Into The Wild

AI Proofing Kids

Disclaimer / Disclosure

What will they do?

I don’t know. It is a wild world. I’m about to start sending them off into the wild one by one. It is probably an evolutionary advantage that we are as a species overconfident – not just cheerily optimistic but also sure that we have a good sense of what comes next. Our ancestors might have stayed under their woolly mammoth blankets in their caves if they could fully contemplate what lay ahead. The catastrophes would be too scary and the opportunities would be too exciting to contemplate.

So herein some wild-ass guesses at what matters as the next generation starts to leave home. I don’t really know and that is the point. But I’m quite sure my job isn’t to optimize kids for success circa when I left home or as the kids now apparently call it “before the turn of the century”.

First, learn how to learn. Hopefully that has been a part of their education from the beginning. But study habits and memorization techniques (probably?) still matter. Swaths of our skills will get replaced by technology. I don’t want to be sentimental about them – lots of work was actually boring. It only mattered because it was valuable at the time and we liked adding value. Pivot. Instantly. The more flexible, the better. That means having all the tools to learn new things fast and effectively. This is not passively getting exposed to information that washes over us. It is trial and error wrestling with material, vectoring in on the hard stuff and the sticking points. We will all get replaced. But we can be the replacement.

Secondly, be frugal. It might take money as well as brains to grab the opportunities ahead. Be more frugal than you planned to be. Allowing consumption to track income is normal, but also stupid. It makes sense only in a world that stagnates around current patterns so that your consumption is sustainable and appropriate. It won’t be. If there are disasters – and there will be – you’ll be glad to have saved more. If there are bonanza opportunities – and there will be – you’ll be glad to have saved more so you can survive disaster and exploit opportunity.

An emergency fund is a good idea. Have 6-12 months of living expenses set aside to survive calamities. Sure. But it doesn’t have to be a bad emergency. Also have money set aside for good emergencies. Have some amount of money (it doesn’t necessarily need to be more than $50-100k but can’t really scale down much below that to hit practical minimums and be relevant) set aside to invest with every smart person you know and trust whenever they launch a startup. Make it small enough to not ruin the relationship if it is a $0, but big enough to change your life if it is a 100-bagger.

Besides having the liquidity ready to deploy, aggressive saving is also a good practice to let the world underestimate you. Once you get far off of the track of stupid consumption fads, it gets easier to stay off. Keep up with the Joneses? Let them drive by (probably in an expensively leased sports car). Let them be unimpressed. Let them pity you. Let them forget about you. The easiest way to get rich is to not spend $0.01 trying to look rich. The easiest way to avoid getting rich is to make a lot of money but spend it impressing people you hate.

Here’s a highly actionable easy place to stick savings: a treasury fund. Mine gets a tax aware 3.33%. Nothing exciting. But whenever I want to move savings to investing, I can shift it to my long/short direct index. Direct indexing is great but one of its caveats is tracking error, especially when leveraged. Dollar cost averaging from savings can get it back on track with its underlying index. Whenever I want liquidity, I can use the portfolio line of credit for 4.64%. So there is a quite intentional ratchet effect – I add over time but never need to subtract from net investments. I can seamlessly borrow against it far more than I’d ever want or need.

Third, get a job. Unless you sing like Taylor Swift or dunk like Lebron James, your salary isn’t going to make you rich (and theirs is a small minority of what drove their net worths). It doesn’t have to. It just provides a runway. If you are exclusively an early stage entrepreneur founder, you are either quickly or slowly drowning. But if you have a job, you can still keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities while you get paid and can buy groceries. This takes off a lot of pressure while you think, build, connect, and tinker on your own time.

Actors Ashton Kutcher and Ryan Reynolds are two examples of men who put their wages to good use. They share many similarities: good acting careers that were lucrative, but not spectacularly so. In both cases they used what they were paid for work as their bankrolls. They made far more money in equity deals, Kutcher in angel and VC investments and Reynolds in Mint Mobile and Aviation Gin. They didn’t coast. They didn’t waste their money. They didn’t act as if they were too good to hustle. Reynolds even makes his ads into shtick, lightheartedly and self-depreciatingly shilling for his companies. A lot of actors who act too good for that kind of work are a lot poorer than he is because of his willingness to do it.

Fourth, get strong. Being physically fit is as important as ever. The faster technology advances, the more upside you get from health and longevity. AI could cure cancer. But it is up to you to survive until then. Health is a choice. Pay special care to things that we have failed to fix after bad damage – eyes, ears, teeth, and especially brains. We’re getting good at limb trauma so I’m not endlessly worried about scrapes and bruises (and appear to gravitate to things that cause them) but in some cases prevention is still far better than what we can do after unforced errors. Earn your scars, but wear eye, ear, teeth, and head protection. Materials have improved so they are far lighter and more comfortable than they were in prior decades. No one used to ski in helmets. Now practically everyone does. Protect your eyes and ears shooting. Protect your teeth rolling and boxing. If you’re around ice and rock, keep your helmet on even when you’re not the one climbing.

My informal fitness test is to be able to say “yes” to any inbound invitation that comes my way regardless of domain. Get and stay fit enough to not dodge anything with anyone you’d want to do stuff with. Be strong for a fast guy and fast for a strong guy. Powerlift >1k lbs. with abs. Run an ultra with an upper as well as lower body. Plenty of guys can lift heavy with enormous bellies or run far with no chests. But be at least somewhat capable across both.

Fifth, be reliable. If everything changes, the specific job at hand might go away forever. But people will still remember if you did it cheerfully, competently, on time, and under budget. Those attributes will still be in demand as technology transforms the specifics. If you don’t know what to do, just do the task in front of you.

Finally make friends. Forge authentic connections. Live life with people who know your true self and still for whatever reason love or at least tolerate you. This more than anything is what makes life worth living. I find such people dangling from the sweaty, muddy, sometimes bloody limits of my capabilities. Do hard and dangerous things together to find out who people are. If someone saves someone else’s life, it becomes impossible to come between them. So do consequential things. Be there for the people who are there for you. Never let them down.

In the most transactional way, if your ability to perform specific tasks and even intelligence itself gets commoditized, smart jerks will be in a lot of trouble. The people who thought they were irreplaceable but you wanted to fire? You will be able to get rid of all of them. The people you just like having around? The never complainers. Mirthful people who make everything better by their presence. Those with calm energy. People with the first five attributes – learners who aren’t wasteful, who work even if they don’t have to, strong people who would be good in a bar fight who you can always rely on? They will always be in demand whatever specifics are demanded. Teams will just make up reasons to keep them around no matter what. Be such a man.

In the least transactional way, if we are about to enter a new heaven or hell, then we might all have it rich and easy even if we don’t deserve it or might have doom and destruction even if we don’t deserve that. Maybe nothing matters. So let’s go down (or up) with the people we love. Let’s be the people we want to be. If you are purely transactional, it is entirely possible that the transactions all flop. Don’t be miserable in some convoluted scheme to eventually be happy later because no one knows what later looks like.

Savor this moment. Focus on the here and now. If you are equal weighting the people in your life, that is almost certainly wrong. If you allow inbound solicitations to drive your attention, that is probably a mistake. Choose. Cut off the bottom three quarters of people who try to get access to you completely. Ignore. Ghost them. Reallocate all of that time and energy to your best relationships. You might not need more friends but can always have deeper friendships. Find the people worth more to you than you can or would count.

Circle your wagons tight. If the outside world wants to burn it down, let the outside world burn. If you are someplace beautiful with people who love you, then the ups and downs of the wider world become unemotional. Be in the right tribes and do everything you can to make them better. Then glance at the outside world’s depredations only when interested. Waiting for fairness and justice is just an excuse to not start because they never come. Once you have the right team and plan, just start. You can figure it out as you go.

TL; DR

Learn to learn, save your money, get a job, get strong, be reliable, and make friends. Almost everything else around you could change. Those things won’t.