The Next Renaissance

Epilogue: A Last, Honest Story

There is a final question I would like to address. It's the one most people have asked me at various points along this journey: Did AI write this book?

The answer is no. But it allowed me to.

When I first conceived the idea for this book, I was eager to share a vision for the future, and a set of frameworks others could use to shape their own.

What followed tested my patience, my conviction, a few friendships, and (on many occasions) my desire to write the book at all. I hired two ghostwriters and multiple researchers. I leaned on dozens of friends. I spent more money than I care to admit trying to get my story onto the page.

On August 15, 2025, 10 days before the manuscript deadline, I felt a strange, hollow excitement. The pages said everything I wanted them to say. They just didn't sound like me.

So I decided to start over. I called a brilliant technical editor, James Lynch, whose work I had long admired, and asked him if he had anything important to do in the next week. Then I asked if he wanted to write a book. That night, the two of us cleared our calendars and opened a blank document with only the title of the book on the page.

Here's what happened in our final sprint.

We used ChatGPT like a scaffolding crew. We poured everything I'd ever recorded or written, and all of the book's research—thousands of pages of papers, interviews, notes, transcripts—into a shared account. It gave us back clean bones—timelines, definitions, competing viewpoints, ...