you focus intensely on one thing at a time

• Multi tasking is not doing two things at 50% capacity each, it's doing two things at 25% capacity each

• 60 minutes of deep work and a 10 minute break is worth at least 2 or 3x more than 60 minutes of distracted work

• A 10 minute run is better than a 0 minute run

• You can only have one priority

• Every time you say no to a distraction when focusing, you make your focus stronger

• Even if you think it might not be a distraction, it's probably a distraction

• If you engage with two excuses in a row, you know that now you're just looking for excuses

• Don't waste time negotiating with yourself—do the thing

• Find outlets to stay grounded, like journaling every night or doing 100 pushups a day; you'll ultimately go further faster

Shoot me an email if you have anything I should add to the list...

[Don't Stop Learning]

A reminder to keep learning, even if ‘they’ tell you it’s too late.

A lot of people in 2025 claimed that you should learn how to use LLMs & agents instead of learning skills like coding, writing, design, or any non physical thing. Some people even claimed skills like selling should be taken over by AI.

I ignored this “advice” and invested a LOT in continuing to learn and refine skills like coding & sales, and I'm very glad that I did. Those two things were critical to my contribution to accomplishing what we did with BirdDog.

So, going into 2026, I’m particularly concerned that this narrative has so much staying power for 2 reasons:

1. I know firsthand how much better you can get at something by actually doing the thing instead of relying on AI entirely to do it for you

2. I’ve seen very bright people become afraid to invest in skills because of the narrative that AI will obsolesce them all in 6 months

Remember, me speaking out against this narrative is not some grizzled 10 year programmer afraid of losing his job. I'm the dude who took Adderall &* talked to an LLM for 3 days in 2022 to teach himself enough Python to deliver a final project for a class I didn't go to that wasn’t even taught in Python. In 2024, I wrote about using LLMs to write code in 3 programming languages I didn’t know. Even then, though, the goal was always learning.

Learning is how you make yourself more powerful. Don't let someone convince you that you just need to pay them $200 a month for the rest of your life instead of learning anything ever agian.

Briefly, here are some arguments for vibe coding along with counter arguments. I chose vibe coding because it’s the poster child for people saying “you don’t need to learn x anymore”, but I’m sure the arguments can be generalized or mapped to other domains as well.

1. LLM autocomplete is faster: Autocomplete lets the LLM starts driving & you start editing, which puts pressure on your code to be no better than average LLM quality. An LSP + VIM motions should accomplish the same speed boost with greater accuracy.

2. LLMs are great at boiler plate code: This in one of my most frequent uses of LLMs, but a lot of the time it's still more efficient to a) use VIM motions to rapidly copy & mutate boiler plate code b) build a code base that doesn't need much boiler plate code. In other words, if you need an LLM to write boiler plate code for you, the real problem might be that you need boiler plate code in the first place.

3. LLMs are great at answering questions I don't know the answer to: My favorite use of LLMs, especially around syntax. That being said, if you catch yourself asking it the same question more than 5 times, you might not be paying enough attention to actually learn the thing…

4. LLMs let you operate at a higher level of abstraction / English is the new programming language: Every time you go up another level of abstraction, you don't know what you're missing one layer down; the trade offs someone else made could be costing you dearly overtime. Awareness of these tradeoffs & alpha comes from going down the ladder of abstraction.

In short, please do not give up or lose hope about learning things just because the LLM & agent hype bros and marketers are shouting from the roof that we’re at the end of history. It’s never as cut and dry as they’re making it out to be—keep going.

_{*Crossing something out means it was a joke ;)}

If you enjoyed this post & want to follow along on my & BirdDog’s journey through 2026, please subscribe!

[2026]

Cheer's to everything you did in 2025 that you're proud of and every little moment that made it meaningful.

I’m very excited for what the future holds, and am filled with vigor to engage with it.

And, when that vigor wears off, what will be left beneath it will be an unflinching & unwavering commitment to continue on the mission.

Live Deeply,

2025.12.28

CXXXII

[A Force of Nature; The Greatest Sufferer Award Goes To...; The Drink Was Poisoned, Not the Well; Rattlesnakes & Bears; A Bitter Life is a Life Only Partly Lived]

Thesis: Don't let experiences make you bitter.

[A Force of Nature]

I'm reading a phenomenal memoir called "Every Man for Himself and God Against All" from one of my favorite directors, Werner Herzog.

Herzog beautifully traces his life in a roundabout, non linear way. What is most shocking to me is how many terribly challenging experiences he’s had:

• Born in Germany in 1942; his cradle was covered in dust and rubble during an allied bombing raid

• Grew up severely impoverished in Bavaria; one loaf of bread per week for a family of three.

• Didn't meet his father until he was 4, and then, rarely saw him

• As a young boy, saw his friend get in a ski crash and carried him down the mountain unconscious

• Repeatedly dissuaded from his ambition to be a director (too young, inexperienced, go work for someone, getting laughed out of a studio at 15, etc)

The life of myself and my average reader is so far removed from this level of challenge that it is hard to comprehend. You'd think that most people who went through a childhood like that would get calcified into a bitter ball of hate.

Herzog did not become bitter. He reflects back on the memories with a steady hand and often a fondness. And, in spite of all of those challenges, he went on to do the impossible, again and again:

• Direct over 70 feature films

• Get a 320 Ton Steamboat over a mountain

• Publish over 10 books

• Act in a few movies

• Win the Venice Film Fest Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (less than 100 director / film maker recipients ever, including Kubrick, Charlie Chaplin, Spielberg, Scorsese, Lynch, Tim Burton, etc etc etc)

He did all of this as if it were inevitable, as if the challenges and “handicaps” weren’t even a consideration. To boot, all the rights to his movies are owned by a non profit foundation he started that supports up and coming film makers with awards & workshops.

Bitterness comes from being stuck on things that happened to you in the past. In sharp contrast, all of Herzog’s achievements speak to a present curiosity and vitality and forward momentum.

If someone with so many objective challenges can protect himself from turning away from the world in bitterness, why can’t we?

[The Greatest Sufferer Award Goes To...]

We all have suffered in our lives, and it’s kind of crazy to think that someone else hasn’t.

It’s also pretty unempathetic to assume that your suffering is greater than someone else’s. In reality, you have no idea what someone else went through.

By assuming your suffering is greater than anyone else’s and letting others know it, at best, you get some pity, but more likely, you come across as entitled and calloused and umempathetic. I wrote about the danger of romanticizing suffering in a post anchoring on the DMV to show that suffering is a matter of perspective; ironically, I had someone respond to the post, saying I could only write like that because I hadn’t suffered enough yet, unlike him!

On the other hand, you have a man like Herzog, who recounts both the negative and the positive with a steady hand, accepting that each is a part of his life. I see the objectively higher level of challenge in his life than mine, and marvel at the fact that not once does he say anything in the neighborhood of, “My life was the hardest life there was!”

There's no contest or prize for suffering, but there is one for overcoming and creating.

So yes, we all have a “reason” to be bitter, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean you should be.

[The Drink Was Poisoned, Not the Well]

I view bitterness as calcified fear.

This bad thing happens, and you’re afraid of it happening again. So, you create rules to protect yourself from it.

I don’t know if there is a single person breathing who has never experienced pain that was only possible by being vulnerable with a romantic partner.

If the pain is strong enough, the trap is that some people become bitter and think that all women or men are heartless and will hurt them if they get close again.

You’re afraid of being hurt and you let that fear calcify into a protective behavior change. Of course you won’t get hurt by a romantic partner if you internalize the view that it’s not worth it to open up to a romantic partner ever again!

But you also will never have a romantic partner ever again!

While bitterness is an effective protection from getting hurt again, it also severely limits your range of motion. If it dominates you entirely, you can fence yourself in from doing some of the things you’re most interested in! Don’t let one or even multiple painful experiences cut you off from the possibility of a good one for the rest of your life.

For instance, I would not be able to build BirdDog if I let the fear of painful things that happened in my last businesses dominate me.

When bad experiences calcify into an overly protective fear, your bitterness takes over and you start to cut yourself off from life itself. The painful thing that happened in the past becomes more important than the amazing things that could happen in the future.

[Rattlesnakes & Bears]

Fear is not inherently a bad thing. Fear helps us identify risks in our environment.

If you become afraid of everything, though, the greatest risk becomes your fear.

On a hike in Yosemite, I heard, for the first time in my life in the wild, a rattling of a snake's tail. Immediately, I received a shot of cortisol. We were on a relatively narrow (but also well traveled) mountain trail, and had to carefully pass the rattlesnake at as much distance as possible.

This was an appropriate response to risk. There was a real threat that I wasn’t used to and needed to safely navigate it. Once we passed it, I was more cautious than before, but eventually returned to relatively normal stress levels after the threat was passed.

On the other hand, on the first >7 day backpacking trip I went on, I became totally dominated by fear near the end. At that point, the fear isn’t at all useful.

My friend Bobby & I were in Olympic National Park; we were maybe 5 days into our trip and made it to this absolutely beautiful location, the Enchanted Valley.

When we got into the Valley proper, the walls were covered in countless waterfalls from the spring melting of the glaciers on the summits above. It was as if the mountains themselves were weeping uncontrollably at their own majesty.

Zoom in to see at least 5 waterfalls in the picture

There were also quite a few black bears in the floor of the valley with us. We saw one not 20 meters away from one of the 3 other campers at the site. They were yelling at it to go away, but it was ignoring them for the longest time before finally wandering off.

I had never been so close to a black bear, let alone a persistent one. I became terrified. Everything became a threat. I clutched my bear spray in the tent that night. It stormed. Would we be struck by lighting? Would the inside of our tent get wet? The next day, would we run out of food? Would the trails wash away?

When I finally did drift off to sleep, funnily enough, I woke up to my friend Bobby, who is notorious for sleep walking shenanigans, leaning over me. He was pantomiming driving our tent as if it were a car and saying, “Look, the water park is right over there,” pointing with his hand off towards some phantom location only he could see in his dream.

Now, I think that story is terrifically humorous, but at the time, the re awakening only served to make me more stressed and anxious. How would I even survive the next day without enough sleep?

Anxiety can help guide you and identify the most critical risks. But if everything is the most critical risk, nothing is.

If you are enjoying this post, it would mean the world if you subscribed… I’m here every week!

[A Bitter Life is a Life Only Partly Lived]

If you let each of the bad things that happen to you calcify into protective fears, you might find yourself walking through life wracked by anxiety, like I was walking through the most beautiful natural place I have ever seen.

Bad things will happen to you, and some of them will be very, very bad and hard to understand.

Those aren't the things that define, you, though, not if you don't let them. Yes, like Herzog’s poverty and fatherless upbringing are part of what made him who he is, they were each only part of the mosaic of experience.

If you focus more on the suffering and less on the overcoming, you'll fence yourself into a safe little square that you are convinced is surrounded by rattlesnakes. To hell with the world out there, I'm safe in here!

Rattlesnakes are part of life, but they’re not the only part.

A bitter life is a life only partly lived.

Yes, I'm sure some of the things that happened to you were terrible.

That doesn't stop you from living a life of so much beauty that they're just footnotes in comparison.

Live Deeply,