The questions worth sitting with
Insights move fast. Big Ideas move slow. This is where I take one large question at a time, across five areas, and think it all the way through: evolution, psychology, the universe, technology, and the world we share, and the strange places where they meet.
Evolution
4Where we came from, and what the long game of life is really optimizing for.
Psychology
4The machinery of the mind: why we feel, fear, want, and look away.
Universe
1Our place in something vast, old, and strange beyond intuition.
Technology
1The tools that remake us as fast as we make them.
Our World
2How civilization actually works, and what it takes to build the next age of it.
What's Left When the Work Is Done for You
For centuries we anchored our identity in what we produced. As machines absorb more of the doing, the hard part will not be the economics. It will be finding a source of meaning sturdier than output, and that is the real adjustment ahead.
You Are Being Optimized Against
Your reward system is the product. Recommendation engines are trained by relentless optimization to hijack the brain's novelty and dopamine loop, and understanding the mechanism is the first real step to owning your attention rather than being farmed for it.
The Petri Dish We Built
We did not build artificial intelligence so much as breed it. Training is variation, selection, and heredity running at industrial speed, which means the traits emerging in the lab are the traits our filters selected. Unlike nature, we get to rewrite the fitness function, and it is still ours to write.
The Attention You Have Left
Attention is the one genuinely non-renewable resource of a human life, and it is being strip-mined at industrial scale. Reclaiming the capacity for sustained, single-pointed attention is both more effective and more humane, and increasingly a radical act.
The Egg That Started as Skin
Scientists turned human skin and blood cells into early human eggs. In vitro gametogenesis is the biggest reproductive shift since IVF, and its real story is a decades-long scientific relay, not a lone eureka. A perspective on the three ways it goes right, the three ways it goes wrong, and why open collaboration is both the engine and the only real guardrail.
How Not to Be Very Powerful Broken People
A tool amplifies whoever holds it. As we pick up the most powerful tools in history, the decisive variable is not the machine but the human. Why becoming fully human is the work of this age.
Nothing Great Gets Built in a Storm
Destruction feeds on chaos; abundance gets built on stability. Why the coming age of AI abundance is really a story about energy, supply chains, and calm.
The Animal That Knew Too Much
Peter Wessel Zapffe thought consciousness was not humanity's crowning achievement but an evolutionary overshoot, a trait that grew past its usefulness like the antlers that doomed the Irish elk. A deep look at The Last Messiah, the four ways we cope, and whether the bleakest theory of mind is actually right.
The Great Mergers
Evolution's headline is competition, nature red in tooth and claw. But every giant leap, from the first cell to your own body to the anthill, came from the opposite move: smaller units giving up their independence to merge into something larger. A look at the major transitions, why selfish parts ever cooperate, and why cooperation is really competition moved up a level.
The Zero-Player Game
A British mathematician's 1970 toy, the Game of Life, runs itself from a handful of rules and no players, yet grows gliders, clocks, and whole computers. Scale that intuition up and you reach the simulation hypothesis. Here is the rigorous version of the argument, the supposed evidence, and the counterpoints that make it more interesting than scary.
Twelve Doors: How the Age of AI Could Actually End
Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 lays out twelve futures for a world that builds superintelligence, from utopias to extinction. The most disturbing is not that AI kills us, but that it keeps us, studied like animals in a zoo. A full walk through all twelve, the alignment problem underneath them, and why doing nothing is itself a choice of door.
We Stole the Pen
For four billion years evolution had no author: blind, slow, and without a shred of foresight. Then, in a single generation, our species learned to read the code, edit it, select it, and route around it entirely. Evolution is becoming intentional for the first time, and we are the ones holding the pen, with all the power and almost none of the wisdom that implies.