JA Westenberg

The US declared measles eliminated in 2000. It's back. One reason is simple: nobody remembers what measles does to children. When a miracle fades into the background, the machinery that produces it starts to look unnecessary. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/we-live-i...

I don't get involved in all the petty online arguments you mortals waste your breath on. I, an intellectual, instead write 2,500 words on Substack about why such small matters are beneath me, which is a far more sophisticated way to spend 6+ hours thinking about them

4 steps to a roadmap for the life you want: - Write 100 things you WILL do. - Map the skills needed. - Knock out the quickest wins today. - Swap 1 hour of doomscrolling for 1 hour of building. Treat your life like a project. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-bu...

OpenAI has announced GPT-6 Astra... Initial benchmark scores: - 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3 - 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4 (including solving open math problems) - 100% on ExploitBench www.laterware.com/story/hn-49...

A polished product used to be proof of grueling labor. Now, a perfect surface can be generated instantly. You can’t actually tell the difference without a degree of hard-earned taste - something a tool can never hand you. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-orche...

AI detectors don't work, false accusations are skyrocketing, and actual nuance is dying. Why the current witch-hunt against AI writing is doomed to fail (and what we should be focusing on instead): www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-ai-wr...

The "Second Brain" had a fatal flaw: human maintenance fatigue. Here’s why the Third Brain changes everything www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-age-o...

The classic Soviet bureaucratic failure applies to modern productivity: we spend more time organizing our notes than actually thinking with them. Most people’s "Second Brain" is just a digital graveyard of untagged links, orphaned thoughts, and guilt. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-age-o...

Herbert von Karajan never composed a note, but he orchestrated masterpieces. AI gives us all a baton, but it doesn't give us an ear for music. In the age of the orchestrator, taste and judgment are your only moats. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-orche...

Expressing extreme panic online has become a performance metric for moral superiority. If you aren't screaming that the sky is falling, people assume you don't care. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/congratul...

There are three ways to use history: To blindly comfort yourself about the present. To fuel your despair about the present. To actually equip yourself to reason about the present. The third is the hardest. And the only one that matters. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/congratul...

Pontius Pilate washed his hands. Macbeth blamed the witches. Tech CEOs blame Claude. It’s a 2,000-year-old tradition of powerful people inventing a middleman to take the fall for their own wreckage. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-art-o...

A bucket list is stuff you wish you could do. A roadmap is stuff you will do. Shift your framing from "I want to" to "I will." When you treat your personal goals with the same seriousness as a paid job, everything changes. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-bu...

It's wild how fast hashtags become anti-signals. You can pretty much ignore any post using them on almost every platform.

A read receipt isn’t a subpoena. A stranger’s breakdown isn’t your content. Your friends aren’t an audience. AI shouldn’t speak for you to the people you love. 21 new rules for being human: www.joanwestenberg.com/p/neo-etiqu...

The Enlightenment promised a world of adults who think for themselves. We built one where everyone has the right to an answer, and nobody has the obligation to understand it. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/kants-adu...

The only question that matters for any productivity system: Did it let you produce something, or not? That’s all there is. If you’re bored with your productivity system, embrace it. It means it’s time to do the actual work. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/dont-beco...

Everyone’s selling picks and shovels to people already drowning in picks and shovels, in a great big barrel of picks and shovels at the International Pick and Shovel Convention.

Stop trying to build for "the algorithm." Stop trying to scale to a million faceless users. If you want to make something people actually give a shit about, shrink your target audience to a single person you know. 5 rules for creating work that leaves a mark:

Listening to a podcast at 2x speed while answering emails isn’t "learning." It’s just noise with a productivity badge. If you want real leverage, turn off your phone, sit in silence, and read a damn book.

Budget is never your ultimate advantage. You can build the best product, hire top-tier talent, and raise millions; but strategy without belief is dead on arrival. Why the "3-to-1 Rule" decides who wins in business and in war: open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...

US AI labs: "Scraping the entire open internet without consent is fair use! It's transformative!" Also US AI labs when someone distills their models: "Wait no not like that, that's intellectual property theft" New post on why distillation is just the industry looking in the mirror:

If your data is bad, adding more compute just helps your AI learn the wrong things faster. Before you buy more GPUs or double your model parameters, ask: Do we actually need more compute, or do we just need better data?

Julius Caesar didn’t conquer empires by waiting for 100% certainty; he moved at 80% and adjusted on the fly. In a world of slow committees, speed is an unfair advantage. open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...

If OpenAI doesn’t submit their Hugging Face "exploit" in the Disruptive PR category at Cannes Lions this year, what are we even doing here

(Free download) Everything is seamless. Frictionless. Immediate. You can summon a meal, a driver, a dopamine hit, or a partner with the slide of a thumb. The world has been engineered to demand absolutely nothing of you. And it's making us soft, uncreative, and fragile. onfriction.com/

"Growth hacking" and hustle culture are a series of stolen victories. Are you building a legacy, or just chasing numbers? open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...

Sun Tzu ranked strategic outcomes, best to worst: - Thwart the enemy's plans - Break his alliances - Fight his army - Besiege his cities Notice fighting comes third. The whole point is to win without it.

The reason humans don’t want to generate personalized AI movies is the same reason humans don’t talk about their dreams: Nobody else gives a shit

Developers have GitHub contribution graphs to track their consistency. Writers deserve the same. Kerouac automatically tracks your publishing frequency across Substack, Ghost, & Medium. Streaks, gaps, and all. Finally, proof of work for your words... www.kerouacapp.com/

Don’t ask: “What niche should I choose?” Ask: “What can I see because of where I’ve been - and who else desperately needs help seeing it too?” That question will give you a body of work. That’s a lot better than a “content” category.

The best ideas hit you in the shower, then vanish by the time you open a doc. Kerouac’s Inbox captures half-thoughts the moment they arrive. Drop them into the drafting board when you're ready. Everything from idea to published. $8/mo. 30 days free. No credit card. www.kerouacapp.com/

The AI industry has confused abundance with value. More drafts. More images. More summaries. More angles. More options. But “more” is not a product. It’s often the product refusing to do its job. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/infinite-c...

great, now I can chase them via email to get them to look at the portal

"Link in bio" for writers is usually a mess of random URLs. Kerouac syncs everything you've ever shipped on Substack, Ghost, & Medium into one clean profile. One URL. Put it in every bio. Let people find your work without a scavenger hunt.

In a sea of thousands of VC firms, differentiation is the only thing that matters. Acting like a commodity makes you a commodity. You need a public identity that separates you from the thousands of other checkbooks. You need to write.

New on Kerouac: link in bio tools that let you add up to 15 custom links to your writing profile. Shipped and ready: www.kerouacapp.com/u/joan

The unexamined life is fine, actually. It's the over-examined life that never ships anything.

Your writing workflow shouldn't be: - Ideas in Apple Notes - Drafts in Google Docs - Schedule in Notion - Tracked on 3 different platforms Kerouac is one studio for the whole job. A kanban pipeline from spark to shipped. No more scattered docs.

I have a bread machine. Ingredients cost pennies. The recipe is 5,000 years old. The machine does everything with one button. I've used it 3 times in 3 years. Americans still buy 10 million loaves of pre-baked bread every day. Which is why SaaS isn't doomed. And Basecamp, etc will be fine.

RIP Lindsey Graham. You taught us all that it's never too late to abandon every single thing you claimed to believe in as recently as 60 seconds ago. Brave. Iconic. Unhinged. We'll miss you.

We replaced God with the Gross Domestic Product. But we kept on feeling guilty about resting and virtuous about toiling. The religious veneer faded, and the moral weight of work never left. Rest shouldn't require an excuse. But here we are.

Tech millionaires dropping fortunes on longevitymaxxing are repeating the exact same psychology as ancient kings eating mercury pills. They view death as a technical problem waiting for a technical solution. It's a desperate refusal to sit with the discomfort of finitude.

A blog is the only employee you have who works for you 24/7, sells your ideas while you sleep, and never asks for a raise.