The Pivot: Harvard 2, February 2025
Third in a series about my AI lecture tour through Ivy League and international universities
Full AI
By February, I was done pretending.
The first Harvard lecture had been “AI and Blockchain.” Cornell Tech was supposed to be about Andromeda’s protocol. But every time I talked about AI, the room lit up. Every time I talked about blockchain, eyes glazed over.
So for my return to Harvard, I dropped the pretense. This was going to be a futurism talk. Pure AI. What’s coming. What it means. How to prepare.
The Shape of Things
This lecture was the first time I gave the content the overarching futurism sheen it deserved. Not just “here are some tools” but “here’s how everything changes.”
I’d started building reusable blocks by now - pieces I could mix and match across lectures:
The History Block - Kurzweil, neural networks, the 2012-2024 progression, ChatGPT moment
The Tools Block - What’s available now, what’s coming, what I’m hearing through the grapevine
The Signal Block - How to manipulate your social media feeds to get the highest signal-to-noise ratio for whatever field you’re researching. Most people’s feeds are garbage. You can fix that.
The Future Block - Where this is all heading, what it means for work, creativity, knowledge
The Audience
Harvard’s crowd was diverse and sharp. Graduate students from different programs, different backgrounds, different countries. They came with good questions and genuine curiosity.
What struck me was how ready they were. By February 2025, the skepticism I’d encountered in late 2024 had faded. People weren’t asking “is AI real?” anymore. They were asking “how do I use this?” and “what should I be worried about?”
The conversation had shifted.
The Building Blocks
This became my template going forward. Instead of building each lecture from scratch, I had modular pieces I could assemble based on the audience:
- Engineers got more technical depth on tools and implementation
- Business students got more examples of workflow transformation
- Mixed audiences got the futurism narrative that connected everything
Harvard 2 was where this modular approach clicked. The content wasn’t just information anymore - it was a framework for understanding what was coming.
What I Covered
- AI history and the progression to current models
- Social media optimization for research (getting high-signal feeds)
- Current tools and what’s working
- Rumors and previews of what’s coming
- The shape of the future - how work and creativity transform
The Feeling
Standing in Harvard again, three months after my first visit, with a completely different kind of talk - that felt like progress.
The first time, I was conflicted. Keeping secrets. Unsure how much to share.
This time, I was just teaching. Sharing everything I knew. Helping people see what I could see.
It felt right.
Next: MIT Sloan - where Sam Altman came from, and where I got to tell business students their world was about to change.
Date: February 4, 2025 Venue: Harvard University Topic: AI Futurism Shift: First fully AI-focused lecture, dropped blockchain framing