Month: September 2026

The Future of Communication

Posted on by Leonard Pham

In the future of things to come, I won’t message or text you directly. I’ll tell my AI Assistant (Thaddeus) to talk to your AI assistant who will message you at the most appropriate time. That way you don’t get text messages in the middle of your workday asking: “In Avengers Endgame, as the team is transporting captured Loki and the Tesseract, they take the elevator down Stark tower and tell Hulk to take the stairs. Hulk gets angry and hilarity ensues. My question is, why didn’t Hulk just jump out the window? He’s the Hulk. It wouldn’t hurt him to jump 93 floors down to the ground. I’m just saying”

And you wouldn’t reply: “FFS Lenny, I’m in the middle of a board meeting. Was this really an emergency‼️”

No, but it’s been bothering me all day.

It’s like living in the future.

The Apple Intelligence Hub

Posted on by Leonard Pham

Shortly after returning to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs reoriented the company around what he called the “Digital Hub”. They launched the iMac the following year which ditched the 3.5” floppy drive in favor of USB and became an all-in-one internet machine for students and home users.

I don’t want to tell John Ternus how to do his job but he needs to follow a similar recipe and reorient the company around an “AI Hub”. A next generation computing device that takes the processing power of a Mac Mini (M5 Ultra) and smooshes (that’s a technical term) it into a super-sized HomePod chassis that sits in your living room. Normies like their home decor to match so it should come in a bunch of different colors. Finally, every Mac computer should support MagSafe charging. In other words, I want my iPhone to be able to dock with my Mac Mini or Studio or iMac or my “AI Hub”. It needs a better name. Let’s call it an iPod, no wait, I guess we already used that one. I got it, AI Pod.

Strange New Worlds

Posted on by Leonard Pham

Every company gets more efficient. No company gets permanently more profitable. That is the story of AI and operating margins.

The prevailing thinking amongst CEOs is AI can cut costs by reducing head count, while raising output, and expanding operating margins expand. This is already happening, and they’re not wrong, BUT…

A high operating margin is not a stable state – it’s a signal. It signals that there is money to be made in the market. Capital follows that signal. Newbies show up with lower price points. Existing competitors ramp AI investment to close the efficiency gap. Customers gain bargaining power as alternatives multiply. The margin that AI created starts compressing before your next annual report is filed. Sustaining innovations spread through an industry, raise the productivity floor, and then get priced into competition. Disruptive innovations produce durable excess returns for innovators because they create new competitive terrain. That’s not an opinion. That’s science, the same as water’s wet, the sky is blue, and the Dallas Cowboys suck. The confusion comes from the fact that most CEOs fundamentally don’t understand how computers work, let alone AI.

Terminal operating margin – the margin a business can sustain in perpetuity – is fundamentally a competitive equilibrium concept. It reflects what a company earns when the market has fully adjusted to its cost structure and its competitive set.

If AI raises efficiency for all players in an industry, the terminal margin should not change much. The productivity gains become the new baseline. Prices adjust downward as competition passes efficiency through to customers. Input costs for AI tools themselves rise as vendors capture value. The equilibrium reasserts itself at higher productivity but similar profitability.

Here is the constraint that rarely gets named: AI is trained on historical data. It is, by design, a system for solving known problems well. Feed it enough past examples and it will find patterns, compress costs, and optimize processes at a scale no human team could match. What it cannot do is identify a market that does not yet exist, or recognize a business model that has no precedent in the training data. Those discoveries have no historical examples to learn from. They require something different. They require…wait for it…humans.

Specifically, the kind of human who can sit with ambiguity, notice what customers cannot articulate, translate the incoherent ramblings of execs, and imagine competitive terrain that hasn’t been drawn yet. The irony of the AI era is that the companies who treat human employees primarily as costs to automate away are optimizing their sustaining innovation. They will get more efficient. They will not get more disruptive. The companies that invest in the human capacity to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new markets, to boldly go where no AI has gone before, those are the ones building a durable advantage.

The Wisdom of Garfield the Cat

Posted on by Leonard Pham

When I was a kid, my favorite comic strip was Garfield. And for those who remember “the comics” that came with the Sunday paper, stay with me. A recurring gag with Garfield was him constantly trying to send Odie or Nermal (the world’s cutest cat) to Abu Dhabi. So to me, Abu Dhabi seemed like the furthest place away that you could possibly send something – by mail.

I can’t help but notice that every business leader from here to Abu Dhabi is hyper focused on investing in Artificial Intelligence. I’m not suggesting that investing in AI is a bad thing, quite the contrary. But I do worry that business leaders can’t see the forest for the trees. Here’s what I mean. One of my most favorite-ist quotes is from former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III:

“I’m not going to take care of my career anymore. I’m going to take care of my people. And the moment I did that, everything changed because they wouldn’t let me fail.”

If you truly believe that the nature of human thinking, judgement, decision-making, and creativity can be codified and automated into a durable business advantage, then by all means, do your thing.

OR, you could invest in the training, resources, and yes, agentic AI-enabled IT stacks FOR your humans that will enable them to become…Metahumans. Humans with extraordinary paranormal cosmic mutant supernatural technological capabilities who will then embue their teams and new hires with metagenes and together with the Justice League…ok I’ve taken the comic book analogy too far, but that to me a durable business advantage.

I think my point is
1) My team has never let me down. Never. Not once. Never. (And it wasn’t because I was a good manager)
2) There are several forms of intelligence you should be investing in and
3) Everything I ever needed to learn in life I learned from comics. For everything else, I just ask Claude.

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” – Some dude, somewhere, some long time ago.

P.S. – If you remember reading the Sunday comics, I would encourage you to wear a glucose monitor for a couple weeks. This week I learned that my body can no longer absorb 2 pop tarts, 3 cans of Coke, a 12″ Subway Club, and a bowl of pasta every day.

The Energy store called, they’re out if energy

Posted on by Leonard Pham

Did you see they updated the map? No I’m not referring to Lake Ontario [grow a spine Google]. I’m referring to the new world map that the UN adopted. Greenland it turns out is but a dot and most of the world’s continents together could neatly fit inside of Africa. Shrink-flation is a bitch. 🙃 So it makes you wonder how a tiny little island such as the UK was able to project their influence across the entire globe or how in the span of less than 250 years, the United States was able to become the world’s economic superpower? The history of human civilization has fundamentally been a history of energy capture. And to win in this game you need a BIG FAT energy surplus. Maybe I did learn something in class? 🤔 I told you that story to tell you this one.

Am I to believe that the titans of AI, who have both announced plans to IPO, had an epiphany within the same 72 hour span, and woke up believing that the world’s AI Corporations need government regulation? Perhaps the ghost of AI future visited them? Fat fracking chance. They’re stalling for time. Things have changed. Quickly, oily, financially, economically, geographically, environmentally, energetically, electrically, physically, figuratively, literally, grammatically, but definitely NOT ecumenically. “They” need investors to believe that slowing down is necessary cuz…

I’ve done the math. The entire PJM electricity grid is maxed out and there are no quick fixes. Meanwhile there’s a country on the other side of the world who in the past ten years has added more energy capacity than the rest of the world COMBINED. Hint: I love their takeout.

By my math we’ve had like 28 years to build new nuclear power plants and solar farms. So to my fellow Americans, I say unto you, “you reap what you sow stupid.” If you’ve ever uttered the phrase “I’m just not into politics”, know that 1. You live in a democracy and 2. You’re the problem.

Wake me up when the AI Apocalypse begins. On second thought, I’ll just DVR it and skip the commercials.

That is all.

Human Touch

Posted on by Leonard Pham

Ponder this: Starbucks spent a skillion dollars automating their in-store processes in order to reduce staff and improve margins. Sound familiar? 🤔

Since then, they’ve pulled a 180. Rather than leaning into robotic drink-making or complex AI, the company concluded that replacing staff with automated machinery hurt service quality. So we’re back to less automation and the return of friendly hand written notes on my cup.

What’s the lesson to be learned here? Hell if I know. I for one welcome our Chinese Physical AI Robot overlords. But maybe the lesson is that in a world of instant everything-all the time, the scarce commodity that people are willing to pay more for is the Human Touch. Let it marinate.

P.S. – If the first thing you thought of when I said Human Touch was Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 chart topping song and album Human Touch…be careful standing up too quickly when getting out of bed. You old! 😂