Modern VR headsets, like the Apple Vision Pro, contain the equivalent of two teeny-tiny 4k TVs, one for each eyeball.

Not long ago, it would have taken a supercomputer to push this many pixels, but now, a portable chip will do the job.

But there’s a trick happening here—misdirection worthy of a seasoned magician.

The truth is, today’s chips aren’t powerful enough to run two displays like that, even now.

But because these headsets can track our eye movement, they know to only really render the pixels we happen to be looking at. This is called foveated rendering.

The rest is an approximation that we don’t notice, because we can’t focus on the periphery. The change happens so fast, the illusion is that we have pixel-perfect resolution everywhere we look.

Not only is this clever, it’s also true of life: We see what we’re focusing on in incredible detail, and everything else is just a sea blurry shapes that feel more-or-less right without further inspection.

The question of “when is it done?” is not an easy one to answer.

When working on any project, we can easily get bogged down in details that don’t matter. But the problem is, many of them do.

We shouldn't be asking: “Is this font 1px too big?” “Are these wheels 10g too heavy?” “Is this video 5% too bright?”

The right question is: When does it sing?

When do all the elements come together to turn something from audio into music? From pixels on a screen into art?

All human work is art. And it either sings or it doesn’t.

You've heard of gaslighting—when someone makes you feel like you’re the crazy one—by pretending that something clearly wrong is actually normal.

The term comes from the film Gaslight, and it's become a well-known psychological phenomenon.

It’s the same concept behind “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: If everyone around you acts like the emperor's wearing clothes, but we know he's naked, we start to question ourselves.

When we post content online, we hope people will like it, share it, maybe even subscribe. We don’t love being criticized—especially for how we look or who we are.

But historically, even if a rando said something cruel, at least you knew it was a real person—a 12-year-old troll in his mother’s basement perhaps, but still human. It was part of the “town square” dynamic that platforms like Twitter (now X) were built on.

Now, that’s changing.

Soon, the majority of online discourse will come from AI bots.

And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but on X—leaning more and more to one side of the political spectrum (thanks to its almighty CEO)—you’ll see something disturbing:

Anytime someone from “the other side” posts something, it’s met with a flood of nasty, hateful, vitriolic replies. This creates the illusion that the entire world hates that viewpoint.

I used to scroll through YouTube or Reddit comments to gauge public sentiment on hot topics. But increasingly, many of those replies—especially on X—aren’t written by real people.

And that has a real effect. We start to question ourselves. We wonder if we’re wrong, or if everyone else sees something we don’t.

If everyone else seems to think one thing and we think another, our brains starts to say: “Maybe I’m wrong,” or “Maybe I’m just dumb.”

In a good faith system, questioning our values is a wonderful thing that can lead towards tremendous personal growth. But when our values are questioned/manipulated en masse by an algorithm, that’s gaslighting—by the system, at scale.

It chips away at our confidence, our logic, and our reasoning.

And that’s what makes AI so dangerous. It makes intelligent, thoughtful people question their own sanity.

So here’s my advice: don’t take any of it at face value.
Don’t doubt your mental capacity—trust it. Assume that if someone disagrees with you online, they might not be real. In fact, that’s increasingly likely.

Turn off comments if you need to. Turn off likes.

But don’t turn off your own brain.

Don’t let an algorithm convince you that you have nothing of value to say.

My daughter had me search high and low for the second book in a series.

We had to scour multiple public libraries until we found an available copy.

“Do you want another book?”

“No, I want that one!”

In a sea of children’s books across multiple large libraries, only that one would do. I’d say that’s a pretty specific need!

But the first book? The first book was a random library find she picked up, skimming through hundreds of titles.

So many things are like this.

Our spouse just happened to be at the same college we attended. Our favorite taco truck just happened to be next door…

And now? We can’t imagine being happy without our spouse or without that damn taco truck, no matter how many thousands of miles away we may live.

Nothing is worse than handing over a pitch deck you worked hard on, or concept drawings, and being ghosted by the other party.

This is a hard lesson I’ve had to learn over the years. Prospects are quick to ask for a pitch deck, because it's easy and takes all the burden off of them.

Whether prospects read these decks or not, service providers are asked to waste a ton of time on something that may never be glanced at—or worse, something that’s used as an A/B comparison to justify going with a lower-priced competitor.

Tip: Don’t send decks or PDFs or concept pitches via email any more. If a prospect wants your pitch, they should schedule a call. Go over the deck together. That way you'll know they at least heard your ideas the way they were meant to be heard.