Reads & Riffs: public intelligence, miasma madness, indie protocols, elderly housing market, AGI fact/fiction, info commons | #295

some things I enjoyed reading and thinking about

May 2, 2025: Greetings from Koh Samui, Thailand. It’s nice to be sending this again on a Saturday. For some reason, when my days are “ahead” of the US workweek, I can publish more regularly at the end of the week. We are in Koh Samui for a month at the start of a year of exploring in Asia (more on this soon, I promise). We have some other stops planned, but are open to meeting up with others, especially families, so let me know where you’ll be. I will also host some events in Chiang Mai, Singapore, and potentially other locations. Please message me if you want me to do something in your city.

📘 New Release: I dropped 250 gift editions of Good Work (epub + pdf) on Metalabel. You can “collect” it here. (Would love any feedback on their platform too, as I’m planning more experiments). There are about 100 left as they went a bit faster than I thought!

My daughter has an insatiable thirst for going in the water and pools and I am trying to keep up!

👋 Welcome to “reads and riffs” - I’m likely going to start a more formal (or as formal as I get) section of “links & riffs” where I’ll share things I’ve been reading and also my reactions to them. Expect these about once a month or so.

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#1 We need a public intelligence:

Kevin Kelly

writes on imagining a future “public intelligence”:

Imagine 50 years from now a Public Intelligence that was a distributed, open-source, non-commercial artificial intelligence, operated like the internet, and available to the whole world. This public AI would be a federated system, not owned by any one entity, but powered by millions of participants to create an aggregate intelligence beyond what one host could offer.

He makes a compelling argument in this vein for embracing AI more fully as our fear likely just empowers further centralization and control:

There is a very natural tendency for AI to become centralized by a near monopoly, and probably a corporate monopoly. Intelligence is a networked good. The more it is used, the more it can learn. The more it learns, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more it is used. Ad infinitum. A really good AI can swell very fast as it is used and gets better. All these dynamics move AI to become centralized and a winner-take-all. The alternative to public intelligence is a corporate or a national intelligence. If we don’t empower public intelligence, then we have no choice but to empower non-public intelligences.

In reading this (and many other recent posts from Kevin) I’m really impressed by his lasting curiosity as he ages. A role model for sure.

#2 Protocols for Indie Lives:

I’m a big fan of what Timour, Janine and team are doing with Edge City. I think the popup city is a positive addition to the increasing indie world of free agents and remote workers. They are doing another popup city in California this year (message me for a discount code!) and also launching several residency/fellowship programs for entrepreneurs and creators including a program to harness “magical weirdness.” (sounds fun)

They’ve already hosted 5-6 of these popup experiences and I think they are serving as an important node for people who don’t quite fit in traditional systems of employment. This is a big barrier for people who want to do their own thing but aren’t sure how to find opportunities, how to collaborate, or simply, how to make friends.

I plan to hopefully attend a full month somewhere in the world at a future popup city and ideally would like to host some sort of writing sprint over a week (or maybe I’ll do it on my own in Asia).

#3 Taking The Leap:

I always enjoy reading about people’s reflections, especially early on the journey. They rarely map to our perceptions of what we think bold leaps are supposed to look like.

Emily

just joined substack and wrote this reflection on leaving her job:

So where am I now? I’m going in the dark, without a light.

I have 4 months of runway left of my savings. I’ve managed to get one freelance sales advisory client from my network, and I will need more - but mainly I want to open up space to try different things, and build my own path day by day.

I have difficult moments (many of them) where I think - what the HELL am I doing?

But I am doing it.

And maybe I’ll write about it as I go.

On leaving my career without a plan

#4 On Aging & Inheritances:

Nick Maggiulli on why you should give money away to your children when they are younger.

To make matters worse, the average age at which someone receives an inheritance has been increasing over time. In 1989, the average age of inheritance was 41 and today it’s around 51.

I wrote about my own reflections (and plans) in my review of Die With Zero. Norms like this are interesting to revisit as people live longer.

We live in a weird time in which the current oldest generation has benefitted from epic economic tailwinds and is living longer & healthier lives to enjoy the wealth they’ve built. Eventually some of that money may be passed down but I could see increasing amounts of it spent as markets develop around catering to the first retired generation primed for consumerism via mass media.

#5 Minimally Extractive:

Also Nick Maggiulli on how to be “minimally extractive” through the lens of Jack Bogle and his work with lowering fees for investors at Vanguage. I think a good lesson for any profession. Here is Nick on his own approach:

But that’s it. I’ve tried to make money through writing in the most honest, minimally extractive way possible. It’s the thing that I pride myself on the most. Not my pageviews, book sales, or follower count.

No, the thing I value the most is that I’ve been writing for 8 years and haven’t sold my soul. I’ve turned down hundreds of brand partnerships, affiliate deals, memecoins (lol), and more because they weren’t a good fit for individual investors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Mother Theresa. I want to make money as much as the next person. But I’m not willing to sacrifice my integrity to do so. That’s what really matters. I can look in the mirror every day knowing that I did things my way.

I agree with Nick’s self-assessment. He’s been a good actor in this weird world.

#6 Reality is weirder than I thought:

RFK Jr. isn’t simply a “vaccine skeptic,” he literally doesn’t believe in germ theory. This is from Paul Offit, the inventor of the Rotavirus vaccine, one of the safest vaccines in the world:

Nonetheless, in a section in his book titled “Miasma vs. Germ Theory,” RFK Jr. continues to embrace the miasma theory, writing the following statements:

“The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccinations are only two of the many indicators of the dominating ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public health policy. A $1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology…The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune responses.”

Understanding RFK Jr.

This is just bad thinking but it does take us a long time to update ideas. And weirdly, health agencies around the world were hesitant to say Covid was airborne in 2020 because of a legacy of a fear of empowering miasmists and their believe in pungent odors that cause disease.

Here is a quote from a book review I wrote on the Ghost Map, a book about solving the cholera outbreak in London, back in 2021:

In 2020 doctors were thus living with this legacy, terrified to say that diseases spread through the air. Wash your hands and "socially distance". In 2021 aerosol spread is known, yet many still think that eating indoors behind a barrier magically stops disease spread.

Zeynep Tufekci has a great essay and quotes an epidemiologist from Australia: “If we started revisiting airflow, we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do...It will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society.”

Pretty wild. In 2025, most people still thinking washing hands rather than purifier air and increasing ventilation is the best way to stop viruses. I guess we still need time to update!

#7 Housing is for old people now

On top of increasing demands for more space for the average household, we aren’t building enough housing, except maybe in Austin? I am not that optimistic this will change anytime soon.

Everyone has their ideas and solutions but it’s probably just not a good marker for societal health when the average age of a homebuyer is 56 and first time home buyers are only 23% of the market.

Personally, I’ve lost interest in becoming a homebuyer in the US. It doesn’t seem practical without major employment changes in most places I’d want to live, especially at 7% interest rates. But I’m happy with this as I love exploring alternative ways of living anyway. I suspect most people are not quite as happy about it.

I suspect we’ll see norms change: parents paying for homes instead or or in addition to education, and young people exploring new ways of thinking about where to live, including living abroad as an expat.

#8 WTF is AGI?!

I have no idea what AGI is and the more time I spent trying to figure it out, the more lost I became.

I think

Jasmine Sun

nails it here:

Finally, I conclude that AGI is more a worldview than technology—nobody knows when we’ll get there, or where “there” is—and we may be better off focusing on the AIs we build along the way.

The whole essay is a good read.

I also found this essay on AI as a “normal” technology as much more persuasive and easier to understand than most of the bolder “AI changes everything in 2-3 years papers coming out of AI research labs:

We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

I think my experience as a consultant and in so many large organizations shapes my priors on the possible pace of change in the economy. I don’t think many people, especially those having only worked in AI, have good mental models of how much of the economy actually works. I don’t think “intelligence” is the constraint in most industries as much as physical limits, legacy (and working) business models, complexity, regulation, and structural issues.

Tyler Cowen shares this belief that AI won’t lead to a “fast takeoff”.ere are two of his points:

• A simple way to put it is that you are not smart enough to notice directly how much better o5 will be than o3. For various complex computational tasks, not observed by humans, the more advanced model of course will be more effective. But when it comes to working with humans, those extra smarts largely will be wasted.

• The human IQ-wages gradient is quite modest, suggesting that more IQ in the system does not raise productivity dramatically. You might think that does not hold across the super-intelligent margin the machines will inhabit, but the O-Ring model suggests otherwise, apart from some specialized calculations where the machine does not need to collaborate with humans.

#9 AI Experiments

Despite my hesitance toward AI completely changing the world in the next two years, I do think it's a pretty mind-blowing technology. I've been using it almost daily and need to do a post of everything I'm using it for.

In the meantime, my friend

Khe Hy

is chronicling his own addiction curiosity with new AI tools here.

He’s a substack n00b too. Excited for more people to be hanging out on notes.

#10 Intellectual commons

kyla scanlon

is circling a similar topic to my previous newsletter on the informational commons. I like this test:

Here’s a quick way to tell if a space has healthy informational commons: Can you describe reality without immediately sparking an argument?

Can we agree on a common language, basic facts, or even what words mean? Increasingly, the answer is: No.

The informational commons - language, reality, and basic consensus - is collapsing because we've monetized division. Social media platforms aren't built for clarity or understanding; they're optimized for engagement, outrage, and polarization. Algorithms don't reward nuance; they reward certainty, controversy, and emotional triggers.

What replaces consensus reality? Loyalty realities. Tribal realities. Personalized realities!! We no longer debate ideas or solutions - we debate whose facts count, whose feelings matter, whose truth wins. Truth itself becomes a loyalty test, not a shared ground. And without a shared informational commons, cooperation becomes impossible. We don’t solve problems, we fight over who gets to define them!

Language is weaponized and reality is fractured.

#11 Books in the last year

I recently wrote up some of the books I finished over the past year. Here are the top ones:

Non-fiction: Two books from friends were great and I enjoyed both

• Crypto Confidential: I’m a sucker for the personal narrative + non-fiction combo because it’s what I liked to write too. Nat Eliason’s book is less about crypto and more about his own journey of making sense of work, life, and family through crazy times.

• Tiny Experiments: Anne-Laure is great, and the book felt resonant with her online writing for years. I feel like this is by far the best how-to companion for people who loved The Pathless Path. I suspect many people will buy both for years to come, which is while I’ll be a part-time promoter of this book indefinitely.

Historical fiction

• How We Disappeared, Jing-Jing Lee: Powerful historical novel set in Singapore that details a woman's experience as a "comfort woman" during the Japanese occupation in WWII, and a young boy's modern-day discovery of his grandmother's secret past. Slow start but picks up and very interesting lens into WWII asian life.

• The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng: Enjoyable historical fiction set in Penang, Malaysia, in the 1920s, detailing a visit from the writer Somerset Maugham to a British family. Overlaps with the Chinese revolution efforts of the time, including Sun Yat-sen's activities in the region. Really nice mix of story, characters, real history, and scandal.

• Cold Victory, Karl Marlantes: Fiction. Set in post-war Helsinki in 1947, the story unfolds around two military wives, one Russian, one American, whose husbands' drunken ski race challenge sets off a chain of dangerous events. Interesting view into the tensions in Finland at the time, too.

• The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo: Historical fantasy set in 1890s Colonial Malaysia about a young Chinese woman who agrees to become a ghost bride to a wealthy family's deceased son. Exploration of Chinese customs and traditions, which I found interesting, but the story was a bit meandering at times.

True stories / historical

• The Spy and the Traitor, Ben Macintyre: An Entertaining account of Oleg Gordievsky, perhaps the most impactful KGB double agent of the Cold War. Chronicles his journey from KGB officer to MI6 informant, culminating in a breathtaking escape from Moscow via Finland. My heart was racing at the end.

• American Kingpin, Nick Bilton: A very fast-paced account of Ross Ulbricht, creator of the Silk Road dark web marketplace. Chronicles his rise from libertarian idealist to running a billion-dollar drug empire, and eventual capture by the FBI. Many interesting characters throughout. Not sure who I was rooting for at the end.

• Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson: An almost day-by-day walkthrough of the lead-up to the start of the civil war. A clear-eyed look at the emergent mania around succession, Lincoln’s leadership skills and an unavoidable conflict from many different perspectives. Very cool to read so many first person perspectives from the time.

Memoirs

• Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey: An epic audiobook. McConaughey's life story is fascinating. Pathless human and self-aware of the mysterious and poetic nature of life. His narration is masterful, one of the best audiobooks I've ever experienced.

• Here After, Amy Lin: Heavy memoir about the loss of her partner and process of grief. Raw and poetic. Intense.

• Tokyo Noir, Jake Adelstein: A follow-up to the bestseller and TV series Tokyo Vice, this book details Jake’s post-takedown of the yakuza days and his making sense of his life in midlife. The book wanders a bit and has interesting thoughts on the underworld and crime, but comes together through the touching personal relationships Jake has toward the end.

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Thanks for reading with me

Which I’ve been doing since 2015. I’ve somehow figured out how to hack a living doing things like this.

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