Creating wisdom infrastructure for the next 100 years
July 2025
I just returned from a retreat in Scotland with a small group of close friends — mostly founders and investors. One of them was Nico Michaelsen, whose work, I believe, could quietly lay the foundation for what he might call a new layer of “wisdom architecture.”
Nico’s recent essay, Birth of the Wisdom Economy, argues that as AI rapidly automates knowledge work, the real scarcity — and opportunity — lies in cultivating human maturity: presence, discernment, emotional clarity, and ethical coherence. “In a world defined by instability and interdependence, the ability to stay calm under pressure, make sense of complexity, resolve polarities, and act with integrity is no longer a luxury,” he writes. “It’s a prerequisite for leadership, coordination, and societal continuity.”
Nico’s venture studio, Basin Collective, is developing the foundational tools — modern monasteries, open-source wisdom infrastructure, and vocational pathways — to support what he calls the “reattuning” of over one billion adults for a post-AI world. To me, it’s a necessary idea — one we should be thinking about more seriously.
Key quote: “There are pathways we can iterate off of, frameworks that scaled, traditions that lasted, institutions that once held the depth we now seek. We don’t need to reinvent everything. But we do need to merge the best of what came before with the new insights of systems thinking, trauma science, developmental psychology, and collective intelligence. And perhaps most importantly, we must look to the elders. Those who have walked this road in contemplative lineages, indigenous traditions, initiatory systems, and long-forgotten corners of culture hold keys we can no longer afford to overlook. The wisdom economy doesn’t replace them. It honors and expands upon them. We’re moving from the age of tools to the age of selves. From knowledge economies to wisdom cultures. And we need the same level of imagination and investment we brought to previous civilizational upgrades, only this time, directed inward, and guided by what’s already been hard-won.”
Learning to love deep time
Geologist Marcia Bjornerud makes a compelling case for “timefulness” — a way of seeing shaped by deep time.
In her work as a professor at Lawrence University and author of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, she argues that modern society suffers from “chronophobia,” a fear of time that blinds us to long-term thinking. While politics and economics chase the short term, geology reminds us we live on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet with stories far bigger than ourselves.
Bjornerud believes our time illiteracy has real consequences, from climate inaction to undervaluing education and art. But she’s not pessimistic. Instead, she offers geology as a guide. Rocks, she says, aren’t nouns — they’re verbs. They reveal processes, change, and resilience. Her latest book, Turning to Stone, continues this theme, showing how the wisdom of rocks can help us think — and act — for the long haul.
“Short-term thinkers,” she writes, “are rewarded with reelection, while those who dare to take seriously our responsibility to future generations commonly find themselves out of office.”
Key quote: “Biology as a discipline is elevated by its molecular wing, with its white-coat laboratory focus and its venerable contributions to medicine. But lowly geology has never achieved the glossy prestige of the other sciences. It has no Nobel Prize, no high school Advanced Placement courses, and a public persona that is musty and dull. This of course rankles geologists, but it also has serious consequences for society at a time when politicians, CEOs, and ordinary citizens urgently need to have some grasp of the planet’s history, anatomy, and physiology.”
A few more links I enjoyed:
Key quote: “A thousand years from now, we will have learned to move beyond the planet without carrying the problems of the past with us. This will come through a global cultural revolution. We will be ready to travel through to the stars without harm. We’ll be able to respect where we are going for what “where we are going” demands. We’re not going to impose our ideas of what respect is onto wherever we travel to.”
Key quote: “Reading is not just about collecting facts, but building new mental models. By immersing ourselves in new ideas, we hone our ability to spot patterns, challenge assumptions, and make wiser decisions. For Charlie [Munger], reading was a discipline that compounded over time — much like his legendary investments. A practice that builds not just knowledge, but a better way of thinking.”
