Category: About life in the last third

It Will Take Innovation, Not Debt, to Save Italy

In my recent post, “The Next War Will Be Like No Other,” I wrote about the growing tension between generations. As populations age, younger people are being asked to support more older people, while also inheriting the debts accumulated by their predecessors.

That tension becomes especially difficult when economic growth is weak. Governments face demands to protect pensions, improve public services and preserve living standards. Borrowing offers a politically convenient way to postpone difficult choices. But postponing a problem will likely make it more difficult to solve.

I moved to Italy in February 2025, and it is now my home. In this post I want to explain the economic challenge Italy faces as I see it, suggest some ways forward and describe the part I hope to play.

Government debt must be measured against the economy’s ability to support it

Debt per person tells us something about the scale of public obligations. Adjusting it for inflation helps distinguish a real increase from the declining purchasing power of money. But debt relative to GDP adds an essential perspective: how large are those obligations compared with the income the economy generates?

The first graph shows how inflation-adjusted debt per person has changed. The second shows the debt burden relative to annual economic output.

Line graph showing government debt per person from 2005 to 2025, highlighting growth for USA, France, Italy, and Israel. USA shows a 145.2% increase, followed by France at 93.0%, Italy at 33.7%, and Israel at 14.5%.

Figure 1. Real government debt per person, percentage change since 2005. Cumulative change 2005–2025, with the compound average annual rate in parentheses: Italy +33.7% (1.5%), France +93.0% (3.3%), USA +145.2% (4.6%), Israel +14.5% (0.7%).

Line graph displaying government debt as a share of GDP from 2005 to 2025 for Italy, USA, France, and Israel.

Figure 2. General government gross debt as a percentage of GDP.

Starting and ending values

Measure · 2005 → 2025	Italy	France	USA	Israel
Real GDP per person Index, 2005 = 100	100 → 103.5	100 → 114.0	100 → 129.7	100 → 144.6
Real debt per person Index, 2005 = 100	100 → 133.7	100 → 193.0	100 → 245.2	100 → 114.5
Real debt per person Average annual change	1.5%	3.3%	4.6%	0.7%
Government debt / GDP	106.2% → 137.1%	68.2% → 115.5%	65.8% → 124.4%	85.7% → 67.9%

Source: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2026, and calculations used in the accompanying graphs. Rounded estimates, subject to revision. Real series are indexed to 2005 = 100, not dollar amounts; debt is adjusted using the GDP deflator. Average annual changes are compound rates. GDP per person is an output measure, not household disposable income.

The table tells an important story. Italy’s real debt per person rose by about a third over twenty years—less than in France or the United States. Italy’s problem is not that it borrowed more than they did. It is that its economy barely grew: real GDP per person rose just 3.5% in twenty years. The United States borrowed far more, but stronger growth cushioned part of the effect. Israel is the striking exception. Its debt per person barely increased, its GDP per person rose by 45%, and its debt burden fell. Growth, not austerity, is what brought the burden down.

The principle is straightforward: government debt cannot persistently grow faster than the economy without the debt burden rising. The ratio comes out the same whether we compare nominal debt with nominal GDP or adjust both for inflation, as long as the same price index is used for both. That is why the real indices in the table produce exactly the same debt-to-GDP ratios.

That does not mean governments should never borrow. Borrowing can help during emergencies and finance investments that improve future productive capacity. Nor must every country eliminate its debt. Borrowing to finance productive investment can strengthen the future; borrowing indefinitely to sustain commitments that outgrow the economy cannot. Interest payments compete with education, infrastructure, research and other spending that might improve that future. As younger people realize that their future is being mortgaged, they may opt to leave the country, weakening it even more.

In Italy, this is already happening. ISTAT, the national statistics institute, estimates that over the past decade Italy has suffered a net loss of about 97,000 young university graduates—people whose education the country paid for and whose talent now strengthens other economies.

Population aging intensifies the problem. Pension and care needs rise while the workforce supporting them may shrink. This combination can produce prolonged stagnation, painful tax increases, cuts in services or a fiscal crisis. Collapse is not inevitable, but neither is a comfortable adjustment.

The politics of postponement

The protests over pensions and public spending in Europe reveal how difficult these choices have become. People reasonably fear losing security or being asked to work longer without suitable jobs. Their concerns deserve serious attention.

Populism makes that harder when politicians promise benefits today while disguising the future cost. Borrowing can become an electoral tool: the benefits arrive before the next election and help keep politicians in office, while much of the bill arrives afterward.

This temptation belongs to no single political camp. It appears whenever leaders promise that difficult trade-offs can somehow be avoided.

Nor do I believe that “tax the rich” is a sufficient economic strategy. Wealthy people should contribute, and effective enforcement matters. But capital, entrepreneurs and highly skilled professionals have choices about where to invest and live. Tax policy must account for those choices.

Longer lives require a change in retirement policy

A government needs a productive, expanding tax base. It cannot substitute ever-higher claims on that base for the work of helping it grow.

As people live longer, retirement policy needs to adjust. If longer lives mean longer retirements without longer working lives, the cost falls increasingly on younger workers through contributions, taxes or government borrowing.

The relevant measure is life expectancy among people approaching retirement. Linking pension ages to that measure would make adjustment more predictable and help distribute the benefits and costs of longevity across generations.

The goal should be to enable longer, productive working lives. Governments and employers must support flexible hours, gradual retirement, retraining and opportunities for older workers. There must also be protection for people whose health or physically demanding occupations make continuing unrealistic.

Italy already has a relatively high standard pension age. The greater challenge is the gap between the legal retirement age and when people actually stop working. Raising the threshold has limited effect if workers instead shift to unemployment or other benefits.

Retirement reform can help, but it needs to be part of a broader economic strategy.

Italy needs to grow

I am uncomfortable with presenting “austerity” as a complete prescription for Italy. Spending discipline matters, but indiscriminate cuts can weaken the education, research and infrastructure on which future growth depends.

Italy needs to examine what government spends, what that spending achieves and what government makes unnecessarily difficult.

Bureaucracy can hang like a wet blanket over a business. A large company can employ specialists to navigate complicated requirements. A small company may find that compliance consumes the time and money it needs to survive.

This is especially damaging for innovative companies, which are already dealing with technical uncertainty, limited capital and the challenge of finding customers.

Simpler procedures, predictable decisions and faster administration are economic policies. Their value should be measured in businesses created, investment attracted and time returned to productive work.

Israel shows that an economy can change

Israel was not always the “Startup Nation.” The Israel I knew decades ago had a much stronger socialist orientation and a far larger role for the state in economic life. Its later transformation was a process involving economic reforms, research institutions, technical capabilities, immigration, entrepreneurship and access to international markets.

Government helped connect those ingredients. The Yozma initiative helped develop a venture-capital industry capable of attracting international investors. Technology incubators helped entrepreneurs move from ideas toward businesses. These policies addressed a practical problem: research and technical talent do not automatically become successful companies.

Immigration also mattered. Engineers and scientists arriving from the former Soviet Union expanded Israel’s technical capabilities. Giving that talent opportunities to build companies helped turn immigration into an economic advantage.

Innovation is an important part of Israel’s economic story, although it is not the only explanation for its performance. Italy cannot copy another country’s history. It can learn from the deliberate effort to connect talent, research, capital and customers. A key to Israel’s remarkable success was government policies. The Israeli government was proactive in creating the environment that led to the Startup Nation.

Three priorities for Italy

I would concentrate on three connected priorities.

First, make it more attractive to finance and join innovative companies.

Italy should offer strong, straightforward and predictable tax incentives for early-stage investors and employees. Employee ownership is particularly important. Young companies often cannot compete with established employers on salary. Equity allows employees to share in the value they help create. Tax rules should recognize that an ownership stake in a young company may be illiquid and highly uncertain.

Investor incentives should encourage genuine risk-taking and new investment. They should be simple enough to use and evaluated against results.

Second, actively attract the people the innovation economy needs.

Italy should welcome entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers and other professionals who wish to move to Italy and help build new businesses. It should also make it easier for international graduates to stay and for Italians abroad to return.

Immigration policy should connect to practical needs: permission to work, timely decisions, recognition of qualifications and workable arrangements for families. The contributions of Indian immigrants to American technology and former Soviet immigrants to Israel illustrate the opportunity. Talent is distributed across the world. Countries benefit when they give that talent a reason to come and a way to contribute.

Italy’s quality of life is an advantage. For people reconsidering their future in the United States, Israel or elsewhere, Italy could become an attractive professional destination as well as a beautiful place to live. But that requires a credible opportunity to build a career or company.

Third, improve the path from research to business.

Italy has excellent research institutions, including IIT. The challenge is to turn more of that research into products, customers and growing companies. The OECD has explicitly noted the gap between Italy’s excellence in basic research and its weaker commercial innovation.

This requires experienced entrepreneurs working alongside researchers, practical arrangements for intellectual property, access to early capital and incubators that provide more than office space.

Education also belongs here. I would like to see more approaches that connect learning with technology, entrepreneurship and practical problem-solving, with H-FARM as an example worth examining. Students need opportunities to experiment, collaborate and turn ideas into something useful.

None of this is free. Tax incentives have costs, and effective institutions require people and resources. But progress does not always require an enormous new spending program. It often requires imagination, simpler rules and better use of capabilities that already exist.

AI must be central to the response

For an aging country, one of the most important questions is how to produce more value with a constrained workforce. I believe AI will be the most powerful tool for doing so in the coming decades, and a driving force of innovation.

Italy should stop debating whether AI will change work. It will. The practical question is how Italian companies, researchers, educators and public institutions can use it well to raise productivity and create businesses.

This matters especially in Italy, where most businesses are small. A small company cannot afford a team of specialists, but AI can help it with software, customer service, translation, analysis and administration. For researchers, it can accelerate parts of discovery and development. For government, it offers a way to cut delays and repetitive paperwork—the same bureaucracy that weighs on businesses today.

The opportunity extends well beyond creating AI companies. It includes helping existing Italian businesses become more capable and competitive. AI will also change jobs, and some people will need help moving into new work. That makes education and adaptation more urgent. Resistance alone will not protect living standards if competitors become more productive.

A contribution to my new home

Before coming to Italy, I lived in the Netherlands and, before that, spent eight years in Israel during my second time living there. While I understand America and Israel very well, I am still becoming familiar with this beautiful country and increasingly aware of the economic challenges it faces. I also recognize the extraordinary capabilities it could bring to solving them.

My professional life has largely involved helping turn new technologies into businesses. But I am still a scientist and inventor at heart.

I decided to devote some of that experience to my new community. I became a Fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology, invested in Elevo, a venture studio, and began advising H-FARM and CMCC. At 81, I still want to be relevant and experience the satisfaction of making a significant contribution. I have been fortunate to enjoy that throughout much of my life. I would like to continue here.

Eventually, I decided to focus on creating an innovation ecosystem in Lecce, where I live. I hope to help startups develop here and persuade American and Israeli companies to locate their European headquarters in Lecce. So far, I am making good progress. I do know that innovation will be key to making Italy economically vibrant once more.

I do not believe Italy lacks talent, creativity or ambition. I see those qualities around me. I want to help create conditions in which more of them can become successful enterprises. I feel like I entered an auditorium and found an amazing orchestra but one without a conductor. Italy needs company builders. I have met a few, like Davide Rota who helped create Generative Bionics along with Elevo and Riccardo Donadon, the visionary founder and leader of H-Farm. But we need many more. I strongly believe this will take attracting people from outside of Italy and in particular America. Most will be surprised to learn that about 50% of the CEOs of the top technology companies in the USA are immigrants (most from India).

What draws me to Lecce

What draws me to Lecce is the possibility of connecting research, entrepreneurs, investment and international experience in a community that blends the ages. A place where the past can meet the future surrounded by beauty and warmth of the land and the people.

My wife and I are renovating a palazzo built in 1731 in Lecce’s historic center. It is a major undertaking and symbolizes my work here: integrating modern technology into a home built from carefully carved local limestone.

I cannot promise that my efforts to accelerate growth in Italy will succeed. Building companies has taught me to respect uncertainty. It has also taught me that worthwhile change can only begin when people decide to try.

Building, not borrowing

Longer working lives can help sustain the workforce. Immigration can bring additional talent. Innovation can increase what each worker produces. Better government policy can make all three more effective.

We cannot ask younger generations to carry debts they did not create while denying them the economic dynamism to pay them. Borrowing buys time, but time alone solves nothing. If we want to honor our past without mortgaging our children’s future, our only real choice is to build things that matter and create the growth that debt never could.

October 25, 2026

The Next War Will Be Like No Other

The war of the generations

We are living in a remarkable time, and a frightening one. Artificial intelligence is driving a transformation that gives us reasons for both excitement and fear. The world order that emerged after World War II appears to be coming apart. Whether another order will replace it, or whether we are heading toward greater chaos, is unclear. Meanwhile, climate change is beginning to make its power felt.

But beneath all of this is another transformation whose consequences, I believe, are greatly underestimated: the inversion of the population pyramid.

For most of human history, there were many young people and relatively few old people. Each generation could expect a larger generation behind it, helping to support society and care for those who could no longer work. It generation expected to be better off than the previous one.

That arrangement is changing.

Across the OECD, fertility is below replacement level in every country except Israel. Even India is now below that threshold. This does not turn a population pyramid upside down overnight. But combined with longer lives, sustained low fertility changes the balance between generations.

We built our institutions around one demographic reality. We are entering another. The implications go far beyond the financing of pensions. They reach into the distribution of wealth, political power, opportunity, and hope.

What happens when young people begin to believe that the society they are expected to support has no place for them? They face expensive housing and uncertainty about their working lives. They are asked to prepare for a future in which AI may eliminate or transform the very jobs they are studying to obtain. At the same time, they see people who already own homes, investments, and businesses enjoying advantages that seem increasingly beyond their reach.

I do not know whether AI will replace most workers. But I worry that it could generate enormous wealth while weakening the connection between work and economic security. We have no broadly accepted answer to how that wealth should be shared.

For someone starting out, the promise that hard work will lead to a better life may become difficult to believe.

Look at France. Protests that began over school conditions and teacher shortages have broadened into anger about inequality, living costs, and public services. These demonstrations involve several generations and many grievances. Yet I see in them a warning about what happens when young people lose confidence in the institutions responsible for their future.

My fear is that this loss of confidence will deepen as the demographic balance changes.

Democracy does not automatically resolve the problem. Politicians need to get reelected. Older voters are an influential constituency, and asking them to accept fewer benefits or contribute more so that younger people can have better opportunities is politically difficult. The politicians themselves are getting older. In the last fifty years the average age of someone in congress went from 40 year to 50 years.

Protecting existing promises brings immediate rewards. Investing in people whose influence is smaller, and whose needs will unfold over decades, requires a longer view than our political systems encourage.

I write this as someone who is in their 80s. I understand why people want security in their later years. Many older people have little wealth and depend on public services. Nor do all young people face the same disadvantages. Those who inherit substantial assets may have a very different future from those who inherit nothing.

But those differences do not remove the underlying tension. They may make it worse. A society in which opportunity increasingly depends on what you already owns will struggle to persuade young people that the system deserves their loyalty.

For generations, there has been an implicit agreement: the young support the old, with the expectation that their turn will come.

What happens when the young no longer believe that promise?

I can imagine a breakdown in which age becomes one of the defining lines of political conflict. Anger could turn toward pensions, property, taxation, inheritance, and the institutions that determine who gets what. Movements could gain power by promising to tear down arrangements that younger generations believe have excluded them.

This is the war I fear: a struggle between generations over who must sacrifice, who deserves protection, and who gets to have a future. It would unfold within countries, communities, and families. That could make it particularly bitter. Growing government debt adds another dimension to this generational imbalance. Younger people stand to inherit not only the private wealth accumulated by older generations, but also the public obligations we leave behind. The two inheritances will not be distributed equally: private wealth will flow disproportionately to those whose families already have assets, while the cost of servicing public debt will compete with education, infrastructure, research, and other investments in everyone’s future. Borrowing can make sense when it builds a more productive society. But when it primarily sustains current consumption, we are passing the bill forward without necessarily passing along the means to pay it.

I do not believe this outcome is inevitable. But avoiding it requires us to take the possibility seriously. We need to give younger people credible reasons to believe that they can build secure and meaningful lives, and that the gains from technological progress will reach them. That will require difficult choices from my generation as well as theirs. I know this is pessimistic. But it is what I think, and what I feel compelled to share.

A society cannot remain stable indefinitely when its young people believe their future has already been spent.

October 18, 2026
Goodbye Mark Stephens AKA Bob Cringely

My friend Mark Stephens died last Saturday. Most of the world knew him as Robert X. Cringely. I knew him as the neighbor who stood with me on garage roofs in Sonoma County, pointing dish antennas at distant ridge tops in 2020, because it was not possible to get a broadband internet connection at my location. That is how we became friends, more than 25 years ago. We managed to use directional wifi and created a link to someone that had broadband several miles from my home.

Mark was creative, technically competent and a dreamer. He was a gifted writer and storyteller. One of the few historians of his time to track the development of the computer industry. Sometimes we would dream together. He and his family lived close to our home in Sonoma for many years. He had an amazing family including a wonderful wife, MaryAlyce. Eventually they moved back to South Carolina where is wife had family. With all his moving and all my moving, we did not communicate often but we meant a lot to each other.

When I published my memoir, I asked Mark to write the foreword. He ended it this way: “I believe I know Avram well enough to love the guy.” I want to say the same about him. I wish I could have been near him towards the end of his life so I could have held him and told him what a special person he was.

Below you will find, his obituary, the forward he did for my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck and finally a long interview he did with me for a series on nation television in 2014. It is my favorite interview.

Obituary of Mark Stephens

https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49806651

FOREWORD to the Flight of a Wild Duck

Though our careers in Silicon Valley overlapped by a dozen years, I didn’t meet Avram Miller until shortly after his retirement from Intel in 1999. We were neighbors in the rural Wine Country of Sonoma County, sharing the struggle of using long-distance Wi-Fi as the only alternative to crappy telephone dial-up Internet. We literally goto know each other on garage roofs aiming dish antennas at distant ridge-tops.

Over the subsequent 20 years I came to know Avram, his children and grandchildren, his wife and ex-wife, even Avram’s father, who died a bit more than a year ago. I know most of the people mentioned in this book and I believe I know Avram well enough to love the guy.

Avram is known for his intellect and specifically for his rare habit of asking the question Why? Why do we do things the way we do rather than some other way? In Silicon Valley the operant question for most people is How? not Why? But why is more powerful than how. How is by nature evolutionary while why is revolutionary. The other big proponent of asking why in Silicon Valley was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which pretty much makes the point of how important why can be.

Dave House, one of Intel’s most senior executives—a noted asker of How? who worked with Avram at Intel before moving on to become CEO of Bay Networks, an important networking company—once told me at a Computer History Museum event that Avram was crazy “but also the smartest man I ever met.”

Avram Miller co-founded Intel Capital and, by doing so, brought the chip giant into businesses that Intel founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore would never have considered on their own. Avram used Intel money to literally create home broadband Internet, even though Intel was not intrinsically a networking company. But the why for Intel and broadband was obvious to Avram if a mystery to those others.

Home broadband drove demand for faster and more powerful processors in home computers, directly driving Intel’s growth and changing both the Internet and the world in the process. Avram Miller did that.

The best part about this book you are about to read is its modesty. It’s the story of an inquiring mind finding its way in the world from very modest beginnings and almost no expectations. Avram’s lifestory is one of choices. Did he want to become a rabbi or a jazz piano player? Did he want to be a neuroscientist or a computer pioneer? All paths were open for Avram because of his ability and his creativity. The world is a better place for the choices he made. Young Avram once rented the space under a baby grand piano for a place to sleep. That’s a modest beginning and yet charming, like Avram, gaining him not only a place to live but also an instrument to play.

Imagine how far he might have gone had Avram been able to afford to live under a concert grand?

—Robert X. Cringely, host of the PBS TV series Triumph of the Nerds, and author of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date

Mark interviews me

October 11, 2026
The Netherlands, a Graveyard for Jews, Makes a Choice

In 1969, I moved to Rotterdam to help found the Thoraxcenter at Erasmus University. There I met my first wife. We lived in the Netherlands for five years, and both of our sons were born there. I became fluent in Dutch, a skill I have retained. My wife and I had agreed that our sons would be raised Jewish. She eventually converted as well.

While we met a few Dutch Jews (our closest friends were Jewish), there were not many in the Netherlands to meet. Before the Holocaust, about 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands. That was about 1.5% of the population, less than half the share in the USA at the time. Today the Jewish population is about 35,000, or around 0.2% of the population, roughly the same as the percentage of Jews worldwide. And it will keep shrinking, as the death rate exceeds the birth rate.

Jews had played an important role in the development of the Netherlands until WWII. There were many brave Dutch people who sheltered and protected Jews (the story of Anne Frank is just one example). But the Dutch largely failed to save their Jewish fellow citizens. Denmark saved nearly all of its Jews. In Italy and France, around three-quarters or more survived. In the Netherlands, only about 26% survived.

I have always identified, and continue to identify, as a Zionist. After my sons were born, I realized that I could not raise them in the Netherlands, a country that had become literally a graveyard for Jews. My wife agreed, and we emigrated to Israel in 1974 and stayed until 1979 when we moved to the USA. I returned to Israel again in 2015 where I stayed for another eight years. I have been a Zionist my whole life, meaning that I believe there had to be a Jewish homeland. I still hold that view. That does not mean I support the actions of the current Israeli government, just as I do not support the actions of the American government.

I am writing this post because I am outraged at the recent actions of the Dutch government. Since 22 September 2026, the Netherlands has banned travelers from bringing in goods made wholly or partly in Israeli settlements that the Dutch government considers unlawful. This includes souvenirs, gifts and items for personal use, even if they were bought before the ban. Customs may inspect luggage and ask travelers to prove where a product came from. Prohibited goods can be seized, and the Public Prosecution Service says violations can bring fines or up to six years in prison.

In its first week, Dutch customs reportedly singled out passengers arriving on El Al flights from Tel Aviv for luggage searches, including travelers who had gone through the “nothing to declare” lane. A country that failed its Jews so badly eighty years ago, and where so few Jews remain, is now pulling aside travelers from Israel to search their bags for a bottle of wine or a jar of Dead Sea mud. I would have hoped the Netherlands, of all countries, would think twice before doing that.

The situation is complex. The Dutch definition of occupied territories includes the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed (recognized by the USA but not by many other countries); parts of the Dead Sea shore; suburbs of Jerusalem; the established Jewish city of Ariel; and settlements that are clearly in the West Bank, including outposts that are illegal even under Israeli law. The ban demonstrates, at best, the ignorance of the Dutch officials who drafted it. The Druze of the Golan can choose Israeli citizenship, and a growing number have. What do the people who wrote this ban hope to accomplish? Do they think Israel will give back the Golan Heights to a Syria whose future is still uncertain, so that Israeli farmers in the valleys below could once again come under fire?

If this ban succeeds, it will hurt Palestinians as much or more than Israeli Jews. Many Palestinians work in settlement factories and farms, including along the west side of the Dead Sea. When those businesses lose their markets, those workers lose their jobs.

Meanwhile, products made with child or forced labor can still be sold in Dutch shops. The European Union’s ban on goods made with forced labor will not take effect until the end of 2027. The ban on a souvenir from Ariel took effect two months after it was published.

Fifty-two years ago, I decided I could not raise my sons in the Netherlands. I take no pleasure in saying that the Dutch government has just reminded me why.

September 30, 2026
I am getting tired of being me

I always had a lot of drive. I used to joke that I would wake up standing because I jumped out of bed. It was not really a joke. It was the truth. For such a long part of my life, I woke up with tremendous energy. That energy would keep up pretty much during the day but would start to fade in the evening. But even that was relative. My low point was probably equal to most people’s high point.

Now that energy is fading. It probably has something to do with being 81 years old, but there may be other factors. I am really speaking about my physical energy. The opposite seems to be happening with respect to my mind. It seems to be on fire, lit by a match called AI.

Unfortunately there’s sort of a mismatch between my mind and my body. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced this. I used to joke that my body was just a socket for my brain because I had a pretty big disconnect between my mental self and my physical self. Then when I was 40 I was able to integrate the two parts of who I am. That happened when I started working out regularly at the gym, doing yoga, and then later doing Pilates.

I still am physically active, but I’m starting to feel a decline in my energy level. I don’t have the same drive, but I have the same desire to do things. In fact, while my body may be declining some, my brain seems to be going the other way, particularly as it has been stimulated by AI. There are so many things I want to do every day, so many things I want to write, so many things I want to learn. I want to play piano more. I want to study Italian more. I am still helping to start companies and continuing my work in medical science. I have all these desires but I can’t keep up with it. At a certain point I just don’t have the energy, and this is really a new experience. I’m grappling with it and I worry that the schism will increase. What’s worse, perhaps I will want to do more and more and I will be able to do less and less.

Thinking about this takes me back to my childhood, a time when severe asthma ruled my life. It was a curse and a blessing. Without it, I doubt that I would have developed the creative abilities that have played such an important role in my life. Back then, we did not have “devices,” so my device was my mind. I am in no way comparing myself to the great physicist Stephen Hawking, who suffered from ALS from the age of 21. By the time he was in his 30s he could no longer write by hand. He lost the ability to speak with his own voice at the age of 43, 33 years before his death. I have been interested in how he handled this transition, including the tools he used and in particular the skills he developed to work on complex problems just in his head.

Perhaps my decline in energy is related to taking a small dose of GLP-1 every week or two to maintain my weight at a very healthy level and derive additional and significant health benefits (my labs are amazing). Another possibility is it’s my diet. I have been on an intermittent fasting diet for more than 6 years. I eat between 12 pm and 8 pm, although sometimes I eat a little bit later than that. I’m wondering if taking GLP-1 and intermittent fasting have reduced my energy level. It could be. This is something I could experiment with and get some more information. Another possibility is just really changing my diet. Also, for the longest time I was on a very low-carb diet, but that’s virtually impossible here in Italy. Everything is carbs and you just end up in situations where you’re eating a lot more carbohydrates than you used to, which also means I’m eating less protein.

Many of the hours of my day are spent standing in front of my computer (I don’t have a chair), writing or reading or watching. I’ve been using a standing desk for probably 15 years. I don’t know if that contributes to the lack of energy, but I don’t like to sit and I actually think sitting is not a good thing. I either stand or lie down and read.

I am starting to use tools like Wispr to help me dictate. This blog post was dictated using Wispr, for instance. I love that I can now write just using my voice. This has freed me up to work on my writing while I am also taking a walk. I also do a lot of work with ChatGPT or Claude just using voice. So my dependency on being in front of a screen and some kind of keyboard is declining.

It has also occurred to me that I might actually be working harder than I have been in the last several years, and that’s one of the causes of the sense of losing energy.

What do you think?

September 26, 2026
Rewired: Life in the Third Age

I recently asked ChatGPT a simple question: “Would you describe me as elderly?”

I confess I already knew the answer. I just wanted to start a dialogue with my buddy Chat.

Technically, yes. I am 81 years old, and by most demographic definitions that makes me elderly. But the word does not feel right. “Elderly” suggests someone frail, diminished, dependent, disengaged from the future. That is not how I see myself, and it is not how I see my sister, who is close to my age.

We are certainly old. There is no point in pretending otherwise. I have lived more than eight decades, and my body occasionally reminds me of that fact even when my mind would prefer to ignore it. But old and elderly are not the same thing. One is a count of years. The other is a description of how you live them.

I do not feel that my life’s work is finished. I am still involved with new companies, new technologies, and new ideas. I was recently named a Fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology. I give speeches and sit for interviews with journalists. My wife and I are renovating a palazzo built in 1731 in the historic center of Lecce, in a country still relatively new to me. I am learning Italian. I am playing the piano, writing, traveling, and experimenting with artificial intelligence while trying to think clearly about what it means for the future of humanity. Some of these projects will take years. I undertake them on the assumption that there will be years, and that I will be here to finish them.None of that is what “elderly” describes. The problem is that we do not have a good word for what it is.

“Senior citizen” sounds bureaucratic. It belongs on a discounted train ticket. “Older adult” is accurate but lifeless. “Active senior” sounds like an advertising category invented to sell cruises, retirement communities, and vitamin supplements. “Elder” has more dignity, but it casts you as someone who dispenses wisdom from the sidelines. I am glad to share whatever wisdom I have acquired, as I have been doing my whole life. I am not interested in living on the sidelines. I still want a significant role, including a leadership role, in the things I care about.

We are not short of a name for the period itself.

Gerontologists have used the third age for half a century, and so has the University of the Third Age, which has been running since the 1970s. It is a decent name: neutral, clear, and free of any implication of decline. In the first age we prepare ourselves — learning, experimenting, becoming. In the second we build careers, raise families, accumulate responsibilities, establish a place in the world. The third begins when those obligations loosen their grip, when what we do becomes more a matter of choice than of duty.

Readers of this blog will notice I have been circling the subject for a while. I called it Two Thirds Done because that is roughly where I felt I stood. I was wrong about the arithmetic, but right about the shape. What we lack is not a name for the stage. It is a word for the people living in it, and for the posture they take toward it.

My suggestion is rewired

Retirement assumes that when the duties stop, the doing stops along with them. You are unplugged, honorably, and set down somewhere pleasant. Rewiring assumes the opposite. The current is still on. It has simply been routed somewhere new, and the new circuit is one you get to design yourself which is more than most of us could say about the second age.

The conventional script says the third age is when you finally stop and enjoy yourself. I think we have that sideways. We should keep learning until we no longer can. We should stay productive, to some degree, until we no longer can. And we should enjoy our lives from the day we are born until we no longer can. Enjoyment is not a stage. It is a practice.

For earlier generations, the third age was short. People worked until 65, retired, and often died within ten or fifteen years. Longer lives, better health, greater prosperity, and new technology have changed that. Many of us will now spend twenty or even thirty years here.

That is too long to treat as an epilogue

Rewiring is not a matter of age. One person rewires at 65, another at 75, and some never do. Nor does it require exceptional health. We have illnesses, limitations, and losses; at this point in life, most of us do. What matters is that we remain independent, engaged, curious, and oriented toward the future. This is not about passing the time that remains. It is about still having plans.

I should say plainly that circumstance matters here. Good health, some money, work that still wants me, I did not arrange all of that myself, and I know it. Not everyone gets the same runway. But that is an argument for making the third age more available, not for pretending it does not exist.

The distinction matters because language shapes expectation. If society files everyone past a certain age under “elderly,” it quietly teaches us to expect less of them — and eventually to expect less of ourselves.

None of this denies mortality. If anything, we are more conscious of time than younger people are. We know the runway ahead is shorter than the one behind. That knowledge creates urgency, but it also creates clarity. There is less reason to do things because they are expected of us and more reason to spend our attention on what we find meaningful. I rejoice in this.

The third age may offer something the earlier ones could not: experience without so much obligation, ambition without the same hunger for recognition, and curiosity supported by a lifetime of accumulated knowledge.

My sister and I are not young. We are not middle-aged. Neither of us feels elderly. My wife, Deborah, is 63, which by the common definition puts her close to the same category, an absurdity that tells you most of what you need to know about the category. We still share the kind of love teenagers believe they invented. Every time I see her, I light up.

So if you are of a certain age, do not let them make you feel elderly.

And if you have not yet reached it, do not plan your retirement. Plan your rewirement.

August 3, 2026
To My Grandsons

I am writing this at the age of 81. Your ages range from 16 to 23. You have never known me as a young man, and I will never know you as old ones. We share only a short stretch of time, perhaps 20 or 30 years, about a third of my life.

We do not see one another very often. It is not like the days when you were children and would visit me at my home in Sonoma. Now you are busy building lives of your own, and even three of you no longer live with your parents. I know what that is like. Once I became an adult, I spent very little time with my own parents, let alone my grandparents.

I was once young too. Sometimes I wonder whether, if we had been the same age, we might have been friends. I hope so.

There were occasions when you and I all came together such as a bar mitzvah or an important birthday, like when my father turned 90 or I turned 70. But now we are scattered all over the world.

Perhaps one of you will get married while I am still alive, and the family will come together again for that celebration. But most likely, I will see each of you separately from time to time. Perhaps you will visit me in Italy, where I now live. You will always be welcome.

I wrote a book about my life, The Flight of a Wild Duck. I never expected you to read it when it was published, but it is there, waiting for you if you ever become curious. In the meantime, please ask me questions. Many people, as they grow older, regret not having asked their parents and grandparents more while they still had the chance. I certainly do. So please take advantage of the opportunity I am offering you.

I never had the chance to talk with my father’s parents about their childhoods. I knew more about my mother’s mother, and even her grandmother, because we were all close when I was growing up. Even so, there is still so much I wish I had asked them.

While I cannot know you beyond my own lifetime, I can help you understand where you came from and what shaped the years before you arrived. I hope that one day you will tell some of these stories to your own children, whom I may never have the chance to meet.

Fortunately, we live in a remarkable age. I will leave behind not only letters like this, but books, blog posts, photographs, recordings, and interviews. Your children may someday be able not only to read my words but also to see me, hear my voice, and perhaps know me a little, even though we will never meet. I am hoping to create a digital twin so that they can interact with me, hear my voice, see my face and ask me questions.

I often wonder about the world you will inherit. It will be very different from the one in which I grew up, and it will present challenges I cannot even imagine. I hope I have given you some tools for dealing with that future. You have all had excellent educations, and you will continue learning throughout your lives. But remember that some of life’s most important lessons are not taught in schools. They are learned from experience, from failure, from love, from loss, and sometimes from listening to someone who has simply lived a very long time. I still have much to offer you should you wish. I would love to teach you about the importance of imagination, of the joy in discovery, of responsibility to make the world a better place.

As I write this, I find myself smiling, trying to imagine you, many decades from now, sitting down to write a letter to one of your own grandchildren. If that day comes, I hope you will remember that you are part of a long story, one that began long before you were born and will continue long after you are gone. We each get to write only a few chapters. My hope is that mine will help you write yours a little better and most importantly, you will know the possibilities than only love can offer.

Grandpa Avram

July 20, 2026
Avram Goes Video

My blog posts are now available as short videos on my new YouTube channel. You can subscribe here. I will also put a link on blog posts for which I have created videos. I hope you enjoy the new format. Here is an example:

My primary form of communication has been writing blog posts, along with posts on social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Yet I myself consume a lot of video from YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.

It is a bit strange, because during the majority of my career I often gave speeches, sometimes to audiences of over a thousand people. Most of those were never recorded, although a few were, such as my testimony to Congress regarding the development of HDTV and interviews on news shows.

Over the last 20 years, I have done a number of video interviews, especially around the time of the publishing of my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck.

I still give talks, but not often. For instance, I gave a speech at the World Business Forum, which was held in Milan in November 2025.

I am really comfortable speaking and love having an audience, especially one that can ask me questions. But when I have tried to make videos on my own, they are really awful. I am stilted and have no energy. I need a live audience — but perhaps one of the AIs can simulate this for me.

However, I have now found an easy way to create videos from my blog posts using NotebookLM’s video generation capability.

Next, I intend to create a clone of my voice to replace the voice that NotebookLM uses.

I would be grateful for your comments. Do you think the videos do a good job of capturing what I wrote on my blog? Do you prefer the video or the written blog? Do you think using a clone of my own voice would make this more interesting?

July 12, 2026
My First Eighty Years Were About Building the Platform — Now the Adventure Begins

I write about my eighties not because my life has been exceptional, but because so few people my age write about this time of their life at all. I want to inspire them if I can to embrace the future not fear it.

Trying to Understand What Defines Me

A few weeks ago, I created a series of Venn diagrams on my iPad to help me understand what defines me.

The diagrams weren’t about my career. They weren’t about money or success. They were about curiosity, contribution, gratitude, imagination, learning, relationships, health, and creating things that didn’t exist before.

As I looked at the overlapping circles, I realized that after more than eighty years I was only beginning to understand the thread that connected my life.

Perhaps my first eighty years were just about building the platform for what is to come next.

The Curious Child Is Still Alive

At 81, I still feel like that little boy who found that everything was interesting.

For the curious, every unanswered question is an invitation, not a problem. Every new technology promised another adventure. Every book opened, another world. That boy never saw limits, only possibilities. The piano keyboard was always waiting for his fingers. The typewriter wait for his touch.

That little boy is still running my life. And he wants to run even faster now.

A Beautifully Complicated Life

My life today is wonderfully, and sometimes frustratingly, complicated.

I’m still helping create companies. I’m fascinated by science and consider myself a scientist. Writing is a big part of my creative process; in addition to this blog, I am working on two new books. I play the piano and compose music. Deborah and I have moved to Italy, where I’m learning not only another language but another culture. We’re restoring a three-hundred-year-old palazzo and imagining what a truly intelligent home can be. I am using AI to create a digital twin of a home which was born in 1731.

At the center of all of it is Deborah. Our relationship is the anchor of my life. I have been blessed by such love.
(more…)

July 3, 2026
Memories of the Past-Dreams of the Future-the Sweetness of Now

I have had difficulties living in the present. For most of my life, the future dominated my thoughts. I preferred dreams over memories. The present was about how to move to the future. Now that is starting to reverse. While I think about the future, it is often one in which I am no longer present even though I might still have some impact on it.

Thankful, I have my piano. Playing piano is like a massage for my brain. But then often in the dark of the night, the past returns. Fortunately, it is mostly the beautiful moments that I recall having learned to let the painful ones go.

Then there are often the special moments I share with Deborah just walking through the small tourist free streets of the historical center of Lecce.

Our Palazzo renovation is where the past meets the future in the present. Designing a home that was initial built in 1731, to be our home in the future. It will be a place where tech meets limestone but also where there is a room dedicate to music to be played in the moment.

June 21, 2026