People. Process. Product.

A tree fell down in Venice, Italy, and everyone misses the shade. So we're planting a new one. But a young tree is not nearly as cool as a mature tree.

The idea: a 3D-printed hexagonal frame that wraps the trunk and stacks into a canopy. Real plants drape down from it — shade, movement, sound. As the tree grows, you add segments at the base to raise the entire structure, keeping the canopy above the growing tree. The structure adapts to the biology.

And the best part, it's designed to disappear. When the tree matures, you pull the frame off.

If you hand me something and say "here's what the robot gave me," you've already told me everything I need to know. Not about the robot, but about you.

It's a tool. If you're hammering something into a wall and break a vase, you don't tell your wife "the hammer broke it." You say "I broke it." That ownership is the difference between using a tool and hiding behind one.

You used AI to draft a strategy deck? Great. But the moment you present it, it's yours.

Own the thinking. Own the outcome.

There's a moment in the first season of Westworld where a host (robot) is fitting a customer (human) in cowboy gear and starts coming on to him, sexually. He hesitates. She's a robot. She says: "If you can't tell, does it matter?"

I think about that line constantly now. We're deep into the era where AI is augmenting everything. If the experience was good; the email clear, and the plan sound — does it matter what made it? Nobody asks what brand of chisel carved the sculpture. The tool has never been the point. Humans don't just consume outputs. We consume stories about how things were made. That story is, a big, part of the product. It's why we pay more for products with good stories.

The AI-made thing doesn't have that story (yet). Its origin story is: a most likely white male drank coffee and typed a prompt. So what happens next? You already know…Capitalism fabricates origin stories.

We do it with food: "farm to table", "artisanal" bread from a factory with a rustic font. AI provenance (thanks Patrick for adding this to my lexicon) fraud is next.

We've been fine with fake origin stories for generations. The "family recipe" that came off a box. The "heritage brand" founded in 2019. The "handmade" label on something from an assembly line. We buy it anyway.

But when a robot does it? Suddenly we are outraged! Which is weird because the human version of this lie has been running for centuries.

Here's where the Westworld metaphor breaks in an interesting way. In the show, the robots eventually develop real deep stories… suffering, memory, consciousness. What happens when the AI's origin story becomes more compelling than the prompter's?

If you can't tell, does it matter?

When everyone runs their work through the same model, the output converges. Everything starts to sound the same.

I don't shop at Walmart. I'm a designer in Venice, California, and I have a certain curated vibe. Walmart is the antithesis of that. So why would I use the Walmart of AI to do my creative thinking?

The market is wide open for the boutique. Not a better general model — a model tuned to a specific sensibility, domain, and taste. One that generates work that sounds like it came from someone who has an opinion.

Picture this: you're in a meeting, your team needs creative direction. Instead of pulling up ChatGPT and getting the same output your competitor got ten minutes ago, you pull in a model trained on twenty years of Thought Merchants' work. Our taste. Our instinct. That's not AI — it's a creative partner with a point of view.

Commoditization always creates a premium tier. You can buy a $12 bottle of wine at Costco or a $1,200 bottle from a vineyard in Napa. Both are wine. They are not the same thing.

AI is heading the same direction. The commodity layer gets cheaper and more universal…the more universal it gets, the more sameness it produces. The more sameness there is, the more valuable differentiation becomes.

I don't shop at Walmart because I have style. Your brand shouldn't either.

You can do almost anything right now. That's the problem.

The capability ceiling has been removed. The bottleneck was never capability. It's attention.

The same discipline problems I had doing manual work are showing up with AI. When I sit down with the robot and I don't know exactly what I'm building, I scatter.

Sound familiar? It should, because it's the exact same muscle that atrophies every time you open Instagram.

Social media is attention poison. But the real damage isn't the wasted hour. It's the habit. You're training yourself to scroll and never go deep…

Then you sit down with the most powerful tool ever built and wonder why you can't focus long enough to do something meaningful.

AI doesn't fix a lack of direction. It multiplies it.

Someone posts a video. They've got a swarm of agents: one writing code, one doing research, one managing a database, one talking to another agent who's talking to another agent. It looks impressive. They're the conductor of an enormous orchestra and they want you to see how many instruments they control.

There's a guy on Twitter promising that Claude plus Polymarket will retire you. "Basic arbitrage gigs net around $25 an hour, but dialed-in ones scale to millions." Zero proof. Just potential! It reads like a late-night infomercial.

Cool. Are you playing a symphony or just getting as many musicians together as possible to bang on their instrument? Is any of this actually good?

Making things is hard. It requires taste, decisions, a point of view. Orchestration is easy by comparison. It's logistics! It's plumbing. And plumbing is important, but nobody goes to a restaurant because the toilet flushes like a beast.

So now when I see one of these posts—autonomous workflows running workflows, trading bots that'll retire you by Thursday—I just ask one question:

Is it good?

If the answer isn't obvious, it's not.

I went to art school. I'm terrible at standardized tests. I'm damn certain I'm not dumb. I'm smart in ways those tests just don't measure. Street smarts versus book smarts. The kid who aced every exam but couldn't hold a conversation.

The difference is EQ. Emotional intelligence. Knowing when to push and when to shut up. You know — reading a room…

EQ matters just as much as IQ. Think about the best people you've ever worked with. It wasn't the highest GPA. It was the person with proper timing and touch. Every few weeks there's a new headline. A robot just crushed the bar exam. Another one aced the SATs. New benchmarks drop and everyone celebrates.

…Cool…

You're great at taking tests. No shit. You were designed to be great at taking tests. But that's all IQ. Every benchmark, every leaderboard — book smarts. At some point you need to ask: what about everyone else? Are you even aware?

You know what is a fun thought? The first robot drug dealer. We'll learn quite a bit from that.

Shout out to Gabby: The robots are cinderblocks!

There's going to be a new class of people. I'll call them: lamp rubbers: humans who know how to talk to the genie. Everyone else will stare at the lamp, waiting for magic.

The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed. William Gibson said that, and I felt it this weekend when I set up OpenClaw on my Mac Mini. I told it to scrape every event happening in Venice Beach for the next three months, score them for quality, and queue the good ones for me to approve for my Venice Times project. It did that, then built the middleware app I am using to manage everything. Ok that only took 20 minutes… that is faster than I can wrap my head around the problem space AND a brand new solution.

I sat there with an empty text box. I did not know what to ask for yet...I made tea to think about what I wanted next.

And that is the new divide. Who can articulate what they want clearly enough to make the machine useful. Most people can't. They've spent their whole lives capability constrained by bosses, client briefs, technology. Now the constraint isn't capability, it's the terrifying question:

What do you actually want?

Lamp rubbers figure that out. They get comfortable with the blank page. They learn to translate vague ambition into specific direction, one question at a time. They don't need to know how to code or design — they need to know how to think out loud with enough precision that something useful comes back.

This is where products like AI agents suck. You can't let the creativity of your customer determine the value of your product. The tool is only as good as the person rubbing the lamp.

So — how do you become a lamp rubber?

You play. Not hacks. Not prompt engineering courses. You practice the uncomfortable act of sitting with an open-ended tool and no instructions.

John Cleese calls it "open mode." A state of creative play. Curiosity held longer than feels productive. The lamp doesn't reward the smartest person in the room. It rewards the one who's willing to rub it wrong fifty times and keep going.

So if you're staring at that empty text box right now, wondering if you're built for this — you're asking the wrong question. The right question is: what would you build if the only limit was your ability to describe it?

Start rubbin' the lamp!

What if it didn’t matter if we didn’t pay our contractors a living wage? Uber found out that worked.

What if the law didn’t matter? Trump found out that worked.

What if security and intellectual property didn’t matter? AI is finding out that’s not a barrier.

What if skiing in the olympics without and ACL didn’t matter? Ah — fuck. That didn’t work at all. In the world where everyone is testing the structure of society, why the fuck not try? Look at what these other people did!

Welcome to the Lindsey Vonn Find Out Era, or LVFO.