If you've spent your entire life being the smartest person in the room, I have some bad news for you. Your intelligence is getting cheaper, and the more you've relied on it to make a living, the more you stand to lose.

For most of your life, being smarter than the average person was a pretty good deal. You could learn things faster, solve problems other people couldn't, acquire skills that took years to master, and get paid accordingly. The harder something was to learn, the fewer people could do it, and the more valuable you became. That's how you justified spending years in school, building a career, collecting credentials, and becoming the person everyone came to when they needed an answer.

Well, congratulations. We just invented something that can give everyone else the answer too.

And it doesn't particularly care how many years you spent earning the right to know it.

If you consider yourself an intelligent person, I think you should pay very close attention to what's happening, because the rules that made your intelligence economically valuable are changing. And judging by how most people are responding, I think we're about to see an extraordinary number of very capable people become very good at something nobody particularly needs them to do anymore.

I'm going to show you where I believe the money is going, what you should be getting good at, what you should stop wasting your time on, and why all of this might change the way you think about your life.

But first, we need to talk about horses.

For thousands of years, owning a horse was an enormous practical advantage. You could travel farther, carry heavier loads, transport goods, cultivate land, and generally accomplish things that would have been considerably more difficult with your two perfectly inadequate human legs.

Then we invented the car.

And as cars became affordable and accessible, horses lost much of their economic value as a means of transportation. Why would you spend hours traveling on an animal that requires feeding, grooming, shelter, medical attention, and a certain amount of emotional cooperation when you could accomplish the same journey in a machine that starts with the turn of a key?

Yet horses never disappeared. In fact, owning and riding horses is now associated with wealth, leisure, and luxury.

Think about that for a moment. We invented a machine that does the horse's original job better, faster, and more reliably, and somehow created a world in which people willingly spend thousands of dollars for the privilege of doing things the old, inefficient way.

The horse didn't become better at transportation. We changed what we valued about it.

Something becomes luxurious when it is both desirable and difficult to obtain. Scarcity matters, but scarcity alone is useless. I could draw a picture of a three-legged pigeon right now, and it would be the only one of its kind in the world. Unfortunately, I suspect the auction would be poorly attended.

What makes luxury interesting is that technology constantly changes which things are scarce and which things are desirable.

Take a handwritten letter. Before electronic communication, writing letters was simply how people communicated across distances. Today, you can send an email to ten thousand people while sitting on the toilet, yet receiving a handwritten letter from someone you love can feel extraordinarily special.

Or consider mechanical watches. Your phone tells time more accurately, costs less than many luxury watches, and performs about a thousand additional functions. Yet people willingly pay tens of thousands of dollars for a mechanical device whose primary function has been rendered technologically unnecessary.

In both cases, the practical value of the original object declined while other forms of value became more important. The experience. The craftsmanship. The human involvement. The deliberate inconvenience.

If we can understand how technology changes scarcity, we can begin predicting what will become valuable next. Instead of asking which jobs will survive AI, I think a much more useful question is: what is AI making abundant, and what will become scarce as a consequence?

Because the answer tells us where people are likely to start paying a premium.

A competent article, a marketing strategy, a financial model, a website, a piece of software, a presentation, a research summary. Things that once required specialized knowledge, expensive training, or entire teams of people can increasingly be produced by someone with a laptop and a decent internet connection.

Of course, there's still a difference between excellent work and mediocre work. There always will be. But the minimum level of competence required to produce something useful is becoming dramatically easier to reach, and that changes the economics for everyone who used to charge a premium simply because they knew how to produce it.

Now consider what happens when producing something becomes almost effortless.

You can generate a hundred business ideas before breakfast. A thousand possible designs. Fifty versions of an advertisement. Ten different strategies for the same problem.

Wonderful.

Which one is worth pursuing?

Which design is actually good? Which business solves a problem people care about? Which strategy makes sense for your circumstances? Which answer is technically correct but completely irrelevant?

And perhaps most importantly, which of those opportunities do you actually want?

Because having access to infinite possibilities is surprisingly useless if you have no idea how to choose among them.

This is where I think the economic premium is moving.

Toward the ability to recognize what matters.

Rick Rubin is one of the most influential music producers of the past several decades. He's worked with artists across wildly different genres, from hip-hop to rock to country, and helped produce records that have shaped entire generations of music.

What's interesting about Rubin is the nature of his contribution.

He's often described as someone who doesn't approach production primarily through technical mastery of every instrument or piece of equipment in the room. His value comes from listening, recognizing what works, identifying what doesn't, and helping artists find the thing that makes their work worth hearing.

Imagine a room full of musicians who have spent decades mastering their instruments. An engineer who understands every technical detail of the recording process. A songwriter who can construct melodies and harmonies with extraordinary sophistication.

And then someone walks in, listens for twenty minutes, and says, essentially, get rid of that part. And he's right.

The entire room becomes more valuable because someone recognized what deserved to stay and what needed to go.

That's judgment.

And judgment becomes especially interesting when execution gets cheaper.

For most of history, the person who could make something had an advantage over the person who merely had an idea. Ideas were cheap. Execution was difficult. You needed capital, equipment, expertise, employees, distribution, and often years of experience before you could bring something into the world.

Now many of those barriers are falling.

Which means more people can execute more ideas, more quickly, at a lower cost.

But the world doesn't need every idea that can be executed. If anything, the easier creation becomes, the more important selection becomes.

We have spent centuries organizing knowledge into separate disciplines, and for good reason. Specialization allowed people to develop extraordinary expertise in individual fields. But it also created a world in which someone could become exceptionally good at one part of a system without understanding how that part affected everything else.

But what happens when AI allows one person to perform work that previously required five different specialists? Understanding the relationship between those functions becomes more important. You can build a technically perfect product that nobody wants, market it brilliantly to the wrong audience, and turn the whole thing into a very efficient way to lose money.

Every individual part can be working exactly as intended while the overall result is a disaster. And the ability to recognize that, to see how one decision affects another, to connect ideas across disciplines and anticipate consequences, is a form of judgment that becomes more useful as our ability to execute individual tasks improves.

And this changes how we should think about value across almost every field.

In business, it's the ability to recognize which problem is worth solving before spending six months building a solution. In investing, it's recognizing value where other people see noise. In writing, it's knowing which observation deserves an entire essay and which one should probably remain a sentence in your notebook.

And in your own life, it's knowing which opportunities are worth pursuing and which ones will simply make you very busy building something you never wanted.

That last one is particularly important. Because getting what you want requires knowing what you want.

I know. Groundbreaking stuff.

But look around you. How many intelligent, ambitious, disciplined people do you know who have spent years becoming extraordinarily competent at pursuing things they never independently decided were worth pursuing?

They learned the right skills, pursued the right credentials, accepted the right promotions, bought the right things, and followed a perfectly reasonable definition of success.

Then they reached it. And discovered that being successful at something you don't care about is a rather expensive way to waste your life.

I've done versions of this myself. I've built things that worked commercially and still found myself wondering why I was spending my days doing them. I've pursued opportunities because I could see how to make them successful, without spending nearly enough time asking whether I wanted the life that would come with that success.

And this is why I think judgment has two distinct forms of value.

The first is economic. You develop the ability to recognize problems worth solving, ideas worth developing, and opportunities other people haven't noticed. You make better decisions about where to direct your effort, and the market can reward you for the results.

The second is personal. You develop the ability to recognize what you actually want, rather than endlessly optimizing your ability to obtain whatever happens to be rewarded by the people around you.

And these two things have to work together.

Otherwise, you can become very good at making money and very bad at knowing what to do with your life.

Which brings us to a rather inconvenient problem.

The very technology making independent judgment more valuable is also making it easier than ever to stop exercising it.

Think about the last time you had a difficult question. Maybe you were trying to make a business decision, understand something complicated, write an argument, or figure out what to do about a problem in your life.

How long did you actually spend thinking before asking someone else?

And I don't mean how long you spent worrying about it. Most of us are perfectly capable of worrying about something for six months without producing a single useful thought.

I mean thinking. Sitting with the question, examining your assumptions, developing an argument, looking for contradictions, and trying to arrive at a conclusion you can explain and defend.

Because increasingly, the moment we encounter intellectual friction, we have a machine waiting to remove it.

You can ask AI to explain the problem, identify the options, compare the alternatives, evaluate the risks, recommend a decision, and write the email announcing whatever you've decided.

You can outsource almost the entire process, and the results can be excellent.

That's precisely what makes this so interesting.

If the machine were terrible at thinking, we wouldn't have much of a problem. We'd ignore it and carry on.

But as it gets better, the temptation to let it do more of our thinking becomes stronger. Why spend two hours struggling with a question when you can get a coherent, sophisticated answer in thirty seconds?

For many practical purposes, you shouldn't. If you need a formula, a translation, a summary, or a technical explanation, use the tool. I certainly do.

But there's a difference between using intelligence to accomplish something and using intellectual effort to develop your own intelligence.

Imagine going to the gym and discovering that someone has installed a forklift next to the squat rack.

Fantastic invention. The forklift can lift considerably more weight than you ever will, and it doesn't require a protein shake afterward.

So you load the weights onto the machine, press a button, and watch it perform the exercise.

Technically, the weight has been lifted.

Unfortunately, your legs haven't become any stronger.

That's what concerns me about outsourcing our thinking.

We increasingly judge the value of intellectual work by the quality and speed of the output, while forgetting that the process of producing it can develop something valuable in the person doing the work.

And judgment is developed through that process.

You encounter a question. You form an opinion. You discover something that challenges it. You notice a distinction you previously missed. You revise your position. You make a decision. You discover whether the decision was any good.

Repeat that enough times and you become better at recognizing patterns, evaluating arguments, anticipating consequences, and distinguishing what matters from what merely sounds impressive.

You develop discernment. You exercise judgment. And over time, you build self-trust.

Self-trust matters because even the best judgment cannot eliminate uncertainty. At some point, you still have to make a decision without knowing exactly how things will turn out.

And if you've spent your entire life asking other people to tell you what to think, that becomes an increasingly uncomfortable thing to do.

We are going to see an enormous difference between people who use AI to extend their judgment and people who use it to replace the need for judgment altogether.

Both groups will have access to extraordinary tools, but only one will be developing the ability to decide what those tools should be used for. And I suspect that difference is going to become very expensive.

Last year, I published an essay called The Paycheck Era Is Dying. I was writing about the changing economics of work, but somehow ended up arguing that a business is not a life plan.

A year later, I've written two books, developed a few methods for making better decisions, and found myself increasingly getting paid for the ideas that come out of my own curiosity.

Which is rather convenient, considering what I've just spent several pages telling you.

But the interesting part is how I got here. I wasn't following a strategy. I was following questions.

And recently, I started doing that deliberately.

History doesn't repeat itself. Human behavior does.

Some of the smartest things we can learn about ourselves were figured out by people who've been dead for centuries. And one of them was a Frenchman who, almost 450 years ago, developed a practice I think we desperately need to bring back.

In 1580, a French philosopher named Michel de Montaigne published a collection of writings called Essais.

Essai is a French word meaning an attempt, a trial, an experiment.

Montaigne would take a subject that interested him and investigate it through writing. Friendship, education, fear, death, human behavior. He wasn't necessarily trying to arrive at some definitive conclusion. He was examining his own thinking, testing his assumptions, and seeing where the investigation took him.

Almost 450 years later, with more information available to us than any generation in history, I can't think of a better practice to bring back.

So that's what I've started doing.

Every month, I choose a question I think I understand and spend thirty days investigating it. I look for contradictions, question my assumptions, and follow the ideas wherever they take me.

The first question was cheating. Twenty-two pages later, I arrived at a rather disappointing conclusion: I don't know what cheating is. I know considerably more about what it isn't. I've turned these investigations into a monthly printed publication called Les Essais, and I'm inviting you to participate.

The next investigation is about purpose, which should be particularly entertaining considering how confidently people talk about having one.

You can start with cheating. You might agree with me, find something I missed, or decide the whole thing is ridiculous.

Good. That's something we can work with.

Because the point of this practice is to develop the ability to examine ideas, make distinctions, form judgments, and trust yourself enough to act on them.

And I can't think of a more useful ability to develop at a time when intelligent answers are becoming cheaper by the day.

Now, before you go, I want you to notice something about what you've just read.

We started with horses. Somehow ended up talking about luxury watches, Rick Rubin, artificial intelligence, and a French philosopher who's been dead for nearly 450 years.

And yet, they all helped answer the same question: What becomes valuable when intelligence is no longer scarce?

I didn't know I'd end up connecting all of these things when I first started thinking about that question. That's what I love about following my curiosity. I never quite know where it's going to take me.

Which makes me wonder what I'll be writing about on October 19, 2027.

I have a few ideas. But I'd rather find out.

Stay curious,

Benoit