To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans. This is the opening passage from Kevin Kelly’s 2008 essay, “Thousand True Fans.” Kelly is one of the defining techno-optimist voices in the history of the internet.

We are passionate about our science, and that is wonderful; it is one of the best things about this job. It is worth cherishing and worth cultivating. There is a danger that comes with that passion. It may make us a bit blind to the danger of over-committing, getting overwhelmed, getting exhausted, and may lead to burnout. You say: Surely this would never happen to me. I love my work! My science is so cool, how could it lead to burnout?

Transcript with some hyperlinks Eric Topol (00:00): Hello, Eric Topol here. And what a privilege to have as my guest Al Gore, as we discuss things that are considered existential threats. And that includes not just climate change but also recently the concern about A.I. No one has done more on the planet to bring to the fore the concerns about climate change. And many people think that the 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, was the beginning, but it goes way back into the 1980s.

PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Steam Deck $29.99 7 hours long The Invincible is a sci-fi adventure game where you search for your missing crew on a mysterious planet. You’ll walk and drive across deserts and cliffs, unearthing clues from abandoned bases and robot probes, all while talking to your boss on the radio. It’s based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1964 novel of the same name, about humanity’s reckless quest to dominate the universe and the nature of intelligence, and adopts a period-appropriate “atompunk” aesthetic: vivid colours, chrome surfaces, ray guns, and flying saucers, everything westerners thought the future was going to be in the 50s and 60s.

Well friends, we made it. It’s the season finale. This episode is called “Looking Ahead“ and since the show hasn’t been renewed yet, it’s quite possibly the last ever episode of Gen Q. I’m sorry for getting this out a day late. I had so much to say about this episode (this recap is over 4000 words long) and Showtime didn’t send me the screener until Thursday afternoon and my anniversary with my girlfriend was on Saturday, so I was doing such things as going on an aquarium date and procuring a romantic dinner of gyros and fries from the really good spot in our neighborhood.