I was in the city a few weeks ago and exclusively used Waymo for the entire trip. My biggest complaint? I needed to walk four minutes to a pick-up spot. Other than that, the car just showed up, traversed San Francisco streets easily, and the cost was reasonable¹. Sitting in the back seat watching the robot drive through San Francisco, I realized now I was at ease with the machine taking me hither and fro. I’ve been on more than 20 rides, and I think robots can drive a car in a crowded city.

I am dissatisfied when I ask ChatGPT or Claude.ai to write something for me. The writing has no life, no flair. It’s repeating patterns it’s been trained on, and the result is a pretty good imitation, but the voice is tinny and robotic. Anyone exploring AI has a similar experience; they test the robots on topics where they are the expert and quickly find it’s not creative, but impressively derivative. No art, no flair.

The point: there is a whole class of tasks where, job loss aside¹, I am fine with robots doing the job with absolutely no flair. I need the job done safely, efficiently, and reliably. Every time. I require no flair for a car taking me from Point A to Point B. I want no pomp and circumstance. The perfect ride is one I forget immediately because nothing interesting happens.

The Trap

Problem is, I like driving. Her name is Audrey. She’s a black Porsche 718, and I love driving her. We love zipping around the small mountain roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains. I like the feel of her wheels on the road, I like how she growls when we decide to go fast. It’s a visceral experience full of colors, sights, and sounds.

In a hypothetical future world where all I ever knew was sitting in the back of a robot car, I would not appreciate the work involved because I’d never had the opportunity to learn to drive. This might be fine for many humans on the planet, but not for me. I learned how to drive on Highway 17, a scary mountain freeway that required me to become a competent driver as quickly as possible. I remember those lessons, they made me… me.

I liked learning to drive.

Better yet, I like learning. It gives me appreciation of the craft.

I recently received a job description from a friend. As I started to read it, here’s the vent that went through my head:

• “Robots, really?”
• “Well, Rands, not everyone is a writing zealot like you. Many humans are intimidated by writing, so chill. They completed the necessary task.”
• “Yeah, but… if they don’t learn how to write well, isn’t that a problem?”

I looked at him when done and said, “ChatGPT?”

“Is it that obvious?”

This is the problem. And it’s large. For every task we’re asking the robots to perform, there was an essential initial step where the robots were trained on data generated by hard-working humans so the robots could perform the task. It’s called machine learning. They need to learn from the hard work of our learning, except it’s not learning, it’s mimicking and repeating patterns. While it’s a joy to sit in the back of Waymo and appreciate the robot doing an effective job, it’s a trap and a familiar one.

Minimum Viable Friendship

Remember back when you first got on Facebook or your first social network. A revelation, right? Everyone is here! Suddenly, you connected with friends from high school, finding long-lost friends, and it all felt very social. Your brain told you you’d found all these valuable friends, but this is a minimum viable friendship.

What does it mean to have a friend? To have a friendship? Your definition differs from mine, but off the top of my head, it includes:

Shared and repeated in-person experiences and achievements that built familiarity and eventually trust. The magnitude and consistency of these shared experiences and stories become embedded in your brain, connecting you. Their presence in your mind moves you, often randomly, to reach out and remind all involved, “Hello. Hi. Remember. We are friends.”

Facebook or other social network connections are humans that you know, but for many, we do the minimum work to build and maintain the relationship. Brief interactions tickle the “I’m being social” bit of your brain, but you aren’t. You’re sitting in your slippers in your Cave doing the minimum viable work, telling yourself you’re being social. These services are not built to help you be social; they are designed to extract data, which ironically is being used to train the robots to help you be less social.

Maintaining any relationship is work, and like all complex skills, you start with no skill. Via repeated failures and successes, you learn the work necessary to build healthy personal and working relationships. You learn over and over again, and the act of doing work is the lesson.

Are you wondering why we’re so anxious? It’s because we’ve never been connected with more humans less. We’re forgetting about the important work of investment in relationships, or we’ve never learned how to create, develop, and maintain relationships because we think those vacuous relationships we’ve made on the Internet are substantive relationships. They are not². I believe building relationships takes time, patience, and proximity. You learn how to friendship by doing the hard work.

Do The Work

I’ve made a career being a human terrified by becoming irrelevant long before AI showed up to drive my car. You bet I am poking every bit of AI that I can. Daily. I am trying to figure out what it can and can’t do, and this article aside, I am optimistic, just like I’ve been for the last three decades, that revolutionary innovations will knock your socks off in the next few years. It’s still early days for AI. Really.

However, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand. Many humans don’t check their facts; they believe what they read in the feed. Most humans believe the manufactured reality is designed to get them to believe someone else’s agenda. The convenience of these services and tools has made us lazy and, worse, not curious.

AI does an incredible job of confidently sounding like it knows what it’s talking about, so it’s easy to imagine what it will do in the hands of those who want to manipulate you. AI does a shockingly good job at programming and other structured tasks we thought were the domain of hardworking engineers, but AI is not curious. AI is trained, but it does not learn.

My primary fear is that, like Facebook before it, those humans empowered to build, write, and create with AI stop with the slop because the act provides an unearned sense of accomplishment. The work is the trying, trying again, failing, finding inspiration in the lessons of the failure, and going one more time. Only to fail once more. Being curious. “Why am I failing?” is required reflection. You ask yourself, you ask your friends, and then sometimes a lightning bolt strikes and you realize, “This is the lesson. I understand now. I know how to improve.”

The value of creation is a function of the effort. Creation without effort is meaningless.

Waymo Paradox

I’ve been working on the ending of this article for a few months because I can’t tell if we’re screwed or blessed. I’m not excited by a world where humans aren’t required to go through trials that require them to learn.

I’ve walked close friends through the arc of this piece to get their gut read, and most have a similar initial reaction. They’re concerned about AI running wild and doing unspeakable things to humanity. Yeah, I saw Terminator, too. This opinion has a valid recency bias, but I also think this is a repeat of a core human reaction — we fear the unknown. Change is scary.

I think we’re screwed, not because of the power and potential of the tools. It starts with the greed of humans and how their machinations (and success) prey on the ignorant. We’re screwed because these nefarious humans were already wildly successful before AI matured and now we’ve given them even better tools to manufacture hate that leads to helplessness. But I have a cure for that helplessness. Curiousity.

I think we’re blessed. We live at a time when the tools we build can empower those who want to create. The barriers to creating have never been lower; all you need is a mindset. Curiousity. How does it work? Where did you come from? What does this mean? What rules does it follow? How does it fail? Who benefits most from this existing? Who benefits least? Why does it feel like magic? What is magic, anyway? It’s an endless set of situationally dependent questions requiring dedicated focus and infectious curiosity.

When faced with change or an aggressive unknown, I take a deep breath, count to four, pace my feet firmly on the ground, and ask, “Do I really understand what is going on here? Really?” I start with curiosity because curiosity informs action. Action creates consequence, and when consequence shows up, you start learning.

Here’s the thing. We are equally screwed and blessed. These contradictory states exist at the same time. It’s a paradox, a confusing, in-progress, contradictory mess. It’s a state I understand because I am a human who continues to learn and I’m curious how it’s going to turn out.

Abalone Fishergirl with an Octopus (c. 1773-1774) by Katsukawa Shunsho.

Cephalopods in Japanese prints. There are many more octopuses than squids, especially the marauding variety, and that’s before you get to the erotic encounters like Hokusai’s notorious shunga dream.

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814) by Katsushika Hokusai.

Seven Divers and a Big Octopus (c. 1830–40s) by Utagawa Kunisada.

Ario-maru Struggling with a Giant Octopus (1833–1835) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Popular Octopus Games (1840–1842) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Parallels for the Cloudy Chapters of the Tale of Genji (1845–1846) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Parody of Umegae Striking the Bell of Limitless [Hell] (c. 1847) by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

A Female Abalone Diver Wrestling With An Octopus (1870s) by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

Delicacies of the Sea by Totoya Hokkei.

Fish and Octopus by Setsuri.

Sea Monster – Kaiju Manga – No. 8 (2007) by Tom Kristensen.

Squid (1940) by Ohno Bakufu.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Seventeen views of Edo
• The art of Yuhan Ito, 1882–1951
• Eight Views of Cherry Blossom
• Fourteen views of Himeji Castle
• One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji
• The art of Kato Teruhide, 1936–2015
• Fifteen ghosts and a demon
• Hiroshi Yoshida’s India
• The art of Hasui Kawase, 1883–1957
• The art of Paul Binnie
• Nineteen views of Zen gardens
• Ten views of the Itsukushima Shrine
• Charles Bartlett’s prints
• Sixteen views of Meoto Iwa
• Waves and clouds
• Yoshitoshi’s ghosts
• Japanese moons
• The Hell Courtesan
• Nocturnes

Tina on the transformative power of enthusiasm

When I was eight, I made a big, hand-drawn poster that said, “Do you want to join my fan club?” and put it up in the small Swiss town where I grew up.

Neighbors would ask me, “What are we going to be fans of?” and I’d say, “It doesn’t matter—it’s just about being excited.” Eight year old Tina.

Decades later, I’m still convinced that being a fan is a state of mind.

Being a fan is all about bringing the enthusiasm. It’s being a champion of possibility. It’s believing in someone. And it’s contagious. When you’re around someone who is super excited about something, it washes over you. It feels good. You can’t help but want to bring the enthusiasm, too.

This, to me, is the real transformation. Confidence is impressive, but enthusiasm can change people’s lives.

If I trace all the defining moments of my life back to their beginnings, I can always find a person with this fan state of mind: someone who believed in me, opened a door, or illuminated a new path just by being who they are.

This is a love letter to all the people who believe in us and nudge us in new directions with their enthusiasm.

To the person who showed me you can live life your way—my beloved, eccentric Aunt Hugi

She was the most creative, unique, stubborn, wild Swiss woman I have ever known. I grew up in the Swiss countryside and visiting Hugi in Zurich was always an adventure. She was a fashion designer, artist, and a true original. As I got older, I really started to appreciate how she didn’t care what people thought. She lived a courageous, creative life and inspired me to be bold, forge my own path, and break rules.

To the person who opened up a different future—my first boss, Matthew Waldman

After I earned my graphic design degree, I convinced my parents that I wanted to go to New York to find a three-month internship. I arrived on a Monday night and had an interview lined up the next morning with Matthew Waldman—the CEO of a small, now defunct design studio. Within five minutes of talking to me, he offered me a job and predicted that I would never leave New York.

Not only was he right, but his instant belief in me taught me that your boss can be enthusiastic, kind, and caring. This set the tone going forward—I would not accept anything other than a loving work environment.

To the person who nudged me to ask myself, “What am I waiting for?”—my daughter Ella

While working as a Design Director at a digital agency and pregnant with my daughter Ella, I found myself inspired to think bigger. I always wanted to run my own design studio and an urgency suddenly hit me—I was making a human, and I wanted to be a role model to them, so what was I waiting for? I started my own design studio the day she was born.

To the person who helped me realise “I can do this too”—the inspiring Jim Coudal

My blog swissmiss became quite popular, but when I had other ideas, I’d second-guess them. I’d think, Who am I to do this thing? A real epiphany came when I was watching Jim Coudal at SXSW. As he was describing his fun side projects, including The Deck Network, Layer Tennis, and Field Notes, I realized I could put my ideas into the world, too. Seeing someone create the things they want to create can give us permission to do the same.

So I did it. I knew intuitively that the people you surround yourself with change what you dream about, which led me to start the coworking space Studiomates (now known as Friends Work Here). It has been magical to see what unfolds when you gather creative, kind, driven humans in a physical space. We often find ourselves in deep, engaging conversations over coffee or lunch, which in turn has led to the founding of multiple companies, magazines and conferences. We believe in each other, and we make each other brave.

To the person who encouraged the momentum of CreativeMornings—co-founder of Mailchimp, Ben Chestnut

After experiencing the power of my coworking community, I felt inspired to share the magic. I was in a city of eight million people, but the creative communities felt fragmented and disconnected. I knew there had to be more heart-centered, creative people looking to connect. So, I decided to invite people to the space for a free breakfast and a talk. I vividly remember being made fun of for inviting people to an event at 8:30 a.m., and assuming no one would show up. I am proud to say we had 50 attendees at the first ever CreativeMornings in October of 2008.

Just four months and four events later, I received an email from Ben Chestnut, co-founder of Mailchimp, saying he and his team were big fans and he wondered if they could sponsor future events. I had never dealt with sponsors before and clumsily invited them to pay for breakfast, which turned into the most supportive and encouraging 15-year corporate partnership and friendship.

Mailchimp consistently reminded us to focus on what we do best: serving and growing our community. Having more people say, “We just want to make sure you can do your magic,” is what the world needs.

To the person who helped CreativeMornings think bigger and bolder—Ruth Ann Harnisch

When I first met Ruth Ann, a former journalist and the visionary philanthropist leading the Harnisch Foundation, she told me she believed in CreativeMornings’ potential to change the world, one friendship at a time. In an act of radical generosity, she pledged $1 million and became our first ever patron—the ultimate fan!

Her support isn’t just financial—it’s a reflection of her deep belief in people and their potential.

With her donation, we’ve been able to pilot Clubs: intimate, community-led gatherings built around a shared passion. In just one year, NYC Clubs brought together 6,000 attendees, further propelling the CreativeMornings friendship-engine.

To all the people who transform our lives

Every time I meet someone with a fan state of mind, I am transformed—my limiting beliefs are challenged, and possibilities are expanded.

If one person can change the trajectory of my own life, imagine what entire communities can do?

I believe heart-centered communities can create a cultural shift towards generosity, kindness, and curiosity.

A central agreement for CreativeMornings is: “I believe in you, you believe in me.” We celebrate with each other. That kind of mutual uplift changes you—it helps you step into your potential and work towards a better future.

And that’s the power of enthusiasm. In a world that sometimes feels like it’s waiting to discourage you, we need to find and become uplifting, optimistic, heart-forward people more than ever. People who ask, “What if it turned out better than you ever imagined?”

This is a love letter to the people who inspire us to be bolder and braver, but also an invitation to show an unwavering belief in someone else.

People show us what’s possible every day—and each of us, in our own way, can be those very people. To be a fan is to open your heart, stand courageously in your enthusiasm, and help transform the world.

So be the eccentric Aunt Hugi to someone.

Share your ideas with the world to inspire others.

Contribute to the things you love and would miss if they were gone.

Believe in people. Be a fan.

This blog series is our love letter to everyone who’s ever been part of a CreativeMornings gathering. Since our start in 2008, our remarkable volunteers have hosted over 15,000 events across the globe. As a community, we have become experts in what it means to create spaces that allow for deep, loving, human connection in an increasingly disconnected world. With this series, we’re sharing what we’ve learned hoping it will encourage you to join in or create your own meaningful spaces. The future is not lonely. It’s communal and hyperlocal.

In 2005, Jeremy Winterson bought a bootleg copy of Revenge of the Sith in Shanghai and noticed something wrong with the English subtitles.

The movie’s dialogue had been translated mechanically into Chinese and then translated back again into English, leaving it almost incomprehensible. (A similar disaster had befallen a Portuguese-French phrasebook in 1883.)

Fans replaced the movie’s original audio dialogue with voice actors reading the mistranslated subtitles, and the result is Star War the Third Gathers: Backstroke of the West (highlights above).

The Hollywood Reporter called it a “masterpiece.”

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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This is another one of those 'is Zach okay' comics and the answer is Zach is cashing in on ennui HARD.