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The Real Correction: End the H-1B, Force the Reckoning
Let’s stop pretending this is complicated. It’s not. We’ve spent 25 years watching American companies train foreign talent, outsource their own innovation, and then cry labor shortage when they realized they can’t find skilled workers at home. Newsflash: you can’t find them because you stopped building them. I know because I was there. I spent months in India during the dot-com boom, training my replacements. Not metaphorically — literally. These people were brilliant. PhDs,

Rich Washburn
5 days ago4 min read


Optimus and the Meaning Economy: Building the Next Renaissance
“Optimus will eliminate poverty and provide universal high income for all.” — Elon Musk That line didn’t just drop into the news cycle — it landed like a flare. Because if Elon’s right, we’re not talking about the next version of work. We’re talking about the end of it. For generations, we’ve been told that work is what makes us who we are. But what happens when machines do the work — and humans get the why ? The Digital Labor Class Came First Let’s start with a little truth

Rich Washburn
5 days ago5 min read


Tribal Knowledge as Capital (And Why Experience Is the Next Frontier of AI)
Let’s start with a truth that makes a lot of people uncomfortable: The most valuable data set in the world isn’t sitting on a server. It’s sitting in people. Specifically — in you. All those years of doing, breaking, fixing, managing, selling, designing, negotiating, training — that’s data . Real, human data. Pattern recognition, decision trees, instinct models, and judgment calls that no algorithm could fake until now. And here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud:That knowle

Rich Washburn
5 days ago3 min read


The Confirmation Effect
So, I just finished watching Jensen Huang sitting next to Elon Musk — both of them nodding in agreement — saying there’s no AI bubble. And, you know what? That hit exactly the way I thought it would. Because it’s not a revelation; it’s confirmation. I wrote two days ago that there is no AI bubble — only a delusion bubble — and this, right here, is the proof. Not because Jensen said it, but because he had to say it. The narrative has finally caught up to the math. This is wh

Rich Washburn
Nov 193 min read


There Is No AI Bubble — Just a Delusion Bubble
I just got back from a data conference in Chicago, and I left honestly stunned. Not by the technology — by the people. Panel after panel, supposedly “leaders” in data science, logistics, and analytics — all of them dancing around the same idea: “We’re being cautious about AI.” Cautious. That word kept coming up like a reflex, a corporate mantra. “We’re waiting for regulation.” “We’re concerned about bias.” “We don’t trust the outputs.” It was like watching a room full of data

Rich Washburn
Nov 164 min read


Warren Buffett Just Bet on Google — And That’s Bigger Than It Looks
When Berkshire Hathaway makes a move, markets don’t just react—they pause. Because when Warren Buffett, the high priest of long-term value, decides to buy something, it’s usually not a guess. It’s a signal. This week, that signal came in the form of a $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. The buy makes Alphabet one of Berkshire’s top ten holdings, right alongside American Express, Coca-Cola, and of course, the ever-beloved Apple. And that, in itself, is al

Rich Washburn
Nov 164 min read


We’re All Looking at the Same Map: Reflections on Mary Meeker’s AI Trends
Every era of technology has its cartographers. People who climb high enough above the noise to see the shape of what’s coming, and then translate it into something the rest of us can navigate. For decades, Mary Meeker has been one of those people. Her Internet Trends reports shaped the early web, the mobile wave, and the first real data-driven understanding of our digital lives. And her new deep-dive into AI marks another one of those moments where her view from altitude cl

Rich Washburn
Nov 144 min read


The Fossil Fuel Mindset: How Ego, Meetings, and Fear Kill Modern Work
There are days when I leave a session feeling like we just cracked a new code for what’s possible. And then there are days like this . Yesterday was Alchemy at AI Speed —eight and a half hours of pure momentum. One client, one mission, one day. A full platform, born from nothing, live by dinner. That’s what it looks like when the spark hits oxygen. Today? Today was the opposite. Five months (actually five years ) into a project that should’ve taken five days . A team of smart

Rich Washburn
Nov 134 min read


The Most Dangerous Person in the Room Now Runs on Operational Power
It used to be the one with the title. The corner office. The authority. Not anymore. Today, the most dangerous person in any room isn’t chasing applause, approval, or perception. They’re the one sitting quietly in the back — calm, confident, and completely underestimated — because they’re running a system in their head no one else can see. That’s operational power — and it’s rewriting everything you think you know about hierarchy, influence, and control. The Old Game: Power T

Rich Washburn
Nov 124 min read


How Do You Say “Sputnik” in Chinese?
Quantum Just Went Rack-Mountable — And Everything Just Changed Let’s not bury the lead. China just launched a 100-qubit, room-temperature quantum computer — and you can rack it in your data center. Not a prototype. Not a physics experiment. An actual product. Shipping now. Called Hanyuan-1 . Three server racks. Neutral-atom architecture. Plug and play. Let me translate that into reality: This week, quantum computing went from science fiction to IT procurement. From Lab Equip

Rich Washburn
Nov 104 min read


I Don’t Have a Pick-and-Place Machine, and That’s the Real Problem with the World
There’s a guy on YouTube — a seemingly innocent man — who builds these tiny remote-control cars in his garage. They're adorable. They’re fast. They corner like little rally demons. He even programs them with wireless remotes and custom PCBs and prints the enclosures on what appears to be a farm of 3D printers. He’s smart. Creative. Focused. Wholesome, even. I hate him. Now to be clear, my hatred has nothing to do with the cars. The cars are great. I hope they go to nationals

Rich Washburn
Nov 103 min read


AI: The Everyman’s Revolution — The End of Institutional Authority
You’ve probably heard me say this before: the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as designed. Hospitals, banks, insurance companies, government agencies — all of them have operated for decades on a simple, ugly truth: the less you understand, the more they can charge you. That’s not cynicism. That’s architecture. It’s called institutional information asymmetry — and it’s the invisible engine behind every “policy,” “procedure,” and “unavoidable fee” you’ve ever been hi

Rich Washburn
Nov 94 min read


The New Arms Race Inside Every Data Center
Let’s be honest — the 10kW rack era isn’t just over. It’s ancient history.And it’s not coming back. What’s happening right now is something entirely different: an all-out power and cooling arms race inside every data center — built or unbuilt. The demand curve isn’t plateauing. It’s accelerating, steeply. And for the foreseeable future, that’s not going to change. People keep saying, “Well, quantum will change everything.” Not for this. Quantum is incredible, but it’s not bui

Rich Washburn
Nov 82 min read


The Great Scrape: How Reddit vs. Perplexity Exposed the Broken Economics of the AI Era
The internet just caught AI in the act — but the crime scene looks more like a mirror. Reddit set a “honey pot” — a fake post visible only to Google’s crawler. When Perplexity’s AI surfaced that invisible post, it confirmed what many suspected: Perplexity wasn’t just browsing the open web; it was pulling from Google’s cached Reddit content via proxy networks like OxyLabs, WMProxy, and SerpAPI. In plain English: Reddit built a locked vault, Google indexed the vault, and Perpl

Rich Washburn
Nov 63 min read


Skills-as-a-Service: The Next Great Gold Rush (And Why You Can’t Sit This One Out)
Let’s start with a truth that’s equal parts uncomfortable and undeniable: If you’ve got deep expertise in anything — consulting, medicine, engineering, marketing, welding, whatever — you’re training your replacement right now. And no, not the human one. The AI one. Projects like Argentum (Bloomberg’s scoop about hundreds of ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants training AI to do entry-level consulting) and Project Mercury (ex-bankers teaching financial modeling to models)

Rich Washburn
Nov 63 min read


Trustwidth: The Quantum Internet Era Has Begun
We just teleported the state of light through a live internet cable. That’s not metaphor — it’s infrastructure now. Let’s talk about what that means for trust, sovereignty, security, and how we even define “sending information” anymore. “Beam Me Up” Just Became a Network Protocol Not to get overly sci-fi here, but yes — we’re officially in Star Trek territory. In 2025, scientists at Northwestern University teleported the quantum state of a photon across 30 kilometers of comm

Rich Washburn
Nov 64 min read


MELISSA OVER JAMAICA: A PERFECT, TERRIBLE MACHINE
I’ve always had a thing for weather.Not the polite kind—the afternoon sprinkle on your windshield or the thunder rolling off somewhere near the horizon. No, I’m talking about the kind of weather that gets under your skin. The kind that hums with voltage. The kind that feels like the planet taking a deep breath before it decides what happens next. Hurricanes have always been that for me. They’re chaos and order intertwined—fluid, elegant, and terrifying. I’ve stood through the

Rich Washburn
Oct 285 min read


The Inevitable Obsolescence of Consulting Firms
Let me tell you something strange: We don’t know how to build the Space Shuttle anymore. NASA had the plans. The blueprints. The specs.What they didn’t have was the team —the network of minds, habits, and shared mental models that made it all work. That knowledge didn’t live in one document. It lived in hallway conversations. In hand gestures. In intuition built through repetition and failure. When those engineers retired or moved on, the Shuttle didn’t just become obsolete.

Rich Washburn
Oct 263 min read


The Last Version: Why Memory Changes Everything in AI
Here’s a question I get all the time:“Is everything I type into ChatGPT making it smarter?” Short answer? No. Longer answer? Hell no. And honestly, that’s the part people don’t get — but it’s the key to understanding where we are right now in AI and where we’re heading faster than most realize. The AI You’re Using is Frozen in Time Every AI model you’ve ever interacted with — GPT-4, Claude, Grok 1, 2, 5, whatever — is basically locked in amber. It's not learning. It's not ev

Rich Washburn
Oct 253 min read


Adapt or Die: The Brutal Truth About the Modern Tech Divide
There’s a hard truth nobody wants to say out loud: if you’re not adapting to modern tools — if you’re not using AI, automating your workflows, or streamlining with the tech that’s already freely available — you are the problem. Not the market. Not the system. You. We’re living in an adapt or die era. Technology isn’t creeping forward anymore — it’s sprinting. AI has hit escape velocity. What used to take teams of people and days of work can now be done in minutes. For free.

Rich Washburn
Oct 242 min read
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