Imagine a policy where kids give 10% of their earnings to their parents.

It incentivizes parents to have more kids and push their education. And it funds their retirement.

To keep children from becoming pure financial instruments, and to keep the genetic lottery alive, you blend it 50/50 with a public pension pool. And it only works where education is affordable and roughly equal.

It's not clean. But on paper, it holds.

East Asia indirectly runs this exact system (filial duty, children as retirement plan) and birthrates there are the lowest on Earth.

Maybe no single policy moves birthrates at all.

If so, it will solve itself with a shift in the collective consciousness.

New consumer apps are one primitive and one mechanism.

Snapchat's primitive was the front-camera photo, and the mechanism was texting friends with disappearing photos.

My personal AGI should read my books, hear my podcasts, watch my movies. It should start from my foundations and augment me from there.

If your consumer app launches with more than one tab, you've overbuilt.

My law of staying in touch from far away:

Being in touch means talking to someone often enough that calls aren't just catch-ups. I need to be able to call for three minutes and start a new conversation. I need to be able to hang up like I'm seeing them every day. The best way I found: short calls every other day. I can only stay in touch with so many, so I pick carefully.

After three days offline, I looked in the mirror and it took over a second to recognize myself. I find it fascinating how quickly one gets indifferent to the self — and how quickly obsessed again.

Nonfiction books, mostly biographies, struggle to hook you in the first pages. Starting chronologically, or slow. Who cares when Mr. Doe was five. Unlike streaming, TV and short form, where competition is fierce and abundant, you carry only a single physical book with you. Switching costs are high, so you force yourself through it. Now I have hundreds on my Kindle and when hunting for a new read, I open them one after the other and none manage to hook me like a few TikToks would.

The future isn't just happening. People, companies and institutions make it happen. We are the future-makers.

Whatever you care about, you do every day. Conversely, whatever you do every day is what you care about.

If that second statement isn't true for you, then your days need redesigning.

Marketing: find where your customers spend their time and infect those spaces with your idea.

Won't the age of abundance kill creativity, innovation and culture?

Altman and Musk promise this bright, abundant future, yet innovation has historically come from constraints and tight budgets. Without them, challengers would never beat incumbents. Perhaps you can constrain yourself artificially, but few have that discipline.

Abundance is only measured against today's resources. Tomorrow we'll want new things and experiences that don't yet exist. Someone from 200 years ago would say we live in an age of abundance. Yet no one stopped wanting more. Or building it.

There cannot be an age of abundance when the goalpost keeps moving.

In countries without fixed prices, you get arbitraged until you learn what things cost. A seasoned traveler takes a few hours to converge to market price.