🌻 conversations on culture in the AI age

my Substack talk and interview with Benjamín Labatut

I just returned from New York, where I had the pleasure of joining a few well-curated events celebrating human culture in the age of AI. Now that two of the videos are up, I wanted to share them with you.

The first was the Sana AI Summit, where I interviewed the novelist Benjamín Labatut on the legacy of John von Neumann, his conversations with Demis Hassabis, and the humanity that gets lost in the AI age. Labatut is not only a great author, but also a poetic, provocative, hilarious speaker—and plainly unafraid to challenge the buttoned-up executives sitting in the crowd.

The second (and sunnier) talk was for the Substack Media Forum, where I shared how my views on AI shape my approach to my writing career. For all my concerns about AI-driven disruption, I think it’s an incredible time for creatives who are enterprising enough to ride the wave. I’m especially bullish on secrets, socializing, and having a quirked-up style.

New York was as fun and stimulating as always, and I’m grateful to Substack and Sana for convening such a tasteful and thought-provoking crowd. (If we all get to be event planners and party hosts in the post-knowledge-work future, maybe it won’t be so bad.) Still, I hate that I’ve been doing more talking than writing lately, and am devoting June to staying put in SF so I can start some new projects. Thanks for the patience. More to come!

—Jasmine

(The actual videos are more fun IMHO, but both transcripts are below.)

edited transcripts

conversation with benjamín labatut

Jasmine Sun & Benjamin Labatut | Sana AI Summit | May 21, 2026 | Link

Jasmine Sun You cover deeply technical and scientific concepts in your novels, from quantum computing and physics to advanced AI innovations like AlphaGo. What is it about literary writing that you’re drawn to as a medium for exploring these technologies?

Benjamín Labatut I think that human phenomena is much more complex than can be captured with nonfiction. Participating in these talks, you get a sense of something that’s being left out, something fundamental. I think that just goes back to the way that at least this part of civilization has evolved. We have taken a definite direction towards the digital, and that leaves out the continuous, no? And I think we are really unlike these things that we’re creating. We are continuous beings, we are not digital, and there’s an enormous part that is left out.

Literature tries to weave the rainbow back together. It involves irrationality; it involves all of those things that science has, by its own method, left out. Literature tries to put it back in, so it presents a messier, darker, and perhaps more complete, if less powerful, perspective on the world.

Jasmine Sun What do you mean when you say we are “continuous beings,” exactly?

Benjamín Labatut I think that is an incredibly profound subject that I could not explain in sixteen minutes. Just listening to the talks and looking at the visuals of the event, I feel I’m back at a time when people were washing their teeth with radioactive products and smiling—beaming, no? It all feels sort of 50s, a nuclear enthusiasm.

Before I could even attempt to answer the difficulties posed by the fact that most of our being right now is digital and discrete, divided into things that can be easily accessed through rationality and logic—our computer systems all work like this. The equations behind them are sort of like that. It goes back to the foundation of this technology. The McCulloch-Pitts neuron, right? It’s an abstraction; it’s a mathematical model of a neuron. It’s basically Boolean logic applied to the idea, the abstraction, that a neuron either fires or it doesn’t, and that is the ground zero of AI.

You immediately understand what’s left out. After that neuron, neural nets arise from that. But the people who wrote that paper, McCulloch and Pitts—Pitts drank himself to death because he was accused of raping his mentor’s daughter. And McCulloch was a brilliant philosopher-scientist who ended up trying to find a new type of non-digital, non-two-valued logic, working in a tiny study, and he also drank himself to death. So what I do in literature is this: if you actually look at the people who make the fundamental discoveries, look into their lives, and try to look into their minds as well—their souls—you get past the advertising.

I was at the back looking at the beginning of the conference and I said, “Well, how about we add a little AI slop to the visuals?” Or some of the darker elements, because we all have visions of a really dark future, a very non-human future, but we don’t include it, at least not in the aesthetics. But I think that’s coming. I think this is a precious time to be here because we’re going to replace this enthusiasm with a little bit of shame and fear. I think it’s happening to the people who created these technologies. Their enormous enthusiasm is being replaced by something else.

Jasmine Sun Let’s talk about one of the people who was a forefather of the technology. In your novel ‘The MANIAC’, the middle section is this partly fictionalized but historically grounded biography of John von Neumann. He appears as this flesh-and-blood incarnation of superintelligence—somebody who is brilliant but also terrifying because he is brilliant. I’d love it if you could say more about what made his character so compelling.

Benjamín Labatut Not just because von Neumann was such an astounding scientist and mathematician. But listening to the people who used to talk about him, it’s like hearing someone talk about a superintelligent AI. The way that he affected those around him, the way that he would suddenly meet someone in a corridor and destroy their PhD thesis in 35 seconds. And the vistas that he had on humanity, no? It’s a cold and calculating, logic-driven perspective. I used von Neumann to show his blind spots as a person; as a thinker, I’m fascinated by him.

Luckily, we are not a species that reasons only. Our ways of being will always be more than our ways of knowing. Many of the problems that we face as individuals and as a species, of course, you can look at them with logic and reason, but then you get to scenarios like mutually assured destruction, because that’s where it leads. Because it is an either-or, if-not-this-then-that mentality. But we have other ways of going about things. The biggest problems, we don’t solve them with our minds. We just live through them, and we are changed by them.

I think that we’re at a moment where this is no longer science fiction, but it’s going to start to interact with the messiness of the world. If there is one thing that I could bet all my money on, it is that we will get the bad almost for sure, because the good is always harder. Not just from the point of view of science, but from the point of view of an individual. The terrible things are easily reachable, right? But to change yourself in a meaningful way—to be better, not faster or cheaper—is difficult. I think that optimism and realism at this point, we can even throw those perspectives away and just look around right now at what is happening, how we’re living our lives. I don’t see that bright 2.5% GDP increase. I don’t think we’re going to sleep soundly just because we’re going to grow 0.5% faster.

Jasmine Sun I remember when Claude Code came out and I started playing with it. You first feel this excitement at the technology and how much you can create. And then I started to wonder how many of my problems are solved by software. And the answer is less than you think.

One thing that I really love about your retelling of the AlphaGo story at the end of ‘The MANIAC’ is that it holds the light and the dark. It is both suffused with this clear marveling at the capabilities of the technology—you really understand and appreciate these systems—and it also has the emotional texture, the sadness, and the tragedy of the human players who lost to AlphaGo.

Then the very last sentence of ‘The MANIAC’ doesn’t end with Lee Sedol’s loss; it ends with the invention of AlphaZero, this successor system that didn’t even need any human data to train on. I’m curious why you chose to leave readers with that final image.

Benjamín Labatut I think it’s the trajectory that we’re on, and I think it’s a mistake. It’s more exciting to think about AlphaZero and then AlphaFold and Alpha whatever—Alpha, Beta, Gamma. But I’m sure that Lee Sedol’s life after that has been more interesting. We forget to ask the right questions. The questions are “How much?” and “How quick?”, and we forget “What for?”

I’m sure in this audience there’s a bunch of people who have met the people driving these technologies. They’re not very interesting people. I’ve been amazed by it. What they’re doing is fascinating, but we are living beings. I think about the trajectory that we’re on right now. I think about Lee Sedol, who quit playing Go. The thing that seduced me the most about him—of course, he was a genius, right? But he has this obsession with K-pop dramas. I imagine him singing in the shower in that really weird voice that he has. And I thought, “Well, yeah, that is the human phenomena.” The entire thing, that he has a family, that he has kids. We leave it aside because we’re caught in abstraction. We’re enamored of our abstraction. We’re enamored of the things that we can do, and we forget what for.

I don’t think things are getting any better. They might be getting flashier, but not even just that. The AI that we’re getting right now, I can’t get it to write a single good paragraph, and I’ve tried. I’m sure you all have. I’m like, “What do you mean? You can read every book.” Do I need to pay more?

Jasmine Sun I’ve tried the $200 a month version. They’re not writing poetry either.

Benjamín Labatut What did you get out of it?

Jasmine Sun Not a lot. In a way, it makes me feel better that it can’t write. Maybe just because I’m a writer and that’s cope, but it pushes people to write in more interesting ways, because you don’t want to just be remixing other ideas, since it can do that already. I’m interested to see where the systems will go. Maybe they will be able to write good poetry in a few years from now. I actually won’t be surprised if they do.

There are a lot of people in the audience who are scientists, technologists, and engineers—people who are excited about building some version of superintelligence, or maybe about superintelligence that accompanies or augments humans. I’m curious what message you would leave these folks with as they go on their journeys.

Benjamín Labatut We’re all drunk on these words, ‘super’, ‘ultra’, and they just obfuscate the fact that there are ways of knowing that are not intelligence-based. There are lived processes that affect everything about you. We are not this brain in a jar. It’s amazing that we’ve managed to prove this hypothesis that intelligence is not substrate-dependent. That’s fine. It doesn’t take anything away from the fact that we are more than that.

How about they start thinking about a super loving being or a super sexy being?

Jasmine Sun They’re building those AIs too.

Benjamín Labatut I want one of those robots as soon as it’s out, but I don’t think we’ll be able to take them out with us because people will shame us.

So, okay, superintelligence, right? Let’s say we have it tomorrow, and then let’s say we have the brilliant idea to put it inside one of these robots. You told me the impression that you got from spending time with them in China. What was it? What did you feel?

Jasmine Sun I was in China at Unitree, the leading humanoid robotics company. When you stand face-to-face with a humanoid robot, the first thought that you have, before anything else—it’s something precognitive—is “This thing could kill me.” It’s evolutionary. It’s psychological. In the same way that a chatbot talks back and you think you care about it, you stand face-to-face with a humanoid and you think, “This could kill me.”

Benjamín Labatut That is absolutely fundamental. That is your entire being telling you something profound about what it means to be alive and what it means to be a human being. Our first filter we pass anybody through is “Is this guy a psychopath? Is he going to kill me?”

The way that we talk about this technology, the way that CEOs talk about it, it is chickens coming home to roost. We’ve spoken about taking everybody’s jobs. We’ve spoken about the percentage at which we’re going to destroy the human race. Let’s take ourselves seriously. Let’s take what we’re doing seriously. There is a plan B and a plan C. There’s also a great plan, which is the no-fucking-clue plan. We don’t have a plan, and yes, we’re going through this and I don’t believe anybody’s plan. Nobody who is intellectually honest will tell you a plan.

I’ve spent time with Demis Hassabis, and I ask, “What do you think?” He replies, “I don’t know. What do you think?” People are fundamentally lost. What does that signal to me? If we navigate this space, it won’t be by thinking about it. We’re going to live through it, and I hope we listen to the part of our brain that says, “killer robot,” no? Trust that.

Jasmine Sun How do you think Demis feels when he encounters the enormity of what he’s doing?

Benjamín Labatut I love him. I’m a friend, so I’m not going to betray the truth of our conversations. But there is that level, right? Everybody has what they will say in private versus what they will say in public. I think Demis is a wonderful example of our culture’s Faustian pact, this thirst for knowledge. All our stories ask, “Should I pick this cup, drink it, live forever, and know everything? Or should I just be this human thing?”

Wisdom has always said to leave that to the gods. Leave it to the gods. You are not immortal and you are not all-knowing, and that is what makes you precious. You are precious because you’re weak; you’re limited. We disabused ourselves of the notion that we will live forever. We’re living in this scary time, so let’s be a little bit more human.

Jasmine Sun Even though Tyler is an optimist and you are not, you converge on some of the same ideas around the limits of intelligence and rationality, and everything else that humans are. Thank you for having this conversation.

Benjamín Labatut Thank you so much. Sorry for bumming everybody out.

how independent media wins in the age of ai

Jasmine Sun | Substack Media Forum | May 28, 2026 | Link

My name is Jasmine. I’m an independent writer covering AI and Silicon Valley culture. I also contribute to The Atlantic and do some freelancing. My background is actually in the tech industry, specifically at Substack, where I spent almost four years—mostly as a product manager, but also on the partnerships team.

I quit my product job at Substack to become a freelance writer a year and a half ago, in November 2024. I was doing an exit interview with Chris after I left, and Chris asked, “Why did you do this?” I replied, “Well, my job for four years was going to all these writers and saying, ‘Isn’t it sick to not have a boss? Don’t you want to do everything yourself? Isn’t it so great to be an independent writer?’” I drank the Kool-Aid so hard that I thought, “Man, I’m jealous of those guys. What am I doing over here with these meetings and Linear tickets?” So I quit my job and told Chris, “No, you can’t convince me to stay. I really want to go to the other side of the platform.”

My friends told me that this was a risky thing to do: it’s not a normal move to go from a secure W-2 tech job with healthcare to saying, “I want to be a freelancer now.” But I have actually felt really good about it over the past year and a half. I think it is one of the best times in the world to be an independent writer. I’m going to talk about why that’s true, and why I think the macro trends with AI are going to make it more valuable than ever.

I really think that we are in a new world now. Noobs are the new experts. Founders are as secure, or as precarious, as W-2 employees. Sometimes people ask, “Why don’t you join a publication as a staff writer?” Well, I think it is not a good gig to be a staff writer at the majority of newsrooms right now. I actually feel better with my own brand and my own email list. Nothing is sacred, and everything is fallible. I spent a good amount of time meeting top editors at legacy newsrooms, and when I chat with them, they feel on the back foot vis-a-vis Substack. They feel on the back foot vis-a-vis video. They feel on the back foot vis-a-vis AI. I don’t think the institutions that always seemed secure are going to continue to be so.

The fact that the old world is dying is scary, and most of my reporting and writing focuses on how disruptive and weird it is. But I actually want to take a little bit of a sunnier tack. For those with the gumption to seize the opportunity, now is basically the most exciting time in the entire world.

Every new technology shifts the balance of power in society. We all know this. The printing press shifted power from the Catholic Church to the Protestants and their pamphlets, and to the scientists who were able to publish contrarian ideas for the first time. The internet shifted power towards the broad public instead of a few media gatekeepers, and revealed the cracks in the system in a way that we are still learning from. I actually think that a lot of the macro trends AI presents could be a pretty amazing thing for a lot of writers.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about AI and the future of work: Who is going to get stuck in the permanent underclass? Is it going to be me? I talked to a lot of economists. And when economists debate the future of work, they often ask, “What will humans’ comparative advantage be?” I think the key to understanding what the future of work looks like is not asking how humans can race against the machine, or how we can generate slop faster than the machines can. Rather, it’s identifying human strengths. It’s understanding what skills will go down in value now that AI has commoditized them, versus what skills will go up in value because they are still scarce and the machines simply aren’t very good at them yet.

I’m going to introduce four ideas or provocations that have shaped the way I think about my media career. I’m sorry I don’t have slides, and I’d be curious to hear how others are thinking about this as well.

Number one: I think the value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. It’s taking things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, tacit knowledge, and open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to collect them and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.

There’s a reason these robotics startups are paying thousands of people to strap little cameras to their heads so they can fold t-shirts all day and try to intake the world from a human point of view. There’s a reason data companies like Mercor are paying Redditors $100 an hour to write up their niche hobbies and explain all the intricacies of being a knitter or playing Magic: The Gathering. There are all these details and tacit knowledge that you only know by doing, that AI hasn’t had access to yet because it’s just not in the data. AI can summarize and remix information out there, but it can’t see stuff, it can’t feel stuff, and it can’t break news. The thing writers can uniquely do is all of that. You can build relationships, go out into the world, take that knowledge, and make it public or sell it. That is something that is really valuable.

Number two: I think the value of static content will go down, and the value of live interaction will go up.

AI is making it nearly free to generate endless content—endless slop. It’s a lot of text right now, but I think videos are coming: they’re going to get better and we’re going to have endless video slop, too. This is probably controversial, but I don’t think we’re that far from a world where AI can take any of our writing styles and replicate it to the point where your median reader will not be able to tell the difference. That is a scary thing.

But your audience wants to feel connected to you. They want to know that you are the person generating the text. There’s a reason why behind-the-scenes videos go really viral now. People don’t just want to see the final presentation; they want to see all the proof of work behind it. For a solo creator, doing live events, podcast interviews, meetups, and hangouts proves that there is a life behind the voice. It allows people to make a connection between a living being and the words on the page, showing that the point of view comes from somewhere. That stuff is going to be scarce. It’s going to be irreplaceable.

I think most writers should be doing a lot more interaction. Every time I do a big written reported piece, I block out a month afterwards just to go to conferences, go on podcasts, and talk to as many people as possible. Some writers don’t like that. They feel like it’s marketing and not the part they really enjoy. But I think about it as building a connection and getting the ideas out to more people. If I care about my ideas, I want everyone to know about them, no matter the format.

Number three: The value of bureaucracies will go down, and the value of founders will go up.

Anyone who works at a tech company will know that AI has blurred the lines between roles. At Substack, some engineers became designers and designers became engineers. Companies are also getting much smaller because one person at the very early stages can be their own data scientist, programmer, and marketer all at the same time. I think it’s the same for media founders. AI is going to offer a lot of value to people who are jacks-of-all-trades.

I’m a generalist. When I worked at Substack, my thing was that I was not very good at anything, but I was about 60% okay at everything, and that allowed me to switch jobs all the time. I’d be the first person in a job, we’d hire someone better than me, and I’d move on and do something else. Actually, for a lot of media founders and creators, this is your strength, too. You’re pretty good at editing your own work. You’re pretty good at picking your own stories. You’re pretty good at being your own marketer.

AI is then a real boon. I like that AI helps me read a contract before I sign it and tells me what to ask questions about. I like that AI can help me fact-check articles, look up the citations for every sentence, clip videos, and negotiate speaking fees. Before, people would say that if you’re a woman negotiating your speaking fees, you should ask a white man with a very large ego. I asked ChatGPT. It’s incredibly good at this, seriously. One reason I’m not anti-AI in general, even though I’m against some uses of it, is that there is a lot of stuff I do not want to do, and I really want AI to do it for me. This is going to be an amazing age for founders who are excited about being the directors of their projects, and who can take advantage of technology to handle the other stuff so they can focus on their creative vision.

Number four: The value of polish is going to go down, and the value of personal charisma, style, and weirdness is going to go up.

I asked a senior media person whether I should take a staff job at a big publication. He told me that The New Yorker—the publication was not The New Yorker, to be clear, but it was an example—“makes bad writers good, good writers good, and great writers good.” When I wrote for The New York Times’s Business section, I felt like I was basically outputting code syntax. It felt totally LLM-able. The reporting was not—again, I’m very bullish on reporting—but the writing style itself was something you could shove through Claude and say, “Go figure it out.” That was a little bit demoralizing because I like writing and I like style.

The really great thing, though, is that what every Substacker is already really good at is having a very distinct voice that is fully theirs, which readers really connect with. I think your readers probably don’t mind that there are typos, and they don’t mind if you get stuff wrong. I love being able to say halfway through a post, “Actually, I’m only 50% confident in this idea. I don’t really know.” People love that. People want to see the imperfections. Being a creator who isn’t beholden to a house style is a really powerful thing because that style is what is scarce; that is what the AIs cannot do. Being able to talk in the first person and be provocative, versus hedging every single little thing.

One thing that a lot of my AI friends don’t really understand is that trust is not about information alone; it’s about the messenger. When they say we’re going to have AGIs that do super-persuasion by writing the most persuasive sentences in the world, I tell them, “You don’t understand trust. It’s not about the sentence; it’s about who says it, their track record, and what they’ve told you before.” The stronger your individual brand, the trust you build, the voice you have, and the track record that is distinctly yours; the better off you’ll be.

I imagine that some people in the audience might disagree with me on AI progress. That’s okay; you can argue with me about that later. But I think there are a lot of good reasons to be optimistic as a creator right now—as an independent writer in particular, somebody who is not part of an institution and is just doing your own thing. Again, I don’t have as many subscribers, and I don’t make as much money as a lot of folks here, but more importantly than that, I’m very, very happy.

I live in San Francisco, and I talk to my friends who are working at these AI companies. They’re working 996 hours, and I ask, “Why are you doing this?” For some people, it’s the mission. Others say, “I’m going to escape the permanent underclass so that in the post-scarcity utopia, I can finally make art and have a coffee shop.” And I tell them, “Dude, you don’t have to wait. You can literally do that right now.” I really feel that if someone handed me a UBI check and 24 hours in a day, I would be doing exactly what I do right now. I would be talking to people, going out and seeing stuff, writing about it, and talking to people about what I write. It’s the best time in the world to be an independent writer, and I’m very glad to get to do it with all of you.