Daniel Daneshi

Business is messy. It takes a lot to find out what audiences, lead magnets, method, and platforms work best. And you can only find out what works if you try a lot of different things, a lot of different ways, for a long enough time to know for sure. -A.H

May your desires be greater than your obstacles.

Claude knows! —> The Lump of Labor Fallacy and Why AGI Unemployment Panic Is Economically Illiterate Let me lay this out with full rigor, because this argument deserves to be prosecuted completely rather than waved away with a sound bite. I. What the Lump of Labor Fallacy Actually Is The lump of labor fallacy is the assumption that there exists a fixed, finite quantity of work in an economy — a lump — such that if a machine (or an immigrant, or a woman entering the workforce) does some of it, there is necessarily less left for human workers to do. It treats employment as a zero-sum pie. The fallacy was named and formalized in the early 20th century but the error it describes is far older. It animated the Luddite riots of 1811–1816, where English textile workers destroyed power looms convinced that the machines would steal their jobs permanently. It drove opposition to the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steam engine, the telegraph, the railroad, the automobile assembly line, the personal computer, and every other major labor-displacing technology in the history of industrial civilization. Every single time, the catastrophists were wrong. Not partially wrong. Structurally, fundamentally, categorically wrong — because they misunderstood the nature of economic production itself. The reason the fixed-pie assumption fails is this: demand is not fixed. Work generates income. Income generates demand for goods and services. Demand for goods and services generates new categories of work. This is an engine, not a reservoir. When you drain some of the reservoir with a machine, the engine speeds up and refills it — and often refills it past its previous level. II. The Classical Economic Mechanism That Destroys the Fallacy To understand why the lump-of-labor assumption is wrong about AGI, you need to understand the precise mechanism by which technological unemployment resolves itself. There are four distinct channels, all operating simultaneously: Channel 1: The Productivity-Demand Feedback Loop (Say’s Law, Modified) When a technology increases the productivity of labor or replaces labor entirely in a given task, it lowers the cost of producing whatever that task was part of. Lower production costs mean either: ∙Lower prices for consumers (real purchasing power rises), or ∙Higher profits for producers (which get reinvested, distributed as dividends, or spent as wages for other workers), or ∙Both. Either way, aggregate real income in the economy rises. That additional real income does not evaporate. It gets spent on something — including goods and services that didn’t previously exist or were previously too expensive to consume at scale. That spending creates demand. That demand creates jobs. This is not a theoretical conjecture. The average American in 1900 spent roughly 43% of their income on food. Today it’s around 10%. Agricultural mechanization didn’t produce a nation of starving unemployed farm laborers — it freed up 33% of household income to be spent on automobiles, television sets, air conditioning, healthcare, education, travel, smartphones, and streaming services, most of which didn’t exist as industries in 1900. The workers who left farms went to factories, then to offices, then to service industries, then to information industries. The economy didn’t run out of work. It metamorphosed.

@pmarca the best thread I read on x.

VI. The Deepest Problem: Wants Are Infinite, Time Is Finite The most fundamental reason the lump-of-labor fallacy fails — in its AGI application as in all prior applications — is that human wants are effectively infinite and human time is absolutely finite. Even in a world where AGI can produce every good and service at near-zero cost, humans will still want things that are irreducibly scarce: other humans’ time and attention. A massage from another human. A meal cooked with love by a person who cares. A conversation with someone who genuinely listens. Live performance. Mentorship. Friendship. Community. Spiritual guidance. Teaching that is responsive to a specific child’s specific needs in real time. These things cannot be AGI-produced without losing the very quality that makes them valuable, because the value is constituted by the human origin. As AGI drives down the price of machine-produced goods and services, it increases the relative scarcity and therefore the relative value of genuine human connection and human time. The inevitable long-run consequence of AGI is not mass unemployment. It’s a massive repricing of human time upward, with employment shifting toward the domains where human presence is the product — and the expansion of service, care, craft, performance, and connection sectors to a scale that would dwarf current employment in those areas. Conclusion The AGI unemployment catastrophism is the Luddite fallacy wearing a PhD. It makes the same structural error every previous generation of technological catastrophists made — treating the quantity of work as fixed, ignoring the demand-creation and productivity-feedback mechanisms, conflating transitional friction with structural permanence, and ignoring comparative advantage and complementarity effects. The lump of labor fallacy is not a fringe economic insight. It is one of the most robustly empirically validated and theoretically grounded propositions in all of economics. The economy is not a fixed pie. Technology that increases productive capacity increases the size of the pie, and bigger pies employ more people doing more differentiated and higher-value work. AGI will disrupt. It will displace. It will create extraordinary transitional friction in specific occupations and geographies. It will reward people who adapt quickly and punish people who don’t. It will reshape the composition of employment radically. All of that is true and worth taking seriously. What it will not do — cannot do, given the basic logic of how market economies work — is produce permanent structural mass unemployment. The people making that argument are making a claim that has been empirically falsified ten times in a row over 250 years, grounded in a logical error that every serious economist since Bastiat has recognized as a fallacy. The burden of proof is entirely on them to explain what mechanism, precisely, breaks the demand-creation feedback loop that has operated without failure through every prior technological revolution in history. And “AGI is really really powerful this time” is not a mechanism. It’s just the Luddites in better clothes.

III. The Specific Structure of the AGI Unemployment Argument and Where It Goes Wrong The AGI catastrophist argument typically runs like this: 1.AGI will be capable of performing any cognitive task a human can perform. 2.Cognitive tasks constitute the majority of employment in advanced economies. 3.Therefore, AGI will be able to replace the majority of workers. 4.Therefore, mass permanent unemployment follows. Step 3 to Step 4 is where the lump of labor fallacy smuggles itself in. The argument assumes that the quantity of cognitive work to be done is fixed, such that when AGI does it, humans are left with nothing. But this is precisely what is not true, for all four channels described above. Let me be more specific about how each gap in the argument fails: Gap A: “AGI can do the task” ≠ “There is no more task to do” When spreadsheets replaced bookkeepers in the 1980s, they did not reduce the total amount of financial analysis done in the American economy. They increased it, massively, because the cost of analysis fell, which meant more analysis got demanded, which meant more analysts got hired — to do more complex, higher-value analysis that the spreadsheets enabled. Automation of the low end of a cognitive spectrum does not eliminate work in that domain; it shifts the frontier of what human effort gets applied to upward. AGI will do the same thing. If AGI can draft a competent first-pass legal brief in 30 seconds, law firms won’t employ zero lawyers. They’ll employ lawyers who review, refine, strategize, negotiate, argue in court, build client relationships, exercise judgment in novel situations — and they’ll take on far more cases per lawyer because the cost per case has fallen. Total legal work done in the economy will increase, not decrease, because more people will be able to afford it. Gap B: The Argument Ignores Price Effects on Demand The catastrophist framing treats the displacement of workers as a pure subtraction problem. But displaced workers who find new jobs (as they historically do) are also consumers. The productivity gains from AGI don’t disappear into a void — they show up as lower prices, higher real wages, or both. Higher real purchasing power means more consumption of more goods and services, which means more demand for labor to produce them. Furthermore, the catastrophist argument generally ignores what happens to the profits generated by AGI-driven productivity. Those profits go to shareholders, who spend and invest them, creating demand elsewhere. Or they get competed away in product markets, lowering prices and raising real consumer purchasing power. Either pathway generates demand for labor. The only scenario where this mechanism fails is one where the gains from AGI are so concentrated and the distribution so pathologically skewed that effective aggregate demand collapses — which is a political economy problem (a distributional problem solvable through tax policy and redistribution) rather than a fundamental unemployment problem caused by the technology itself.

@IcyCortex یاور تنگه انرژی جهان رو بستن تاوان داره برای کشور. جوون آریایی جزو هیچ معادلاتی نیست در جنگ. حرفش هم مفت نمیرزه نه برا اینور نه برا اونور. شکایت باید از کسی کرد که این استراتژی تنگه بستن رو به اسم قدرت نمایی نظامی سالهاست تبلیغ کرده در کشور، غافل از عواقبش.

اون جوون #سفیدپوست #آریایی که عرب‌ها رو سوسمار خور می‌دونست و شعار می‌داد ما آرییایی هستیم عرب نمی‌پرستیم، حالا وایساده پشت آمریکا واسرائیل که به کمک اعراب یسان جزیره‌های ایران رو بگرن. خیلی ماشالله دارید

Learn the alphabet first: - Scarcity → Think Picasso paintings at auction. - Network effects → Think Email, Internet, Telephone, Language, WhatsApp, Uber, Instagram, Credit cards. - Resilience → Survives nukes, hacks, and politicians. - Property rights → No government or entity can seize your asset. Now you speak Bitcoin.

Learn the language of prosperity. $BTC

More proof that introspection, journaling, and other faff is often more counter-productive than JUST DOING THE WORK

do everything, ignore nothing.

@tfadell noted: you fail when you don't try again.

DO. FAIL. LEARN. Failure isn’t the end. It’s how we get better. And I’ve had my fair share of it over the years. Startups don’t always succeed, but how you talk about the journey matters. Building a startup is hard, harder than hard. The pressure is real. The stakes are real. And when things don’t work out, it’s not easy to talk about. When I see founders sharing their stories with a level of honesty, that stands out to me. The ones who say: Here’s what worked and what didn’t Here’s what we learned along the way Here’s what we’d do differently next time They’re not just closing a chapter, they’re showing how they think. They thank their teams. They appreciate their investors. They reflect on what they’d do differently. There’s humility. There’s clarity. There’s growth. And that’s what builds trust. There’s no shame in the outcome, only in not learning from it. The best founders I know don’t get everything right the first time. But they do take ownership. They do learn fast. And they do come back stronger. That’s who you want to build with. That’s who you want to back. You don’t fail when something doesn’t work. You only fail when you give up, when you don’t learn from the failure, adapt, and then try again. Respect to anyone who’s taken the risk to build something from nothing. And even more respect to those who keep building.

@EricJorgenson @elonmusk just ordered. can't wait to read it.

🚨📕 THE BOOK OF ELON IS NOW LIVE!!! 🎉🚀 This is the book we WISHED @elonmusk would write… “All of Elon's most useful ideas, in his own words.” Learn directly from the world’s greatest entrepreneur, like you’re sitting across from him at dinner. It took FIVE YEARS to make this for you. Because it's built from hundreds and hundreds of Elon's public appearances. I went through 3,000,000+ words to collect the most useful and timeless ideas. The final book is ~50,000 words. Every word is USEFUL. (This is what I do. My first book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, is one of the top 100 most highlighted books of all time on Kindle.) Then, I spent $50,000+ on editing and design so it looks and feels beautiful. Then… > Foreword by @naval. > Visuals by @jackbutcher. > Blurb from @mrbeast. > Published by @scribemediaco. > And yes, approval on this idea from Elon himself, thanks to @samteller. I went Maximum Effort to make this an all-timer. We got 10/10 on reviews from early readers, then worked on it for ANOTHER YEAR. Why so much effort? My mission is to create One Million Musks. For a generation to lift our gaze and build, so our grandchildren live in a world beyond our wildest dreams. I’m an independent author. I don’t get an advance. I risk my own time and money to make these books. Then we give away millions of them. Digital versions are free. I believe this book can benefit every human, and if you can’t pay five bucks for it, I want to personally gift it to you. Because I know it is useful. Useful how? You may be seeking purpose, a mission worthy of your life’s effort. You may have a clear purpose and seek the tools for success. You will find both in this book. Get the benefits of Elon’s entire life of hard-won lessons in a five-hour, easy read. (I checked, it’s a 5th-grade reading level.) You’ll feel personally mentored by the greatest entrepreneur in history. Click below to buy it now on Amazon, Audible, or directly from me. Amazon: amzn.to/47avSuh Audible: lnkd.in/gi_7HrFP Me: lnkd.in/gS2xWUWH If you’re not sure it’s worth $4.99 yet, just start reading the free version. PLEASE take 6 seconds to Like, Bookmark, and Repost. Even better: send this to your friends, team, or Group Chats! I guarantee this book will improve their lives. Spread the word! Every little thing helps. Your support spreads good ideas around the world, helping people and making the future better for everyone. Thank you! Forward. Together.

Successful creators write 100 posts to find 10 that work. Unsuccessful ones write 10 posts and wonder why none work. Quantity creates quality. Volume negates luck. You're not doing enough.

@IcyCortex IR's foreign policy is the main reason for this war. Pahlavi having a meaningful influence on the start of the war is not quite accurate. I wouldn't look outside for Iran's misery.

#پهلوی، حداقل محمدرضاشون، نامش در زباله‌دان تاریخ کنار #مجاهدین و رجوی‌ها قرار خواهد گرفت. آدمی با ضریب هوشی پایین، که چون خودش عرضه و توانی نداشت، دست به دامن یک حکومت محکوم به نسل‌کشی شد که کشورش رو به آتیش بکشه تا خودش بشه پادشاه خاکستر‌ها.

What I find hardest, and what would make the biggest difference, is the highest-impact habit I haven't cracked yet. It's simple to describe but very hard to execute: staying focused on a course of action for an extended period of time (say 24 months) without being distracted and losing momentum in the absence of feedback.

@pmarca I agree. Next let's debunk meditation plz.

My big conclusion from this week: Introspection causes emotional disorders.

It's a great alternative to UG or GmbH for startups, because it's shareholder-friendly (easy to manage shares for co-founders, investors, or give employee stock options) and you don't need to deal with separate legal entities across the EU, plus it's easy and fast to set up. But for small businesses (profit less than €60–80k), the Einzelunternehmen makes more sense financially and overhead-wise.

@oost_marcel @_generalkaizen

🚨𝘽𝙍𝙀𝘼𝙆𝙄𝙉𝙂: European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled EU–INC, a new framework that lets you launch a company in 48 hours for under €100 Starting a company across the EU today = 27 legal systems, 60+ company structures 🤯 That might be about to change… The European Commission just introduced 𝗘𝗨 𝗜𝗻𝗰., a new optional corporate framework designed to make Europe actually function like one market. Here’s what stands out: → Set up a company in 48 hours → Cost: < €100 → Fully online, no minimum capital → One single framework across all EU countries → Easier share transfers & fundraising → EU-wide employee stock options (huge for talent) Especially the EU-wide stock option plans, taxed only when employees actually sell (instead of when granted) is huge. This makes it far easier for startups to attract and retain top talent, finally putting Europe closer to the US playbook. Source/More info: ec.europa.eu/commission/pre… In short: This is Europe trying to compete with the simplicity of a Delaware C-Corp 🇺🇸 And honestly… it’s long overdue. For years, European founders had 2 choices: 1. Stay local and deal with fragmentation 2. Move to the US to scale 𝗘𝗨 𝗜𝗻𝗰. is trying to remove that trade-off. If executed well, this could be one of the most important structural changes for European startups in decades. What do you think?

@garrytan @ycombinator A world without scarcity is a world without desire.

I want the machines to make a world without scarcity for all humans

It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.

@paulg unboxd.ai

@paulg you still reading emails?! I don’t. simply decide what topics or who can show up in your inbox. btw, it’s one of your old ideas to turn emails into a smart todo list that you can teach.

Hey Paul, just following up.

@saylor nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically.

Strategy has acquired 22,337 BTC for ~$1.57 billion at ~$70,194 per bitcoin. As of 3/15/2026, we hodl 761,068 $BTC acquired for ~$57.61 billion at ~$75,696 per bitcoin. $MSTR $STRC strategy.com/press/strategy…