Most Human Wins

A Strategy Memo for Humans, 2025 and Beyond

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Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by 2025 Presenting Sponsor… Rox

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When I wrote about Rox last year, I heard from a lot of you that this is the revenue tool you’ve been waiting for. No overpromises. No Salesforce implementation. Just insights and assistance. So Ishan and I decided to team up to get more Not Boring readers on Rox.

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Wednesday! It is good to be back!

It’s been a minute. This is as long as I’ve gone without writing an essay since starting Not Boring. That’s intentional, as you’ll read in today’s essay. I don’t think this is an essay I could have written if I hadn’t given it time to breathe.

There’s this growing narrative, perpetuated in large part by the AI labs themselves, that AI is going to be able to do everything that humans do, and more, very soon. Last night, OpenAI announced a $500 billion project to accelerate that future (although Elon says they don’t have the money).

So what will happen to us humans? Will we be put out to pasture? Is it over?

This essay explores that using a little philosophy, a little math, and a lot of business strategy. A preview: we’re just getting started.

Let’s get to it.

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Most Human Wins

Since the last time I wrote to you, I have spent a lot of time meditating and a lot of time reading about meditation.

I am as beginner as beginner gets, and not just in the “beginner’s mind” sense, in the actual sense, but one thing I’ve come to understand is that meditation is a process of understanding what we are not so we can better see what we are.

There’s a fun phrase for this: neti neti.

When you sit in silence and make yourself observe, you notice things like:

“I am not my thoughts, because I can observe them come and go.”

“I am not my emotions, because I can watch them rise and fall.”

“I am not my body sensations, because I can feel them changing.”

The idea is to strip all of that away so that you know – not intellectually, but gnostically – that “you” are a process, an undefinable part of an incomprehensible whole.

Meditation is also the process of moving up abstraction layers. From living inside of your thoughts to observing your thoughts. Once you stop identifying with something and observe it, you commoditize and modularize it; that is not a unique “I am ugly and no one will ever love me,” that is just a thought.

What is true spiritually is true economically, too.

As more of the work that humans have historically had to do gets commoditized, we get a clearer understanding of what it is that is uniquely human.

“I am not a farmer, because I can go to the grocery store.”

“I am not a heavy object carrier, because I can drive a truck.”

“I am not a computer, because I can use a computer.”

Of course, we have the ability to be all of those things, but those things are not all we are.

It’s no wonder, maybe, that I and so many others are drawn to meditation at this moment in time, that we’re allowing the magic to return.

Machines are now able to do things we long thought only humans could: writing, speaking, science, math, code.

OpenAI o3 Benchmarks, Weights and Biases

This is the Great Commoditization.

Things that were once scarce and precious are becoming abundant and cheap, quickly.

Things that were once hard-won outputs – of years of study and tireless dedication, of multi-billion dollar government programs – are becoming readily available inputs.

From the perspective of a human or a business who previously commanded a premium for what is now readily available at low-cost, it can feel unsettling. It is unsettling.

But as fast as it’s happening now, this is not a new phenomenon. It’s the way of things.

The history of progress is the continued commoditization of once-scarce things.

Commoditization is the mechanism of compounding. It’s only by turning previously rare and unwieldy things into building blocks that we can build bigger and bigger things.

Its biggest beneficiaries are those who recognize what’s becoming commoditized and what will become either possible or precious as a result.

There is a whole business strategy canon related to understanding where value pops up when it disappears in one place. But in order to apply business strategy to something that feels so personal, you need to realize this:

Humans are not being commoditized. Certain things that we thought only we could do are.

When you view each skill as a valuable commodity – some more precious and rare than others, and therefore more valuable, but commodities nonetheless – you can start thinking strategically instead of waiting for the inevitable.

Let go of your attachments. Consider the resources available. Plan.

This is a strategy memo for humans.

Marcel and Albert

I can tell, you’re not with me yet. This one feels weird. Machines that can think like we can.

Recognize this: even cognitive commoditization is not new.

We do it to each other. Whoever operates at the higher layer uses others’ work as input.

Raise your hand if you know who Marcel Grossmann is. A few physics fans in the back. I see you. For everyone else, here’s a little story.

In 1907, Albert Einstein had what he would call his “happiest thought,” born of his very human intuition: “The gravitational field has only a relative existence… Because for an observer freely falling from the roof of a house - at least in his immediate surroundings - there exists no gravitational field.”

For the next four years, he struggled to turn that happy thought into a coherent theory. Simple mathematics couldn’t deal with the audacity of his insight. Specifically, simple mathematics couldn’t handle the accelerating reference frames that he imagined.

In 1912, he took a professorship in theoretical physics at ETH Zurich, where he reconnected with an old mathematician classmate: Marcel Grossmann.

It was Grossmann who realized that Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus, both of which existed purely in the world of pure mathematics because physics hadn't yet had a need for them, might do the trick. God doesn’t play dice: he had the math waiting when Einstein needed it, and Grossmann to bridge the gap.

They bridged the gap in 1912 and 1913. The two wrote a paper together, “Entwurf,” coming close to General Relativity (GR), but the equations weren’t quite right yet.

Grossmann went back to his work. Einstein spent the next two years struggling with various versions of the field equations, trying to make it tie out. For a time, the math was so hard that he went back to simpler approaches.

In 1915, he realized that he had to stick with the tensor approach, worked intensely for a few weeks, and finally arrived at the correct field equations of GR. He presented them to the Prussian Academy of Sciences over four weekly lectures.

Einstein unlocked the universe.

For more than a century, GR has passed every experimental test thrown at it, often with remarkable precision. Even ideas that seem to break the known laws of physics may just be engineering skill issues. In 2010, Hal Puthoff wrote a paper, Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering, that suggested that observations of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs, or what we used to called UFOs) – things like time manipulation, faster than light travel, and antigravity – can all fit with within GR.

Einstein commoditized Grossmann, in a way. He used Grossman’s output as his input, while he himself provided the spark that could not be reduced, the intuition, and the drive to see it through for nearly a decade, a drive perhaps only possible if you yourself experienced the spark.

“Commoditized” is not a knock against Grossmann.

Einstein’s intuitive gift was made more valuable by the commoditization of its complement: the mathematics required to turn it into a theory. Without Grossmann, you may not know Einstein.

We imagine the word commoditized as an insult, but rare commodities can be very valuable indeed. Give me an ounce of Rhodium, even a gram of Painite, Tritium, or, better, Californium any day.

If you look up “commodity” in the dictionary, you’ll find this secondary definition: “something of use, advantage, or value.”

At the time Grossmann constructed the mathematical bridge that made General Relativity reachable, his mathematical ability was a very rare commodity indeed. You had to be Albert Einstein and hold a professorship at ETH Zurich to access it. If Grossmann’s mathematical talent was a commodity, it was Rhodium ($20,880 per ounce) than Chlorine (8 cents per kg).

What is fascinating is that, now, 113 years later, math is becoming Chlorine.

I just had this exchange with o1 pro:

I told it I was Einstein, gave it my happiest thought, and asked it to help me with the math.

It did, in a couple minutes. Marcel Grossmann, included in a $200 per month subscription.

Of course, it has the benefit of knowing what Grossmann did. And Grossmann himself made an intuitive leap; it was not obvious that Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus held the key. o1 pro did not have to make that same leap. It just had to do some math.

But the trend is clear: answers to even very hard questions are becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. Which means the ability to ask them is getting more and more and more valuable.

In other words, the cheaper Grossmann becomes, the more valuable Einstein becomes.

A Strategy Memo for Humans

This is very good news or very bad news depending on your skills and aspirations.

What is clear, though, is that it is not a simple situation. It is certainly not as simple as, “AI will replace all of our economic value and steal our meaning,” nor is it as simple as, “Don’t worry, everybody will be fine.”

The situation, like most situations, is dynamic. Dynamic situations require strategy.

If our highest and best use isn’t our ability to do hard math, what is it? If we reduce Einstein to AI next, what are we?

Neti neti.

Now I can tell you’re with me. The situation is different than it appears. We can fight.

It has been said that “the only alpha left in life is sitting in rare books and manuscripts, & scrolls that OpenAI hasn’t fed into the machine yet. Your job is to find them, read them, and destroy them before they get to them.”

I need you to print this, read it, and destroy it. It is password protected so the AIs can’t read it. Try “rerecaptcha”. Don’t tell them. Don’t tell Sam.

This is a strategy memo for humans.

Read it, and come back.

Notes on the Process

When I started writing this piece, I didn’t know it was going to end up where it ended up. It started as a normal strategy essay.

I had six strategies companies have historically used for dealing with commoditization at one layer of the stack – similar to those in the One Strategy section – and that was pretty much going to be the payload.

The idea was simple:

1. Some human skills are being commoditized.

2. Things get commoditized all the time.

3. Here are the strategies that people and businesses have used to compete.

Even that idea was an evolution. I started thinking about something like this piece over the break, but it was a different idea then. Something about how I was planning to approach 2025 differently as a window into what I think will be a particularly crazy year: less scheduled, because you want to be long optionality into increasing volatility, for example. There was going to be something about writing fewer, deeper pieces, and about leaving room to experiment.

I probably have eight or nine drafts of different versions of this thing. I’ve been working on them for the past three weeks. I was going to send on the 7th, then the 14th, even yesterday. But the drafts weren’t right, so I didn’t send.

I guess I will write about those other things I was going to write about now, because they’re pertinent.

Last year, I might have just hit send on a polished version of one of those earlier drafts. Everything was set up to do that: we booked sponsors into individual dates, and had a packed calendar. (Awesome work, Nancy!) I wouldn’t have sent anything I wasn’t proud of, but I would have slammed coffee and sprinted to the deadline. I can’t tell you how many essays I reworked starting at 4am on Tuesday morning last year. And it worked well enough; I was happy with last year’s writing, though it can always improve.

For 2025, though, I wanted to give my essays more room to breathe. I want more time to go really, really deep on Deep Dives. And I want weirder ideas to have time to evolve.

One thing we did was change how we do sponsors. We now have three presenting sponsors for 2025 that I’m honored to be telling you about more consistently: Rox, Ramp, and Vanta. If you need sales, finance, or compliance – and every company does – go say thanks to them to kick us off on the right foot. Importantly, they don’t have set dates. Whenever I send an essay, one of the three will sponsor it. So if a piece just isn’t there, I don’t hit send.

I have to be honest. Not sprinting against a deadline felt weird. I moved out of the home office and into a real office for the first time in five years at the beginning of the year, and it’s quiet. I thought maybe it was too quiet to be productive. It felt lazy not getting anything out.

At the same time, though, just getting things out is no longer valuable, to the extent that it ever was. Or, it’s less valuable than ever. Even pretty good writing is commoditized.

So I kept banging my head against this piece, trying to write something that wasn’t just slop, even good slop. Trying to write something unique on a topic a lot of smart people (and even more smart AIs) have written about.

I meditated a lot, too. I’ve meditated every day for the past 45 days, since the day I decided to start meditating. Some days for as few as 10 minutes, some for as many as 90. For the first time in an adult life of trying to meditate because I thought I should, this time actually feels like something in my brain is changing, even if it’s subtle.

That, too, weirded me out! I’ve been worried that I’ve gotten too chill and detached, that I’d “one shotted” myself as the kids say. I haven’t felt very stressed, when in the past, not sending anything for a few weeks would have really stressed me out. But Trust the Process, as they say.

Then last week, something interesting started happening.

On Friday, I came into the office, meditated, and then had the insight at the beginning of this piece: niti niti economics.

On Saturday, on my commute in, I decided to go no headphones and just let myself think. I’ve also been reading a bunch of seemingly random things and letting them clank around my brain, including There is No Antimemetics Division and the CIA Reading Room. While I was walking and thinking, another idea hit me: do an old-school memo. The memorandum linked above is the result.

Then on Monday, I commuted without headphones again, and as I was about to get into the subway, a final idea struck: that in the end, what all of this is for is to maximize novel human experience, relations, and love. That one clearly came from the work I did for The Return of Magic and related reading over the break, but it struck me like a bolt that that’s the economic end game, too. That we want to live longer and travel further and accumulate more resources in order to experience more of what it means to be human. When you strip it all away, that’s the uniquely human thing, and something that even the best competition can’t take away.

I stopped, recorded the idea into Claude, asked for feedback, and chatted the whole way in, working on the idea, refining it, beating it up. When I got into the office, I incorporated it into the piece, then kept refining, adding, cutting. All the way, both Claude and ChatGPT provided feedback, some useful, some less so. The feedback I dismiss the most quickly is the feedback that tries to add too much polish. I want this one to be weird.

I even got their help writing out mathematical proofs for some of the ideas in the piece, something I simply never would have included before but can now, practically for free. I’m not sure it adds too much, besides a little Grossmann callback, but it’s a newly commoditized ingredient that I can throw in the mix. I don’t expect it to become a constant.

Anyway, I’m not sure this essay is strictly better than anything ChatGPT or Claude or DeepSeek or Grok will be able to write in a year, but it’s certainly different. And personally, the experience of those AHA! moments and the realization that strategy and religion/mysticism point to the same truth were experiences worth having. I hope reading them is a good experience.

Now I’ve written it. These ideas are now a commodity. Take them, remix them, incorporate them, build on them, or even throw them out, leave them sitting in the back of your head until they might be of use.

This will be a theme of 2025. Understand what was formerly scarce and is now commoditized. Don’t shrink from it. Play with it. Experiment. See what it can do that you used to have to do. Learn what you can do with it that you couldn’t before.

At Not Boring, we’re going to experiment a ton. Aman and Sehaj are cooking up new tools, like the agents behind Boring News, and the three of us are coming up with ideas for things we couldn’t have previously done without them. We want to use more compute per person than any other fund.

A framing I’ve found helpful, and maybe you will too, is that there exists out there the one thing that would be the best we could accomplish this year. There is one investment that will turn out to have been the best investment we could have made. There is one essay that is the best essay only I could write. Discovering and executing on those are the mission, and whatever inputs we can use to achieve it, we should.

That’s the fun thing about getting to be alive right now. If you’re open and curious, you’ll be able to do more, and learn more about yourself, than has ever been possible.

Don’t let the machines get you down. Make them lift you up.

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Thanks to Claude and ChatGPT for editing and input.

And thanks to our 2025 Presenting Sponsors who make deeper explorations like this possible: Rox, Ramp, and Vanta. Get your company set up right to start the year. Rox, Ramp, and Vanta.

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That’s all for today! We’ll be back in your inbox with a Weekly Dose on Friday.

Thanks for reading,

Packy