Josh Bowen

“Optimistic but dissatisfied is the road to progress.”

I’d like to keep my family together and raise my boys into adults who are “publicly useful and privately happy.” Anything else is gravy.

This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work. As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims... See more

Watch @jonbatiste turn Beethoven into the blues. It’s absolutely amazing.

Can artificial intelligence help us to be creative? That’s the important question, and it’s a question about user interfaces, not about who has the biggest model.

Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception of it. An example I love that is not mentioned in the book: for years, few people bought “death insurance.” Then some genius changed the name to life insurance and grew the industry by many billions of dollars. After all, life insurance sounds so much better than death insurance.