Robb Smith

1/ The Big Picture Mind: What Every Elite is Missing Big Pictures are holistic, integrative, self-consistent systems of thought that when combined represent the broadest and deepest philosophical worldview available to humanity today. Big Pictures liberate. By building a mind capable of seeing what’s really happening, you have more freedom, more understanding, and feel at home in the world no matter how chaotic it seems. I recently did a live event to provide what I hope will be one of the Biggest Picture views of what’s happening in 2025 available anywhere in the world. This thread clips the video for easily digestible chunks and explains each piece along the way.

This loss by Cassidy, combined w soaring inflation & a takeover of the electoral system by the GOP via gerrymandering, will show voters they don’t have power to control their lives. Good, it’s exactly what’s needed to amplify & accelerate the release phase. Not enough pain yet.

I think a values trust mark is a profoundly important idea right now. And integrative values even more so. Check it out. Adopt it if it fits.

@Clara_Gold Even as kid growing up in Bay, obvious it was modernity on acid, as if nonlinear compute of money, code, tech—anything exterior—will magically jump the ontological divide & yield spiritual meaning. Least wise place on earth, a city-sized Atman Project.

6 months ago, I moved to San Francisco. It’s the best place in the world to build, and one of the worst places to stay human. My unfiltered take: 1. SF is both overhyped and underrated The overhyped part: there are a lot of people with incredible resumes who are deeply unimpressive in real life. They were at the right company, at the right time, in the right market, and got carried by the wave. They made money, got comfortable, and now spend their time “exploring opportunities” over coffee, wasting your time. The underrated part: the top 1% here is insane. But almost impossible to get. Hiring in SF feels like being a guy on a dating app: everyone you want is out of your league, and everyone in your league wants someone out of theirs. The best people have unmatchable packages, endless options, and are optimizing for maximum impact: labs, frontier companies, or startups raising $100M pre-seed rounds. If you raised $10M from Tier 1 investors, you’re not hot shit here. You’re a B-player. It’s humbling. 2. There are fewer mission-driven people than I expected Especially on the application layer. A lot of people are in “secure the bag before it’s too late” mode. And honestly, it gives me the ick. The real religious builders I’ve met are often in labs, hardware, biotech, deeptech, defense — places where the work is hard enough that you can’t fake obsession. 3. The status game favors builders This is what SF does better than anywhere else. It rewards obsession. It rewards weirdness. It rewards people who make building their entire personality. Europe punishes that. SF gives it status. If you’ve felt like an outsider your whole life because you care too much, work too much, think too radically, or refuse to be chill about things that matter, this city will make you feel less insane. 4. The market liquidity is absurd Even if you don’t build a billion-dollar company, if you manage to build a strong product with a great team, someone smart might still acquire you for $ 100M. Yeah I know, it’s not your dream outcome as a founder, but on the days you feel desperate, it helps to keep going. 5. SF does not care about the meaning crisis that’s coming Anyone paying attention here can feel that something massive is happening with AI. But I’m shocked by how little people talk about the meaning crisis coming next. Everyone wants to talk about AI liberating humanity. Almost no one wants to talk about what happens when work — the thing that gives most people identity, structure, dignity, status, and purpose — starts disappearing. The vacuum will not be peaceful. People are underestimating the chaos that comes from humans suddenly having no idea why they matter. And I really feel like no one cares. 6. Personally, I’ve never been more unhappy I moved to SF and entered the matrix. I’ve always been intense. I’ve always worked crazy hours. But here, I lost the last parts of myself that were not about building. I don’t go to events. Most networking events feel like theater for people pretending to be important. The only events worth going to are small, curated dinners with people who are actually alive. I’ve made 0 real friends. I don’t do well with transactionality. I don’t do well with people constantly performing greatness. I don’t do well with rooms where everyone is optimizing and no one is being honest. So yes, SF is lonely, transactional, delusional, addictive, inspiring, boring, extraordinary, and completely insane. But it is still the only place to be right now if you’re a founder trying to build the next wave of humanity. And for now, that’s enough.

On the error of the AI alignment field.

If you’re working on AI alignment, you might find my latest paper worth a read.

“humanity’s leading-edge cultural technology”… love that

If you tried to DM but couldn’t, try again, I loosened my settings.

For any of my followers who want a private sneak peek of a @IAMetatheory’s latest project, DM me.

Trump will be judged as history’s biggest idiot. Over a decade, he somehow blundered every step necessary in order to single-handedly give Iran its nuclear weapons. The Iranians have to be awestruck at their good fortune.

I just released a paper @IAMetatheory arguing that AI alignment is insoluble as currently framed, and might require a move to topographical, values realist meta-alignment to make it both technically tractable and philosophically coherent. iamalethic.ai/gnosis/v4z7n2m9

Every single American is on the verge of becoming an historic monster that future generations will look on in shame, wondering how a people could be so depraved as to allow a clear and expressed genocide to be committed by their nation in their name.

@emillively Working on it.

@RobbSmith I mean: how can AI help us think more integratively as a tool that surfaces blind spots, connects disparate frameworks, or challenges our existing worldview?

I’ve never been more optimistic about the future than I am today. AI is the technology the Integrative Worldview needed, and the worldview is what AI cannot succeed without.

Watching this unfolding energy debacle with Iran thinking the same forces that’ve killed our march toward non-petro energy resilience also act to guarantee its inevitability. Reality eats simple leaders for lunch.

We’re being pulled back toward the 19th-century across all four quadrants, says @RobbSmith. History already tested that model — and it led to endless conflict. So what’s the new story that can bring coherence to today’s fragmented world? 🎧 iamtheory.link/2p8fne5e

1/5 Can faith development be measured with greater precision? @BrendanGrahamD1 shares some compelling findings from his research into Integral altitudes: a statistically significant correlation between Fowler’s stages of faith and the Lectical Assessment Scale.

@Jacob_Billings Vice versa. lol Try LI? linkedin.com/in/robbsmith?u…

@RobbSmith @ninja_maths For some reason, I can't DM to your handle

Knowledge graphs take the guesswork out of tracking student learning. This animation visualizes a student's knowledge profile as they progressed our SAT Fundamentals course. Each circle represents a topic. The darker the circle, the stronger their knowledge of that topic.

@AnnMcNeal11 The world has the innovators it needs to create a beautiful future. But they’ve been missing both the intellectual resources and the acute pain to motivate them to do so. Integrative AI is solving the first. The metacrisis is solving the second.

@RobbSmith Can you elaborate on this? I am having a difficult time seeing past the chaos and corruption that we are living in today.

@emillively That Q can be interpreted in two ways, can you clarify which way you mean it?

@RobbSmith How does AI help us think more integratively in practice?

@Jacob_Billings @ninja_maths Hi Jacob, DM me and we can connect. Thanks for reaching out…

@RobbSmith @ninja_maths Ciao Robb. I'm replying to this thread in order to open up a discussion re knowledge graph building @ IAM. My background is graph theory (esp. topology). Current work leverages AI for NLP (e.g. knowledge extraction) and graph theory for multiscale interpretation/visualization.