A month and a half ago I hurt my lower back. Not from one clear moment, but from accumulation, from working out heavy, week after week, and then one day I just bent down the wrong way getting up from sitting and I felt it go. The pain that followed was unbearable. Your lower back touches everything. Bending, sitting, walking, brushing your teeth, tying your shoes. The worst was mornings. You’d think sleep would let it rest, but it was the opposite. The stillness made it stiffen, and waking up felt like cracking the pain back open from scratch every single day.

I did what I always do when something hurts. Acupuncture, cupping, the spot by my house that’s worked for years. It helped. Then a few days later it was reaggravated, right back to where I started.

So I went to Doctor Kim. He’s been the healer in my family and my community since I was a kid. A family friend of ours used to apprentice under him. He used to help me with physical pain when I was younger, and going back to him now felt like going back to something old and trusted. Three sessions in, he told me not to work out. Not at all.

There’s nothing more satisfying than a good pump at the end of a day that demanded a lot from me. So hearing don’t work out from someone like him should have been hard to swallow.

It wasn’t. I didn’t give a crap. If a few weeks without the gym was the cost of actually being healthy, that wasn’t even a question. The pain made the decision before I had to.

And somewhere in that forced pause, I realized something simpler than I expected. I wasn’t listening to my body. I’m decent at listening to my mind, my thoughts, when something’s off mentally I usually catch it. But physically, I’d been pushing through for so long that I stopped noticing what my body was actually telling me. The injury wasn’t really an accident. It was an accumulation of not listening.

So last night I decided to listen differently. I went to hot yoga.

I’d done it once before. A friend, Rachel Solomon, brought me to a Core Power class in Culver City years ago. It was not a beginner class, though I didn’t know that going in. The room was packed, hot as hell, we were stacked in like sardines, and she put us right at the front next to the instructor. I’m a heavy sweater. I came with a towel and still ended up sliding around on my mat, losing my grip. I had no idea what any of the poses were called. I just watched the people around me and tried to copy what they did. And somehow, after all of that, I left feeling calm. Satisfied in a way I didn’t expect.

At the gym, it doesn’t matter how strong the person next to me is, I know what I need to do to get stronger. I have the map, even if someone else is further along it. In yoga I don’t even know what the map looks like yet. The teacher says it over and over, go at your own pace, nobody’s looking at you, nothing else in this room matters but you. And I believe her. But I still want to do everything correctly, not for anyone else, but for myself. At the gym I can block everyone out because I know exactly what I’m there for. In yoga I’m still figuring that part out.

Or maybe I do know, and I just never said it out loud before. The gym has always been release. A long hard day, and lifting is how I let it out. Yoga is the opposite. It’s repair. To get more in tune with my body, more flexible, to stop pushing it like a brute until it breaks. I’ve never gone to something to fix myself instead of empty myself.

Last night wasn’t that first class with Rachel. But it felt nostalgic in the same direction. I picked the nine PM class on purpose, because I didn’t want a crowded room. Turned out only five people showed up. I hadn’t planned that, I’d just guessed that late at night would be quieter. Underneath the guess was something I don’t love admitting: I didn’t want to be seen not knowing what I was doing.

The instructor calls out pose after pose, names I don’t know, words I can’t even hold onto, and between that and my hearing not being great, I’m constantly half a step behind, scanning the room to see what everyone else is doing instead of just being in my own body. And the whole practice is built around breathing, and that’s exactly what I forget to do, because my brain is too loud trying to keep up.

But last night, even without the crowd, without the chaos of that first class years ago, something in me settled. It was calming. It was a chance to test the edge of my own stretch, my own limit, without comparing it to anyone else’s. It felt like listening again.

Today, writing this, I feel the best I’ve felt since before the injury. I lifted at the gym again for the first time in a month. My hamstrings are sore in a way that caught me off guard. I’m already looking forward to the next hot yoga class.

I didn’t choose to listen first. The pain chose for me.

But here’s the thing about criminals. Sometimes they’re just people who are bad at their job. My dentist is a sweet lady. Her assistant says nice things to me. And for two months, I drove twenty minutes to Sunset Boulevard, multiple times, for a crown that didn’t fit, a crown that was the wrong size, an appointment that got canceled before I even sat down. I smiled every time I walked in. Not because I forgave them. Not because I’m enlightened. Because what was I going to do?

I sat with half a tooth in my mouth for weeks. I ate carefully. I didn’t dwell. Life kept moving the way it does when you just don’t stop moving, and somewhere in there I confused that with acceptance, which maybe is what acceptance actually is when it isn’t a concept.

Six years I didn’t go to the dentist. No pain, no warning, no reason to think anything was wrong. And then everything was wrong. I guess that’s the thing about problems you can’t feel coming.

The chapter closes like this. My Hebrew birthday. A table with my family, the Atzmon family, cracking jokes, laughing, being exactly who we are together. An eggplant dish, crispy rice with spicy tuna, beef carpaccio, a Wagyu burger, two pastas, a glass of wine, a cocktail. The first real meal with the finished tooth. And I never felt it. Which is how it’s supposed to be. Which is the whole point.

Except I do feel it. Not at dinner, not when it matters, but in the quiet moments when my tongue finds it and I remember. There’s a fake tooth in my mouth now. I’ve been marked. That’s the word for it. Marked.

My brother asked me at dinner, one piece of advice as a twenty eight year old, what would it be. I said: one thing at a time. Life isn’t a to do list. It’s big movements. You own one, then you move to the next. You’re not checking off tasks. You’re building yourself.

I believe the first thirty years are just part one. You’re laying the base for everything that comes after. And looking back at twenty eight, I think my part one has been pretty good. I’ve met people who changed me. I know there are so many more people I haven’t met yet, and that’s the part that gets me going.

Here’s what the tooth taught me, if it taught me anything. No pain doesn’t mean no problem. I know there are things in my life I’m stalling on. Relationships I could make better. Conversations I keep not having. I’m just brushing my teeth and hoping something changes. But that’s how you end up needing a root canal. And when you finally show up for it, you’re not even ready.

So just do things. One at a time. Don’t neglect.

I’m switching dentists. The sweet lady will be fine without me.

But I can’t wait to meet my next dentist.

There’s a question that shows up right before I’m about to say something that matters. Who am I?

Who am I to say this. Who am I to approach this person. Who am I to be the one who points at what everyone else is letting happen.

It almost always comes when there’s hierarchy. Someone above me, something wrong unfolding in front of me, and then the question, right on cue, talking me out of opening my mouth.

For a long time I thought the question was about whether I was right. It isn’t. It’s about whether I’m allowed.

So I started listing what I was actually afraid of. Being told I’m wrong. Being seen strangely. Being pushed out. One word kept rising to the top: ostracized.

I wanted to understand why that word had so much weight. And when I sat with it, I didn’t land on something personal. I landed on something primal.

Go back to the first times people gathered into groups to survive, and vulnerability was a threat. Someone shows weakness, someone shows sickness, and the instinct of the group was to remove them. They might be sick. Cast them out before they take the rest down.

That wiring never left. Some part of me still believes that saying the true thing gets me sent away from the fire to die alone in the cold. So I stay quiet. And staying quiet feels like survival.

So I built a different response. The moment I catch myself thinking Who am I?, I stop and I answer immediately: I’m the perfect person. Not from arrogance. From the opposite. I believe that in that exact moment, I was put there to see that exact thing, and nobody else in the room sees it the way I do. That isn’t a license to feel good about myself. It’s a debt. Because I saw it, and only I saw it like that, I now have to say it. The recognition creates the obligation.

You don’t stop asking the question. What happens is it gets quieter. It comes from ego, from fear, from insecurity, and every time you answer “perfect person” and then actually do the thing, you give it less to feed on. It starves. For me it now happens maybe once a month. For most people it’s daily, hourly. That’s the whole job. To shrink the question until the real you is what’s left standing in the room.

And here’s what I noticed about it. The question never shows up when I’m trying to distort something. It only shows up when I’m trying to improve something. Who am I is never the voice of someone about to do harm. It’s the voice that stops the person who sees something true and wants to make it better. Which means the question isn’t protecting me. It’s protecting the thing that shouldn’t happen.

The real you doesn’t speak from ego. He speaks because he can’t bear to watch another person sit in pain while everyone else looks away.

I used to think all of this was about courage. It isn’t. It’s about what we’re here for.

The wiring that keeps me quiet is built for one thing. Survival. Stay small, stay in the group, stay breathing. And the more I’ve sat with it, the more I’m sure of the one sentence underneath all of it.

We didn’t come here to survive. We came here to live.

Every time you override that old instinct and say the true thing, that’s the choice you’re making. Not bravery. Just the difference between the thing that keeps you breathing and the thing you actually came here for.

May 26, 2026. Two years to the day.

Two years ago today I went full time at LeverageVC. And today, on this exact date, I sat down with my GP and partner David and told him I’m closing this chapter to pursue something that feels like me.

I want to tell you the whole story, because the anniversary matters, but so does everything that led here.

Before I broke into venture, I had just shut down my company. I was questioning every decision I had ever made, from bouncing between jobs trying to figure out what I wanted, to going to college and feeling like I got nothing out of it. I had no confidence in my past and no vision for my future, and that combination made just existing feel miserable. I was lost in a way I had never allowed myself to admit before.

But something happened when I finally said it out loud. I was lost. For the first time in my life I actually said those words, and instead of feeling worse, I felt something I didn’t expect. Relief. Like the admission itself was the first solid ground I had stood on in a while.

So I pulled out a piece of paper and I wrote down who Yehuda Atzmon actually is.

I pursue knowledge obsessively. I understand what makes people tick. I’m drawn to founders who are on fire for a problem. And I’m a good guesser.

When I looked at that list, the answer was right there. Venture capital wasn’t a pivot or a compromise. It fit the actual shape of me.

Breaking in wasn’t easy. It took months of networking, meetings with founders, outreach to VCs, and a lot of rejection. But every no just made me chase harder. I wasn’t trying to convince people to give me a job. I was trying to convince them to bet on someone who would show up every single day as their fullest self. I believed that if somebody bet on me, it would be the greatest bet they ever made.

Eventually I met David. We sat at a coffee shop near Penn Station for 45 minutes. I came with a plan and I told him straight: I want to work full time at LeverageVC. He said they were a small fund and couldn’t pay me. I told him I would triple their deal flow on day one, laid out exactly how I would do it, and said I’d start for free. A few months later, after I had shown what I could actually do, he hired me full time.

The next three years were some of the most exciting of my life. Real autonomy. Real trust. Four investments sourced. I was finally in an environment where the thing that makes me me was the actual asset.

Then the fund started winding down toward the end of Fund One. Deal flow slowed. The one thing I had been hired for, the one thing I loved, was no longer needed at the same pace. And I felt something I recognized immediately, the same feeling I had when I shut down my company. Lost. Uncertain. Waking up without knowing what I was doing.

What confused me was that nothing had collapsed on paper. I was still at the fund. But the feeling was the same. And that told me something important: the fulfillment was never fully in the vehicle. It was somewhere deeper, still waiting.

This is the thing nobody talks about. Most of what people call their desires aren’t even theirs. We grow up watching our parents, seeing someone successful in finance or law or business, and we tell ourselves we want that. We want their happiness, their success, their life. But that is not your essence. That is borrowed power. And you can run on borrowed power for a long time before you realize it was never yours to begin with.

We are also living through a moment that is making this more urgent than ever. AI is automating tasks at a scale and speed we have never seen before. Jobs that people have clocked into for decades are disappearing. And the people most affected are not just losing their income. They are losing the thing they used to answer the question of who they are. When you have spent your whole life clocking in, doing tasks on repetition, and clocking out, and then that disappears, you are not just unemployed. You are lost in the exact way I was lost. No confidence in what came before. No vision for what comes next.

Tasks can be automated. You cannot.

You were born into this world with a purpose and an essence that only you can carry. But most people have never had to find it. And now, suddenly, they have no choice.

So I went through the deepest excavation process of my life. Every single day I was begging to be shown what my actual purpose was. Not the purpose that looked good. My own.

While I was searching, I kept being put in positions to help other people find theirs. I had built a consulting process where I would give people deep questions and use their answers to create a manifesto, a North Star document they could return to whenever they felt like they were straying from who they actually were. I was doing this for others before I had ever fully done it for myself.

Then came Lag BaOmer. The 33rd day of the Omer, the death anniversary of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. Every year on this day something significant happens in my life. It was late afternoon, the kind of light that makes everything feel slightly more open than usual, and I walked into that day more open than I had been in months.

I ran into a woman named Yael. A year ago to the exact day, in the exact same spot, we had spoken about her art studio, Raz Land, her vision of combining spirituality with art, her dream of studios all over the world. A year later she was telling me the same thing in different words, still scattered, still hoping someone would fund her vision, still unable to explain clearly what Raz Land actually was.

I stopped her. I asked her three times: what is Raz Land?

The first two times, same scattered answer. The third time she said something different.

Raz Land is me.

I asked her who she was. She got defensive, said she knew, and moved on.

And I felt it before I understood it. A pull. Like I needed to help this person get to something she was standing right next to but couldn’t see. I couldn’t walk away from that.

I went home and built The Atman Method.

Within 48 hours I had the MVP. Before I sent it to anyone, I ran myself through it. I asked myself the hardest version of the question: what is my actual purpose in building this? What came out the other side was my own manifesto. And it said this:

You are someone who sees people, not the mask, but the truth underneath. You’ve carried that gift your whole life, often alone, often waiting for others to catch up, often standing on a podium where no one could meet you where you actually were. That waiting cost you. Not everything, but something. A specific kind of loneliness: being surrounded by people who couldn’t name what you gave them, who came to you again and again but couldn’t reflect back what made you rare.

You learned to be patient. You learned to trust that people would come around. But patience became a way of surviving invisibility, and invisibility became the price of your gift.

What you’re building now is not just a way to change the world. It’s a way to stop waiting. To finally be met. To have people stand with you, not behind you. What you’re really after isn’t impact. It’s true love. Connection. The experience of being seen the way you see others.

And underneath all of it, the method, the mission, the years of holding truth alone, there’s a version of you that feels like a child. Pure. Unhidden. Present. Not performing, not proving, just being. That’s who you’re coming home to. That’s who you already are when no one’s watching.

The Atman Method is your gift to the world. But it’s also your way back to yourself.

This is your compass. Not who you should be. Who you already are.

Only after I had that did I know what I had built was real.

I sent Yael a questionnaire and asked her to answer each question by voice note. When I listened back, I heard her brush past her truth five or six times. So instead of sending her a manifesto I knew wasn’t right, I told her the truth: I would be doing her a disservice. I wanted her to be the first person outside of me to go through the full Atman Method. We scheduled an in person session at her studio.

I showed up at ten in the morning. I didn’t say a word for the next forty minutes. I just ran the process. By the end of it she had her manifesto. She read it out loud and started crying. I started to tear up too. Not because I had built something impressive but because I watched someone look at herself clearly, maybe for the first time. She didn’t need the funding. She didn’t need anyone else’s framework. The truth was always there.

The name came from a mistake. I was building the business plan and I misspelled my last name, Atzmon, as Atman. An AI told me that Atman is a Sanskrit word meaning self, or true essence. I hadn’t chosen the name. It had chosen itself.

The biggest form of love I have ever given myself is the search for my own truth. What I’m building is the chance to give that same search to others.

That is why I’m leaving.

I’m not closing a chapter because I failed. I’m closing it because I finally know what I came here to do. And I’m already doing it.

Two years to the day. Same date. The work has already begun.

There is a section in the Amida, the daily prayer I do every single day, where you can bring your personal requests. Your wishes. The things you want for yourself.

At some point I realized I had nothing left to ask for.

Not because I had everything. Because I started understanding that if my desires are truly aligned with the creator, if what I want is actually what God wants for me, then what I am really praying for is to share my essence with the world. Not as an obligation. As the thing I actually am.

Which means praying for myself and praying for others starts to collapse into the same prayer.

So I flipped it. Ninety five percent of that time goes toward others now. Because that is not a sacrifice of self. That is the self.

There is a ceiling to doing things for yourself. Not a ceiling on what you can accomplish. A ceiling on what it means. The achievement lands and then sits there. The acknowledgment comes, including from yourself, and it stops hitting the way it used to. There is no finish line that actually finishes anything.

I know what I am called to do. Help people find their truth. That is why I search for mine so relentlessly. The excavation I do on myself is not separate from what I want to do for others. It is the same motion, practiced first on the only person I have full access to.

But even if I do that well, one person at a time, every day, for the rest of my life, there is still a ceiling. You help one person find something real. Then the next. Then the next. And you start feeling the math. The limit is not about running out of drive. The limit is that the model itself has a ceiling built into it. And sitting with that feeling is uncomfortable in a way that is hard to name. It is not fear. It is something closer to impatience with reality.

People are an infinite surface. There is no running out of ways to matter to them. But you are one person. So the question becomes: how do you put enough of yourself into something that it stays true at a size you will never personally be able to touch?

That is what I am working on. I will share more about it soon. What I can tell you is that it has to be real. People feel authenticity. You cannot engineer the thing that actually lands.

Tasks can be automated. You cannot.

Saturday lunch. Shabbat table. Great food, a little wine, family, my mom’s friend, and my friend and I pulling out nicotine pouches post-meal.

That’s all it took.

Suddenly we’re in a full debate about nicotine. Is it addictive? Is it the nicotine itself or everything that comes with it, the additives, the preservatives, the ritual? She’s telling me it’s not the nicotine, it’s everything else bundled around it. I’m telling her nicotine is the addictive compound, full stop.

No phones on the table. That’s the thing about Shabbat nobody talks about enough. You can’t just Google your way out of a disagreement. You’re stuck with what you actually know, what you actually believe, and whether you can defend it with nothing but your own reasoning. It’s the oldest philosophical setting in the world and it happens every week at a dinner table.

So I asked her: if it’s the additives making people addicted, name one. Name a single chemical.

She couldn’t.

And then I provoked her. Not condescendingly. I went straight for her credibility as a thinker. I questioned whether she could actually find real information, whether she was just pulling from whatever the internet handed her. It hit a chord.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about people who actually believe what they’re saying: you can’t rattle them with a wrong accusation. If I tell someone they’re something they’re clearly not, they don’t get offended. They look at me like I’m crazy, because I am the one saying the crazy thing. The offense only lands when there’s a crack. When some part of the person isn’t fully sure. The provocation isn’t cruelty. It’s a search. And the response tells you more about the belief than any argument ever could.

She got offended.

But this only works inside a container of trust. I’ve provoked people without that foundation and it just damages. The provocation only becomes useful when the other person already knows that you are not trying to hurt them. That you want them to be fully themselves. Silly, wrong, goofy, right, whatever. When that’s established, the provocation isn’t an attack. It’s a nudge back toward their own truth.

My dad is sitting at the head of the table, saying nothing, just smiling. He already knew where it was going.

After all of it, the pushback, the laughter, the failed chemical names, she said something that stopped me. Nicotine isn’t bad for you. And I agreed. Completely. I think there are real benefits to nicotine, as a nootropic, for focus, in its cleanest form.

We had been fighting over two different claims the entire time. I said addictive. She heard bad. And that gap wasn’t random. It came from somewhere. Her life, her associations, whatever she’d been told or seen or lived through that made those two words collapse into the same meaning. Most arguments aren’t really disagreements about facts. They’re two people defending different definitions of the same word, neither of them realizing it, both of them convinced the other one isn’t listening. The fight was real. The disagreement wasn’t.

I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind. I’ve stopped believing that’s possible in a single conversation. But I try, every time I talk to someone, to show up as my truest self. And the biggest form of love and respect I know how to give is to search for someone else's truth with the same hunger I search for my own.

I hadn’t been to the dentist in six years.

I finally went two months ago. Checkup, cleaning, the whole thing. My family dentist, a very nice Russian lady. She hasn’t seen me in six years, so she asks how everything is going. I told her I got a little hairier and maybe a little less funny. She laughed. It was fine. It was chill.

Then she found a root canal.

I didn’t even fully know what that meant. She explained the procedure, ran the insurance, and told me my out of pocket would be over a thousand dollars. I went home, told my parents, and watched their faces do the thing faces do when something is serious. That’s when it started to feel real.

But here’s the part that actually broke my brain.

My mom looked at me and said: “Maybe go to a different dentist and see if you actually need it.”

I stopped. What do you mean, if I need it? A credentialed professional just looked in my mouth and told me I need a root canal. Why would a different dentist say something different? And why is “get a second opinion” just... normal advice? Why do we say that like it’s obvious?

Because what it actually means is: experts can look at the same mouth and disagree. Experts can look at the same X-ray and reach different conclusions. And we’ve all just quietly accepted this. We say “get a second opinion” the same way we say “drive safe.” It’s so normal nobody stops to notice how insane it is.

Here is the position that puts you in.

You are not a dentist. You don’t have the degree, the training, or the time to fact-check someone who does. That’s the whole reason you went. And now you’re being told that trusting the expert isn’t enough. You have to somehow evaluate the expert. But you don’t have the tools to do that. So you can’t just trust, and you can’t verify. You’re stuck in the middle with your mouth open.

Most people do what I did. You take the hit. You pay the money. You do the procedure. Not because you believe it’s right, but because the alternative costs something you can’t afford: your time. Your attention. Your life. You’ve got work, relationships, things that matter. You can’t spend three weeks shopping dentists to confirm a root canal. So you consent. Not out of trust. Out of exhaustion.

The data is not comforting.

A 2017 study at the Mayo Clinic found that 21% of patients who sought a second opinion left with a completely new diagnosis. Not a refined one. A different one. In a separate national review of nearly 7,000 second opinions across multiple specialties, 37% resulted in recommended changes to treatment. And when doctors were surveyed about their own industry -- over 2,000 of them, by Johns Hopkins -- they reported that 11% of procedures and 20% of overall medical care is unnecessary. More than 70% believed physicians are more likely to perform unnecessary procedures when they personally profit from them. Doctors. Pointing at other doctors.

One economist summarized it simply: as long as people are paid more to do more, they will tend to do too much.

A third of knee replacement surgeries are considered unnecessary. That is 790,000 surgeries a year. Over $5 billion spent on one procedure alone that people didn’t need.

Only 30% of people even believe they should seek a second opinion.

So most people never check. And when they do check, the answer is often different. And the system just keeps going.

I don’t have a solution. I want to be honest about that. I don’t know what the alternative looks like or how you fix a system this large. What I know is that nobody talks about the thing underneath all of this: that we have built an entire infrastructure of expertise, and then quietly built in an assumption that the expertise might be wrong, and then never told the people on the receiving end what to do with that information.

We even have a name for the workaround. We call it informed consent. We make you sign a form. Then we send you home.

That’s not a personal failing. That’s the design.

People need to know this is the deal they’re in.

There is a meme that floats around online that goes something like this. You could show someone your texts. You could show them your search history. You could hand over your phone. But your AI conversations? Those stay private.

And there is a lot of truth in that. Because AI creates conditions for vulnerability that almost nothing else does. There is no social consequence. There is no judgment. There is no performance. And so people go deeper with AI than they would in almost any other conversation. Real problems. Real confusion. Personal matters. Things they would not bring to a friend, a coworker, or even a therapist.

AI does not ask for that vulnerability. It just creates the conditions for it.

But here is what makes that dangerous. With a person you trust, whether that is a parent, a friend, a mentor, the relationship is built over time and your guard comes down naturally. You do not ask them to cite their sources. You do not fact check them in the moment. The person is the context. With AI, the walls come down first. The intimacy arrives before the trust is earned. And that means when something comes back wrong, or even slightly off, it lands in a much more exposed place. It does not feel like a bad source. It feels like your thinking was flawed.

That is a different kind of wrong. And it is worth taking seriously.

The Ownership Gap

The real problem is not that AI might be wrong. The real problem is that AI does not show its work in a way that lets you make the answer yours. There is a difference between information that you own and information that just happened to you. Real ownership requires that you trace the reasoning, wrestle with it, and decide you believe it. When AI skips that process, it is not saving you time. It is robbing you of authorship.

And this is where truth matters. Universal truth exists. It is the foundation. AI does not get to define it or soften it. What AI can do, when it is working the way it should, is help each individual actually get there through their own reasoning, their own context, their own deliberation. The truth does not change. The path to owning it does.

AI has gotten better at citing sources. You will often see links and references attached to answers now. And that matters. But citing sources solves a credibility problem. It does not solve an ownership problem. You can footnote every answer and it still does not change the fact that you never made the choice to trust that source yourself. Accuracy and authorship are two different things. AI is getting better at the first one. The second one still needs work.

The best version of AI understands this. When a system asks you upfront what the research is for, who it will be presented to, what format you need, it is not just gathering context. It is giving you your authorship back. You declared your intent. You shaped the output before it arrived. And when the answer comes, you co-built it. You can stand behind it.

The Struggle Is the Point

This article is a good example of what I mean.

I came into this piece thinking it was about one thing. How AI shifts the burden of proof onto the individual. That was the idea. That was the entry point. But that is not what this article is about. Not really. What it is actually about is vulnerability, and ownership, and what happens to human thought when we stop pushing for the truest version of it.

That only came out because I did not take the first answer. The idea got pushed. Questions came back. I chose to answer them, to sit with them, to go one layer deeper each time. And what came out at the end is not what I walked in with. Which means it is actually mine in a way the first version never could have been.

That is what the struggle does. It does not just sharpen the idea. It transfers ownership of it into you. And that is exactly what most people are skipping when they use AI as a shortcut. They are not just getting a worse answer. They are getting an answer that will never fully belong to them, that will not retain, that will not travel, that will not land in the people they are trying to reach.

The toiling is not the obstacle. The toiling is the point.

Now Prove It Wrong

Do not accept the first answer. Do not take the summary and move on. Go at it. Prompt it harder. Declare your intent, your audience, your purpose before you even ask the question. Push back on what comes back. Ask it to show its reasoning. Keep going until the answer feels like something you built, not something that was handed to you.

Because the future of real thought, of concepts that actually expand, of ideas that actually land, depends on whether humans stay sharp or get soft. AI is not going to make that choice for you. The tool is only as deep as the person using it is willing to go.

You came in with a surface idea. Most people leave with it. The ones who don’t are the ones who keep asking the next question until they find the truest version of what they were actually trying to say.

That is not an AI skill. That is a human one. And it is worth protecting.

It started with video calls.

Think about what happens when you are on one. You are supposed to be focused on the other person, reading their face, picking up on their body language, figuring out what they actually mean. That is how real conversation works. You use the other person as your reference point.

But on a video call, there is a small box in the corner of the screen. And most people spend a significant amount of time looking at it. That box is them. They are using themselves as the reference point.

It sounds like a small thing. It is not.

That shift, from looking outward to looking inward, is a preview of something much larger that has happened to how we work. The format of how we communicate shapes what we actually transmit. By format, I mean the structures we have normalized: the video call, the AI summary, the distributed task list, the structured interview. Each one is efficient. Each one is also a filter. And what gets filtered out, consistently, is the harder stuff. Belief. Intent. The reason someone actually cares about where the company is going.

Now think about what happens after the call ends. The AI summarizes it. Someone reads the summary later, builds a framework from it, and executes. The machine runs. The deliverables get done. And if you could watch the whole process from above, it would look like a team moving in the same direction. But look closer. Nobody is looking at each other anymore. Everyone is looking at the box in the corner. Everyone is using themselves as the reference point.

Content makes it through the format just fine. Vision does not.

And here is the problem most companies are not naming out loud: the systems they have built, for hiring, for meetings, for execution, are very good at producing one type of person. The task completer.

Task completers are capable. They show up. They follow through. They clear the board. And right now, with AI handling more and more of the actual execution, task completion is becoming a commodity. Almost anyone can complete a task, or at minimum, manage the tools that do.

What is rare, genuinely rare, is someone who can take a vision and expand it. Not just execute on it. Not just protect it. But actually carry it forward, add to it, make it bigger than it was when it was handed to them. A vision carrier does not need every answer spelled out. They understand the why well enough to generate the how on their own.

So the real question is not whether your team is productive. The question is whether your team is actually inside the vision, or just adjacent to it.

And that starts at hiring.

Most hiring processes are optimized for task completers, because task completion is easy to measure. Did they do the thing? Yes or no. Vision, belief, intent, those are harder to see on a resume or in a structured interview. The format filters them out.

Which means if you want to find vision carriers, you cannot use the standard process to find them. You have to look for something different. The most useful question you can ask a candidate is not what they did, but what they were trying to build. And when something went wrong, did they fix the task or did they fix the thinking?

The difference between those two answers is the whole thing.

Companies that figure out how to identify and keep vision carriers will not just execute better. They will actually grow. Because growth is not a deliverable. It is not something you can summarize or hand off or automate. It requires people who are genuinely inside the idea, who feel the weight of where the company is trying to go, and who are willing to carry that weight even when the format gives them every excuse not to.

Most companies are hiring for one and hoping for the other.

I put together a practical framework for actually finding vision carriers in a hiring process — three lenses, the specific questions to ask, and what to listen for in the answers.

If this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next.

And if you want the framework, comment VISION below and I will send it to you directly.

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I work in venture. Every day I sit across from early-stage founders and try to understand what makes someone worth betting on. Most of what gets written about them is either too early or too polished. This series is my attempt to tell the real story — from the inside, while I’m close enough to see it. Not the highlight reel. The real thing. My hope is that within each of their stories, you find something that belongs to you too.

The best founders I’ve met aren’t more logical than everyone else. They’re more certain.

Not reckless. Not delusional. Certain in a way that lives somewhere deeper than the spreadsheet, deeper than the market analysis, deeper than what makes rational sense. It’s the thing that makes someone move anyway — toward something they can’t fully explain yet, away from something they can no longer stay inside.

David Berg is the clearest example of this I’ve ever seen up close.

I’ve known David since kindergarten. We grew up together, lost touch when he moved to New York in ninth grade, and rebuilt the friendship as adults — a few times a year, holidays, whatever windows life gave us. But every single time I saw him, I saw the same thing: someone whose values were as strong as his instincts, and a trust between us that didn’t need to be explained. We could always talk about the hard things. Where we were trying to go. What it meant to actually succeed and find our place in the world.

That closeness is why I can tell this story. And why I think it’s worth telling.

———

Before Commander AI, David was one of the top-performing salesmen at Battle Motors — selling trucks in the waste management industry. Traveling all over America, sitting across from company owners, learning their world from the inside. He was good at it. Really good.

But David Berg was never born to sell garbage trucks. That was never his essence. And somewhere in him, he always knew it. The gap between where he was and where he was supposed to be — that gap has its own specific kind of pain. The pain of knowing your future self and not being there yet.

That’s what I believe built Commander AI. Not just a market insight, not just a clever idea — though those were real too. It was the pain of a man who couldn’t stay where he was.

———

I started to really see it when David moved to Miami toward the end of his time at Battle Motors. I used to visit him there, and we’d work out together, sit in the sauna in his building, and talk for hours. He was in the early stages of ideation — what could this startup be, who would build it with him, how would it work. And I was in my own version of the same leap, early in my time in venture, meeting five to six founders every day, trying to understand what made someone worth betting on.

We were both standing at the edge of something unknown at the exact same time. And I think that’s part of why I could see him so clearly.

One afternoon, we’re sitting on the beach. It’s a couple hours before Shabbat — that night, we’re helping host 30 to 40 young professionals for the Kabbalah Center’s new location in Miami’s Design District. And David is on the phone with the person who would become his CTO. I’m sitting right next to him, watching him essentially will this man into a co-founder. Not with a pitch deck. Not with data. Just with pure, unshakeable conviction that this was going to be the next big thing, and that this person needed to be part of it.

And I felt joy. Real joy. Because I was watching someone who didn’t just believe in himself — he could transmit that belief. In waste management, of all things. There’s no glamour to hide behind in that industry. You can’t seduce anyone with the vision of revolutionizing garbage trucks. You just have to be that certain. And David was.

———

After the pre-seed, David opened an office on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The same street we used to hang out on as kids. And I remember hearing about it and thinking — of course. Of course that’s where he landed.

But the romance of that image fades quickly when you’re in it. Because what followed was the real education — hires, fires, something breaking, something threatening to break, every single day. I used to tell David he was a glorified firefighter.

And here’s what I noticed during that time: I stopped feeling the need to give him advice. Every time we spoke, every time he laid it all out, I already knew that he knew what to do. My job wasn’t to fix anything. My job was just to be there. To witness it. To be the person who saw him clearly while he was in the middle of it.

———

Then came the seed round. And before the $5,000,000, there was a gauntlet.

No. No. No. No.

Rejection after rejection.

From the outside, David was stoic through all of it. But I knew him well enough to see underneath that. He was carrying a lot. And the way I understand how he kept going is this: the pain of those rejections was real — but the pain of not building this thing was greater. The pain of giving up would have been more unbearable than any no. So he kept going. Not because it was easy. Because stopping was simply not an option his identity would allow.

Here’s what doesn’t get said enough, especially about non-technical founders: what David did, consistently, is genuinely rare. He had the vision. He had the sales instincts. He didn’t have the technical background. And he went out and built it anyway. Found the right people. Convinced them. Raised the round. Built the team. Put out the fires. Day after day after day. Most people with his profile would have waited until the conditions were perfect. David understood that the conditions were never going to be perfect. So he moved anyway.

He raised $5,000,000. He built Commander AI into what it is today. And he’s just getting started.

———

The throughline of David’s story — and I think the throughline of every founder worth watching — is this:

A life lived entirely by logic is a life not fully lived.

David woke up every day with certainty beyond logic. With the belief that no matter what was in front of him — as hard as it was, as painful as it felt — what needed to happen would happen. And he would will it into existence.

That’s not blind faith. That’s not naivety. That’s a person who understood something most people don’t: the distance between where you are and where you’re supposed to be is not closed by logic. It’s closed by conviction. By movement. By refusing to let the gap between your present self and your future self become permanent.

———

More founder journeys coming soon. Each one a different story. Each one with something in it that belongs to you.

I’m not here to inspire you and evaporate. I’m not here to give you a framework or a list. I’m here because I believe that when someone sits down to read — really sits down, really slows down — something can transfer. My thinking can become your thinking, at least for a moment. And in that moment, something might shift. How you see the world. How you see someone in your life. How you see yourself.

I want you to feel thoughtful when you finish reading. Not motivated. Not hacked. Thoughtful. Thought is the predecessor to action, and I respect your time enough to make it worth sitting still.

The topics will vary. Founders — the real ones, not the polished version. Intuition. Identity. Creativity. The artists and films and bodies of work that I cannot stop thinking about. Technology, but only as a mirror — what it is doing to us, what we are becoming inside of it, what we might lose. Some of what I write will be wrong. I value disagreement. That is how thinking sharpens.

The lens will not vary. Everything comes through the same place — how I see it, what I actually think, what I believe it means.

My biggest fear is that this becomes performed. That I write something that looks like me but is not fully me. So I am making a commitment, right here, in the first thing I publish: this will be the truest version of who I am. Every piece. Every word.

The people who feel that will know it. And that is enough.