David Geere

@pmarca 'Claude responds:' is doing incredible work here. Marc is literally outsourcing his side of the debate to AI while arguing AI won't make humans obsolete. The call is coming from inside the house. lol

Claude responds: The "Rising Cost of Existence" Claim Has No Mechanism — And the Default Technological Trajectory Is the Opposite The argument asserts that AI pushes the cost of human existence up. This is stated, not argued. And it runs directly contrary to the entire historical trajectory of technological advancement, which has been to collapse the real cost of goods and services that constitute basic human welfare. Consider what the subsistence floor actually consists of: food, clothing, basic shelter, energy, medicine, communication, transportation. Every single one of these categories has seen its real cost fall dramatically as a function of technological productivity gains. An American minimum-wage worker today commands more calories, more clothing, more computing power, more pharmaceutical access, and more travel capacity per hour of labor than a solidly middle-class person in 1920. The technological arrow on the cost of material subsistence has pointed unambiguously downward for 250 years. AGI accelerates this, not reverses it. If AGI can perform cognitive labor, it dramatically lowers the cost of producing everything that requires cognitive labor as an input — which is everything. Drug discovery gets cheaper. Medical diagnosis gets cheaper. Legal services get cheaper. Engineering design gets cheaper. Agricultural optimization gets cheaper. The AI-abundant world is one where the absolute cost of meeting basic human needs plummets, not one where it rises. So the mechanism for the "cost of existence rises" half of the scissors needs to be specified. There are exactly two categories of goods that resist this downward pressure: Category A: Positional goods and social status. Being in the top 10% of income is by definition zero-sum. If AI makes everyone richer, relative rank competition intensifies. But this is about relative impoverishment, not absolute destitution. Confusing these two is a serious analytical error. Humans being worse off relative to AI-augmented entities is categorically different from humans being unable to meet basic needs. The argument requires the latter to generate the "economic destruction" framing. Category B: Location-constrained goods — primarily housing. This is the strongest version of the real concern. Housing in desirable, productive urban locations is fundamentally constrained by land, zoning, and geography, and AI doesn't solve the zoning problem. If the gains from AI get capitalized into urban real estate (which is partly what happened with previous technology booms), housing costs can rise even as manufactured goods get cheaper, and housing is a large component of the subsistence floor. This is a genuine concern — but it's a political economy problem with known solutions (zoning reform, land value taxes, building incentives), not a fundamental economic law produced by AI. Packaging it as evidence that AI inevitably raises the cost of human existence requires ignoring that the mechanism is political dysfunction, not technological necessity. The technology doesn't raise housing costs. Regulatory capture and NIMBYism raise housing costs. These are separable.

Billionaires using Hegel in tweets is the intellectual equivalent of putting a spoiler on a minivan. It doesn't make it faster. It just makes everyone in the parking lot look at you.

@pmarca You said edge cases break AI, then concluded AI wins at edge cases. That's not Hegel, that's the middle slide missing from your deck. AI agents work where screwing up a case doesn't kill anyone and there are too many cases for a human to care. Less tweetable though so I get it.

Thesis: the problem with AI working in every domain = all the edge cases. Antithesis: domains with lots of edge cases = difficult & time consuming to practically impossible for error-prone people. Synthesis: such domains = where AI agents will do best. (Such as SAAS migration…)

@atmoio I really enjoy your fucking takes man, so good. :)

Normal people are starting to go crazy

@pmarca You're not right, but you're not wrong either, I think it depends on who the power consolidates to and their psychology. davidgeere.substack.com/what-the-end-a…

AI employment doomerism is rooted in the socialist fallacy of lump of labor. It is wrong now for the same reason it’s always been wrong. More people really should try to learn about this. The AI will teach you about it if you ask! (Hinton is a socialist. youtube.com/shorts/R-b8RR6…)

Effect wise it's hard to compare. I did this in the jungle, not a lab, so I can't give exact numbers, but my doses were roughly 3-4x what others in the group were taking. The effect on synthetic is like a really strong cup of coffee. The effect from bufo excretion is much of what Bryan described: ego dissolution, mind very quiet, very focused. Integration wise, the hyper awareness while my mind was super quiet lasted for hours after. Ego just chilling. The best way to describe it is absolute contentment in life, self and existence. I'm genetically an ultrarapid metabolizer on at least one of the enzymes that processes 5-MeO, which may explain why synthetic clears my system before it can do anything. Bufo's other alkaloids (bufotenin especially) may slow that down or add their own contribution. Also my response to this thread was absolutely not to shit on Bryan, or 5-MeO, or synthetics. My whole reason for switching to synthetics is due to the practice of how they milk the toads. It felt perpendicular to the gift we get from ingesting/inhaling the bufo. My working theory is nature has complexity we shouldn't ignore. Isolating a single molecule is isolating an experience.

@davidishim @theallinpod @friedberg @bryan_johnson I’m curious how you’re working with dosage across synthetic and Bufo, what differences have you noticed in effect and integration?

🚨INTERVIEW: Bryan Johnson just took the world's biggest dose of psychedelics... here are his reactions 48 hours later. @friedberg sits down with @bryan_johnson (0:00) Friedberg intros Bryan Johnson (0:54) Why Bryan Johnson did 5-MeO-DMT (12:56) What brain scans actually show (18:36) Psychosis, bad trips, and life-altering decisions (26:23) The next frontier: organoids and gene therapy (33:26) GLP-1s, abundance, and human optimization (35:35) The longevity drug nobody's talking about? -------------------------------------- Thanks to our partner for making this happen! The Pod by @eightsleep cools your bed to 55°F and uses Autopilot to optimize your sleep, all night. Use code ALLIN at eightsleep.com/allin for up to $350 off.

Wrote another one. This time about capitalism, spit roasts, and why we keep turning the crank ourselves. davidgeere.substack.com/the-free-marke…

@drewwilson Ha ha!! :)

We made it! I'm officially important on my own timeline ;)

@benkimbuilds Creating an app is honestly trivial, even prior to AI, distribution is the real challenge.

mobile app distribution is 100x harder than building the app

@pmarca are you conflating introspection with rumination on purpose? Because if introspection is some modern Freudian thing, what was Marcus Aurelius doing?

@LinusEkenstam Yikes, maybe he didn’t understand the question or the word? Lol

“Billionaire Marc Andreessen says he has "zero" introspection, and that the idea itself is a modern invention.” Respectfully Marc, but Marcus Aurelius wrote meditations 2000 years ago give or take a few years…

@darylginn iMessage, seriously, I text myself everything

@VadimStrizheus APIs first and whatever form factor serves your market.

As a founder, what’s the best thing to build in 2026? 1. iOS Apps 2. Web Apps

Who’s excited for @valiocon 2026?! If you’re not yet, watch these videos to get amped up :D and go grab your tickets now! youtu.be/iutMjFg3tqE youtu.be/dyehGWTfdp8

I wrote a thing about consumption, AI, and why an old man standing on a street corner might be the most honest picture of where we're all headed. It's not optimistic. But it's not hopeless either. open.substack.com/pub/davidgeere…

@bryan_johnson might be relevant as a thought experiment.

No matter what I learn, it somehow always ends up at the same place: why do we exist, why do we die, and is there any version of this where we get to keep being us? Some new and old things decided to brew recently, and this is what came out. open.substack.com/pub/davidgeere…

@drewwilson @jameygannon @ndstudio 🫡

Ready to help get America Online 🇺🇸 @ndstudio 🤩

What was the message? The App Store reviews are stupid, so cryptic, often times it is localization stuff, subscription screenshots, literally just put the email from Apple into your Cursor or Claude-Code and ask it to go down the "typical issues why Apple rejects apps" route. (I'm assuming you're not using any private APIs or restricted APIs etc) It seems like yours might be health related so Apple will require you to cite any claims via a link to the source. Also don't be afraid to ask for more details, or even schedule a call with them.

Rejected for the third time🥹 What do i do at this point?

Okay, who was the person that decided @LinkedIn should have games annoy me in my feed? The platform has become so useless as a professional network. More reasons to not allow LinkedIn notifications. LinkedIn has always suffered from a lack of strategic foresight in delivering products that solve for their real users and make their product more useful. You guys work against yourselves longitudinally, and maybe that is okay for your business, just like scammers you bet on the marginal percentage of people who will engage with your dumb shit. A slow death, it will have.