Social media—it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here: Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It's prison. It's horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member? I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.”

So, the question that keeps me up at night is, what are us humans gonna do with all of our newfound time? Which brings me back to Japan, and this quaint Kyoto restaurant I found myself sitting in one evening. There were 10 seats, one chef/owner and one apprentice, and the most incredibly crafted experience. It wasn’t expensive, but everything was intentional. I found myself admiring this sensational and remarkably unscalable experience. The chef seems to make a good living, loves meeting interesting people, and gets to be wildly creative (the selection of glassware, the decor, the care and craft applied to every dish). Japan is full of these experiences, where art, curiosity, and craftsmanship yield tiny scattered wonders like “owl cafes,” micro arcades, plastic food shops, cotton candy shops, and the list goes one. I found myself wondering, why aren’t there 1000x more of these experiences in all societies? Why must the purpose of business be to scale, grow bigger, become franchises, squeeze in more seats, and compromise quality for automation and reach? Could a fundamental change in society, like mass automation and AI, spur both the growth and demand of human-intensive highly crafted unscalable experiences?