So What?

Asking “what’s next?”

We all see the same long term trends that will shape the next decades of markets, company building, and society. We can all basically agree that:

• AI will keep getting better
• We’re driving off a demographic cliff
• Software will eat the world
• We’re gonna need way more rare earth metals
• The space boom is real/inevitable
• Climate change is faster than adaptation
• Attention is the new economic substrate

There’s any number more of these propositions that are largely uncontroversial (or should be). But rather than debating them over and over and over again, we want to be asking “so what?” What happens next? What are the second order impacts? Third order? What do you do in response?

If we can agree on some basic direction it gives us an opportunity to ask and answer better questions, to extrapolate the future from the present, and to trace the potential ripples from the massive historical shifts/catalysts underway today.

Over the coming months, I’ll be hosting a series of So What Dinners in NYC (and beyond) to extrapolate out and figure out what happens next.

Each dinner will explore a single topic along infinite axes among a small, intellectually diverse group for a closed door session (sign up here). They will require some preparation/pre-work and earnest buy-in. Everyone will be expected to speak, share, and speculate.

You can read my own extrapolations on the second order impacts of improving AI here. And We’ll be sharing what the groups come up with as we go.

May you live in interesting times.

-Yoni