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IRL is going to crush AI over the next 5 years.

In the last 3 months, $750M+ in capital was deployed on "anti-AI" bets.

Big players are doubling down on their investments in events, experiences and in-person connection.

Here's what I'm seeing:

@cornerapp, a social map app for Gen Z, has grown to 60K+ users helping people curate and share places to meet IRL—"Google Maps but social." Everyone ik in NYC loves them.

@partiful, @poshvip_, and @LumaHQ have raised a combined $60M and are exploding. Partiful hit 500K+ MAU, Posh hit 6 million registered users, and Luma has over 2 million users signing up for events.

Harvard alum @aidaxbaradari just launched @be_inaudible, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings and keep IRL conversations private.

@mcuban made a massive bet, investing in Burwoodland, a NYC-based live-events company behind IRL experiences in the US, Canada, and Europe.

Former COO and CPO of Hinge officially launched Rodeo to help people spend more time IRL with friends.

@a16z keeps doubling down on IRL via investments and a16z Build — a dinner series and community for founders / operators figuring out their next move. @nazzari, @katiekirsch, @eriktorenberg.

Billion-dollar companies are paying $$$ for community and events leads:

• @AnthropicAI: Events Lead - $320k
• @Substack: Events Lead - $190k
• @VaynerMedia: Head of Experiential - $250k
• @Spotify: Global Experiential & Content - $175k
• @BiltRewards: Director of Events & Experiences - $150k

Investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI.

But smart money is quietly deploying millions into IRL at the same time.

a16z backs both OpenAI and Partiful. ElevenLabs and Substack.

The nuance is - it's not AI vs. IRL.

It's that the more we live online, the more premium real-life connection becomes.

They're not competing investments.

They're a hedge on each other.

as of this writing claude is now #2 in the app store & there’s a real non trivial downside scenario here for openai that many aren’t really grasping.

it’s low prob but structurally interesting. lemme explain.

if a clean meme forms on tiktok & instagram tying openai to the department of war, & that framing hits mainstream liberal users, the reaction won’t be analytical, it’ll be fucking visceral.

most ppl won’t parse contract scope, defensive use cases, or historical precedent. they’ll respond to timing & symbolism. & if this perception hardens, the competitive alternative becomes emotionally obvious. an association that feels morally dissonant could trigger switching behavior, employee discomfort, media amplification, & even long tail brand drift.

i’m not even arguing companies shouldn’t work with the war dept. that’s not the point.

the point is that in a memetic environment, perception compounds faster than facts.

& if that perception locks in among a politically concentrated user base, the second & third order effects on consumer ai could be far more significant than most people expect. again low probability cuz switching is hard but damn if they haven’t opened a can of worms.

I am so bullish on the real world.

Group events. Cookouts. Sports. Parties. Animals. Music festivals. Phoneless dinners. Co-living centers. Healing centers. Retreat centers. Beautiful views. Group adventures.

These things light me up. Tech, ai, and materialism continue to disguest me more every day.

The pendulum has swung too far. A small group of soulless nerds will continue to obsess over ai, automation, effiency, and the intellect. But those of us connected to our hearts and spirits are becoming disgusted by it. We want real, and we want human.

Expect a huge countersurge of irl businesses and events in the next few years.

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.

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today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.

first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.

we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.

a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.

we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.

to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.

to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.

jack

I did a 40 hr and then a 70 hr social media fast.
I’ve come to believe that social media is pollution. 

Not a vice or guilty pleasure.
It’s closer to water toxins, air pollution and microplastics.

Social media has been on my mind because I can feel how bad it is for me. For my health and agency. I am a professional rejuvenation athlete. For five years, I’ve engineered my life around biological renewal and the elimination of decay. After hundreds of experiments across food, sleep, exercise, therapies, and toxins, I’ve developed both data and intuition about what strengthens or degrades my system.

I can viscerally feel that social media is bad for me.  It erodes my autonomy and increases cognitive entropy.
Like other toxins, it accumulates. You can’t unsee or unfeel what you’ve consumed. It settles into mental tissue like heavy metals, producing chronic low-grade inflammation.  Evidence suggests even after you stop scrolling, attentional fragmentation and emotional priming persist. Your thoughts begin to mirror the algorithm’s incentives. Independent cognition quietly erodes and you don’t notice the loss.

Time away and getting lost in deep focus is the only remedy.

When something erodes your agency, the rational response is elimination. The problem is, elimination isn’t realistic. “Just put the phone down” is as practical as telling someone in 19th century London to stop breathing coal smoke.

You need to know what’s happening in the world, be in touch with your friends and be part of the tribe.

That necessity is what allows companies to harvest your emotions, intellect and time for their profit. You are their raw material they exploit. Then in an ironic twist, the system gets you to exploit yourself by engineering an environment where it takes more effort to stop than to continue scrolling.  Pollution exposure by default.

What specifically makes social media toxic is that value and poison are inseparable by design.  You go to hear from friends and you leave an hour later absorbed in outrage that serves no biological interest of yours. The water is real. The lead is in the pipes.

The performance metrics (likes, views, etc.) bleed you of independent thought. They create quantified social proof, triggering ancient hierarchy reflexes. You no longer evaluate signal from noise; the engagement metrics do it for you.

Like all toxins, the damage is cumulative. We live inside the exposure long enough that it feels normal.  The 40 and 70 hour social media fasts did that for me. Gave me just enough separation to feel and diagnose the poison. The obviousness of it feels like when I went to India and saw their humanitarian crisis of air pollution which no one sees anymore.

So what do we do?

Neither platforms nor individuals are likely to change on their own. AI may be the countermeasure. An AI layer between you and the feed. Filtering rage, removing vanity metrics and translating sensationalism into calm, factual language. Preserving signal and eliminating noise.

I want social media to become a longevity intervention, not a longevity threat. I never want to see the raw feed. I want an AI agent to read it for me, strip the engagement metrics that hijack my judgment, filter the rage, and return only what I actually came for.

Every generation faces its pollutants. When cholera spread through London's water, the answer wasn't telling people to drink less. It was building filtration. The same logic applies here. Best next move is to design the filter to avoid being the raw material.