Humanmaxxing: Packy McCormick (8/10)

Humanmaxxing: Packy McCormick (8/10)

An investor on the meaning of life

Sublime

and

Sari Azout

Oct 10, 2026

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Welcome to Humanmaxxing, an interview series on thriving in the age of machines.

New episodes drop weekly. You can watch full conversation with Packy on

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and listen on

Spotify

or

Apple Podcasts

. Committed wordcels can find the edited transcript below.

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I met

Packy McCormick

many years ago in a group chat for newsletter writers. His newsletter Not Boring had taken off and mine was still small. I asked if he wanted to do a guest piece together, and he said yes.

Packy is

funny

, brilliant,

deep

, genuine, and one of the best players of

the great online game

. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s used his platform to boost others. One of the good guys in tech, in my book.

In this conversation, he covers:

His theory of differentiation as a moral obligation

Why the people building AI make it so hard to love the tech

Why he thinks the environmental arguments against AI are bullshit

Why AI is oil, not God

and lots more…

Enjoy ;)

Sari

P.S. I’ll be in NYC Oct 21st hosting an

event

in partnership with the fab team at

Air.hq

and

Julia Harrison

. Come hang w/us - RSVP

here

.

ALEX DOBRENKO

: In “

Riding the Leopard

” (Sari’s note:

do yourself a favor and read the essay!

) you ask what humans are here to do when machines can do more and more of the things we’ve built our identities around. Your answer is that each of us is here to experience and create in a way no one else can and you get there through the idea of the Sanskrit

neti neti

—“not this, not this”—the practice of stripping away what you’re

not

. I’d love for you to talk about what it means.

PACKY MCCORMICK

:

I think “what is this?” must be the oldest human question, and maybe the hardest. The idea is that, in certain types of meditation practices, you can sit and understand that your thoughts come and go. You are clearly not your thoughts. It’s similar with your emotions. You are not your emotions. Neti neti is a meditation practice of learning what you are

not

so you can know what you

are

.

For example, I really love writing and I love investing. And for a while, I would try and write about everything and invest in a ton of different stuff. Lately, I’ve gotten good at just writing about and investing in the things I’m actually excited by. I think I used to be FOMO-driven for a while and that’s gone away. Those other things are the things I’m not. Of course, it’s also like, am I thinking this because I’m getting old? Or is it the age we’re living in?

Same with what we believe ourselves to be with work. I don’t know if humans are the ones who are writing code anymore. I think maybe some of the predictions will end up being overblown. But I think it’s a really interesting practice, because you take away a bunch of stuff you think humans can do. There’s all this stuff we think we have to be, that we think we are, and it turns out we don’t have to be that. So what are we exactly? When you strip away your thoughts, emotions, and roles, what remains is awareness: a particular way of experiencing the world that no one else can have.

When you strip away your thoughts, emotions, and roles, what remains is awareness: a particular way of experiencing the world that no one else can have.

AD

: The FOMO piece — how do you counteract it? Let’s say you see a company or something you want to write about, how do you understand whether you’re feeling FOMO or it’s something real? Whether it’s something you’re

not

or something you actually

are

?

PM

: I don’t want to pretend I’ve done a great deal of work on myself. I think some of it is just experience. The companies that have done well for me are ones that I’ve come to deeply on my own. You have to support a founder for many, many years, and what matters is whether you actually enjoy working with a person. Are you fascinated by the thing or not?

This could also just be a mental trick, to be clear. A lot of where the FOMO would be is in AI. I didn’t invest in Anthropic, and it would have made me very rich if I had. But I’ve mostly told myself that there are a lot of people who are, A, smarter than me, and B, spending their time focused on this while living in San Francisco. Every coffee they have is with somebody at a lab, and I’m not going to win that game. I think it’s important to get comfortable playing the game that I play.

The FOMO has left my body, and there are a bunch of reasons why. I’m not here to say it’s entirely healthy, and maybe I’m missing some of what would drive me to do a better job. But I just don’t feel it as much anymore.

AD

: I feel like I have a lot of FOMO. Do you have it with writing stuff too, or not really as much?

PM

: Here’s an example. I’m in the middle of writing a piece for a magazine right now, and I’ve been working on it for months. I’ve never done that before, where I’ve gotten to pick a topic, and it’s something I’ve wanted to write about forever. Two days ago, the editor texts me a link to someone else who’s written the exact same piece. And they did a really good job writing about it.

AD

: Better than you, though?

PM

: It was really good. I think I could have gotten close after months of working on it, and I don’t think I would have done anything radically better, partially because magazine writing is a new format for me. One, I’m glad the story got told that way. Two, I still have great material for it, where I can tell the story in a different way. Maybe I go meta on it. Or maybe I just got beat. I was bummed for a second, but it didn’t hit me nearly as bad as I would have thought. I would have been pissed off before about that, but now I either have to up my game, or figure out how to do something obviously different.

One obviously different thing that works for me is writing about a company for the third time. Even if someone else writes about them, the story isn’t the same as chapter three of writing about the same company. So now I’m either trying to go weird, or deeper, and pick the few things I really like and get better at those. I think that’s true on the writing and investing side: just get to know a few things better.

I’m either trying to go weird, or deeper, and pick the few things I really like and get better at those.

AD

: You said you’re trying to go deeper or weirder when writing about companies. Tell me more about the weirder.

PM

: It could be a company that’s lesser known, one that nobody’s had the chance to write a deep dive on. I’m working on two of those right now. One company, I doubt anyone in my audience has heard of, and I think will be a very big company is Somos Internet and its founder is down in Colombia. I wrote thirty-three thousand words on a vertically integrated telco run by an amazing founder, but it’s certainly not a company that’s right down the middle, like a frontier AI lab. For the talk I did in Los Angeles about the meaning of life, I skimmed a handful of Hindu texts and put all this stuff together behind a paywall, and half of my paid subscribers came from that piece. I’d never thought in a million years that more than a few people would even finish reading this. But it resonated with people.

AD

: I love that piece so much. More than weird it’s a piece that it feels like only you could have written.

PM

: Yeah, the event was thrown by my friend Grant Gitlin, who runs a firm called Lasagna Capital. This was for some of his LPs and founders — a small, intimate thing, eighty to a hundred people, which made the nervousness even sillier. I send emails to 250,000 people a couple of times a week and here are eighty people in a room who I’ve never met and may never meet again. I was still so nervous about the latter. There were only two speakers at the whole thing, me and one of the Skims founders. I stumbled over some of the Sanskrit words, but people loved it, and the response was better than I’d expected. People have realized that we’ve hit a limit with materialism, or rationalist materialism, the idea that everything emerges from matter and there’s no real magic in the universe. It’s just a bunch of dead atoms that come together, but then you die and who cares.

People have realized that we’ve hit a limit with rationalist materialism, the idea that everything emerges from matter and there’s no real magic in the universe.

I also think it applies a lot in the post-AI world. I don’t actually believe there will be no jobs and AI will do everything. It seems silly, and I feel busier than ever. But it’s certainly what the leaders of the labs are telling you, even though Sam Altman, to his credit, has gotten a lot better about not saying it as much. I think there’s something important about hearing that there’s something immensely special about being human, that you’re part of this big beautiful thing, and it’s not that you’re better than anybody else, it’s just that you’re you. Nobody else could have the experience you’re having, lean into it.

I don’t believe there will be no jobs and AI will do everything. It seems silly, and I feel busier than ever.

AD

: The right brain / left brain stuff, I find that fascinating. How does that connect to all of this for you?

PM

: I’m going to botch Iain McGilchrist’s idea. He’s way smarter than I am, and his books are like 75,000 pages. But here’s a go. You have a right brain and a left brain. Your right is more creative and open. It sees the wholeness of things. Your left is more like a calculating computer. He has a bunch of neuroscience studies that show that if, for example, a bullet goes through your left brain and your brain keeps working, you might actually start to feel more connected to things. And when your right brain shuts down, you become more schizophrenic, you start having more mental disorders.

And his point is that society is becoming too left-brained. We go back and forth in these cycles, but we’re deeply left-brained right now. We’re very computer-y. And we can move back towards a balance, where we see ourselves as part of this whole.

All of this really came to a head for me a year ago. Ilya Sutskever gave a talk, I think at the University of Toronto, where he was their graduation speaker. This is before everyone was booing their AI-related graduation speakers. He basically said: You’re all going to be replaced by AI, because your brain is a meat computer. I thought that was gross. I don’t like how anyone behind this movement talks about AI, even though I use the technology every day and think it’s great.

I don’t like how anyone behind this movement talks about AI, even though I use the technology every day and think it’s great.

AD

: And this logic is the substrate underneath all of it, since so much of this thinking comes from who runs the labs. There’s not a lot of magic to it, even though AI is magical, doing spells and incantations.

PM

: It’s a different type of magic too than what the labs are saying. There’s a tweet that I saw about how all of the language we use, how we anthropomorphize technology, like “the AI is trying to trick you” — it’s actually not doing that. We’re making this whole thing feel so much weirder than it really is. The people at the labs are much smarter than me, and if I went to debate with them on the finer points of model training, I’d get run over and lose that debate in a heartbeat. But there’s the important part where you, as a human, use these things, you feel them, and you understand that it doesn’t want to take your job. It doesn’t even have goals of its own. It’s weird that people think the next thing that happens is that it will wake up and take over the universe. I get the exponential, but I just don’t get how we even get to that point.

AD

: Do you feel like you knew that everyone would hate AI this much?

PM

: I didn’t in the early days. With the image generation stuff, I was like, the artists don’t get it. Then, it came for the writing, and it would be worse if the writing were really good. But it’s bad, and now anyone can produce bad or mediocre stuff. People who are otherwise good thinkers are just handing that piece of their brain over to the machine.

Probably to my detriment, I tend to get too excited about new technologies. AI just never really did it for me. It’s not that it hasn’t been one of the most transformational technologies of all time, or that it hasn’t had a big impact on the economy. It just hasn’t grabbed me spiritually.

AD

: Basically, it doesn’t track for you how people jumped to “it’s going to take over everything.”

PM

: Maybe it will. But it does, we’ll all be dead anyway, and I’d rather be the pro-human guy until the machine kills us all. But it also seems like a lot of people are making up stories and asking other people to disprove those stories. That’s just not how this works.

AD

: I have to admit that sometimes I feel a little bad about AI use. There’s some shame, like I’m on the wrong team. Everyone online is like, this is evil. I have a lot of writer friends who say that it stole their stuff. Do you ever feel that? And how do you think about the environmental stuff?

PM

: The environmental stuff is complete bullshit. I think data centers are awesome, I write about this in my piece

Thank God for Data Centers

. Every now and then, you need an irrational buyer to come in. Normally it’s the government or something. They don’t care about the cost of what they’re paying for, they just want it done. This action brings a bunch of technologies that are good for the world down the cost curve. Data centers are very much this thing right now. I don’t know where this water stuff is coming from — maybe there was some issue with evaporative cooling early on, but it isn’t a big issue. They’ve done so much to accelerate demand for nuclear power, which I’m a big fan of. We’ve killed so many people choosing coal over nuclear for fifty years now.

And nuclear, I’m bullish on. There’s always this precautionary principle where you have to prove that a new technology can’t harm anyone, and that’s not how anything works. I’m sure a phone has been dropped off a building and harmed someone at some point. But nuclear is way less harmful than it seems. If you look at the record at Fukushima, 99% of the deaths were from the water and not the reactor. Chernobyl was a disaster — no one would ever build a reactor that way again. There were no deaths on Three Mile Island.

There’s this myth built up around nuclear that makes it scary — and there have also been other messaging issues. Early on, people thought demand for energy would go up forever and it didn’t. A lot of utilities got stuck holding the bag on big projects. But I think the pause around nuclear has cost a ton of lives and a ton of progress.

You seem like the good guy if you’re the one saying that things seem dangerous. But I think the data center environmental stuff is bullshit, and I think they’re actually pulling us forward into a cleaner energy era.

You seem like the good guy if you’re the one saying that things seem dangerous. But I think the data center environmental stuff is bullshit, and I think they’re actually pulling us forward into a cleaner energy era.

To be honest, I think the biggest problem is from how the people at the labs talk about AI. There’s a race to the bottom on costs. If your competitor is using AI instead of real people for customer support, then you have to use a little bit of dead internet theory to say their customer support isn’t as good. And, of course, I don’t like that there’s so much slop writing on the internet. And I can see why writers are pissed off about not getting paid for their writing. It’s funny that we don’t want the models to be distilled, and we’re also saying, thank you so much for all the books we just ripped the covers of, scanned, and shredded. There’s a lot of talking out of both sides of the mouth, on everyone’s side. But I think mostly AI is good. You’re not a baddie for using it.

AD

: I just needed you to say that. Packy doesn’t think I’m a baddie, guys. You have this idea of “Oil not God,” right? That AI is much more like oil than God.

PM

: Yeah, totally, with oil being a commodity that supercharged everything. Here’s another hot take while we’re on the topic: Standard Oil has done more good for the world than every charity and philanthropic effort ever combined. It’s a wonderful commodity that you can supercharge everything with. We used to have horses and carriages that shit everywhere. They didn’t go that fast, got tired, you had to give them water and feed them. But then along came oil. We refine it to gasoline and then you have cars. Does this create other problems? Sure — car accidents, pollution. And then we figure out how to fix those problems. Now we have self-driving cars, cleaner electric cars. Progress happens this way.

My bet is that AI is the same thing.

Sam Altman was on Invest Like the Best

recently — and I give credit to the TBPN guys, his media training has been unbelievable — and he said that people often want to feel like they’re the hero of history, like they’re at the center of this thing that’s completely abnormal and out of line with history. But if you zoom out, you’re actually on an exponential, and this is just the current part of the exponential.

What strikes me is that the exponential gets steeper. The new thing that keeps it going has to be cooler than what came before, more powerful than what came before. If oil drove the exponential before, you need something like oil-plus to keep driving it now. So computer AI will get us a little bit, then robots, then something cooler. The zoomed-out historical view is useful. It’s like oil, but maybe more powerful, because it has to be to keep the exponential going.

AD

: I often think about how we are the future’s past, you know? Someday this will be so quaint. Can you believe they had to talk to LLMs on their computer? My grandpa had to do that, he was a loser.

PM

: I’m sure some Bayesian rationalist in the audience is gonna be like, actually your base rate’s wrong — but even using AI, you can feel where it’s gonna look stupid to future people.

I think one thing we overestimate is the extent to which everything has already been talked about and written about in history. It’s why companies like Mercor are so valuable. For the LLMs to keep learning, you have to feed them increasingly specialized data at the edges. That feels bearish to me. Of course, for use cases like coding there’s a lot of information already out on the internet. But with physical engineering, a lot of that knowledge isn’t captured. So you’ll hire a bunch of experts to say, here’s a question, here’s how I’d answer it, here’s a rubric for the right answer. You train the model on what the right answer looks like. I’m sure someone smart out there would say that recursive self-improvement is coming, and that it applies not just to models but to knowledge, and reasoning for long enough can help you figure anything out.

Maybe I don’t spend enough time in San Francisco. But when I walk down the street in New York, I catch myself sometimes thinking that there is nothing about my experience that has changed a single iota because AI exists. It’s the same as it would have been five years ago. There’s clearly something harder than just building a machine that can do math that then changes the world.

When I walk down the street in New York, I catch myself sometimes thinking that there is nothing about my experience that has changed a single iota because AI exists.

AD

: It’s always the simplest things. Like in New York, it’s trying to buy that t-shirt or figuring out if you want to buy it. It’s complicated. And that’s the beautiful weird stuff right?

PM

: Did you see the video going around of Michael Porter Jr., the Brooklyn Nets player, trying to get into Club 22? He’s waiting outside, and I don’t know why they’re not letting him in — the video starts and he’s just waiting outside the door. Jalen Brunson shows up, gets out of the car, and they’re like — right this way, sir. Two NBA players. One of whom just won the NBA championship, one of whom didn’t. You’d think, Michael Porter Jr. should be able to do whatever. He’s a millionaire, tall, good-looking — and then he’s just some schlub compared to some other guy with higher status. A lot of the AI discourse misses that piece — everything becomes table stakes as soon as anybody can do it, and there’s always that hierarchy, status, one-upmanship that’s just human nature.

Everything becomes table stakes as soon as anybody can do it, and there’s always that hierarchy, status, one-upmanship that’s just human nature.

AD

: The status thing is really interesting. I did a ton of improv comedy in LA, and a lot of how they teach it is about status games. When audiences see comedy, they’re laughing often at status games. As a performer, you’re often playing low status or high status, and high status people are kind of idiots. Audiences connect more with low status people. Most of comedy is being alright with losing. It’s something AI just doesn’t really seem to get.

PM

: It’s back to the Riding the Leopard stuff. Every religion has essentially taught “dissolve your ego” stuff, and it’s not because some magic thing happens when you do. It’s because you’d be, for example, better at comedy if you were just cool with being like, yeah, I’m gonna lose because it’s funnier. Who cares.

AD

: I thought a lot about comedy reading Riding the Leopard. The other thing you learn in comedy is to “find the weird.” Find the thing that’s off and name it.

PM

: It’s like the “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” thing. Everybody loves an underdog, and each underdog is an underdog for a different reason, because they’re weird in some way.

AD

: And that’s also why we’re always gonna be different and weirder than AI. AI can’t be an underdog.

The last big question I have is around the idea of friction. I think what AI exposes are new frictions. What are the new frictions you have, as a writer, investor, human, dad, whatever?

PM

: They’re maybe one level up but in the exact same spot. If everyone in the world, any VC, can afford any pro subscription, and some are spending a lot more on tokens than I am, that just becomes table stakes, so you have to find the next thing. With writing and investing, it’s about finding your differentiation and your competitive advantage. A lot of that comes down to figuring out what stories are interesting, and getting good at reading people. I think the era of looking at a SaaS company’s metrics and saying how much it’s worth and how much you’ll pay is over. It’s now coming down to, is this founder good or not? Are they going to win the market or not? Then, you need to actually get these founders to pick you and want to work with you. You need to prove to them that you can understand where they’re coming from beyond running an AI analysis of their market or something.

The friction feels as frictionful as before.

With writing, I think the friction is about fighting my urge to do the easiest thing. If I had seventeen conversations, I’d read them in the before times and try to find the gems. Now I just put them in a ChatGPT project and try to find the gems. I think it makes me a worse writer, and I think there’s real value in the process of going through it.

I was going to say there’s value in doing fewer things better. But let me contradict myself, because I tried something like that. At the beginning of 2025, I changed how sponsorships worked for Not Boring. Instead of sponsors picking a particular date that I’d have to write for, I offered five slots in the first half of the year. Whenever I decided to write an essay, I’d write one. I thought that would give me time to read and think. But taking away the deadline actually made me worse.

There’s that photography experiment where half the class is told to get the perfect shot and the other half is told to take as many pictures as they can. The best photos come from the group that just did a bunch of things. So part of it is doing more. And part of it is forcing yourself to put something out by a certain time.

AI makes it even easier to talk yourself into waiting for perfection, because you have access to all the world’s knowledge and can keep checking whether you’ve covered every base. But even with this easy machine, the world is so dynamic that removing the friction can make things worse. The friction feels as frictionful as before.

Thanks again to

Granola

for making this series possible. You can chat with the full conversation

here

and use code SUBLIME to get 3 months free

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.

The Sublime Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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