J. Eric Wilson

See a problem, fix a problem.🔥PhD in hot sauce.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

The only thing worse than having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI is not having the CEO knee-deep in building stuff with AI.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Deep inner suffering inevitably arises when the human person is reduced to performance, consumption, or a statistical datum. Many young people today live under the yoke of expectations to perform, immersed in an exasperated competitiveness that generates anxiety, fear of not measuring up, and disorientation.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

@mattvanswol @NYCMayor The idea for DOGE was good but implemented poorly. Missed opportunity to develop thoughtful case studies with insights on “low-hanging fruit” policies that can be shared with states.

[Olivia Moore @omooretweets]

So many people do not understand this - and it is core to consumer software👇

Gen Z and beyond does not care about data privacy as long as a product delivers for them

Bank accounts, contact book, email access, camera roll, etc. - they will gladly give it up

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

Huge trust hurdle to convince people to connect their finances.

[ChatGPT @ChatGPTapp]

A preview for Pro users: a new personal finance experience in ChatGPT.

Pro users in the U.S. can securely connect financial accounts, see where their money is going, and ask questions based on the information they choose to connect.

Your full financial picture, now in ChatGPT.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

I’ve shared this with several friends.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

🤮

[Sam Altman @sama]

Our Principles:

Democratization, Empowerment, Universal Prosperity, Resilience, and Adaptability

https://t.co/g58WGndARw

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

So. Much. Noise. In all my feeds, on every platform. Spam filters need to race faster in blocking chat bots.

[Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman]

Not enough companies are using AI to dissolve the coordination tax.

As you add people and increase scope, the tax on aligning them grows superlinearly.

AI can increase throughput without adding layers of humans whose core job is alignment work.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

Hi @grok, how many regulatory hurdles and fees are included in developing, owning, and operating a casino?

Now compare that to popular gambling apps that put a casino in your pocket.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

“People tell you who they are, but we ignore it. Because we want them to be who we want them to be.” Don Draper talking about President Trump.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this is actually insane

> be tech guy in australia
> adopt cancer riddled rescue dog, months to live
> not_going_to_give_you_up.mp4
> pay $3,000 to sequence her tumor DNA
> feed it to ChatGPT and AlphaFold
> zero background in biology
> identify mutated proteins, match them to drug targets
> design a custom mRNA cancer vaccine from scratch
> genomics professor is “gobsmacked” that some puppy lover did this on his own
> need ethics approval to administer it
> red tape takes longer than designing the vaccine
> 3 months, finally approved
> drive 10 hours to get rosie her first injection
> tumor halves
> coat gets glossy again
> dog is alive and happy
> professor: “if we can do this for a dog, why aren’t we rolling this out to humans?”

one man with a chatbot, and $3,000 just outperformed the entire pharmaceutical discovery pipeline.

we are going to cure so many diseases.
I dont think people realize how good things are going to get

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Boil the Oceans

You know the phrase: “don’t boil the ocean.” Everyone’s said it in some overly ambitious meeting. It’s good advice in normal times. It keeps teams focused. It prevents scope creep. But we are no longer in normal times, and I think it’s time to retire saying it.

Artificial Superintelligence means it’s time to boil the ocean. We’ll start with a few lakes first.

I was recently with a university endowment’s head of private investing who told me their engineers were terrified for their jobs after seeing what Claude Code could do. And I get it — that’s the natural first reaction. But it’s the wrong one. It’s a zero-sum reaction to a positive-sum moment.

Instead of worrying about doing the same thing we’ve been doing for cheaper, why not focus on doing the thing we never even dreamed of doing? Why can’t that endowment achieve 50% net IRR instead of 10%? Why can’t a startup deliver a service that is 100x better than the incumbent? Why can’t we have fusion energy? Why can’t we talk to every single user and have a perfect understanding of every bug in our product?

These aren’t rhetorical questions anymore. They’re engineering problems with paths to solutions.

Here is what I think is actually going on with the fear: our fear of the future is directly proportional to how small our ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, then yes, a machine that can do it faster and cheaper is terrifying. But if your plan is to do something dramatically bigger, then the machine is the best news you’ve ever gotten.

If you’re a worker — someone who trades labor for a living — this is the moment to become a builder. Start a business. And if you’re already management or capital, it’s time to go 10x more hardcore on what your aspirations could be. Not eking out 5% efficiency gains. Not increasing profit margins 2% by lowering cost and firing people. Those are the old games. The new question is: what would it look like to build a product or service so good that people would happily pay 10x what they pay now?

The net result of this is more jobs, not fewer. As Ryan Petersen likes to say, the human desire for more things is absolutely limitless. We can actually fulfill that desire now — if we have the agency to prompt it for ourselves.

Buckminster Fuller coined the term “ephemeralization” in 1938: doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing. His entire vision of progress was about technology enabling radical expansion of human capability through dematerialization. He traced this from stone bridges to iron trusses to steel cables — each iteration stronger, longer, lighter, cheaper. He wasn’t describing job destruction. He was describing civilization getting better at being civilization.

This is Jevons Paradox for everything. When you make a resource dramatically more efficient, you don’t use less of it — you use vastly more. Steam engines didn’t reduce coal consumption. They made coal so useful that demand exploded. The same thing is about to happen with intelligence, with labor, with every service and product we can imagine.

But Jevons Paradox doesn’t activate on its own. It requires capital and management to actually raise their ambitions — to boil lakes and oceans instead of drowning them in committee

That’s what startups have always been good at: moving fast in the face of radical uncertainty, building for the 10x future while everyone else is optimizing for the 1.05x present.

Time to start.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

When did war, including the deaths of men, women, and school children, become something to trivialize?

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

UNDEFEATED.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

@JonHaidt @RepAuchincloss Top-down policies, instead of student-driven solutions in schools, is going to make this the next DARE.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

How many more steps away from its original nonprofit mission is @OpenAI willing to take?

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

@greg_price11 Disagree with most but I’m for ranked choice voting.

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

Who was in the room when this drug deal went down?

Louisiana waived $3.3 billion in sales taxes (enough to build 33 high schools or pay every public school teacher for a year) to attract Meta’s Hyperion data center, which will create just 326 permanent jobs.

h/t @kylewestaway

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

How Newell Brands onshored the manufacturing of Sharpie pens to a 37-year-old factory in Tennessee, while enhancing quality and without raising prices https://t.co/ewaXg53Uqf

[J. Eric Wilson @jericwilson]

Both sides are blaming the other for the #shutdown. Shocked. Which narrative will you accept and echo?