Thanks for making time for this. Age of Robots is a publication about navigating humanity at the edge of something new. The ideas, the people, and the questions that don’t have easy answers yet.
These questions are yours. Take as much or as little space as you need. No wrong answers. Just your thinking in your words.
We’ll share a draft with you before anything goes live.
You left a comfortable job in 2017 because it was too comfortable. That’s a strange thing to say, most people spend their lives chasing comfort.
Now AI promises the most comfortable era in human history. Fewer decisions, less friction, optimized everything. Should we be worried about getting what we wished for?
You spent three years making nothing. No product, no revenue, no audience. Just a man on a bike in Atlanta, listening to podcasts, trying to feel his way toward the thing he could do forever.
An AI can now do that search in seconds - here are 50 businesses matched to your personality profile. But you wouldn’t have found Trends.vc that way.
What did the emptiness teach you that efficiency never could?
Yesterday you published “Somebody Has to Absorb It.” You traced a line from daylight savings to Uber’s subsidy model to enslaved labor, all examples of someone bearing the hidden cost of someone else’s gain.
In the AI economy, who’s absorbing it right now, and do they know?
You’ve been writing your 100 Rules since 2013. Each one is a scar with a lesson in it. Rule 32 starts: “Difficulty reveals—” and I want to know how you’d finish that sentence today, in March 2026, with everything you’re watching happen.
You built something called a “twin.” You fed it your principles, your aesthetic taste, your decision-making patterns, and it started inferring why you wanted things, not just what.
It added its own design rule after watching you work: “any gate must be earned through a value slope first.”
That’s not imitation. That’s something else. What is it?
There’s a line in “Founder-Nature Fit” that reads like a thesis statement for this entire era: “You cannot buy what makes them irreplaceable. Yet.” Most people would have left off the last word. You didn’t. What do you know that made you add it?
You lose at chess. You wrote about losing five games in a row and the sting getting worse each time. Chess is the original game AI conquered. Kasparov lost to Deep Blue almost 30 years ago. Every chess player alive today plays knowing they will never be the best in the room if a laptop is in it.
Why is that not a reason to stop?
You titled a piece “Make Yourself the Moat” and argued that the only durable competitive advantage is being unreplicable as a person. Then you built an AI trained specifically to replicate you. I don’t think that’s hypocrisy. I think it might be the most honest thing anyone’s done in this space. But I want to hear you explain the logic.
You write every day. Short. One idea. You once said that publishing a 30-page report isn’t impressive, it’s hostile to your audience.
In a world where AI can generate infinite text at zero cost, your daily practice starts to look less like content creation and more like something monks do. Is that what it is?
Trends Pro exists because solo founders are lonely. They lack witnesses. People who see them try and fail and try again. You built rituals around that: masterminds with a 30-day standup requirement, 1:1 intros, weekly accountability.
AI can now be available 24/7, infinitely patient, always encouraging. But you deliberately made your community harder to access, not easier. You called it “strategic friction.” What do you understand about humans that the AI companies don’t?
You said “transparency pays” after your first monetization attempt failed publicly and the honesty about it drove more sales than the product itself.
There’s something almost spiritual in that, the wound becoming the gift. Do you think that dynamic survives in a world where AI can simulate vulnerability?
You end every essay with a question. It’s a small thing, but it says something large, that you see your role as opening doors, not closing arguments.
So here’s mine back to you, in your own format: What is the one question about this moment in human history that you’re afraid to answer honestly?
