You are not here to learn.
If you have been told for the last twenty years that you need to keep up, that you need to reinvent yourself, that you need to learn a new piece of software every six months or you will be left behind, we would like to begin by apologising for our entire industry.
That is not what this conference is. We are not here to teach you AI. We are not here to bring you up to speed on anything. There is no part of the day where somebody twenty-five years younger than you stands in front of a slide and explains what you should be worried about.
You are coming because the rest of us have lost something we did not mean to lose, and you are one of the people who still has it.
“The young person did the thing badly and the old person watched and said not like that, like this.” The older way
What we lost.
For most of human history, the way knowledge moved was from someone older to someone younger. Not in a classroom. At the table. In the workshop. Walking to the river. The young person did the thing badly and the old person watched and said not like that, like this, and the young person tried again, and after enough tries the thing was in them.
Then we built an economy where the older person had to keep working a full job to pay the bills until they were exhausted, and the younger person had to be in school to qualify for the job that would do the same to them, and the hours when one used to teach the other quietly disappeared. We did not vote for this. It just happened.
So the young people are getting their answers from a phone. The phone does not know them. The phone has never raised a child or buried a parent or seen a marriage through a hard winter. The phone is doing its best with what it was trained on, which is mostly other phones.
You are what the phone is not.
There is a library being built. It does not look like a library yet because it is mostly empty. The shelves are the part you can see. The books are the part we need help writing.
None of that is in a phone. It cannot be. The phone was trained on what people wrote down, and the most important things you know are the ones you never wrote down because nobody asked.
We are asking.
What we are not asking.
We are not asking you to make a website. We are not asking you to learn a new platform. We are not asking you to be on camera. We are not asking you to perform anything. If you can speak, somebody will write it down. If you would rather write it yourself, you can. If you would rather sit in a room with three other people your age and just talk, that is fine and that is in fact the format.
The conference is three hours. You can do three hours. We will feed you. The room will be quiet and warm and there will be people in it whose company you will probably enjoy. If at the end of three hours you have said one thing that nobody else in the room had thought of, the library is bigger than it was. So is the world.
Why this is not flattery
We are aware that telling older people their wisdom matters is the oldest move in the book and that it is usually followed by a request for money or time or both. So here is the honest version.
You have lived through things. Some of them were terrible and some of them were ordinary, and the difference between what you know and what a thirty-year-old knows is not that you are smarter. It is that you have been in the room when the thing actually happened. You watched it land. You watched what came after.
It is worth a great deal. It is worth, in fact, more than almost anything else we know how to build, because it is the one thing the new machines genuinely cannot make. Everything else they can copy. This they cannot, because it is made of having been there.
We are not flattering you. We are telling you what is true and what we suspect you already know and have been quietly waiting for somebody to say out loud.
“If at the end of three hours you have said one thing that nobody else in the room had thought of, the library is bigger than it was.” POST AI
What it costs.
If you are coming to the main session in Izu, a delegate pass is one hundred US dollars and covers the day and the food. If a hundred dollars is the thing standing between you and the room, write to us and we will find you a seat. We mean this. Some seats are held back for exactly this reason.
If you would rather host a small group of friends your own age, wherever you live in the world, that is the format we most want to see succeed. You do not need a venue. You need a table, a few chairs, and a kettle. We will help you with the rest.
If you read all of this and you are still not sure, that is fair. We are asking you to take a Saturday afternoon, or one evening, and sit with some people and talk honestly about things that matter. That is not a small ask. It is a different kind of ask than the world has been making of you lately.
We hope you will come.