How I Learned to Stop Worrying, Love AI, and Be a Bit Less Responsible
The AI doom is coming. Take a slightly longer vacation. Go skiing with your kids. Buy that bigger TV. Watch a play.
Stuff George Writes
Latest posts
Space Elephants Across the Universe: Why Nobody Knows What's Going On With AI
Why it’s so difficult to understand what’s going on with AI in early 2026.
How To Become Wildly Successful in Business
The hard part isn’t understanding how to do it.
A Frustrating Adventure Trying To Design A Logo With AI
AI can do many things, but apparently not product logos.
Why is B2C User Acquisition Broken?
In which the author discovers that vibe coding has made it a lot harder to build profitable companies.
Books That I Read in 2024
Many are the books, short are the hours.
Is Population Density the Reason Americans Can’t Discuss Politics?
A couple of weeks ago, I was at a work dinner with other members of my team. We were at an amazing restaurant in downtown Austin. The appetizers had come and gone, the drinks had arrived, and conversation had started to open up a bit from the perfunctory discussions of work projects and the weather. As inevitably happens, a lull in the conversation occurred and a member of our engineering team,…
Choosing to Have Kids During the End Times
My best friend believes that humanity has a 60% probability of becoming extinct in the next 15 years. He’s one of the smartest people I know and is an extremely well-adjusted and high-functioning person. He scoffs at conspiracy theories, doesn’t wear tin foil hats, and has an abiding love of statistics. His belief is terrifying because it derives not from fevered information bubble YouTube binges,…
Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2023 and What They Taught Me
Here are the top 10 nonfiction books I read in 2023 and 3 things that each of them taught me. ★★★★★ An Immense World by Ed Yong An organism’s umwelt (pronounced “um-velt”) is a description of what they can perceive. Many organisms have such different umwelt that they are essentially existing in different universes without any perception of one another. It makes no sense to make statements like “a…
2023 Reading Update
So far in 2023, I’ve read 24 books and gave up on 7. I would have written about all these awesome books earlier, but writing on my new personal finance blog has taken up more of my time than previously. If you’ve read any good nonfiction books, please pass the recommendations my way. I’m always looking for new material! ★★★★★ Chip War If you read one book this year, I would recommend this one. The…
7 Things I Believe About the Future
I spent several hundred hours earlier this year researching how best to optimize my family’s investments. We are very conservative about how we invest our money. Most of it is in index funds. I think it is a bad idea to have a portfolio that doesn’t have at least a couple high-risk assets, so I embarked on a project to learn more about riskier asset classes and which would fit our lifestyle and…
The Top 10 Nonfiction Books I Read in 2022
This year I read 21 books. Here are the best 10. For more on the 11 books I didn’t include, you can check out my Q3 Book Review and my recent Q4 Book Review posts: ★★★★★ The Betrayal of Anne Frank I first read The Diary of Anne Frank in middle school and I didn’t really understand it. I don’t mean that I didn’t comprehend the facts. I read it and learned about Anne and her family and what they…
Q4 2022 Book Review
Here’s what I read in Q4 2022. ★★★★☆ The Alchemy of Air This was a really, really good book. The only reason it didn’t get 5 stars is that it didn’t fundamentally change the way I view the world. But it is everything else you’d want from a great nonfiction book: fascinating characters, counter-factual revelations about important events in history, and chemistry. What’s not to like? My wife has…
Getting to Base Camp is Skill, Getting to the Summit is Luck
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.” -Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb Most types of achievement I have observed follow a power law. You see this pattern in lots of highly-visible areas of life: wealth, power, followers, attention, income, and corporate titles to name just a few. As technology becomes increasingly pervasive and people…
The Best and Worst Books I've Read So Far in 2022
Book Bounty Before I get into it, have you read or do you know about any books focused on the following topics? If so, send them my way. What do you get out of it? My respect and admiration of course! Predicting second and third order effects of climate change. Climate change is a widely discussed topic in modern nonfiction books. Among the 12 books below, 4 dedicated extensive sections to climate…
I Watched 68 New Movies - Here are the 10 Best and Worst
Back in January, my wife and I had our third child. Young infants have no circadian rhythm which means they wake up - and want to stay up - at all hours of the day for the first couple of months. When we had our first kid, the sleep deprivation was terrible because I hadn’t figured out any coping techniques to deal with the new demands on my time and energy. But I quickly found my outlet: movies.…
Homework Pass Syndrome
When I was a kid, my teachers would sometime issue slips of paper to students as a reward for good behavior. These little decorated slips entitled the owner to escape any given homework assignment. Forgot to do that worksheet? Just turn in your homework pass and you'd get a 100% for that assignment. They were the real life equivalent of a "get out of jail free" card and I coveted them. I would…
Q4 Books and The 2016 Nonfiction Divide
I set quarterly goals for myself to not only write but also to read. In Q4 2021, I read 10 books (more on those below), but also crystalized a trend that I’ve been noticing for a couple of years: there is a stark difference between nonfiction published pre-2016 and afterwards. I’ve started referring to it as the Nonfiction Divide. Before 2016 and the Trump presidency, the capitol riot, and the…
Moving from SF to Austin: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
A little over a year ago, my family moved from San Carlos, CA to Austin, TX. There are real costs to relocating to Texas from California, but it has been a very positive change for us. If you are considering making the transition, I hope you will find this post useful. A Little Background About Us Here are a couple important things to know about my family and I before reading further: My wife and…
Why I’m Not an Angel Investor
Last year, I became interested in angel investing as a potential hobby and business opportunity. It seemed like a pretty good fit for my professional experience: I’ve founded 2 profitable companies, raised venture funding, went through YC in W14, and have subsequently worked at Salesforce and Facebook. I’m not an expert in most things, but I have become an expert in building and shipping new…