Intelligence lives in the ability to stay open, follow curiosity, and build understanding together as the world keeps changing.
There’s a quiet rebellion underway. People are growing tired of curated personas, institutional gatekeepers, and the exhausting performance of always appearing to know. The old markers of intelligence—titles, prestige, cultural capital—are losing relevance in a world cycling through breakthroughs at the speed of a tech super-cycle.
Just as one wave of innovation renders the last obsolete, static credentials can’t keep up with minds that adapt in real time. When knowledge evolves daily and insight surfaces from unexpected places, what matters more is how we think, not what we’ve collected. What’s emerging instead is a different kind of intelligence: lived, iterative, shared. Less about performance, more about presence.
We no longer need perfectly polished ideas handed down from above. We need permeable minds working together in real time—minds that can draw insight from anywhere, whether it’s a Substack essay or a Reddit thread, a scientific paper or a pop culture reference. Intelligence today means staying open. It means unlearning old frameworks, following genuine curiosity, and letting go of the need to appear sophisticated. It means practicing sense-making in public, without fear of being mid-thought.
The people shaping the next era won’t be the ones who climbed highest in the old systems—they’ll be the ones who moved beyond them. The ones who show up not as experts, but as collaborators. Who ask sincere questions instead of broadcasting hot takes. Who know that no one person has the answer, but that something new emerges when many perspectives collide. These are the people building the culture we need next—one grounded in exploration, not exhibition.
So maybe the new measure of intelligence is a deep willingness to keep learning—a mindset rooted in openness, curiosity, and growth. It reveals itself in those who expand collective understanding, who make connections visible, and who actively shape conversations that matter. Intelligence today lives in shared breakthroughs, in the momentum that builds when thoughtful people engage across boundaries.
The future belongs to those who participate fully, who co-create generously, and who stay alert to what’s emerging.
Substack is like the Royal Society of the 21st Century for The New Enlightenment
At that early phase of ideation and innovation, you don’t look to elected officials, who have spent their lives focused on getting elected through the old systems. You don’t look to the established figures, who have climbed to the pinnacles of all the old institutions from elite universities to mainstream media to billionaire-backed think tanks, either.
At that early stage of ideation and innovation, you look to the intellectuals and entrepreneurs and out-of-the-box thinkers — those who are not constrained by the old world and are focused instead on the new one. You are looking for truly independent thinkers who can figure out the new ways forward that work better for everyone over the long haul.
Peter Leyden | 15 Minutes
the prison of curated intelligence
Real intelligence is messier than this. It's the willingness to look for meaning everywhere, to approach all human creation with genuine curiosity rather than predetermined judgment. It's recognizing that insight can emerge from unexpected sources and that wisdom doesn't respect our carefully constructed cultural hierarchies. Perhaps what we're really witnessing is a confusion between intelligence and intellectual identity. The former is a practice; the latter is a performance. And those who mistake the performance for the practice often find themselves trapped in prisons of their own making, missing the very insights they claim to seek.
Stepfanie Tyler | 6 Minutes
The Gray Lady’s Data Dragnet: How One Court Order Just Nuked ChatGPT Privacy
There is also a blatant ethical hypocrisy here. The Times routinely positions itself as a principled watchdog on technology, lecturing Silicon Valley on surveillance and privacy abuses. Yet it has asked a court to impose one of the most sweeping data-retention orders in tech-policy history. That request does not “elevate the ethics of AI” in any recognizable sense; it weaponizes discovery to score legal points while disregarding the collateral damage to user privacy.
Nate | 10 Minutes
The New Rules of Silicon Valley with Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha
These things are happening so fast that if you tell people that things are going to change too frequently, then it also has a distraction factor. You could create a cultural environment where everybody has uniform access to information and understanding of what is happening around them. And then bring all the brains in the game because that’s how you’ll connect the dots.
One person will not know everything, but the way you communicate should not rely on the past. Leave the baggage of the past. Everything that we knew in the past is irrelevant. In fact, the day after Rubrik went public, I wrote a note to everybody in Rubrik saying that the old Rubrik as we knew it is dead. Because somebody who put in money into our IPO, they don’t care we went zero to IPO and what returns we created. They care about where we go from here.
Bipul Sinha in The Logan Barlett Show | 66 Minutes