Hot Takes

I said it. Dragon fantasy romance is not it. I understand the appeal in theory: dragons, war academies, a love interest who's probably a red flag in any other context. But the writing reads like a Wattpad draft that got a book deal because BookTok needed content. The worldbuilding is paper-thin, the dialogue makes me cringe, and the "twists" are visible from orbit.

If you love it, I genuinely respect that. Reading is personal and joy is joy. But as someone who's read Sanderson, Abercrombie, and Kristoff, this felt like someone described a fantasy novel to an AI and asked it to make it "spicier." Hard pass.

Here's the argument I keep coming back to: we've never seen a cap on what humans want to consume and create. Every time technology makes something cheaper or faster, we don't just do the same thing for less. We invent entirely new categories of demand. When computing got cheap, we didn't just do accounting faster. We invented the internet, streaming, mobile apps, and entire industries that didn't exist before.

AI will do the same thing. The cost of creating content, code, research, and analysis is collapsing. But instead of that killing jobs, I think we shift what we do. I can genuinely imagine a world where you hire a one-person studio to create a custom video game just for you and your partner. Like, a literal bespoke video game, designed and built by one creative person with AI tools over a month. That would be a premium service. That's a job that doesn't exist yet.

The part that's scary isn't the destination. It's the speed. The trends take hold so fast that entire skillsets become obsolete before people have time to retrain. The transition period is where the pain lives. And I don't think we talk about that enough.

Related reading: AI Won't Take All Our Jobs (Bob Hutchins) · What If AI Moves Faster Than Society Can Adjust? (The Hub) · AI Is Changing the World Faster Than Most Realize (Axios)

I know this is polarizing. I don't care. Separate the person from the product track record for five minutes and look at what's actually been shipped: reusable rockets that land themselves, a global satellite internet network, electric cars that drive themselves and smoke $190K sports cars off the line, tunnels, brain implants, an AI company. The velocity of execution across that portfolio is unlike anything else in tech history.

Fun fact: I bought a Tesla Model Y, and the social whiplash was hilarious. First, my blue-collar neighbors gave me grief for being "a silly liberal who cares about the environment." A year later, when Elon threw in with Trump, I got it from the other direction. Everyone suddenly had opinions about a car that drives itself, costs $30K, and is faster than almost anything on the road. Meanwhile I'm just sitting in a self-driving car laughing.

You can disagree with someone's politics and still acknowledge they ship at a level most people can't comprehend. From a pure product perspective, as a PM who lives and breathes shipping, the track record is hard to argue with. That's the hot take.