We are in the middle of the digital renaissance, please take advantage of it

There will be 3 types of people in the future.

And the divide between them is growing larger every day.

If you want to win in the next 10 years, it is critical that you avoid becoming number 1 or 2.

1) The Purists

“We’re the ones who stayed clean.”

The ones who rejected AI and retreated into nature, simplicity, and screen-free living.

It’s a peaceful existence, until they come across someone who uses any form of technology, then they have an uncontrollable violent reaction because it threatens their identification with this new religion.

When you look at a purist, you can’t tell if they’re being serious or if they’re just doing it because it’s the rebellious and cool thing to do.

2) The Automatons

The ones who outsource every decision.

They’re allergic to friction and addicted to optimization. If their eyes aren’t glued to a screen, they feel as if they are losing an imaginary race. Every thought they have runs through Claude.

They don’t know where AI ends and where life begins.

Most people think they have to pick a side.

But I like to be different from most people. Maybe it’s a character flaw. Maybe it sounds cringe. But I find joy in it. It’s a creative challenge to live a life that very few people live, but I’ve found that growth (and therefore meaning/fulfillment) does not come from following the herd.

I’m convinced both sides are wrong.

The Purists reject an entire portion of reality (external progress), demonize it, and assume that it can’t be healthily integrated with prioritization and effort.

There are 4 quadrants of reality.

Like a skill tree in a video game.

You put points in each as you gain experience and increase your level. They interconnect. You can try to max out your money, but if you haven’t improved your mind, body, or spirit at all... money can only go so far. The greatest fruits of life await those who accept the challenge of continuous development in all domains of life.

The Purists treat their internal world (mind and spirit) as the highest truth and reject the external world.

This is a recipe for disaster.

It does not matter how enlightened you are. If your body is frail, health is at stake, and you don’t have any money to your name - you will suffer unnecessarily, and the solution to your problems is something you consider evil, so you have no choice but to play victim.

The Automatons, on the other hand, do the complete opposite. They obsess over money and progress until their humanity is nowhere to be found.

There is a 3rd option, however.

It sounds crazy and impossible to those who can’t think for themselves, but the future belongs to those who become multi-dimensional.

Here is how you win in the next 10 years:

The Digital Renaissance Man: Why Polymaths Win In The AI Age

We’re in the middle of the second renaissance where proof of work replaces the resume, an audience replaces the employer, and taste replaces credentials.

The greatest tragedy of our times is that we were fooled into believing that the Mechanical Life is the only path to success.

You were told to pick a lane.

You were convinced that having multiple interests was a character flaw.

Become a designer. Become a writer. Become an engineer, a marketer, a salesman, or just get whatever high-paying job you can because that’s how you become respected and live a good life.

And that seemed reasonable, but now you feel replaceable.

Because that was never how humans were meant to live.

The modern version of a “job” is only about 250 years old.

Before it, the ideal was a free person who did many things throughout their life (compared to a slave who did one specialized task... sounds familiar). The artisan, farmer, and pirate are all examples of those who knew how to run an entire operation, not just one piece of it. They were both the thinker and the maker, the artist and the scientist, they understood that in order to live a good life, they could not be limited to one area of study.

Leonardo Da Vinci walked into Verrocchio’s workshop to learn painting and left knowing anatomy, engineering, optics, and bronze casting. Nobody told him these were separate things that were supposed to be learned as their own credential or degree.

In The Renaissance, nobody gave a shit about your niche. They gave a shit about what you were capable of.

During Industrialization, the factory model wasn’t meant to destroy education, critical thinking, individual agency, and taste, but that’s exactly what it did. It steered us away from the Renaissance ideal. Education became training instead of discovery. Employment and repetitive tasks kept us dumb to the entire entrepreneurial process, so we didn’t develop the experience or agency to do our own thing.

The unfortunate reality is that this is normal to us.

The linear career instead of the exponential.

The masses don’t question it.

And now that AI is on our doorstep, only those with an open mind (who do not identify with the “team” that fully rejects or embraces the next phase of evolution) will take advantage of this shift.

One person can now do what a 10-50 person team used to do, depending on the task. One person now has any and all known information at their fingertips. One person has access to social media (free distribution of their work).

If you are a true New Renaissance Man, this is the greatest time to be alive - and many people will try to convince you that the world is doomed.

AI can now handle the machine-like repetitive tasks that, for the past two centuries, used to be our entire way of life. People are so worried that AI will ruin our thinking and make us more like machines, when they’ve already been living like machines for the whole of their lives.

To those who join this Second Renaissance, your job is to choose your craft, leverage AI so that you can manage the entire operation, and focus on taste, direction, and judgment - because the output of AI does not have perspective. AI is simply that, artificial intelligence. Like a bag of water that you must mold.

Become a multi-dimensional, irreplaceable, walking contradiction

The most interesting people are walking contradictions.

Jacked intellectuals. Casual billionaires. Spiritual warriors.

Life is better when you can’t be shaved into a box that others can easily make sense of.

In the future, the most interesting person will be the one who lives between two extremes. Pure creativity and pure productivity. They seamlessly balance the analog lifestyle (no screens, no urgency, pure life enjoyment) and the AI-native lifestyle (leveraging technology to do what used to be impossible).

Meaning and fulfillment are not found in a flat “balanced” lifestyle. They are found in contrast. If you were happy all the time, you wouldn’t consider it happiness. You would consider it normal. Honestly, a bit boring. You would need greater euphoria to feel what you think happiness is (hence why people can’t get off their phones today. A normal happy life is too boring for them). But when you fail, struggle, and suffer for something you care about, you learn what true happiness is on the other side.

Those who win will lean into that contrast. They work and rest deeply. Intense bursts of focus on their craft and life’s work followed by periods of complete rest - just like the world’s most successful creatives.

Charles Darwin wrote 19 books in his lifetime.

His morning routine would surprise people for that level of output:

7:00 AM - Short walk, then breakfast.

8:00 - 9:30 AM - First work session in his study. This was his most productive block.

9:30 - 10:30 AM - Break to read letters and spend time with family.

10:30 AM - Noon - Second work session. By this point, Darwin considered himself to have “done a good day’s work.”

After noon - Second walk of the day around the Sandwalk, a famous quarter-mile gravel path he built specifically for thinking and reflection.

After lunch - Read the newspaper, then rest while his wife read aloud to him.

4:00 PM - Third walk of the day, usually around the Sandwalk again, sometimes with company.

Darwin worked roughly 3 hours of focused, creative work per day across two sessions.

I believe those who will thrive in the future will have a similar routine, but with the output of 10-20 people, and be able to single-handedly build their life’s work.

They will have a One-Human Business (will break down in another letter).

There are almost 7B people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7B companies. – Naval Ravikant

Before factories and industrialization, you worked until the task was done, not until your 8 hour shift was over. You worked according to the rhythm of seasons, sunlight, and energy.

More importantly, you didn’t learn how to become valuable through a standardized curriculum and meaningless memorization tests.

You learned by doing.

You learned in the workshop from apprentice to journeyman to master, imitating someone who knew what they were doing until your own taste and judgment were formed.

The question now is just that.

How do you become a New Renaissance Man?

How to Become a Digital Renaissance Man

Do it all.

Become a writer, designer, marketer, filmmaker, bodybuilder, runner, or whatever your curiosity desires.

But channel your focus and attention into one vessel.

One craft. One thing that you choose to become known for, and your multi-faceted development will only contribute to your ability to get ahead of everyone else.

Here’s what you do.

Choose your craft, become irreplaceable

Most artists, writers, and creatives are revolting against AI right now because they identify with their skill, tool, or specific way of working.

I don’t care about the argument of whether or not AI art is real art or AI writing is real writing because that seems like a great distraction that prevents you from doing anything with your life (outside of complaining for views and likes, reinforcing the identity that isn’t going to serve you well in the coming years).

You need a craft, but you need to choose your craft wisely.

Your craft lives at the intersection of what you care about, what you can uniquely do, and what others are willing to pay you for.

There are 3 layers to building an irreplaceable skill stack.

Layer 1 is a foundation of human nature.

Marketing, sales, writing, speaking, psychology, etc. It’s understanding the mechanics of human attention and how what people perceive as valuable is highly subjective and changes as the world does.

Every single person who wants to succeed on their own, in any form, must master this domain.

This is the “what others are willing to pay you for” part.

Layer 2 is your domain obsession and unique interests.

Philosophy, fitness, design, coding, nutrition, or anything else. None of these are going away, they are simply evolving.

The combination of these interests is where your uniqueness lies. The jacked philosopher is far more valuable than the armchair philosopher who only grows their mind without direct experience to test their theories, and it is far more interesting. People will come to you over the next guy.

This is the “what you care about” and “what you can uniquely do” part, and it is the thing that other people come to you for. The human nature foundation is what helps you make it appealing to those people.

Layer 3 is technical skill.

Email marketing software. Photoshop. No-code website design. Social media management. Typing the physical code on a screen.

This used to be the most important, because it took time and effort to learn these tools, but now AI does it all with ease. You should not bank your future on mastery of a tool.

The pattern of every technological shift is the same. The mechanical part of the skill gets automated, and the human role moves up a layer. The scribe became the editor, and the hand-weaver became the machine operator.

We’ll discuss this more in a second.

How to become dangerously self-educated

Schools teach you how to operate within society.

Which is fine and necessary to some extent, but they do not teach you how to navigate your own path. Public schools are filtering and conditioning mechanisms more than anything.

True education is discovery.

It is the process of learning what’s necessary to achieve self-generated vision and goals, not the process of hoarding knowledge or memorizing facts to do well on a test that does not map to reality.

Even worse, most people stop learning after graduation.

They turn 20-25 and repeat the same day for the rest of their life. They do not pursue a creative challenge that demands unique knowledge.

So how do you actually learn?

You follow the apprenticeship model.

The beautiful thing about today is that you can find mentors and masters by simply picking up a book or opening YouTube on your phone.

I don’t care if you use AI to get information.

I don’t care if you get all your advice from one YouTube guru.

What I do care about is if you have a vision, have a goal, work toward that goal, and apply what you learn to problems that come up along the way. That is how you test what you learn to verify its validity for your specific situation.

Whether AI hallucinates or not, there are still plenty of profoundly stupid humans that you probably shouldn’t listen to. You need to question and test and experiment either way.

Don’t learn and then do, that’s how you get stuck in tutorial hell.

You do the thing first, or attempt to do the thing, and only then is your mind primed to receive the lesson that allows you to make forward progress.

The one-human business (and how to join the new economy)

Creators are replacing institutions.

I know that sounds silly, but can you not see it?

Creators are the new education system - do you not learn most of the things that are actually useful in your life on Substack, YouTube, podcasts, or niche accounts on X?

Creators shape culture, culture shapes behavior - do you not trust a creator whose thoughts you’ve spent time with over politicians who obviously have their own self-interest in mind?

The internet is permissionless leverage - you don’t need approval to build an audience, start a business, or sell a product. It is the high-agency path.

AI accelerates the generalist and polymath - you can become a one-human business. Content on social media to attract an audience around your life’s work, code to build the product, funnel, and digital real estate, and domain specific knowledge that makes what you do valuable over the next person.

Now when I say creator, you probably think of an influencer or “personal brand.”

That’s not exactly what I mean.

I mean someone who creates value. They solve problems, create solutions, and help others do the same. And since value exchange is the crux of human relationships, they return the favor, often in the form of money.

James Clear has a personal brand, yes, but he is really just using newsletters, books, content, and other media to get eyes on his life’s work and earn an independent income.

I believe most ambitious individuals will take this route in the future, even if what we know as social media today isn’t where you put your work in front of other people. In the past it was newspaper and radio, now it’s social media, who knows what it will be in the future, but starting on social media puts you ahead of everyone else. That’s where the attention is.

A personal brand is just the highest leverage vessel to be a creator right now. It’s unfortunate it’s turned into a marketable “content creator” identity, but that’s the world we live in. That doesn’t mean you have to conform to what you think a content creator should be.

We will break down the one-human business in a future letter, but the next Creator Bootcamp starts September 9th. If you want to learn irreplaceable branding, unique content, and non-gimmicky social growth strategies, consider joining here.

How to achieve the impossible with AI

Most people do not realize that AI is more than a slop generator and a new-age search engine.

They do not realize that they can quite literally ask it to build a software, landing page, funnel, app, tool, or whatever else they need to do anything on the internet.

“But Dan, that just leads to AI slop!”

Correct. And that’s where most people stop.

They don’t realize iteration exists. And that your first iteration would suck with or without AI.

The landing page starts as a rough draft, then it’s up to you to make micro adjustments until it’s actually effective.

The software is extremely buggy and looks horrible until you fix the bugs over and over again until it’s better than 99% of apps on the market.

In short, people don’t understand that they can just ask “How can I do this?” And continue asking questions until a clear plan is formed, then have the AI execute on your vision that you choose and control, not a random guess, and proceed to iterate until it is valuable.

It still takes quite a bit of time, and those who are only there for a quick dopamine hit will fizzle out.

Here is a quick start guide on how to do anything with AI:

1) Know what you want and what good looks like

For most of you, you are going to use AI to build a one-person business.

And if you don’t know how to build a business, then you’re going to expect the AI to do it perfectly for you without knowing what you need.

It still takes years of iteration to see any form of success, nothing has changed in that regard.

But if you know what you want, what you need, and what good looks like, then you can simply ask the AI how it can help you accomplish those goals and go from there.

The best place to start is by simply using AI as a learning tool.

Offer creation. Copywriting. Social media. You can’t have AI do something that you don’t even think to ask about.

2) Have absurdly high standards

The reason every response you get from AI is slop is that you treat the first draft as the final draft.

You don’t understand that you still have to tweak every little design, feature, word, sentence, or whatever else you are having AI do.

What you create with AI sucks because you see AI as this thing that should just be an absolute genius rather than seeing it as a tool that meets your level of intelligence and ambition.

3) Try to replace yourself with AI.

The best way to learn AI is to try to automate everything that you do.

You will quickly learn what can and can’t be automated.

Only then can you choose what parts of your business and craft you want AI to touch.

For me, AI is obviously great at scanning large swaths of information for patterns and trends. It would be silly to only manually research social media for top YouTube videos, tweets, and articles as that now puts you at a major disadvantage. That’s why you now use AI to do this.

But when it comes to writing the posts themselves... One, I like the creative process of writing, so I make it a part of my day. Two, the value of writing is in the eyes of the reader. With code, no end user cares about what the code looks like. They don’t see it. They care about if it’s beneficial to them. That’s why I write, for fine tuned control over the value provided.

If you don’t know where to start, just think of anything you do on a daily basis.

Then, ask AI how it could be turned into a repeatable process with a prompt, skill, tool, software, or skill.

And of course, understand that the automation (the prompt/tool/skill) is also a first draft. It will suck at first. Just tell it how to improve.

In future letters, we are going to dive deeper into everything mentioned in this letter. The Digital Renaissance. How to learn effectively. The best skills to learn. How to use AI without ruining your thinking. How to think with clarity. And more.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan