I’ve spent my career tearing down walls. At BitTorrent, we proved that decentralized systems could challenge the most powerful incumbents on earth. At Samba, we built a cross-platform identity layer to break through the silos that fragment the media industry. The future I see is shaped by that same tension: powerful forces building higher walls, and determined builders tearing them down.
Here are my bets.
AI and Human Intelligence
What’s coming:
AI becomes broad and powerful — better than most humans at most cognitive tasks, but not godlike. The real shift is not AI replacing people but people orchestrating swarms of AI agents to accomplish goals no individual could achieve alone. A few mega-platforms will dominate frontier AI, but brilliant open-source independents will remain culturally essential and economically critical — the same dynamic we saw with BitTorrent versus the Hollywood oligarchy, playing out again at a civilizational scale.
Runaway AI behaviors are inevitable. Not because the technology is inherently evil, but because negligent and malicious actors will deploy it recklessly. White-hat teams will forever be cleaning up after them. This is not a problem to be solved once — it is a permanent condition of a powerful technology loose in the world.
What we should fight for:
Open-source AI must remain viable. The concentration of frontier AI in a handful of companies is a structural risk. We need compute sovereignty, open research, and independent alternatives — not because they’ll be the biggest, but because they keep the biggest honest.
Work and the Shape of Society
What’s coming:
Ninety percent of white-collar tasks get automated. Humans are reabsorbed as agent orchestrators — directing, supervising, creating. But the nature of elite competition changes fundamentally. The hyper-elite do not find any kind of work-life balance. They are in vicious competition with other high-achieving humans and teams, amplified by machines that make them extraordinarily high-output. The winners are those best able to harness human and machine resources together — but that does not make their lives easier. They work harder than ever to stay ahead.
Below them, a comfortable vocational middle class emerges — people doing meaningful, hands-on work that machines cannot easily replicate. And below that, a tier that is not starving but is stagnant, sustained by government guarantees of food, healthcare, and basic services.
There is some mobility between these tiers, but the path upward demands intensity, agility, creativity, and clarity. There will be a sharp generational divide: what worked in a previous era of technology may not translate to the AI era. The valuable commodities become taste, design, creativity, unpredictability, humor, soulfulness, spirituality, empathy, and charisma — the things machines cannot fake.
What we should fight for:
The real elite advantage — mental health, strong families, emotional stability — should not be reserved for the elite. If we believe these are competitive advantages (and they are), then we should re-build education systems to make humans more familiar with them. A high floor and an infinite ceiling is a defensible society. A high floor and a locked door is not. We really need to stop teaching kids the narrative about oppressors and victims. Everyone needs to believe they have total agency over their outcomes… because they do.
Politics and Global Power
What’s coming:
Democracies devolve into populist theater to win votes, while technocratic cores quietly run policy. Autocracies gain speed but struggle to control their own AI-empowered elites. The world consolidates into a U.S.–China duopoly, with China pulling ahead first and the U.S. regaining competitiveness only after painful defeats.
Global alliances realign around compute, data and IP treaties, and space infrastructure. China and others ignore Western intellectual property frameworks, and new geopolitical blocs form around IP enforcement and compute sovereignty.
What we should fight for:
The decentralized, open, builder-driven model of innovation — the one that produced the internet, open-source software, and peer-to-peer networks — is the West’s genuine strategic advantage over state-controlled systems. We should stop trying to win by imitating centralized control and instead double down on the messy, competitive, open ecosystem that has always been our edge. Regulation should focus on outcomes and accountability, not on licensing regimes that entrench incumbents.
Education and the Next Generation
What’s coming:
The bottom ninety percent of higher education collapses into vocational training — nursing, tech, trades, repair, robotics. This is not a tragedy; much of what passes for higher education today is already vocational in everything but price. Two elite tracks remain: liberal-arts institutions that produce creative, charismatic, multidimensional leaders, and ideological counter-elite schools that produce the political and military class.
Kids learn through hybrid AI-human systems. AI tutors become ubiquitous. But elite families keep some children partially analog — not out of nostalgia, but because grit, character, and depth require friction that frictionless technology cannot provide.
What I would fight for — and what I want for my own children:
Physically and emotionally strong. Deep thinkers. Philosophical. I would protect a meaningful part of their day to be offline, physically active, and emotionally bonded to family. Spiritual discussion and practice would not be an add-on — it would be central. The children who thrive in an AI-saturated world will be the ones who know who they are when the screens are off.
The Economy and Inequality
What’s coming:
Global growth stabilizes at two to four percent, ending around two to three times current GDP by 2050. Inequality grows sharply, but governments guarantee a baseline of food, healthcare, and medicine — a high floor, infinite ceiling society.
Data becomes a tokenized asset. Individuals earn credits for their attention and data; firms pay tolls into personal data wallets. This is not science fiction — it is the logical extension of the privacy movement and the economic value of identity data. The infrastructure to make it real is what Samba has been building for over a decade: cross-platform identity that is device-based, household-based, and ultimately person-based.
What we should fight for:
The largest media companies — Google, Meta, Netflix — want to monopolize consumer attention and advertising investment by erecting higher walls. The winning strategy to tear those walls down is one that aligns with the consumer, who gains nothing from walled gardens. With the right incentives, consumers could join an effort to build cross-platform identity. Privacy regulations and sympathetic regulators could facilitate this future state. The fight is not against technology — it is against monopolistic enclosure of the commons.
Energy, Climate, and Mobility
What’s coming:
Climate fades as a central fear — not because the problem disappears, but because the world embraces modern nuclear energy, yielding abundant, cheap, clean electricity. This is the unlock that makes everything else possible.
Space becomes a commercial-military race. The U.S. private sector builds lunar data centers and energy hubs. China and Russia build rival industrial bases. Mars is pursued only if minerals or strategic resources justify the investment — romance alone will not fund it.
One hundred percent of short trips shift to autonomous EVs. Car ownership moves to a smartphone-style leasing model. High-speed rail in the U.S. stalls; autonomous high-speed corridors win instead.
What we should fight for:
Nuclear energy, full stop. The regulatory and cultural barriers to modern nuclear are the single biggest obstacle to abundant clean energy, and therefore to broadly shared prosperity. Everything else — autonomous vehicles, space infrastructure, electrification — follows from solving the energy problem.
We also need to get over the petrochemical era. Oil-rich economies should be free to invest in the future, but they should not be steering policies that prop up petrochemical dependency while holding back other parts of the world — especially regions rich in the human capital we will need most in the knowledge economy.
Biology, Longevity, and the Body
What’s coming:
Biology will be altered to extend life expectancy and eradicate many of the ailments that humans currently endure. Gene therapies, GLP-1 drugs, and longevity science will reshape what it means to age. But longer lives exacerbate the mental health and fitness challenges that already define modern life. Living longer does not automatically mean living better.
An aging population also creates new social needs. We will look for ways that older people can be less lonely and more contributive — particularly around childcare and intergenerational support, areas where experience and patience matter more than speed.
What we should fight for:
Longevity without purpose is a curse. The goal should not be merely to extend life but to extend the years of contribution, connection, and meaning. Physical fitness, mental resilience, and spiritual grounding are not luxuries for the biohacking elite — they are the foundation of a life worth extending.
Media, Culture, and Advertising
What’s coming:
Human stories remain the soul of culture. AI becomes the production, distribution, and personalization layer. Mass tentpoles — sports, elections, mega-franchises — stay enormous, but every viewer gets a personalized feed, angle, and narrative. Generative AI content only feels nourishing when it blends your people (family, friends) and your creativity.
Advertising evolves in three directions: identity-resolved media, where every impression is tied to a real person; agent-to-agent negotiations, where AI systems buy and sell attention on behalf of humans and brands; and personal attention and data wallets, where consumers are compensated for their participation in the media economy.
Cross-domain identity plus automated incrementality measurement becomes the universal standard. This is the bet Samba was built on. Our earliest invention was an identity for televisions — a bridge between offline linear TV, streaming, and the digital ecosystem. That cross-platform view of the world is what consumers need as they move fluidly between platforms, and what the industry needs to make sense of it all.
What we should fight for:
The walls must come down. Identity that is device-based, household-based, and ultimately person-based allows people to move flexibly between shared and personal media. The industry that figures this out — that aligns its interests with the consumer rather than against them — wins. Privacy-respecting, cross-platform identity is not just a product strategy. It is the architecture of a fairer media economy.
Human-AI Integration and Values
What’s coming:
External AI interfaces become universal. Neural implants remain an elite minority for the foreseeable future. The real divide is not between those who use AI and those who do not — it is between those who can plug in fully and disconnect deeply, and those who can do neither.
Spirituality, love, humility, and authentic human relationships become the antidote to a machine-saturated life. This is not soft thinking. It is a survival strategy.
What we should fight for:
A good future requires three things: high agency over one’s own time, loving and stable childhoods, and opportunities to serve others with humility. These are not policies. They are values — and they are the only durable foundation for a world where machines do most of the work and humans must find reasons to matter that go beyond productivity.
North Star
The good guys win — not because the world becomes easy, but because enough humans stay soulful, courageous, loving, and service-driven in an age dominated by machines. The walls come down — not all at once, but persistently, because builders keep building and the open, connected, cross-platform future is what people actually want.
That is the world I am building toward. That is the bet.