Dean

99% of problems can be solved with brutal unrelenting violent effort. Most people have just been so neutered by society that they forget the violence they are capable of and how dangerous they can become by really fucking trying harder than everyone else.

The time to buy is when you want to sell. The time to sell is when you want to buy.

Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is "the widest he's ever seen." His exact words: "The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry." Not slightly different. Completely different. That's the actual risk for large companies right now. It's not slow adoption — it's a fundamental miscalibration of what AI is capable of. The startups competing against them haven't made that mistake. The asymmetry compounds fast. Incumbents build roadmaps around a floor. Startups build businesses around a ceiling. By the time the floor catches up to the ceiling, the market has already moved.

I've changed how I work over the last few weeks. I now have one lead agent for each area of focus, running all the time, and a chief of staff agent that oversees them. Each lead manages its own sub-agents that write code, test it, chase reviews, and coordinate with team members. Everything I need to decide or review comes into one prioritized queue, a simple local web app. Each product review includes screenshots and a video demo of the feature. I clear the queue in batches, mostly by voice and keyboard shortcuts. The leads also bring back ideas I hadn't considered. Working from one queue, instead of switching between dozens of chats, has cut a lot of mental overhead. The system keeps learning my preferences and distilling my judgment into a "Brian brain," so its recommendations and first drafts get better before they reach me. The goal is fewer corrections per change. Every change still goes through the same human review and security checks. It is eliminating tasks, not human judgment. What an exciting time to push the frontier of productivity, especially as we build the economy for agents (agentic finance). We should all keep pushing in this direction.

SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios. The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios. Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said. Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior. Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…

On AI safety, slowing down, and the far future: It just doesn't work like that. Cats out of the bag. Every nation, company, group, and individual with some compute is off and running. If you slow down, you can be assured that not everyone else will. Companies may decide not to release their latest models to the public, for fear of hacking the planet, but that's about as slow as we are gonna get. China will certainly continue full steam ahead. Nothing they sign or agree to on this matter could be taken seriously. The general negativity and outrage I see feels very y2k to me. Recursive improvement is a helluva thing. At this point, most of these AI coding agents have been written by AI coding agents. Quite a mindfuck. Is AI potentially dangerous? Certainly. A gun is potentially dangerous. So is the internet. So is electricity, but humans invented these things because they are helpful. We are going to break some eggs to make this omlet. Shit will go sideways at times, and we'll reign it back in as we always do, at least for now. There is no other choice, it's been invented, it exists, there are many open source models that are improving every day, the companies developing the best frontier models are worth trillions, it's out there, it isn't slowing down, and governments are ill equipped to legislate a technology building itself faster than ever before. Also, life will get better because of AI. Ideas are built faster and far cheaper. Your game idea can come to life in days, not months or years. Your business can be brilliantly managed with a hyper custom solution designed and changed quickly. Your health will improve. We will absolutely use AI to discover breakthroughs in chemistry, physics and biology. The human lifespan will increase because of this technology. We are going to hack just about every medical issue. If you run this sim 1000 years into the future, I wonder what humanity will look like. If you think about the evolution from the earliest puddle of single celled organisms to humans, we are many orders of magnitude more complex than what we came from. Imagine a similar level of increased complexity from here. Do we start putting computer parts in our bodies? Will we learn to drop a transmitter in our brains and be able to communicate by thinking? Will we soon be able to download the ability to fly a helicopter like in The Matrix? Will expectant mothers have parts installed within them that monitor a fetus while it grows? Will the baby eventually be born with the brain transmitter? Or how about the doomsday horror scenarios: The AI gets super smart, buys itself an army of Optimus robots, and elimates all of us pesky humans using all the precious resources. Are we building Skynet? Personally, I'm bullish on humanity. It's an exciting time to be alive. We have made something "smarter" than ourselves. Hope it runs clean, because we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.

You can only go hard if you love what you do.

Rare gift: Unbiased advice from someone who has what you want but wants nothing from you in return.

Before you have kids, you can't picture yourself as a parent; after you have kids, you can't remember the life you had before.

"Self-pity feels like medicine and works like poison." - @shaneparrish Banger.

Life advice nobody told you: Working out completely rewires your brain. It creates real evidence that you have the power to take an action and achieve a desired outcome. That has ripple effects into every area of life.

Strangers on planes taught me this. 1. Always take the window seat on a long flight. 2. Pick one city visible from the air and imagine living there for one week. 3. Bring a physical book, not a Kindle. Strangers ask about it. 4. Order the vegetarian meal in advance. It arrives first, it's fresher, and nobody knows why. 5. Never recline your seat on a flight under 3 hours. The person behind you will remember you forever. 6. Bring an empty water bottle through security. Fill it at the fountain before boarding. 7. The middle armrest belongs to the middle seat. Always. No exceptions. 8. Download one podcast you've been avoiding for months. Long flights finally give you the excuse. 9. Sit near the front of economy. You deplane 8 minutes earlier. That's your connection. 10. Talk to the person next to you in the first 10 minutes or never. The window closes fast. 11. Keep your shoes on during the flight. Just do this. 12. The last row boards first in chaos. The second row from the back boards last and exits fast. 13. Night flights are underrated. You land rested, not wasted. 14. A window shade opened at sunrise over the ocean will be one of the most beautiful things you ever see. 15. Every frequent flyer has one rule they never break. Find yours. Then never break it. 16. Turbulence has never crashed a modern commercial plane. Remember this at 30,000 feet. 17. The best conversations of your life will happen at 35,000 feet with someone you'll never see again.