I agree with the main point of the thesis: we need to think more carefully about which problems we choose to solve, instead of just starting another food delivery app company, working on internal tools at big tech firms, or going into consulting. We could spend our entire 20s making PowerPoint slides, Excel charts, and B2B engineering tech — or we could work on problems we deeply care about. The main reason I think we don’t often do this is because it’s genuinely hard to know what you want to work on, and there’s little evidence to suggest that your path will work out. (But that’s okay, people need you to lead them to places they don’t even know exist.) That said, there are important problems we need to solve beyond just defense (which is the main comparison point in the book). For example: sustainability, making AI interpretable, and so on. Originally, I would have given it 3 stars, but the book sparked deep conversations among me and my friends — so +0.5 star. If the book were stripped of fluff and hand-wavy arguments, I would have rated 4 stars. > The creative energies of Silicon Valley engineers would end up being directed toward solving their own problems, which, for many, stemmed from a fundamental disconnect between the life they thought they had been promised as a result of their intellectual talents—a life of ease and wants sated, of car services and assistants at the ready to fetch meals and groceries—and the reality of their relatively modest incomes. This generation was told that they were bound to become the next masters of the universe, but there was little for them to inherit. So they would ultimately go about constructing the apps and consumer services that would create an illusion of the good life for themselves and their peers by making it possible to summon taxis, make restaurant reservations, and book vacation home rentals with only a few swipes on a phone.