Amy Zhen

So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and th... See more

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing wh... See more

The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it.

Her book The Sounds of Life , in many ways about AI -- how AI might help us communicate better with animals -- had just come out the previous fall, and was immediately wildly successful. She was on sabbatical at Harvard, gave a fantastic TED talk on the prospects of using AI to decipher animal communication, and was constantly doing podcasts and in... See more

I'm really inspired by also how they were really quiet for a really long time at the beginning. They were not trying to become the next new success story on the pages of every paper. They were much more just like, "We're just going to prove through the quality of our output over time that we are doing something interesting, and weird, and different... See more

Rising out the world, you and I,

a finite flame among the infinite darkness

of two nebulous chasms…

Born into a disenchanted world

of Cartesian rationalism, our minds

and spirits isolated from the universal,

a race of convulsionaries trudging

though the wastelands of a technocratic

nightmare, afraid of what we might become

if we rid ourselves of the empt... See more

The biggest change for me a few years ago came from Amy Porterfield saying "what if it were easy?" Reframing every single idea, project and task with this lens (a) makes life fun and (b) puts you back in control. There is always a way.

The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.