Stop Waiting for Proof
People are making a big deal about the fact that we haven't yet seen full displacement in jobs and knowledge work. So many are starting to doubt that massive disruption is actually coming soon. Investors are asking if they can just ignore it for a while. Smart people are spending energy arguing about exact timing.
That debate is missing the point entirely.
History Already Issued the Warning
There's an old story I love from the late 1920s. A wealthy Wall Street operator, also a brilliant tinkerer and inventor, saw the market as wildly overvalued in 1928. He predicted the crash that followed in 1929. But he didn't spend his time trying to guess the exact day the market would roll over, or trying to extract the last few bucks by timing the top. Once he was convinced the crash was inevitable, he sold out and protected his wealth.
The part that always lands with me: how baffled he was by friends who kept asking when the wheels would come off, after they had already accepted that a crash was coming. He thought that was insane. Because once you accept the premise, the prudent move is to act decisively and reduce downside, even if that means giving up near-term upside. That takes real discipline when the market is ripping. Remember, the S&P was up about 38 percent in 1928.
He used the same framing to talk about the period before the US entered World War II. A lot of people "in the know" expected the US would join the war soon. They spent time speculating about exactly when, rather than preparing.
His point was simple, and it's one of my favorites because it's so applicable to AI today: if you believe a major event is coming, you don't get to sit around guessing the precise calendar date while making no meaningful preparations. You start acting like you're already in that new reality.
Act Before the Obvious Moment
There's another parallel from history that drives the same lesson home. In the 1930s, Jews in Germany faced a rising tide of hostility. The ones who left early, before it was obvious to everyone, had a chance to protect themselves. Those who waited until it was undeniable often waited too long. The lesson isn't about panic. It's about understanding that timing precision is less important than taking decisive action once you're convinced about where things are heading.
That's what I feel about AI and robotics now. Whether the big structural shift lands in 2028, or 2030, or somewhere in between, is materially less important than the posture you take while you wait. If you believe it will be transformative, you change behavior across a broad set of things, not just your job. You change investments, the advice you give younger people and kids, your consumption, and how you allocate time and risk.
Treat AI as Present Tense
I'm very bullish on the transformative power of AI. I don't think this is just fancy autocomplete. I think strong AI is already present in pockets. It's unevenly distributed across tasks, and the economics of applying it to knowledge work are already compelling. The path we're on opens a narrow window for outsized gains, and that window rewards people who crank hard, leverage AI ruthlessly across everything they do, and who bring deep vertical expertise that the models can amplify. That's a real, actionable asymmetry over the next two to three years.
One basic implication: AI will further entrench owners of capital, unless you're intentionally trying to capture value yourself. Getting ahead of that means pulling forward effort, creating assets and optionality that compound in the new regime, and owning IP or capital rather than just selling labor. It also means that employers who are slow and complacent will be vulnerable to faster-moving large competitors, and to startups that scale revenue faster than anything we've seen before, by using AI as a multiplicative force.
Three Tribes, None Useful
There are three broad tribes in conversations about mass disruption. None of these stances are useful by themselves. Useful stances are action-oriented.
- Doomers: who reflexively predict collapse and lose credibility.
- Dreamers: who prematurely claim AGI tomorrow, and tell people to sell everything and wait for post-labor utopia.
- Deniers: who have their heads in the sand and treat current models as harmless productivity tools.
What You Should Actually Be Doing
Here are practical examples, from the small to the radical, because I want this to be useful and not just armchair philosophy:
- Start cranking on productizable work. Use AI obsessively to speed execution. Focus the next two to three years on building value that can be captured by you.
- Spend where leverage is highest. Buy the compute, the tools, and the data access that let you iterate faster than competitors.
- Coach the next generation differently. If you're in a position to advise children or mentees, push them toward craft, domain expertise, and skills that compound into products and platforms.
- Design roles for irreplaceable humans. In hiring or operating a business, prioritize people who can integrate AI into workflows, and design roles so the human contribution is uniquely high value.
- Hold optional, scalable bets. Keep a portion of your portfolio in optional, scalable bets that can pay off massively if the flood comes. Robotics, advanced AI, infrastructure.
The Rewrite Is Coming
I already saw the writing on the wall during the pandemic. From behind the scenes of the financial system, it really felt like they were stress-testing what a world with 50 percent unemployment might look like. Stimulus checks went out to anyone under $100k. PPP loans were basically free and unverified. The Fed turned on a literal money faucet for banks to tap whenever they wanted.
Fast forward to now and it's obvious: AI is displacing the worker economy, and crypto is displacing the financial system. Together they will likely force a rewrite of capitalism, at least in its current form. We're maybe 5 to 10 percent of the way into that transition. Things are going to get real interesting in the coming years.
People only change when reality hits hard. That's a blunt truth. The best you can do is avoid the very worst downsides by being willing to give up some short-term upside, and lean aggressively into capture mechanisms that will still matter after the structural change.
Stop asking when. Start preparing like it already happened.