In the summer of 2022, a few months before ChatGPT showed up and scrambled everyone’s sense of the future, Byron Reese told me he was a techno-optimist and an AI skeptic.

Both at once.

Four years later, that combination looks less like a contradiction and more like one of the few defensible positions left in the room.

And his skepticism doesn’t come from the sidelines. Byron has two NASDAQ IPOs behind him and was running a company that uses AI to build products when we spoke.

Our two-hour conversation was officially about his book “Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think.” His argument: stories let us imagine the future, dice let us calculate it, and thinking rocks (computer chips) let us build it. But we ended up in places I didn’t plan for. A stone hand axe that our ancestors barely changed for over a million years. Helen Keller and the moment language switched on a mind. The Stoned Ape Theory of #consciousness. And why punctuality is a virtue somebody had to invent from the top down.

That last one stayed with me. If the clock could redefine what a good person looks like, what is #AI quietly redefining right now?

Byron had an answer. Whether you agree is another question.

Watch or listen to my full conversation with Byron Reese here: [ https://snglrty.co/3FnFhU0](https://snglrty.co/3FnFhU0)

Byron Reese is an entrepreneur, technologist, and futurist who’s done 2 NASDAQ IPOs. His latest book is ‘Stories, Dice and Rocks That Think.’