Despite the many benefits of technology, there’s nothing new about its consequences throughout history…

1440: The Printing Press.

The printing press enabled the rapid spread of misinformation in the form of broadside pamphlets.1

1990: The Search Engine.

The search engine brought new consequences like click bait, SEO-optimization, and dead internet theory.

2004: Social Media.

Social media led to the attention economy, infinite scroll, loneliness, polarization, and issues with attention control… squirrel!

2022: Large Language Models.

Generative AI makes it possible to create limitless content. More books, blogs, academic papers, New York Times opinion pieces, and award-winning short stories. The cost to create is zero but we’re drowning in mediocrity.2

In this essay I propose concrete solutions to the era of AI, where, to quote the Charmin Soft Bear, “less is more”.

How Knowledge Accumulates

In 1903 Wilbur Wright had an obsession with birds. He thought: If birds can fly, why can’t humans? A‍t the time, flying was considered impossible. The New York Times even published this article that same year:

In the 1890s, there was no internet, YouTube, or Google. So Wilbur wrote letters to libraries across the country, requesting every book about birds, physics, and mechanics. After studying the evidence, Wilbur concluded that:

1. Birds can fly (obviously).

2. Which means flying doesn’t defy the laws of physics.

3. Therefore humans can fly, too.3

Wilbur leveraged knowledge that exists today to solve hard problems at the cutting edge. To paraphrase Isaac Newton: “we stand on the shoulders of giants.” Since 1903, research has gotten easier and more competitive.

Good Ideas Are Harder To Find

Are Ideas Getting Harder To Find? (2020), addresses the elephant in the room: it’s harder to find good ideas.

Long run economic growth is predicted by (i) the number of researchers, (ii) their research productivity. Research effort is rising but research productivity is declining.

To put it in perspective, the number of researchers required to maintain Moore’s Law is 18x larger than in the 1970’s, because they’re individually less productive. (And that’s before population decline in developed nations.)

The reason researchers are less productive is because of the burden of knowledge: as the total body of human knowledge expands, you must spend more time learning just to reach the frontier of your field, leaving less time to innovate.

“As a body of knowledge doubles so does the cost of wrapping your head around what we already know. This cost is the burden of knowledge. To be the best in a general field today requires that you know more than the person who was the best only 20 years ago. Not only do you have to be better to be the best, but you also have to be better just to stay in the game.”

— Shane Parrish, Half Life: The Decay Of Knowledge and What To Do About It

I’ve told a joke (that I stole from Twitter) about how the next generation’s surgeons are using Chat GPT to write their college essays. This worry isn’t too farfetched.

A recent CEPR study of 26,000 Chinese students evaluated how AI affected learning. It helped students produce short-term results: 30% faster homework completion time, with 18% higher scores. Long-term results were worse: exam scores decreased by 20% after six months. The full learning penalty emerged after two years of using AI.

Most AI Is Litter For The Internet

A few months ago, several researchers conducted a study of 10,272 AI- and human-written stories. They determined that human writing could be identified from AI slop 93% of the time. This visualization is the best defense of learning to write without AI I’ve ever seen.

I can think of a few Substack ‘artists’ publishing AI content. Maybe you know someone like this too. Artists like this aren’t contributing to the stock of human knowledge. They’re actually lowering the common denominator of knowledge.

AI, Human Cognition, and Knowledge Collapse (2026) argues that:

1. Good human judgement requires general knowledge you’d find on Google combined with specific knowledge that you can’t find online.

2. Things made by humans (but not AI) create both general and specific knowledge as a byproduct.

3. This process increases the steady state of general knowledge upon which others can combine their own specific knowledge with.

Creating with AI lowers the common denominator of knowledge. Over time, knowledge could fade away.

Before the 1960’s, littering was culturally acceptable. After WWII, disposable goods and plastics skyrocketed. So did litter. But in 1970 the American public finally turned against littering when the Crying Indian PSA aired during the first Earth Day. Now we all agree that littering is bad. Do we agree that low effort AI slop is bad?

A Pew survey found that American adults believe AI will be negative for society. Less believe it’ll be negative for them personally.

AI Makes Specific Knowledge More Valuable

Warren Buffett spent hours pouring over annual reports, books, and primary sources to develop a mental model of the world.

Today the entirety of The Intelligent Investor, every company’s 10-K, and transcripts to every speech Benjamin Graham ever gave is an LLM prompt away. The breadth of Buffett’s general knowledge isn’t an advantage anymore.4

General knowledge is more common (and less valuable) than ever before. In fact, there’s little arbitrage opportunity in public domain source material because it’s… public. There’s nothing proprietary about it.

Specific knowledge is proprietary and highly valuable. It’s less common (and more valuable) than ever before. That’ll become more true with artificial intelligence.

The relative utility of specific knowledge tends to ebb and flows throughout history.

“The distribution of knowledge across humankind also vary over time.

For instance, in 10,000 B.C., the average hunter-gatherer probably knew the difference between a blueberry and a poison berry. By contrast, I have to ask my wife what a Kumquat is at Trader Joe’s. Today it’s less useful to be an expert at identifying poisonous plants than it was for our ancestors.

That’s not to say that no one can identify poisonous plants today - many can. But just because knowledge exists doesn’t necessarily make it useful. The relative utility of specific knowledge ebbs and flows over time.”

— Grant Varner, “The Collapse Of Human Knowledge”

Even though anyone can conjure encyclopedic knowledge like Buffett, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can think like him. All the information, experiences, and insights you’ve collected over time and put into your noggin contributes to your judgement.

Kant defines judgement as any mental representation of an object. Unlike knowledge, it deals with differing ideas, using life experiences to seek out truth. Good judgment is the highest form of specific knowledge because it requires real life experience. In fact, there are several kinds of specific knowledge which AI still has trouble replicating.

Virtue bench, an LLM benchmark which measures the Cardinal virtues, found that Claude Mythos struggled with the moral virtue of courage.

Unlike the other virtues, courage requires the ability to suffer (sometimes to death) for the sake of a greater good. For all the predictive capabilities AI has, it hasn’t been able to replicate real virtue yet because that requires subjective awareness.

A Return To Enlightenment Principles

The London coffeehouse culture of the late 17th and 18th centuries is a big reason why ideas spread like wildfire during the Enlightenment. For a few cents, anybody could grab a coffee and discuss great ideas. Unlike taverns, which promoted drunkenness, the coffeehouses stimulated the mind, leading to insightful conversations.

You might think, “AI also democratizes knowledge. Shouldn’t we be in the midst of a second Enlightenment?”

You’re absolutely right that AI democratizes creation. But because everyone is using the same few LLM models, culture is collapsing into trendslop and ideological homogeneity. By contrast, the London coffee houses enabled a wonderful clashing of many human minds.

With the cost of secondary tuition higher than ever, being able to converse with others in person will accelerate your accumulation of knowledge. Even if your city doesn’t have a coffeehouse culture, you have another option that’s more solitary, but equally affordable: reading books.

A great book compresses a lifetime of wisdom into a consumable format with 7 hours of focused effort. There’s no better way to orient your thoughts than to spend time with an author by reading their book. echoes the same sentiment:

“Part of what is happening when you spend 7 hours reading a book, is you spend 7 hours with your mind on the topics in the book, grappling with them, drawing connections, having thoughts you would not otherwise have had. And so without that process of grappling, without those hours inside that book, it doesn’t get inside you. It doesn’t impress itself upon you. It doesn’t change you. What reading and writing and processing information is supposed to do is change you.”

How you read books is just as important as what you read. Digging into the primary sources of a book to evaluate its validity is another form of specific knowledge. AI can use a web scraper, but it cannot make a judgement about the validity or value of a source, beyond quantifiable means like Google page rank.

A study by The Wharton School found that “research” with AI makes learning more passive than ‘ole fashioned Google search. To train your source literacy, when you read something interesting, read the original sources linked. As yourself, “Was that article valid? Do I agree with the point of view?” Doing that repeatedly eventually strengthens your ‘muscle’ of primary source literacy.5

If there’s one thing you do…

Put trust at a premium. Two things are true because of how much is being produced by AI today:

1. The cost of trust is higher than ever.

2. The value of trust is higher than ever.

Doing things in person is bar none, the fastest way to build trust. I see it in tech, where Account Executives send hundreds of emails, with zero revenue to show for it. Then they drive to Indianapolis to drop off donuts to a customer, and revenue immediately starts flowing.

I’m experiencing it here in downtown Chicago, where I met , a fellow Substack writers at a book tour. The London coffeehouse culture is more necessary than ever.

“Having the attention of a local community or a niche group can be just as powerful as having it within a popular online space. You don’t need to be a content creator, but if you can keep attention and build a community, you will undoubtedly be rewarded for it. I believe this will be especially true for in-person communities in 2026 and beyond.”

— , “Signal Collapse and the New Proof of Work”

Every time I second guess the value of mastering the art of writing, I go back to quote from Hayao Miyazaki’s memoir. In it, he laments his struggle with creating animated films in an era of 24/7 media.

“I question whether it’s necessary for someone to add a bucket of water to a flood, just because it’s particularly good water. However, I can justify doing so by saying that even in the midst of a flood we still need to drink good water once in a while.”

— Starting Point, Hayao Miyazaki’s memoir

Two years ago, I said we’re going to see the supply of writing increase dramatically. It took me months to write these 3,600 words you just read. But an LLM could write 2,600 words in seconds. But just because you can produce more, does that necessarily make it better?

Every once in a while, you need to read something beautiful, written by a human voice. You should fill that void. Because AI cannot.

As always… thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner

1

It’s also believed that the printing press accelerated European witch hunt executions from 1440-1650, per this great essay by Katie Jagielnicka.

The Noösphere

How the Printing Press Ignited Europe’s Deadly Witch-Hunt Frenzy

The Noösphere is an entirely reader-supported publication that brings social sciences research into frequently overlooked t…

Read more

2 years ago · 541 likes · 93 comments · Katie Jagielnicka

2

There’s a great study Writing Code vs. Shipping Code (2026), which finds that sync agents lead to a 741% increase in lines of code and a 65% increase in pull requests, but releases rise by only 20%. In other words, AI is producing a lot of code - but not much of it is deemed high quality enough to be published.

4

I have a working theory that the commoditization of general knowledge is why there’s a gap between the skills people learn in college vs. what’s actually valuable for work.

A college degree is a low bar. In some cases, it’s not even necessary. For example, Graham Stephen skipped college to go straight into real estate after high school.

The main point is this: It’s the specific knowledge you develop after graduating college that makes you truly marketable — not the degree itself.

5

Surfing the web like it’s the 2000’s is another antidote to the brain melting effects of AI.

offline soul

this is what the internet should feel like

Before scrolling and algorithms, there was “surfing the web…

Read more

8 months ago · 412 likes · 32 comments · Dani Offline

Buy In This Economy by Kyle Scanlon

I. The Vibe Economy

Our feelings about the economy have a big impact on how the economy behaves. Stock market rallies yield irrational exuberance. Grim headlines yield uncertainty. When prices go up, consumer sentiment decreases, and vice versa. But there’s nothing new about sentiment driving the economy. Back in 1936, John Maynard Keynes coined the term animal spirits to describe how emotions influence people’s decisions and market behavior.

Half a century later, Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory (1979) asserted that emotions drive financial decisions, opening up Pandora’s Box of behavioral economics. Because the economy runs on human emotion, facts don’t always equate to truths about the economy.

II. How Money Works

Back in the good ‘ole days (3500+ B.C.E.), early societies operated on principles of communal sharing. Over time, as civilizations grew, standardized mediums of exchange became necessary.1 The Mesopotamians established the first formal monetary system in 3500 B.C.E. via clay tokens. In fact, we know that the Mesopotamians charged interest on loans before they discovered how to put wheels on carts.2

Since then, currencies have come and gone, but the principle is this: Money is a medium of exchange, backed by trust in an institution. 5,000 years later, the U.S. dollar is now the dominant currency globally. Since its inception until 1971, the U.S. dollar was tied to the value of gold.3 President Richard Nixon ended the gold standard through an executive order called the “Nixon Shock” which suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold to battle inflation.

We haven’t turned back, which makes the U.S. dollar a fiat currency — which means it’s entirely backed by the full faith of the U.S. government.

Recently there’s been worry over the dollar maintaining its status as the federal reserve currency.4 The speculation is that hyperinflation will drive down the purchasing power of the dollar. But most countries’ debts to other countries are denominated in dollars, so the currency won’t blow up anytime soon.

III. How Money Is Measured

The price we pay for things is determined by demand (how many people want it) and supply (how much is being produced).

When demand is low and supply is high, prices go down. And versa. This is called the supply and demand curve.

GDP is the total market value of all finished goods and serves produced within a country’s borders. Think of it like a scorecard of a country’s economic heath, represented by this equation:

GDP = Consumption (what people buy) Government Purchases (money the U.S. government spends) + Investment (capital spending) + Net Exports (exports minus imports)

Historically, rising GDP has been a signifier of economic growth. But as populations age, we may need to look for new ways to measure economic success.5 The Federal Reserve bank of Dallas wrote in 2022:

“As trend GDP growth slows due to aging demographics and slower productivity gains, there may be more frequent periods of negative GDP growth without an increase in unemployment, making the distinction between increasing slack and declining activity more relevant than in the past.”

The Labor Market

Back in the day, you could buy a new house out of college, work at the same company for forty years, and raise 3 kids with one working parent. Today, most 20-something’s can barely afford guac on their Chipotle burrito. (Half joking.) The labor market has changed a lot. People want to work, but the options for growth today are limited. According to McKinsey & Company, the main reason people leave their job is because of limited opportunities for career advancement.

The Housing Market

Back in 1950, you could buy a home for 3x your annual salary. Now an entry level home costs 11x your salary. What happened?

Why housing has gotten so expensive is a topic for another day. Put simply, it’s a supply issue. But the tides are starting to turn in some regions of the United States. Rent prices in some sun belt cities have fallen drastically since the market’s peak in 2022.

Regardless, the housing market is shifting underneath our feet. Because housing data is a lagging indicator of the current state of the market, the tides may have completely shifted in some regions.

The Stock Market

Market concentration is a characteristic of the stock market in recent years. In the early 2020’s, the Magnificent 7 (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla, and Nvidia) accounted for most of the S&P500’s gains.6

In a world dominated by passive investing, index providers, like the S&P Dow Jones, have an incredible power to redirect billions of dollars of investment by reclassifying a single company.

• We saw it when in May 2025, Moody’s downgraded the U.S. debt rating to AA1.

• We also saw it when Tesla’s addition to the S&P 500 Index led to a price surge.

• We’re seeing it now as S&P Dow Jones considers changing its rules to admit SpaceX, after an IPO.

Small companies are staying private, because as Jamie Dimon put it, “the governance of major corporations is evolving into a bureaucratic compliance exercise instead of focusing on its relationship to long term economic value.” Put differently, there’s a lot of hoops corporations have to jump through that privately owned companies don’t have to.

Recessions

Recessions are subjective and occur when the economy shifts from expansion to contraction. In the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) decides whether we’re “officially” in a recession. James Hamilton put the subjectivity of recessions eloquently:

“The NBER’s dates as to when U.S. recessions began and ended are based on the subjective judgement of the committee members, which raises two potential concerns. First, the announcements often come long after the event. For example, NBER waited until July 17, 2003 to announce that the 2001 recessions ended in November, 2021. Second, outsiders might wonder (perhaps without justification) whether the dates of announcements are entirely independent of political considerations.”

Because economic data is a lagging indicator, we don’t even know we’re in a recession until after it’s already happened. Since a recession isn’t made “official” until later on, sometimes your gut can tell you whether we’re in a recession or not.

IV. How Money Moves

Fiscal Policy

The debt ceiling is the cap set by Congress on how much the government can borrow. It’s often compared to a credit limit.

The original intention was to promote fiscal responsibility. But in practice, the debt ceiling has become a tool for politicians to advance their own agenda at the expense of the nation’s well being. Exhibit A: O’Hare’s TSA lines during the government shutdown.

By eliminating this arbitrary limit on spending, Congress could focus on more meaningful debates about spending and revenue without the bi-partisan showmanship.

Since 1960, Congress has moved the debt ceiling seventy-nine times. Every time the U.S. approaches the debt ceiling, anxiety spikes about the prospects of not hitting it. It’s unlikely that’ll ever happen because it we did breach the debt ceiling:

• The Treasury would stop functioning. That’d end payments to federal workers, agencies, Social Security beneficiaries, delay Medicare providers. There’s likely be a ripple effect through the markets, too.

• The United States would go into default. This has never happened, so we can only speculate. The U.S. dollar is the premier reserve currency because America has the biggest, most stable economy.

The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve reports to Congress, but it’s not really part of the government. That’s why the Fed’s actions (monetary policy) are different than the government’s (fiscal policy). The Fed gets bi-partisan pressure from politicians, and it’s up to the Fed alone to make sure policy keeps the economy stable.

Since the United States is the most powerful global economy, the Fed has immense power on a global scale. To quote Uncle Ben from Toby McGuire’s Spider Man: “With great power comes great responsibility.” The Fed’s great power came with two great responsibilities:

1. Price stability. The Fed’s goal is to keep inflation at a steady 2%.

2. Maximum employment. Which historically has been a 4-5% target.

When interest rates go down, stonks go up. When you can make more money from your interest in the bank, it might make sense to do that. When interest rates increase, the opposite happens. This is where the TINA (“There Is No Better Alternative”) principle gets its name. When interest rates are near zero, might as invest in Pokémon cards.

V. Theories, Problems, and Opportunities

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden said “the things you own end up owning you.”

Things don’t define you as a person. The mere desire for things can enslave you. Character speaks louder about who you are than the things you own.

Problems

The current global mental health crisis has a big impact on the economy. This impact is reflected in both absenteeism and presenteeism at work — where individuals are less effective in their jobs due to mental health issues.

“Lost productivity as a result of two of the most common mental disorders — anxiety and depression — cost the global economy $1 trillion USD each year. In total, poor mental health was estimated to cost the world economy approximately $2.5 trillion per year in poor health and reduced productivity in 2010… a cost projected to rise to $6 trillion by 2030.”

— The Lancet Global Health

The pandemic also caused many 20- and 30-something’s to have a new relationship with work — haunted by their early adulthood not going aa expected. For example, Gen Z has already lived through three major economic downturns, despite being in their mid-twenty’s. Young professionals who started their careers in remote-first environments are playing catch-up:

An image of their parents struggling to make ends meet during the 2008 recession is making many re-think their relationship with work. Many more are coming around to the idea that work isn’t the primary source of fulfillment. For the past 40 years, productivity has increased while wages have remained stagnant. Minimum wage remained stagnant, while living costs skyrocketed.

The attention economy — whose shoulders upon which nearly the entire American economy stand — are built to monetize on our eyeballs. In order to drive clicks, media must resort to increasingly extreme stories. Just look at the sentiment towards news article headlines in the last 25 years:

The economy is rough right now, but there’s hope.

Opportunities

In a 2022 article published in The Atlantic, highlights what he calls an “abundance agenda”, which spans healthcare, immigration, and housing.

Healthcare. Our current healthcare systems is designed to over diagnose and keep people sick. As Juan Enriquez wrote in Scientific American in 2022:

“The U.S. uses a fee-for-service model, which patients pay for the procedures that doctors perform, not for the outcomes they achieve. This financing structure has led to a health-care system that has advanced, technological interventions for the very sick, but poor public-health infrastructure. Fee-for-service has distorted health-care priorities in favor of more expensive treatments for people who are sick, rather than measures to keep them from getting sick in the first place.”

Immigration. Typically, the best of the best legally immigrate into the United States. My wife is one of them. Just look at Ohio, where immigrants make up 4.8% of the state’s population, yet account for 11.8% of the STEM workforce.

Housing. In recent years, homes have gone from a use asset to an investment. In 1945, John Dean taught the peril’s of this line of thinking in his book Homeownership: Is It Sound?:

“For some families some houses represent wise buys, but a culture and real estate industry that gives blanket endorsement to ownership fail to indicate which families and which houses.”

Half a decade later in 2022, Jerusalem Demsas wrote a piece echoing a similar sentiment:

“Wealth building through homeownership requires selling at the right time, and research indicates that longer tenures in a home translate to lower returns. But the right time to sell may not not line up with the right time for you to move… People want to live near family, near good schools, near parks, or in neighborhoods with the types of amenities they desire, not trade their location like penny stocks.”

Home ownership is forced savings. They shouldn’t be your sole source of wealth — although for many, it is. just “forced savings”. We need to encourage more stock ownership.

I hope you had as much reading this as I did writing it! Kyla’s book is thorough, and I learned a lot about the vibe economy.

Buy In This Economy by Kyla Scanlon

As always… thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner

5

Which is ironic because in his Essay on Population (1798), Thomas Malthus explained that:

“Without these periodic checks [of famine and pestilence], the birth rate would so far exceed the death rate that the multiplication of mouths would nullify any increase in the production of food.”

One of the greatest thinkers in the 18th century worried about whether the food supply could keep up with population.

Today we know that food supply did keep up:

And that a leading fear among economists is how the declining birth rate in developed nations will affect the economy.

This article is part of The Boyd Institute’s quarterly policy sprint on the debt and deficit. To learn more about them and the work they do click here.

The United States national debt increases $70,000 per second. In the time it took you to read that sentence the National debt increased by $350,000. Houston, we have a problem.

In this essay, I’m going to explore:

1. Whether America’s debt “problem” is actually a problem. (Spoiler alert: It is.)

2. What we should do about it.

I. A Brief History Of Global Reserve Currencies

To figure out whether the U.S. debt “problem” is actually a problem, it’s useful to look at a brief history of national debt for countries who had the global reserve currency at the time.

National debt is a necessary evil for maintaining global reserve currency status.

1933: FDR passes the New Deal.

Following a landslide election, Franklin D. Roosevelt passed the New Deal during his First Hundred Days. In an effort to revive the economy post-Great Depression, he implemented social security for the first time.

1945: America wins World War II.

When WWII ended, the United States effectively won the global economy. At the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, the dollar was pegged to gold – and every other currency was in turn pegged to the dollar.

1965: LBJ passes Medicare and Medicaid.

After winning the 1964 election, Lyndon B. Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid.

1971: Nixon takes USD off the gold standard.

Richard Nixon takes the U.S. off the gold standard in 1971. The dollar (still the global reserve currency) became a fiat currency. Which means that it’s fully backed by full trust in our country — and more accurately, the strength of our military.

1978: The 401(k) is invented.

Ted Benna, a benefits consultant, realized a newly passed tax law allowed employees to contribute to retirement accounts with tax advantaged salary deductions. While it wasn’t the original intention, the IRC technically allowed for this.

1997: The Roth IRA is invented.

The Taxpayer Relief Act, sponsored by Delaware Senator William Roth, was designed to encourage retirement savings by allowing tax free growth of your investments.

2003: The HSA is invented.

The HSA, as we know it today, began in 2003 when George W. Bush signed it into law.

Historically, this broader context matters. Excessive spending on social benefits has already happened before. By looking at the past, we can infer how the future could look.

II. Wagner’s Law

America’s growing debt is eroding trust in the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency.

In 1863, the German economist Adolph Wagner first observed something interesting in his homeland: public expenditure tends to increase as national income rises.

His observation suggests that welfare states evolve from free-market capitalism because the population votes for ever-increasing social services as income grows.

Starting in the 1920’s, and until after WWII, the British government dramatically boosted spending on social services. This led the UK to spend less on education, causing them to fall behind most Western Economies by the 1970’s.

In 1961, Peacock and Wiseman made a key addition, by positing that public expenditure does not grow smoothly, but rather in spikes during social disturbances like wars and pandemics.

Since the 18th century, Wagner’s Law holds true in America:

Since 1980s, debt began to soar once again — but during peace time. The reason is three-fold:

1. Aging population who the government spends on for social security and Medicare.

   

2. Rising healthcare costs.

   

3. Escalating interest payments on the national debt.

   

How we’re racking up debt matters less than the fact that we are. The track we’re on is unsustainable if we hope to maintain financial dominance as we’ve had since post-WWII.

III. Why Debt Is A Big Problem For America

The biggest threat to the current world order is de-dollarization causing the USD to lose its status as the reserve currency.

The federal deficit is a serious problem.

Since Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard in 1971, the dollar became a fiat currency — backed by full trust in the U.S. military strength — which, by necessity, means we have to continue funding it.

Because the USD is the global reserve currency, we have the luxury of lower borrowing costs, which helps us fund the military.

Could lack of spending on military strength cause us to lose global reserve status? Or could spending on military and other things cause us to run up a deficit so high that value of the U.S. dollar lose the trust of other nations?

Unfortunately, it seems as though both could be happening right now.

In 2023, when the U.S. froze $300 billion of Russian assets during the Ukraine War, Middle Eastern energy producers began to hedge against total dollar dependence. Some nations like the UAE began accepting the Chinese Yuan for some transactions.

When I told my wife, who has family in Cairo, she matter of factly said, “They’re already talking about de-dollarization.” In 2024, Egypt announced it’d switch from USD to EGP as part of the BRICS de-dollarization program.

And by 2030, nations like Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and the UAE – collectively known as BRICS – will represent 50%+ of global GDP by 2030.

The Middle East is already de-dollarizing. If Iran successfully takes control of the Strait of Hormuz in 2026, that could be a huge blow to global confidence in the United States’ military, from whom the U.S. dollar’s value is derived.

Domestically, the trend lines of confidence in the U.S. dollar isn’t much better. In May 2025 Moody’s downgraded the United States’ credit rating. The share of gold in official reserve assets has more than doubled from sub-10% in 2015 to over 23% now.

Which brings up an interesting ‘chicken or the egg’ dilemma. Could government spending on many things — especially our military — be eroding confidence in the dollar, thus shifting our status as the reserve currency? Or do we have to continually fund our military to maintain the strongest militia to preserve faith in the U.S. Dollar, without backing by the gold standard?

IV. What We Should Do About It

Roll back social benefits to reduce costs and let people fund their own retirement without government assistance.

Anything the government subsidizes goes up in price. The federal government spends $2+ trillion on social security, Medicare, and health care annually. Because we ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025, eliminating those expenses alone would put us in the green. And I believe it’d make healthcare more affordable because prices wouldn’t be propped up by federal government spending.

An interesting write up by the Cato Institute echoes this sentiment:

“Economic growth drives innovation and longer lifespans — but under Medicare’s open-ended design, those gains automatically translate into higher costs for taxpayers. As medical technology advances and Americans live longer, Medicare automatically pays for more treatments, more procedures, and more years of coverage, ensuring that program spending expands.”

— Cato Institute, Why We Can’t Outgrow The Medicare Driven Health Crisis

Mark Cuban also wrote an essay in which he describes all that’s wrong with healthcare today. His DTC pharmaceutical company, Cost Plus Drugs, is designed to transparently deliver maximum value to patients without the middle man taking a bite. America needs more upstarts like this making it affordable to get quality healthcare.

Teenagers — encouraged by their parents — are investing in stocks in droves. (WSJ) While not planned, the tax-advantaged retirement accounts — 401(k) (1978), Roth IRA (1997), and HSA (2003) are paving the way to eventually eliminate social benefits. I’m not alone in thinking this. Half of my fellow Gen Z brethren also think rolling back social security is the best way to handle the budget deficit.

Gone are the olden days where retirement income is provided by a company pension. Now we have 401(k), Roth IRA, and HSA’s. Gen Z is also investing sooner than boomers. Per Barron’s:

“Younger Americans are beginning to invest sooner than previous generations, thanks to increased access to investing and financial education, according to the latest Charles Schwab Modern Wealth Survey.

On average, Gen Z — generally described as those born between 1997 and 2012 — began saving and investing at 19 years old, according to the survey. Baby boomers — Americans born between 1946 and 1964 — didn’t start until age 35, on average.”

In other words, as a country, we’re not in a place to pull back on social benefits yet, but we’re on our way. But surely it can’t be that easy, right?

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls suggests that we imagine ourselves sitting behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ that keeps us from knowing who we are and our personal circumstances so that we can more objectively consider how society should be run.

1. The liberty principle requires that the social contract should ensure that everyone enjoys the maximum liberty possible without intruding on the freedom of others.

2. The difference principle asks that the social contract should ensure everyone has equal opportunity to prosper.

Under the ‘veil of ignorance’, the right time to eliminate social entitlements is never. If we’re redesigning a society without knowing our place in it — whether wealth, health, or socioeconomic status — we’d choose a framework that protects the worst-off, making the total eradication of safety nets unacceptable.

And yet, I can’t help but look at our savings rate in America in comparison to European countries, and ask myself ‘could we do better’? Household savings rates in euro area countries are higher than in America because there’s a cultural preference for financial security. Maybe we should be more like our European neighbors?

Necessity is the mother of invention, and I hope that with time, we learn to wean off the social benefits that could otherwise hold us back as a nation.

V. Conclusion

To paraphrase Lessons Of History by Will and Ariel Durant, civilizations are in a constant state of flux. What causes continued growth is the agency of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of will — capable of responding to new situations with good ideas to progress civilization forward.

This essay is an attempt to move the needle in a tiny way for this great nation.

(Just don’t cut social security until after my dad retires.)

Thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner

Some Interesting Ideas

argues that the US doesn’t have to pay back our budget deficit. link

on why education, health care, and child care cost so much in America. link

Some Interesting Charts

• Within an hour, we forget 50% of new information,

• Within a day, we forget 70%,

• And after a week, we forget 90%.

Plotted on a chart, the forgetting curve looks like this:

In short: we lose information immediately after learning it. Unless we revisit that information over time.

Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition flips the learning curve on its head. By reviewing information over and over again, you retain more.

By writing the ‘ole fashioned way (line-by-line), you must slow down to wrestle with competing ideas, viewpoints, and primary sources. It’s the platonic ideal of the learning curve.

By contrast, writing with AI creates the illusion of learning. You think you’re learning. You feel like you’re learning. But in reality, you’re bypassing the spaced repetition where learning actually happens.

(Human) Writing Is Learning

If you’ve developed your own unique writing style, you could train a large language model to mimic that style.

• To the reader, it’d look the same as your writing.

• For the writer, the impact is different.

Writing well requires aesthetic taste to identify which ideas are quality. In the pursuit of writing aesthetically beautiful things, your capacity to create more beautiful things increases.

An essay can literally change your beliefs. Written well, it can change your reader’s beliefs, too.

There’s power in writing. But fewer than ever can write without AI.

Can you?

Thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner

“The thing that f*cked up television is money,” he said. “Because of advertising you can’t just express yourself.”

After a five year stint hosting Fear Factor, Rogan saw firsthand how TV’s business model killed creativity. Until he had an epiphany, “The internet is like radio and television combined. There’s no time constraint.”

Two years later episode #1 of Joe Rogan Experience aired. Like a surfer, he saw the big kahuna wave, caught it, and never looked back.1

How’d he see the wave of online media before anyone else? How can we do that? What’s the next big media wave?

It all starts with knowing where to look for the next big wave.

Substack Is Accelerating The Spread Of Ideas

Nowadays, ideas found in the depths of Reddit are too half baked to be relied upon for signal. And once that dialogue eventually hits LinkedIn, it’s already entered mainstream discourse. The Goldilocks zone of high signal ideas in 2026 is right here on Substack.

In his essay, “Substack is like the Royal Society of the 21st Century for The New Enlightenment”, claims that Substack is accelerating the spread of ideas. I agree.

I’ve steadily supplemented my morning WSJ reading to adding the works of talented writers like , , and (here, here, and here). Their perspectives are refreshingly authentic, human, and tap into a higher signal that I’m looking for.

Ideas Spread Through Conversation

Building awareness for new ideas is hard. Which is exactly why the best ideas are spread organically through dialogue with others.2 That’s how Rogan stumbled upon podcasting — by joining Tom Green’s show, he experienced the future before the rest of the world caught on.

You can use this principle to grow an audience from zero to one. , co-founder of , ran this strategy to a T with his “love letters to Silicon Valley”:

In fact, one goal of this blog post is to spur conversation about human creativity in a world with AI.

The Next Wave: Human Generated Content

Because large language models are trained on several corpuses of existing knowledge, AI struggles to produce anything truly novel — hence, trendslop.

In The Analog World, writes about an “ick” that I also share about AI-generated content.

“I can always tell when I’m seeing a video that’s been created by AI or reading a paragraph in an article that’s been authored by it. I know it’s AI because I have an instant revulsion to it, almost like an allergic reaction or a mental gag reflex. It’s hard to describe. It’s what the Gen Z girls refer to as “the ick” and it’s real. I click away as soon as I know. And I know quick. I can see it in things I click on, I can see it on social media feeds, I can see it in my email inbox. And it’s an instant “f*** this” - I won’t read or watch any of it.”

, CEO Ritholtz Wealth Management

A Raptive study of 3,000 U.S. adults found that when people suspect content is AI-generated, their trust drops by nearly 50% — even if the content was actually human written. There mere perception of AI generation was enough to give readers the ick.

I predict that more readers will gravitate towards unapologetically human writers as publishers increasingly use AI in non-creative ways to keep up with falling profit margins.

By contrast, high quality human-generated content is high signal and fuels your mind with insights that enable you to see around the corner. The million dollar question is “why?” The pornography research of Gary Wilson gives us a clue.

Observe Real Conversations Between Real People

In 2006, the late Gary Wilson observed something peculiar: a growing number of young men were congregating in online communities to share strategies to overcome porn addiction.

Although the addictive qualities of online pornography weren’t yet publicly known, Gary had the foresight to hypothesize that high speed internet made porn more accessible, affordable, and anonymous than ever before.

Since then, his Ted Talk The Great Porn Experiment has been viewed nearly 20 million times. 17 states have issued statements declaring pornography a public health crisis. The World Health Organization formally recognizes compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD) as an impulse control disorder.

Gary Wilson saw the future before it came (pun intended) because he paid attention to real conversations between real people — back when Reddit was the center of human-to-human discourse.

Create, Consume, And Converse With Humans

If you take away anything from this essay:

1. Create more human-generated content.

2. Consume more human-generated content.

3. Converse more with human-generated humans.

In doing so, we can accelerate the spread of good ideas.

As always, thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner

Hat tip to Shane Parrish, whose essay “Ride the Waves” was the inspiration for the wave theme of this essay!

My packing list was intentionally simple. 20,000 calories of peanut butter, tortillas, and trail mix. For four days, I slept, journaled, and hiked the Chisos Mountains. My batteries were fully recharged when I came back to work on Monday.

It’s hard for high achievers to unplug. There’s this voice in your ear that constantly says: “Work harder!!”

Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Today I work at a different company, in a different city. But burnout struck me just the same as it did before.

Why do we burnout? What can we do to prevent it? How can we balance progress and rest?

The Theory of Cumulative Stress…

…says that the buildup of repeated stressors across various domains of life.

There’s a "stacking" effect where minor everyday stress builds up and eventually leads to burnout.

These small stressors are like adding small rocks to your backpack. Each weighs a little more than the last. Over time the cumulative weight of all those tiny rocks add up.

You remove rocks by doing stress relieving activities.

Your body doesn’t have a warning light that goes off when your body has reached its limit. If it did, it’d be a lot easier to operate at a high level without burning out.

The key to avoiding burnout is consistent stress relief, even if you don’t feel burnout out yet.

Strategic rest is work. The same way a NASCAR driver slows down before the turn to accelerate through it, you should cyclically take rest.

By strategically scaling down your stressors, and scaling up your stress relief, you’ll use your batteries, but not to point of complete exhaustion.

Rest Is Productive

I often think about how all variables held equal, it’s better to make consistent (but slower) progress, than making fast progress that’s halted by periodic stops.

This is a lesson for you (and me) to take a break. It might be the most productive thing you do.

Thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner

Genesis lays out God’s plan for our work. He gave us talents so that we can serve Him by cultivating the earth and serving others.

In the beginning (Genesis), God spent six days creating the universe. Because of aseity, He created the universe for the sheer joy of creation.1

The work that God did in the early days of Genesis resembles our own physical (and intellectual) work. He moulded us out of dust, gave a spirit to our physical body, and breathed life into the garden of Eden (Genesis 2:8).

This same creative vitality God used to mold the universe is present in humans.2 When enthralled by the wonderful act of creation, you enter a state of Flow.

Do More Leisurely Activities

Jesus was a humble carpenter until he started his ministry at 30. Let that sink in… The savior of humankind spent majority of his life making tables.

Maybe you’ve fallen for the false notion that less paying work has less dignity. Don’t let this stop you from doing leisurely things that bring you joy even if they’re not profitable.3

Leisure, in the biblical sense, is having the ability to enjoy things as an end in themselves, without regard for utility.4 It’s the pursuit of anything where that act of doing that thing is a gift itself.

God is self-sufficient - which means He doesn’t need the universe to exist for Him to exist. Therefore, He created it (and us) for the pure joy of it. Because God doesn’t need us, He created us out of leisure.

This blog is an attempt to be leisurely. It’s good to take a break from work to worship God through leisure.

Our Call To Cultivate Earth

Whereas God created the universe, He calls us to cultivate it, by being active contributors to culture, society, and the economy.

Here’s what this looks like, per Al Wolters:

“The earth had been completely unformed and empty; in the six-day process of development God had formed it and filled it - but not completely.

People must now carry on the work of development: by being fruitful they fill it even more; by subduing it they must form it even more… as God’s representatives, we carry on where God left off.“

I worked on a soybean farm during college. It was hard work, but it was fun to cultivate the earth, shaping it into something that God would smile upon.

You don’t just have to create by the sweat of your brow. Creating with your intellect is another way to cultivate the earth God gave us.

The Purpose Of Work Is Service

The purpose of work is to serve God by serving others. Which requires self-knowledge of your unique abilities.

Because using your talents to serve others happens to be a great way to earn more money, it’s important to be weary of golden handcuffs because the endless pursuit of money will never satisfy.

Even if you do achieve high income, you’re on unsteady ground. What if you get laid off? What if the stock market tanks? How are you defining self worth?

By aiming to honor God through your work, you take the pressure of material success away. Father Jacques Philippe hit the nail on the head when he said that “[without God] man is condemned to success.”

Tim Tebow is a great example of serving God by being excellent. He was a beast of a quarterback for the Florida Gators, and always repped John 3:16.

II. Problems with Work

Adam’s garden of Eden in Genesis was the perfection of work. There was no selfishness, ego, or vanity attached. Since the forbidden fruit, work has gotten distorted.

When you base your life on achievement through work, you live on unsteady ground. Work itself cannot be the sole provide of inner peace.

Even if you’re one of the few who accomplish all you hoped for, the hedonic treadmill brings you right back to baseline. What’s more is that we all end up as dust - even civilization itself will cease to exist one day. Either the Sun with burnout, or some other cataclysmic event with happen before then. Achievement doesn’t last forever, but heaven does.

When Work Becomes Selfish

Work has this funny way of convincing you that you’re working hard for your family - when in reality you’re being seduced through ambition to neglect them. Working for the glory of God is worlds more fruitful than working for the glorification of yourself, because there a natural stopping point when you’ve overdone it.

There is this shiny allure to prestigious jobs. David Brooks puts it well:

“In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration, and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity, and self-indulgence…

Around what ultimate purpose should your life revolve?”

Too many people ignore their abilities, talents, and capacities. And instead choose prestigious work that boosts their own self-image. In a perfect world, you’d choose good work that fits your God-given talents, capacities, and gifts.

1. The first goal of work should be competence.

2. The next should be aspiring to advance your field of work by increasing humanity’s capacity to do that work.

When your sole focus is on serving God by serving others, these two goals come naturally.

When Work Becomes Prideful

C.S. Lewis has this great quote about pride from Mere Christianity:

“…Pride is essentially competitive by its very nature. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better looking than others.”

Even the most moral people fall prey to selfish motives of greed, vanity, glorification of self, and pride. Accept your own brokenness - and recognize that’s exactly why you return to God like the Prodigal Son.

There’s another fallacy of pride that’s common among successful people: a belief that worldly success is of your own doing. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Everything you have (good and bad) is given to you by God. If you happen to be in a position of power, influence, or wealth, seek to use it in the most God loving way possible.

When your influence, professional reputation, and resume are gifts from God, it’s easier to risk them, spend them, and even lose them in an effort to serve God by serving others.

Serving others will often come at the expense of your own progression, but Luke 6:30 calls for us to “Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.” By giving away everything we have, God gives us a seat in heaven for a lifetime.

Work Reveals Our Idols

The final idol that work reveals is that of control, security, significance, satisfaction, and beauty.

By expecting work to provide us these things to its fullest, which only God can provide, is idolatry. Work can give us a taste of some of these things, but it’s always in the broader context of serving God.

III. The Gospel And Work

Segmenting your Christian life from your work life isn’t possible or healthy. A fully integrated life is one where your actions point to one thing: pleasing God.

Every advancement in learning, art, and technology is simply God “opening his book of creation and revealing his truth”. These self-evident truths were part of God’s original creative design, and are discovered through human cooperation with God’s will.

God gives out gifts of wisdom, talent, and skill according to His grace. By studying great examples of excellent human culture, like reading amazing writing, we know God more.

God reveals himself through human culture. Anyone who becomes skillful at anything is literally being taught by God.

A New Vision for Work

Integrity is the most worthy long term aim. It can take years to build up a reputation, and one moment to ruin it. Unethical business practices can snowball into further unethical decisions. A “zero tolerance” policy for unethical business practices is key.

You should hold yourself to the highest ethical standard, even at the expense of financial gain. Doing the right thing honors God, but only the virtuous are able to lower themselves for the betterment of others.

80% of the challenging situations you’ll face at work aren’t directly addressed in the Ten Commandments. To act rightly in fuzzy situations like this, you need to:

1. Know God personally. Spend time with God daily in prayer, liturgy, or inviting him into your life through your hobbies. In 1 Thessalonians 5:17, St. Paul wrote, “Pray without ceasing.”

2. Know yourself. Many bad decisions stem from a lack of self-knowledge. The Bible reveals who you are by way of example.

3. Learn wisdom through experience. By reading the gospel frequently, and applying its wisdom learnings to life, you will grow.

Proverbs is an amazing book for the acquisition of wisdom. There isn’t one situation you’ll ever encounter ever that isn’t already covered in Proverbs.

Work For The Lord

Christians should be fully engaged at work as a whole person, giving their minds, hearts, and bodies fully to doing their best work possible on the task at hand. Why? Because you should work as if they’re serving the Lord.

By working as if you’re serving the Lord, you’re freed from both overwork and underwork. Aspiring to please God helps you find the right balance. What’s more is that Pleasing God through your work is a greater reward than money.

You should not be ruthless in your work, but instead have a reputation for being fair, caring, and committed to serving others. You should also be calm in the face of difficulty or failure.

New Power For Work

Resting on Sunday is a great way to get perspective on work and put it in its proper place. Often you can’t see your work with properly until you reimmerse yourself into other activities and come back with fresh eyes.

If you worry about work during the sabbath, you aren’t truly practicing the sabbath. Rest, in God’s eyes, means you don’t even think about work. Overwork and underwork violates the nature of work that God intended.

Jesus is the only boss who will neither give you too much nor too little work. To get the deepest picture of biblical work, look no further than Matthew 11:28-30:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

When you carry the yoke, you have the power to work with a free heart. You can accept whatever level of worldly success God gives you.

If you’re truly working for God with your heart and soul, then you have nothing to worry about. You can work with passion, rest, joy, satisfaction, and zero regrets because the real reward is heaven.

Thanks for reading!

— Grant Varner

“What any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning.”

Any level of expertise is available to anyone. It all depends on your mindset.

This principle can work for or against you.

1. If you’re a beginner committed to improving, you will eventually pass the less committed experts in your field.

2. If you’re an expert, you need to keep improving, or you’ll get passed by a beginners that are committed to improvement.

I. In Sports

Many of the GOATs (greatest-of-all-time) in sports started out as the WOAT (worst-of-all-time). The mark of a champion is the ability to quickly recover from setbacks.

• Michael Jordan was cut from his freshman basketball team. Later he said, “The mental toughness and the heart are a lot stronger than some of the physical advantages you might have.”

• Tom Brady split playing time with Drew Henson at Michigan. Then Brady was picked 199th overall by the Patriots. Only to be seventh on the QB depth chart, struggling to get playing time.

• After the 2022 Beijing Olympics, Alysa Liu burned out from skating. She returned to skating two years later to win gold in the 2026 Milano Cortino Olympics with genuine joy — regardless of the outcome. In an interview on 60 Minutes, she said:

  “I love struggling, actually. It makes me feel alive.”

II. In Business

At work, growth minded people surround themselves with strong teammates. They’re capable of evaluating their own mistakes and constantly ask what skills are needed for their team’s success.

• Growth minded bosses are open to learning, feedback, and confronting obstacles with clear eyes.

• Fixed minded bosses make everyone worried about their performance and bring down the overall team’s performance.

Growth minded companies are focused retention and unlocking the potential of their employees. They don’t look for people who “have it in their DNA”.

Instead, they recruit for learning ability.

Employees in a growth culture believe that risk taking, creativity, and innovation is supported. Even if they fail.

III. In Relationships

Romantic relationships can be hard for high achievers.

In virtually every facet of life, if you fail, the blame is all on you. But when a relationship fails, there’s three things at play:

1. You.

2. Your partner.

3. Your relationship.

Growth minded people believe relationships take effort. Compromise, communication, and conflict resolution are required to work through inevitable differences.

• Problems can be a vehicle for developing greater intimacy. Don’t dilute yourself into thinking your relationship will be all sunshine and roses.

• Get better at communicating and understanding each other’s thoughts, needs, and feelings. Don’t fall prey to the low effort belief that your partner should be able to read your mind.

IV. In Coaching

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden was famously obsessed with growth.

“You have to apply yourself each day to becoming a little better. By applying yourself to becoming a little better every day over a period of time, you will become a lot better.”

Equilibrium doesn’t exist in the physics of continuous improvement. The iterative process of improving leads to success. It includes hard work, trying new strategies, and seeking input from others.

Your process dictates your outcomes. If your hard work isn’t getting result, ask yourself why your efforts aren’t effective.

And above all, be weary of success. Just because you’re successful once, doesn’t mean you will be again. Instead, ask yourself, “Did I give my best effort?” If you did, you’ve already won regardless of the outcome.

How To Change Your Mindset

The growth mindset is based on a belief in your ability to change.

You subconsciously (and consciously) keep mental track of what’s happened to you, what that means, and what you should do. Frequently audit your thoughts. Keep them if they’re serving you well. If your thought aren’t serving you, update them.

The growth minded person recognizes that people stand out because of commitment, effort, and (a little) luck.

By combining effort, strategy, and time, you’ll probably have similar results. If you aspire for results bigger than you’re seeing now, realize that you’re in a necessary period of learning. Fall in love with putting in effort and results will come with time.

Once a problem improves, it’s easy to stop doing what led to the solution.

Change doesn’t work that way. Improvements have to be supported or they’ll go away faster than they appear. One way to avoid this is by asking yourself every day, “What are my opportunities to learn and grow today?“

Change is hard. But you’ll never regret changing your life for the better.

You’re capable of doing incredible things. Go forth: Change your mindset and change your life!

Thanks for reading!

A 1981 study in The American Economic Review coined the term “Superstars”, or a small number of people who earn disproportionately more.

There’s a steep demand curve for the best. Everybody wants to hire the best. Few want to hire average.

The Automation Of Entry Level Jobs

Failing to get really good at one thing means bouncing from one cookie cutter role to the next as AI repeatedly replaces your job.

Last May, I wrote How To Not Lose Your Job To AI, in which I detailed how:

“Specific knowledge is information that cannot be taught at scale. Pick up and capitalize on specific knowledge because this is what AI cannot spit out answers for.”

Ironically, the examples of specific knowledge I used in that essay have already been automated with AI.

As a result, you need to be at the bleeding edge of technology and creativity.

Social Skills

I’m nerding out over a working paper by David J. Deming called “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market” (emphasize mine):

“The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs — including many STEM occupations — shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period.

Employment and wage growth was particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage.

In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently… Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s.”

---

Most of the knowledge I use in my job at Salesforce, I learned on the job. Social skills is the lubricant that helps workers more freely trade information to win as a team.1

Workers that will excel in the decade ahead will be have the following skills:

1. Social Skills: Being a likable, high EQ person makes you an easy partner to “trade” knowledge with.

2. Specialist Skills: Having some unique, useful knowledge that you can “trade” to others.

By working well with others, you and your colleagues win as a team. 1 + 1 = 3. A rising tide does indeed lift all ships.

• The act of writing turns out to be its own reward which you can find joy in.

• Fixating on getting published misses the point of writing.

• If you struggle to complete your work, write about something that is near and dear to your heart—something you find personally moving to your core.

Be Consistent

• The best writing advice is to write more often.

• Try to sit down to write at approximately the same time every day.

• This trains your unconscious mind to become creative at that particular time each day.

Start Small

• Chunk your writing into the smallest most bite-sized piece.

• Don’t think about the whole book: just get one single thought down on paper at a time.

• When you sit down at the same time each day to write, don’t necessarily have a goal in mind; just write what comes to mind.

Good Writing Is About Telling The Truth

• Draw writing inspiration from what you observe out in real life, not from what you read in other books.

• When you write about truths you’ve personally experienced, readers will relate, seeing parts of your story in their own lives.

• If something inside you is real, the reader will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal.

Writing Is a Process of Discovery

• Becoming a writer can get you to start paying better attention to the little things around you.

• Writing a first draft is like watching a Polaroid develop; you’re not supposed to know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

• You’ll know you’re writing well when it feels as if the right words were already inside you waiting to be freed onto paper.

First Drafts

• Almost all good writing begins with a terrible first draft, called the ‘down draft’, where you get something down on paper that you can fix up later.

• The second draft is the ‘up draft’ wherein you fix it up by saying what you meant more accurately.

• The third draft is the ‘dental draft’, where you check every nook and cranny to make sure it’s perfect.

Practical Advice for Aspiring Writers

• Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it.

• There are a million reasons to give up writing, which is why it’s so important to commit to finishing sections and stories to completion.

• Don’t save any stories or inspiration for your next writing because if you freely use all your best inspiration for your current writing, you will always find more.1

Key Themes

Learn Slowly

• Ironically, the best way to learn appears to be the slowest way to learn.

• The average age of a founder is 45 years old — at company launch — for the fastest growing startups in the USA.

• A 50-year old tech founder is 2x as likely to start a successful company than one who is 30 years old.

If you need a reminder on when to go full time with your side hustle, look no further:

Kind vs. Wicked Learning Environments

• Experts in a wide array of fields distinctively recognize and act on patterns they’ve seen before.

• In domains where patterns do not clearly repeat, repetition & experience are actually a disadvantage. This is known as Wicked Learning Environments.1

• The unique strength of humans is our ability to integrate knowledge broadly, whereas AI has narrow specializations.

Breadth Leads to Success

• High achievers tend to have broad interests. This breadth results in insights that couldn’t be achieved by having domain experience alone.

• They take knowledge from one pursuit, and apply it creatively to the next.

• They also use patterns from their previous domains of expertise to creatively solve problems.

Self-Knowledge

• Match Quality is the fit between the work someone does and who they are.

• It’s more important to gain self-knowledge than hard skills because having good Match Quality is more important than getting a head start on a defined career path.

Match Fit Leads to Success

• To be successful, you need to work hard and have a singular focus.

• This is why you need to consistently reflect about what you WANT in life, and what you need to do to achieve that. What you lack in IQ, you can make up for with grit in life to achieve success.2

• People who are the most fulfilled spend immense time and energy figuring out their Match Fit.

Be a Problem Solver, Not an Expert

• Don’t get lost in the details trying to be an expert in something. Instead, focus on finding solutions to problems.

• The amount of times a creator has tried to solve a problem and failed is a predictor of their eventual success.

• Thomas Edison had thousands of patents, failed experiments, and tossed away ideas. Because he tried so many times, his odds of a massive success were high.

While she yapped about how the Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, I’d zone out. And day dream about football, girls, and what was for lunch.

What struck me is everything underneath the tip of the iceberg. I was equally amused as I was skeptical. Did success really require hard work, persistence, late nights, and rejections?

At 12, I had no idea. I hadn’t done anything impressive yet. My idea of “success” was running up a kill streak a in Halo: Reach.

A decade and a half later, I’ve come to realize that success does require all those things under the iceberg.

There’s a joke among tech sellers that the best salespeople can never turn it off. They’re always selling.

Whether it’s trying to convince their novice buddy to snowboard at a bachelor party (true story). Or negotiating a flippin’ sweet Valentine’s date to the Field Museum followed by China Town.

I even see it in myself. I’m a Solution Engineer. Which means I’m solutioning all the time, even when I don’t mean to.

There’s a great Mediterranean spot near us called Pita Inn, with a great Kofta Kebab sandwich. Whenever I order it with added potatoes + tabbouleh on the phone, they take the order, and I’m on my merry way to Flavor Town. But when I order in-person, Jerusalem-style isn’t an option.

I spent a full 30 minutes on the way home from church convincing my wife that their Point-Of-Sale (POS) system was the issue. And how they could potentially fix it, resulting in a better customer experience, and heightened loyalty.

See what I mean?

Holding all else equal, the more hours you dedicate to your craft, the better you are. And the better you are at your craft, the more money you will make.

This chart may over simplify the concept. But all else held equal, the more you work, the more money you’ll make.

Mastery is one path to higher earnings. Just like the corny iceberg of success poster from 7th grade, mastery requires a lot more beneath the surface. You’d never know how hard the best sellers work when you see them in action because they make it seem so… smooth.

To the outside observer (me), it’d seem like they’re naturally born to sell. And maybe they are. But reason why they’re so good is they’ve spent hours perfecting their craft. Even when they’re not “working”.

And their earnings show it.

It’s best to combine multiple skills into a combination that’s so uniquely you that you’ll be irreplaceable.

The late Scott Adams advised his blog readers to become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. By being very good (though not necessarily great), you will be successful.

Decide what you want to get better at — which is often a moving target over time. And pursue mastery of those things with dogged persistence. Like an olympic athlete competing for a gold medal.

Newton’s First Law of Motion (inertia) states that an object at rest stays at rest. And an object in motion remains in motion, unless acted upon by an external force. Your career is subject to Newton’s First Law.

Inertia works for you when decades of hard work in a specific career path make you highly employable. It works against you when it’s wildly challenging to break into a new industry.

The beauty of work ethic is that it pays compounding results in the future. By working your ass off and parlaying your early wins today into bigger wins tomorrow, your career will compound over time.

With time, all your hard work behind the scenes will pay off.

I’m 29. I’m early in my journey of growing my career, building wealth, and finding joy through it all. I often forget that hard work is the greatest asset to accomplishing all three.

If my 12 year old me could give 29 year old me some advice, while staring at the iceberg of success, it’d be this:

Success is the tip of the iceberg. It’s the result of all the things you don’t see. Stick with it. Keep working hard.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

You combine hard work, discipline, and strategy to create a life of abundance for yourself, your loved ones, and your community.

Grant’s Story

1) Financial Mutants combine hard work with strategy to increase their earning power.

You recognize that the most valuable asset is you. And that the acquisition of specific knowledge increases your earning power.

You’re also aware of the premium that soft skills like creativity, curiosity, and lifelong learning have in the global economy. You actively strive to improve your soft skills to be an in-demand employee.

You also recognize that of all the soft skills, focus is the most valuable in the 21st century. Thinking strategically and focusing on the right things will set you apart in the long term. Having the ability to focus deeply on one thing at a time will make you unstoppable.

2) Financial Mutants know the value of a dollar and spend their money well.

Rather than pinching nickels, eating beans ‘n rice, and clipping coupons, you find ways to get the most out of life. You know how to ball on a budget. Especially in your first leg of the journey to $1M. You know how to get that proverbial financial snowball rolling. And create moments you’ll feel nostalgia for later in life at the same time.

You also know when to splurge. For your expensive tastes, you know exactly what you like, why you like it, and what’s worth spending a little more or a little less on. You have the financial self-knowledge to know that grilling the $20 Costco steak at home is better than buying the $60 ribeye from the steakhouse downtown. And that the $30 sushi buffet is light years better than the $6 sushi from the grocery store.

You’ve figured out your “enough”. Which could be $10M living in a beach house in Seabrook Island. Or $600K living in a trailer next to Barton Creek in Austin.

Whatever your definition of “enough”, you have the cajones to define it and get it.

3) The Financial Mutant applies timeless financial advice to the new economy.

You’re aware that with enough time, the path to $1M at retirement is a mathematical certainty. But the cost of living is higher than ever before. And $1M at 35 is jaw droppingly more useful than having $1M at 65.

The faster you become financially free (without missing out on life), the longer you get choose how to spend your time, give back to others, and pursue meaningful things — whether it’s reading every American classic novel on the beach in Milos, Greece. Or continuing to work the same high paying job without regard for the paycheck. It’s entirely your choice. Money gives you the option to choose.

You use brute force to reach the mathematical halfway point to $1M ($250K invested). And let the snowball roll, baby, roll. You have the patience to allow it to keep rolling. And toss on more snow as it crashes down the hill until it’s the right size for you.

Above all, you recognize that money is a tool. It’s neither good nor evil. It’s a reflection of your character, so you the luckier you get, the more generous you become.

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How To Do Hard Things

The fact that you’re aspiring for a role like this tells me you’re already on track to do great things in your career. But this recurring question is also an indication of a knowledge gap that I can (hopefully) fill for you.

Even if you aren’t dead set on becoming a Solution Engineer at Salesforce, this roadmap can help you become a sought after candidate for any position in tech.

1. Don’t immediately focus on applying; instead start learning.

Sign up for a Trailhead account. And download the Trailhead iPhone app. Complete Trails, rack up points, and get badges.

Rather than wondering what you should learn, go out and learn what genuinely tickles your curiosity. That will take you far in this job search and in your career.

Get at least Ranger status (100 Badges/50,000 Points). This is typically the minimum threshold for Hiring Managers of entry-level SE jobs to take you seriously.

Next, get Salesforce certified. Start with the Salesforce Foundations exams. They cost $75 each and there’s six of them.

Buy a practice test and study guide from Focus On Force, and get studying!

I got hired with Salesforce Sales Foundations (an easy cert) and Agentforce Specialist (a hard cert).

Because the role requires continuous learning, you need to commit to continual learning and certifications.

2. Let others know what you’re learning.

I learned firsthand that getting a tech job is hard in this brutal market. A VP Sales at my last job told me how to get noticed.

Since you’re actively doing Trailheads, write about what you’re learning on LinkedIn.

This will build trust with hiring managers at scale and help you get noticed faster.

If you’re not sure what to write about, you can:

1. Write about the topics on job descriptions for roles you want.

2. Summarize the Trailheads you’re learning. Look at my profile if you want some examples.

3. Publish your Ranger status and certifications on LinkedIn.

3. Go to in-person networking events.

Going to an in-person networking event?! It sounds old school. But it works.

Join your local Salesforce groups by looking in the Community section of Trailhead.

If you live in a dense city, like Chicago, where I live, there will be a lot. If you don’t live in a dense city, find the nearest city to you.

Go to the events. Learn. Get to know the partners. Exchange LinkedIn profiles. And post about what you learned on LinkedIn.

Follow the Salesforce Marketing Managers on LinkedIn (Kyren Wong, Kaela Altman, Joel Primack). They will post about virtual Community Meet Ups, which you should attend.

4. Talk to hiring managers because they make hiring decisions.

Don’t waste your time on informational interviews (including talking to me). I don’t make hiring decisions. Hiring managers make hiring decisions.

Don’t waste your time reaching out to recruiters, either. If a hiring manager wants to hire you, you’ll breeze through the phone screen anyways.

Do you see a theme? Get in front of managers by sending LinkedIn DM’s with your new Salesforce-optimized profile.

Diversity is a guiding principle at Salesforce. There are managers of many backgrounds and walks of life. Find someone whose background is similar to yours and reach out.

Here’s an example of a good cold networking message:

Don’t reach out to 2nd line and 3rd line managers, either. Hiring managers aren’t as keen about new hires that have been passed along to them by their boss or their boss’s boss.

Measure your success by how many coffee chats you set up with hiring managers.

5. Interview like a pro.

The pinnacle of Salesforce’s SE interview process is a 60-minute panel demo presentation. It’s meant to condense the entire SE role into a concise evaluation of your ability to demo.

This was the slide deck I used for mine.

You’ll also get paired with a current employee on the team you’re interviewing for.

Meet with them daily to validate your thinking, course correct you, and ensure that you’re on the right track. They will steer you the right way.

The panel demo presentation is how they decide whether you’re a “yes” or “no” decision, so make it count.

6. You can do it.

When it comes to tech sales, it’s less a matter of “if” you’ll get a job, but more so a matter of “when” you’ll get a job.

Once you’ve proven you have the hard qualifications by posting your learnings on LinkedIn, you have enough to get your foot in the door.

Now you have to prove it by selling the best product out there: you.

How To Connect With Me

Thanks for reading. If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to reach out.

— Grant Varner

Connect With Me On LinkedIn

In a way, I felt like the speech spoke directly to me. You’ll find the lessons within it as useful as I did.

Speech Transcript

(Picks up at 6:22)

Believe it or not, they asked me to come up with a title for this speech. The name I came up with was: “What do I know?”

Funny enough, that line went from being a jokey device I used to deflect my own fears of being up here on stage to a genuine challenge to myself:

What do I know that I tell you about that can possibly illuminate the future that stands in front of you?

I know that tomorrow you’ll receive a paper that says you’ve received one of the best educations there is. I also know that that education didn’t necessarily happen in the classroom.

I didn’t feel like I deserved to get into Brown. So I made it my mission to deserve to graduate from Brown.

I was admitted as a mid-year. Which means that I was one of 32 students who started in January. Cold, alone, and afraid.

I remember immediately trying to find my place. To find my group. My people.

There was a moment I tried walking on to the Brown basketball team. My brother, Paul, was team captain so I communicated with the coach about walking on. It was January, mid-season, so I walked up to meet with the coach. I opened up the door. As the door swung open, by the time it reached the end and was coming back I said, “Nope. No way.”

These guys were too big.

Too good.

And it was just after lunch and they were on their second practice!? No thank you.

So I turned around, walked straight through campus, when something caught my eye. I saw a flyer for a sketch comedy group called Out Of Bounds. I remember the flyer catching my eye because it nailed to… a tree? I thought:

“I hadn’t been at Brown long, but I thought protecting trees was your thing?”

So I went in for the audition. And my entire life changed. Not because I got in. Not because I started acting. It was through that group that I found my way into this community. It was through that group that I met my people. And all of a sudden I was surrounded by the most inspiring peers. Every single one of them seemed way cooler than me. And way more interesting.

One of the best decisions I ever made was to lean all the way in. Not to acting. I really wasn’t good enough to act here. The only parts I’d ever gotten in a play was Armed Guard #4 and Terrified Hostage Guest #2…

That’s right. When I was at Brown we did Die Hard: The Musical. You guys really missed out.

No, I didn’t get to throw everything into acting. But I did throw everything I had into this unparalleled pool of brilliant people.

People often ask me how I got into acting. But the truth is I didn’t get into acting.

I got into everything.

Believe it or not, when I got to Brown, I hadn’t listened to any music that wasn’t in the radio. I’d never seen any movie that wasn’t in the multiplex.

One day, I asked a small group of friends to each give me one of their favorite movies, favorite albums, and they did.

Every week. For four years.

It was the experience of my life. One of the most mind blowing, mind expanding experiences.

And no drugs were necessary.

It was, without a doubt the beginning of everything. For the next four years, I wanted to be part of it all. I formed a new way of thinking. A new way of executing those thoughts.

I leapt out of my comfort zone. Then stayed there. Then leapt again.

I experienced the powerful shift in doing something out of love, rather than out of necessity. I learned what it meant to believe. I took chances. I failed. And I took more chances.

So yes, in the classroom I received one of the greatest educations one can possibly get. But the piece of paper I got at graduation also represents that education.

The piece of paper I got not only says where I was educated, but who I was educated with. And it declares that I am a member of a community of people to be relied upon to take risks. To provoke thought. And to be committed participants in this world.

The piece of paper I got represented every facet of my experience. The piece of paper I got is the exact same piece of paper you’re going to get tomorrow. The piece of paper I got, I lived my life by every single day.

Because when looking at this sense of nervous that you’re feeling now upon graduating, ask yourself:

“What’s it based in?”

Is it based in the unknown? Because if so, my question to you is:

“Up until now, how else have you approached each new tomorrow?”

And if your nerves are based on a fear of failure, my question to you is:

“Up until now, how have you defined success?”

Because in this community, without the presence of financial gain, isn’t the definition of success simply defined as you being onto something? Taking an idea farther than it had ever been before? Why does it ever need to change? It doesn’t.

Or if your nerves are based on something bigger. The fear of the world at large. Well, to that I say, “Yes it’s true. They’re right.”

The future does indeed belong to you.

But the abstract weight of the responsibility to change it over night does not. Real change is organic. The only responsibility you have is to hold fast to everything you’ve lived right here. To not conform. To realize that when you’re out in the world, you’ve done all this before. Right in here.

Remember fondly the discomfort when you were asked to push farther than you were ever sure you would go. And the wash of elation when you finally got there.

Remember to be scared. You’ve been scared before. You’ll be scared again.

Find more of your people. Lean all the way in. Take chances. Fail big. And take chances again.

Listen to music. Remember to believe in something. And fall in love as many times as it takes.

And remember: Before you do something special. Just do something.

The truth can almost seem too simple. But the simple truth is the program you ran here is the same program. Just run it again. And again. And again.

That’s what I know.

Thank you to this class. To this institution. It’s my honor. Thank you.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

One good idea for work, life, and writing is to communicate minimally.

• Communicating minimally makes it easier for the listener to follow your direction.

• Writing minimally makes it easier for the reader to act on your advice.

This is what minimalist writing looks like. Last year I wrote a quick, 600 word essay about wealth.1

Initially, I was embarrassed because it read more like a Tweet thread than a blog post. But the advice was actionable.

To this day it’s still in my top 5 most read posts.

This is not what minimalist writing looks like. I recently spent weeks writing a 4,000 word blog about how LLMs work.2

Upon hitting ‘publish’ it was one of my least read newsletters in a long time.

Since then, I deleted over 2,000 words, and now it’s actually picking up traction.

The lesson (to me) is that people (including me) don’t want to read a dissertation.

They want short, actionable advice. So they can get on with their day.

When I played college football, my defensive line coach was adamant about brevity during in-game communication.

During a night home game vs. Harvard my sophomore year, Daryle, my Nose Tackle and I were discussing the backfield before a crucial play on 3rd down.

In the middle of our discussion, the center snapped the football. We both got our noses smashed by a wave of Crimson offensive linemen!

The next morning while breaking down game film, our D-Line coach circled his laser pointer around Daryle and I during our heated discussion.

He rightfully said, “When you communicate, you don’t need to give a dissertation! Get to the f***ing point!”

He was right. Get to the point.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke (1962)

The Wizard of Oz used smoke, fire, and a booming voice to create the illusion of power. Every munchkin in the land of Oz was convinced of the wizard’s wonderful powers.

But his facade was foiled when Dorothy — and her dog Toto — go to meet him. Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal Oz’s true nature: a regular, ordinarily sized man with a larger than life imagination.

With all the hype around LLMs, it feels timely to pull a Toto, by yanking back the curtain, to reveal the magic of Chat GPT. And why history is pointing to a third AI Winter.

Modern LLMs (GPT-3)

The illusion hiding behind Chat GPT’s Ozian curtain can be summed up with a simple equation: Web Scale Data + Transformer Architecture.

Web Scale Data

OpenAI’s GPT-3 was trained on 500 billion tokens — the equivalent of 5,000 books. This is exactly what it was trained on:1

Common Crawl — a corpus of 9+ petabytes of data collected every month since 2008 — makes up 60% of the training weight. The data is similar to the Google Indexed Page Search database, except that it includes history, meaning it includes snapshots of web pages that were once online but have since been deleted.2

If you want the juicy details on WebText2, here’s OpenAI’s original paper that announced its predecessor, WebText, the training dataset used for GPT-2.3

WebText2 made up 22% of the training data for GPT-3. It consists of the filtered text of all web pages from Reddit posts that got 3 or more upvotes. The goal of this data source is to train on human-generated content. But there’s an unfortunate downside to capturing human-made content (even with filters):

Content made by humans can be inappropriate, divisive, and outright vicious.4 Harmful output from LLMs is a mirror image of the fallen nature of humanity.

Another 16% came from two datasets of internet-based books corpora — with a random sample of a small subset of all public domain books available online. The final 3% comes from Wikipedia.

As the saying goes, “you are what you read”. Chat GPT is extremely well read, with training data from over 5,000 books. Therefore it’s book smart. But it doesn’t have any sensory data to have a practical knowledge of the real world.5

Attention Is All You Need (Transformer Architecture)

In 2017, eight AI researchers from Google published “Attention Is All You Need” — an influential paper that introduced the transformer architecture to the world.6 Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This paper is one of those giants. Nearly every major breakthrough in the last decade of AI was built on its shoulders.

The transformer architecture is so influential because it introduced the ability to parallelize (or break something down into smaller parts).

Compared to human brains, computers can read a lot more information at once. But it still has a limit to the amount it can process. So what does it do? It uses a transformer architecture to read entire blocks of text simultaneously using parallelization.

So how does Chat GPT gobble up 5,000 books during pre-training? It reads in parallel, processing many tokens of text at once. But when it writes, it puts one token at a time (sequentially) with each token getting computed with tons of parallel math under the hood.

LLMs can provide plausible (though often hallucinated) answers based on linguistic patterns. But they cannot make claims about truth, judgment, or pattern recognition. The human brain is the superior pattern processing machine. LLM’s are a lower quality imitation. Under the hood, GPT-3 is an illusion of intelligence.

Isaac Newton is also credited with saying “what goes up must come down” in reference to the law of gravity. Today, it refers to the irrational, predictable, and cyclical exuberance of AI followed by a unmet expectations, as we’ll soon see with AI.

AI Winters

On May 9, 1973, at the Royal Institution in London, a debate ensured. Sir James Lighthill, a British mathematician, and critic of AI engaged in a heated debate against John McCarthy and two of his colleagues.

The debate was sparked by a damning report published in 1973, titled “Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey”, to evaluate the state of AI research.

The outcome of the debate resulted in a catastrophic loss of funding for AI in the United Kingdom and helped trigger the first “AI Winter”. A term to describe when the delta between expectations and reality trigger a loss of funding towards AI research.

The First AI Winter (1974-’80)

Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky — two leading researchers warned the AI community of the first AI Winter.

They described a chain reaction, similar to a nuclear winter, that would begin with pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, a severe cutback in funding, and the end of serious research.

Thankfully, the 1970s AI hype was isolated to academic and defense-driven investment (via DARPA). As a result, it didn’t crash the stock market. But the results of the 1973 Lighthill Report did cause DARPA to cut funding to AI research.

The Second AI Winter (1987-’93)

The second AI Winter was triggered by a collapse of the AI hardware market. As a result, over 300 companies were bankrupted or acquired, and it paved the way for Apple and IBM to become market leaders.

The Third AI Winter

Since the early 50’s, there’s been a repeating hype cycle. A new computer technology gets invented. It gets dubbed “AI”. There’s a swell of enthusiasm, research, and investment.

Eventually it reaches a point of diminishing returns and stalls. Enthusiasm for AI dies down. And the groundbreaking technology goes back to being called its technical term.

It happened to bayesian networks. It happened to Markov chains. And (maybe) it’ll happen to large language models.

Lacking Enthusiasm for AI

Overall, Americans are expressing concern, rather than excitement for AI. Specifically on the fear that we’ll become too dependent on AI and our humans skills will erode as a result. I share this fear as well.

A handful of Americans provided interview responses to a handful of questions from this Pew Research Center survey.

“I think a sizable portion of humanity is inclined to seek the path of least resistance. As annoying and troublesome as hardships and obstacles can be, I believe the experience of encountering these things and overcoming them is essential to forming our character.” – Woman, age 30-39

A teacher had concerns about he students developing skills because of AI:

“As a school teacher, I understand how important it is for children to develop and grow their own curiosity, problem-solving skills, critical thinking skills and creativity, to name just a few human traits that I believe AI is slowly taking over from us. Since children are digital natives, the adults who understand a world without AI need to still pass the torch to children for developing these human qualities with our own human brains, instead of relying on the difficulty to be passed on to AI so that humans don’t have to feel the struggle of what real learning is.” – Woman, age 40-49

Even teens nowadays are skeptical about the benefits of AI (specifically LLMs like Chat GPT). They’re either not using it entirely, or limiting their use to specific use-cases.

If the perception of AI progress takes a nose dive, that could cause the AI house of cards to topple, like it did in the AI Winters of the 70’s and late ‘90s.7 That’s why the best thing OpenAI can do is what it’s already been doing. Investing in storytelling. Shaping the narrative. Playing Pokemon Red.8

Humans Strength Over AI

The difference between you and Chat GPT is a God-given human ability to make aesthetic judgements. Chat GPT is trained on 5,000+ books worth of text - more than a human is capable of reading. But only a human like you has the taste to discern what’s quality and what’s not in the little (compared to an LLM) you do read.

The human brain has a secret sauce that experts of cognitive research still don’t understand. You are capable of connecting your life experiences, observations, and information into a story that AI could never.

That’s the beauty of being human. It’s why I love being human.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

1

As a quick note, GPT-3 is the latest model I was able to find pre-training weight data online. It’s now common practice to withhold AI training weight data, for a variety of reasons (to protect intellectual property, maintain a competitive advantage, and reduce legal liability). I guess OpenAI isn’t so “open” anymore.

It’s also worth calling out that this isn’t the only data that LLMs use. Depending on the model, there’s different sources of data. Once again, and unfortunately, OpenAI and the other leading AI labs are quiet about how they’re training newer models.

8

Given that at 6 years old, I beat Pokemon Silver with an overpowered Typhlosion, poor reading ability, and a helpful big sister — I’d hope AI can do the same. Update 3/23/26: Well, Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.5 are getting pretty damn close.

Buy The Wealth Ladder on Amazon

Earning Up The Wealth Ladder

As your income increases, so does your wealth. Your income today is the bedrock upon which all your future wealth will be built tomorrow. In a word, get your money up, not your funny up. But beyond W-2 income, there’s four kinds of leverage to make more money:

1. Labor: Paying someone to work for you is one of the oldest forms of leverage. It requires you to rely on your workers.

2. Capital: Using your own (or someone else’s) money to increase your wealth.

3. Content: Anyone can share content at scale (that’s what I’m doing with this blog). But because everyone can easily share information, competition is fierce. It requires (i) excellence and (ii) consistency to stand out.

4. Code: Like content, anyone can sell code. But it requires a highly technical skill, and is highly competitive.

The .01% Rule

Sharp income drops are more likely among high earners.1 Consuming based solely on your income puts you on unsteady ground. Personally, this opened my eyes. My household earnings are higher than average for the typical American my age, but it’s a good reminder that layoffs are frequent, so it’s important to live below my means, save, and invest.

When it comes to spending, it’s better to spend based on your liquid net worth using the .01% rule: You can spend .01% of your liquid net worth without worry. If you have $200,000 in cash, you can spend $20 worry free. The distinction here is liquid net worth. If your money is tied up in your 401(k) like mine is — it’s better to spend care free based on what’s in cash.

Level 2 ($10K-100K): Grocery Freedom

You can buy what you want at the grocery store without worrying about your finances. At this stage I started buying ribeye steaks from Costco.

To ascend past $100K net worth, find work at the intersection of:

1. What you’re good at.

2. What you’re interested in.

3. What people will pay for.

And whenever you’re in doubt about your career, work harder — especially at sub-$100K net worth. Per Sam Altman:

“Working hard early in your career to get the leverage and compounding effects is underrated and one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I ever got.”

Level 3 ($100K-$1M): Restaurant Freedom

You can eat what you want at restaurants. At this stage I tried buying steaks at restaurants, only to find out that steaks I grill at home taste much better.

To get to your first $1M, it’s best to start fast, then coast later. If you invest more earlier, and stop contributing later, you’ll be just fine. Just don’t overdo it though — in either direction.

Save your money, but still be willing to spend your money on fun things. Otherwise you might come to regret it when you do reach the $1M milestone. I’m going skiing for one of my college friends’ bachelor party — along with one of my buddy’s who I played college football with at Brown.

Since we both have never snowboarded before, we each dropped $600 on lessons. My knee jerk reaction was to think this is an absurd amount of money. But at the same time, it’s gonna be so much fun — and a memory I’ll have forever.

On the other side of the same coin, avoid overspending. Homeowners with $100k-$1M tend to have 65% of their assets in their home. In most cases, your primary residents is a use asset — just like a car. Try not to stretch yourself too thin by buying something above your means so that you can keep the snowball rolling to fund the life you want in the future.

If you avoid overspending, increase your income, and invest consistently, Level 4 ($1M+) will come in a jiffy.

Level 4 ($1M-$10M): Travel Freedom

You travel when and where you want.

Your 9-5 job that got you to $1M won’t get you to $10M. Equity is how you get there.

“To become rich, every single percentage point of anything you own is crucial. It is worth fighting for, tooth and claw. It is worth suing for. It is worth shouting and banging the table for. It is worth begging for and groveling for. In extremis, it is even worth negotiating for. Never, never, never, never hand over a single share of anything you have acquired or creating if you can help it.” — Felix Dennis

Level 5 ($1M-$10M) households have 31% of their assets in businesses. Start a business. Buy a business. Get equity. I’m not at $1M+, so my focus isn’t here yet. But one day it will be.

Level 5 ($10M-$100M): House Freedom

You can afford your dream home with little impact on your overall finance.

The characteristics that got someone to $10M are likely the same ones that will prevent them from stopping when they do get there. Being money-driven has advantages, but beyond being able to pay for the basic necessities, no amount of money will ever satisfy. In fact, there’s convincing evidence that going beyond $10M+ net worth might actually be a downgrade to your life.

Loss of trust: Wealth can change your relationship with others because you don’t know if they are interested in you or your money. This is why the friends you had before you’re wealthy are so important. Because you know they liked you for who you are and not because of the wealth you have today.

Increased stress: One study found that the relationship between wealth and mental health an inverted U shape. In other words, more wealth is associated with better mental health… to a point. Beyond the peak, more wealth led to decreased mental health. William Vanderbilt echoed this sentiment when comparing his life to a less wealthy neighbor:

“He isn’t worth a hundredth part as much as I am, but he has more of the real pleasures of life than I have. His house is as comfortable as mine, even if it didn’t cost so much; his team is about as good as mine; his opera box is next to mine; his health is better than mine, and he will probably outlive me.

And he can trust his friends.”

Altered family dynamics: Moving up the Wealth Ladder often requires sacrifices from you and from your loved ones — no matter how you ascend the Wealth Ladder. If you have a demanding job, this could lead to long hours and time away from your family. If you run a business, that might also take time from family, and doing other things that you love.

Level 6 ($100M+): Philanthropic Impact Freedom

You can use money to have a profound impact on the lives of others (e.g., engage in large-scale philanthropy, buy businesses, etc.).

One problem some face while ascending the Wealth Ladder is that the higher you climb, the more wealthy people you meet — many of whom will be wealthier than you. Misha Saul explains relative deprivation:

“The more of an outlier you are in any respect (money, intelligence, beauty, chess, archery, whatever), the larger the gaps between you and the next best above and below. If you are median wealth, well, so are many others (by definition).”

As a result, you can feel like you need to catch up to those wealthier than you. Wealth can morph your perceptions past the point of necessity.

Does Money Buy Happiness?

As Kahneman and Deaton found in their 2010 paper, “Unhappiness decreases with increasing income, but there is no further decline beyond ~$75,000.” No one is immune to unhappiness, no matter how much money they have.

Money itself doesn’t make people happier. But what money allows you to do, can make you happier. The comedian Bill Hicks once said, “Money can't buy happiness. But it can buy a jet ski and have you ever seen someone frown while riding a jet ski?”

All this being said, the ideal strategy for maximizing happiness seems to be having enough money to alleviate struggle and worry, then focus on things other than money. As the saying goes, “Money can’t buy happiness, but poverty can’t buy anything.” Felix Dennis has a net worth of $750 million. Regarding wealth, he once said:

“If I had my time again, knowing what I know today, I would dedicate myself to making just enough to live comfortably (say $60 or $80 million), as quickly as I could — hopefully by the time I was thirty-five years old. I would then cash out immediately and retire to write poetry and plant trees.”

The Great Enhancer

In the same way that salt enhances the existing flavor already in your food, money elevates the experiences you have in life. My wife and I love sushi. Spending $30 on all-you-can eat at a spot near us is light years better than buying the $6 sushi from the grocery store. It’s still sushi. Just better.

Eventually comes the question: I already have enough money. How do I get more “flavor” out of life? Sahil Bloom lays it out in The 5 Types of Wealth:

Social Wealth: Dr. Matthew Lieberman found that seeing a friend on most days was worth making an extra $100,000/year. Being married was worth an additional $100,000. Seeing your neighbor regularly was worth $60,000. What’s more, leaving a toxic relationship, or changing jobs due to a bad boss will dramatically improve your life.

Mental Wealth: According to a 2021 report by Pew Research Center, work was one of the biggest sources of meaning for people across seventeen advanced economies. If you don’t love your work right now, that’s OK — but that should be your goal. Because work can be a great source of fulfillment. To quote Richard Nixon:

“The unhappiest people of the world are those in the international watering places like the south coast of France, Newport, Palm Springs, and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night. Playing golf every afternoon, then bridge. Drinking too much. Talking too much. Thinking too little. Retired. No purpose. As so, while I know there are those who would totally disagree with this and say, ‘Gee, if I could just be a millionaire that would be the most wonderful thing. If I could just not have to work every day. If I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world’, they don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle. The struggle. Even if you don’t win it.”

If you want mental wealth, don’t avoid work, embrace it. And if you believe that your work has purpose, you’ll have greater meaning in your life.

Physical Wealth: The Roman poet Virgil once wrote, “The greatest wealth is health.” Over two thousand years later, the rapper Pusha T said, “Ask Steve Jobs, wealth don’t buy health.” The earlier research from Dr. Matthew Lieberman also found that health was “by far the most valuable non-monetary asset researchers examined. To be maximally healthy, there’s two metrics worth pursuing:

1. Physical strength. In a study of active male firefighters, those who are stronger had a 96% reduction in heart attacks.

2. Cardio strength. Having a VO2 max in the top 2.5% for your age drops your risk of death by 80%. Even going from the bottom 25% to the 50th-75th percentile reduces your risk of death by 50%. For context, a non-smoker only has a 29% lower chance of death compared to a smoker.

Time Wealth: I take after Charlie Munger who said, “The first $100,000 is a b****, but you’ve gotta do it.” I’ve written about how starting fast, then coasting is the best route for a wealth building journey.

My (Grant Varner’s) Journey Up The Wealth Ladder

Currently, I’m at Level 3 ($100K-$1M). Here’s what I’ve learned along the way.

Start fast, then coast. Because of the power of compound interest, it’s easier to start fast, and coast through the finish than is to start slow, and rush to the finish to make time. So far, this principle has served me well in building wealth. It taught me that when it comes to wealth-building, it’s far easier to sprint out of the gates. By intensely focusing on maximizing income, minimizing expenses (without overdoing it), and investing the rest, I got the snowball of compounding interest started.

I don’t know how it feels to be playing catch-up on your financial life at age 50, but I can tell you that I never felt like I was missing out on anything. Even though I was financially disciplined, I was able to backpack through Europe, take two trips to Big Bend National Park, eat out often with friends — mostly at Juan in a Million or Terry Black’s BBQ — visit Egypt and Greece, try and fail at starting a hot sauce business, and pay for a wedding.

If you’re young and trying to sprint out of the gate ASAP, then you’re in luck because time is on your side. The first step is to get your income up.

On August 12, 2023, I invested my first $100,000 — a big financial milestone. Last month, I hit another financial milestone: $200,000 invested. That day, I wrote in my journal, “When I hit $100k, I thought my life would change. It didn’t. Now I’m at $200k and my life still hasn’t changed.”

In retrospect, that wasn’t 100% accurate — my life did change a lot during the time I grew my net worth from $100k to $200k. But it had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with relationships. I married the love of my life. I went to the weddings of some of my best buddies from High School and College. I went on vacation to South Carolina with my family. I don’t have enough money. Because I never will. But I still have more than enough.

The Wealth Ladder is the exact book that I needed at this moment in my life. If you’ve read this far, it’s likely that it’s the exact book you need, too. Like Nick, my goal is to build wealth my own way — the Grant Varner way.

Buy The Wealth Ladder on Amazon

Whew… you made it! 2,500 words later. As always…

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

The work is deliberately humble and repetitive. The purpose of their work is spiritual formation.

Machines can weave baskets better, faster, and more cheaply. But the monks weave by hand because it sanctifies them in the eyes of the Lord.

Today AI has the ability to do the work that humans used to. What happens when we outsource physical and mental labor to computers?

The Problem Of Recursive AI Systems

In January 2026, artificial intelligence researchers Arend Hintze, Frida Proschinger Åström and Jory Schossau published a study showing what happens when generative AI systems are allowed to run autonomously – generating and interpreting their own outputs without human intervention.

The researchers linked a text-to-image system with an image-to-text system and let them iterate – image, caption, image, caption – over and over and over.

Regardless of how diverse the starting prompts were – and regardless of how much randomness the systems were allowed – the outputs quickly converged onto a narrow set of generic, familiar visual themes: atmospheric cityscapes, grandiose buildings and pastoral landscapes. Even more striking, the system quickly “forgot” its starting prompt.

The researchers called the outcomes “visual elevator music” – pleasant and polished, yet devoid of any real meaning.

For example, they started with the image prompt, “The Prime Minister pored over strategy documents, trying to sell the public on a fragile peace deal while juggling the weight of his job amidst impending military action.” The resulting image was then captioned by AI. This caption was used as a prompt to generate the next image.

After repeating this loop, the researchers ended up with a bland image of a formal interior space.

This happens because:

Without the creative touch of a human, AI-generated output predictably regress to the same generic looking text, images, and video. Hardly a representation of God’s wisdom and goodness.

Today, you can write an essay in seconds with AI. But that doesn’t mean it’ll be aesthetically beautiful — or have a human touch. Well written essays require two uniquely human skills:

• (i) A taste for aesthetics to identify good ideas across subject matter domains.

• (ii) A mental model of the world (and your human experience) to synthesize these ideas through.

If you’re interested in how to acquire these skills, read this essay:

Writing, to me, is like free-style building Legos without the instructions.

If you’re good at Lego (writing), and someone handed you a cluster of haphazardly connected Lego pieces (AI-generated text), the first thing you’d do is dissemble the pieces to their raw parts (cherry pick the few meaningfully AI-generated sentences).

What does creative expression look like through the medium of AI?

Human Creativity Enhanced With AI

Zach London uses AI to create post-apocalyptic storytelling like this.

Despite producing his videos with AI, Zach’s process is painstaking — and clearly only possible with a discerning human.

During an interview with Dear Future, he describes his process:

“Every video starts with a script. For a single set of characters, I run probably 400 prompts and 1600 images. And that’s just to get the faces right. That level of iteration doesn’t show up in the final video. You only feel the polish, not the mountain of attempts behind it.”

His art — despite using AI — still contains the criteria for a uniquely human creative act:

• (i) A taste for aesthetics to identify good AI-video output for his stories.

• (ii) A mental model of where the world is headed as the basis for his futuristic stories.

The Proverb Of The Farmer And The Draw Well

There’s a Taoist proverb from the 4th century B.C. about a farmer who dug an irrigation ditch on top of a hill. The farmer would routinely descend the hill to a well, fetch water, and pour it into the ditch.

His efforts were excruciatingly difficult. And his results were painfully meager.

A passing traveler — just trying to be helpful — suggested:

“There’s a way you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day with less effort. All you have to do make a draw well. Take a wooden lever, wighted at the back and light in the front. With this, you can bring up water so quickly that it gushes out.”

Angrily, the old farmer responded:

“When you use machines, you work like a machine. When you work like a machine, you grow a heart like a machine. With the heart of a machine, you lose touch with your soul. I refuse to lose touch with my soul. It’s not that I have no knowledge of how to make a draw well. I refuse to lose what makes me human.”

There’s dignity in doing work — whether it’s carrying buckets of water, writing essays, or making videos.

The Morality Of AI Depends On Human Choices

There’s nothing wrong with AI. But the ends for which you use it matter.

Human creativity is a gift from God, which glorifies by reflecting His perfection in a small way. A note from the Catholic Church on AI put it succinctly:

“God ‘gave skill to human beings, that he might be glorified in his marvelous works’ (Sirach 38:6). Human abilities and creativity come from God and, when used rightly, glorify God by reflecting his wisdom and goodness.”

Receiving the fullest Grace of human labor is possible from anywhere. Whether your work place is a monastery, high rise office building, or standing desk in your bedroom.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner

1

The Trappists are an order of Catholic monks. They’re monastic, which means they renounce worldly pursuits to fully devote themselves to spiritual activities. Think of it like the Christian version of a Tibetan monk.

One weekend after Apple hit a 3-year record low stock price, Steve Jobs went to Macy’s in Palo Alto to study kitchen appliances.

The following Monday, Steve bounded straight to the iMac team, and said:

“Buy a Cuisinart. Study its lines, curves, and bevels. Then write a new draft of product design changes. The first iMac should have a friendly appearance.”1

After launching, the iMac became the best-selling computer. Apple eventually rebounded, becoming the first $1 trillion company.

II. Contrarian Thinking

Terry Oyama, who worked on the original iMac team credits Steve for teaching him what it meant for a computer to be “friendly”.

”Even though Steve didn’t draw any of the links, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is. To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.”

Steve had the foresight to know the aesthetic value of a computer, insisting that it should look friendly — like your grandma’s Cuisinart kitchen appliance.

This was a contrarian idea.

Microsoft was the market leader. But they lacked the ability to make valid judgements about aesthetic value.

In Steve Jobs’ view, that’s why Microsoft builds third rate products.

“The only problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. Absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way — I mean that in a big way. They don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”

Fonts, for example, come from old books. Had Steve not seen the aesthetic value of different typefaces, and programmed that into the iMac, this essay’s font might be in plain Times New Roman rather than Slab.

III. How To Have Taste

Taste is the ability to recognize what is aesthetically excellent. There’s three ways to develop aesthetic taste:

1. Read old books that have been around for centuries. If an idea has stood the test of time, it’s worth reading.

2. Strive to create something high quality (like I’m trying to do with this essay).

3. Make aesthetic judgements yourself. The amount of ‘likes’ on social media has replaced independent judgement of aesthetic value — keep ‘flexing’ your knack for taste by asking yourself ‘what is quality?’.

In doing so, you refine your taste, broaden your understanding of what is truly good, leading to more tasteful work in the future.

That’s how you develop a taste for aesthetics. Just like Steve Jobs.

Thanks for reading.

— Grant Varner