I have always been a fast eater. My brother was a hungry guy, too, and our desire to get to seconds faster than the other one created an arms race neither of us could escape.

By the time I reached my 20s, there wasn’t a Peking duck, let alone a dollar slice, in the East Village that could escape the ferocious speed of my jaw muscles. I’d realize, ketchup smeared at the edge of my mouth, that I had eaten an entire burger before my wife had made it through the edge of her bun.

Then one day, a friend gifted me a small set of books by the beloved Zen Monk Thich Nhat Hanh. One of the books was called How to Eat.

It was humbling. I was eating all wrong.

I made three big changes.

Slow down

I realized I was skipping this thing called chewing. And that each bite could give me more enjoyment than I had previously realized was possible. I started slowing down, enjoying my food for much longer, and fully tasting and feeling the texture of each bite.

I started by savoring the dishes at my favorite restaurants, but before I knew it, I was sitting in my kitchen, swirling milk around my mouth and appreciating a creaminess and nourishment I didn’t realize milk had going for it. “I see you milk,” I started to think.

Stop doing anything else

I had often spent nights balancing ramen on my lap as I simultaneously slacked and watched Denver Nuggets basketball, but I started to realize that even Nikola Jokic isn’t as good as fully savoring a bowl of fresh ramen.

I started to notice that my body had a natural intelligence that connected me to my deepest feelings when I slowed down and stopped thinking. I’d be in the middle of enjoying a bao bun or baked ziti and suddenly feel sadness, anger, joy, or shame. Learning to allow these sensations helped me understand what needed to be at the top of my agenda the next day.

I’ve come to appreciate the power of observing my mind and body with curiosity as I’ve developed a deeper meditation practice, but paying attention to food consciously was my initial foray into a different way of being.

Start noticing

As I slowed down, it became natural to think more about the food I was enjoying. I became more squeamish about low-quality meat and cut back on deli sandwiches, but the dominant emotions I felt were awe and gratitude.

Eating strawberries, blackberries, avocados, and almonds with a friend in the middle of a frigid Brooklyn winter, we realized we were enjoying a feast that even the great kings of the Middle Ages could not have.

Without steamships, railroads, and the mechanized refrigerator, there would have been no fruit in February. The berries on our plate traveled further than most kings ever did. The avocados required all of those inventions, the Green Revolution, NAFTA, and thousands of years of Aztec ingenuity. Almonds are particularly wild. California’s Central Valley ships honeybee colonies in by the millions every February just to pollinate the trees that grow them.

You feel more in awe of your life when you start noticing that you are eating better than Louis XIV at Versailles rather than ingesting some random Costco produce.

Share the love

My wife, Paige, is the kind of cook who will spend 10 hours making lasagna. She gets it from her mama. When I was in peak company-building mode, I remember thinking, “We cannot possibly be hosting another dinner party on a Tuesday night.” But there is something about Paige’s cooking that makes people feel cared for in a way they didn’t know they needed.

You can feel the way she felt the tomatoes at the grocery store, tasted the sauce to make sure it had just the right amount of salt, chose the napkins to create festiveness. Her care pulls people into presence. Suddenly, everyone around her stops posturing and numbing and starts connecting and living.

Food made with that kind of attention does something that a restaurant rarely can. It says: you are worth ten hours of my Sunday.

Paige jokingly calls me “baby chef,” and I have never spent ten hours making anything, but I’ve learned that you don’t have to be a great cook to have a great relationship with food. You can eat fast and distracted, already thinking about what’s next, or you can live differently: licking the bones, savoring the flavors, and living like a king.

Work together: I am a former venture-backed CEO and founder coach living in Brooklyn, New York, with my wife, Paige, and our Great Dane, Tuna. If you or a CEO in your portfolio is interested in getting in touch about leadership coaching or you have an angel deal you are excited about, you can email me at andrew@brooklynhatchery.com.

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If this resonated, drop a comment — I'd love to hear about your relationship with food.

This post isn’t about the evolution of AI. It is about my own struggle to productively respond to some of the fastest technological changes in human history.

A little background context

Five years ago, AI could barely write a coherent paragraph. Today, it passes the bar exam, generates video indistinguishable from Hollywood cinematography, discovers new drugs, predicts the function of human DNA, and writes most of the code used to build itself.

Ten days ago, a Citrini Research thought experiment imagining America’s 2028 AI meltdown helped trigger IBM’s worst single-day stock drop in 25 years — and on Friday, the Pentagon gave Anthropic a deadline: remove your safeguards against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, or lose your contract. Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, refused.

Last month, Amodei wrote a public essay on the existential risks posed by the technology he has helped create. I respect the folks who question whether anything a CEO says publicly is bullshit, but CEOs of companies in the middle of historic wealth creation don’t typically write to the public to warn that their technology could destroy the world. It seems reasonable to me to pay attention when one does.

Crushed like ants

I still remember the way my throat tightened the first time I felt real fear about AI. It happened three years ago. I was seven years into scaling the company I had started in college. We had wrapped up a grueling quarterly planning retreat, and I could feel the dark circles under my eyes. I wanted to laugh and shoot the shit. I felt some relief as we all sat down to dinner.

That is when my Co-Founder, Eric, looked up at the leadership team gathered around the table and said something like:

“We could be crushed like ants by machines that don’t give a damn about us.”

I felt anger creep through my chest. Eric sounded crazy. I could see how his curiosity with early LLMs was pulling him in a new direction. I knew it could hurt what we were working together to build. But underneath the anger, I felt a constriction in my throat that didn’t have anything to do with how he was talking to our leadership team.

“What if he is right?” I thought.

I spent a year trying not to think about it.

Two wolves

There is a popular parable commonly attributed to a Cherokee Chief:

A grandfather says to his grandson, “In life, there are two wolves inside of us, and they are always at battle. One is a good wolf representing hope. The other is a bad wolf representing fear.”

The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. He then asks: “Grandfather, which one wins?”

The grandfather replies:

“The one you feed.”

Bad wolf

I hate how we have algorithmized the feeding of our fear wolf. To me, the most corrosive force for American democracy in the last hundred years has been the way social media companies have weaponized fear to maximize profits.

Facebook’s internal reports show that they understand that using algorithms to inspire fear and anger is easier and leads to more durable monetization than pulling users towards other emotions. Despite the howl of whistleblower complaints, Meta and many other social media companies continue to pump out the kind of content that traps people in scarcity and fear.

And I see this same fear-stoking playing out with AI. At first, I noticed it in my friends. And then, more embarrassingly, I noticed it in myself.

I realized I was getting this weird glee from warning others of their coming despair. Something about telling my friends about AI doom activated a part of my brain that liked to feel like a Roman Sentinel heroically alerting my people of the coming threat. Yikes.

I’ve learned that any time I feel like I can puff up my chest because I forwarded an email, I probably need to get off my computer and go for a walk.

I understand what Oliver Burkeman meant, writing The Imperfectionist, when he chose not to share the anxiety-inducing AI articles he has been reading “for the same reason he doesn’t go around sneezing on people.”

So why am I still sneezing on you?

Possoming

As much as I don’t like giving more oxygen to fear, I also believe my fear had something to teach me. It just needed to be examined and understood before I could place it back in its proper place.

Most folks in tech are now folding some combination of GPT, Claude, Claude Code, and other agents into everything they do, but for the 70% of Americans who aren’t using AI regularly, I sense that most folks are playing possum.

When fight and flight both seem futile — when the nervous system concludes that the threat is overwhelming and inescapable — the dorsal branch of the vagus nerve takes over. We play dead. And hope the threat goes away.

Many of us are already at our limit. We are doing our best to meet our responsibilities and provide for our families amid political dysfunction and fear.

If installing AI on your computer feels overwhelming, how the hell are you supposed to save humanity from it?

Play with fire

Amodei lucidly unpacks his concerns about existential risk here, and I am not going to rehash them. But I will say I find his logic, on autonomy risk, misuse for destruction, and how AI could help bring about a totalitarian nightmare, thoughtful and compelling. Amodei’s warning reminds me of what Robert Oppenheimer would have tried to do if he had access to WordPress.

But the truth is, if I’d read Amodei’s essay during my possoming period, I might have tuned it out. In the same way that you don’t understand the power and danger of fire by reading books on fire, you can’t understand the power of AI unless you are playing around with it. This is obvious to people who like tinkering with a car or codebase, and much less obvious to people who like to spend all day in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

My period of possoming didn’t end with some terrifying realization or worldview-shattering moment. It ended with wondering how best to turn the bok choy in my fridge into dinner. From noticing I now had the power to fix my grill despite having the mechanical ability of a goldfish. And then, eventually realizing I could use AI to automate all sorts of things that I used to pay people to do for me.

In the same way, you notice how fire accelerates in the wind, I started to notice the almost unbelievable jump in sophistication I was experiencing as models evolved in real time. It was only from that base that I came to believe many of the most important questions for democracy, the economy, and our world will have to do with our response to AI.

Taking action

Eric left the company we had founded together to start Goodfire, an interpretability startup focused on making blackbox AI models safer. He gave up his life in New York and started over in San Francisco. I was hurt and angry with him at first for leaving RippleMatch, but I also deeply respect his conviction and desire to make the world safer.

If we see a fire spreading that could envelop our community, we need to do what we can to ensure it is controlled.

Most of us won’t start AI safety companies, but that doesn’t mean we should keep possoming.

You don’t have to agree with Amodei’s level of concern on existential risk to appreciate how AI is going to transform the economy and automate a lot of what college-educated workers have traditionally done. Just look at what played out at Block last week. Jack Dorsey fired 40% of his workforce AFTER beating earnings and raising guidance for the year.

Dorsey remarked:

“Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. A significantly smaller team using the tools we’re building can do more and do it better.”

Block stock surged 24% in after-hours trading. This should terrify you, excite you, or both, but you should feel something.

There are such good questions.

How should wealth be distributed in a world of abundance with less need for labor?

What would a world look like in which our job was less central to our identity?

Who should control such a powerful technology, and with what safeguards?

Do we want the government’s ability to surveil to become absolute?

Good wolf

I am done possoming. I want to play with AI, talk about AI, and vote for leaders who are thinking thoughtfully about AI. And I want the rest of the world to do the same.

But I don’t want to give in to the doom. My fear wolf is fat enough - fed by algorithms, headlines, and the part of the brain that likes to play Roman Sentinel. I’m choosing to put him on a diet.

A few years ago, my uncle Sam showed me Mary Oliver’s Poppies, and it has been one of my favorite poems ever since. In it, she talks about how “the black curved blade” of death is inevitable — but that happiness, done right, is a kind of rebellion “palpable and redemptive.”

AI or no AI, we don’t make it out of life alive, but we get to choose the way we live. My marriage, my friendships, and my best work have all come from feeding the right wolf.

Once I finish writing this, I’m going to go play in the snowy woods with my dog. I might even eat chocolate and play Fortnite tonight.

I knew I wasn’t. I would work all week and then when Friday night came, I would default to the better option of whoever my girlfriend had made plans with or whoever happened to text me. I wasn’t talking about my biggest problems with friends. I rarely gave feedback and never cut ties with anyone.

I would have been fired if I ran my business that way.

And I’m not alone. So many of us don’t treat our friendships with the care they deserve.

Today, my friendships are the happiest part of my life. No matter what happens in my world, I am surrounded by a group of friends that make me laugh, push me, and fill my life with joy. There is a lot to say about everything that goes into developing strong friendships, but I want to write about the less obvious learnings that have helped me the most.

Be present

Can you picture how good it feels to be in the company of a friend who listens to your every word with total focus and then asks good questions? Or how bad it feels to open up to someone who is half-listening?

There is no greater soil for friendship than undivided presence. When you are spending time with a friend, silence Slack. Put away your phone. Treat the moment like it could be the last you will ever have. That kind of attention builds loyalty and connection.

Share vulnerably

Laughter, wit, and shared interests are all great, but the deepest relationships require vulnerability. By being honest about our fears, we invite the support we need to grow. We also deepen our friendships. Most people love their friends more when they see their humanness underneath their armor.

This one was hard for me. And it is something I still have to work at.

To be successful here, I had to learn to stop saying things like: “It’s been a stressful month at work, but I’m hanging in there. How are you?” And start saying things like: “I am feeling nauseous looking at how much cash we have in the bank and have this recurring nightmare of firing everyone who took a leap of faith on me.”

If your skin isn’t crawling a little bit when you share your challenges, you probably aren’t being real enough.

Play like a kid

We default to meals and drinks, but Peter Pan had it right - nothing accelerates friendship like creating space to play like a child. No matter how busy work gets, I try to get away for extended play with friends at least twice a year. So many of my deepest relationships have been formed sloshing through the mud in Upstate New York and pretending to be water slugs in Puerto Vallarta. I have seen Burning Man’s childlike freedom create bonds that last for life. No one outgrows dress-up.

At home, board game nights, soccer, and poker nourish my relationships. Friendship needs moments that shake loose the rigid social roles we inhabit and give us space to move into humor and joy.

Embrace confrontation

Successful leaders embrace radical candor at work, but almost everyone flinches at challenging their friends. Most of us picture a worst-case scenario where the friend turns on us, but this has never been my experience. Giving hard feedback from a grounded place is an act of love, and your friends can usually see that.

I’ve seen conversations ranging from “I’m struggling with your partner” to “you’re using too much toilet paper” strengthen relationships. Most damage we do is unconscious. Relationships deepen through rupture as long as there is repair.

Practice forgiveness

Honest communication must be balanced with forgiveness. I can’t put this one better than David Whyte. In Consolations, he writes:

“All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.”

Sustained friendship has to survive new romantic relationships, work triumphs and sorrows, and children. Like root rot, tension in friendships builds over time. It is easier than we like to think to let friendships slip away because of petty resentment or pride.

I have one friend who refused to use a cell phone properly for a decade and would reappear every six months with an email: “I am in New York tonight. Can you meet me in Bushwick?” He has gotten better recently, but if I hadn’t made peace with how he was in his twenties and canceled my plans to see him whenever he visited, I could have let a beautiful friendship fade. His love, wisdom, and good humor outweighed his mediocre communication. Going with his flow was worth it.

At my wedding in October, my own groomsmen had, at various times, forgiven me for being completely absent as I got RippleMatch off the ground, falling asleep at a 25th birthday dinner, being a slovenly roommate, and approaching a variety of situations with way too much or way too little force.

I don’t have a single strong relationship that hasn’t involved some element of minor or major forgiveness.

Let me know your thoughts!

If this piece resonated for you, leave a comment or shoot me an email. I like hearing from folks.

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