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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
Nov 255 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
Nov 253 min read


Crazy People, Quantum Nonsense, and Why I’m the Dumbest Guy in the Room on Purpose
You ever notice how every era has its buzzword bullshit? Like, back in the day, every computer was bragging about its clock speed. “1.4 gigahertz!” “2.0 gigahertz!” It was the language of power. Nobody actually knew what it meant, but it had a number, and bigger numbers meant better computers, right? Same with RAM. Same with hard drives. Same with every tech label we could slap on a box. “Intel Inside” was practically gospel — and it didn’t matter if anyone understood it. Mar

Rich Washburn
Nov 234 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


The Pharaoh of PowerPoint: When Egos Build Pyramids Instead of Products
There’s something almost biblical about the way these guys operate.They don’t build companies anymore — they build temples to themselves. You’ve seen it: the aging executive who insists on running a “modern digital venture” entirely through local copies of Microsoft Word . No version control, no shared drives, no Google Docs, no transparency. It’s not about productivity — it’s about control.He treats the document like sacred scripture, locked in his desktop tomb where only he

Rich Washburn
Nov 163 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


Meetings Are Dead. Execution Is the New Conversation.
Why I don’t meet — I build. If you’re looking to “schedule a meeting,” stop. I don’t do meetings. I do. And I don’t mean that like a tagline — I mean it literally. If I have an hour free, I’m not spending it talking about doing something I could just… do. That’s not impatience; that’s what focus looks like in the age of AI. The work I do doesn’t start with discussion. It starts with motion. Meetings were invented for people who didn’t have the tools to execute in real time.

Rich Washburn
Nov 133 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


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


Process Mapping in the Age of AI: Why Skipping It Now Is Inexcusable
Let’s be honest—process mapping used to suck. It was the equivalent of eating your vegetables before you could touch the steak. Necessary? Sure. Fun? Not remotely. Whether it was defining database structures before writing a single line of code, or sketching out user journeys before building an app, process mapping always felt like the preamble to the “real” work. But here’s the thing: it was always the most important part. If you've ever written a business plan, mapped out a

Rich Washburn
Oct 273 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


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


Macrohard: The Schrödinger’s Startup That Might Build the Future (or Be the Ultimate Musk Troll)
If you’ve been on the internet in the last 48 hours, you’ve probably seen that photo — a massive white-roofed facility in Memphis with MACROHARD painted across it in letters so huge you can literally see them from space. And of course, it came straight from Elon Musk’s X account. Classic Elon: half-joke, half-omen, and somehow both at the same time. This is the same man who named a car line “S3XY,” sent a sports car into orbit, and made flamethrowers a consumer product. So

Rich Washburn
Oct 223 min read


This Browser Just Killed a Thousand Startups (and Maybe Gave Birth to the Next Internet)
So… OpenAI just dropped Atlas , their brand-new AI-powered browser . And somewhere out there, a thousand Chrome extensions just quietly curled up and died. Copy helpers, summarizers, productivity widgets, those sidebar AI things everyone rushed to build last year — all gone in one press release. Atlas basically did to browser plug-ins what the iPhone did to the flip phone industry: it smiled, waved politely, and rewrote the rules of the game. But under the hood, this isn’t ju

Rich Washburn
Oct 215 min read


Thinking About Hosting a Custom GPT + VIBECODING Workshop… Would You Want This?
So I’ve been tossing around an idea — part experiment, part hangout — where we spend a couple hours together learning how to vibe-code our own custom GPTs and web apps. Picture this: laptops open, coffee in hand, me walking you step-by-step through how to take an idea and turn it into something real — something that actually runs on the internet before you leave the room. No coding degree. No dev team. No five-figure contracts. Just you, a laptop, and a couple hours to brin

Rich Washburn
Oct 162 min read


The Mirror of Us: Welcome to the Era of Intent
There’s a strange kind of silence that comes right before a revolution—not the loud kind filled with slogans and sirens, but the quiet...

Rich Washburn
Oct 64 min read


I Accidentally Tony Starked My Productivity
I didn’t mean to end up here. I wasn’t trying to be the guy floating in midair clicking invisible buttons like a Marvel character. But...

Rich Washburn
Sep 283 min read
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