Last fall @rootsofprogress invited me to give a talk on what's wrong with the news and what we can do about it. Thanks so much to @jasoncrawford and the team for the opportunity!

“Be weird and esoteric because humans are weird and esoteric.” ❤️

People take economic growth for granted. But in the background there are millions of these improvements happening below your awareness. They happen because people you have never met are informed of your desires and motivated to work to satisfy them by market prices.

This NYT article on the "golden age" of air travel is an amazing example of an unthinking journalist failing to make contact with reality. The narrative: air travel used to be much better, but less affordable. 1/

What's changed is that the middle class can fly at all. They fly at a level of safety -- an important quality measure -- that was unavailable to royalty in 1958. And today’s equivalent of the 1958 flying public gets an experience that's better in essentially every way. 7/

realizing that cary grant would've been the king of gifs in the 30s-40s if they'd existed back then

🎯

so i did a @bigthink interview it’s live today!! you should watch it: https://t.co/keB58V49sk

This is actually a dystopian and anti-tech take. It’s very hard to remember what the world pre-internet was in… 1991, and how basic things like getting information, reaching out to someone, collaborating with a remote work team, or buying a household item or plane ticket was

Work-life balance is a false dichotomy. Work is part of life. If you hate your work, you'll naturally want to make it a smaller part. If you love it, you'll make it a bigger part. The debate is sadly dominated by people who hate their work and assume everyone else does too.

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Special issue from @bigthink coming out of Progress Conference 2025! Featuring pieces from some of the speakers and perspectives from several @rootsofprogress fellows who attended, with an intro from me: https://t.co/8WLvsiuLrA

If America’s nuclear regulations reflected modern science, nuclear plants could be built faster, smaller, and at lower cost. Instead, the system still relies on research first published nearly a century ago. Engineer Ray Rothrock explains:

“Monopoly” used to mean only one company in a market 5 years ago I heard someone talk about the “Uber/Lyft monopoly” Recently I heard someone bemoan “concentration of power” in AI, despite there being 3–5 frontier labs—because it's all “Big Tech”

This, but for all perspectives you encounter in life: “…it is up to you to meet these hurting, strange voices with compassion, critical thinking, and curiosity; you have to evaluate if anything they say is valuable and true and applies to your life.”

We’re a nonprofit, cross-partisan initiative to move beyond "us vs. them" thinking and solve problems together. 👉 Let’s grow this movement together—start by signing the pledge: https://t.co/YdaGkbtmeA

Decentralization brings new order and new order brings new disorder. The old order will insist re-centralization is the only answer to addressing that new disorder. This explains most of the techlash/disinformation dialog of past decade.

And courage is in scarce supply

I find the failure modes here fascinating because it highlights how these "alien intelligences" actually function. Their successes are all too close to our successes, but their failures are startlingly different, and that's what we ought to learn from.

I'm sorry but wtf is a "superintelligence"? Can we at least *define* something? Or maybe the act of defining is itself prohibited? What about the TikTok Intelligence? Can we get some clarity? How can there ever be broad scientific consensus on gobbledygook?

@liangsays @tszzl @a16z @bigthink @LumaLabsAI @elevenlabsio @theworldlabs As i told you today - one of the best things I’ve ever seen - and hit even harder live in the room with so many amazing founders, leaders, and luminaries. Literal chills. Amazing, kudos.