A Frustrating Adventure Trying To Design A Logo With AI

I started my career in tech as a product designer. Since then, AI has fundamentally changed the way most design work gets done. I’ve been having fun following along in my limited free time. For instance, last year, I taught myself Figma.

Most tools today give designers the ability to ideate alongside AI models. In general, I haven’t found them to be very useful, but it’s still early and I always figured that I might just be a n00b. After all, I haven’t been a full-time designer in 10+ years, so every time I tried using one of these AI design tools, in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think “your inability to get what you want might be user error.” 

One area of design in particular that I’ve been disappointed in AI output has been in the logo design department. I’m not sure exactly why AI logo results have been so lackluster, but I had this nagging sense that maybe if I spent an hour or two really focusing on this, I might be able to get much better results.

So I took some time on MLK day to go deep on this and see whether present AI capabilities really are lackluster or if I’m just doing it wrong.

After testing 13 AI design tools across several different prompt types, I’m forced to conclude that AI probably just can’t do a good job of creating logos at this point.

I have some ideas as to why this might be the case and I discuss those at the end, but before we get there, join me on a tour of some wonderful AI slop!

The Test Product

For this experiment, I decided to help a friend out with an app that he’s building. It’s a niche app in the heavy manufacturing industry. He’s calling the product PAX which is an acronym for Power Asset Exchange. Basically, his company connects power generators (utilities and middlemen) with used gas turbine parts.

I spent a couple of minutes iterating a prompt with ChatGPT and used this throughout all of the testing. 

Prompt

Design a simple logo for a company called Power Asset Exchange (PAX) that helps power generators by providing them with used gas turbine parts. The company operates in the heavy manufacturing industry.

The logo must be simple. This is the most important constraint.

The logo must have a square 1:1 ratio.

The logo must be visually distinctive in both black and white and color.

The logo must be easily identifiable at the size of a favicon (16x16px).

The logo must be conceptually relevant to the brand.

To reiterate, the logo must be very simple - fewer lines, fewer themes, fewer shapes. The ideal logo has only a couple of edges and shapes and even fewer colors.

Attempt 1: Free Online Tools

I did a quick pass through some of the free logo design tools and the results were pretty bad, so I didn’t spend much time trying to iterate. My current hypothesis is that these tools are able to offer a free version of the product by using older, cheaper models and they aren’t using evals to actually measure the quality of outputs. 

• Looka

• Logo.com

• Adobe Free Logo Maker

• Design.com

• Logomakr

Looka

Looka doesn’t do a terrible job, but all of the logos feel like they should be for a small town CPA firm, not an innovative tech manufacturing company: 

Logo.com

They paid a lot for that domain, but don’t appear to have invested much in differentiating the product. Same complaint as Looka:

Adobe Free Logo Maker

Nothing much to see here. I got several of these, but at this point, I strongly suspect that the system prompt and model that each of these companies are using is very similar: 

Design.com

These are actually pretty good compared to everything else I’d seen so far. You could imagine putting in some time to tweak and simplify one of these into a working concept. Still not excellent, but getting warmer:

Logomakr

The guided prompt builder approach here looks promising, but the output was disappointing. It’s not terrible, it’s just not very inspired. The tool promises that you can go further and iterate, but the starting point doesn’t inspire confidence: 

Attempt 2: Dedicated Design Tools

Maybe tools that are actually built for designers will perform better than the free, one-shot, off-the-shelf variety. Here I considered 5 products, some of which you’ll probably recognize: 

• Canva

• Lovable

• Recraft

• Midjourney

• Figma

Canva

Canva does an okay job. It created a couple of design ideas, I picked the one that looked the best: 

I have no idea what the graphic is supposed to be and it has some inexplicably-complicated stuff in the middle. The font is okay, the border looks dated. Overall, I wasn’t impressed.

Recraft AI

I heard about Recraft from a friend and was pleasantly surprised by the results. Still not super inspiring, but these are at least simple and would be easy to amend: 

Lovable

I got a bunch of ideas out of Lovable, but this seemed to be more of a quantity over quality approach. They were at least simple, though: 

Midjourney

I know, I know, Midjourney is normally used for pictures, but why not give it a shot as well? 

The black and white aesthetic is nice, but I have no idea what these designs are trying to convey. There’s no indication that any of these are logos for an energy company. Oh well, it was worth a try.

Figma

Figma is the 800 lb gorilla in the design space these days. Like all modern design tools, it has a generative AI mode. I should note here that Figma’s generative AI feature appears to work by creating SVGs rather than rendering pixels, but since it IS a purpose-built design suite, I felt like including it was fair. 

Somewhat hilariously, Lovable and Figma gave me nearly identical designs:

I’ll hand it to Figma that this design is indeed simple, but there just isn’t much to connect it to a power generation company, the full product name, or the acronym. 

Attempt 3: Just Use The Leading-Edge Models Directly

So maybe the solution is to go directly to the best leading-edge models and do some prompt engineering to get better results. I have paid subscriptions to all the major models, so I might as well get my money’s worth, right? Here’s what I tried: 

• ChatGPT 5.2

• Gemini Nanobana Pro

• Claude 4.5 Opus (note that Claude doesn’t have native image generation capabilities, but I figured I’d give it’s SVG generation a try

Claude’s attempt was a complete failure, but that’s reasonable given the product’s constraints.

ChatGPT and Nanobana’s results aren’t terrible, but they lack consistency or a unifying concept. For instance, why is the ChatGPT logo not symmetrical? Nanobana’s attempt looks neat, but the “P” looks a lot like an “F” and I don’t know why. 

Attempt 4: Starting From Examples

Up to this point, I had been using words to describe the prompt design, but what if I uploaded some reference logos in addition to the prompt? 

The industrial manufacturing sector isn’t a bastion of cutting-edge mobile and web UI design, but I was able to quickly locate a few clean-looking logos: 

I uploaded 2 of these to Figma just to see whether the results changed much. To my surprise, I got a borderline-usable output: 

I thought, “great! It’ll be even better when I add in the other data points.” So I uploaded the remaining two and … we’re back to unusable: 

Conclusion

It was pretty fun trying a bunch of different prompting approaches, tools, and comparing notes. During a normal work week, I don’t have the time to really go deep to differentiate whether some AI output is garbage and I need to do the work myself or I’m just bad at prompting.

My takeaway is that at least in the domain of logo creation, AI isn’t all that useful right now.

“But George,” you might say, “there are dozens of ideas that you got for nearly free! Surely this is an improvement over what came before!”

And I would agree with that sentiment, I just don’t think it’s a significant improvement. Here’s why: actually using one of these AI-generated ideas for a real business would take a significant amount of rework.

For instance, scaling a logo down to 16x16 for use as a favicon requires more than just resizing a high-res version of the logo. To get something clean and discernable at the smaller size requires a rethink of the design elements into individual pixels. 

Similarly, most businesses need a bunch of different aspect ratios to be rendered for different social media platforms, trade shows, and marketing materials. I did this a lot for my two companies and it’s a surprisingly creative process. For one ad format, you may need to isolate an element and render it alone. On a newsletter masthead, you may need to create a completely horizontal version of the logo that was designed to be square. Businesses need clean, organized underlying assets to rapidly create design resources like these.

So, while I think AI models can probably create decent fodder for brainstorming, I think we’ll need to wait for better underlying models before we can seriously talk about automating designers out of the logo creation process.

Why is B2C User Acquisition Broken?

Backstory

Right after graduating from college, I started my first company, Skritter, with my two best friends. It’s an app that helps students learning Chinese and Japanese write characters. We didn’t do anything special to get users: we created content on our blog, hosted a forum, learned about a new thing called SEO, and kept releasing new features. The company grew little by little via word of mouth. The company is now old enough to vote and is still growing.

In 2013, we all stopped working on Skritter to start our second company, CodeCombat. It’s an app that helps middle schoolers to code. We were part of the W14 YC batch. At CodeCombat, we became experts at getting onto the HackerNews front page, but most of the lasting user growth was viral. Learning to code was hot in 2014 and our product was eventually pretty good. Today, the company is several times larger than Skritter and continuing to grow. 

After CodeCombat, I was experiencing burn out and decided to work a corporate gig for a while. But I learned the hard way that it’s really hard to scratch my entrepreneurial itch at a corporate gig. So I did what any sane father of 3 does: I started building some side projects in my free time. 

It can be fun to build for yourself, and I’ve done it plenty of times, but it’s a lot more fun to build something that other people want. So, rather than just building the 10,000th bespoke Quantified Self app for myself, I set out to find the overlap between 1) things I want to build and 2) things that other people might want to use.

This time around, I wasn’t interested in creating another startup. I had pretty modest goals: build something that other people find valuable and maybe generate a little income on the side.

Little did I know that at some point during the intervening decade, B2C user acquisition broke.  

My 3 B2C Attempts

I had a couple of ideas that I was passionate about and I thought might resonate with other people: 

Never Apply 

My idea here was to help people find jobs through their network. $1,000 in LinkedIn ads later and there was no engagement at all. I drew what seemed then like the natural conclusion: no one wanted this because my idea or execution were bad. No big deal, running companies has taught me that most of the stuff you try doesn’t work. Onwards to the next thing!

Here’s what the homepage looked like: 

Talk with Sage

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life and I thought there might be a niche in making a much better agentic AI chatbot therapist. I did some organic Reddit content creation and also bought ads. Here too, I got literally 0 engagement. No signups, no support requests, no rants about pricing. Absolutely crickets. 

Like Never Apply, I thought, well, I probably just didn’t clearly express the value-add or find the user group who would actually use this thing. Another case of poor execution or market segmentation. But it was mildly interesting to me that I’d had two absolute flops. You sort of expect things to fail when building new stuff, but getting zero signups or signs of life was a bit extreme.

Here’s what the homepage for this one looked like:

Family Caller

My grandmother was diagnosed with early stage dementia last year and her care has been challenging for my family. I offered to build this one to help my mom. I felt a lot more confident about this one because I personally know a couple of family members caring for elderly folks. They all agree it is hard, draining work. My initial run of Meta ads showed some of life, so I decided to invest a bit further.

I doubled down, iterated the product messaging and dove deeper into the actual product build. But despite that initial ads-based interest, there was almost zero engagement with the product. 

And this is when I started to think that something systematic might be broken with the ecosystem, not the products I was testing. Family Caller is still live, here’s a screenshot of the homepage: 

None of these ideas seemed obviously stupid. I helped to design each of the pages with a designer who is a lot better than me, and Scott helped me out and built the backend for Family Caller. True, each of them had noticeable rough edges, but I showed the pages to some friends and family without first telling them I’d made them, and the feedback was generally “this seems legit.” 

Broken B2C User Acquisition

At this point I need to stress the problem: there was almost no engagement at all. It wasn’t that what we built didn’t work from a business perspective. We instrumented the apps pretty well and what we saw is that people (or maybe just bots) were looking at the pages, scrolling, and tapping, but almost nobody actually used the products.

Here’s all the stuff we tried to figure this out:

1. Conducted in-person UX testing. At first, I thought maybe the pages were misleading and that people were signing up thinking that each service did something else. That might explain why accounts were getting created and then going silent. So I did some UX testing with live humans: they had no problems navigating the sites or explaining what each product did.

2. Installed Posthog for screen recordings. Dead internet theory 101 says that most activity on websites are crawlers and bots. So I installed Posthog to give me screen recordings of sessions. You can’t tell definitively from a recording whether it’s a person or a bot, but if these were bots, they were super inefficient and idiosyncratic. I concluded that either they were sophisticated bots built to closely emulate somewhat weird human behavior or actual humans.

3. Installed Cloudflare’s Turnstile to screen for bots. This only partially worked and introduced noticeable bugs. Via Posthog user sessions, we were able to see that a fair number of sessions were getting Turnstile errors that broke the site for them. These weren’t “you’re a bot, no more pages for you” notices, these were “Turnstile broke everything” errors. We ended up uninstalling it. 

4. Emailed users. I had legit-looking email addresses and I figured that if someone was willing to part with their email, they must have some shred of interest in the product. So I tried a couple of email tactics. I reached out asking for feedback. I offered first unpaid and then paid usability testing sessions. I emailed to “check in” to see if they needed help completing onboarding. I sent all of these emails personally from a Google workspace account 1 by 1 to maximize delivery. Out of the couple hundred I sent, I got one generic reply. 

5. Installed a chat support bubble. We installed a “chat with us” feature for a while and we got … 0 chats, despite manning the chat threads myself and trying hard to ensure the users knew I wasn’t an AI agent. I guess I failed the reverse Turing Test.

After all this, I was even more convinced that B2C user acquisition might just be broken compared to a decade ago when my cofounders and I were running CodeCombat. But why? 

Nobody Buys Software Anymore

I track my finances religiously and am responsible for managing our spending categories. A couple of years ago, I mentioned to my wife that even though she and I are always worried about paying for software subscriptions that we don’t use, we buy almost no software these days. Here’s a full dump of all the software that we’ve bought in the last 12 months:

• Steaming entertainment: Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+

• Big Tech services: Microsoft Office, Amazon Prime, Youtube Music

• One-offs: TinyBeans (yearly kid photo storage subscription), Partiful (nice party invites, only 1 month for a party we hosted), Quicken (yearly subscription)

So apart from streaming entertainment (which I would argue is more akin to cable television than software) and services from FAANG / MAANG, we just aren’t buying much software.

Next, I asked a couple of my friends about this. The way I phrased the question was “apart from FAANG and streaming services, do you buy software?” The answer seems to be “not really.”

So what happened? I remember a decade ago, I bought all sorts of niche software. I had a Zeo headband with a monthly data analysis subscription, I tried the paid tier on Strava, I bought the pro plan on AllTrails, etc, etc. I wouldn’t say that I was a software spendthrift, but I certainly paid for more B2C software than I do today and I arguably had fewer problems to solve in my life. (nothing beats kids for creating life problems!)

Then I had an idea: what if this isn’t just me and my little social bubble? What if people in general are just not buying much software anymore? That would be kinda weird, but I had an easy way to sanity check my idea.

It’s Not Just Me, YC Is Funding Mostly B2B Startups Now

YCombinator has a publicly-available list of all the companies that they’ve funded: YC Startup Directory. They are funding a lot more B2B companies now than B2C: 

YC has funded 5,407 companies. 2,685 are B2B, only 838 are B2C. That’s a telling statistic on its own. The single biggest startup accelerator in the world has funded approximately 3x as many B2B companies as B2C. 

But if you take a look at the time trend, the data gets even more stark. I did some tedious scraping and number-crunching from public sources for you. The percentage of B2C companies that YC funds per batch has fallen from around 30% in the early 2010s to around 7% in recent cohorts. 

And that number actually understates the drop. If you actually dig into the B2C companies in the most recent cohorts, most don’t monetize their products directly. IE, people aren’t paying for them, they’re ad-supported, VC-backed, or funding themselves via affiliate revenue.

So, putting this all together:

1. My own little side experiments have proven that user acquisition for B2C products is not working for hobbyists.

2. My peers and I no longer buy much software directly.

3. The YCombinator Startup directly provides strong evidence that B2B is where venture-scale investments pay off, not B2C. 

Despite these trends, the tech industry is bigger than ever as measured by public markets and VC funding: 

So what’s going on? 

Some Hypotheses

After thinking about this a bit, I have a couple of hypothesis that might explain this trend, but would love to hear from readers to see whether I’m overlooking some more obvious explanations:

1. Software ate the world, now there’s nothing left. Andreessen may have been right that software is eating the world, but perhaps now there’s no world left. If there are 50 note-taking apps, the 51st is going to struggle to find users, even if it’s demonstrably a lot better. Maybe the problem is literally that there’s too much software.

2. AI bots have made user discovery impossible. Large language models are flooding product communities faster than they can be detected and removed. It’s possible that this asymmetric advantage has essentially spoiled the ability of new products to find their users. Maybe with time, defensive tactics will catch up and things will be like email spam in the early 2001s: a major problem until it isn’t any more. But for now, AI could just be ruining things. This trend applies to B2B as well: cold emailing, content marketing, and direct phone sales used to work and are no longer viable strategies. The one saving grace of B2B is that business owners are real humans that have real needs and you can sometimes talk to them. 

3. Growing distrust of tech in general. Maybe people are turning away from tech-driven recommendation engines like ads and feeds as part of the tech backlash that kicked off in the mid-2010s. You could imagine a world where average people have just stopped trusting that they’ll get good value from any digital purchases after they struggle to cancel the subscription on their fitness app or the accumulation of dark patterns in their social networking app of choice leaves them with a bad taste in their mouth.

4. The middle class is finally gone. We’ve been hearing the story about wage inequality for a long time, but maybe things have finally become bad enough that mass-market apps that aren’t explicitly tailored for the top 1-10% just aren’t viable. Anecdotally, I know quite a few underemployed and unemployed people my age that are finding it extremely difficult to get jobs or save money, so this one too seems at least plausible.

Of course, it could be all of these things plus 2-3 more that I’m missing. What do you think: why is B2C broken for new startups?

Books That I Read in 2024

Nonfiction

★★★★★ Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist - changed the way that I view the behavior of myself and my young children.

★★★★★ Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet - some much needed optimism about climate change and our ability to change the world.

★★★★★ Humankind a Hopeful History -reminded me of the book “Factfulness,” it’s a good read for anyone feeling gloomy about the state of the world.

★★★★★ Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity - lots of people have already learned this stuff, but I haven’t been paying attention to nutrition or longevity research and it was a fascinating read.

★★★★★ The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - a good rebuttal to “Sapiens” and “Better Angels of Our Nature.”

★★★★☆ The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment - well-researched argument that gun rights and slavery are tightly entwined in ways that most people don’t want to talk about.

★★★★☆ Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace - apparently we don’t start wars over resource scarcity which was a surprise.

★★★★☆ Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia - I learned about the Nuremberg Trials in school, but never learned about the Japanese equivalent. This was a long but fascinating read.

★★★★☆ The Little Book of Aliens - I don’t know where I learned that humanity had done a lot of searching for aliens, but this book disabused me of that fact.

★★★★☆ Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath - this and “New Cold Wars” pair well together if you’re interested in an analysis of US / Russian relations.

★★★★☆ The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade - change is never tidy and uniform, this book does an amazing job of bringing to life a transition that was always quickly and factually summarized in school history books.

★★★★☆ Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich - I knew that lots of drugs were legal in the early part of the 20th century, but didn’t realize that the Third Reich was meth’d up and that it may have been responsible for some of their early military victories.

★★★★☆ Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals - I had been avoiding working on some important life projects because they didn’t feel enjoyable. This book explained to me why that is and why it’s imperative to do the work anyways.

★★★★☆ The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - if you thought that cancer was monolithic, you should read this and marvel at how our best enemy really is ourselves.

★★★★☆ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt - so much has been written about TR’s presidency, but not as much about his adolescence and early adulthood. You can disagree with some of his policies and still respect the man.

★★★☆☆ Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic - pair this with the TV show “The Last of Us.” You’re welcome.

★★★★☆ Nuclear War: A Scenario - prior to reading this book, I ranked nuclear war as perhaps the 3rd or 4th more pressing existential threat to humanity. Now I think it’s probably #1.

★★★★☆ The Price of Time: The Real Interest Story - a compelling and well-researched argument against low interest rates.

★★★★☆ The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again - a great snapshot of historical consequence, but I fear that what worked previously won’t work now that Facebook, Instagram, and video games exist. Just the same, fascinating.

★★★★☆ The Demon of Unrest - I spent a full semester learning about the American Civil War and had never learned about this pivotal event that started it all.

★★★★☆ The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma - would have been better if it had taken more seriously some of the existential AI threats, but I still really liked it and thought the points were timely and well-articulated.

★★★★☆ Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power - before reading this, I thought that the political situation in the US now was very similar to Germany in the 1930s. Turns out I was quite wrong.

★★★★☆ Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories - if you can get past the kinda weird intro, this is absolutely addictive read about a botanical history I’d never heard.

★★★★☆ Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs - the author might not be super trustworthy, but GLP-1 weight-loss medications are borderline magic and may fundamentally change the world.

★★★★☆ Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It - finally a politically centrist book about some of Charles Murray’s points about gender and sex without all the conservative axe-grinding and culture war baggage.

★★★☆☆ Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory - made me think harder about death one moment and laugh out loud the next.

★★★☆☆ The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder - pure entertainment, this is a real page turner. It’s what would happen if Indiana Jones were actually real.

★★★☆☆ Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall - I didn’t know most of the history of crypto currencies even though I’d lived through it. Good, if fairly opinionated read.

★★★☆☆ Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty - don’t watch the TV show, read the book. This also pairs well with “Smoke and Ashes” above.

★★★☆☆ Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong - high schools should be teaching from books like this not textbook propaganda. This is entertaining and illuminating.

★★★☆☆ The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann - John von Neumann was truly an impressive dude. A bit scary, but also impressive.

★★★☆☆ Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe - it turns out that Anne Boleyn was a total badass.

★★★☆☆ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook - I’m surprised that this story hasn’t been turned into a TV miniseries already. It’s got everything you need: murder, intrigue, disease, war, sex, suicide, and ambition.

★★★☆☆ The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments - good reminder about mortality and the beautify of being human.

★★★☆☆ The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI - not as good as “The Coming Wave,” but still an interesting read for context about how current-gen AI systems were created.

★★★☆☆ Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted - even though we’ve made so much progress treating cancer (see “Mother of All Maladies” above), surviving cancer sucks.

★★★☆☆ Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan - don’t watch the TV show, read the book. It’s a lot more realistic, complicated, and entertaining.

★★★☆☆ The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party - there are some incredibly visceral and memorable human stories in here.

★★★☆☆ Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great - I’ve read quite a bit about Alexander the Great, so this wasn’t a revolutionary book for me, but still interesting.

★★★☆☆ The Trading Game: A Confession - I listened to this on Audible and the author’s narration makes it 2x as good. It’s like “Chaos Monkeys” but for finance.

★★★☆☆ Marilyn Monroe: The Biography - turns out she didn’t commit suicide and may, in fact, have been killed? Interesting story about an American icon.

★★★☆☆ Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age - not as good as Blitzed, but still an interesting read.

★★★☆☆ Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias - now that I’m a Texan, I really enjoyed learning the history of the city directly to the north.

★★★☆☆ The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity - I started this one for the neurobiology, but ended up taking away some interesting lessons about the brain chemistry of people in different political camps.

★★★☆☆ Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age - the couple of depictions Xerox park being pillaged by Steve Jobs that I’d seen are wrong. It’s a quick read, so if you work in the tech industry you should probably read it.

★★★☆☆ New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West - good, but very, very long. He makes a pretty convincing argument that the US government hasn’t done a great job responding to either China or Russia across administrations and we need to put aside partisanship and get serious about being more hawkish.

★★★☆☆ The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet - great read if you live in a hot climate because the heat really is dangerous and we don’t commonly admit that.

★★★☆☆ The Woman in Me - I’m not a huge fan of Britney Spears, but it was sad and illuminating to hear about the struggles that she’s endured.

★★★☆☆ Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China - pair this with “New Cold Wars” to get a more balanced read on Chinese / American relations.

★★★☆☆ In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - this is the story that Moby Dick is based on and it’s better than the novel.

★★★☆☆ Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere - didn’t learn a ton, but it was interesting to learn about how much more valuable it would be to remove atmospheric methane than CO2.

Fiction

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - very different than the TV show and (like almost every book), better. If you enjoyed the show, you should definitely read this.

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson - pretty fun read, but drags a bit at the end.

The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End by Cixin Liu - I devoured all 3 of these in 2 weeks. Very entertaining and better than the TV show.

Books I Started, but Didn't Finish

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore

Notes on a Nervous Planet by matt Haig

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

November 1942 by Peter Englund and peter Graves

Behave by Robert Sapolsky

The 99% Invisible City by Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick

1177 B.C by Eric H. Cline

Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill

Solito by Javier Zamora

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Life After Power by Jared Cohen

Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream

Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough

The Small and Mighty by Sharon McMahon

The 10 Books I'm Most Excited to Read in 2025

Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War

A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq

The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia

Is Population Density the Reason Americans Can’t Discuss Politics?

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a work dinner with other members of my team. We were at an amazing restaurant in downtown Austin. The appetizers had come and gone, the drinks had arrived, and conversation had started to open up a bit from the perfunctory discussions of work projects and the weather. As inevitably happens, a lull in the conversation occurred and a member of our engineering team, Vinay (not his real name), piped up and asked if he could ask our table a somewhat sensitive question. 

I love controversial conversations. I was also sitting right next to Vinay, so I piped right up and told him to fire away. There were about 8 people at our table, and I reckoned that even if the conversation got a bit spicy, the background din of the restaurant and organic cross-conversation could cover.

“Why is it impolite for Americans to discuss politics?” 

He said it gently and urgently. It was obvious that he wasn’t spoiling for a heated conversation or baiting anyone at the table. He went on:

“In my hometown in India, everyone talks about politics all the time. And most of us don’t agree with one another. But that’s okay. I can even tease other people about our political disagreements and it doesn’t get in the way of friendships. Why isn’t that the case here in the US?”

People were fidgeting at the mere mention of the word politics, and another member of the engineering team sitting across from me chuckled as if to dispel the tension.  “Well, it’s just something we’re all taught: politics and money aren’t topics for polite company!” He looked around as if to say “what can you do?”

But Vinay was having none of that. 

“Sure, there is some social training here, but I’m betting you can all feel the tension of even just asking this question among coworkers. Why is that? Why can’t we disagree and remain friendly at work? It’s not like we are making policy decisions, we work at a tech company writing code.”

Another coworker interjected, “It’s so hard making friends as a parent, I don’t want to risk losing out on a friendship over political beliefs.” Several others nodded in agreement. 

Vinay smiled in a self deprecating way, “I’m sorry, I have to push further on that. Why is it that a disagreement about something as abstract about politics is an acceptable reason to end a friendship? Do all Americans spend most of their weekends attending political rallies?”

I took a half-hearted swing at a response: “I think that in America, political beliefs and violence are more closely entwined than in other parts of the world. I’d be a bit worried about getting punched if I got too deep into politics with someone who disagreed with me.” I said that last bit sarcastically to help diffuse the tension.

Vinay smiled apologetically at me. “You know that people have been lynched in India in the last few months due to political violence, right? Americans think their politics are so polarized, but it’s worse in India right now. Has anyone been killed in America recently because they were a Democrat or Republican?”

I felt pretty stupid, I clearly didn’t have much of a handle on the political situation in India. I had to confess that nobody I’d heard of had died because of their party affiliation. And if that happened, I suspected I would have heard about it. 

I meekly replied “I don’t think so, that’s a fair point.” 

Fortunately, Vinay wasn’t interested in embarrassing me and continued, “In Bangalore, my family lives in an apartment building and when I go home to visit, I have conversations with a couple dozen people every day. If politics were as divisive as here in America, I’d have no friends left.”

That got me thinking. “You know, one thing that’s very different between most of the US and most of India is population density. I live in a suburb here in Austin and I have to actually go out of my way to see my neighbors at all.”

A couple of my coworkers were shaking their heads in agreement. 

“Most of the time, it’s as if I don’t have neighbors. There’s a lot of physical space separating humans. If I have even a slightly uncomfortable situation with someone, it would be easy for me to never see them again.”

Vinay thought about that for a moment. “I couldn’t avoid most of the people in my apartment building if I wanted to, I almost trip over them when I come and go.” 

Another coworker added. “This all lines up with my experiences. I’ve been trying to find a tennis partner to play with and the one guy that’s been the most dependable lives about 20 minutes away from me. If either of us said anything to offend one another, it would be super easy to make excuses not to play again. That’s one of the reasons we don’t talk about politics.”

As he concluded that thought, the entrees started to arrive. Vinay grudgingly accepted that something as trivial as population density could be an important catalyst for forming a cultural norm against offending others. 

More food came, we drank and talked about other topics. You could feel the tension draining away as the dreaded “P” word was replaced with other more polite subjects.

Choosing to Have Kids During the End Times

My best friend believes that humanity has a 60% probability of becoming extinct in the next 15 years. He’s one of the smartest people I know and is an extremely well-adjusted and high-functioning person. He scoffs at conspiracy theories, doesn’t wear tin foil hats, and has an abiding love of statistics. His belief is terrifying because it derives not from fevered information bubble YouTube binges, but from years of methodical research and predictions.

But I don’t need his bleak predictions to feel like the world is ending. I’m apocalyptic enough on my own for that. And now that I have 3 young children, I’m more worried for them than I am for myself. What kind of world did I bring them into?

Is it wrong to have kids when you are aware of all the risks? Am I to blame if my children suffer through a world-ending event?

It’s Not Just In Your Head

Last summer at a family gathering, I asked my parents about my feelings of dread.

“Mom and Dad, is it just me or is the world ending? Are my concerns just what it’s like to be the father of 3 young kids?”

My parents are some of the most rational and loving humans I’ve ever met. I’ve always been their paranoid, obsessive son. The kind of son you have to constantly tell to relax and not to worry. Take a deep breath, things aren’t that bad, George.

“The world is a lot scarier now than it was when you were little.” I almost couldn’t believe they said it. Maybe they had misunderstood my question?

Later that weekend, I asked my 93-year-old grandmother. She looked at me with pain in her eyes and said, “I’m worried about what your generation will have to face.”

These Are the Ways the World Ends

And those are just the risks that have a decent shot at ending our species. If you’re more conservative and only care about you and your family living, you’ve got lots of other risks to worry about: political instability, war, and the normal plagues.

Most people probably fall into this camp, and the sad fact is that it’s historically mundane for entire families, cities, and nations to be extinguished unceremoniously.

Let’s stop here for a moment and return to the main point of this post: the kids.

As a parent of young children, the thought of even these mundane calamities befalling my children is heart-breaking. No. Those words don’t quite do the emotion justice.

If I think of my children dying, a lump forms in my throat. I lose the ability to function. My brain freezes and I teeter on the brink of tears. The idea of this happening to every person’s kids is unfathomable. It’s pointless to multiply infinite suffering by anything.

So perhaps it is rational to just not have children?

Are We Just Species-Level Hypochondriacs?

People have been predicting the end of the world since there were words to record the sentiment. I’m fond of this Wikipedia article: list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. And lest you think that all of these predictions are just about a religious end of the world, don’t overlook the predictions about floods, comets, and earthquakes.

It’s tempting to conclude that humans are just species-level hypochondriacs. Even before nuclear weapons, prophets were envisioning the end of the world in a hundred different ways. 

We now know that apart from the mundane firestorms, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves, there are more exotic and deadly natural phenomenon: 

• The Chicxulub asteroid impact killed ~75% of plant and animal species on earth. It was only 1 of 3 truly enormous asteroids known to have impacted the Earth.

• Massive volcanic eruptions are strongly linked with 4 out of the 5 major extinction events in Earth’s geologic record.

While all of the major asteroid impact events and mass extinction events predate our species by hundreds of millions of years, far smaller events happen regularly. For a sobering read, check out the Tunguska event.

So yeah, nature is out to kill us, and that’s stressful. But that’s sort of our species’ baseline. Me, my parents, and my grandmother all seem to be cluing into something more modern and ominous. 

Many Existential Risks Really Are New

Our species has probably existed on earth for ~190,000 years. Four out of five potential ways to end ourselves were created in the last 100 years. That means that the bulk of our species’ known existential risk has been created in the last .05% of our collective existence. Two of those risks (AI and pandemics) have really only become existentially threatening in the last 20 years. That’s .01% of our species’ existence.

Against the backdrop of massively increased risk, we’ve also created instantaneous worldwide communication and algorithmic information bubbles. That seems like the perfect storm for anxious people. 

Whenever I start down this path, I reflexively think “well, we haven’t destroyed ourselves yet, so maybe I’m just worrying too much.” But we’ve come alarmingly close more than you’d think: 

• There have been at least 20 nuclear close calls since the creation of nuclear weapons. Some incidents got so close it makes me nauseous to read the accounts.

• Covid-19 killed ~27M people and was probably created through non-nefarious gain-of-function research plus an innocuous containment leak. Oopsie.

• Climate change is thought to have already killed ~2M people.

So, we’ve already nearly ended our civilization with nukes about two dozen times and millions of people have already been killed by two of the other major risk vectors. And unlike previous generations, we are cursed with the knowledge of the risks, the near-misses, and the accelerating rate of change. 

Given all of the above, I have to conclude that it’s fairly rational to be more worried about our civilization and our children than previous generations.

So, Why Have Kids?

If you’ve read this far, it may seem stupid to invest time and energy bringing children into such a risky world. Selfishly, kids take a lot of work and cost a lot. If you think our civilization will end in 5 years, why not remain child-free, retire early, and sip cocktails in the Caribbean? Even if cocktail-sipping in the tropics isn’t your thing, isn’t it philosophically cruel to bring kids into a world knowing that there is an increased risk of suffering and dying young?

I think that if you believe the world is going to end in less than 5 years and you don’t already have kids, then yeah, maybe don’t do that. But if you think we have more than 5 years and / or you already have kids, I think investing in them is essential and valuable. 

The Utilitarian Argument for Kids

I’ve read a bunch about the psychology of happiness. Daniel Kahneman proposes two ways of understanding the experience of happiness: the experiencing self and the reflecting self. The experiencing self is what everyone is most familiar with. It’s just how you feel while you live your life. It’s how you feel while you read these words. 

The reflecting self is different. How did you feel when you last went on vacation? What was something particularly fun that happened in the last month or so? Spend a couple seconds thinking about those experiences. Remember all the little details: the events, the people, colors, smells, and sensations. This is your reflecting self.

Kahneman and others have shown that we think very differently about our lives in these two modes. And most importantly, he has shown that we spend the vast, vast majority of our lives experiencing rather than reflecting.

This makes intuitive sense: most people spend orders of magnitude more time just living life than thinking about living life.

I think this simple fact makes for a pretty strong argument to have kids. I’m not a strict philosophical utilitarian, but follow me down the utilitarian path for just a minute here. 

Let’s say that you have a kid and every hour of that child’s life they get to experience a range of emotions that net out slightly positive. Sure, there are tantrums, pain, and displeasure, but there’s also lots of joy, excitement, and love. Over 5 years, that child gets to experience 25,550 hours of waking, positive life.

If the world gets nuked out of existence, they might have a couple of weeks of terror and pain followed by death. Even if that terror and pain last for 3 months and every single waking second is miserable, that’s still only 5% of their life. More likely, they can find joy even in the most grim circumstances. If this point seems hard to believe, read Man’s Search for Meaning.

Also, as a father of young children, I can attest that young kids seem from the outside to be very joyful most of the time. They aren’t plagued by the morose moods of adults. The movie Inside Out did a good job of visualizing this early-life psychological simplicity.

So, unless the end of the world is extremely drawn out and painful and your kid is already prone to suffer an unusual amount of physical or mental pain, I think having kids creates net-positive human experience … if you think the child can live beyond early childhood. 

Why the caveat about age? Because among most parents I know, raising kids from 0-5 is a very net-negative experience. Some people love babies and toddlers, but I haven’t met anyone yet that loves them for 90+ hours a week. 

The Phenomenological Argument for Kids

If you’ve done your philosophical homework, you may have read Heidegger or Sartre. They represent a branch of philosophical thought called phenomenology. One of the tenets of that system of thought is that human experience is inherently valuable, regardless of the quality of that experience. 

I’m not fully convinced of this in the extreme cases. For instance, I think it’s wrong for someone dying of excruciatingly painful and terminal cancer to be denied euthanasia on the basis that their suffering is meaningful. But for more mundane examples, I agree that human experience is superior to none at all. I think most people fundamentally agree. It’s pretty obvious why: we’re all human and the vast majority of us inherently value other members of our species. 

This school of thought would argue that a child’s existence and consciousness are valuable, regardless of whether that child is happy or sad. I think it’s tough to quantify this value, but I agree in principle that our species is enriched by having another child exist vs not exist.

The Hedonic Treadmill Argument for Kids

Maybe you aren’t convinced by esoteric philosophical arguments. That’s fine, I think there’s still a very strong argument for having kids if you want to. It’s called the Hedonic Treadmill. Empirical studies find time and time again that most people revert to a happiness set point, regardless of what life throws at them. 

This was popularized in the highly influential and oft-quoted study about recent lottery winners and paraplegics. Researchers enlisted people who had recently won the state lottery and people who had recently become paraplegics or quadriplegics due to an accident. They asked those participants to rate their happiness while experiencing everyday events like watching TV and talking to friends. What they found was that in the long run, there wasn’t much difference between the two groups despite their substantially different life circumstances. 

Put more simply, we can adapt to basically anything life hurls at us, and for most of us, we’ll probably be about as happy before and after. This effect has been labeled the Hedonic Treadmill. Like walking on a treadmill, our brains quickly adapt to new life circumstances and we tend to return to a happiness “set point.” 

Why is this applicable to having children? Because it strongly suggests that over the long term, you’ll be about as happy with kids as without them.

I can hear some folks reading this now and saying “whoa, hold on a minute, one of your arguments for having kids is that they probably won’t make you more miserable?!”. But I actually think that is a very strong argument. Bear with me for a moment.

I think Jean Twenge made a pretty compelling argument in her book Generations that despite their rhetoric, most young adults that choose not to have children today do so for selfish reasons. But what the Hedonic Treadmill strongly suggests is that avoiding kids so that you can enjoy your life more won’t work for most people. 

You might think “without kids, I can have tons more fun, I can go hiking and go to parties and live in an expensive city and play video games all day!”. And those things are fun, but only for a while. After you finish playing your 30th video game of the year, you’ll probably want to do something else. After living in San Francisco for 5 years, you might want to try living somewhere else.

Personally, I think parents in the US really are less happy on average for the first 3-5 years. Childcare is criminally expensive. Most parents don’t get any leave from their work. Young children induce sleeplessness, sickness, and marital tension. And in reaction to all these changes, many parents do stressful things like move out of big cities, change jobs, and remodel homes. All of that pushes a lot of parents to be less happy moment-to-moment.

In the long term, though, parents are about as happy as non-parents.

If you think that the world is going to end next year, there’s a pretty strong argument not to have kids because you’ll struggle less in those 12 months. But if you think the world will last at least 5-10 years, there’s a pretty good chance that having kids won’t make much difference to your long-term happiness.

Also no, having a kid isn’t an environmentally immoral action.

The Life Regret Argument for Kids

People regret things they didn’t do more than the things they do. That’s true even if the things they do end badly. 

Even with advancements in reproductive technology and medical care, if you want to have kids, it’s still a very good idea to have them when you’re relatively young. So, unlike some other big decisions in life, it’s not feasible to wait and see indefinitely. 

I’m a firm believer that people who don’t strongly want children shouldn’t have them. The US cultural norm that you grow up, marry, and have kids has become less prevalent, but is still too strong. If you don’t want kids, you shouldn’t have them. It’s that simple. And anyone that pressures or shames you for that decision is wrong.

If you do feel strongly that you want kids, but are worried about the state of the world, however, things are more tricky. If you’re in your mid-30s and feel strongly that you want kids, but decide not to do so because of political strife, climate change, nuclear war, etc, you may come to regret the decision. And there are very few options to go back and change your mind.

Why I’m Raising Kids in the End Times

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life. I’m not proud of it, but there is a certain comfort in the thought of surrendering to nihilism. What’s the point in struggling to raise children when there’s a non-trivial chance Putin will end the world in 2026 with the flip of a button? When you’re in that mind-space, you’re numb to all the fears and concerns.

But for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, I still think having children is worthwhile. Is it always pleasant? No. Does being a parent heighten my concerns about existential threats? Yes. But to simply surrender to nihilism and depression would make the world a worse place. If for no other reason than to show my children how I want them to act, I’m not willing to do that.