Why Brains Still Need Knowledge, Velocity Above All Else and How to Build a Vibrant Technology Industry

Velocity Above All Else.

Good morning,

In today's edition, among other things:

• Brains Still Need Knowledge

• Velocity Above All Else

• How to Build a Vibrant Technology Industry

• Speed x AI

• Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence

• How to Measure AI Fluency in an Organization

• Employee Option Pools at AI Companies

• State of B2B Monetization

Onwards!

---

Brains Still Need Knowledge

The easier external knowledge becomes, the more dangerous it is to rely on it. We lose about 70 percent of new information within 24 hours if we don’t review it. – Cognitive psychologists call this “transience,” and it explains why yesterday’s password already feels distant.

Humans have always exported cognition. Clay tablets tracked Sumerian barley; the printing press shrank bibles into pockets; smartphones shrank libraries into status bars. Now when people know information is stored online, they store the location of the fact, not the fact.

(I highly recommend reading The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper).

We once feared calculators; now we fear AI. Most of the time, for the wrong reasons.

Domain knowledge acts like compression—more ideas travel through the same neural bandwidth. Experienced chess players “chunk” entire board positions; physicians pattern‑match symptoms that would drown novices in detail. Here’s when the AI-powered external memory kicks in. External memory is a partner - we are responsible for the quality of the relationship.

Humans became dominant by building memory outside our skulls, but every tool from papyrus to ChatGPT has come with a hidden tax: unused neural circuits. The paradox of modern intelligence is that the more silicon you can afford, the more gray matter you must defend.

This is going to be the competitive advantage.

---

Velocity Above All Else