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“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

Melvin Kranzberg

The dentist has her hands in my mouth and I’m working out which jobs survive this.

I have to be in the room for her to work. Software reads x-rays now. Drilling teeth still takes her hands.

I quit my job in 2017 on a few years of savings and a software skill. Nine years on, a person with no training can ask for software in plain English.

Intelligence is getting cheap.

Economists call a technology that shows up everywhere at once a general purpose technology.

By one count there have been about 24 of them in human history including:

• Domesticated plants
• Writing
• The printing press
• The steam engine
• Electricity
• The computer

AI sits on that list. We are living through its arrival.

Each of those 24 technologies made some things cheap. Each one made other things scarce.

Money flows to whoever controls scarce resources.

So what does cheap intelligence make scarce? Start 5,400 years earlier.

Writing made remembering cheap

Around 3,400 BC, scribes in Mesopotamia started pressing marks into wet clay to record who owed what.

Before that most debts existed only in someone’s memory. After it a debt sat on a clay tablet either party could go and check.

Plato hated it. In the Phaedrus he has an Egyptian king tell the god who invented writing that the gift will backfire:

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

Remembering got cheap. Reading got expensive, because those marks meant nothing to anyone who couldn’t decode them.

Power moved to the scribes who could read and to the states that kept the records.

If you’ve ever ended an argument about what you paid by pulling up the receipt, you’ve used what the scribes invented.

Writing made reading a skill worth having.

The printing press made copies cheap

A print shop in the 1450s could turn out more in a day than a scribe could in a year.

After 50 years of printing, more than 9,000,000 books existed in Europe.

Guild rules covered hand-copying and said nothing about a press. So the scribes had no legal way to stop a print shop opening down the street.

For a printed book, paper ran to about half the cost. A scribe bought one sheet at a time and sold what they finished.

A printer selling on the open market bought thousands of sheets up front and got paid only if the books sold.

The trade stopped running on labor and started running on money. It moved to whoever could front the capital and choose the right manuscript. A bad choice meant paying for pages no one wanted.

If you’ve ever paid up front for something that never sold, you’ve run the printer’s risk.

Choosing what to print got expensive.

Steam made labor cheap

Between 1780 and 1840, British output per worker rose 46%.

Real wages rose 12%.

Economic historian Robert Allen named that gap Engels’ Pause. For 60 years the machines produced more while the people running them saw very little of it.

The profit rate roughly doubled. Profit’s share of national income grew at the expense of labor and land.

From 1840 to 1900 output per worker rose 90% while real wages rose 123%, passing productivity for the first time.

Wages caught up a generation late. Anyone who was 30 when the machines came would have been 90 before the numbers turned.

If your output went up this year and your pay stayed flat, that’s Engels’ Pause running again.

When a machine does what hands did, the money goes to whoever owns the machine.

Electricity made power cheap

Electric power was available in the 1880s. Productivity didn’t move until the 1920s.

Factories bought motors and dropped them into buildings laid out for steam.

A steam factory ran off one central shaft. Belts came down from it to each machine, so machines had to sit close to the shaft whether or not that suited the work.

An electric motor on each machine cut the belts.

Now the floor could be arranged in the order the work actually happened. Wide, single storey, lit from above, built around the product instead of around the power.

The factories that got the gains tore out the shaft and redrew the floor. The ones that bolted a motor onto the old layout got almost nothing.

If you put a chatbot into your workflow this year and nothing much changed, you added the motor and left the workflow exactly as it was.

Power got cheap and the money went to whoever knew what to rebuild around it.

Haber-Bosch made nitrogen cheap

Plants run out of nitrogen first.

Until 1909 the supply came from three places.

Lightning and rain delivered some. Root bacteria on peas and beans pulled more from the atmosphere. The rest came from bird droppings and nitrate beds in Chile.

You could not manufacture nitrogen.

You dug it up or you waited for weather.

The supply capped how many people the land could feed.

Fritz Haber pulled nitrogen out of the air in 1909. Carl Bosch made it industrial and the first ammonia plant ran at Oppau in 1913.

Synthetic fertilizer now supports roughly half the people alive.

Odds are that includes you.

The reaction takes enormous heat and pressure. It burns something like 1% to 2% of the world’s energy supply.

The ceiling on food stopped being land. It became energy.

Break a hard limit and whatever powered the breaking becomes the new limit.

Oil made moving cheap

Karl Benz patented a gasoline automobile in 1886. Ford’s assembly line turned the car into a middle-class purchase.

Between 1950 and 2000 the share of Americans living in suburbs climbed from 23% to 50%.

An engine changed where a person could afford to live.

If you drive to work, you can live further from your job than anyone could have in 1900.

In 1960 the countries sitting on the oil formed OPEC. By 1973 they could swing the price of almost anything that moved on oil.

Getting places got cheap and oil got expensive.

When moving gets cheap, the money goes to whoever owns the fuel the moving runs on.

The computer made calculation cheap

In 1987 the economist Robert Solow wrote that we see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics.

He meant it literally. Firms bought the machines and the output numbers sat flat.

The paradox held for years and economists argued about it the whole time.

What broke it was the work around the machine:

• The software
• The retraining
• The redrawn processes
• The people who could tell which tasks were worth automating

By then the computer was a commodity. Two rival firms could buy identical hardware off the shelf. One would pull ahead anyway. Hardware explained none of the gap.

IBM built the PC and set the standard. Microsoft sold the operating system that ran on it and Intel sold the chip inside it.

IBM captured the least of the three.

When the machine gets cheap, the money moves to whatever makes it useful.

The internet made publishing cheap

With the internet, you can publish as much as you like this afternoon for nothing.

Attention is as scarce as it always was, because a day still holds 24 hours.

So the value moved to whoever sits between the infinite supply and the fixed demand.

• The feed
• The ranking
• The recommendation

Setting the order became its own industry. It decides which of the infinite things a person ever sees.

When making it costs nothing, the money moves to whoever decides what gets seen.

What’s getting scarce now that intelligence is cheap?

Copies got cheap and picking got expensive. Making things got cheap and capital got expensive. Nitrogen got cheap and energy got expensive. Publishing got cheap and attention got expensive.

Intelligence got cheap.

What’s getting expensive?

1) Picking the right answer.

AI generates infinite plausible answers for free. Producing gets cheap. Picking gets expensive.

At Trends.vc, we sell judgment on which ideas are worth chasing.

2) Signing your name to the answer.

AI produces the answer and carries none of the loss when it’s wrong.

The auditor who signs the books, the engineer who stamps a drawing, the surgeon in the operating room. Each sells the same thing: a person who eats the consequence.

3) Getting anyone to look.

Cheap intelligence pours infinite supply into a day that still holds 24 hours. Curation and distribution capture the margin.

4) Being in the room.

If your work requires hands in a room, you have more runway than headlines suggest.

⁂

Progress relocates scarcity. Wealth belongs to whoever stands where it lands.

🏺

What could you create that gets more valuable as the cost of intelligence drops?

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“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.”

James Baldwin

I spent 3 years with zero income before my first pre-sell flopped.

7,000 subscribers got the email. Nobody bought.

My savings were running low, but having no product gave me total freedom.

With nothing left to lose, I changed the model for Trends.vc. I gave away half the report for free and charged for the rest.

People bought within minutes.

Wellington Management fired John Bogle as chief executive on January 23, 1974.

The mutual funds Wellington managed had separate directors. They kept him on and handed him Vanguard.

On August 31, 1976 Vanguard launched the First Index Investment Trust.

It tracked the S&P 500 and tried to beat nobody.

Wall Street named it Bogle’s Folly. One critic called it un-American.

The underwriting raised $11.3 million against a $150 million goal. Bogle described it as an abject failure.

Over its first 20 years the fund’s assets compounded at 53% a year.

A man with no firm left to run proposed something the people running firms found offensive. What they defended was the fee on beating the market.

He could afford the insult because Wellington already took what it could take from him.

When you have no position to defend, you can afford to take big swings.

Bogle’s downside was a fund few people believed in. My downside was a report nobody bought.

In each case the worst outcome was to stay where we already stood.

When an idea hasn’t taken off yet, starting from zero gives you the freedom to try big experiments.

🔓

Where could you take a wild swing because nothing is working?

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“The dose makes the poison.”

Paracelsus

He had one lap before the engine turned into a lump of molten metal.

In 1986 Formula 1 let teams run as much turbo boost as they dared in qualifying. BMW pushed 1.5 liters to more than 1,400 horsepower, roughly ten times what that size makes in an ordinary road car.

Teo Fabi qualified fastest at the Austrian Grand Prix on that engine, the first time his Benetton racing team ever took pole position, two tenths of a second ahead of his teammate Gerhard Berger. Afterward it came out of the car for a full teardown, each part inspected or replaced. The gearbox and the tires were built for the same short life.

On Sunday the BMW died on lap 17 and Fabi was out of the race.

Qualifying bought him the front row. The race took it back.

I protect a daily floor of 21 small experiments. Each one is a test where I don’t know how it will turn out.

• A recipe I might wreck
• A new targeting test on a paid ad
• A photo swapped on my Kindle author page
• A pinned comment to funnel my YouTube viewers

In June I thought about raising the floor to 34.

A higher floor meant moving faster, testing more ideas each week and compounding gains sooner.

The risk was crashing out.

Pushing the floor to 34 meant shrinking my margin for error. The higher you set the intensity, the more vulnerable you become to everyday volatility. A travel day, a night of bad sleep or a sudden shock can take the whole routine out.

Pushing harder works when you build the support to hold the higher setting together.

When you push a habit harder, durability is the first thing you spend. If your ambitions require that pace, build the conditioning and the recovery to carry it.

Turn the setting up when you have priced the trade and built what holds it together.

The engine that qualifies fastest is the engine most likely to come apart.

🏎️

What habit are you ready to run hotter with better support?

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“Physical fitness is the first requisite of happiness.”

Joseph Pilates

I score each day from -4 to +4 to track how life and progress feel. A morning run predictably improves my state. If I log my tempo before running, I capture a lower baseline.

For 15 years meditation has done the same job, lowering my anxiety and making my decisions better for the rest of the day.

Shutting my laptop by 10pm took years to spot, because the action lands at night and the payoff shows up the next day.

Cold water on the face works in seconds.

On a surface raft above a 300-foot drop, a free-diver splashes cold water across their eyes and cheeks before taking a single breath. Stimulating the facial trigeminal nerve fires the mammalian dive reflex, slowing the heart and shunting blood to the core.

One handful of cold water cuts an elite diver’s heart rate by more than half.

Bright morning light, around 10,000 lux, reaches the retina and sets the clock in the hypothalamus, which drives the morning cortisol rise and the timing of evening melatonin. Charles Czeisler, a circadian researcher at Harvard Medical School, aimed it at NASA astronauts and ground crews drifting off their schedules.

Scheduled bright light moved their clocks to where the mission needed them.

The human body needs core temperature to drop by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit to initiate deep rest. Matthew Walker, a sleep researcher at UC Berkeley, points to the bedroom thermostat: at 65 degrees, blood vessels in the hands and feet dump heat into the air.

That ambient drop raised deep slow-wave rest by 10 to 20 percent.

When your energy drags, the default move is to fight the mind directly. You push harder and try to reason your way through a slump.

Mental state is a lagging output of physical state. When you find the few physical triggers that predictably shift your mental state, you stop negotiating with mood and pull the lever directly.

🧊

What could you do with your body before pushing your mind?

“Thus we are all born into a silent war-game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing.”

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)

I put my newsletter on Product Hunt in 2020 and it won Product of the Month. No newsletter had done that before.

I credited my skill and ignored the market. The newsletter boom was lifting thousands of writers that same year. I was one of them.

Finance splits an investment return into beta and alpha. Beta is what the market gave you just for showing up. Alpha is what your skill added on top.

Beta reaches well past markets.

It can be a massive tailwind: the year you were born, the caste or class you were born into, family wealth or an industry growing 40% a year. A founder who catches a rising tide can drift forward and mistake the current for their own stroke.

Beta can also be a brutal headwind.

Growing up in deep poverty, facing discrimination or building inside a dying market pushes you backward from day one.

If someone starts $50k in debt with no safety net and builds a $100k business, they crossed a canyon. They made real alpha. An heir who starts with $2 million and turns it into $2.1 million barely moved.

The boom was the beta in that Product Hunt win.

Winning it as a newsletter was the alpha.

You see the power of beta in scientific discoveries.

• Newton and Leibniz both built calculus independently, ten years apart.
• Darwin and Wallace both wrote down natural selection by 1858.
• Bell and Gray filed for the telephone at the same patent office on the same morning.

When the same answer arrives twice from people who never met, the era’s beta did the heavy lifting. The tools, the math and the demand were already ripe. The person sped up the arrival, but the discovery belonged to the moment.

Alpha shows up when the result depended on who was in the room.

If you cut Bach, nobody writes the B Minor Mass. The music of the era keeps going. If you cut Einstein in 1905, special relativity still arrives through other physicists quickly. But General Relativity might wait 30 years for someone to see that space itself curves.

Art has no second inventor waiting. The work exists because of your taste, judgment and grit.

When you size up a win, separate the current from the stroke.

🌊

Which rising current could you launch your next project into?

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“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong.”

Sophocles

He sued to save his name and lost his freedom instead.

It started with a card. The Marquess of Queensberry left it at Oscar Wilde’s club, scrawled with the words “posing sodomite,” misspelled and public. Wilde was famous, quick and stung. So he sued Queensberry for libel.

Indignation drove the case into court. Then Queensberry’s lawyer produced a line of witnesses ready to testify about Wilde’s private life. Wilde’s lawyer saw the collapse coming and urged him to drop the suit. On the third day Wilde withdrew.

He waited too long.

The witness statements went straight to the public prosecutor. A warrant went out the same afternoon Queensberry walked free.

Wilde was arrested, convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor. He entered prison a celebrated writer and left it broken.

Wilde escalated the fight into court.

The legal momentum finished him.

He could have ignored the card. That was the brake.

He never pulled it.

A flywheel has no conscience.

A loop that feeds itself accelerates whatever direction you point it. Point it toward compounding wins and one output fuels the next. Point it toward a blunder and momentum carries you straight into a wall.

Poker players call this tilt.

Lose a hand you expected to win and anger takes over. A reckless bet chases the loss.

That bet loses too. Now you are down more chips, angrier and making worse decisions on each deal.

The loop feeds on its own momentum.

Players who survive break the loop immediately: they accept the loss, cash out their remaining chips and walk away from the table.

I know the pull from speed chess.

The app is engineered to feed its own loop: win or lose, one match immediately queues the next to capture more time and attention. If I open the app late at night, that engagement flywheel takes over. An hour slips by and then it is 1 a.m.

The real error happened before the first move: opening the app late at night when willpower was already low.

Wisdom is prevention. But you will still find yourself caught inside loops you did not plan for.

When momentum takes over, you need the muscle to hit the brake.

Meditation gives me the awareness to zoom out to a 40,000-foot view and see myself inside the spiral before it crashes. Running trains the executive control to act on it. When my body screams to stop on a hard mile, my mind forces my legs forward.

Building that control on the trail carries over to the desk. When a negative loop starts spinning, I have the executive function to step in and shut it down.

Wisdom keeps you off the wrong path. Executive control is how you pull the brake when you are already on it.

🛑

What negative loop can you stop before it starts?

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“Error is the engine of evolution.”

Stewart Brand

The drugs were killing people.

In April 1989 the safety board stopped the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial.

For years, cardiologists prescribed encainide and flecainide to suppress abnormal heartbeats after an attack. The logic seemed airtight: if irregular rhythms trigger sudden death, suppressing the beat should save lives.

The study tested that assumption across more than 1,700 patients.

When the safety board compared the double-blind columns, 56 patients on the active drugs died, compared to 22 on the placebo.

Halting the trial stopped a lethal practice that was quietly killing thousands of people each year.

The stakes in medicine are life and death, but the same rule applies to any system. Testing an assumption exposes you to temporary downside to discover what actually works.

I face a low-stakes version of this tradeoff on the Trends.vc email join page.

The page converts above 20%. Pushing for a higher conversion rate means running split tests.

When a baseline is already high, most new variants perform worse.

Each test routes visitors to an unproven design. Some variants shed subscribers before we restore the original baseline.

The short-term numbers look worse.

Short-term downside risk is the price of testing. Running an experiment means accepting temporary dips to discover what actually works.

When an offer or routine is already working well, your natural instinct is to leave it alone. Testing carries immediate downside risk. Why touch something that works?

In 1973 a biologist named Leigh Van Valen looked at extinction rates across the fossil record. Within any group of organisms, the probability of extinction stays roughly constant regardless of how long a species has already survived. Age buys no safety.

His explanation was simple: competing species keep evolving, so improving only keeps you level.

Major journals rejected the paper.

So Van Valen founded a journal called Evolutionary Theory and made his manuscript the first paper it published.

He named the principle after the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

The Red Queen forces Alice to sprint in place: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Standing still guarantees that entropy and competing operators will overtake you.

Most experiments pay nothing. Most attempts drag your metrics down before you find what works.

Each attempt at better opens a door to worse. You pay the short-term drop to find the rare change that compounds.

⚗️

What working routine will you test to make it better?

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“Extreme people get extreme results.”

Sam Altman

He turned down the extra guns and rode in anyway.

In the summer of 1876, George Custer was offered Gatling guns before marching to the Little Bighorn. He said no.

Captain Edward Godfrey remembered the reasoning. They might hamper the movement at a critical moment.

He was also offered two more cavalry companies. Taking them would have roughly tripled his force to around 2,500.

He declined those too.

At the river he split his command four ways. Reno and Benteen took three companies each, about 120 apiece.

Custer rode north with the rest. Each of the 210 men who followed him died. So did he.

Protecting his speed by refusing artillery and extra troops turned an aggressive move into a reckless one. It wiped out his entire command.

I got back into poker recently and the app I use grades aggression on a scale.

It tracks pre-flop raises, steal attempts and re-raises. Then it slots players into five bands: mouse, passive, balanced, aggressive and maniac.

A mouse checks and calls instead of raising. A maniac bets and raises with almost anything.

The scale struck me because it names a spectrum that applies outside the game.

I started slotting my habits onto it. At this floor, am I a mouse, passive, balanced, aggressive or a maniac?

Courage challenges are the clearest case. My floor is 5 a day. That sits between balanced and aggressive.

Pushing that floor to 13 a day would push me into maniac territory. I would be taking reckless risks just to feed the count.

Sam Altman wrote in 2019 that extreme people get extreme results.

He said nothing about those results being good.

Custer was extreme and got an extreme result. The maniac at a poker table gets an extreme result: they either stack everyone or go broke before the night ends.

The far end of any scale is where the largest outcomes live, in both directions.

My first reaction to the scale was that I didn’t want to be a mouse. Nobody does. It sounds like the worst position on the chart.

The worst position sits off the chart entirely.

A mouse who checks and calls still has a seat, a stack of chips and a shot at the pot. Someone who never sat down holds none of those.

Playing timidly still beats not showing up.

In areas that carry your highest ambitions, a passive setting bleeds opportunity. You have to push the pace.

Where you just need to cover a base or maintain a baseline, a mouse setting does the job. Sizing the habit to the bare minimum keeps the system moving without draining energy from what matters most.

Aggression decides how much you win. Presence makes winning possible at all.

🎛️

What habit are you running on the wrong setting right now?

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“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”

Steve Jobs

I turn off my phone at 10pm each night.

My laptop closes at 9pm. Work finishes by 4pm.

Messaging apps stay closed until 12pm. Coffee stays off the menu, with all caffeine ending by 10am. Meals happen only between 12pm and 10pm.

My diet excludes sugar, rice, fried food, grapes and watermelon. Red meat appears only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Chess and poker wait until work ends and stop by 8pm.

These 10 rules are anti-habits.

Commitment habits are the actions chosen for execution: meditating for 2.5 hours, running for 13 minutes, doing 21 experiments, finishing 5 courage challenges and reaching out to 5 people a day. Each demands time, energy and working memory.

Standard advice focuses on what to add: morning routines, daily disciplines and habit stacks. But adding more disciplines increases fragility.

The more parts a system has, the more prone it is to breaking. Adding more tasks increases context-switching and makes a daily routine fragile. To keep work reliable, you must put a strict limit on active commitments.

Anti-habits protect capacity by deciding what stays outside.

A refusal requires zero runtime execution, so you can maintain dozens of boundaries without cluttering your day. Turning off a phone at 10pm protects sleep, making the next morning’s schedule far more likely to hold.

Under the Federal Aviation Administration’s Sterile Cockpit Rule, flight crews cannot chat, eat or read non-flight material below 10,000 feet. The policy protects the pilots’ attention so they can execute critical checklists during takeoff and landing.

In surgery, teams maintain a sterile field around the patient. Staff hold their hands above the waist, keep unsterilized tools off the tray and leave unscrubbed visitors outside the perimeter. The barrier stops contamination so the surgeon can finish the operation safely.

When your routine starts to break down, adding more disciplines exhausts the system.

Instead of piling on new tasks, set anti-habits on what you refuse to do.

🛡️

What anti-habit would make your most important commitment habit easier?

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“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

William Blake

I cut my team’s one-on-ones from every 2 weeks to once a month. Stretching the schedule looked like a clean win: fewer calls and more hours back.

Alignment broke instead. Feedback piled up, expectations pulled apart and reconciling the drift took more time than the calls I set out to save. I moved them back to every 2 weeks.

Stretching the time between calls revealed the hurdle rate for team alignment: 2 weeks kept us aligned, 4 weeks fell behind.

Each habit has a hurdle rate: the minimum input the system needs to clear what pushes back on it.

Entropy pushes back on each habit: competition, fatigue, things going wrong, life. Run below the rate and you lose ground, however faithfully you show up.

In 1966, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern put 5 healthy 20-year-olds on complete bed rest for 3 weeks. 3 weeks of lying still dropped their aerobic capacity by 27 percent.

30 years later, cardiologist Benjamin Levine measured the same 5 men as 50-year-olds. 30 years of natural aging only reduced their fitness by 12 percent.

3 weeks of zero input cost them more conditioning than 30 years of aging.

The Silver Bridge had no regular inspection schedule when it collapsed into the Ohio River in December 1967. 46 people died.

Investigators traced the disaster to a single crack in 1 steel eyebar. In 1971, the federal government established the first national bridge safety standard: every 2 years by a trained inspector.

It took 46 deaths to discover the minimum check a suspension bridge needs to survive.

Pay below the hurdle rate and you lose ground. Pay too far above it and you waste energy on diminishing returns. You find a habit’s hurdle rate by lowering what you put in until progress slips, then returning to the input that held.

📉

Which habit could you trim until you feel the floor?