An exciting future.
A letter about the distance between the world we have and the one we could have — and a tentative plan to help close it.
The gist
- Life is better than ever, yet the gap between what it is and what it could be has never been wider. That gap is the opportunity.
- Value = Resources × Connections × Assembly. We’re flush with resources and assembly (AI). The weak factor is connections — and the judgment behind them.
- The real bottleneck isn’t technology. It’s the wisdom and courage to point it at what actually matters.
- Capitalism vs. socialism is the wrong fight. Both end with power and knowledge pooling at the top.
- A third way: fierce, open competition built on shared, public foundations — identity, knowledge, and outcomes as public goods.
- That’s what I’m building, as Amend, starting with Amend iD. A decades-long climb — and worth a life.
Life is good. It could be extraordinary.
On paper, this is the best time to be alive. We live longer, know more, and want for less than almost anyone who came before us. By every chart, the line goes up.
And yet a lot of us feel that something is off. I don’t think that feeling is a malfunction. I think it’s accurate.
The distance between what life is and what it could be has never been wider. We are sitting on more knowledge, more tools, and more capacity than any generation in history — and most of it isn’t pointed at making our actual days better.
The gap between what life is and what it could be has never been wider. That gap is the opportunity.
That gap isn’t a reason for despair. It’s the opening — the most exciting one of our age.
How value actually gets made
Strip the economy down to its bones and value comes from three things, working together.
Resources — atoms, data, knowledge. Connections — the systems and rules that route those resources to where they’re needed. Assembly — the labor, tools, and compute that turn them into something real.
It’s a product, not a sum: weaken any one factor and the whole thing collapses, no matter how strong the others are. But look closely at what it actually produces — not value, just output. The same three factors can build a vaccine or a poison, a home or a weapon. Output is neutral; whether it’s worth anything depends entirely on the idea behind it.
That’s the part the usual advice gets backwards. We’re told execution is everything and ideas are cheap — the “idea guy” is a punchline. But we’ve never had more resources, and AI and robotics are dragging the cost of building toward zero. Resources are abundant. Execution is abundant. The one genuinely scarce thing — the real bottleneck, and the real value — is a good idea, aimed by good judgment at something worth doing. Flawless execution of a bad idea is just efficient harm.
Which raises the real question: how do we tell a good idea from a bad one — and get it to whoever it helps most? That’s the bottleneck the rest of this is about.
Why we’re stuck
Our leverage is at an all-time high. A single algorithm can shape the days of billions of people. But our wisdom hasn’t kept pace with our power.
Look at any layer and the same thing has gone wrong: data collected to sell ads, not to improve lives; algorithms tuned for engagement, not wellbeing; the most powerful compute ever built, spent on the trivial.
The bottleneck was never resources or technology. It’s the wisdom — and the courage — to aim them at what matters.
The old debate is a trap
We keep arguing about capitalism versus socialism as if that’s the choice. I don’t think it is.
That argument is really about which system concentrates power — not whether concentration is the problem. Both follow the same arc: power and knowledge pool at the top, incentives drift away from the many, and eventually people flip the table and it starts again.
Data and AI are just the newest vehicles for that old pattern. And they’re making it accelerate.
A third option
There’s a way through that isn’t one side or the other.
Fierce, open competition — built on top of shared, open, public foundations. The foundational layers (who you are, what’s known to work, the honest record of what helped) should be public goods. Competition thrives on top of them. Nobody can hoard the foundation.
Compete fiercely on top. Never let anyone hoard the foundation.
Inequality falls, because the most valuable thing in the world — knowledge — is finally shared.
Why public goods win
Some things get more valuable the more people use them. Languages. Standards. Knowledge. They don’t get used up — they compound.
The most transformative infrastructure in history has been open: the scientific method, the protocols of the internet. They lifted everyone precisely because no one owned them.
What we’ve done instead is hoard and weaponize one particular kind of knowledge: knowledge about people. That’s the thing that has to change.
What I’m building
This is the work. It’s called Amend, and it starts with Amend iD. Three layers, each one a public foundation that competition can be built on top of.
Layer one — identity and context you fully control, in the real world and online. Tap to sign in, to pay, to prove who you are — sharing only what you choose.
Layer two — shared knowledge. Think GitHub, but for how to actually do things in life. Open, and improvable by anyone.
Layer three — collective intelligence. Opt-in, anonymized outcomes, so the system can learn what genuinely helps people — and give that wisdom back to everyone.
You set your own goals. The system helps you reach them with your full context in hand. When truth is cheap and close at hand, what’s good for you and what’s good for everyone line up far more often than we’ve been taught to expect.
How it compounds
Each piece makes the next one stronger. That’s the whole engine.
Data you own makes a tool genuinely useful. A useful tool earns the trust to learn — with permission. That learning produces better outcomes. Better outcomes bring more people. More people deepen the shared knowledge. And around it goes.
Outcome-driven, not engagement-driven. And no ads, ever.
Ads would corrupt the one signal the whole thing depends on: the honest truth about whether your life actually got better. So there won’t be any.
The hard part
I won’t pretend this is likely — or even that I’m sure I know what I’m doing. It’s a climb measured in decades, most of it has to go right, and I’m mostly figuring it out as I go. It’s entirely possible I’ve got big pieces of this wrong — maybe all of it is garbage, and if so, I’m sorry for taking your time. I’m not trying to sound certain about any of it; I’m genuinely just looking for answers and trying to learn in the open — so if you can see where I’ve gone wrong, please tell me. That’s half the reason I wrote any of this down.
What I am sure of is that the gap between what humanity has and what it actually experiences is the widest it has ever been — and closing even a sliver of it is worth a life. It cuts both ways, too: get this right and we could spare an extraordinary amount of pain and suffering; get it wrong and we won’t. That’s exactly what makes it worth everything I’ve got.
And I’m devoting my life to it — honestly, I can hardly believe how lucky we are to be alive at the one moment when actually building this becomes possible. It’s a strange, dazzling, once-in-history kind of opportunity, and I love the people it’s for: all of us, every last one. That’s the whole thing, really — I just love humanity, and I want us to make it.
So I’m going to try. If any of this resonates — if you’d want to build a piece of it with me — that’s exactly the response I’m hoping for.