The Koe Cast I'm begging you to start writing essays (even if you hate writing)
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Apr 11, 2026 A passionate plea for essay writing turns into a bigger conversation about how social media warps attention, identity, and sense-making. It explores civilizational decline, the clash between fast content and real human thought, and why meaning may become the most valuable thing online. It also touches on thinking in public and writing to discover what you believe.
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Internet Is Producing Fake Thinking
- The modern information environment is producing 'fake thinking' that erodes our capacity to make sense of reality.
- Dan Koe warns this cumulative decline in public reasoning — the epistemic commons — can worsen polarization and civic decay.
Epistemic Commons Shapes Identity And Capacity
- Dan Koe defines the epistemic commons as the public information 'water supply' that forms identity and behavior.
- He explains short-form content trains attention span downward and reduces tolerance for complexity necessary to solve civilizational problems.
Three Forces Threaten Civilizational Thinking
- Daniel Schmachtenberger's three converging threats: rival risk dynamics, substrate consumption, and exponential technology.
- Combined they push societies toward collapse or dystopia by incentivizing engagement, depleting attention/trust, and outpacing wisdom.