Aneesh Raman

So much anxiety.

And worst of all, we realized it was fueling this fatalism.

There was this thing settling in that was kind of like, whatever's coming is predetermined.

Whatever's coming is inevitable.

Whatever's coming for me, for us, for all humans at work, AI already knows the answer or a bunch of CEOs already know the answer or academics know the answer.

And we're all just like along for the ride.

That's such an anti-human view because it diminishes not just the potential we have as humans, which the industrial age shrunk us.

And so we've internalized this diminished sense of self that we need to be about efficiency at work and that we need to be machine-like.

And so if something comes, like a machine that can out-machine us or a tool that can out-efficiency us, we get afraid, but we skip past, so wait, we're more than this.

Humans have been around longer than the steam engine.

Our brain...

that's been this brain able to have complex thought and build stories that mobilize us, it's at least 40,000 years old, maybe 70,000 years old.

It built the nation state, the monetary order.

Everything around us was humans imagining something that didn't exist and then figuring out a way to make it so.

We can go back to that.

So a lot of it was like this fatalism.

And so we wanted to push back on that.

And so at the beginning, we went up and down.

What is this book?

Do we have a book or do we just have an idea?