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Today I want to start with something that made me laugh… at myself.  

A few days ago, I asked an A.I. to summarize an article for me. That’s not the funny part; if you’ve been hanging out with me for any length of time, you know my current perspective is that A.I. is something we need to learn — and for certain kinds of work, not using LLMs would be as silly as trying to build your house without power tools.

To do what I do, for example, I need to synthesize a LOT of information, all the time. LLMs can be really helpful with this.

But this article I asked it to summarize? It was an article about how speed has become more important than depth.

It took me a second, but I got the irony.

I didn’t ask A.I. for help because I don’t value depth. I did it because I felt like I HAD TO. I’ve got deadlines and commitments. Kids to pick up from school. An endless to-do list. 

This isn’t just me, of course. This is the environment we’re all operating in.

A world where slowing down feels irresponsible.

Where reading something carefully feels indulgent.

And where pausing feels like falling behind.

That’s when the real insight hit me…

Systems can only reward what they can measure. And our current system cannot measure pause.

That single fact, I think, explains so much of what feels broken right now.

Act 2: Om Malik’s Article

The article that catalyzed this episode was published a couple weeks ago by tech writer Om Malik, where he names the problem with brutal clarity: “We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.”

Our world is now largely governed by machines. We exist inside the containers and boxes our calendars show. We are at the Pavlovian mercy of our phone notifications. We are, as others have pointed out, already cyborgs — emotionally, if not physically — unable to detach ourselves from our technology.  

For these machines, speed isn’t a side effect. It’s the organizing value.

Look at what this produces:

It looks like news cycles that reward volume over accuracy. Flood the zone. Put out ten stories in the time it takes to verify one. By the time a correction appears, five new headlines have already replaced it in the feed. Speed creates volume. Volume creates confusion.

It looks like products shipped before they’re ready because “launch and iterate” beats “test and refine.” This might be OK with a social media app, but what about when it’s medical devices? Bridges? Airplanes? The 737 MAX wasn’t a failure of intelligence — it was a failure of restraint.

It looks like decisions made inside Slack threads with 47 messages in 12 minutes because “moving fast” looks like competence — move fast and break things, y’all! — but “Hold up, I need to think about this” looks like weakness.

None of this is hypothetical. This is just… Tuesday.

When speed becomes the goal, anything that slows us down becomes dangerous.

Here’s Om again:

“Once velocity is the prize, quality becomes risky. Thoughtfulness takes time. Reporting takes time. Living with a product or an idea takes time. Yet the window for relevance keeps shrinking, and the penalty for lateness is erasure. We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes.”

Read that last line again: first takes, not best takes. That’s not a moral critique. That’s about incentives.

If lateness means you get erased, hesitation becomes an existential risk.

If our attention windows keep shrinking, nuance becomes a liability.

To me, this is Om’s most important line:

“When attention is fragmented and speed becomes the dominant value, media rearranges itself around that reality. Not because anyone wakes up wanting to mislead people, but because the context makes some paths survivable and others impossible.”

We talked about this a little last week. This is how systems create outcomes without villains.

No conspiracy.

No evil masterminds.

Just incentives quietly reshaping behavior until certain choices disappear entirely from view.

Truth doesn’t die.

It just becomes… non-viable.

Act 3: Wisdom Doesn’t Travel

One more thought from Om:

“The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months but no one will read. It’s the investigation that required patience. It’s the work of understanding something before declaring judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. And in a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.”

Damn. That line: In a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.

Because you know what doesn’t “travel” well?

• Patience
• Restraint
• Uncertainty
• Careful judgment
• Wisdom

All these things still exist, but remember: in a system where only what travels matters, invisibility is irrelevance.

So things like wisdom don’t travel, because…

Wisdom requires context. You can’t screenshot nuance. You can’t tweet restraint. You can’t make a viral clip out of “I need more information before I decide.”

Wisdom requires time. A carefully considered argument takes, what… 2,000 words? A hot take takes 200 characters. The algorithm doesn’t care which one is true; it cares which one moves.

Wisdom requires uncertainty. Uncertainty isn’t really optional in wisdom! But uncertainty doesn’t perform well in the scroll. “I’m not sure yet” gets crushed by “I’m absolutely certain”… even when the certain person is dead frickin’ wrong.

So the system does what systems do: it selects for what survives.

And wisdom doesn’t survive this kind of velocity.

Which brings me to a story.

Act 4: Josh First Encounters Dead Air

Right out of college, I worked at Mix100.3 FM in Denver. “The best mix of the 80’s, 90’s, and today!”

I started in marketing and promotions, and due to the kindness and support of a fabulous Program Director (thank you, Ron!) — and just everyone on the team, really… Mark, Giff, Murph… I really love all you guys!  — I eventually worked my way to being on-air.

In radio, if you don’t know, there is one unforgivable sin:

Dead air.

Silence means panic.

Silence means you seriously effed up.

Silence means the audience is… gone.

So if you’re on air, you learn — professionally — to fill space at all costs. Talk over your thoughts.

Never let a beat land too long. Always keep the sound moving.

After I told my LLM to summarize Om’s article, I realized we didn’t just train DJs this way.

We’ve trained our entire culture.

Silence feels like disengagement. Delayed replies feel like incompetence. Pausing before speaking feels risky. 

We’ve built a world that despises dead air.

And the system responds the same way radio did:

FILL. IT. NOW.

Act 5: Wisdom, Not Intelligence

This is where our society is really missing the plot.

We talk somewhat endlessly about intelligence right now.

Artificial intelligence. Human intelligence. Collective intelligence. Machine intelligence.

But intelligence is just NOT the limiting factor anymore.

Wisdom is.

And across history, wisdom has meant something very specific. Not knowing more. Not moving faster.

Knowing when NOT to act.

As Daniel Schmachtenberger says:

“Pretty much any definition of wisdom that anybody offers usually has restraint as an embedded concept… Wisdom involves what not to do — where you could have personal advantage, where you could have some near-term advantage, but it’s actually not the right thing to do.”

That’s the core of it.

Wisdom = power + restraint.

Let me be specific about why the distinction between intelligence and wisdom matters so much right now.

Intelligence is about solving problems. Wisdom is about knowing which problems to solve.

Intelligence asks: Can we do this? Wisdom asks: Should we?

Intelligence optimizes for outcomes. Wisdom accounts for consequences.

If promises hold up, A.I. will make us radically more intelligent. 

We’re building technology that can:

• Process millions of data points instantly
• Generate solutions we’d never think of
• Automate decisions at literally inhuman speed

But none of that is wisdom.

A.I. can optimize, but it cannot restrain.

A.I. can solve, but it cannot know what not to solve.

A.I. can already act, and soon it will act at scale. But it cannot know when not to act.

This means the gap between intelligence and wisdom is about to become a chasm. Historically, that chasm has a name: catastrophe.

And here’s the big system problem that’s widening the canyon: our systems can measure movement, but they cannot measure restraint.

They can’t see:

• the email you didn’t send
• the decision you delayed
• the advantage you chose not to take

Those places are the very places where wisdom lives. But according to our speed-based system, those things get a score of… zero.

Act 6: The Ancient Practices Of The Future

These insights aren’t new, of course. They’re actually quite ancient.

Let’s explore three examples…

First, from Stoicism: Restraint Is Agency

Marcus Aurelius ruled an empire and still wrote: “You have power over your mind, not outside events.”

Here’s what makes Stoicism brilliant as a system: 

It doesn’t say “care less.”

It just says “direct your energy where you have agency.”

Stoicism asks: What can I actually control?

I don’t have control over the project getting derailed, but I can help determine what our team does next.

I don’t have control over a market crash, but can determine my response to it.

I don’t have control over receiving that email that pissed me off, but I can determine whether I reply immediately or wait an hour.

It’s saying: I refuse to spend energy on things I cannot change, because that energy is finite and I’d rather spend it where it matters.

Showing restraint is wisdom.

Second, from Taoism: Don’t Push The River

Taoism gives us one of my favorite sayings:

“Don’t push the river.”

Taoism gets misread as passive. It’s not. It’s about reading systems well enough to know when intervention makes things worse.

You wake up some mornings with energy, clarity, focus — everything flows. 

Other mornings you wake up in fog and can barely think. You didn’t do anything different. Your body just has its own rhythms you don’t fully control — circadian, hormonal, mysterious.

You can fight it. Chug coffee. Force yourself through tasks that require sharpness when you don’t have it. Push the river.

Or you can read the conditions and adjust. Save deep work for when your brain is sharp. Do admin when it’s foggy. Answer emails. Organize files. Let the work match the energy you actually have, not the energy you wish you had.

Don’t push the river doesn’t mean don’t act. It means: work with the flow you’re in, not against it.

It’s not anti-action. It’s anti-forcing. It’s knowing when effort creates flow — and when it breaks it.

Not trying to push a river is wisdom.

Third, from Judaism: The Sabbath

The Sabbath isn’t a vibe, it’s systems design.

Here’s what ancient cultures understood that we’ve forgotten: we humans will generally not stop on our own. Given the option, we will always do one more thing.

Swipe to another video.

Do just one more scroll.

Answer one more email.

So the Sabbath doesn’t suggest rest. It mandates it. Not optional. Sacred. A mandatory pause.

No productivity. No optimization.

Why?

Because ancient cultures already knew this: if we don’t structurally protect pause, acceleration will devour everything. And 3,000 years later, we’re proving them right.

Scheduling breaks is wisdom.

Act 7: Why This Moment Is So Dangerous

Here’s what makes now uniquely dangerous:

We have unprecedented power. Unprecedented speed. And almost no restraint.

A.I. accelerates capability, but really does nothing to accelerate wisdom.

So very old human temptations get amplified:

• short-term advantage
• dominance
• extraction
• reaction

at machine scale.

Let’s make this concrete.

Right now, a 19-year-old with a laptop and an LLM could:

• Generate a disinformation campaign that reaches millions
• Create deepfake videos indistinguishable from reality
• Write code that could crash financial systems
• Produce deeply persuasive and personalized propaganda

And this isn’t science fiction. This is all happening right now. 

None of those things require wisdom, they just require access.

We’ve democratized intelligence without teaching restraint.

And the gap between what we CAN do and what we SHOULD do has never been wider.

That’s not a technology problem.

That’s a wisdom problem.

Act 8: The Wisdom Deficit

Here’s the pattern I keep seeing — and we’ve talked about this with economics, with debt, with A.I., with capitalism itself:

We’re solving problems in ways that create bigger problems.

We’re letting the market try to solve problems that market dynamics actually make worse.

We’re using debt to dig ourselves deeper into a hole that’s going to be really hard to escape from.

We’re automating jobs without thinking about what people do for income when work disappears.

Every solution becomes the next crisis.

Not because we’re stupid, but because we’re intelligent without being wise.

Intelligence solves the problem in front of you. Wisdom asks: “What problem will solving this create?”

We’ve completely failed to heed the warnings of the inimitable Jeff Goldblum: we’re so focused on CAN WE that we’ve stopped asking SHOULD WE.

Do you remember this scene from Jurassic Park? I looked it up, because it’s been awhile… I swear, today it feels like Dr. Malcolm is talking directly to Sam Altman or someone… here, watch:

That’s the wisdom deficit.

It was dangerous with resurrecting dinosaurs. And it’s even more dangerous here, in real life.

Act 9: The Optimistic Rebellion

What do we do to combat this?

A few years ago I helped lead a small tech company where we asked a simple question: can you actually learn to enjoy work? Knowing how much time everyone spends in a job, we wondered: is it possible to teach greater enjoyment of work? As in: you can learn a sport, or learn to play an instrument… can you learn to love work? Turns out, the answer is largely YES.

And a key part of work enjoyment is, you guessed it, cultivating wisdom. 

But HOW do we cultivate wisdom?

One of the biggest ingredients isn’t motivation or perks — it’s space. We need more space in our lives. But here’s the hard truth: We are unlikely to “find” space. Remember, the system believes space is failure. Its job is to fill dead air.

So space must be made.

Cultivated like a garden. Protected like an heirloom.

Here’s what I’m realizing: space is the language of the rebellion.

How do we make space?

If you’re able to, start scheduling it. It feels strange at first, but quickly becomes deeply restorative. Put it on your calendar! Time for a walk. Time to read. Time outside. Time for a bath. Time for yourself.

Depending on your life stage, that can be harder or easier to do.

So there’s one more thing we can ALL do, because it’s a micro-practice. And this isn’t theory; this is something I have seen change how people experience their days.

In our app we called this practice Pause & Get Curious.

Viktor Frankl said: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

We can ALL practice this.

In the moment before we react, Pause & Get Curious instead.

That’s what building wisdom actually feels like.

The impact of a pause is hard to measure, but we feel its power whenever we do it.

And the system will probably never account for it.

But I’m pretty sure that’s exactly why it matters so much.

So this week, our Optimistic Rebellion is to practice Pausing & Getting Curious. In the moment, take a moment. Create space. Don’t rush. Try moving through life just 5% more slowly. Give yourself margins. And when you pause, let yourself get curious about what’s happening.

It’s simple to understand, but, at least for me, takes a lot of practice.

Here’s the rule: when you feel urgency — which is exactly when the system wants you to react — give yourself ten seconds. One breath in, one breath out. Then get curious.

We can practice together! 

I did go back and read Om’s article, by the way. Slowly. With care. It took awhile. But that felt like the point. 

Because I’m learning something simple, and surprisingly hard.

Wisdom doesn’t sprint. It usually doesn’t “trend.” It doesn’t travel fast.

It pauses.

Even if the system never learns how to measure that.